The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,42

anything? I’ll get you some Vaseline.”

“Vaseline, yes. What did you mean, sneaking up on me like that?”

Weeping, I ran to the powder room. When I came back with the Vaseline, the rage had drained out of Mama. Her face was pale, and she whimpered when I applied the Vaseline to her feet and ankles and put gauze over it.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call the doctor?” I asked.

“I just need to sit here and rest a little.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t … Yes, could you clean up? In the kitchen?”

“Is it soup? Should I save what didn’t spill?”

“Soup? You think like they say about old bubbes, I flavor my soup by pissing in it?” She started to laugh, but wildly. She must have seen she was scaring me, because she stopped and caressed my cheek. “Darling, it’s not soup. Throw it out. And please?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell anyone. This will be our secret, all right?”

I mopped the floor twice. Still, the house stank of onions for days. And Mama limped on her burned feet; she accounted for her injuries and the smell by saying she had knocked a pot off the stove.

Barbara had another explanation for the mystifying scene I’d witnessed. (Of course I told Barbara. I didn’t breathe a word to anyone else, as I’d promised Mama. But sharing the story with my twin sister didn’t count as telling; it was like trying to make sense in my own mind of what I’d seen.)

“You sit over a pot of boiled onions if you don’t want to have a baby,” Barbara said.

“What? That’s stupid.”

“That’s what Sari Lubow’s aunt said. Sari told me once she heard her mother and her aunt talking about it. Her aunt said it was old-country meshugas.”

Barbara was my source of information about such things; she picked up every whisper about the facts of life the way I absorbed subjects in school.

A few weeks later, though, Papa announced that this year, instead of getting Hanukkah gelt, we were receiving a truly wonderful gift: a new baby was growing in Mama’s tummy. So maybe Barbara had it backward and squatting over onions was what you did when you wanted a baby? Either way, I knew just enough about human reproduction to be certain Sari’s aunt was right: the onions were meshugas.

And Mama didn’t want another baby. “I can’t do it this time,” she had cried to God. Maybe I’d misunderstood her Yiddish? But despite, no, because of my confusion about the pot of onions, I felt certain of what I’d heard her say, the words burned into me by the very strangeness of that moment when I stood in the kitchen doorway and couldn’t recognize my own mother. She had said, too, that women in America had little choice about getting married. Did that mean she didn’t love Papa?

With all that on my mind, I was less upset than I might have been when Danny got caught shoplifting at Chafkin’s, just before New Year’s. Besides, even Eddie Chafkin felt sorry for the Berlovs, so the punishment Eddie devised was relatively mild: Danny just had to do ten hours of work at the store, sweeping and helping in the stockroom, to atone for his crime.

What did upset me was that Danny stopped telling me his stories. Maybe it was because of his embarrassment over my letter or because I, his unquestioning listener, had confronted him over the stolen candy bars. Maybe getting caught stealing was too great a collision with reality.

I suppose the stories would have stopped, anyway. We turned twelve that spring, too old for childhood fantasies.

When we went to the beach the next summer, rather than taking walks with me, Danny got obsessed with the muscle men. He spent every minute hanging out where they lifted weights and ran errands for them, and the men took him under their wing and got him started on bodybuilding.

I lost Princess Verena. And I gained a new sister, Harriet.

I’M NOT GOING TO DRIVE ALL THE WAY TO COLORADO SPRINGS. OF course I’m not, I assure myself as I head east on the 10 freeway. That would be insane, especially for an octogenarian in pink Keds who has to stop every hour to pee and can’t drive after dusk because her night vision is shot. I just couldn’t stay in my house one more minute, couldn’t bear the confinement of the walls. What does any true Californian do when she’s jumping out of her skin? She gets