a finger could cause a pregnancy. She had sat down with Barbara and me and, with unusually explicit language, made sure we understood exactly where babies came from and what we should never let any boy do to us.
As much as Danny might enjoy necking, however (and as skilled as he was at doing it, I thought with a shiver), he also loved to talk and argue, and he had always sparred with Barbara. When I was older, I would have said Danny used argument as a form of foreplay. So, did they argue about Zionism? I was hardly going to ask. I rarely talked about Danny with Barbara, or Barbara with him. Dangerous territory. As it proved this time.
“Is that why you’re going? Because it’s important to Danny?” She gave me a mocking smile, and I felt ripped open, my impossible love for Danny Berlov naked and pathetic like a newborn bird fallen from its nest. Did she know? Danny would never have told her; some other boy, a boy who was compulsively honest, might have felt a need to confess, but not Danny. Barbara must have just been referring to the torch I’d always carried for him; that was bad enough, a humiliation that made me squirm.
“Don’t you care what’s happening in Germany?” I lashed back. A crude defense, and she laughed.
“Oh, Elaine. You’re going to spend two hours listening to a lecture, and you think you deserve a medal?”
“It’s better than spending two hours giggling with your friends and trying out new hairstyles.”
“What does it matter if I care? You’re the serious one, the smart one.” Her voice went raw, but for just an instant; then the mocking tone returned. “Say hi to Danny for me.”
YOU’RE THE SERIOUS ONE, the smart one. Maybe it was just a dig, a reminder that she was the pretty, popular sister, the one Danny loved. Yet there’d been a crack in her voice, I was sure of it. As I sat in the packed hall, waiting for the talk to begin, I wondered if I’d received a glimpse of what Barbara suffered by being constantly compared to me. Though how smart could I be, if in my resentment at being not-Barbara, I’d never imagined it might be hard for her to be not-Elaine?
It hit me that, of my two most important childhood companions, I had made an effort not to drift apart from Danny. And I knew Danny: I understood what he cared about and could easily fall into a conversation with him. When it came to Barbara, on the other hand, I guess I’d figured it was enough to live under the same roof and share a room. But it was my sister who’d become a mystery to me. We rarely talked about anything bigger than “Did you see my hairbrush?” And the occasional times when our conversation went beyond the mundane, how often did I belittle her—as, I realized with dismay, I had done just an hour earlier? Barbara didn’t get the grades I did, but that hardly meant she was stupid. As the speaker walked to the podium, I promised myself I was going to get closer to Barbara; I would make a real effort to find out what she thought about life and the world, and I’d take her ideas seriously.
Then the talk began, and I was riveted. The professor, Dr. Blum, wasn’t the gaunt, hollow-eyed refugee I’d expected but a portly man with a rather pedantic speaking style. His ordinariness made what he said more awful. He spoke about losing his university post with no protest from Christian colleagues he’d known for years, having his children barred from sports facilities, and being stripped of citizenship and even forbidden to fly the German flag by the Nuremburg Laws. And there was the constant fear of physical violence, but how could you complain when the attackers wore government uniforms?
The story had a familiar ugliness. Many people in Boyle Heights were immigrants who had experienced similar injustices. But those things had happened in eastern Europe and Russia, not in “civilized” Germany! And there was a relentless pettiness to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. A relatively minor law that chilled me was a ban on the use of Jewish names to spell something to a telephone operator—you couldn’t, for instance, say “A as in Abraham”—a rule that burrowed so deeply into the minutiae of daily life, it was as if the Nazis wanted the Jews, and I suppose all Germans, to be