The Tin Horse: A Novel (20 page)

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.

But I didn’t want them to stop. Unlike almost every other discussion I’d witnessed around our dinner table—about people we knew, alive or dead, or the minutiae of our days—Mollie and Papa were arguing about ideas! And Mollie was standing up for what she believed with no fear or apology. Not that Mama didn’t hold her own in fights with Papa, but she fought only about household issues; only rarely and timidly did she venture an opinion about politics. Not Mollie. And she wasn’t just throwing out inflammatory statements the way Zayde sometimes did, but calmly marshaling evidence, making her case. I felt as if our house—and beyond it, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and the world—had become more spacious, as if the next time I walked out the door, the streets would be wider and the figs on our tree fatter and sweeter.

Mollie paused for a second after Mama’s interruption. Then, to my delight, she plunged back into the argument.

“Jerry Bachman is violating state law,” she said. “They all are.”

Papa bristled. “That is a very serious charge to make.”

“The bosses!” Zayde said.

“Listen to all of you.” Mama laughed uneasily. And then
she
got into
the fray. “Who at this table has actually worked in a dress factory in Los Angeles? Why doesn’t somebody ask me what I think?”

“You’re right,” Mollie said. “You’re the authority, Charlotte. Did you feel you were paid fairly?”

“I … You know, an immigrant, you take any work you can get. You don’t complain.” Flustered, she glanced from Mollie to Papa. Her eyes settled on Papa. But she took Mollie’s side! “And they know it. They know they can cheat you and get away with it.… Now, is anyone going to eat my poppy-seed cake?”

The discussion of Mollie’s organizing continued, though Papa shifted to a less contentious tone. I dug into my cake with relish, thrilled by the power in Mollie that had sparked Mama to take a stand, that galvanized all of us and made us think about things beyond our narrow lives.