The Tin Horse: A Novel (29 page)

“In Mexico, in his village, people don’t get divorced,” Pearl said. “And I wouldn’t want him to divorce her.”

“Do they have children? … I don’t mind,” Barbara said.

Ah, but didn’t I know what it was like to be desperately in love with a man who belonged to someone else?

“Four children,” Pearl said.

I let out a small sob.

“I’m sorry, darling.” Pearl said. “You didn’t know your auntie Pearl was such a terrible person.”

Now I was crying too hard to speak. All the rationalizations I’d made about free love crumpled, and I saw the tawdriness of everything I’d been doing—betraying Barbara and, even worse, being so pathetically in love with Danny Berlov that I was willing to be his girl on the side. No stranger to self-criticism, I knew how it felt to be embarrassed or ashamed over something I’d done, but this was the first time I truly loathed myself.

Pearl hugged me and stroked my hair, at first apologizing—and, as I kept weeping, asking “Elaine, what is it? Is something else the matter?”

I found my voice then; I would have died before I let her suspect I had my own reason for tears. “It’s just sad that you can’t get married.”

“Oh, no, it’s not. Really,” Pearl said. “I’m an idiot, I should have explained better. I don’t
want
to marry Bert.”

“But you love him,” Barbara said.

“Love.” Pearl sighed. “The two of you, sixteen years old, you should listen to all the love songs they play on the radio and think you’re in heaven when a boy takes you in his arms on the dance floor. Just know that when
you get older, it will be different. Bert is a very sweet man. But darlings, I don’t want to be any man’s wife.”

“You married Uncle Gabe,” Barbara said.

“And I found out that not every woman likes being married. To have a man telling you what to do, even what to
think
! Keeping you awake all night with his snoring. Sulking if you don’t make your kugel with the exact number of raisins his mother put in hers.”

Despite the cloud of misery that surrounded me, I was captivated by this revolutionary idea. I realized I had seen plenty of examples of unmarried women who, as far as I could tell, led fulfilling lives—Pearl, Mollie, many of my teachers. But no one had ever stated it outright:
not every woman likes being married
. And although Mollie always remained my model for activism, it was Pearl I would think of when the feminist movement came along.

My mind also buzzed with the reverberations of
snoring
, which forced me to consider what else went on when a man and woman shared a bed. Barbara and I had figured Pearl and Bert “did it,” but it was different when I’d expected them to get married. Suddenly, things I had observed between Pearl and Bert—the clingy sweater she’d worn the night of the earthquake, the intimate looks he gave her as his baritone caressed the lyrics of a song—became a peek at the scary-thrilling mystery of grown-up sexual desire.

“What if a husband wouldn’t
allow
me to work?” Pearl was saying. “Or he tried to take over my business and run it himself?”

“Bert wouldn’t do that,” Barbara said.

“Oh,
chiquitas
,” Pearl said; it was what Bert called us sometimes. “You never really know a man until you let him put a ring on your finger. Then he thinks he owns you. I’m happy with my life the way it is.… But what’s this nonsense your
meshuganah
aunt is filling your heads with?” She kissed Barbara’s cheek, then mine. “So, do you want new dresses to wear to dances, so the boys will flock around you?”

Was Pearl only saying she didn’t want to marry Bert so we wouldn’t feel sorry for her? I wondered, as she unrolled challis and crêpe de chine. But Pearl did seem happy—invigorated by her thriving business, excited at
the prospect of buying a house. Actually, sinful Aunt Pearl seemed like the happiest of all the adults I knew, a conundrum I chewed on for days.

IT
’
S TOO SIMPLE TO
say that finding out about Pearl changed my life or Barbara’s. It was more that the choices each of us made not long afterward reflected who we already were.

For me, hearing Pearl’s revelation set off my first struggle with adult moral ambiguity. Carrying on an affair with a married man—that was the province of
bad
women, home-wreckers. (Now I understood Papa’s and Zayde’s coldness toward Bert.) Yet Pearl was one of the people I loved and admired most in the world. She was kind, principled, straightforward; although she didn’t volunteer unpleasant truths, she leveled with Barbara and me whenever we asked. Look at the way she’d told us about Bert, making no excuses. And in her not wanting to marry, there was a freedom of thought that dazzled me.

Not that her choices lacked consequences. After that conversation, I felt a pang whenever I saw her cuddle my youngest sister, Harriet, and coo about her delicious baby smell.

“I’m not a baby!” Harriet protested. “I’m four!”

“Well, you still smell scrumptious!” Pearl burrowed her nose into Harriet’s belly, making her gurgle with laughter. Even if Pearl had no desire to be a wife, I suspected she would have loved being a mother. But she seemed clear-eyed about what she’d given up and, as she had said, genuinely happy with her life as it was.

Yes, Pearl was dating a married man, but his wife was far away in Mexico. And she was seeing him openly, willing to face censure. Not like me—sneaking around, cheating on my own sister!

A few days later Danny whispered, after our history class, that he wanted to see me. And I said no.

He caught up with me after school. I was hurrying to catch the streetcar to get to my job at Leo’s bookstore.

“What’s wrong?” Danny said.

“I just don’t want to.…”

“You mean this week?”

“I mean not ever. There’s my streetcar.”

“Elaine, wait. Can’t we talk about this?”

The streetcar, one of the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Street Railway, pulled up. “I have to go.”

To my amazement, Danny got on the car after me and dropped a precious nickel into the fare box.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Don’t you have to work?”

“Eddie won’t mind if I’m a little late.”

The car was crowded, and we couldn’t sit together at first. But at the next stop, my seatmate got off, and Danny slid in beside me.

“Did something happen?” he said.

“No.”

“Is it something I did?” He looked at me as if I held his happiness in my hands. No one had ever looked at me that way, and to see that yearning in Danny’s eyes! I felt a dizzying sense of power … and an urge to spare him any pain.

But I took a deep breath and said, “I just don’t feel right.”

“Can we still get together sometimes and talk? There’s no one else I can talk to the way I can with you.”

“We can talk.”

He flashed me a rakish Errol Flynn smile. “If that’s really all you want to do.”

“We can
talk
,” I said, weakening again at the intimacy, the smell of him, as he leaned close to me.

“Good, I’m really glad. Guess I’d better get to work … Uh, Barbara didn’t say anything, did she?”

Of course, that was why Danny had jumped on the streetcar after me and why he’d looked heartsick—his fear of upsetting my sister!

“Do you and Barbara kiss?” I demanded.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said softly, his eyes flicking toward the woman on the seat ahead of us.

“Do you kiss?” I whispered.

“What do you think?”

“French-kiss?”

“Elaine, are you nuts?”

The woman in front of us giggled. We were already downtown and almost to the car barn at Fifth and Olive, where I would transfer to the streetcar to Hollywood.

“Let’s get off, okay?” I said.

“Fine!”

“You tell him, sister!” the woman called out as we left.

Somehow the constraint of being on the Yellow Car had made it easier to talk. On the street, I stared at Danny for a moment, then started walking fast.

“Do I let you do things she won’t do?” I said. “Is that why you keep wanting to see me?”

“I thought you liked—”

“Maybe I should ask her.”

“No!” He grabbed my hand. “If it matters so much, I do more with her. Elaine, please, look at me?”

I let him pull me out of the pedestrian traffic, under the awning of a music store.

“Danny, you have Barbara,” I said. “What do you want with me?” I had wondered all along, but hadn’t dared to ask.

He gave a bark of laughter—except it came out like a strangled sob. “
Have
Barbara? No one will ever have Barbara.” Then he quickly made himself into Errol Flynn again. “You don’t want to see me, suit yourself. It was just … it’s not like you have anyone special, and you’re a good kid. Guess I felt sorry for you.”

“Felt sorry for me? I hate you!” I yelled as he sauntered away.

THE FIRE OF ANGER
carried me, head high, through work that afternoon and school the next day. Too soon, however, my fury lost its all-consuming force, its ability to incinerate every other emotion. I crashed into misery. Around people, I managed to impersonate the Elaine Greenstein everyone knew, a girl who was smart and serious but no more or less happy than any other Boyle Heights sixteen-year-old. But, alone in my bedroom, I wept.

Again and again, I relived that moment just before Danny strode off.
Not when he said he was sorry for me, I knew he was lashing out then because he was hurt. But I kept remembering the uncertainty he’d revealed about Barbara. That, I understood wretchedly, was what Danny really wanted with me: it wasn’t the thrill of having more than one girl nor his genuine attraction to me, though I suppose both those things were part of it. But more than anything else, Danny saw me as insurance, a rough replica of Barbara in his back pocket because he couldn’t count on the real thing.

It was as if he had intuited something in Barbara that became more and more apparent during our junior year. That September she started attending the Lester Horton dance school in Hollywood; Miss Helen had recommended her for a scholarship. Taking the scholarship meant she’d had to stop running her children’s playgroup, and at first Papa balked and said we couldn’t afford to lose her income. Mama, however, went on a campaign to ensure that Barbara could go to the dance school. She discovered a dozen new places to pare household expenses. After years of insisting we didn’t need charity, she applied for the free milk available for needy families. And she continually repeated the word
scholarship
—which Papa revered, even if the scholarship was to a dance school. For weeks that fall he started conversations with, “Did you know Barbara was awarded a scholarship?”

Barbara now went to the Horton studio most days after school and didn’t come home until eight or nine. She spent every Saturday there, too, and often stayed in Hollywood and spent Saturday evenings with friends from her dance class. Her conversation bubbled with new names: Lester, of course, and Bella, the star dancer who taught some of her classes, and her fellow students. Most of all, she mentioned Oscar, who played piano to accompany the classes, although Oscar rarely played the keys, she said; instead, he plucked the strings inside the piano or drummed rhythms on its body. He offered singing lessons, too, and Barbara reported excitedly that he considered her “a natural talent.”

The night of the dance studio’s Christmas party, she didn’t get in until after midnight. I woke up when she stumbled, trying to undress in the dark.

“Oops,” she said with a giggle.

I switched on the light.

“Ow!” She shielded her eyes. “Could you just light a candle?”

I lit a candle and turned out the light. “Are you drunk?”

“Not really. Well, a little. Oscar made gin rickeys.”

“Barbara, are you going out with Oscar?”

“It was just a party.” With efficient, graceful motions, she shed her dress and dropped it on the floor.

“How old is he?”

“Want a ciggie?” She fished a pack of Chesterfields out of her dance bag. Even though I smoked on dates or at parties, I had never actually bought my own pack of cigarettes. Or smoked at home.

“In here?”

“Why not?” Still, she threw open the window.

We lit our cigarettes from the candle flame, and I emptied our tin of bobby pins to use as an ashtray. Barbara, clearly tipsy, lounged unselfconsciously in her slip and said things she might otherwise have kept to herself.

“Oh, Elaine,” she sighed. “He has the most exquisite hands. Musician’s hands.”

“Oscar?”

“Umm.” She took a slow, luxurious inhale.

“Isn’t he in his twenties?”

“God, it isn’t like high school, where it’s a huge deal for a sophomore to date a senior. We’re artists working together.”

“Does Danny know?”

“About Oscar’s hands?” she teased.

“You know what I mean.”

“Danny Berlov doesn’t own me. No man is ever going to own me.”

The words may have been borrowed from Pearl, but the sentiment, I came to understand, was pure Barbara. She continued to date Danny officially—the dates announced to Mama and Papa and Danny picking her up at the house—while she saw Oscar under the pretext of socializing with her dance-class friends. That lasted for a month or so. Then Oscar disappeared from her conversation, to be replaced by a dancer named Ted.

I had no idea if Danny was aware of the other boys—the men, really—in Barbara’s life. Though I did my best to avoid him, there were times I couldn’t help seeing him—for instance, if Mama invited him and his father to Shabbos dinner. I was at the table sometimes when Barbara gushed about her new friends, her classes, rehearsals for a student show. As for Danny … for all that he’d molded himself into a muscular, take-charge young Zionist, I kept seeing the barefoot kid I’d met when we were five, a boy who lied to cover up his shame over his absent mother and feckless father.

Love!
In my mind, the word took on Pearl’s weary tone. I loved—well, I used to love—Danny. Danny loved Barbara. And Barbara … Poor Danny, his real rival wasn’t Oscar or Ted, it was something he could never compete with. Barbara loved freedom. Not that any of us—Danny or Barbara or me—could have articulated it at the time, but Danny felt it keenly. “No one will ever have Barbara,” he’d half sobbed—and as the world of Hollywood and the dance studio became more and more her world, I saw that he was right.