The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,102
tepid heh-heh that drove Barbara nuts but a big, relaxed laugh that made me wonder how he might act if he weren’t burdened by being the recipient of our charity.
Years later, when I would see Ivan in Las Vegas, getting by, I assumed, on small-scale finagling, I’d think of the life he might have had. I’d wonder if he could have been a mathematician or a business whiz, if his life could ever have been as big as that laugh. And I would promise myself I’d go to see him more often. (He rarely came to visit us in L.A., he claimed he had too much business to attend to.) But I didn’t. I knew that the qualities in Ivan that made Barbara’s skin crawl—and which, I admit, I found distasteful—were survival skills that came from his being born in a rotten place at a horrific time. Still, by the time he was living with us, he seemed furtive and calculating as if by nature. When Barbara called him “the Rat,” I felt, guiltily, that the name was apt.
“The Rat” was how Barbara continued to refer to Ivan, in spite—actually, because—of Danny’s liking for him. She fumed that she couldn’t go to a party anymore without Danny wanting to spend half the night yammering with her creepy cousin. And if she finally got Danny to dance with her, then Ivan mortified her by asking some girl to dance—if you could call his odd shamble dancing—and sometimes misinterpreting the girl’s ordinary American friendliness and putting such a mash on her that she had to shove him away.
Danny pleaded Ivan’s case. And he got furious one time when Barbara was supposed to bring Ivan with her to a movie but she came to the theater alone, saying that Ivan had stayed home with a headache; and then he found out she’d crept out the back door to avoid Ivan.
I got the feeling Barbara and Danny were arguing a lot. She came home early from several of their dates, tight-lipped and cross. And she spent even more time than before at the Hollywood dance studio.
Barbara did her best to keep her life at the dance studio separate from Boyle Heights. She never invited dance-school friends to our house, and when she went to their parties, she didn’t ask Danny to come as her date. But her two worlds inevitably collided when she performed. That September, a few weeks after we entered our senior year of high school, she danced at the studio in a program of solos by advanced students. Our whole family went; Mama, Papa, Audrey, and Harriet piled into Pearl’s Plymouth, while I went with Ivan and, of course, Danny by streetcar.
Barbara’s dance was electrifying. To a soft tropical drumbeat (her onetime boyfriend Oscar played congas), she prowled the stage with a lazy, sensual stalk that nonetheless carried a sense of danger; she made me think of a panther leisurely closing in on its prey. The drumbeat built, and she pivoted sharply and sprang, arms and legs slashing—I could almost see claws. When she finished, I clapped so hard my hands stung.
Afterward, there was a reception with punch and cookies. Standing in a cluster of her dance friends, Barbara was flushed with the afterglow of performing. She shot a dazzling smile toward us—Danny, Ivan, and me—when we approached her. The smile must have given Ivan courage, because he went up and kissed her on the cheek.
“Beautiful! Beautiful!” he said in accented but clear English.
“Oh. Thanks,” she murmured, then quickly turned away.
“Who’s that, Babs?” one of her fellow students asked.
“Um, just … Aren’t you just perishing of thirst? Let’s get some punch.”
“It’s her cousin,” Danny said loudly. “He’s a Jewish refugee from Romania.”
“Really?” The girl turned toward Ivan, clearly fascinated. “Would you like some punch?” she said, making a gesture of drinking.
“Sure. Okay.”
She took Ivan’s hand and led him toward the table. The other girls followed, vying for Ivan’s attention.
That left Barbara and Danny—and me—in a tight little eddy in one corner of the room, the reception noisily swirling around us.
“Happy?” she said to Danny. Her low voice carried an aura of threat that made me think of her slinking across the stage, getting ready to pounce.
“What is your problem?” he said.
“Never do that to me again.”
“Do what? Remind you that you’re Jewish? Or expect you to act like a human being?”
I knew I should leave them alone, but I couldn’t move.
“Don’t you make yourself sick, being so self-righteous?” Barbara snapped.