The Tin Horse: A Novel (28 page)

At first I tried to start the kind of probing conversations I got into with Danny or my friends in the Plain Brains. But Barbara didn’t mull over ideas or devour books the way I did. Nor did it help that the one burning subject I could have discussed with her, Danny, lay like a stone on my tongue.

Perhaps because she noticed I was making an effort, however, she reciprocated. She invited me to her modern dance class. Me, dance? But she warmly urged me to give the class a try, and one Saturday afternoon I swallowed my self-consciousness and went with her to the community center, where Helen Tannenbaum taught the class.

Miss Helen, I learned, studied with Lester Horton. I had read about Lester Horton in the newspaper. He’d made a dance called “Dictatorship” about the evils of fascism, and another that celebrated the Mexican revolution. Miss Helen, too, combined dance and politics. After she led a series of warm-up exercises (which, despite my clumsiness, were fun), she told us to imagine we were garment workers, shackled to sewing machines
but struggling to break free. I twisted and panted, so absorbed I didn’t even notice Miss Helen watching me until she said, “Yes, you’re a dancer!”—praise that made me giddy with pleasure.

“Why didn’t you tell me you did antifascist dances?” I asked Barbara on our walk home.

“Antifascist?” She rolled her eyes. “You can go for the politics. I go to dance.”

Dancing turned out to be reason enough, a balm for my inner voice that relentlessly analyzed, interpreted, and judged. Not that dancing was mindless. Watching Miss Helen demonstrate a movement and working to reproduce it in my body, I discovered a realm of physical intelligence; she called it “muscle memory.” Yet dance was also intoxicating and primal, my bare feet on the wooden floor, the occasional exhilarating times when I didn’t just do steps but inhabited a dance’s essence—it was like the lines from Yeats I loved, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

I experienced that blissful state in rare glimpses. Barbara, however, had a gift for immersing herself in an emotion or character. She could shed her identity like shrugging off a sweater and transform into someone or something else. Our class did a recital, and a woman ran up to her afterward and gushed that seeing her dance was like watching an angel. We giggled over that for weeks. Still, I thought the gushy woman had a point. Barbara was an artist.

Our shared love of dance—and my recognition that in the world of physical intelligence, Barbara was the smart one—helped us regain some of our childhood closeness; it even made us willing to be vulnerable with each other. She came to me for help with her schoolwork. I quizzed her for tips on attracting boys, which I applied with surprising success. Not that I ever became the bright, chatty girl she was, but I got in the habit of taking off my glasses around boys and casting glances at them; the boys didn’t have to know that until they got close, I saw them as blurs. It didn’t hurt, either, that I got breasts. In the fall they weren’t much more than hopeful bumps, but by the time I turned sixteen in March I had a figure. Although there was no one special, I got asked out on dates.

Between my brighter social life and my renewed friendship with Barbara, it was inconceivable that I would go behind her back with Danny again.

Inconceivable but true. At first, like the time at the playground and after the speech, it happened only when circumstances threw us together. He came by one night in January to see Barbara, but she was at a friend’s, I said; I was sitting outside on the porch, my retreat even on winter nights from the chaos in our cramped house. “I’ll visit you, then,” he said, and sat beside me, and …

The next time, a few weeks later, Mama had sent me to Chafkin’s to pick up a few last-minute things for dinner. Danny was just getting off work. “I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Just come back for a minute while I sweep the storeroom.” We ended up on a cushion of potato sacks. His tongue darted into my mouth. Danny had tried this in the past; so, by now, had a couple other boys. But this time, I didn’t pull away; I French-kissed him back.

Soon we dropped all pretense and simply arranged to see each other. And even though I necked with boys I dated, Danny was always the first: my first French kiss, the first boy I didn’t swat away when he put a hand on my breast through layers of sweater, blouse, and underclothes, and later the first to slide his hand under my clothes and actually touch my breasts. Our trysts took place every two or three weeks, often in Chafkin’s storeroom—where else could we have privacy?

I didn’t split completely in two. I felt guilty and insisted that we discuss how we were wronging Barbara. But he maintained that he didn’t love Barbara any less because he cared for me, too.

“So you wouldn’t mind telling her about us?” I said. “Or going to the movies with me sometime, instead of sneaking around?”

“If we were in Palestine, I would. The pioneers in Palestine are creating an entirely new society.”

“But we’re not in Palestine.”

“What about your cousin Mollie?” he countered.

“What does Mollie have to do with—”

“Bet she believes in free love.”

Mollie did believe in free love, and in one of the stories I told myself I
was a forward-thinker, a revolutionary. Alternatively, I was an ironic intellectual who had no patience for the silly conventions of high school courtship, the dates and moony looks and fantasies of marriage. These were identities I struggled to claim on evenings when Barbara and Danny stole a few private moments on the living room sofa while I lay in bed with a book in front of my face, unable to take in a word. Or when I swam up from dizzy kisses into Chafkin’s storeroom, into the shame of being kissed in secret amid the dark odors of root vegetables and slightly rotten greens.

F
OR MONTHS AFTER WE MET AUNT PEARL
’
S BOYFRIEND, SWEET-VOICED
Alberto Rivas, Barbara and I spun elaborate fantasies about their wedding. We imagined every detail of our roles—and our outfits—for the grand event, and we privately referred to Pearl’s beau as Uncle Bert.

The first time I’d met Bert, I was shocked that Pearl was dating a Mexican. It was enough of a scandal when the son or daughter of one of our Jewish neighbors married a Christian; there were religious families that sat shiva as if the person had died.

But my initial shock soon switched to admiration for the modern American woman who was my aunt. Like the forthright movie heroines for whom she designed costumes, Pearl wasn’t going to be bound by musty, undemocratic conventions. She would follow her heart. As for Uncle Bert, he was charming and funny and handsome, and I adored it when he sang.

Clearly, however, the other adults in my family weren’t as open-minded as Pearl. Bert came to our house with her only a handful of times and never again with the giddy joy of that first night, when he’d borne Audrey safely home after the earthquake. Papa in particular, for all that he preached American acceptance for people of all races and backgrounds, always acted tense and cold when Bert was around.

Barbara and I had enough sense to keep our mouths shut. But one day when Pearl and Bert had joined us for a picnic, Audrey blurted out, “When are you getting married?”

“Audrey!” Mama gasped.

Bert winked at Audrey. “I’m waiting for you to grow up so I can marry you.”

“Audrey, come with me,” Papa said.

“But—”

“Now!” Papa grabbed her hand to lead her away for a private talk. And he glared at Bert with so much anger it shocked me.

At least Papa was willing to speak to Bert. Zayde had refused to shake his hand, even after he’d rescued Audrey. Barbara and I eventually concluded it was Zayde’s opposition that kept Pearl from marrying Bert. It was one thing for her to defy Zayde by living on her own after her divorce, but she must have felt she couldn’t get married again without his blessing. And as time passed with no hint of an engagement, we had let the subject drop.

But now, four years later, Zayde was gone, his absence a rip in my awareness that cruelly occurred again and again—when I caught an astringent, vinegary whiff from the pickle barrels at Canter’s and had an impulse to buy a kosher dill and take it to Zayde at Melansky’s. Or I heard a great joke on the radio and started repeating it to myself, and only then realized I had lost my audience. Sometimes, I was so certain I heard his voice in the next room I had to go look and prove to myself that he wasn’t there.

The one consolation was that Pearl was at last free to marry Bert. Not that she had said anything about it. But wasn’t she planning to buy her own house in Boyle Heights?

“A whole house, for one person!” I heard Mama say to Papa.

“She could afford a house in Hollywood or Westwood if she wanted to live there,” Papa said.

In fact, Pearl was doing so well designing clothes for the movies that she no longer worked out of her apartment but rented an entire floor of a building in the garment district. She employed half a dozen people and had set aside a room for Papa’s business of supplying shoes to go with her costumes. She had even bought a car and learned to drive! She needed the car, a Plymouth sedan, to carry samples and so forth. But those were all requirements for her business. Why would Pearl want to buy a house, except to live in it with Bert? Barbara and I concurred, and we happily resumed our fantasizing about Pearl’s wedding.

“Will they make some kind of announcement?” Barbara said one evening when we were on our way to Pearl’s apartment. This was just after we’d entered our junior year in high school, and we were going to Pearl’s to choose fabric for new dresses; Pearl still did some sewing for the family at home, often using remnants from the outfits she made for movie stars. “Or will she just start wearing a ring and wave her hands until we notice?”

“Waving her hands won’t get any special attention.” I laughed. “She does that all the time.”

“What if she stre-e-etches?” Mimicking our dance teacher, Miss Helen, at her most dramatic, Barbara thrust her arms above her head and skipped down the street. “Come on!” she called, and I danced beside her, my self-consciousness mixed with the thrill of acting like an uninhibited, madcap girl.

We tumbled into Pearl’s apartment giggling and sweaty, and when she asked why we were in such good moods, it spilled out.

“We’re planning your engagement,” I said.

“Who am I supposed to be getting engaged to?” Her laughter had an edge, but I’d gone too far to stop.

“Bert, who else?”

“Darlings, I’m not going to marry Bert. Would you like Coca-Colas? I’ve got Coca-Colas for you. Unless you’d rather have tea, but you’re probably too hot—”

“Coke, please,” Barbara interrupted Pearl’s choppy, strangely nervous chatter. And then added, “Why not?”

“You, too, Elaine, Coca-Cola?” Pearl said.

“Yes, please.”

Pearl bustled into her small kitchen. We followed, hovering in the doorway. I felt a little the way I had dancing down the street, simultaneously wishing I hadn’t started and wild to plunge ahead.

“It’s not because he’s Mexican, is it?” I said. “I think that’s terrible, that anyone would object to—”

“Just let me get your drinks first, all right?” Pearl poured two bottles of Coke into glasses and handed them to us. Then she said, “Don’t you think if Bert and I wanted to get married, we would have done that by now?”

“But you couldn’t,” Barbara said.

“Someone told you about that?”

“We figured it out,” Barbara said.

“Well, then you know nothing’s changed.” She strode to the table, where she had stacked half a dozen bolts of fabric. “Careful with your drinks. Take a look at this beautiful challis. It’s from the new Myrna Loy film.” She started to unroll a bolt of sea-green fabric.

“But now that Zayde’s gone …,” I said, my need to understand stronger than my fear of annoying Pearl.

“Zayde? What are you talking about?”

“You couldn’t get married because of Zayde,” I said. “Because Zayde didn’t like Bert. But now you can.”

“Oh.” Pearl stopped unrolling the challis. “
That’s
what you figured out?”

“Isn’t it—” I started, but she held up one hand and stood still for a moment, her eyes closed. Pearl did that sometimes in the middle of a conversation if she needed to collect her thoughts.

Opening her eyes, Pearl said, “Your parents would kill me. But you’re not children anymore. And better, I guess, that you hear this from me. All right, sit.”

As always, when Pearl was about to enlighten us regarding the adult world, she sat on her love seat—which, thanks to her prosperity, she’d had
recovered with rich rose brocade upholstery—and lit a cigarette. I sat next to her, and Barbara took the chair.

“You’re right, I can’t marry Bert, but it’s not because of Zayde. Darlings …” Pearl glanced from one of us to the other, meeting our eyes. “Bert is married already. He has a wife in Mexico.”

“Won’t she give him a divorce?” Barbara adopted the cool, sophisticated tone of movies in which things like this took place, while my mind reeled. An avid reader and movie-goer, I knew such things happened. But they happened to Anna Karenina or Jean Harlow, not to my aunt Pearl.