the kids did, and blinked away her tears and looked down at the ball game.
In the fifth inning, her father bought a pair of hot dogs, putting just the right amount of ketchup on Jo’s. He drank a beer and gave Jo a Red Pop that left her lips and tongue stained crimson. When Joe Ginsberg, the catcher, a Detroit boy who’d graduated from Cooley High, stepped up to the plate, the crowd erupted into wild cheers, and when Ginsberg hit a home run to right field, Jo stretched out her arms and watched as a man just a few rows in front of them caught it.
“So close!” her father lamented, but Jo didn’t even care. It was enough, more than enough, to be there, at night, away from her mother, and her mother’s anger. Jo drank her Red Pop and let herself imagine what it would be like if, after the final inning, they got in the car and just drove. They could follow the Tigers around the country, going to all the road games until summer’s end; they could drive to the Grand Canyon, or to Florida or California, where it was warm the whole year round. They could sleep in motels, or buy a tent and sleep in campgrounds and cook their food over campfires, like Laura Ingalls’s family did in Little House on the Prairie. Jo could swim in the ocean and wear her buckskin vest with its sheriff’s badge every day, and invite whichever kids she liked to her parties, and no one would holler or make her feel like she was too big, or too loud, or just wrong, no matter what she did.
For the rest of her life, Jo would remember that night, when the Tigers had beaten the Yankees, 6–5 in extra innings. She’d remember Joe Ginsberg’s home run, and how he’d thrown out two of the Yankee batters. She’d remember the sour tang of the beer that her father let her sip, and feel the ticklish prickle of the foam drying on her lip. She would remember the smell of her father’s aftershave as he stood close to her, and the sound of her father’s voice, singing along to Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” as they drove home.
When they pulled into the driveway, he turned off the car and sat behind the wheel as the engine ticked.
“Did your mom talk to you at all about Mae?” he asked.
“She said ‘Birds of a feather must flock together.’ ” Jo bent her head. “Should’ve told her I wasn’t a bird,” she muttered.
Her father looked like he was trying not to smile. “Your mother wants things to be easy for you and your sister,” he finally said. “Things weren’t so easy for her when she was a little girl.”
Jo nodded. She’d heard the stories of how Sarah spoke English while her parents didn’t, and how she’d had to speak for them, and how there weren’t many Jewish families in her neighborhood, and how some of the other kids had been mean, throwing dirt and chasing her home from the streetcar. “Is that why we moved here?” Jo asked. “Because almost everyone’s Jewish, like we are? Because that’s easy, when everyone’s the same?”
Her father looked startled, then thoughtful. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and finally said, “Being in a Jewish neighborhood was one of the reasons. The schools here are better. The old neighborhood was changing. It wasn’t as safe there. And that’s a parent’s job, to keep kids safe.” He sighed and drew Jo close to him, letting her nestle into his warmth and his good smell of clean cotton, hair tonic, and bay rum cologne. “Go inside and tell Mom you’re sorry,” he told her. “She loves you.”
She doesn’t, Jo thought. You know she doesn’t. Instead she said, “I will.” Part of her wanted to explain again, about how she did try to be good, that she wanted to follow all the rules, except sometimes she couldn’t understand them. And part of her—a bigger part—wanted him to turn the key, to back the car out of the driveway and onto the street, to drive and drive and never bring her home again.
Bethie
By the time she was eleven, Bethie Kaufman knew that it was her destiny to be a star. She had shiny brown hair that her mother curled with rags at night. Her eyes were a pretty shade of blue-green, and her eyebrows were naturally arched, but it was her smile