The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,2

shared the box with Harriet.

I keep digging and come upon a packet the size of a half sheet of paper, held together with a rubber band. When I pick up the packet, the rubber band crumbles, and out spill … oh, it’s the programs from Barbara’s dance recitals. There are a dozen or more, with artfully hand-lettered titles, printed on thick, good-quality paper.

I open one of the programs, and I’m sitting in the dark, watching my sister dance. Not just admiring her but feeling her movements in my body—though I could never have danced with her abandon and fire. I craved private moments, whereas Barbara came alive in the spotlight.

“Elaine,” Josh says, and I realize I’ve been miles—years—away. “Did you dance?”

“No. My sister Barbara.” My throat goes rough with the threat of unexpected tears.

“Ballet?”

“Modern,” I choke out.

“Did she ever do anything with it? Have a career?”

“She did what most of the women of my generation did. Got married, raised a family.” Lying, the words come more easily. Still, I have a sudden image of standing on the bank of the Los Angeles River during a storm, the water churning and my nerves alert for signs of a flash flood. Nonsense! I tell myself again.

He asks if he can take the programs for some kind of dance archive at USC, and I say fine—what would I do with them?

Then the box yields a fresh challenge to my equilibrium: Philip’s business card.

Josh whistles. “Wow! What did your mother have to do with a private detective?”

I mumble something about my having worked for Philip when I was in college. That spins Josh into fresh questions, and he mentions a name, someone I’ve never heard of, written on the back of the card. I blurt that I’ve come down with a splitting headache and rush him out the door. Then I stop fighting and let the flood come.

I’m expecting some kind of violence, that I’ll break into wild weeping or hurl a vase across the room. Instead, there’s a sense of surrender as I let myself be carried by the river of sorrow and rage and regret and love, the river of Barbara.

AT 11:52 P.M. ON MARCH 28, 1921, BARBARA WRIGGLED OUT OF Mama into the brightness of White Memorial Hospital on Boyle Avenue in Los Angeles. Seventeen minutes—but the next day—later, I swam after her. Did she shove me aside? Did I, suddenly shy of the world, hold back? But Barbara always arrived ahead of me. She balanced on a bicycle half an hour before I did, and everyone was so busy congratulating her, they didn’t notice when I climbed onto the bike we shared and wobbled to the corner. People always called us Barbara and Elaine, never Elaine and Barbara. And though I met Danny first, Barbara was his first love.

We were fraternal twins, not identical. Still, no one would have doubted that we were sisters. We both had thick, curly dark hair (hers slightly curlier and mine with redder highlights, of which I was vain), gold-flecked hazel eyes, and largish but thankfully straight noses. When we got into our teens, I shot up to five foot three, which was tall for our family; Barbara was an inch shorter. Our most obvious physical difference lay in the architecture of our faces. She had soft apple cheeks like Mama’s, while my face was narrow, with Papa’s deep-set eyes; long before I had to start wearing glasses at eleven, people rightly pegged me as the serious one. Did we grow into our faces, or did they express our natures from the beginning? Both of us spoke at a medium pitch and “so clear, like bells! You girls should go on the radio!” Papa, shamed by his parents’ and Mama’s accents, polished our articulation by having us declaim poems. While I kneaded my thoughts into sentences deliberately, Barbara never hesitated. And she could sing, with what matured into a throaty, torch-song voice, while I could barely croak out a tune.

We have the same smile in photographs, the same gap between our front teeth, inherited from Papa. A film, though, would have shown that she was quicker to smile. If one quality most described my sister, it was quickness, in every sense of the word. Barbara was spontaneous, eager, vital, warm, someone who constantly came up with games and mischief, making her a natural leader of the band of kids in our neighborhood. She was also impatient, impulsive, reckless, and hasty to judge. Mercurial, even cruel,