The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 10

  I knew there were relief agencies where Mr. Berlov could ask for help. Or he and Danny could eat at a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen! On trips downtown, I’d seen people lined up on the sidewalk for soup—often with their heads tucked into their collars, as if they were trying to hide their faces in case anyone they knew came by. I couldn’t bear the idea of Danny—with the shame he’d always suffered, even before the Depression, on account of his father’s poverty—having to stand in a soup line. I had to help him. But what could I possibly do?

  That night I saw Papa sitting in his armchair after dinner, reading the East Side Journal, the local weekly newspaper. Papa especially enjoyed the letters people wrote to the editor of the paper; sometimes he’d read them out loud, and he’d comment to Barbara and me, “A letter to the editor, that’s how an American speaks up!”

  I took a pad of paper into the bedroom and started to write. I saw a terrible thing today. A boy … But I crossed that out, because I didn’t want to point so obviously to Danny. A person who lives in Boyle Heights tried to buy food for his family, but a grocer said his family couldn’t get credit anymore. As I would do one day in legal briefs, I laid the groundwork for my position by acknowledging the arguments that could be made against it: Grocers couldn’t afford to just give things away. And there was help available for anyone who was in danger of starving. But sometimes people need just a little help. What if the relief agency gave money to grocery stores? The grocers know which customers are having a hard time, and they could use the money to help them, without anyone having to ask.

  I carefully copied the letter with my fountain pen onto a sheet of good writing paper and signed it the way we did in school when we wrote letters to, say, thank a fireman or a nurse who came to speak to our class: Elaine Greenstein, Mrs. Villier’s sixth-grade class, Breed Street Elementary School. I put it in an envelope and addressed it to the East Side Journal. When Mama wasn’t looking, I took a stamp from the drawer in the kitchen where she kept them.

  I mailed the letter the next morning. That was on Friday, and the newspaper didn’t come out until the following Wednesday. In the meanwhile, Barbara came up with her own strategy to help Danny.

  On Monday, she and I went to Chafkin’s after school with Mama’s grocery list. “You go get everything,” she told me. While Mrs. Chafkin helped me collect the items for Mama, Barbara roamed in another part of the store, and she hung back as Mrs. Chafkin totaled up what I’d bought.

  Excitement and secrecy and wildness zinged off of her, and the second we were out of sight of the store windows, I grabbed her arm.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “You’ll see.” She jerked away and kept walking, fast.

  “What did you do?”

  “You’ll see,” she repeated.

  I’d thought we were going straight home, but instead she turned down Soto Street. To the rooming house where Danny lived.

  I had barely seen him since the incident at Chafkin’s the week before. That wasn’t unusual—Danny had a gang of boys he hung out with, just as Barbara and I had our own girlfriends—but even when I’d waved to him on the playground, he’d pretended not to see me.

  “What do you want?” he challenged when he answered Barbara’s knock. He stood in the doorway, not asking us in.

  “Is your father home?” Barbara whispered.

  “No. Why?”

  “Can we come in?”

  He shrugged.

  Barbara went over to the small wooden table that Danny and his father used for eating and as a writing desk. She folded back the flap of her school knapsack. “Look!” She took out several cans, a stick of butter, a bag of rice—about a dozen things in all—and placed them on the table.

  “So?” Danny said.

  “Barbara, where did you get that?” I said, thinking for a moment that she must have raided our own pantry before we’d left for school that day.

  “Where do you think? Chafkin’s,” she answered. Then she said to Danny, “It’s for you.”

  “We don’t need you to buy us food.”

  “I didn’t buy it.”

  Her words hung in the air.

  “You stole it?” Danny and I spoke at the same time, with, I sensed, similar shock at this act, which every Boyle Heights kid understood on a small scale—swiping a piece of bubble gum—but which we had never encountered at this magnitude.

  Then my disbelief turned into fear, and Danny’s became anger.

  “You stole this while we were in the store?” My knees wobbled with the inevitability that we’d be caught and held equally guilty.

  “We don’t need you to steal for us, either!” Danny snatched up the cans and shoved them back into her knapsack.

  “Fine, take it back, then,” Barbara challenged him.

  “They’ll think I stole it.”

  “Then you’ll have to eat it, won’t you?”

  “I’ll take it back,” I threw out, but it was impossible. Either I’d be branded as the thief or I’d have to tell on Barbara.

  “I don’t care what you do with it.” Barbara raked us both with a scornful glance and made her exit, slamming the door.

  Danny surveyed the booty still on the table. Butter. Half a dozen eggs. Two cans of tuna fish, his favorite food.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was doing it,” I said.

  “You were right there, and you didn’t have any idea?” But another quality entered his voice: admiration. For Barbara stealing! I thought of telling him about my letter then, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

  “How was I supposed to know she was stealing?” I’d figured she was up to something, but my imagination for transgression was so limited, all I could think was that she was getting back at Eddie Chafkin by sticking chewed-up gum someplace or jumbling items on the shelves, putting a box of cereal with the canned peaches.

  “Was Eddie around?”

  “Just Mrs. Chafkin.”

  “Guess that’d be easier. Still.” He rolled his eyes. “Your sister’s nuts! Well, you take this.”

  “I can’t. Mama …”

  “I guess it’s stupid for it to go to waste.” He picked up the stolen items from the table and started putting them away.

  In just two days, the East Side Journal would come out with my letter in it. Then Danny would really have something to admire.

  On Wednesday I put on my nicest school outfit, a navy jumper and crisp white blouse. The East Side Journal got delivered (by Mr. Berlov; it was one of his ways to earn a little money) sometime during the morning, so it should be at our house when we came home for lunch.

  Novice author that I was, it never crossed my mind that the newspaper might not publish my letter. But as a matter of fact, they did. I saw my letter in print when we returned to our classroom after the morning recess. Mrs. Villiers picked up a newspaper—the East Side Journal!—from her desk. Mrs. Villiers was one of my favorite teachers, a feathery woman of about forty who had been widowed in the Great War. She loved to quote famous sayings and always kept a pencil tucked into her blond chignon in case she was seized with the inspiration to write a poem.

  “Look, children!” she said. “See how mighty the pen is!”

  She had me come to the front of the room, and I saw that my letter occupied the place of honor at the top of all the letters to the editor, beneath a giant headline: “FDR, Listen! Boyle Heights Sixth-Grader Offers Relief Policy.” Mrs. Villiers asked me to read my letter out loud. I had to push my glasses, new that fall, up my suddenly sweaty nose, and my legs got so tense from excitement I could barely feel them under me. Yet my voice rang out, thanks to Papa’s elocution lessons and an unexpected stage presence, perhaps inherited from the fusgeyers on Mama’s side. When I finished reading, Mrs. Villiers clapped, and everyone applauded with her. Then she cut out my letter and pinned it up on the wall. Mr. Roosevelt might invite me to Washington to give him advice when he took office as president, she said.

  When school let out for lunch,
I galloped out to the playground, certain that everyone knew about my fame—as if “Boyle Heights Sixth-Grader” were emblazoned on a banner that streamed out above my head. But my schoolmates hurried home the way they always did, the bold kids scuffling and shouting and the timid, gawky ones yearning toward a brief return to their real lives in which they were their mamas’ treasures instead of the dull, easily bullied children they impersonated at school.

  I told Barbara my news on our way home.

  “You wrote a letter saying Chafkin’s should give free food to … people we know?” She glanced at Audrey, whose six-year-old legs trotted to keep up with us.

  “I didn’t say any names. And it’s not free food, it’s money the government would give to the grocery stores, and then they …” My plan, so elegant in writing, sounded ridiculously complicated when I tried to explain it. “You’ll see. Mama will have the paper at home.”

  “Did you print or do handwriting?” Audrey asked, focused on the mechanics she was just learning in first grade.

  I groaned.

  “Why didn’t you write to the relief agency?” Barbara said. “Or the mayor?” She wasn’t being obtuse to deflate me. The idea of writing to a newspaper was as foreign to her as stealing from Chafkin’s—which I’d gotten her to promise never to do again—was to me.

  Barbara may have failed to be impressed, but Papa appreciated the momentousness of this event. He’d gotten Mr. Fine to give him time off during the busy lunch hour, and he was waiting on the porch. As soon as I came into sight, he ran out and swept me into his arms. “Did you see the East Side Journal? And you didn’t make one spelling error!” In the house, one East Side Journal lay open to my letter on the kitchen table, and another dozen copies sat pristine and untouched on the sideboard.

  Mama, too, was all smiles and said she’d make anything I wanted for dinner that night.

  “Meatballs!” I said.

  Once Barbara saw my name printed in the newspaper, she joined in the fuss, showing the genuine pleasure in each other’s triumphs that coexisted with our perpetual rivalry. On our way back to school after lunch, she carried an East Side Journal to show her class.

  Everyone must have heard about my letter in their classes that afternoon, because I was the center of attention when school let out. The only person who acted oblivious to my exalted status was the one on whose behalf I’d attained it—Danny, who was waiting with Barbara in our usual spot at the edge of the playground. The one concession he made to my fame was to notice all the people looking my way.

  “I have something to show you, but not with people staring at us,” he said.

  He had an air of suppressed excitement, and Barbara didn’t balk at missing her after-school dramatics class. She and I went with Danny to the playground across the Red Car trolley tracks. He waited until we’d sat down on a bench, then made a show of reaching into his satchel. Was he going to pull out an East Side Journal?

  “For you!” With a flourish, he handed Barbara two Milky Way bars. “And you.” Another flourish, and he produced two Snickers for me. Last came a Hershey’s bar for himself.

  Candy bars, costing a nickel each, were rare treats during the Depression—far too great a luxury for a boy whose father couldn’t afford a bag of potatoes. Barbara was always the one who challenged Danny, and I expected her to say something, but she had already peeled the wrapper from her Milky Way and was chewing her first bite.

  “Danny, where did you get these?” I said.

  “Chafkin’s. Pollack’s.” The two local grocery stores.

  “How did you get them?”

  “Bought ’em. Snickers is still your favorite, isn’t it? Did I get the wrong kind?”

  “I love Snickers.” I started to unwrap one. “It’s just …” I had never before questioned Danny’s versions of events. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?” he said through a mouthful of chocolate.

  “You didn’t buy five candy bars.”

  Danny hesitated and glanced at Barbara. She was taking tiny bites to savor her Milky Way.

  “So?” he said.

  “So, you could get caught!” The grocers kept the candy bars right at the counter, under their noses.

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “Danny, since when is stealing the only way to get what you want? Didn’t you see my letter in the newspaper?”

  His face went cold. “The letter where you said my father can’t pay his grocery bills?”

  “I didn’t say anything about your father.”

  “I can take care of myself. You want the Snickers or not?”

  Barbara poked my arm. “Elaine, don’t be such a stick.”

  “Of course I want it.” I tore the wrapper off my Snickers and took a big bite.

  “How’d you do it?” Barbara asked with the respect of one thief for another.

  As Danny explained how he had pocketed the candy bars while the grocers helped him with small legitimate purchases, I devoured my Snickers.

  The candy bar barely touched the ravenous emptiness gaping inside me. The sense of exclusion I had long felt around Barbara and Danny was no longer a mystery. Now I glimpsed the chasm that isolated me on one side while they stood, laughing, on the other. I played by the rules; I would eventually come to understand the rules inside and out, and fight to turn them to my—and my clients’—purposes. But believing in the value of rules was in my nature, just as Barbara and Danny were both natural outlaws.

  That night at dinner, I stuffed myself with meatballs, as well as two pieces of the chocolate cake Mama had baked for the celebration.

  BETWEEN ALL THE SUGAR and the excitement, the next day at school I felt sick. Mrs. Villiers put her cool hand on my forehead, then sent me home.

  “Mama?” I called when I walked in the door.

  She didn’t answer. She must have been out. I was a little disappointed, but I had already been fussed over as much in the previous twenty-four hours as I usually was in months, and I was eleven, old enough to take an aspirin without any help and put myself to bed.

  I pushed open the kitchen door to get a glass of water and saw … I didn’t know what I was seeing. This was surely our kitchen: I recognized the green linoleum floor and primrose-flowered curtains, and the oak table standing in the middle of the room. A woman stood on the other side of the table; she had her back to me and didn’t notice when I came in, but she was wearing Mama’s blue housedress. And I recognized the black cast-iron soup pot and the smell of boiled onions. But …

  Instead of being on the stove, the soup pot sat on a low stool.

  The woman straddled the steaming pot, her legs wide and her knees slightly bent, as if she were going to sit on it.

  And she was sobbing and talking out loud in Yiddish.

  I stood frozen in the doorway. I hadn’t thought I was very ill, but now I felt dizzy and my scalp exploded in sweat.

  “Please, God, I can’t do it this time,” she said. “I know I don’t talk to you as often as I should. Maybe you didn’t hear I live in America now? Even here, a woman doesn’t have much choice about getting married, all right. But you think I’m still in Tecuci, where the women have baby after baby—”

  Tecuci was Mama’s village in Romania. This woman talking to God was my mother.

  “Mama?” I said.

  She sprang up—and kicked the pot over. Steaming onions and water spilled onto the floor, onto her legs and bare feet.

  “Ai!” Screaming, she ran toward the doorway. Toward me, shrieking, “What are you doing here?”

  She shoved me aside, knocking my head into the swinging door. Once she’d escaped the kitchen and the scalding liquid, she staggered to a chair, moaning. “God in heaven, my feet!”

  “Mama, should I call the doctor? Or Papa? Why don’t I call Papa?”

  “Elaine, no!”

  “Please, can I do anything? I’ll get you some Vaseline.”

  “Vaseline, yes. What did you mean, sneaking up on me like tha
t?”

  Weeping, I ran to the powder room. When I came back with the Vaseline, the rage had drained out of Mama. Her face was pale, and she whimpered when I applied the Vaseline to her feet and ankles and put gauze over it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to call the doctor?” I asked.

  “I just need to sit here and rest a little.”

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “I don’t … Yes, could you clean up? In the kitchen?”

  “Is it soup? Should I save what didn’t spill?”

  “Soup? You think like they say about old bubbes, I flavor my soup by pissing in it?” She started to laugh, but wildly. She must have seen she was scaring me, because she stopped and caressed my cheek. “Darling, it’s not soup. Throw it out. And please?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell anyone. This will be our secret, all right?”

  I mopped the floor twice. Still, the house stank of onions for days. And Mama limped on her burned feet; she accounted for her injuries and the smell by saying she had knocked a pot off the stove.

  Barbara had another explanation for the mystifying scene I’d witnessed. (Of course I told Barbara. I didn’t breathe a word to anyone else, as I’d promised Mama. But sharing the story with my twin sister didn’t count as telling; it was like trying to make sense in my own mind of what I’d seen.)

  “You sit over a pot of boiled onions if you don’t want to have a baby,” Barbara said.

  “What? That’s stupid.”

  “That’s what Sari Lubow’s aunt said. Sari told me once she heard her mother and her aunt talking about it. Her aunt said it was old-country meshugas.”

  Barbara was my source of information about such things; she picked up every whisper about the facts of life the way I absorbed subjects in school.