my life the way it is.… But what’s this nonsense your meshuganah aunt is filling your heads with?” She kissed Barbara’s cheek, then mine. “So, do you want new dresses to wear to dances, so the boys will flock around you?”
Was Pearl only saying she didn’t want to marry Bert so we wouldn’t feel sorry for her? I wondered, as she unrolled challis and crêpe de chine. But Pearl did seem happy—invigorated by her thriving business, excited at the prospect of buying a house. Actually, sinful Aunt Pearl seemed like the happiest of all the adults I knew, a conundrum I chewed on for days.
IT’S TOO SIMPLE TO say that finding out about Pearl changed my life or Barbara’s. It was more that the choices each of us made not long afterward reflected who we already were.
For me, hearing Pearl’s revelation set off my first struggle with adult moral ambiguity. Carrying on an affair with a married man—that was the province of bad women, home-wreckers. (Now I understood Papa’s and Zayde’s coldness toward Bert.) Yet Pearl was one of the people I loved and admired most in the world. She was kind, principled, straightforward; although she didn’t volunteer unpleasant truths, she leveled with Barbara and me whenever we asked. Look at the way she’d told us about Bert, making no excuses. And in her not wanting to marry, there was a freedom of thought that dazzled me.
Not that her choices lacked consequences. After that conversation, I felt a pang whenever I saw her cuddle my youngest sister, Harriet, and coo about her delicious baby smell.
“I’m not a baby!” Harriet protested. “I’m four!”
“Well, you still smell scrumptious!” Pearl burrowed her nose into Harriet’s belly, making her gurgle with laughter. Even if Pearl had no desire to be a wife, I suspected she would have loved being a mother. But she seemed clear-eyed about what she’d given up and, as she had said, genuinely happy with her life as it was.
Yes, Pearl was dating a married man, but his wife was far away in Mexico. And she was seeing him openly, willing to face censure. Not like me—sneaking around, cheating on my own sister!
A few days later Danny whispered, after our history class, that he wanted to see me. And I said no.
He caught up with me after school. I was hurrying to catch the streetcar to get to my job at Leo’s bookstore.
“What’s wrong?” Danny said.
“I just don’t want to.…”
“You mean this week?”
“I mean not ever. There’s my streetcar.”
“Elaine, wait. Can’t we talk about this?”
The streetcar, one of the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Street Railway, pulled up. “I have to go.”
To my amazement, Danny got on the car after me and dropped a precious nickel into the fare box.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Don’t you have to work?”
“Eddie won’t mind if I’m a little late.”
The car was crowded, and we couldn’t sit together at first. But at the next stop, my seatmate got off, and Danny slid in beside me.
“Did something happen?” he said.
“No.”
“Is it something I did?” He looked at me as if I held his happiness in my hands. No one had ever looked at me that way, and to see that yearning in Danny’s eyes! I felt a dizzying sense of power … and an urge to spare him any pain.
But I took a deep breath and said, “I just don’t feel right.”
“Can we still get together sometimes and talk? There’s no one else I can talk to the way I can with you.”
“We can talk.”
He flashed me a rakish Errol Flynn smile. “If that’s really all you want to do.”
“We can talk,” I said, weakening again at the intimacy, the smell of him, as he leaned close to me.
“Good, I’m really glad. Guess I’d better get to work … Uh, Barbara didn’t say anything, did she?”
Of course, that was why Danny had jumped on the streetcar after me and why he’d looked heartsick—his fear of upsetting my sister!
“Do you and Barbara kiss?” I demanded.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said softly, his eyes flicking toward the woman on the seat ahead of us.
“Do you kiss?” I whispered.
“What do you think?”
“French-kiss?”
“Elaine, are you nuts?”
The woman in front of us giggled. We were already downtown and almost to the car barn at Fifth and Olive, where I would transfer to the streetcar to Hollywood.
“Let’s get off, okay?” I said.
“Fine!”
“You tell him, sister!” the woman called out as we left.
Somehow the constraint of being on the Yellow Car had