The Tin Horse: A Novel (34 page)

But he was stocking shelves, and he called out, “Wait!”

“I’ve got to get home,” I said.

“Have you seen
The Lady Vanishes
?”

“The Hitchcock movie?”

“Want to go on Friday?”

“I …” I went mute, aware of Eddie Chafkin, who wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop.

“Friday, then? Good.”

What an idiot I was! I’d seen
The Lady Vanishes
two weeks ago when it first came out—I could have just said that. But the Berlovs didn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call Danny that night and set things straight. I’d tell him the next day at school.

In bed that night, I kept going hot and then cold, pushing off my blankets and a minute later piling them back on.
For me to really care about a girl, she has to be a person I respect
. Wasn’t it what I used to dream, that Danny needed to get Barbara out of his system, but his truest connection was with me?
And look where that dream got me!
I thought, throwing off the covers.
Sneaking around in Chafkin’s storeroom
. This wasn’t sneaking, though. He’d asked me on a real date. Shivering, I grabbed for the blankets again.

In the morning, I ached all over and lurched to the breakfast table. I must have looked awful, because even Harriet asked if I was sick. Mama placed her blissfully cool hands on my face and ordered me back to bed. She even called the doctor.

I’d caught an influenza that was going around, the doctor said when he came by that afternoon. This flu wasn’t severe, he assured Mama. Still, just the word
influenza
, to someone who’d lived through the 1918 epidemic, struck terror. Mama muttered
kaynehora
against the evil eye that had spotted a foolish girl who called too much attention to herself by getting so many A’s in school, and she prayed that the forces of darkness wouldn’t notice her other daughters. She moved Barbara out of our room onto the sofa and banished everyone, even Papa, from visiting me.

Only Mama entered my sickroom—Mama at her most tender, bearing chicken broth and hot milk with honey; propping me up, her arm around my shoulders, and coaxing me to sip. She gave me sponge baths and Bayer aspirin for my fever and held me, crooning in Yiddish, when I shook with chills. Sick as I was, I basked in Mama’s coddling and in the feverish lassitude that made me feel like a small animal, all my awareness telescoped into my body with no room to think about anything else.

I slept for most of two days. Then, around the time my fever broke, Audrey, Harriet, and Papa all got sick, and Mama had to take care of them.
Still weak but no longer consumed by illness, I longed for distraction. I was thrilled when Barbara snuck into the room.

“Look what I found.” She held out a book.

It was a book of poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, a pristine brand-new copy like the ones I got to handle at Uncle Leo’s bookstore but couldn’t afford for myself.

“Barbara, thank you!”

“Oh, it’s not from me. I found it by the front door.” She smiled. “Guess he was afraid of running into me.”

There was a note stuck between the pages.
Dear Elaine, When I said
The Lady Vanishes,
I didn’t mean you! Get well soon. Lucy said you’d like this book. Sincerely, Danny
.

“Danny never gave
me
any books.” Barbara’s tone was teasing, but I searched her eyes for signs of hurt.

“Do you mind?”

“When do you ever see me sit still long enough to read anything?” She picked up a brush and coaxed it through my fever-matted hair. “Yecch, bet you can’t wait to have a shampoo.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Darling, I don’t mind at all.”

Her nonchalance might have concealed deep pain. Nevertheless, I heard condescension, the noblesse oblige of the naturally attractive toward those of us who have to work to be loved.
Just like Danny!
I thought, regarding his gift with loathing and for a full day refusing to touch it.

But my boredom became unbearable, and a new book was too tempting to resist. And reading poems about a West Virginia mining disaster, even if Danny had given them to me, didn’t weaken my determination to resist
him
.

When I returned to school after two weeks of convalescence, he asked me to the big New Year’s Eve party, a youth dance at the Workmen’s Circle hall. I should have made it clear then that I didn’t want to date him, but I was still shaky from being sick; that was the excuse I gave myself. Instead, I hedged and said I didn’t know if I’d be feeling well enough by New Year’s Eve to go out. I hoped another boy would invite me to the party—you
didn’t have to have a date to attend, but who wanted to walk into a New Year’s Eve dance with her girlfriends? No one else asked me, though, and I decided to stay home.

Ah, but then New Year’s Eve arrived, and everyone was going out. Barbara had a party in Hollywood, although she told Mama and Papa she was going to the Workmen’s Circle dance. The rest of the family was spending the evening at Sonya and Leo’s. I’d die before I tagged along to the family party, the gawky daughter who at seventeen didn’t have big plans of her own. But why did I have to spend New Year’s Eve by myself just to avoid Danny?

And how could I pass up the chance to wear my first evening gown, a Hanukkah gift from Pearl made out of coppery brown silk? The gown had a bias-cut bodice, a nipped-in waist, and a skirt that draped snugly over my hips. When Pearl was fitting the dress, I worried that it was too sophisticated for me. She said a girl who was almost eighteen deserved a grown-up dress and that the color would pick up the gold flecks in my hazel eyes. And it did!

I went to meet Lucy and Jane at Jane’s house. Our fourth Plain Brain, Ann, had a boyfriend—Bill Adelman, the class math whiz—and she was going to the party with him. We fussed with one another’s hair and makeup, spritzed on Jane’s mother’s Chanel No. 5, and passed around a bottle of Scotch that Lucy had gotten from her older brother. It was cheap Scotch, raw in my throat, but the buzz—and the swish of my copper silk dress against my thighs—made me feel daring and adult as we walked to the dance.

In the cloakroom, Lucy and I took off our glasses and slipped them into our bags; Jane promised to watch out in case either of us started to stumble into a punch bowl.

I walked into the hall, dazzled for a moment by the noise of the band and the hubbub of people, all of them fuzzy to my nearsighted eyes. Instantly, as if he had been watching for me, Danny was at my side.

“You made it! You look …” He took a step back and really looked at me. “Wow! You look beautiful.”

He held out his hand and led me onto the dance floor.

I had danced with Danny before, at parties where everyone partnered
everyone else. But this time, on the final night of 1938 … it wasn’t just that he held me closer. Dancing together that evening felt more intimate than our long-ago necking sessions, as if some psychic distance had melted between us. When a song ended, he kept his arms around me and whispered things into my hair. “Elaine, you’re so beautiful.… What a fool I’ve been.” He ran his hand down my back, the glide of silk and the warmth of his palm becoming a single delicious sensation, as if he were caressing my bare skin.

I didn’t let him take possession of me for the evening. Not at first. I’d have a dance or two with Danny, then return to a cluster of girls, making ourselves available to the stag line. But as he kept asking me to dance, as we talked between dances with our faces nearly touching—and at midnight, when he gave me a long kiss in front of everyone—I didn’t feel like second best. I felt like the one he had always been waiting for.

“N
OT DANNY BERLOV AGAIN
!”
MAMA MOANED WHEN DANNY RESUMED
coming by the house, this time for me.

“What’s the matter with Danny?” I said.

“With a father who never has two dimes to rub together, and the son’s a
meshuganah
dreamer who wants to go farm in Palestine—what’s he going to make of himself?”

“You never said that when Barbara was going with him.”

“I never worried that Barbara was going to marry him. But you … you’d go to the ends of the earth for that boy.”

“Well, I’m not going to go farm in Palestine!” I retorted, annoyed by her pitying look—and because she understood Barbara so well, but she was so wrong about me. How could she look at me and still see the timid little girl who used to follow her sister’s lead? Had she really not noticed what a determined young woman I’d become?

I felt a similar frustration when I was “talked to” by Aunt Pearl, who warned me about the pain I might be inflicting on Barbara and the danger
that Danny was dating me because I was Barbara’s sister. Didn’t she see that Danny had chosen me for myself? Didn’t anyone see me?

Actually, one person in my family acted delighted for me—Barbara. I had screwed up my courage on New Year’s Day and told her that Danny and I had spent much of the previous night’s dance together; I wanted her to hear it from me rather than through the school gossip mill. “Lainie, I always knew,” she said, and gave me a hug. My nerve went only so far. I didn’t ask
what
she’d always known; I didn’t want to find out if she was aware of our clandestine meetings … which would remain in my mind as the lousiest thing I ever did. In the 1970s, I occasionally found myself at a party where someone would insist on playing a pop psychology game. One question was invariably “What is your deepest secret?” Those trysts with my sister’s boyfriend always leaped to mind, and I never mentioned them.

But whatever she knew or didn’t, Barbara quickly adjusted to the new state of affairs. And so did Danny. One evening in February, she happened to be at home when he came to pick me up for a movie. The two of them chatted casually, with no hint of still-wounded feelings between them.

As for the rest of our world, once people got over the surprise that Danny was dating “the other Greenstein twin,” everyone agreed there was a rightness to Danny and me, as if we’d been destined for each other—
bashert
. The intellectual intensity that already existed between us, our passionate engagement with ideas, ignited now that we were going together. Collaborating on articles and letters to newspapers, we debated more heatedly than ever. And with our high school graduation coming up in June, we had fervent arguments about what we planned to do with our lives. Danny and I had radically different ideas about our futures because we had radically different visions of the world and our place in it.

For me, college was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the prize that had dangled in front of me for years. At last I was actually filling out applications to UCLA and USC … and even beginning to look beyond college and consider what I wanted to do with a college degree. Mollie had said I could be a lawyer, and in her letters, she kept telling me that I was “born with a legal mind.” Well, why not? I dreamed of going to law school and fighting for working people in the courts. I broached the idea to Papa,
but he frowned and said it was one thing for a family to invest in a son entering a profession like medicine or the law, but teaching was a fine, respectable job for an educated young woman. The ideas Mollie put in my head! Even my favorite teacher, Miss Linscott, said, “For a Boyle Heights girl to go into teaching, that’s something to be very proud of.”

Danny, however, was all for my becoming a lawyer—and, in a larger sense, doing something that mattered. His quarrel with my ambitions, like mine with his, came back to our debates about Zionism. All of my visions of the future took place in America: I couldn’t imagine being a lawyer anywhere else, couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Danny burned to go to Palestine and fight for a Jewish state; he simply burned to fight, so much so that he saw no point in making any plans for a life in Los Angeles.

“Don’t you want to take Eddie up on his offer?” I asked him. Eddie Chafkin had proposed that if Danny studied business at Los Angeles City College, Eddie would arrange his work hours to accommodate the class schedule; on top of that, he’d give Danny management responsibilities and raise his salary. “He’ll
pay
you to go to school.”

“So I can be a shopkeeper?” Danny paced in front of the bench where I sat in Hollenbeck Park. His need for action was visceral, like the need with which his hands pushed under my clothes when we were alone.

“So you can learn how to run a business. Don’t you think Palestine needs people who know how to run things? At least fill out the application for City College.”

“What’s the point? There’s going to be a war.”

“You sound like you
want
a war.”

“I want someone to stand up to Hitler.”

“But you heard what he said—
Vernichtung
.” The hideous word meant “extermination.” Hitler had announced in January that if war broke out,
Vernichtung
would be the fate of all the Jews in Europe.

“Don’t you think he’s going to do that anyway?”

Of course I didn’t think that. What sane mind, in 1939, could have
imagined
the machine-like design and screaming evil of the Nazis’
Vernichtung
?