The Tin Horse A Novel

AFTER AUDREY WAS BORN, ON JUNE 12, 1926, PAPA CHANGED BACK to the way he used to be before Mama got pregnant. Mama changed, too. But she became someone brand-new. Forceful, purposeful, an arrow whizzing toward one gleaming target—our first day of school, which she had circled in black ink on the calendar page for September, the day after Labor Day.

“Charlotte, it’s only kindergarten,” Aunt Sonya said. “They don’t learn anything. They just play.”

“And where does this just-playing take place?” Mama retorted.

“The elementary school.”

“See! The Breed Street Elementary School,” Mama said, as if that settled it.

“Yes, but kindergarten … Believe me, Charlotte, if you’d ever gone to school, you’d understand.” Sonya patted Mama’s hand.

Mama stood up abruptly. “Girls, we have to get home.” She didn’t even bother to wipe our fingers, sticky from the orange slices we’d been snacking on. And when we started walking, her legs pumped so fast, even as she carried Audrey, that we had to trot to keep up.

What had Sonya meant by that—if you’d ever gone to school? I wondered. Everyone went to school. We often walked by the middle and high schools that Aunt Sonya and Aunt Pearl had attended after Papa’s family moved to Boyle Heights; and Uncle Leo once drove us by the high school in the San Fernando Valley where Papa won the elocution prize. Mama had grown up in another country, Romania, but didn’t Romania have schools? Her apparent rage made me afraid to ask.

Mama’s anger didn’t stop Barbara, however. “Mama, didn’t you go to school?” she asked.

“Can your mama read?” Mama demanded as she charged down the street.

“Yes,” I said quickly. Barbara, to my relief, didn’t mention that if Mama picked up the Los Angeles Times, which Papa brought home at night, she often threw it down in disgust. I never saw her open any of Papa’s books, and she spent a long time perusing letters written in English from our cousin Mollie in Chicago. She had no problems, though, with letters in Yiddish from other relatives or with the signs, in both Yiddish and English, in shops. And Mama read to us from picture books. Still, only Papa read aloud from books with words all over the pages, like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan.

“Can I do sums?” Mama said.

“Yes,” I said. Sums, she could do in her head. She corrected shopkeepers if they tried to overcharge her, and they always ended up shaking their heads and saying, “You’re right, Mrs. Greenstein, to the penny.”

“So.” She stopped so suddenly that I kept walking for several steps and had to come back.

“You girls know I grew up in Romania?” Mama said. “And it was very bad for the Jews there?”

We had heard Mama’s stories of how the Romanians hated the Jews, though Papa tried to stop her from telling them. “Don’t fill their heads with the idea that we’re less than anyone else. We’re Americans,” he’d say. “We’re not Jews?” Mama replied. Still, she usually told the stories when Papa wasn’t around.

I knew that Mama’s father, my other zayde whom I’d never met, used to own a tavern, but then the Romanian government made a law saying Jews couldn’t sell alcohol. They even sent soldiers to make Mama’s family, who lived at the tavern, leave. Mama did the strangest thing whenever she told that story. When she said “soldiers,” she spat. Not wet spit so it landed on anyone, but she made a sound—ptui!—so rude and shocking that if she’d said she had killed the soldiers by spitting at them, I would have believed her.

Mama started walking again, but this time at a normal pace. “In Romania when I was a girl,” she said, “they made a law that only a few Jewish children could go to their schools. We tried to start our own schools, but they wouldn’t let us do that, either.”

“How did you learn?” I asked, bolder now that she was calm.

“Ah! You think, like your silly aunt Sonya, a person’s brain only works inside a building that says school on the front of it? Is that what you think?”

“No.” Although I had thought just that.

“I learned to read Yiddish and Romanian at home, and to do sums,” Mama said. “And English reading, I learned from your cousin Mollie, when I lived with Uncle Meyr in Chicago. You remember, I’ve told you about my brother Meyr? The happiest day of my life was when he sent for me to come live with him in America.”

“Meyr the fusgeyer!” Barbara and I sang out together. The silly-sounding Yiddish word means “foot-wanderer,” and we had learned it from Mama’s favorite story, about her beloved brother Meyr.

WHEN MAMA WAS EVEN younger than Barbara and me, it got so terrible for Jews in Romania that many of them wanted to leave for America. If they could reach the port cities of Hamburg or Rotterdam, wealthy Jews would pay for their passage on ships. But it was a long way to the ports, and most Romanian Jews were too poor to afford even the cheapest train tickets. Then some clever young people came up with a way to turn their poverty into adventure. They decided to band together and go on foot. Calling themselves fusgeyers, they built their strength with daylong marches through the countryside. “Imagine!” Mama said. “The Romanians thought all Jews were weak. They couldn’t believe it when they saw these Jewish boys and girls marching past their farms. Or when they heard that the Jews planned to walk all the way across Europe!” The fusgeyers didn’t actually have to go that far; once they crossed the border into Austro-Hungary, Jewish organizations gave them train tickets to the ports. But they would have walked every step, Mama said. Some groups made themselves uniforms with jaunty caps, like Scouts. And when they took to the road in Romania, they raised money by staging theatricals in Jewish towns. Bands of foot-wanderers formed in town after town. There was even a “Song of the Fusgeyers” that Mama sang when she was especially happy.

One of the first of these bold pioneers was Meyr Avramescu, a strapping nineteen-year-old with a big, sweet laugh. Meyr was loved more than any young man has ever been loved by his baby sister, Zipporah—“That was my name, girls. It’s Hebrew for ‘bird.’ ” From the moment his finger wiggled over her cradle in the final year of the nineteenth century, Mama was captivated by her big brother. And he doted on her. He, the golden firstborn son, could have chosen any of his eight siblings to favor, but it was little Zipporah, the seventh child for whom no one else had time, who captured his heart. “From the moment I could crawl, I followed him everywhere. And he used to pick me up and throw me in the air. ‘My little bird’s flying!’ he’d say.” Mama laughed, and her eyes shone. I laughed, too, as if I were the one being tossed in the air. I loved hearing the fusgeyer story not only because it was exciting, but for the thrill of seeing Mama transform into a lighthearted girl whose soul brimmed with love.

Zipporah was three when Meyr joined a group of fusgeyers in their village, Tecuci. She didn’t understand what it meant, but she loved the excitement when he got ready for an outing and the songs he sang when he came home. He played the accordion, and when he practiced for the group’s theatricals, she clapped her hands and danced.

One Saturday night in the late spring, the whole village had a big party, and the fusgeyers entertained. Meyr played a special song, “for my little bird,” and beckoned her to join him on the stage of nailed-together boards. She danced, and everyone cheered.

The next morning, Meyr hugged her so tight she could barely breathe. “I’ll write to you, little bird,” he said. “Every week. And I’ll send for you, I promise.” Why was he crying? He picked up his satchel and strode off, like he always did when the fusgeyers took their hikes. But everyone was weeping and acting strange. And Meyr didn’t come home that night.

“Where’s Meyr?” she demanded.

“Off to America,” she was told.

That meant no more than hearing her brother had gone to the next village. But after two days passed and still he hadn’t returned, she stopped eating for a week.

True to his word, Meyr wrote to her weekly; there was always a special note for her in the envelope with a letter to the rest of the family. At first one of her older siblings read his letters aloud to her and penned her reply. Soon she was able to correspond with him herself. Now she understood what he had meant about sending for her, and her heart fastened on America just as she had grabbed Meyr’s finger above her cradle and not wanted to let go.

“He promised to send for me when I was twelve,” she told us. “And he said I should learn to sew, that skilled seamstresses did well in America.”

An older sister, Dora, was apprenticed to a dressmaker and sewed beautifully. Zipporah begged for lessons, but no matter how many times Dora explained or placed her hands on Zipporah’s to guide them, her stitches sprawled crooked and ugly. “Oy, Zippi, a girl with no skills ends up a housemaid,” Dora declared in exasperation—though she took it back immediately, stunned by her own meanness; the shame of being sent out to domestic service marked both a girl and her family as failures.

Zipporah tossed her head. What was the story the rabbi in their village told? About Rabbi Zusya saying that when he got to heaven, they weren’t going to ask, “Why weren’t you Moses?” No, they’d ask, “Why weren’t you Zusya?” Zipporah Avramescu clearly wasn’t meant to be a seamstress. God intended her to be … why not an actress? Because didn’t the whole village applaud when she danced with Meyr? And what better talent for a fusgeyer, since new groups kept setting out for America? Dora and two of their brothers emigrated when she was eight. They tried to persuade the rest of the family to come, since some groups, less jolly than Meyr’s, now included whole families. How could they leave, her parents protested, when they’d just gotten back on their feet with a cafe after the government had taken their tavern, and Zipporah’s grandmother and her brother Shlomo were ill, and … the arguments went on for hours. Zipporah cajoled and wept and raged to be allowed to go with Dora and her brothers on her own, but she was too young, her parents said.

As it turned out, Mama’s skill, the one that paved her way to America, lay in neither needlework nor theater. Instead, it was the art she had first exercised in her cradle, when Meyr adored her, and it flowered in her family’s cafe. It was her ability to charm older men. This gift, like her infant winsomeness, she possessed in all innocence. How could a scrawny child, wielding a birch-twig broom taller than she, inveigle the pennies that were invariably slipped into her pocket? She wasn’t a cheeky child, either, a bold girl who got herself noticed by talking back or joking. Why, when she couldn’t even be seen—her arms plunged into dishwater in the kitchen—would Avner Papo the housepainter ask to have the little girl come stand behind his chair when he played cards? And she must be the one to fetch him a bowl of her mother’s stew or a glass of the home-brewed schnapps they sold, illegally—“the Romanians even made a law against Jews doing that!”

Other than an occasional wink, Avner Papo barely acknowledged Zipporah’s presence. But he claimed she brought him luck. And he was lucky; he often won. He always gave her some of his winnings, too. Of course, she had to turn the money over to her parents; why else would they let her waste her time standing behind Avner’s chair when there were carrots and turnips to peel and dishes to wash? Once Avner realized what was happening, though, he always gave her an extra penny just for herself. She put all the pennies in a little purse Dora had sewn for her; they were her savings for America, to add to the money Meyr would send her when he was ready.

Meyr lived in a city called Chicago. He married a Jewish girl whose family came from Poland, and they had one, then two, and soon four children—he sent a photograph when each new baby was born. Now that Meyr was a busy husband and father, his letters came only once a month or even two months apart. Still, he had sent money to help his parents start their cafe, and even though Dora and their brothers paid their own way, Meyr helped them get settled once they got to Chicago.

Zipporah lived for her twelfth birthday. And she died a little when, even after her beloved Meyr sent the money for her steamship ticket, her parents insisted she was too young to travel on her own. And they needed her in the cafe. “I cried and cried. But I kept taking long walks in the hills because when I had my chance to be a fusgeyer, I was going to be ready!”

One day a few months later, Avner the housepainter came into the tavern and announced, “This will be my last card game here.”

“What? You’re sick? You’re dying?” someone asked—“I remember it was Reuven, the barrel maker. He always drank too much and his friends had to carry him home.”

Avner just grinned.

“Has the rabbi turned you into a pious man? No more cards? Not even any schnapps?” Zipporah’s father winked as he filled a glass for Avner.

“I’m going to America!” Avner said.

The broom crashed from Zipporah’s hands. Her legs dissolved to jelly and could barely hold her.

“What’s wrong with you?” her father demanded.

She snatched up the broom. Then she swept again and again by the table where Avner talked about his American cousins who were going to help him get started and the opportunities in pharmacy, which was Avner’s real profession. He had become a painter after the Romanian government passed a law saying Jews couldn’t own or manage pharmacies; he’d decided that painting houses was a better day’s work than making money for the Christian who had taken over his business.

Fusgeyers from another village were going to pass through Tecuci in two days, Avner said. A friend of his was in the group, and he planned to join them.

In all of the hours Zipporah had stood silently behind Avner, bringing him luck at cards, she’d come to know every wart and freckle on the housepainter’s thick, strong neck. She had scrutinized his dandruff-dusted shoulders and his shirt collars, soiled because he had no wife to scrub them—Avner’s wife had died giving birth to their only child, a girl who was already dead when the midwife pried her from her mother. That had happened ten years ago, and no one had washed Avner’s shirts properly since.

Another thing Zipporah had learned about Avner Papo was that he was kind, and not in the show-offy way of some people, who made a fuss so everyone would notice their good deed. Avner was kind in his heart. If Pinchas, who was simple, was doing some small job in the cafe and someone made fun of him, Avner interrupted by telling a joke, so as not to shame either Pinchas or the man who had mocked him. Once Zipporah was crying behind the cafe after a beating from her mother. She looked up, and Avner was there. “He didn’t say a word about me crying. He just reached toward my ear, and there was a penny in his hand!”

Avner asked Zipporah’s father if she could stand by his chair for his “last card game in Tecuci,” a phrase that brought groans from his friends … and set Zipporah’s nerves on fire. She stood patiently while the men played cards, containing herself until Avner heaved himself up from his chair and lumbered to the outhouse. Then she slipped outside and danced from one foot to the other beside the outhouse, waiting for him to emerge. Everyone had been buying him drinks, and he staggered and didn’t hear at first when she said, “Reb Avner! Reb Avner!”

She pulled at his sleeve. “Reb Avner!”

“Wha—?” He wiped a hand over his eyes, as if brushing a cobweb away. Then he recognized her and smiled. He leaned forward, hands on his thighs, to bring his face close to hers. “What can I do for you, my luck-giving friend?”

“Take me to America!”

Zipporah had scarcely ever spoken to Avner, only to tell him in a near whisper what kind of soup her mother had made that day or thank him for a penny. Now all of her longing, all the fierce wanting forbidden to girls in the shtetl—why want when you can never have?—slammed into those four words.

Avner reared back as if she’d shoved him.

“Take me!” she repeated.

“But how can … Your parents …”

As Avner groped for words, she rushed on, “My brother’s there, you remember, my brother Meyr? He sent for me to live with him. All you have to do is take me with the fusgeyers and on the ship.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t. But here, to remember me …” He reached into his pocket for a penny.

“Reb Avner!” She grabbed his arm to make him look at her again, and fixed all the force of her soul into her gaze. “I’ll bring you luck.”

“ ‘I’ll bring you luck’—that’s what I said to him,” Mama told us, all those years later. “He scratched his head, the way he did in a card game when he was figuring out how to play a difficult hand. Every clock in the village stopped ticking, I was sure of it. And I felt so light-headed, my feet must have left the ground. And then he said …” She paused.

“He said, ‘Do you have money?’ ” Barbara and I chorused.

“And for a moment, I was so excited, I didn’t even understand what he was saying. As if he was already speaking English!”

AVNER PAPO DIDN’T JUST bring Mama to America. He bestowed on her a talent that lay hidden … until the summer before our first day of school.

With both Papa and Zayde working, Mama didn’t need to have a job. A lucky thing, she said, since there was nothing she could really do. Before marrying Papa, she’d worked in a dress factory, but, true to her early attempts, she was never a good seamstress. And “it takes a different kind of man than your papa to start his own business where I could keep the books, for instance, or help with the customers.” Whenever she said that, Papa winced. He wanted to open a business someday, and he and Mama and Zayde often talked about it, but he never felt he had enough money—though Zayde said it wasn’t money Papa lacked but chutzpah, a word I heard so often that I was surprised to find out it wasn’t English but Yiddish. It meant “courage, nerve.”

Thanks to the hours spent behind Avner’s chair, however, Mama did have one surprising way to earn money, a skill that she unveiled in the service of our debut at Breed Street Elementary School.

She was a genius at playing cards. No matter what the game—bridge, hearts, poker, gin rummy—she seemed to have a magic power to see straight through the backs of the cards and know what was in everyone’s hand. And she strategized her own play as if she could picture the final trick in a game before she even laid down the first card. She’d always played cards socially, either with Papa and other couples in the evening or with a group of ladies in the afternoon. But she’d hidden her brilliance, like a hustler who fumbles through a few games, then swoops in for the kill. Except that Mama had groomed her marks over years of adequate but unexceptional playing. It made her devastating.

I got the first hint of Mama’s virtuosity one afternoon at Sonya’s in late June. She, Sonya, and two other ladies were having their Monday afternoon hearts game, while the children (all of us except the napping infants) played in the yard. Suddenly, louder than our shouting in a game of Red Rover, came shrieks from our mothers. We tore into the house like the small animals we were, quivering with worry at the sign of adult distress. But the women were laughing. And Sonya, Mrs. Litmann, and Mrs. Zinser were all looking at Mama.

“How did you do that?” Mrs. Litmann said.

“Do what?” Mama replied, with a smile that didn’t show her teeth.

“Charlotte, you look like the cat that ate the cream,” said Mrs. Zinser.

Did Sonya have a cat? Why hadn’t she let us play with it? My eyes darted around the room looking for a hiding kitty.

“Shooting the moon once, all right,” said Mrs. Litmann. “But four times?”

Ah, I knew they weren’t talking about the moon in the sky, but the game of hearts. Likewise, there was no cat at Sonya’s.

“You’re going to think my sister-in-law is some kind of cardsharp.” Sonya glanced uneasily at Mrs. Litmann, one of her new neighbors whose husband owned a men’s clothing store.

“Don’t be silly,” Mama said. “It’s just my lucky day.”

“I’ll say,” Mrs. Zinser grumbled. She took her wallet out of her handbag. “How much do I owe you?”

Mama made almost two dollars that day, and she gave a nickel to both Barbara and me.

But Mama owed her success to more than luck. That Saturday night she and Papa played bridge with several other couples, and the next morning Papa couldn’t stop talking about how brilliantly they’d played. “That five-clubs bid, I never thought we’d make that. And when Arnie had all those high spades, but you kept trumping him. The look on his face! Guess how much we won, girls?”

“Two dollars?” I said.

“Two dollars and seventy-five cents.” He started to hand us quarters, but Mama stopped him.

“A nickel each is plenty. That’s the school fund,” she said.

After a few more afternoons and evenings like that, Mama started carrying a special purse, the very one made by her sister Dora, inside her handbag just for her winnings. She even got Zayde to invite her to games with his poker cronies, which Papa thought not quite nice. In fact, once Mama’s “luck” became a streak, Papa didn’t think any of it was nice. “These are supposed to be social games. You keep taking everyone’s money, no one’s going to invite us to play,” he said.

Mama laughed. “They want to see if they can beat me.”

“You need money for nice school outfits for the girls?” Papa persisted. “A few dresses for five-year-olds, how much can it cost?”

“More than Julius Fine pays you!”

Papa raised his newspaper and pretended to read it, rather than repeat that familiar argument.

Mama’s skill did enhance her social standing. Mrs. Litmann played hearts with Sonya on Monday afternoons and bridge with a different group on Thursdays. One of the Thursday ladies moved, and Mrs. Litmann invited Mama to that group, which even included a doctor’s wife who drove to Boyle Heights from Hollywood in her own shiny yellow car. The minute Sonya heard that Mama was invited to the Thursday group, she was so upset she put Stan in his stroller and walked to our house in the midday July heat.

“You’ve got to get a telephone, Charlotte!” Sonya fanned her red face and gulped the cold lemonade Mama had poured for her.

“What is it, Sonya?”

“You ought to be able to afford one, all the money you’re taking from my friends at cards.”

“What do I need a telephone for? To call Canter’s and have them send me corned beef without the fat trimmed off?”

“Charlotte, I just moved to a new house. I’m just getting to know my neighbors. I’m asking you. Stop with the cards.”

“I will,” Mama said. “As soon as I get what we need for school.”

“Your darling girls, I love them like they were my own. Why don’t you let me treat them to some school outfits?”

Mama stood. “Sorry to rush you out, Sonya. I have so much cleaning to do this afternoon.”

“A few blouses and skirts,” Sonya said, and echoed Papa. “How much can that cost?”

Actually, Barbara’s and my school clothes weren’t expensive, nor were the fancy extras Mama bought us—hair ribbons and ruffled ankle socks, as well as sweaters and jackets for cooler weather. How much did it take to look well turned out when our new Mary Janes, bought at a discount at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, already elevated us above some of our classmates, who would come to school barefoot?

Mama’s project, however, was to outfit “us” for the first day of school. Not just Barbara and me, but Mama herself.

In early August, when Mama’s take added up to twenty-seven dollars, with still more card parties to come, she bought some plum-colored silk shantung and took it to Mrs. Kalman, the dressmaker that Sonya’s neighbors swore by. (A year later and she would have gone to Aunt Pearl, but Pearl was still married at that time and was a housewife; she hadn’t yet started her dressmaking business.) Mama huddled over pictures in fashion magazines with Mrs. Kalman, a thin woman whose mouth was permanently pursed from holding pins between her lips; she would have seemed withered except for the delicious flowery perfume she wore. Barbara and I could still sniff Mrs. Kalman’s fragrance in each other’s hair for hours after we’d gone there; and it scented Mama’s suit when she brought it home. Appropriately for a school outfit, Mama had gotten a “smart suit.” Mrs. Kalman called it that, and Mama echoed her proudly during the weeks of measuring, fitting, making a white silk charmeuse blouse, and purchasing accessories—calfskin pumps with the fashionable new spike heel from Fine’s, a calfskin pocketbook, silk hose, and tan silk gloves. Naturally, the ensemble would include a new hat as well. Aunt Pearl was going to help Mama choose one, and whenever they talked about it, they whispered and giggled like Barbara and me.

Mama picked up the suit from Mrs. Kalman a week before the big day. That evening she modeled it for us. Mama was nice-looking, but most of her clothes were made of cheap fabrics that made her slightly plump figure look a bit dumpy. The new suit had a swagger jacket tailored to hug her hips—“just like the latest fashions in New York and Paris,” as Mrs. Kalman frequently remarked. A daring skirt, that came to just below her knees, showed off her shapely calves, made long and elegant by her spike heels. Uncle Gabe, invited with Pearl for the occasion, gave a wolf whistle when Mama came into the living room in her new outfit.

Papa grumbled, “Does this mean you’ll finally stop cleaning up on our friends at cards?” Still, he couldn’t stop staring at Mama.

And she hadn’t finished astonishing us. The next day, Pearl came over after lunch to stay with Barbara, Audrey, and me. She and Mama whispered together, and Mama said, “Pearl, are you sure?”

“Positive,” Pearl replied. Finally Pearl said, “Charlotte, go already!” and almost pushed Mama out the door.

I was on the porch when she returned, walking fast and dabbing her handkerchief at her eyes. “Mama!” I cried, but she ran up the steps into the house and let out a sob. I ran in after her, but I was too frightened to ask what was wrong.

Pearl rushed to Mama, too, and hugged her. “Don’t worry, Charlotte. It’s how I felt right after, too. Everyone does. Oh, I can tell already it’s gorgeous.”

Pearl eased off the wide-brimmed summer straw hat that Mama had pulled down so it covered her whole head.

She had cut her beautiful hair. The heavy, dark, wavy blanket that she let me brush sometimes had been shorn into a flapper’s bob. Pearl’s hair was bobbed, but Pearl was different—she and Gabe danced the Charleston, and she smoked cigarettes. And her bob clung sleekly to her head, only poufing out a little when she set it in pin curls. Mama’s hair, cut short, was thick and springy, as if the energy that used to wiggle to the end of each hair no longer knew where to go, and now the strands shot out from her head.

I couldn’t help it. I gasped in horror.

Pearl gave me a dirty look and fluffed Mama’s bob with her fingers. “It’s perfect! I knew you had the right kind of hair, Char. So much better than mine—you’ve got that beautiful natural wave. Doesn’t your mama look beautiful, Elaine?”

Barbara—where was she?—might have zipped past the crack that opened in the world, through which I glimpsed the broken places in my mother and knew I had to fix them. But what about the rip threatening to open inside me, the sense of betraying some essential Elaine-ness, if I said what they wanted to hear?

“Yes, beautiful!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, and even though I’d hesitated, Pearl smiled, and Mama said, “I’m a modern lady now, aren’t I?”

“Like a movie star,” I said.

“See?” Pearl said. “Let’s see how it looks with this.” From a big shopping bag she’d brought with her, Pearl took out a hatbox.

“Oh, Pearl!” Mama clapped her hands. Pearl had bought Mama a dark brown bob hat, its bell shape fitted close to her head to show just the edges of her hair at her cheeks.

Barbara came in then; she must have been in the garden. “Let me feel,” she said, and ran her hands through Mama’s bob. It hadn’t occurred to me that the wiry helmet would feel anything like hair.

Mama seemed happy until Pearl had to go home to make dinner. “Can’t you stay just a little longer?” she asked.

“Don’t worry, Bill will love it,” Pearl said. But Pearl knew, just as I did, the story of how Mama and Papa had met—that she took the English class he used to teach at night, and he noticed the dramatic fervor with which she recited poems … and her abundant, almost-black hair.

I heard later that Pearl went straight from our house to Fine’s and warned Papa that he’d better compliment Mama, or Pearl would make him sorry for the rest of his life.

We didn’t need to worry about Papa. No matter how attractive he had found Mama’s long hair, his passion was for modernity. “No more old country,” he said.

It was Zayde who murmured, “Your pretty, pretty hair.” Still, Zayde—who was, after all, an older man, for whom Mama had her greatest appeal—liked everything she did. In fact, he wanted her to keep coming to his card games, but she’d promised Papa she would stop when she got the money for school outfits, and she declared herself finished with all that.

The minefield of the bob crossed, Mama threw us into a euphoria of anticipation. She lectured us constantly on how to behave in school: Always respect our teachers. Never hit or push other children. Never, never fight with each other the way we did at home. She patted her hair and tried her new lipstick, and at least once a day she went to the closet and ran her hands over the plum silk of her smart suit.

On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, three days before our new lives as students were to begin, a vicious Santa Ana wind from the desert invaded Los Angeles. The sun scorched everything it touched, and there was no escaping it on streets whose only trees were skinny palms. Five minutes outside, and my head felt like a warm melon ready to burst. Our wooden house groaned in the dryness, the white paint baked to flakes. Papa limped home from work that day after fitting shoes on an endless stream of kids whose parents were making last-minute school purchases, and he lay on the floor as he always did when his back ached—but he wore only his underwear! Audrey wailed so much that even patient Zayde flinched and said, “Can’t you give her a drop of whiskey, Charlotte, to calm her down?” Mama did it, too, because she had a terrible headache; every so often, she whimpered in pain.

Night, which had been invisible—you closed your eyes in the dark, and then you opened them and it was morning—became a torment of minutes and seconds, a misery of sweat-damp sheets, harsh air from the fires that were burning in the forest to the east of the city, and nasty stickiness whenever Barbara or I shifted positions and any part of our bodies touched in bed.

During the day, our crankiness flared into war. Everything either of us did annoyed the other and provoked yelps of outrage, even though Mama begged us to be quiet because of her headache. If one of us was asked to help with anything, we whined that it was the other’s turn. On Labor Day, our family took refuge in Hollenbeck Park with its shade trees and pond. But Barbara and I started a tickling match that soon exploded in screaming and hitting, and Papa marched us back to the stifling house. Exhausted, Mama didn’t murmur a word about how to behave in school when she bathed us that night. She only spoke to tell us to lift an arm or turn so she could reach another part of our feverish bodies.

None of it, however, not even another uneasy sleep, mattered in the morning. Finally, the giant circle on the calendar marked the day, when we woke before six, the momentousness of the first day of school pounding through our veins so hard, our small bodies could barely contain it. Mama poked her head into our room and said, “You’re awake already, too, aren’t you?” She helped us put on our nicest school clothes, drop-waisted gingham dresses, Barbara’s in red and mine blue. Brushing our hair, she hummed the fusgeyer song. Then she went to get ready herself, while Papa made us breakfast and Zayde took charge of Audrey.

We were set to go—Barbara and I fed and clothed, Mama beautiful in her suit and new hat with her curls peek-a-booing on either side—almost an hour before we needed to leave. “Well!” Mama said. “Your teacher will notice the children who arrive early, ready to learn.” She picked up her gloves.

“Not this early, Charlotte.” Papa’s tense undertone said that he was afraid she was going to make us look ridiculous. “You’ll just be standing on the playground in the heat. Why don’t I read to the girls for a little while?”

“Yes, all right.” Carefully smoothing her suit, Mama sat on the sofa and automatically reached for the sewing basket next to it. But she didn’t take any work out of the basket; she just sat and stroked the fabric of her jacket.

Even Papa got infected by our delirium. Reading from The Secret Garden, he sometimes read the same line twice or skipped a word. Every so often he glanced at Mama and said, “Don’t you want to take off your jacket for now? Or your hat?”

“I’m fine,” Mama said, although her face looked red and sweaty.

At long, long last, we were on our way to Breed Street Elementary School two blocks from our house. Mama had Barbara and me walk on either side of her, holding her hands. Her hand in mine trembled a little. I felt the same trembling inside me. I was alert and happy and scared at the same time. And I noticed a heavy, flowery smell—Mrs. Kalman’s perfume, infusing Mama’s suit and heightened by the warmth of her body under the sun, which was already brutal at eight-thirty.

Even after delaying our departure, we were among the first to arrive at the school. An older boy, maybe ten years old and looking very important, stood at the entrance to the playground and asked Mama what class we were in. “Both of ’em in kindergarten?” he said. “You sure?”

“They’re twins,” Mama said.

He scrutinized us. “No, they’re not.”

“Fraternal twins, not identical,” Mama said, her voice asking permission in our first encounter with the school’s authority, albeit in the person of a ten-year-old child.

“Huh, never heard of that,” the boy said, but he pointed us toward the kindergarten table, one of half a dozen tables set up outside.

Mama looked around at the other mothers on the playground. A few had dressed nicely, but no one looked as nice as Mama, and many of the women wore the same dresses in which they’d probably clean their houses when they returned home. “Old country,” Mama sniffed, regaining her courage.

A pretty blond lady who looked barely older than a teenager stood behind the kindergarten table. Our teacher? I hoped so!

“What a beautiful ensemble,” the lady said when she saw Mama.

Mama beamed, then introduced us. “Barbara Inez Greenstein and Elaine Rose Greenstein.”

The blond lady leaned forward a little and talked directly to Barbara in a voice like bells. “Barbara, your teacher is Miss Madenwald, in room eleven. I’m Miss Powell, I’m a student teacher, and I work with Miss Madenwald. We’re going to have such a lot of fun.” Then she spoke to me. “Elaine, you’re in Miss Carr’s class. That’s in room twelve.”

Miss Powell’s smile traveled to whoever stood behind us, but Mama didn’t move.

“They’re both in the kindergarten,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” Miss Powell said. “Some of the older children are inside, Mrs. Greenstein. They’ll help you find the rooms.”

“They’re twins, the same age, five,” Mama said. “They’re both in the kindergarten class.”

“Oh, yes.” Miss Powell smiled, understanding now. She explained slowly, as if Mama were the kindergartner, “We have two kindergarten classes. One teacher is Miss Madenwald, and the other is Miss Carr.”

“Why put sisters in different classes?” Mama set her jaw the way she did when she challenged a sum at the market. But her accent got stronger, and sweat beaded her face.

“We always put twins in different classes. It helps them make friends with other children.” I noticed now that Miss Powell was sweating, too. I followed her nervous gaze down the line of children and parents that had formed behind us—and spotted Danny, my boy from Aunt Sonya’s party! But I just glanced at him, because the argument between Mama and Miss Powell required all of my attention.

“I know my daughters. They should be together,” Mama said.

“Mama, I’ll be fine,” Barbara chirped, smiling at—allying herself with—Miss Powell. Why not? She had the teacher with the musical name, Miss Madenwald, as well as pretty Miss Powell. Who knew what my teacher, named like an automobile, would be like?

More than that, all of my life so far had been lived as “we” and “us” and “you girls.” In every mental picture I had created of school and classroom, Barbara and I were there together. It wasn’t that I was afraid of walking into a classroom without Barbara at my side; I simply couldn’t conceive it. My personal geography needed to change to allow kindergarten to mean Barbara and me both being at Breed Street Elementary School but in different rooms, with different teachers and classmates. As if I needed to reconstruct the world as I knew it in the few minutes between being on the playground and entering my class.

“Can you remember, Barbara, you’re in room eleven?” Miss Powell addressed Barbara, ignoring the stubborn immigrant who was ruining her first hour of being a student teacher. “And your sister is in room twelve?”

“Yes, Miss Powell. Eleven and twelve. Come on, Mama.”

Mama let Barbara lead her inside, but not because she had conceded to the wisdom of American pedagogy concerning twins.

“Why not tell you to put your legs in one class and your arms in another?” she fumed. “And how am I supposed to meet my children’s teacher if it’s two different people?”

“Here’s my room, Mama,” Barbara said, pointing out a sign that had a big 11 in red crayon, with designs of flowers and animals, in front of the doorway. Papa had drilled us on our numbers up to twenty.

“No, it’s not,” said Mama, and pulled us across the hall to a similarly decorated sign with a green 12. “Here, you’re going to be in this class.”

“Can’t we both be in Miss Madenwald’s class?” I said.

“With that Miss Powell who doesn’t know anything?” Mama led us inside room twelve.

“Hello, children.” Miss Carr had a pleasant round face. But I was already in love with Miss Powell and Miss Madenwald.

“Elaine Rose Greenstein, ma’am,” I mumbled when she asked my name.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Elaine,” Miss Carr said, then turned to Barbara.

“Barbara Inez Greenstein, ma’am.”

“You came to bring your sister to her class, how nice,” she said to Barbara.

“Miss Carr, I’m Mrs. Greenstein.” Mama extended her hand in its beautiful if sweat-damp silk glove. As Miss Carr shook her hand, Mama announced, “I want both of my girls to be in your class.”

Miss Carr, clearly more experienced than Miss Powell in dealing with parents, didn’t argue with Mama. She simply directed us to the school office to talk to the principal, Mr. Berryhill.

Mr. Berryhill wouldn’t be available for a few minutes, said the lady who spoke to Mama from behind a chest-high counter in the large, busy office. She told us to wait in wooden chairs lined up with military precision along one wall. None of us—not Mama or Barbara or me—had ever heard of being “sent to the principal’s office,” but a few minutes in those chairs, catching pitying or condescending looks from people who came in for one thing or another, and we were squirming.

“Mama, I don’t mind not being with Elaine,” Barbara said. “I just want to go to my class.”

“Me too,” I lied.

“We’re going to talk to this Mr. Berryhill.” Mama fanned herself with her pocketbook. Her face no longer looked red but pale. Conceding a little to the heat, she took off her hat, but then she took out her smart new compact and peeked at herself in the mirror. “My hair,” she murmured. Her sweat-drenched bob clung to her head. She jammed her hat back on.

A bell rang. All three of us tensed and then drooped, ashamed. Our first day of school had started, and we were late for class.

A few minutes later, a gangly man with salt-and-pepper hair strode out from behind the counter. “Mrs. Greenstein?” He extended his right hand. “Delighted to meet you. Delighted!”

Mr. Berryhill had a husky smoker’s voice and the brightest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He ushered us into his office—and transformed our seemingly relentless march toward greater humiliations into a treasured experience that Mama would recount for years.

“He was like the rebbe in my town,” Mama told Aunt Pearl later. “You could tell he understood things that you never even thought about. And the books in his office! Like the rebbe’s study, books everywhere.”

The principal didn’t even say the word twins at first. He spoke to Mama about the importance of parents being involved in their children’s education and nodded at her in her smart suit as if to say he knew that a person who had taken so much care on her daughters’ first day of school must be an exemplary parent. By the time he explained that it was school policy to separate twins, Mama was already saying what a fine idea that was, and she’d considered the possibility all along but worried that we’d be afraid.

“You’ll be surprised,” he said. “Am I correct that one of your daughters is quieter than the other, and stays more in the background?”

“Yes, my Elaine.”

I stared at the floor, ashamed for not being louder, but I could feel Mr. Berryhill looking at me, and when I glanced up, his blue eyes twinkled.

“You wait and see,” he said. “Elaine is going to blossom.”

I felt myself blossoming right at that moment, and even more when Mama took me to my classroom with a note Mr. Berryhill had written to excuse my being late. “You met Mr. Berryhill!” my teacher said.

I blossomed all morning, quietly, like the first shoots coming up in our garden. My happiness brimmed over when school let out at noon and I saw Danny—barefoot, his tousled black hair uncombed, just as when we’d met in my nest among the stacks of wood. “Danny!” I exclaimed, full of my new boldness, and ran toward him.

He started to look toward me. Then someone else called him, and he hurried in the other direction. I followed him—to Barbara.

“This is Danny Berlov. He’s in my class,” my sister said possessively.

But Barbara didn’t need to lay claim to him. Danny had already chosen. He was hers.