The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,82

losing contact. As he filled two glasses of punch, she kept her hand on his arm.

I didn’t know for sure what I’d observed, or maybe I just refused to accept it. But over the next few weeks, whenever a group of us went to the movies, Barbara and Danny sat next to each other; I’d glance from the screen and see that his arm had slipped around her shoulders. Then they had their first real “date,” with Danny picking her up at the house. When she returned that night and came into the bedroom we shared (she’d joined me in the room off the kitchen after Mollie left), I feigned sleep.

Just as I’d loved Danny Berlov from the first time I met him, I had always noticed a special energy between him and my sister, a charge I would recognize when I saw the first Tracy-Hepburn movies in the 1940s. As a child, I had moments of hurt when I sensed that intimate friction between them. Those childhood pricks of distress were nothing, though, to the hideous toad that now squatted inside me, spewing out misery and envy, along with hatred toward myself, for not being the one Danny had chosen.

Barbara had movie dates with Danny, evening walks, times when they disappeared from a party for half an hour and came back smiling mysteriously. I maintained my closeness to him by having fights over Zionism.

It was after a Habonim lecture, one muggy night the following August, that Danny and I took our argument to the dark playground of our old elementary school. He had snuck a Schlitz beer and a handful of Chesterfields from Chafkin’s. Sitting on the ground, my back against the school building, I smoked—which I enjoyed despite the harshness in my throat—and forced myself to sip the warm, nasty-tasting beer from the bottle that we passed back and forth.

“You don’t like it, do you?” he said after he’d taken a swig and was about to hand the bottle to me.

“Yes, I do.”

“Think I’ll finish it myself.” He raised the beer to his lips.

“No fair!”

I reached for the bottle. He grabbed my wrist, then pulled me closer and kissed me. It was a rough kiss—and awkward, my glasses jamming into his forehead, and beer splashing onto my hand.

I jerked back. “What was that for?”

“Guess I figured you should have your first kiss.”

“That’s generous of you. But I’ve been kissed, thank you.”

“By Fred the dwarf?” he cracked. So he’d noticed one of the two times I’d gone off at a party with Fred Nieman, a brainy and witty boy who was cursed with being short and baby-faced. Not like Danny, who followed a regimen of push-ups and calisthenics he’d learned from the bodybuilders at the beach. Danny was no more than medium height, but he was muscular and tough, a boy the school bullies avoided.

“Fred’s not a dwarf,” I said. “And he kisses better than you do.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I tossed my head.

Danny’s kisses began softly, like Fred’s. But they were also teasing, and he didn’t just kiss my mouth; his lips touched my cheeks and eyelids and—who knew it could be such a thrilling place?—the hollow of my throat. With Fred, I had watched myself being kissed. Danny, I kissed back. He eased me from sitting against the building to half-lying on the ground, and something inside me melted.…

“No!” I tried to twist away, but he had me pinned. All that bodybuilding he’d done, he was strong. “Danny, no!”

He moved then, enough that I could turn to the side, but kept his arms around me. “Just a little more?”

“We can’t do this.” I pulled away. He didn’t stop me.

“Right. Sorry, I shouldn’t have.… You won’t tell, will you?” he added as we stood and smoothed our clothes.

I knew whom he didn’t want me to tell, and I briefly, intensely, hated him. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Smoke?” He held out a cigarette.

“No … Okay.” Smoking offered a lull in which my hectic cheeks could stop burning, so I could face Barbara when I walked in the door.

As we smoked in silence, it occurred to me that I might be able to avoid seeing Barbara tonight. If I got home ahead of her I could use my standard ploy, pretending to be asleep, when she came in from spending the evening with the Diamonds, her club of eight girls who gathered at one another’s homes, played big-band music on the radio, and danced. I joined them sometimes