The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,136

else. It was one of those perfect late afternoons in May, the sun pleasantly warm yet soft, a sun that kissed everything—the streets, buildings, Paul, and me—with golden light. Flowers bloomed riotously, the jasmine and also California poppies in orange, yellow, and crimson. Walking to Hollenbeck Park, I noticed my legs gliding in my hip joints with an animal joy I hadn’t experienced since I used to dance.

There was another kind of awareness, too, a return of the current I had once felt between us. But it was no longer a flicker, a could-this-be-sexual frisson. As if the current had gained force from months of lying dormant (months, Paul told me later, when he had held back, giving me time to get over Danny), it permeated that afternoon. It was present in the glances Paul and I gave each other, in the brilliant poppies, in the softness of the grass on my bare feet when I took my shoes off in the park. And the heady jasmine—whenever I remembered our first kiss, that afternoon in the park, the memory was drenched with the fragrance of jasmine.

I didn’t love Paul with the sweet abandon of my love for Danny. Thank God. A college woman now, I cringed to think of the girlish sweetness and naivete I had only recently escaped. That summer of 1940, Paul became the first and only man with whom I would ever make love. Still, I reserved parts of me he couldn’t enter, keeping him from getting too close through ironic remarks. He fought back avidly. How we thrived on our battles! Going with Paul—and, later, being married to him—had the kind of charge I used to envy between Danny and Barbara.

I wrote to Danny to tell him I was going with Paul; I felt I owed him that. He didn’t respond, but I didn’t know if that was because of my news or because he’d started a dangerous new job. I had heard through the Boyle Heights grapevine that following the evacuation from Dunkirk at the end of May, Danny, whose first languages were Polish and Yiddish, had volunteered to go behind enemy lines as a spy.

On September 12, 1940, exactly one year after the last time I’d seen Barbara, I was on edge all day. All of us were, privately, unable to bear mentioning it. Surely, wherever she’d gone and whatever filled her day, she was thinking of us. And her persistence in our thoughts, in our yearning, was so intense, I felt as if we could will her into physical presence, at the very least that we could summon her voice on the phone. Magical thinking. Of course, there was nothing. Then the day ended, and it was September 13, then September 14, and so on and on.

LIFE STUBBORNLY CONTINUED.

I completed my sophomore year at USC, making the dean’s list as I had the year before. Paul and I broke up after one of our spats exploded, and for those moments I loathed him—and loathed knowing I’d given him power to hurt me. But the fight also made me realize how much Paul meant to me. And by the time we got back together a week later, with fevered makeup sex, I couldn’t remember the specifics of the fight. (During our marriage, we used to joke that neither of us ever thought of divorce, but we often contemplated murder.)

The war spread. Germany attacked Yugoslavia, Greece, and even the Soviet Union, to the anguish of our leftist group. There was constant debate about whether the United States should get into the fight, and more Boyle Heights boys went to enlist in the Canadian army, two of them immediately after the terrible news that Burt Weber had been killed fighting in North Africa.

In my house, there were just five places at the dinner table; no one made a mistake and set six anymore. I knew from Audrey that Mama still went out a couple of days a week, and I assumed she was going to Hollywood, but she no longer acted as if she were sleepwalking; she seemed herself again.

I hated anniversaries, those false markers on the calendar that raised a flutter of anticipation I couldn’t suppress. The following March 28 was Barbara’s twentieth birthday, March 29 mine. I stayed out late both of those nights, refusing to wait at home for a letter or call that wasn’t going to come. And both nights I got drunk, which in my case didn’t involve dancing on tables;