The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  Mama picked up the suit from Mrs. Kalman a week before the big day. That evening she modeled it for us. Mama was nice-looking, but most of her clothes were made of cheap fabrics that made her slightly plump figure look a bit dumpy. The new suit had a swagger jacket tailored to hug her hips—“just like the latest fashions in New York and Paris,” as Mrs. Kalman frequently remarked. A daring skirt, that came to just below her knees, showed off her shapely calves, made long and elegant by her spike heels. Uncle Gabe, invited with Pearl for the occasion, gave a wolf whistle when Mama came into the living room in her new outfit.

  Papa grumbled, “Does this mean you’ll finally stop cleaning up on our friends at cards?” Still, he couldn’t stop staring at Mama.

  And she hadn’t finished astonishing us. The next day, Pearl came over after lunch to stay with Barbara, Audrey, and me. She and Mama whispered together, and Mama said, “Pearl, are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Pearl replied. Finally Pearl said, “Charlotte, go already!” and almost pushed Mama out the door.

  I was on the porch when she returned, walking fast and dabbing her handkerchief at her eyes. “Mama!” I cried, but she ran up the steps into the house and let out a sob. I ran in after her, but I was too frightened to ask what was wrong.

  Pearl rushed to Mama, too, and hugged her. “Don’t worry, Charlotte. It’s how I felt right after, too. Everyone does. Oh, I can tell already it’s gorgeous.”

  Pearl eased off the wide-brimmed summer straw hat that Mama had pulled down so it covered her whole head.

  She had cut her beautiful hair. The heavy, dark, wavy blanket that she let me brush sometimes had been shorn into a flapper’s bob. Pearl’s hair was bobbed, but Pearl was different—she and Gabe danced the Charleston, and she smoked cigarettes. And her bob clung sleekly to her head, only poufing out a little when she set it in pin curls. Mama’s hair, cut short, was thick and springy, as if the energy that used to wiggle to the end of each hair no longer knew where to go, and now the strands shot out from her head.

  I couldn’t help it. I gasped in horror.

  Pearl gave me a dirty look and fluffed Mama’s bob with her fingers. “It’s perfect! I knew you had the right kind of hair, Char. So much better than mine—you’ve got that beautiful natural wave. Doesn’t your mama look beautiful, Elaine?”

  Barbara—where was she?—might have zipped past the crack that opened in the world, through which I glimpsed the broken places in my mother and knew I had to fix them. But what about the rip threatening to open inside me, the sense of betraying some essential Elaine-ness, if I said what they wanted to hear?

  “Yes, beautiful!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, and even though I’d hesitated, Pearl smiled, and Mama said, “I’m a modern lady now, aren’t I?”

  “Like a movie star,” I said.

  “See?” Pearl said. “Let’s see how it looks with this.” From a big shopping bag she’d brought with her, Pearl took out a hatbox.

  “Oh, Pearl!” Mama clapped her hands. Pearl had bought Mama a dark brown bob hat, its bell shape fitted close to her head to show just the edges of her hair at her cheeks.

  Barbara came in then; she must have been in the garden. “Let me feel,” she said, and ran her hands through Mama’s bob. It hadn’t occurred to me that the wiry helmet would feel anything like hair.

  Mama seemed happy until Pearl had to go home to make dinner. “Can’t you stay just a little longer?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry, Bill will love it,” Pearl said. But Pearl knew, just as I did, the story of how Mama and Papa had met—that she took the English class he used to teach at night, and he noticed the dramatic fervor with which she recited poems … and her abundant, almost-black hair.

  I heard later that Pearl went straight from our house to Fine’s and warned Papa that he’d better compliment Mama, or Pearl would make him sorry for the rest of his life.

  We didn’t need to worry about Papa. No matter how attractive he had found Mama’s long hair, his passion was for modernity. “No more old country,” he said.

  It was Zayde who murmured, “Your pretty, pretty hair.” Still, Zayde—who was, after all, an older man, for whom Mama had her greatest appeal—liked everything she did. In fact, he wanted her to keep coming to his card games, but she’d promised Papa she would stop when she got the money for school outfits, and she declared herself finished with all that.

  The minefield of the bob crossed, Mama threw us into a euphoria of anticipation. She lectured us constantly on how to behave in school: Always respect our teachers. Never hit or push other children. Never, never fight with each other the way we did at home. She patted her hair and tried her new lipstick, and at least once a day she went to the closet and ran her hands over the plum silk of her smart suit.

  On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, three days before our new lives as students were to begin, a vicious Santa Ana wind from the desert invaded Los Angeles. The sun scorched everything it touched, and there was no escaping it on streets whose only trees were skinny palms. Five minutes outside, and my head felt like a warm melon ready to burst. Our wooden house groaned in the dryness, the white paint baked to flakes. Papa limped home from work that day after fitting shoes on an endless stream of kids whose parents were making last-minute school purchases, and he lay on the floor as he always did when his back ached—but he wore only his underwear! Audrey wailed so much that even patient Zayde flinched and said, “Can’t you give her a drop of whiskey, Charlotte, to calm her down?” Mama did it, too, because she had a terrible headache; every so often, she whimpered in pain.

  Night, which had been invisible—you closed your eyes in the dark, and then you opened them and it was morning—became a torment of minutes and seconds, a misery of sweat-damp sheets, harsh air from the fires that were burning in the forest to the east of the city, and nasty stickiness whenever Barbara or I shifted positions and any part of our bodies touched in bed.

  During the day, our crankiness flared into war. Everything either of us did annoyed the other and provoked yelps of outrage, even though Mama begged us to be quiet because of her headache. If one of us was asked to help with anything, we whined that it was the other’s turn. On Labor Day, our family took refuge in Hollenbeck Park with its shade trees and pond. But Barbara and I started a tickling match that soon exploded in screaming and hitting, and Papa marched us back to the stifling house. Exhausted, Mama didn’t murmur a word about how to behave in school when she bathed us that night. She only spoke to tell us to lift an arm or turn so she could reach another part of our feverish bodies.

  None of it, however, not even another uneasy sleep, mattered in the morning. Finally, the giant circle on the calendar marked the day, when we woke before six, the momentousness of the first day of school pounding through our veins so hard, our small bodies could barely contain it. Mama poked her head into our room and said, “You’re awake already, too, aren’t you?” She helped us put on our nicest school clothes, drop-waisted gingham dresses, Barbara’s in red and mine blue. Brushing our hair, she hummed the fusgeyer song. Then she went to get ready herself, while Papa made us breakfast and Zayde took charge of Audrey.

  We were set to go—Barbara and I fed and clothed, Mama beautiful in her suit and new hat with her curls peek-a-booing on either side—almost an hour before we needed to leave. “Well!” Mama said. “Your teacher will notice the children who arrive early, ready to learn.” She picked up her gloves.

  “Not this early, Charlotte.” Papa’s tense undertone said that he was afraid she was going to make us look ridiculous. “You’ll just be standing on the playground in the heat. Why don’t I read to the girls for a little while?”

  “Yes, all right.” Carefully smoothing her suit, Mama sat on the sofa and automatically reached for the sewing basket next to it. But she didn’t take any work out of the basket; she just sat and stroked the fabric of her jacket.

  Even Papa got infected by our delirium. Reading from The Secret Garden, he sometimes read th
e same line twice or skipped a word. Every so often he glanced at Mama and said, “Don’t you want to take off your jacket for now? Or your hat?”

  “I’m fine,” Mama said, although her face looked red and sweaty.

  At long, long last, we were on our way to Breed Street Elementary School two blocks from our house. Mama had Barbara and me walk on either side of her, holding her hands. Her hand in mine trembled a little. I felt the same trembling inside me. I was alert and happy and scared at the same time. And I noticed a heavy, flowery smell—Mrs. Kalman’s perfume, infusing Mama’s suit and heightened by the warmth of her body under the sun, which was already brutal at eight-thirty.

  Even after delaying our departure, we were among the first to arrive at the school. An older boy, maybe ten years old and looking very important, stood at the entrance to the playground and asked Mama what class we were in. “Both of ’em in kindergarten?” he said. “You sure?”

  “They’re twins,” Mama said.

  He scrutinized us. “No, they’re not.”

  “Fraternal twins, not identical,” Mama said, her voice asking permission in our first encounter with the school’s authority, albeit in the person of a ten-year-old child.

  “Huh, never heard of that,” the boy said, but he pointed us toward the kindergarten table, one of half a dozen tables set up outside.

  Mama looked around at the other mothers on the playground. A few had dressed nicely, but no one looked as nice as Mama, and many of the women wore the same dresses in which they’d probably clean their houses when they returned home. “Old country,” Mama sniffed, regaining her courage.

  A pretty blond lady who looked barely older than a teenager stood behind the kindergarten table. Our teacher? I hoped so!

  “What a beautiful ensemble,” the lady said when she saw Mama.

  Mama beamed, then introduced us. “Barbara Inez Greenstein and Elaine Rose Greenstein.”

  The blond lady leaned forward a little and talked directly to Barbara in a voice like bells. “Barbara, your teacher is Miss Madenwald, in room eleven. I’m Miss Powell, I’m a student teacher, and I work with Miss Madenwald. We’re going to have such a lot of fun.” Then she spoke to me. “Elaine, you’re in Miss Carr’s class. That’s in room twelve.”

  Miss Powell’s smile traveled to whoever stood behind us, but Mama didn’t move.

  “They’re both in the kindergarten,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” Miss Powell said. “Some of the older children are inside, Mrs. Greenstein. They’ll help you find the rooms.”

  “They’re twins, the same age, five,” Mama said. “They’re both in the kindergarten class.”

  “Oh, yes.” Miss Powell smiled, understanding now. She explained slowly, as if Mama were the kindergartner, “We have two kindergarten classes. One teacher is Miss Madenwald, and the other is Miss Carr.”

  “Why put sisters in different classes?” Mama set her jaw the way she did when she challenged a sum at the market. But her accent got stronger, and sweat beaded her face.

  “We always put twins in different classes. It helps them make friends with other children.” I noticed now that Miss Powell was sweating, too. I followed her nervous gaze down the line of children and parents that had formed behind us—and spotted Danny, my boy from Aunt Sonya’s party! But I just glanced at him, because the argument between Mama and Miss Powell required all of my attention.

  “I know my daughters. They should be together,” Mama said.

  “Mama, I’ll be fine,” Barbara chirped, smiling at—allying herself with—Miss Powell. Why not? She had the teacher with the musical name, Miss Madenwald, as well as pretty Miss Powell. Who knew what my teacher, named like an automobile, would be like?

  More than that, all of my life so far had been lived as “we” and “us” and “you girls.” In every mental picture I had created of school and classroom, Barbara and I were there together. It wasn’t that I was afraid of walking into a classroom without Barbara at my side; I simply couldn’t conceive it. My personal geography needed to change to allow kindergarten to mean Barbara and me both being at Breed Street Elementary School but in different rooms, with different teachers and classmates. As if I needed to reconstruct the world as I knew it in the few minutes between being on the playground and entering my class.

  “Can you remember, Barbara, you’re in room eleven?” Miss Powell addressed Barbara, ignoring the stubborn immigrant who was ruining her first hour of being a student teacher. “And your sister is in room twelve?”

  “Yes, Miss Powell. Eleven and twelve. Come on, Mama.”

  Mama let Barbara lead her inside, but not because she had conceded to the wisdom of American pedagogy concerning twins.

  “Why not tell you to put your legs in one class and your arms in another?” she fumed. “And how am I supposed to meet my children’s teacher if it’s two different people?”

  “Here’s my room, Mama,” Barbara said, pointing out a sign that had a big 11 in red crayon, with designs of flowers and animals, in front of the doorway. Papa had drilled us on our numbers up to twenty.

  “No, it’s not,” said Mama, and pulled us across the hall to a similarly decorated sign with a green 12. “Here, you’re going to be in this class.”

  “Can’t we both be in Miss Madenwald’s class?” I said.

  “With that Miss Powell who doesn’t know anything?” Mama led us inside room twelve.

  “Hello, children.” Miss Carr had a pleasant round face. But I was already in love with Miss Powell and Miss Madenwald.

  “Elaine Rose Greenstein, ma’am,” I mumbled when she asked my name.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Elaine,” Miss Carr said, then turned to Barbara.

  “Barbara Inez Greenstein, ma’am.”

  “You came to bring your sister to her class, how nice,” she said to Barbara.

  “Miss Carr, I’m Mrs. Greenstein.” Mama extended her hand in its beautiful if sweat-damp silk glove. As Miss Carr shook her hand, Mama announced, “I want both of my girls to be in your class.”

  Miss Carr, clearly more experienced than Miss Powell in dealing with parents, didn’t argue with Mama. She simply directed us to the school office to talk to the principal, Mr. Berryhill.

  Mr. Berryhill wouldn’t be available for a few minutes, said the lady who spoke to Mama from behind a chest-high counter in the large, busy office. She told us to wait in wooden chairs lined up with military precision along one wall. None of us—not Mama or Barbara or me—had ever heard of being “sent to the principal’s office,” but a few minutes in those chairs, catching pitying or condescending looks from people who came in for one thing or another, and we were squirming.

  “Mama, I don’t mind not being with Elaine,” Barbara said. “I just want to go to my class.”

  “Me too,” I lied.

  “We’re going to talk to this Mr. Berryhill.” Mama fanned herself with her pocketbook. Her face no longer looked red but pale. Conceding a little to the heat, she took off her hat, but then she took out her smart new compact and peeked at herself in the mirror. “My hair,” she murmured. Her sweat-drenched bob clung to her head. She jammed her hat back on.

  A bell rang. All three of us tensed and then drooped, ashamed. Our first day of school had started, and we were late for class.

  A few minutes later, a gangly man with salt-and-pepper hair strode out from behind the counter. “Mrs. Greenstein?” He extended his right hand. “Delighted to meet you. Delighted!”

  Mr. Berryhill had a husky smoker’s voice and the brightest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He ushered us into his office—and transformed our seemingly relentless march toward greater humiliations into a treasured experience that Mama would recount for years.

  “He was like the rebbe in my town,” Mama told Aunt Pearl later. “You could tell he understood things that you never even thought about. And the books in his office! Like the rebbe’s study, books everywhere.”

  The principal didn’t even say t
he word twins at first. He spoke to Mama about the importance of parents being involved in their children’s education and nodded at her in her smart suit as if to say he knew that a person who had taken so much care on her daughters’ first day of school must be an exemplary parent. By the time he explained that it was school policy to separate twins, Mama was already saying what a fine idea that was, and she’d considered the possibility all along but worried that we’d be afraid.

  “You’ll be surprised,” he said. “Am I correct that one of your daughters is quieter than the other, and stays more in the background?”

  “Yes, my Elaine.”

  I stared at the floor, ashamed for not being louder, but I could feel Mr. Berryhill looking at me, and when I glanced up, his blue eyes twinkled.

  “You wait and see,” he said. “Elaine is going to blossom.”

  I felt myself blossoming right at that moment, and even more when Mama took me to my classroom with a note Mr. Berryhill had written to excuse my being late. “You met Mr. Berryhill!” my teacher said.

  I blossomed all morning, quietly, like the first shoots coming up in our garden. My happiness brimmed over when school let out at noon and I saw Danny—barefoot, his tousled black hair uncombed, just as when we’d met in my nest among the stacks of wood. “Danny!” I exclaimed, full of my new boldness, and ran toward him.