The Tin Horse: A Novel (10 page)

Thanks to the hours spent behind Avner’s chair, however, Mama did have one surprising way to earn money, a skill that she unveiled in the service of our debut at Breed Street Elementary School.

She was a genius at playing cards. No matter what the game—bridge, hearts, poker, gin rummy—she seemed to have a magic power to see straight through the backs of the cards and know what was in everyone’s hand. And she strategized her own play as if she could picture the final trick in a game before she even laid down the first card. She’d always played cards socially, either with Papa and other couples in the evening or with a group of ladies in the afternoon. But she’d hidden her brilliance, like a hustler who fumbles through a few games, then swoops in for the kill. Except that Mama had groomed her marks over
years
of adequate but unexceptional playing. It made her devastating.

I got the first hint of Mama’s virtuosity one afternoon at Sonya’s in late June. She, Sonya, and two other ladies were having their Monday afternoon hearts game, while the children (all of us except the napping infants) played in the yard. Suddenly, louder than our shouting in a game of Red Rover, came shrieks from our mothers. We tore into the house like the small animals we were, quivering with worry at the sign of adult distress. But the women were laughing. And Sonya, Mrs. Litmann, and Mrs. Zinser were all looking at Mama.

“How did you do that?” Mrs. Litmann said.

“Do what?” Mama replied, with a smile that didn’t show her teeth.

“Charlotte, you look like the cat that ate the cream,” said Mrs. Zinser.

Did Sonya have a cat? Why hadn’t she let us play with it? My eyes darted around the room looking for a hiding kitty.

“Shooting the moon once, all right,” said Mrs. Litmann. “But four times?”

Ah, I knew they weren’t talking about the moon in the sky, but the game of hearts. Likewise, there was no cat at Sonya’s.

“You’re going to think my sister-in-law is some kind of cardsharp.” Sonya glanced uneasily at Mrs. Litmann, one of her new neighbors whose husband owned a men’s clothing store.

“Don’t be silly,” Mama said. “It’s just my lucky day.”

“I’ll say,” Mrs. Zinser grumbled. She took her wallet out of her handbag. “How much do I owe you?”

Mama made almost two dollars that day, and she gave a nickel to both Barbara and me.

But Mama owed her success to more than luck. That Saturday night
she and Papa played bridge with several other couples, and the next morning Papa couldn’t stop talking about how brilliantly they’d played. “That five-clubs bid, I never thought we’d make that. And when Arnie had all those high spades, but you kept trumping him. The look on his face! Guess how much we won, girls?”

“Two dollars?” I said.

“Two dollars and seventy-five cents.” He started to hand us quarters, but Mama stopped him.

“A nickel each is plenty. That’s the school fund,” she said.

After a few more afternoons and evenings like that, Mama started carrying a special purse, the very one made by her sister Dora, inside her handbag just for her winnings. She even got Zayde to invite her to games with his poker cronies, which Papa thought not quite nice. In fact, once Mama’s “luck” became a streak, Papa didn’t think any of it was nice. “These are supposed to be social games. You keep taking everyone’s money, no one’s going to invite us to play,” he said.

Mama laughed. “They want to see if they can beat me.”

“You need money for nice school outfits for the girls?” Papa persisted. “A few dresses for five-year-olds, how much can it cost?”

“More than Julius Fine pays you!”

Papa raised his newspaper and pretended to read it, rather than repeat that familiar argument.

Mama’s skill did enhance her social standing. Mrs. Litmann played hearts with Sonya on Monday afternoons and bridge with a different group on Thursdays. One of the Thursday ladies moved, and Mrs. Litmann invited Mama to that group, which even included a doctor’s wife who drove to Boyle Heights from Hollywood in her own shiny yellow car. The minute Sonya heard that Mama was invited to the Thursday group, she was so upset she put Stan in his stroller and walked to our house in the midday July heat.

“You’ve got to get a telephone, Charlotte!” Sonya fanned her red face and gulped the cold lemonade Mama had poured for her.

“What is it, Sonya?”

“You ought to be able to afford one, all the money you’re taking from
my
friends at cards.”

“What do I need a telephone for? To call Canter’s and have them send me corned beef without the fat trimmed off?”

“Charlotte, I just moved to a new house. I’m just getting to know my neighbors. I’m asking you. Stop with the cards.”

“I will,” Mama said. “As soon as I get what we need for school.”

“Your darling girls, I love them like they were my own. Why don’t you let me treat them to some school outfits?”

Mama stood. “Sorry to rush you out, Sonya. I have so much cleaning to do this afternoon.”

“A few blouses and skirts,” Sonya said, and echoed Papa. “How much can that cost?”

Actually, Barbara’s and my school clothes weren’t expensive, nor were the fancy extras Mama bought us—hair ribbons and ruffled ankle socks, as well as sweaters and jackets for cooler weather. How much did it take to look well turned out when our new Mary Janes, bought at a discount at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, already elevated us above some of our classmates, who would come to school barefoot?

Mama’s project, however, was to outfit “us” for the first day of school. Not just Barbara and me, but Mama herself.

In early August, when Mama’s take added up to twenty-seven dollars, with still more card parties to come, she bought some plum-colored silk shantung and took it to Mrs. Kalman, the dressmaker that Sonya’s neighbors swore by. (A year later and she would have gone to Aunt Pearl, but Pearl was still married at that time and was a housewife; she hadn’t yet started her dressmaking business.) Mama huddled over pictures in fashion magazines with Mrs. Kalman, a thin woman whose mouth was permanently pursed from holding pins between her lips; she would have seemed withered except for the delicious flowery perfume she wore. Barbara and I could still sniff Mrs. Kalman’s fragrance in each other’s hair for hours after we’d gone there; and it scented Mama’s suit when she brought it home. Appropriately for a school outfit, Mama had gotten a “smart suit.” Mrs. Kalman called it that, and Mama echoed her proudly during the weeks of measuring, fitting, making a white silk charmeuse blouse, and purchasing accessories—calfskin pumps with the fashionable
new spike heel from Fine’s, a calfskin pocketbook, silk hose, and tan silk gloves. Naturally, the ensemble would include a new hat as well. Aunt Pearl was going to help Mama choose one, and whenever they talked about it, they whispered and giggled like Barbara and me.

Mama picked up the suit from Mrs. Kalman a week before the big day. That evening she modeled it for us. Mama was nice-looking, but most of her clothes were made of cheap fabrics that made her slightly plump figure look a bit dumpy. The new suit had a swagger jacket tailored to hug her hips—“just like the latest fashions in New York and Paris,” as Mrs. Kalman frequently remarked. A daring skirt, that came to just below her knees, showed off her shapely calves, made long and elegant by her spike heels. Uncle Gabe, invited with Pearl for the occasion, gave a wolf whistle when Mama came into the living room in her new outfit.

Papa grumbled, “Does this mean you’ll finally stop cleaning up on our friends at cards?” Still, he couldn’t stop staring at Mama.

And she hadn’t finished astonishing us. The next day, Pearl came over after lunch to stay with Barbara, Audrey, and me. She and Mama whispered together, and Mama said, “Pearl, are you sure?”

“Positive,” Pearl replied. Finally Pearl said, “Charlotte, go already!” and almost pushed Mama out the door.

I was on the porch when she returned, walking fast and dabbing her handkerchief at her eyes. “Mama!” I cried, but she ran up the steps into the house and let out a sob. I ran in after her, but I was too frightened to ask what was wrong.

Pearl rushed to Mama, too, and hugged her. “Don’t worry, Charlotte. It’s how I felt right after, too. Everyone does. Oh, I can tell already it’s gorgeous.”

Pearl eased off the wide-brimmed summer straw hat that Mama had pulled down so it covered her whole head.

She had cut her beautiful hair. The heavy, dark, wavy blanket that she let me brush sometimes had been shorn into a flapper’s bob. Pearl’s hair was bobbed, but Pearl was different—she and Gabe danced the Charleston, and she smoked cigarettes. And her bob clung sleekly to her head, only poufing out a little when she set it in pin curls. Mama’s hair, cut short,
was thick and springy, as if the energy that used to wiggle to the end of each hair no longer knew where to go, and now the strands shot out from her head.

I couldn’t help it. I gasped in horror.

Pearl gave me a dirty look and fluffed Mama’s bob with her fingers. “It’s perfect! I knew you had the right kind of hair, Char. So much better than mine—you’ve got that beautiful natural wave. Doesn’t your mama look beautiful, Elaine?”

Barbara—where
was
she?—might have zipped past the crack that opened in the world, through which I glimpsed the broken places in my mother and knew I had to fix them. But what about the rip threatening to open inside me, the sense of betraying some essential Elaine-ness, if I said what they wanted to hear?

“Yes, beautiful!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, and even though I’d hesitated, Pearl smiled, and Mama said, “I’m a modern lady now, aren’t I?”

“Like a movie star,” I said.

“See?” Pearl said. “Let’s see how it looks with this.” From a big shopping bag she’d brought with her, Pearl took out a hatbox.

“Oh, Pearl!” Mama clapped her hands. Pearl had bought Mama a dark brown bob hat, its bell shape fitted close to her head to show just the edges of her hair at her cheeks.

Barbara came in then; she must have been in the garden. “Let me feel,” she said, and ran her hands through Mama’s bob. It hadn’t occurred to me that the wiry helmet would feel anything like hair.

Mama seemed happy until Pearl had to go home to make dinner. “Can’t you stay just a little longer?” she asked.

“Don’t worry, Bill will love it,” Pearl said. But Pearl knew, just as I did, the story of how Mama and Papa had met—that she took the English class he used to teach at night, and he noticed the dramatic fervor with which she recited poems … and her abundant, almost-black hair.

I heard later that Pearl went straight from our house to Fine’s and warned Papa that he’d better compliment Mama, or Pearl would make him sorry for the rest of his life.

We didn’t need to worry about Papa. No matter how attractive he had
found Mama’s long hair, his passion was for modernity. “No more old country,” he said.

It was Zayde who murmured, “Your pretty, pretty hair.” Still, Zayde—who was, after all, an older man, for whom Mama had her greatest appeal—liked everything she did. In fact, he wanted her to keep coming to his card games, but she’d promised Papa she would stop when she got the money for school outfits, and she declared herself finished with all that.

The minefield of the bob crossed, Mama threw us into a euphoria of anticipation. She lectured us constantly on how to behave in school: Always respect our teachers. Never hit or push other children. Never, never fight with each other the way we did at home. She patted her hair and tried her new lipstick, and at least once a day she went to the closet and ran her hands over the plum silk of her smart suit.

On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, three days before our new lives as students were to begin, a vicious Santa Ana wind from the desert invaded Los Angeles. The sun scorched everything it touched, and there was no escaping it on streets whose only trees were skinny palms. Five minutes outside, and my head felt like a warm melon ready to burst. Our wooden house groaned in the dryness, the white paint baked to flakes. Papa limped home from work that day after fitting shoes on an endless stream of kids whose parents were making last-minute school purchases, and he lay on the floor as he always did when his back ached—but he wore only his underwear! Audrey wailed so much that even patient Zayde flinched and said, “Can’t you give her a drop of whiskey, Charlotte, to calm her down?” Mama did it, too, because she had a terrible headache; every so often, she whimpered in pain.

Night, which had been invisible—you closed your eyes in the dark, and then you opened them and it was morning—became a torment of minutes and seconds, a misery of sweat-damp sheets, harsh air from the fires that were burning in the forest to the east of the city, and nasty stickiness whenever Barbara or I shifted positions and any part of our bodies touched in bed.

During the day, our crankiness flared into war. Everything either of us did annoyed the other and provoked yelps of outrage, even though Mama
begged us to be quiet because of her headache. If one of us was asked to help with anything, we whined that it was the other’s turn. On Labor Day, our family took refuge in Hollenbeck Park with its shade trees and pond. But Barbara and I started a tickling match that soon exploded in screaming and hitting, and Papa marched us back to the stifling house. Exhausted, Mama didn’t murmur a word about how to behave in school when she bathed us that night. She only spoke to tell us to lift an arm or turn so she could reach another part of our feverish bodies.

None of it, however, not even another uneasy sleep, mattered in the morning. Finally, the giant circle on the calendar marked
the
day, when we woke before six, the momentousness of the first day of school pounding through our veins so hard, our small bodies could barely contain it. Mama poked her head into our room and said, “You’re awake already, too, aren’t you?” She helped us put on our nicest school clothes, drop-waisted gingham dresses, Barbara’s in red and mine blue. Brushing our hair, she hummed the
fusgeyer
song. Then she went to get ready herself, while Papa made us breakfast and Zayde took charge of Audrey.

We were set to go—Barbara and I fed and clothed, Mama beautiful in her suit and new hat with her curls peek-a-booing on either side—almost an hour before we needed to leave. “Well!” Mama said. “Your teacher will notice the children who arrive early, ready to learn.” She picked up her gloves.