The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,60
the pretty mirror edged with Mexican tile that Mama had insisted we buy, while Barbara oiled the wooden bed frame and dresser, and Audrey and I, on our knees, scrubbed every inch of the wooden floor. Mama, holding baby Harriet, stood in the doorway to supervise. That was a lot of people crowded into a small room, and Audrey kept getting in my way. Plus, she barely touched her brush to the floor, and I was desperate to do my job the best, so Mama would pick me to room with Mollie.
When Audrey bumped into me for the fifth time, I butted my hip into her.
“Ela-aine!” She crumpled to the floor, emitting the ominous whine that preceded her tantrums.
“Audrey, don’t you dare,” Mama said. Then she turned to me. I expected to be screamed at or slapped. Instead, Mama knocked me over with what she said. “That settles it. Elaine, you’re moving in here with Mollie.”
“What?” Barbara gasped. “How come she gets rewarded?”
“Not one more word. Barbara, you’re able to get along with Audrey. Elaine can’t. All I want is a little peace in this house.”
“It’s not fair!” Barbara wailed.
She was right. But my twinge of guilt was nothing compared to the delirious happiness that flooded through me. I went at the floor with vigor, as if energetic cleaning would speed the arrival of my cousin—who was so important that the union was sending her to Los Angeles on an airplane.
WE SOMETIMES MET PEOPLE at the railroad station, but I didn’t know anyone who had traveled by airplane. Mollie’s flight was scheduled to land at Glendale Airport on Monday evening, and we all went there to welcome her. Papa recruited Uncle Leo to drive his car, in which my family fit, but just barely, and we planned that most of us would ride back with Leo while Mama and Mollie would take a taxi.
Mollie’s flight was supposed to arrive at seven-thirty. We got to the airport by seven and stationed ourselves along the chain-link fence that separated the waiting area from where the planes took off and landed. But seven-thirty came, with no plane from Chicago; then seven forty-five, eight o’clock, and, to Mama’s growing consternation, eight-fifteen. “Chicago’s always late,” said a man whose nonchalant tone reminded me of movies where people dressed for dinner and sipped cocktails. The man had taken dozens of plane trips himself, he said. “Air currents over the Rockies, you can’t predict.”
Papa took advantage of the wait to give us a lesson on aviation. A plane could fly, he said, because the propeller—“See, the part that’s spinning so fast?”—pulled it forward. If the pilot pointed the nose up, the propeller pulled up the plane. A man apologized for interrupting but informed us that what really made flight possible was the shape of the wings and something about a vacuum over them. None of us said much after that, except for Uncle Leo grumbling that he’d had to rush dinner and couldn’t digest properly, and hadn’t he told Papa that no one arrived at the airport as early as seven to meet a seven-thirty plane?
Mama kept staring at the sky, as if she could will Mollie’s plane to appear. And it didn’t matter if they announced that the next flight landing was from Denver or San Francisco—she hungrily scrutinized every woman who walked down the metal staircase. Only when the last person had left the plane did she pull back, an impression of chain links on her forehead.
For me, every minute at the airport was like breathing the freshest, sweetest air that had ever entered my lungs. Whenever a flight approached, I joined Mama against the fence, watching the airplane transform from high, distant pinpricks of light to a screaming, diving monster—my heart pounded in terror that it would smash into a million pieces. I sighed in relief when each plane touched down safely and juddered to a halt. At night, there were more flights landing than taking off, but it was even more astonishing to see a plane bump over the ground like an ungainly bus and suddenly rise into the air like a swan. Vacuum, I told myself; but how could a word I associated with Aunt Sonya’s Hoover describe this miracle?
Just being at the airport was thrilling. Any other place I’d gone beyond Boyle Heights—the beach, downtown, Leo’s bookstore in Hollywood—still felt like familiar territory. But not Glendale Airport, where everyone was dressed so nicely they might have been film actors costumed by