The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,61

Pearl, and the hum of talk was like listening to the radio, with no choppy accents or mangled grammar.

Papa gave nickels to Barbara and me and said we could go get Coca-Colas at the snack counter. Making the most of our freedom, we first visited the “ladies’ lounge.” I used the toilet, then went to the sink, but I froze when a Negro lady in a starched blue uniform came over and handed me the softest white towel I’d ever felt. “Here you are, miss,” she said. I thanked her, but was that enough? Barbara, standing at the sink, had her own white towel; I tried to catch her eye, but she was absorbed in applying lipstick.

“Here. I’ll meet you at the snack bar.” She gave me the lipstick and breezed out.

As I stroked on the lipstick, the Negro lady picked up Barbara’s discarded towel. “I’m done with mine, too,” I said. “Thank you. Very much.” I searched her face for a hint of what else might be expected of me. Then I saw a lady drop a coin into a dish on a table. I panicked for a moment. Should I use Papa’s nickel? But I really wanted a Coca-Cola. I remembered I had some coins in my pocket, and I put the nickel in the dish.

At the gleaming snack counter, Barbara was talking to a blond boy who looked about our age. He was to her left, and she’d put her sweater on the stool to her right to save it for me, but when I got there, she didn’t look at me.

I ordered my Coke and pretended to be fascinated by the menu.

“Oh, yes, we’ve flown four or five times,” Barbara was saying, her voice bubbly and unfamiliar. “Mummy and Daddy say it’s so much more convenient than the train.”

“I’ll say,” the boy replied. “I can’t wait until they have passenger flights to Europe. Ships are fun, but it takes such a long time, especially from Los Angeles.”

What was a Monte Cristo sandwich?

“Wouldn’t that be grand?” Barbara said. “Just like Lindy.”

“You wouldn’t be scared?”

“I’m never scared.”

“How about you?” the boy asked. “Would you be scared? You,” he emphasized, and I realized he meant me.

“I’d love to fly,” I said.

He scanned my face. “Your sister?” he asked Barbara.

For a breath, I felt her hesitate. Then she said yes and introduced me—as Elaine Green—and without pausing for a breath, told me the boy’s name, Gregory Hawkins.

“Yes, I can see the resemblance,” Gregory Hawkins said. And then, “Well, nice to meet you. I didn’t know it was so late. I have to go.”

“Why did you do that?” Barbara said after he left.

“Do what?” I said. “Why did you tell him our last name was Green?”

She shrugged and slid off the stool. I followed her toward our family outpost at the fence.

She turned back suddenly, forcing me to stop short. “Don’t you ever just want to pretend you’re someone else?” she said fiercely.

And for a moment I glimpsed my family through the crowd as if I didn’t know them. Mama was wearing the “smart suit” she’d had made for our first day of school, now seven years out of style and straining at the shoulders as she held Harriet. Papa and Uncle Leo were shorter and darker than most of the men in the airport, and although there were a few other young children present, only Audrey was squatting by the fence; somebody should make her stand up. And there was the sheer bulk of them—no one else was in groups of more than two or three—and the way they stayed in a clump by the fence instead of strolling around or going inside to have a drink.

Did I seem equally out of place? I wondered uneasily. And was it just that I was a poor girl among these well-off world travelers, or did I look glaringly, irrevocably Jewish? Was that what Barbara had accused me of “doing”? Was it the reason Gregory Hawkins had looked at me, seen the same largish nose and dark curly hair as Barbara had—but with my narrower face and glasses—and lost interest in flirting with us? I felt a wash of shame that stunned me. Where had the sense of “wrongness” come from? Yes, I had heard Mama’s and Zayde’s stories about how Jews were treated in their villages in eastern Europe, and I knew my life was nothing like the lives I saw in the movies. Still, growing up in Boyle Heights, I had