The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 15

  All of that frustration went into the shove I gave Audrey when we were fixing Zayde’s room for its new inhabitant.

  The room off the kitchen had sat empty ever since Zayde left in March. At first we didn’t touch the room because we expected Zayde to return. Once it became clear that his departure was permanent, Barbara and I begged to move there, but Mama and Papa were preoccupied with the new baby and with money worries; and the room needed a few repairs that no one ever got around to. The delay ultimately became part of the silver lining. Instead of the slapdash way we would have fixed up the room for Barbara and me, we were making it beautiful … for Cousin Mollie.

  Papa, Barbara, and I painted the walls with fresh white paint. Mama made new curtains out of crisp fabric with a pattern of pink and blue flowers, and hemmed a square of the same fabric to drape over the orange crate that served as a bedside table. On Saturday night—just two days to Mollie!—Papa was hanging the pretty mirror edged with Mexican tile that Mama had insisted we buy, while Barbara oiled the wooden bed frame and dresser, and Audrey and I, on our knees, scrubbed every inch of the wooden floor. Mama, holding baby Harriet, stood in the doorway to supervise. That was a lot of people crowded into a small room, and Audrey kept getting in my way. Plus, she barely touched her brush to the floor, and I was desperate to do my job the best, so Mama would pick me to room with Mollie.

  When Audrey bumped into me for the fifth time, I butted my hip into her.

  “Ela-aine!” She crumpled to the floor, emitting the ominous whine that preceded her tantrums.

  “Audrey, don’t you dare,” Mama said. Then she turned to me. I expected to be screamed at or slapped. Instead, Mama knocked me over with what she said. “That settles it. Elaine, you’re moving in here with Mollie.”

  “What?” Barbara gasped. “How come she gets rewarded?”

  “Not one more word. Barbara, you’re able to get along with Audrey. Elaine can’t. All I want is a little peace in this house.”

  “It’s not fair!” Barbara wailed.

  She was right. But my twinge of guilt was nothing compared to the delirious happiness that flooded through me. I went at the floor with vigor, as if energetic cleaning would speed the arrival of my cousin—who was so important that the union was sending her to Los Angeles on an airplane.

  WE SOMETIMES MET PEOPLE at the railroad station, but I didn’t know anyone who had traveled by airplane. Mollie’s flight was scheduled to land at Glendale Airport on Monday evening, and we all went there to welcome her. Papa recruited Uncle Leo to drive his car, in which my family fit, but just barely, and we planned that most of us would ride back with Leo while Mama and Mollie would take a taxi.

  Mollie’s flight was supposed to arrive at seven-thirty. We got to the airport by seven and stationed ourselves along the chain-link fence that separated the waiting area from where the planes took off and landed. But seven-thirty came, with no plane from Chicago; then seven forty-five, eight o’clock, and, to Mama’s growing consternation, eight-fifteen. “Chicago’s always late,” said a man whose nonchalant tone reminded me of movies where people dressed for dinner and sipped cocktails. The man had taken dozens of plane trips himself, he said. “Air currents over the Rockies, you can’t predict.”

  Papa took advantage of the wait to give us a lesson on aviation. A plane could fly, he said, because the propeller—“See, the part that’s spinning so fast?”—pulled it forward. If the pilot pointed the nose up, the propeller pulled up the plane. A man apologized for interrupting but informed us that what really made flight possible was the shape of the wings and something about a vacuum over them. None of us said much after that, except for Uncle Leo grumbling that he’d had to rush dinner and couldn’t digest properly, and hadn’t he told Papa that no one arrived at the airport as early as seven to meet a seven-thirty plane?

  Mama kept staring at the sky, as if she could will Mollie’s plane to appear. And it didn’t matter if they announced that the next flight landing was from Denver or San Francisco—she hungrily scrutinized every woman who walked down the metal staircase. Only when the last person had left the plane did she pull back, an impression of chain links on her forehead.

  For me, every minute at the airport was like breathing the freshest, sweetest air that had ever entered my lungs. Whenever a flight approached, I joined Mama against the fence, watching the airplane transform from high, distant pinpricks of light to a screaming, diving monster—my heart pounded in terror that it would smash into a million pieces. I sighed in relief when each plane touched down safely and juddered to a halt. At night, there were more flights landing than taking off, but it was even more astonishing to see a plane bump over the ground like an ungainly bus and suddenly rise into the air like a swan. Vacuum, I told myself; but how could a word I associated with Aunt Sonya’s Hoover describe this miracle?

  Just being at the airport was thrilling. Any other place I’d gone beyond Boyle Heights—the beach, downtown, Leo’s bookstore in Hollywood—still felt like familiar territory. But not Glendale Airport, where everyone was dressed so nicely they might have been film actors costumed by Pearl, and the hum of talk was like listening to the radio, with no choppy accents or mangled grammar.

  Papa gave nickels to Barbara and me and said we could go get Coca-Colas at the snack counter. Making the most of our freedom, we first visited the “ladies’ lounge.” I used the toilet, then went to the sink, but I froze when a Negro lady in a starched blue uniform came over and handed me the softest white towel I’d ever felt. “Here you are, miss,” she said. I thanked her, but was that enough? Barbara, standing at the sink, had her own white towel; I tried to catch her eye, but she was absorbed in applying lipstick.

  “Here. I’ll meet you at the snack bar.” She gave me the lipstick and breezed out.

  As I stroked on the lipstick, the Negro lady picked up Barbara’s discarded towel. “I’m done with mine, too,” I said. “Thank you. Very much.” I searched her face for a hint of what else might be expected of me. Then I saw a lady drop a coin into a dish on a table. I panicked for a moment. Should I use Papa’s nickel? But I really wanted a Coca-Cola. I remembered I had some coins in my pocket, and I put the nickel in the dish.

  At the gleaming snack counter, Barbara was talking to a blond boy who looked about our age. He was to her left, and she’d put her sweater on the stool to her right to save it for me, but when I got there, she didn’t look at me.

  I ordered my Coke and pretended to be fascinated by the menu.

  “Oh, yes, we’ve flown four or five times,” Barbara was saying, her voice bubbly and unfamiliar. “Mummy and Daddy say it’s so much more convenient than the train.”

  “I’ll say,” the boy replied. “I can’t wait until they have passenger flights to Europe. Ships are fun, but it takes such a long time, especially from Los Angeles.”

  What was a Monte Cristo sandwich?

  “Wouldn’t that be grand?” Barbara said. “Just like Lindy.”

  “You wouldn’t be scared?”

  “I’m never scared.”

  “How about you?” the boy asked. “Would you be scared? You,” he emphasized, and I realized he meant me.

  “I’d love to fly,” I said.

  He scanned my face. “Your sister?” he asked Barbara.

  For a breath, I felt her hesitate. Then she said yes and introduced me—as Elaine Green—and without pausing for a breath, told me the boy’s name, Gregory Hawkins.

  “Yes, I can see the resemblance,” Gregory Hawkins said. And then, “Well, nice to meet you. I didn’t know it was so late. I have to go.”

  “Why did you do that?” Barbara said after he left.

  “Do what?” I said. “Why did you tell him our last name was Green?”

  She shrugged and slid off the stool. I followed her toward our family outpost at the fence.

  She turned back suddenly, forcing me to stop short. “Don’t you ever just want to pretend you’re someone else?” she said fiercely.

 
; And for a moment I glimpsed my family through the crowd as if I didn’t know them. Mama was wearing the “smart suit” she’d had made for our first day of school, now seven years out of style and straining at the shoulders as she held Harriet. Papa and Uncle Leo were shorter and darker than most of the men in the airport, and although there were a few other young children present, only Audrey was squatting by the fence; somebody should make her stand up. And there was the sheer bulk of them—no one else was in groups of more than two or three—and the way they stayed in a clump by the fence instead of strolling around or going inside to have a drink.

  Did I seem equally out of place? I wondered uneasily. And was it just that I was a poor girl among these well-off world travelers, or did I look glaringly, irrevocably Jewish? Was that what Barbara had accused me of “doing”? Was it the reason Gregory Hawkins had looked at me, seen the same largish nose and dark curly hair as Barbara had—but with my narrower face and glasses—and lost interest in flirting with us? I felt a wash of shame that stunned me. Where had the sense of “wrongness” come from? Yes, I had heard Mama’s and Zayde’s stories about how Jews were treated in their villages in eastern Europe, and I knew my life was nothing like the lives I saw in the movies. Still, growing up in Boyle Heights, I had never experienced scorn or hatred. Yet it was as if the humiliations and oppression Mama and Zayde had suffered had been lying in wait to ambush me. All it took was venturing beyond my narrow accustomed world, glimpsing myself as someone who belonged at the airport might see me.

  My uneasiness lingered when I was back among my family. Harriet had pooped, but Mama hadn’t brought a fresh diaper, never imagining we would have to wait so long. Harriet stank and fussed, and Mama made Barbara and me take turns holding her. I tried to get excited again about the airplanes taking off and landing, but I just wanted to be somewhere else. Or even, like Barbara, someone else? I glanced at Barbara, who, even though she had to hold Harriet, was standing a bit behind us, keeping her distance from the fence. The way she had chattered about “Mummy and Daddy” and lied about having flown … if I tried to do that, I would choke on the falseness. As always, I marveled at—and envied—my sister’s audacity, her chutzpah. This time, though, something else stirred in me. True, I couldn’t play a role like my chameleon sister. With every inch of my skin, every thought that crossed my mind, every word I spoke, I was Elaine Greenstein. And I was glad of it! I felt the integrity (even if I didn’t have that word for it at the time) of being utterly myself, and it gave me an extraordinary sense of power; it was a way I would feel years later in courtrooms when I was at the top of my game. And Barbara—for a moment I saw past her facility at shapeshifting to her need for it … and I felt sad for her.

  All of these thoughts fled, however, when a new set of lights appeared and someone shouted, “It’s Chicago!”

  “Mollie!” Mama called.

  The plane landed, then jounced toward the fence and shuddered to a stop. Men in coveralls wheeled over the metal stairway, and from inside the plane a uniformed arm flung open the door.

  The first passenger to emerge was a matronly lady in a lumpy brown suit and green hat. My eyes skimmed past her, but Mama screamed, “Mollie!” And the matron turned into a girl as she dashed down the stairs, yelling, “Charlotte!” and not caring that this wasn’t the casual yet dignified way in which everyone else descended from planes. Mollie kissed Mama’s fingers through the fence and hurried through the gate. Then she and Mama embraced, both of them laughing and weeping.

  Finally Mama introduced each of us. “Elaine,” Mollie said and gave me a kiss. “Your mama sent me the letter you wrote to the newspaper. I’m so proud that you’re fighting for justice.” She said a different special thing to Papa, Barbara, Audrey, and even Leo, and she cuddled Harriet (and didn’t wrinkle her nose at the smell) while we waited for her bags. Up close, Cousin Mollie looked a lot younger than when she’d first stepped from the airplane. She had springy dark hair like Mama’s (and mine) that poked out untidily from her stylish green fez. And her brown eyes sparkled with energy.

  When we got home Mama showed Mollie her room and said, “I hope you don’t mind if Elaine sleeps on the cot.”

  “Mind?” Mollie clapped her hands. “It’ll be like you and me, Char, when we were girls.”

  Oh, the wonderful talks we were going to have! The secrets I would share with the heroine of Mama’s Chicago stories. But Mollie stayed up late that first night talking with Mama in the kitchen, and the next morning when I woke up, she had already left. That evening, Mama made a feast for Mollie’s first dinner with us, and we waited an hour and a half before we finally gave up on her and ate. But she stayed out until long after I was asleep. When I awoke the following day, she was gone again.

  It was like that all week. The same blazing energy that drew me to Mollie kept her working for the union from sunrise until midnight. In the morning, she left by six to talk to people on their way into the factories. Every evening, she attended a meeting or strolled around the Mexican center of Olvera Street—most of the dressmakers were Mexican—or visiting workers in their homes.

  I tried going to bed early, hoping to wake up and talk with her when she got ready in the morning, but as the oldest of six children, Mollie had learned to be quiet. She slept with her alarm clock under her pillow and turned it off before the ring penetrated my sleep. She was extremely tidy as well. Other than her scents—a flowery toilet water and the nasty but tantalizingly adult smell of cigarettes—she left little sign that I even had a roommate. Alone at night for the first time in my life, I drew her brush through my hair and put a few drops of her toilet water on my wrists. I wished resentfully that I were a Mexican dressmaker. Then she’d be interested in me.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt slighted. Mama complained that Mollie might just as well have stayed in Chicago, for all the time she spent with us. “Your union is supposed to fight for better conditions for workers. Can’t they give you one night off to see your family?” she said as Mollie prepared to head off to yet another meeting instead of having dinner with us.

  Mollie embraced Mama. “Char, darling, with the union just getting off the ground here, we can’t let up.” She gave Mama a kiss, then left.

  “Twenty-eight years old, and she’s married to that union,” Mama muttered.

  On Friday night, Mollie called to say she couldn’t have Shabbos dinner with us because she was being interviewed on a radio station. “What does she think this is, a hotel?” Mama said, and went to bed with a headache. Later, I awakened to voices from the kitchen. Mollie had finally come home, and Mama was weeping and talking to her in Yiddish.

  Mollie took Mama out for lunch the next day, and on Sunday, though she spent the day visiting workers in their homes, she came back in the evening and joined us for a leisurely dinner. At first the dinner wasn’t what I’d hoped for. All of us were greedy for our guest’s attention, and the important things I wanted to tell her—that I was writing a report about Jane Addams, from Mollie’s own city of Chicago, and that I’d been chosen to be an editor of the school newsletter—got drowned out by everyone else. Audrey recited a stupid poem. Zayde, who’d joined us that evening, boasted about the radical meetings he used to attend in his village. Barbara talked about her playgroup and answered Mollie’s questions about the jobs held by the children’s mothers and what kind of working conditions they had.

  Then Papa cleared his throat loudly. “Mollie, may I ask you a few questions?” he said. “About your union organizing?”

  “Absolutely,” Mollie replied, at the same time that Mama said, “Bill,” with a warning look. Papa had been grumbling that some of the garment factory owners were our neighbors, small businessmen who were having a rough time in the Depression just like everyone else.

  “I voted for FDR,” Papa said, “and I want you to understand, I’m all for unions at a big company like General Motors or in the coal mines. But why target the garment factories? You’re talking about small businessmen,
Jerry Bachman, for instance.”

  “You go to school with Greta Bachman, don’t you, girls?” Mama said. “Mollie, would you care for a bit more kugel?”

  “Thanks, Char. I’ve missed your kugel,” Mollie said, but her focus stayed on Papa. “I met Jerry Bachman just the other day,” she said.

  “Sid Lewis is another one,” Papa said. “He started out working in a factory in New York.”

  “Sid?” Zayde broke in. “A penny-pincher. Minute somebody becomes a boss, they forget where they came from,” he said, smoothly sloughing off his admiration for anyone with the chutzpah to start a business.

  Papa said, “You can’t tell me Sid doesn’t have sympathy for the people who work for him. He and Jerry, they’d pay their employees more if they could.”

  “Bill, I’m sorry to have to tell you,” Mollie said, “but your friend Bachman is one of the worst offenders. He pays some women less than a dollar a week. Minimum wage for women in California is sixteen dollars, you know.”

  “Barbara, help me clear the table, and we’ll bring out dessert,” Mama said, again trying to defuse their disagreement.