The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 4

  The Jewish area was centered at the intersection of Brooklyn Avenue and Soto Street. Brooklyn is now called Cesar Chavez Avenue, and Boyle Heights is entirely Hispanic, but back in the 1920s and ’30s, you could walk in either direction from the corner of Brooklyn and Soto and pass kosher bakeries and delicatessens with barrels of sharp-smelling pickles and matyas herring sitting out front. Canter’s was the deli where all of the junk men had breakfast and a shot of whiskey every morning at six, and every year before Passover it was the site of the crying man—a man who sat on the sidewalk in front of Canter’s grinding horseradish, tears running down his face. There was also the notorious chicken store, where Jews from all over Los Angeles came on Thursdays to buy kosher chickens for their Friday dinners. You pointed to a live, clucking chicken, the unfortunate bird was then taken into the back room and hung upside down, and a religious butcher called a shochet slit its throat. At some point, every child became aware of what went on in the store’s back room and refused to eat chicken for several weeks; some stayed vegetarians for years.

  Stores had signs in both English and Yiddish, and there were Yiddish workers’ societies, community centers, and socialists debating outside the vegetarian cafe. Boyle Heights had many synagogues, too; we lived on Breed Street, a block from the majestic Breed Street Shul, and sometimes went there on the High Holidays. That was the only time we went to synagogue, though, and a number of our neighbors didn’t go at all. We were modern Americans; what did we want with Old Country superstitions? We didn’t need to pray to God to relieve the misery of our lives. What misery? In America, Jews could even own land and build their own houses—as Aunt Sonya and Uncle Leo did on Wabash Avenue in Boyle Heights.

  Sonya and Leo built their house in 1926, when Wabash was just being developed. Approaching their brand-new house, you smelled the delicious sweet scent of fresh wood and heard a symphony of clanging hammers, rasping saws, and the shouts of men swarming over the construction sites—carpenters, plumbers, stuccoers. And what a feast for the eye, the bright facades of the just-completed houses. So modern, so proud.

  Sonya and Leo moved into their house in March, just before Barbara and I turned five. Mama, with us in tow—and our new brother or sister huge in her belly—went there almost every day that spring. Sometimes Sonya had summoned her to witness the house’s latest adornment. More often Mama was simply drawn there, as if under some compulsion to go the six blocks from our house (not new or owned, but rented and in need of repair) and torment herself with her sister-in-law’s affluence.

  “I need to walk! Hurry, girls!” Mama would cry. We’d grab our sweaters, and sometimes persuade her to take us to Hollenbeck Park, where we’d happily spend hours hurtling into space on the swings. Or we might go visit Auntie Pearl, who delighted in playing with us. Mama and Pearl laughed together, whereas Sonya got on Mama’s nerves.

  Most of the time, though, when we took a walk, Mama’s feet turned toward Sonya’s. Sonya was twenty-four then, but no one would have believed she was only a year older than Pearl. Sonya was settled, with her fine house, her two-year-old son, Stan, and her husband, Leo, a stolid, gray-haired man who constantly complained about his dyspepsia. In some ways, Sonya was the better-looking of Papa’s sisters; a “handsome” woman, she wore her brown hair elegantly pinned up, and even at twenty-four her plumpness made her seem important and matronly. (Sonya eventually served as the president of more than one women’s organization.) In contrast, Pearl often looked like she’d just emerged from a hot kitchen, her hair in unruly tendrils and her face shiny.

  The first thing Sonya always said to Barbara and me when she greeted us at the door of her house was not to get anything dirty. And then she’d turn her attention to Mama.

  “Charlotte, did you notice the chandelier? It got delivered yesterday,” Sonya would crow. “Well, how could you not notice? Thirty-two pendants of Czechoslovakian crystal! Two men it took to bring it into the house and hang it!”

  “Beautiful. So elegant,” Mama said of every new item. Then, unable to help herself, she always added, “Can I ask, what did it cost?”

  “We got a bargain, someone Leo knows in business,” Sonya said of every item, before proceeding to reveal the price. Along with bragging about her acquisitions, she’d point out the room she was fixing for Zayde, because of course he’d prefer living in her spacious new home rather than the room off our kitchen.

  Mama was called Charlotte, but her real name was Zipporah, which is Hebrew for “bird,” and she sounded like a bird twittering whenever we walked home from Sonya’s. “Dreck,” she’d mutter. “All that money, and not a shred of taste … If she thinks Zayde is going to trade my cooking for hers …” Mama had started talking to herself a few months earlier, around the time when Papa announced, “Your mama is growing a little brother or sister for you in her tummy!”

  Papa was usually calm and dignified, but often during that winter and spring, instead of giving lessons after dinner, he took us for walks. He said we were going out “to give your mama a little peace.” But I felt he had to move because he had so much excitement inside him. It felt almost dangerous to walk after dark with this man I did but didn’t recognize, a jolly Papa—a Papa who whistled! If we ran into a person he knew, he called “hello” in a big outdoor voice. “My girls,” he introduced us, always adding, “And there’s a new one on the way.” And on Saturday afternoons, he gave Mama peace by taking us to the movies at the Joy or the National Theater. Barbara liked the Joy because it showed cowboy movies. I favored the National because before we went in, Papa bought each of us a little bag of sunflower seeds at the candy store next door; I ate the seeds during the movie, cracking the shells with my teeth and spitting them onto the floor—an act that felt thrillingly mischievous, but no one punished me for it! That’s because everyone did this at the National; by the end of the movie, there were shells all over the floor, hence the theater’s nickname, the Polly Seed Opera House.

  In the spring, Papa and Zayde, who seemed equally delighted with Mama’s pregnancy—he kept smiling at Papa and patting him on the back—planted a vegetable garden by the fig tree in the yard. We helped them water the new shoots coming up and pull out weeds. And I hadn’t known Papa could draw, but sometimes he sat at the kitchen table and practiced fancy lettering. He made a beautiful alphabet for Barbara and me and did each of our names with curlicues and flowers coming out of the letters. One day I saw a drawing he’d done of a storefront with fancy lettering on the window. I hadn’t yet learned how to read, but I recognized our name, Greenstein, and I knew & Son from seeing it on the sign at Fine & Son Fine Footwear.

  Did I feel a sting of rejection, confronting this evidence that Papa wanted a son? Was there already a bud inside me of the attorney who would champion feminist causes? What I remember is that I, too, wanted a boy. I already had a sister. And, in my ignorance of human reproduction, I simply assumed that since it was what we wanted, the baby inside Mama was a little brother.

  At the same time Papa became so cheerful, Mama seemed to be sucked inside her own thoughts. She burned things on the stove or got the buttons wrong when she dressed us or forgot to make us lunch. Worse than her distraction, however, were the times she did notice us. She’d always had a temper, but now if we took too long in the bath or we talked too loud, she’d pinch or slap us.

  I say “we” and “us”—Barbara and I both referred to ourselves that way—but of course we weren’t the same person. Nor did Mama treat us the same. Her punishments for me could be arbitrary, as if she simply needed to relieve some anger and her eyes happened to light on me. I walked past her in the kitchen one day that spring, and out of nowhere she grabbed my shoulders and shook me for what felt like forever. Then, as if a storm had passed through her, she softly touched my terrified face and said, “You just looked like you needed a good shaking.”

  But between Mama and Barbara, a clash could turn into war. Like what happened on the day Sonya showed off her telephone, the first phone I’d
ever seen in a person’s house.

  “Here, Char, call someone.” Sonya plucked the receiver from its cradle on the wall.

  “No, thank you,” Mama said, but Sonya pressed the instrument into her hand.

  “You hold it up to your ear,” Sonya said.

  “I know how to use a telephone! But who do you want I should call? The mayor? The …” The idea of telephoning anyone was so foreign, Mama couldn’t even think of whom else she might call.

  “Call Canter’s. Look, I have their number right here. I call and order a pound of corned beef, they send a boy to deliver it. So much easier when I’m busy with Stan.”

  “You’d buy a pound of corned beef without looking to make sure they give you fresh and trim off the fat?” Mama sniffed and handed her back the receiver.

  “You think they’d give anything but their best to a customer who telephones an order? In fact, I think I’ll order some now.” Sonya made a show of placing the call and telling the man at Canter’s to send her their leanest, most tender corned beef.

  On the way home, Mama grumbled to herself more than ever. “The airs she puts on, you’d think she was the Queen of Sheba.… Who cares that Leo is forty-two and he’s got fat, pudgy fingers, and he laughs like a wheezing donkey? At least he has a head for business.… And I thought I was too good for Slotkin.”

  Barbara and I had both gotten good at pretending not to listen to her muttering. We chattered to each other or chased one of the goats that grazed on the unpaved streets near Sonya’s new house. We scampered around Mama as she walked, spinning in circles until we staggered from dizziness. But sometimes, if she said something like, “Nine kids like my mother, I’d kill myself first,” my eyes leaped in search of Barbara’s; she was looking for me, too, and we exchanged frightened glances.

  We knew not to respond when Mama talked to herself. So I was shocked when Barbara said this time, “Mama, who’s Slotkin? … Mama?”

  For a moment Mama looked dazed, as if she were swimming out of a dream. Then she stared daggers at Barbara. “Was anyone talking to you?”

  It wasn’t too late; Barbara could have backed down. Instead she repeated, “Who’s Slotkin?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said Slotkin. And you said Uncle Leo laughs like a donkey. Hee haw, hee haw!” She skipped a few steps ahead.

  Mama was seven months pregnant, and she’d been complaining that she could barely move, but she swooped forward with astonishing speed and grabbed Barbara’s elbow, then marched her the two remaining blocks to our house. All the while, Barbara kept defiantly braying, “Hee haw!”

  I trotted behind them, trying to will Barbara to be quiet … at the same time as I was transfixed by the drama. I’d never seen Barbara so naughty. Or Mama so furious.

  Mama kept her grip on Barbara as she pushed through our front door and into the hall.

  “Hee haw!”

  Mama slapped her. Then she flung open the door to the hall closet and shoved Barbara inside. Coats and jackets were jammed into the closet, hanging on a rod. Barbara fell into them, and for a moment it looked as if the coats would push her back out. But Mama slammed the door, grabbed the key hanging on a nail, and locked her in.

  “No!” Barbara pounded her fists against the door.

  “I can’t stand to have you in my sight!” Mama yelled.

  “Let me out!”

  “Elaine!” Mama commanded, and I jumped. I hadn’t done anything, but that wouldn’t save me if her wrath turned toward me. All she said was, “We’re going outside.”

  Trembling with the effort of not crying, I followed Mama into the kitchen. She got us glasses of water, then went into the backyard and lowered herself heavily into one of the beat-up wooden chairs Papa had found in the street and placed under the fig tree, next to our garden.

  Fruit trees—figs, apricots, peaches, loquats, pomegranates—grew in the yards of many houses in Boyle Heights. Our tree was a Black Mission fig, with purplish skin and fruit that was amber with a touch of pink. I thought of the tree as Zayde’s. The tree was the reason he’d chosen our house to rent when he moved the family to Boyle Heights, he said, and he sometimes sighed in contentment and said something (which I learned came from the Bible) about dwelling under his vine and his fig tree. Zayde tended the tree carefully, checking it on summer afternoons for the wilting leaves that meant it needed water and harvesting the figs just when they were ripe, not letting them spoil on the tree.

  I usually loved to sit beneath the fig tree, lounging on one of the chairs or, even better, sitting on the ground, where I’d find a perch in a crook of the twisty roots. When I began to read, it became one of my favorite places to retreat with a book.

  But today I wanted to be anywhere but here. I could still hear Barbara screaming. And Mama said, “Sit down. Sit! And don’t you move, or I’ll put you in there.”

  I sat.

  Now that it was May, Mama, Papa, and Zayde often lounged beside the garden after dinner. The early evenings were pleasant, just cool enough for a light jacket or sweater, the air scented with night-blooming jasmine from the bushes along the back of the house. In the middle of the day, though, I was soon hot and uncomfortable. Mama had to be hot, too. She kept fanning her face. But she didn’t say a word; she just sat and stared at nothing.

  There were things in the closet behind the coats, dark old things whose musty reek mingled with the sickly sweet odor of mothballs. And there were spiders. Once Mama was getting her coat out, and she screamed at a giant spider on the sleeve. Thinking about it, I felt like it was me trapped in the dark, with horrid things I couldn’t see crawling on me.

  And worse than that fear was the way I felt toward Mama. Like any child, I accepted the behavior of adults in my world even when it baffled me. But imprisoning Barbara in the closet on a sweltering afternoon … Yes, I knew that Mama’s upbringing had been harsh, and in the 1920s there was no such thing as “parenting”—parents simply reared their children, they didn’t have bookstore shelves filled with expert advice. Still, in what Mama had done, even my five-year-old self recognized a streak of irrationality that terrified me. A wave of dizziness sent me pitching out of the chair.

  I crouched on the ground, drenched in sweat, and cast a frightened glance at Mama. Would she put me in the closet for leaving my chair?

  But Mama’s eyes were closed. She was asleep.

  Carefully, not making a sound, I stood up, planning to return to the chair.

  She didn’t stir.

  I took two steps away. Mama continued to sleep. Another step. Then, moving as silently as I could, I sneaked back inside the house.

  Into the hallway. Something odd had happened. There were bits of white stuff on the floor. I got closer and saw that the bits were plaster. They had come from a hole in the wall about the size of a potato next to the closet door.

  There was no sound from inside the closet, and for a moment I imagined Barbara had squeezed herself out through the potato-sized hole.

  “Barbara?” I whispered. “Barbara?”

  Two fingers poked out from the hole. I reached for them, and our fingers locked. Hers were clammy, as if she had a fever. And she hadn’t said a word.

  I looked at the key, on its nail above my head. If Mama had thrown Barbara in the closet for sassing her, what would she do to me if I …?

  I kissed Barbara’s fingers. She whimpered.

  “I’m going to get you out. I promise.” I had to pull to loosen her grip.

  I went into the kitchen to get a chair. Peeked into the yard. Mama didn’t stir. I pulled the chair into the hall, climbed up on it, and got the key. Climbed down and opened the door.

  Barbara flew out as if something were chasing her. I slammed the door to keep whatever it was inside. She was sour with sweat, her bangs plastered to her forehead. She still didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll get you some water.” I took her hand and led her into the kitchen.

  Oh, no! Mama was coming in! Sh
e was already through the door, and it was too late to hide.

  But Mama wasn’t mad. Instead, she cried out, “Oy, mein kind!” and ran to put her arms around Barbara as if she hadn’t been the one who locked Barbara in the closet. Barbara flinched for a moment, but then started to sob and let Mama kiss her and smooth her sweaty hair.

  That’s how it was between Mama and Barbara. Barbara challenged Mama more than I did, and Mama punished her more harshly. But she was also more affectionate toward Barbara. And it seems bizarre to call Mama indulgent, but how else could you describe the way she sometimes went along with Barbara’s fancies? Like when we went to the party Aunt Sonya and Uncle Leo gave in June to show off their new house.

  Mama planned for us to wear our good Kate Greenaway dresses. She took the dresses out of the closet but left us to step into them and do each other’s buttons—she was now in her final month of pregnancy and had already packed a bag with the things she’d need for the hospital. I donned my dress happily; I loved the soft green color and the fancy smocked bodice. Barbara, however, left her blue Kate Greenaway lying on the bed. Instead she put on her white middy blouse with the navy sailor collar and matching navy skirt.

  “What are you wearing?” Mama said the minute Barbara emerged from our bedroom.

  “I want to wear my middy blouse.”