The Tin Horse A Novel

I FIRST NOTICED OUR FAMILY’S GHOST AT THE BEACH AT OCEAN PARK. It must have been the summer I was five, because I remember Audrey being there in a bassinet—and both Zayde and Pearl were present, so it was before Pearl got divorced.

On our weekend beach outings, the adults occasionally took a quick dip to cool off, and someone always accompanied Barbara and me, standing guard when we dug in the damp, ploppy sand at the shoreline, and clutching our hands in a death grip when we ventured into the sea. By far, though, the top adult pastime was lounging under umbrellas in canvas chairs. They ate, talked, read a little. They looked at the ocean—Mama sometimes stared at the water for hours—or lay back with their eyes closed, luxurious in their few hours of rest. The one exception to all of that indolence was Papa, who charged into the ocean and swam his mile.

Papa swam his mile whenever he got the day off and could come with us to Ocean Park, so I had heard variations of that phrase many times. “I’m going to swim my mile,” he’d say, and stride briskly toward the water. Or someone would ask where Papa was, and another person would respond, “Swimming his mile.” It was part of the casual flutter of language constantly swirling around me, one of many references to events in the adult world that I took for granted. On this day, however, Papa swimming his mile became a treasure chest of ideas so huge and thrilling and dangerous, I nearly burst trying to absorb them: Swimming, which involved lying on your stomach facedown in the ocean, but instead of choking and coughing the way I did when a wave splashed in my face, you moved through the water. A mile, the kind of distance you traveled by car or streetcar (on foot, you went for three or four or ten blocks), yet Papa was going that far in the ocean. Swimming his mile also meant Papa went into the ocean deeper than just up to his chest, which was the farthest I was ever allowed to go; even deeper than a step or two beyond where he could stand, as Pearl sometimes did, giggling and shrieking and then scrambling to regain her footing.

Papa went so far that, from the beach, I couldn’t see him.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mama asked when I clung to her. “Please, Elaine, it’s too hot.”

I didn’t have the words to express the tumult of feelings my new awareness had stirred up—terror that Papa would never return, excitement that he was doing this thing that took strength and courage, and also the sense that I had shot to a more complex level of understanding everything, and I was on the edge of an exciting but challenging new network of meanings.

Mama put the back of her hand on my forehead. “Here, come into the shade. Drink something.”

She poured me a cup of lemonade in which the ice had long ago melted. I sipped the tepid drink but could barely swallow. My gaze frantically swept past the dozens of bathers frolicking near the shore and fixed on the few bold specks beyond where the waves broke that were swimmers. Did Papa always come from the same direction after he swam his mile? Oh, why had I never paid attention?

At last I spotted him, his wavy black hair and mustache glistening with water, his wiry-strong legs jogging across the beach. I shot to him, and he gathered me up against his cool, dripping chest.

“What is it, Elaine?”

“Did you swim your mile?”

“I did.” He laughed, for a moment as carefree as a boy. How old was he then? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? “Do you want me to teach you to swim?”

“Yes!” I said, my faith in my athletic papa overcoming my timidity.

“Let me get something to drink first. Then I’ll give you your first lesson.”

Surprisingly playful, Papa trotted like a pony and carried me back to our cluster of umbrellas and chairs. There, my recent leap in awareness disappeared. The adults seemed to be talking in code, their conversation as foreign as when I heard the Yamotos down the street speaking Japanese.

“Forty-eight.” Zayde shrugged and held up his arm to display his wrist-watch.

“Actual swimming?” Papa said. “Or did you count getting into and out of the water?” His voice sounded light, like he was joking, but, held against his chest, I could feel how tense he’d become.

“Same way I counted forty-two,” Zayde said.

“Pa.” Aunt Pearl rolled her eyes. “Harry was just eighteen. And the water’s rough today, isn’t it, Bill? I heard them say there’s a rip current.”

“Harry” must be Uncle Harry, Papa’s older brother, whom I’d never met because he died before I was born, fighting in the Great War. It was the one thing I understood. I tried to catch Barbara’s eye, but she was playing with baby Audrey and ignoring the simmering tension among the adults, as I suppose I had done in the past.

“Pearl, forget it, will you?” Papa put me down without looking at me.

“Here, Bill.” Mama’s hand lingered on Papa’s as she gave him a towel. “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Seventeen,” Zayde said. “He was seventeen. It was 1914.”

“Well, you see?” Pearl said.

“Is it too much to ask to have a towel that’s not full of sand when I get back from my swim?” Papa shook the towel hard, without taking a few steps away, and the gritty sand blew on us.

His uncharacteristic anger made me think twice before approaching him. But I wanted to learn to swim!

“Papa?” I moved toward him as he dried himself with the towel. “Papa?”

Maybe he heard my voice tremble. Or he’d worn his anger out. “What is it, Elaine?” he said gently.

“You said you’d teach me to swim.”

He hesitated a moment, and I braced myself for a no. But he smiled. “That’s right, I did.”

As a swimming instructor, Papa was more patient than when he drilled me in poetry or history. He made a game out of putting our faces in the water and blowing bubbles. That first day, I went from blowing bubbles with Papa holding me to not being held at all. Soon he taught me to do a dead man’s float, and by the time I was six I could swim the crawl.

As I got a bit older, I sometimes swam out beyond the breakers with Papa. And as the tendrils of mature reasoning I’d first noticed that day at the beach grew, I realized that the key to the conversation that had baffled me was Uncle Harry’s forty-two-minute mile, swum when he was seventeen—and that Harry’s ghost stroked, always a little ahead, when Papa swam his mile.

A FRAMED PHOTOGRAPH OF Harry Greenstein, handsome as a movie actor in his army uniform, hung in our living room. He was also in another living room photo, a picture of Papa’s whole family taken in 1911, the year after they moved from New York to the more healthful climate of Los Angeles. They made the move because our bubbe suffered from tuberculosis, but the change came too late for her. Seated beside Zayde at the center of the family grouping, Bubbe looked chalky and frail, and I knew she had died the next year. But the children! Impossible to believe that my pale, dull-eyed bubbe had ever produced these tanned visions of vitality!

Chubby and smiling, in dark dresses with white lace collars, nine-year-old Sonya and eight-year-old Pearl flanked the group. Bill—that was Papa—who was eleven, stood ramrod straight behind Bubbe; in his serious demeanor, I came to recognize myself.

Then there was Harry, dominating the photo with self-possessed grace. Although he was just fourteen, Harry displayed none of the gawkiness of adolescent boys, the resentful self-consciousness at being shoved inside bodies with which they’re at war. If there had been a war within Harry, he had won. At five-six or five-seven, he hadn’t yet reached his full height, but he’d clearly crossed the bridge from childhood to manhood. Standing behind Zayde’s chair and between Papa and Sonya, he held himself straight like Papa, yet with just a hint of a slouch that telegraphed assurance, humor. Next to whippet-thin Papa, Harry was filled out, and not just because he was older; he had a naturally powerful body with broad swimmer’s shoulders.

Harry swam his famous forty-two-minute mile in July 1914, which made it the centerpiece of an important summer, both for the Greenstein family and for the world. That June, Harry graduated from high school, and he and Zayde started the egg ranch. In August, Europe went to war.

Harry enlisted in the army a year later. The United States hadn’t yet entered the war, but he knew it was coming. When it did, he was sent to the heart of the fighting and killed almost the moment he set foot in France.

“Did you fight in the Great War?” I asked Papa, about the time I became aware of Uncle Harry’s ghost.

“I wanted to, but who would have helped Zayde with the egg ranch?”

A simple enough answer, but it concealed precarious fault lines that would deepen and slip and ultimately—at 5:54 p.m. on March 10, 1933—rupture.

FRIDAY, MARCH 10, didn’t seem like a day that would change everything. On our kitchen calendar, the tenth was merely a blank square, a day whose primary significance was that it fell in the midst of three other dates circled in red: the previous Saturday, March 4, when President Roosevelt was inaugurated, and Barbara’s and my twelfth birthdays, on March 28 and 29.

That Friday night, we would eat our first Shabbos dinner in an America led by FDR, an America that might emerge at last from the Depression. Though the Depression shadowed everyone’s life, it hadn’t hit the Greensteins as hard as it hit so many others. Papa still had a job; Mr. Fine had had to lay two people off, but he had laid off single people, not a family man like Papa. And Papa had worked at Fine’s for seventeen years! Mr. Fine often told him he was like family. We had to scrimp, of course, and Mama and Papa no longer talked about buying their own house someday, but we’d been able to install a telephone; and we always had plenty to eat and even new or expertly mended clothes, thanks to Aunt Pearl. Pearl was actually prospering in the hard times. She’d begun designing costumes for the movies, and movies were a comfort that all but the most desperate allowed themselves. For Uncle Leo, too, the Depression meant business for his bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. People parted with rare books to get by, and Leo needed only a handful of still-wealthy collectors—or the newly wealthy, for whom there was nothing like a shelf of moldy classics to make them look cultured—to have a market. Zayde did all right, too, gambling being a comfort that even the desperate didn’t give up.

We were the ones who felt sorry for other people. Papa gave money to charity, and Mama invited “less fortunate” families to Friday night dinners. Often that meant Danny and his father or—on that Friday—our next-door neighbors, the Anshels. Mr. Anshel, who worked as a printer, had gotten his salary cut in half, and with two small children to take care of, Mrs. Anshel couldn’t go out to work. The whole Anshel family, including three-year-old David and the baby, Sharon, had thick, pasty skin. Mama said it was because they ate almost no meat but had to fill up on potatoes and beans.

To make sure the Anshels got meat that Friday—and to celebrate Roosevelt’s inauguration—Mama was roasting two chickens, prepared by rubbing garlic, parsley, and oil under their skin and dusting them with paprika and her secret ingredient, a pinch of cinnamon. The fragrance filled the house as my sisters and I performed our Friday dinner chores. It was Barbara’s and my job to transform the kitchen table. We moved the table into the living room, added two leaves, and spread out the good white cloth Mama and Papa had gotten for a wedding gift from Pearl. Then we set the table with the rose-patterned Rosenthal china, a gift shipped from the relatives in Chicago, and the crystal wine and water glasses, which were also wedding gifts. It seemed as if every wedding gift Mama and Papa had received was intended for Shabbos dinners, even though the only custom we followed was for Mama to light candles in the silver candlesticks and mumble a prayer. The candlesticks were a gift from Papa’s employer, Julius Fine, and polishing them was Audrey’s task.

Audrey had just placed the freshly polished candlesticks on the sideboard, Barbara and I were smoothing the tablecloth, and Zayde was relaxing in his armchair with a glass of whiskey when Papa came home. Was it after six already? We’d better hurry. But I checked the clock, and it wasn’t even five-thirty. Mr. Fine had let Papa leave the store early.

“Papa! Papa!” Audrey danced from one foot to the other like a puppy that couldn’t contain its joy. Poor Audrey. The harder she tried, the more Papa withdrew from her. She hadn’t figured out that there were times when none of us—not even me, his favorite because I did so well in school—should approach Papa. When he got home from work, you needed to wait until he’d put on his house slippers and had a few sips of whiskey.

Predictably, Papa ignored us and walked into the kitchen. A minute later, I heard Mama scream. Barbara, Audrey, Zayde, and I all ran toward the kitchen and crowded through the swinging door.

Mama sprawled in a chair as if her six-months-pregnant belly were a heavy beach ball that someone had flung at her and, catching it, she’d fallen backward. Her eyes were open, but her face was as pale as the Anshels’.

Papa stood over her, fanning her with a kitchen towel. “Water,” he said.

Barbara rushed to the sink and filled a glass.

“Should I call the doctor?” I said.

“No, it’s all right.” Papa took the glass from Barbara and raised it to Mama’s lips. “Mama just got a little too hot, with the oven going.”

Mama sat up straight and glared at him. “Tell them.”

Papa took a deep breath. He looked at the floor but spoke with his elocution-champion enunciation. “I lost my job.”

“Juli Fine cut your hours?” Zayde said, holding out against the full disaster of what Papa had said.

Papa shook his head. “Mrs. Fine has a cousin who got laid off three months ago. He hasn’t been able to find anything else.”

“Why does that mean Papa lost his job?” Audrey whispered to me. I pinched her arm to shut her up.

“Charlotte, why don’t you come sit in the living room and cool off?” Papa said.

“We’ll finish fixing dinner,” Barbara volunteered.

“How about I tell the Anshels someone’s sick and we can’t have company tonight?” Zayde offered.

“And let this chicken go to waste?” Mama said. “Barbara? Elaine? The chickens need another fifteen, twenty minutes. And can you boil green beans? I was going to fix them with bread crumbs, but …”

“I know how to do it,” Barbara said.

Papa helped Mama to her feet, and they went with Zayde into the living room.

“What happened?” Audrey asked with tears in her eyes. Barbara and I explained. Then Audrey really cried. I grabbed her shoulders hard and said we had to act brave for Mama and Papa. Barbara had her sit down to snap the ends off the green beans, and I returned to the living room to finish setting the table.

Zayde had poured glasses of whiskey for Papa and Mama, who sat at opposite ends of the sofa.

“How about some music, Charlotte?” Zayde asked Mama.

“All right.”

Every comment or gesture, however casual, felt stained by Papa’s news. When Zayde turned on the radio to the classical station, I looked at the Zenith in its handsome cabinet and wondered how long we’d be able to keep it before we had to take it to the pawnshop.

As Papa, Mama, and Zayde sipped their whiskeys, they engaged in terse bursts of talk.

“What did this cousin get laid off from?” Mama said.

“Advertising.”

“What does an advertising man know about selling shoes?”

“He’s been out of work since December,” Papa said. “He’s got two kids and a mortgage.”

“A mortgage! So he could afford to buy? Audrey, for crying out loud, put those candlesticks away.”

Audrey, who’d crept across the room to put white candles in the candlesticks, jumped.

“I’m not going to pray over candlesticks we got from Juli Fine,” Mama said. “I can’t even bear to look at them! Put them away, Audrey. Now!” She took a gulp of whiskey, then said to Papa, “So, where is this house Mr. Advertising Man has got a mortgage on?”

“West side.”

“Naturally. Did Fine at least give you severance pay?”

“Sixty dollars.”

We paid twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a month just for rent.

“Mama?” Audrey whispered. She had returned the offending candlesticks to their place within the sideboard. Now she stood miserably, holding the candles. “What should I do with these?”

“Oy, how can I think about … I don’t care, use other candlesticks.”

Tears glistening in her eyes, Audrey looked around blindly. I realized she might not know there were candles in cheap brass candlesticks in the linen closet, in case the power failed. I was going to tell her, but then she ran into the kitchen.

“Seventeen years you worked for him,” Mama said. “Long hours, overtime, any job that needed doing. You think Mr. Advertising Man with his mortgage on the west side is going to put in hours like that or get his hands dirty in the stockroom?”

“If it was your cousin and my business, wouldn’t you—”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to defend him.”

“Charlotte.” Papa put up his hand: enough. He got up to refill his glass.

“Bill’s right,” Zayde said. “Of course Fine is going to help his cousin.”

“His wife’s cousin.” Mama winced. “The radio. I don’t want to hear it after all.”

I leaped to turn it off.

How could they all be so silent? I was lifting each fork to put a folded napkin under it, oh so gently; still, the forks and napkins thundered onto the table.

“Where will you look?” Mama said after another minute.

“I’ll start with the department stores downtown.”

“To get another job selling shoes?” Zayde said.

Was it because Zayde was sitting under Uncle Harry’s photograph? Somehow, his simple comment implied not just Why would Papa want another job as a shoe salesman? but Why would anyone ever settle for such a job?

“Maybe I should ask if they need someone to run the whole department store.” Papa gave a sharp, dry laugh. “Or I’ll just call the mayor and see if he wants me to help him run the city.”

“All I’m saying, Billy,” Zayde said, “is, this is an opportunity. You can make a fresh start.”

“A fresh start, Pa. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Mama should have touched his arm and said something; it was how she always defused fights between Papa and Zayde. But she just stared into her glass of whiskey. She almost never drank alcohol except for a Friday night glass of wine.

“There’s always money to be made,” Zayde said.

“A man who worked in advertising, a graduate of UCLA, is going to spend all day on his knees trying to force shoes that are too tight over Mrs. Scharf’s bunions. What do you suggest for a man who doesn’t have a high school diploma?”

“Feh, a piece of paper. You see how much good it did Fine’s cousin.”

Thank goodness, Mama finally opened her mouth. But all she said was, “His wife’s cousin. That Trudie Fine, I bet she was at him night and day.”

“You said it yourself,” Zayde said. “If it was your business and a family member needed help, you’d help. Isn’t that the idea, there’s nothing like being in business for yourself so you can help family when you need to?”

“What kind of business am I supposed to go into with sixty dollars, in a depression?”

“Not just sixty dollars. I’m talking about a family business.”

“Like the winery you wanted to get into, Pa. A winery, in the middle of Prohibition.”

“Did Prohibition last? If we’d started then—”

“What did we know about making wine?”

“What did Julius Fine know about shoes when he got started?”

“Jesus Christ, Pa! Fine wasn’t trying to make shoes, just to sell them.”

“Bill, Bill,” Mama murmured.

Zayde, to my amazement, grinned. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “That’s the kind of fight it takes to get ahead. Bill, I say this because you’re my son. You’re as smart as the next fellow; in fact, you’re smarter than most of ’em who make ten times what you ever made at Fine’s and live in fancy houses on the west side. There’s just one thing that holds you back.”

He paused, and I thought of doing something to distract everyone’s attention—dropping a plate? But I couldn’t break a good plate. And I couldn’t resist hearing what Zayde was going to say.

“Billy, you’ve always had a cautious nature. Nothing wrong with that, a little caution is good in business. But sometimes a man has got to take risks. To have a little—”

“Chutzpah,” Papa said with a pinched smile. That’s when I got scared.

Chutzpah, I had heard many times by then, was something Uncle Harry had possessed in abundance, and it was the quality Zayde prized above all others. “Harry could walk into any room in this city and have ’em eating out of his hand,” Zayde often said. “Longshoremen or Torah scholars, didn’t matter, he had the chutzpah to look ’em in the eye and tell ’em what he thought. Even the men who run Los Angeles.” Or, more to the point, bankers who might have saved the egg ranch. Not that it would have needed saving. The ranch was Harry’s idea, and he had had brilliant plans for everything, from getting the most output from the hens to advertising to transporting the eggs to stores. With Harry in charge, Green and Sons’ Health-Wise Ranch would have been the biggest egg producer in the West, Zayde said. As I became aware of Zayde’s tendency to embellish, I took that boast with a grain of salt. Still, how could you look at photos of Harry and not see a man who would have flung himself into the ocean of life … and swum faster and harder than everyone else?

I also knew, though this was never part of Zayde’s stories, that Harry’s enlisting in the army had forced Papa to drop out of high school at sixteen to take his place on the egg ranch. Though, of course, no one could take Harry’s place.

And for all my uncle Harry’s charm when he was alive, I’d come to dread the times when one of the adults—usually Zayde—brought him into a conversation. At the mention of Harry, Papa got tense and unhappy as he had that day at the beach, even if Zayde hadn’t brought up Harry for the express purpose of comparing Papa to him; often, however, the comparison was at least implied, and it was a contest that Papa could never win. I felt bad on Papa’s behalf. More than that, I sensed the story of Uncle Harry and Papa repeating between Barbara and me. I was studious, like Papa, and Barbara was a go-getter, a princess of chutzpah. There was a glow around her, as there had been around Uncle Harry.

And that afternoon, though no one had yet uttered Harry’s name, I knew that his ghost had entered the room.

“That’s it, chutzpah,” Zayde said. “But you’ve got a point. Better to have a business we know something about. A betting shop, for instance.”

“Pa.” Papa stood up and took a few steps toward Zayde—casually, with his hands clasped in front of him, as if he were delivering a lesson in history or poetry.

“I’ve got ideas Melansky can’t understand,” Zayde said. “He doesn’t know how to think big. But the two of us could—”

“Pa! Why do you think Harry enlisted in the army?”

Every nerve in my body crackled.

“Who said anything about Harry?” Zayde said.

“Why did Harry enlist?” Papa repeated.

“Why does anyone enlist? To serve his country.” Zayde shrugged, but he stood, too, and his accent got stronger, a sign that Papa had upset him. I had an impulse to throw myself between them, but they seemed to be talking reasonably, and how dangerous could they be, two men in house slippers?

“Two years before we got into the war?” Papa said.

“He knew the war was coming.”

“So he left a business he’d started just a year earlier. A business that was just getting on its feet.”

“Look, I know it’s hard to hear the truth about yourself. But don’t—”

“The truth?” Papa said, his voice loud and rough. He took a step closer to Zayde. “The truth is, Harry enlisted to get away from your goddamn egg ranch.”

“What are you talking about?” Zayde shouted. “The ranch was Harry’s idea.”

The yelling brought Barbara from the kitchen. We stood glued side to side as Mama, finally roused, cried, “Stop it! Both of you!”

“Harry hated the ranch,” Papa said. “He hated chickens. He told me when he left for the army he never wanted to eat another egg.”

“Your brother was a hero. Show some respect.”

“Know what he hated most of all? He hated getting dragged into your crazy schemes. He was afraid he was going to be stuck doing that for the rest of his life.”

“Crazy? Who doesn’t eat eggs?”

“Please, Pa, he doesn’t mean it,” Mama said.

“Why do you think I had to go to work for Fine?” Papa said. “Because there was nothing left after that.”

“Under this roof, I won’t stay one more night,” Zayde boomed.

“Harry couldn’t wait to get away!”

“Not one night.” Zayde skirted the table and pushed through the swinging door, toward his room.

“Bill, how could you?” Mama exclaimed.

Papa looked at his watch. “Girls, it’s ten to six,” he said firmly. “We have guests arriving soon. Is the food ready?”

“That’s all right, I’ll finish it,” Mama said, but she didn’t leave the room right away; she stood frozen, staring at Papa.

Barbara and I pretended to arrange things on the table; I was blinking my eyes, trying not to cry, and she squeezed my hand to calm me down.

Papa said to Mama, “How could I say it? Or how could I have not said it all these years?”

“You and your father—and poor Harry, dead all these years already—that’s your business. But what are we going to do without your father’s income? I’m going to go talk to him.” Then Mama went into the kitchen.

Papa sank into the sofa. He looked dazed, the way he had one day when he’d swum his mile even though he was getting over the flu and he emerged from the ocean white-faced, his teeth chattering.

I looked at the elegantly set table and imagined the china and crystal stacked on the curb after we’d been evicted.

As if they had absorbed my fear, all of the beautiful things on the table trembled. But it wasn’t just the table. The floor was lurching. Lights flickered. The whole house made terrible, deep grinding noises, overlaid by the shrill, ominous tinkling of crystal.

Barbara and I grabbed each other, screaming, “Earthquake!” Papa threw himself on top of us and pulled us to the shuddering floor as glass shattered around us.

Then it stopped.

For a few seconds, the stillness felt as strange as the shaking.

“Girls, are you all right?” Papa sat up and scanned our bodies for injuries.

We were whimpering like babies, but we hadn’t been hurt. Not like Papa, who was bleeding from cuts on his head and arms! But he said he was all right. He told us to go outside—carefully, there was broken glass all over the floor—and wait in front of the house. Then he ran into the kitchen, yelling for Mama and Zayde.

Barbara and I tiptoed through the room, which had gone crazily askew. A table with knickknacks had toppled over, and all of the furniture, even the big, heavy sofa, had lurched into slightly different places. Outside, our wooden porch looked all right, but the three concrete steps were cracked, and a big chunk had broken off the middle step. Testing the ground each time I put a foot down, I picked my way over the broken steps and out to the sidewalk.

Neighbors were spilling outside, too, everyone dazed and eyeing their houses as if fearing what fresh revenge they might take for our living in them so heedlessly, with so little gratitude for their constant effort to squeeze joists and nails and boards together against the forces of chaos. Except for the porch steps and some broken windows, our house looked unharmed, but the porch roof had collapsed at the Lischers’, three doors down. There was a horrid blaring sound—the horn of a car, one of several that sat askew in the middle of the street, with no drivers in sight.

“Is anyone hurt? Your mother, with the baby?” It was Mrs. Anshel.

What baby? I thought dully, wondering if she meant her baby, Sharon. But Sharon was right there in her arms. Then I understood she was talking about Mama’s pregnancy.

“Papa’s getting everyone else,” I said.

“Tell him he needs to shut off the main gas line.… Barbara, Elaine, are you listening? Just come get me when your father comes out.”

Mrs. Anshel turned out to be one of those people who get invigorated by a crisis. Wearing the navy and white dress and silver clip earrings she’d put on to come to dinner at our house, she bustled over to the Yamotos’, two doors away. She told them about turning off the gas line—now I understood what she was talking about—and Mr. Yamoto went to take care of it. She mentioned the blaring car horn, and the two sons, Teddy and Woodrow, went and lifted the hood of the offending car.

Papa, Mama, and Zayde came around from the back of the house. Papa and Zayde supported Mama, who held a kitchen towel to her forehead.

“Mama!” we cried, running to her.

“I’m fine, girls. Something fell in the kitchen, that’s all,” she said, but she walked heavily and her eyes barely flicked over us.

But then, as if strength had flooded into her, she charged past us to the street. “Audrey? Where’s Audrey?”

Barbara and I looked at each other, as if that would magically make Audrey appear. Together, we looked at the house. Audrey’s face wasn’t in any of the windows.

“Didn’t she come out?” Papa asked me.

I shook my head.

“You said ‘the girls’ were out front. ‘The girls,’ you said!” Mama screamed at Papa.

He was already sprinting back into the house. Zayde was two steps behind him, and then Barbara and me, but, even holding her baby, Mrs. Anshel managed to plant herself ahead of both of us. “What are you girls thinking?” she said. “Take care of your mother.”

Mama’s face was ashen, except for the bloody gash on her head—no longer covered by the dish towel, which dangled in her hand. Mrs. Anshel led her to sit in one of the abandoned cars and told me to press the towel against the wound on Mama’s head. I used it to dab at Mama’s tears as well, while my own tears streamed and soaked the collar of my blouse.

The Yamoto boys had silenced the car horn, and we could hear Papa and Zayde calling for Audrey. No one answered.

“Barbara. Elaine.” Mrs. Anshel made sure we were looking at her. “This is important. Was Audrey with you when the earthquake happened?”

“No,” we said together.

“Where did you see her last?”

“Living room,” I said. “But she was going into the kitchen.” I glanced at Barbara.

“How was I supposed to notice?” she said. “I had to fix the dinner.”

“Oh, was your mama not feeling well?”

“Yes,” we answered quickly, both of us immediately understanding that we couldn’t reveal what had really happened.

“Hmm.” Mrs. Anshel clearly sensed there was more to the story. “Well, does Audrey have a hiding place? Someplace she’d go if she was upset?”

“I don’t know,” I said, as miserable as Audrey when Mama had snapped at her about the candlesticks.

Papa and Zayde returned, alone. Now Papa took over questioning Barbara and me, while Mrs. Anshel went to organize a search party. Were we absolutely certain we hadn’t seen Audrey after the earthquake? Papa asked. What about before the earthquake? Did she go outside?

Yearning to help in some way, I mentioned the need to shut off the gas line. Papa asked Zayde to do it. Then he instructed Barbara and me to stay with Mama, and he joined the search.

Why wasn’t Audrey in the house? Had she run outside in distress after I could have helped her but didn’t? I asked myself miserably as, all up and down the street, people called her name. And then … had she been crushed under a falling building? Had someone taken advantage of the confusion of the earthquake and kidnapped her, like the Lindbergh baby last year? What could I promise God, if He brought her back safely? Of course I would never ever tease her again. But I needed to offer something bigger. What about helping my family, since Papa had lost his job? Some children, even as young as I was, had left school to go to work.

Then I heard a woman cry out, “Here she is! The little Greenstein girl!”

“Look, they found her!” someone else exclaimed.

I followed the pointing fingers and swiveling heads toward the end of the block, and saw … it was Audrey! She rode on the shoulders of a handsome Mexican man. And wasn’t that Auntie Pearl at their side?

Mama let out a cry and staggered toward them. Applauding and cheering, the crowd parted to let her through. The Mexican man gently lowered Audrey from his shoulders, and Mama swooped to embrace her.

“I found her on the street outside my apartment,” Pearl said. “I tried to telephone you, but the line was down.”

Now Mama was scolding Audrey but at the same time hugging her and stroking her hair and weeping, while the rest of us surrounded them, chattering and smiling, a happy family again.

“Bill? Charlotte?” Pearl said after the first few delirious minutes of relief that Audrey was safe. “Papa?” she added tremulously.

Pearl looked … not just pretty, but like women in the movies. Wearing a clingy green sweater and high heels, and with red lipstick on her mouth, my aunt was sexy. She placed her hand on the arm of the Mexican man who had carried Audrey; and who hadn’t, like the other helpful neighbors, drifted away. “I’d like you to meet Alberto Rivas,” she said.

“Bert,” the man said with a smile. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Greenstein.” He held out his hand to Zayde.

Zayde gave Pearl a long, cold look and walked away.

Papa, however, grasped Bert Rivas’s outstretched hand. “Thank you for bringing back our daughter.” As if to emphasize how different he was from Zayde, he added, “Please, stay and have dinner with us.”

“Bill, you don’t have to,” Pearl said quickly.

“He brought Audrey back safe and sound. It’s the least we can do.”

Bert glanced at Pearl. She nodded, and he accepted Papa’s invitation. Even then, I kept telling myself he must be one of Pearl’s neighbors; it was a bit odd that he lived near Pearl instead of in the Mexican part of Boyle Heights, but a certain amount of mixing went on, like the Yamotos living on our block instead of in the Japanese area. And while the idea of Bert being Pearl’s neighbor was odd, it wasn’t impossible, not like the other idea that gradually forced its way into my mind: that Pearl had put on her sexy sweater for Bert Rivas. That this Mexican man was my aunt Pearl’s boyfriend.

“I couldn’t help it,” I heard Pearl tell Papa as we picked our way over the broken porch steps. “The important thing was to get her home. What if there was another earthquake, or we had to get past buildings that were destroyed? It would have been crazy to bring her back by myself.”

Back inside the house, we turned on the radio and heard that the earthquake had been centered in Long Beach, a terrible thing for the people there but a relief for us, since Long Beach was twenty miles away. Papa, with Bert’s help, swept up the broken glass—almost all of the good crystal wineglasses, as well as several pieces of Rosenthal china. Barbara and I reset the table with everyday glasses, and the Anshels joined us for dinner, too, celebrating that all of us had come through the earthquake with little damage and that Audrey was safe.

Everyone was awkward at first around Bert, and no one breathed a word about Zayde having left for Sonya’s. But by the time Papa opened a second—then a third!—bottle of wine, we were having the liveliest Shabbos in Greenstein family history. After dinner, the adults’ cigarette smoke swirled deliciously. And Bert held Audrey on his lap and sang beautiful Mexican songs.

Papa sang along. I had no idea that he knew songs in Spanish. He dropped out during some of the verses but joined in enthusiastically whenever Bert got to a chorus:

Ay, ay, ay, ay,

Canto y no llores.

Porque cantando se alegran,

Cielito lindo, los corazones.

I’d learned that song, “Cielito Lindo,” at school. “Canto y no llores” meant “sing and don’t cry.” I wondered if that was what Papa was doing, after losing his job and then having the terrible fight with Zayde. Did he wish he could take back what he’d said about Uncle Harry (whose photos hung askew; we had not begun restoring the house to its pre-earthquake order)? But I thought Papa looked defiant, even proud. As upsetting as the fight had been, he had finally stood up against … not even Zayde; what Papa had to fight was the ghost of Uncle Harry. And what an unfair fight, Papa forever in the shadow of a golden boy killed on a French battlefield at twenty. Papa, whose imperfect adult life, with its inevitable disappointments and missed opportunities and sheer rotten luck, could never measure up to the youthful promise, the gleaming possibility, that was and always would be Harry.





THE 1933 LONG BEACH EARTHQUAKE KILLED 120 PEOPLE AND CAUSED $50 million in damage. And the rifts that opened in my family that night never closed.

Zayde had moved to Sonya’s once before, after Barbara goaded him to make the tin animals, but he’d returned just two weeks later, complaining that Sonya chased after him with the Hoover anytime he walked on her fancy carpet, and the only subject Leo ever talked about was his dyspepsia—and no wonder, with Sonya’s cooking. This time was different. Zayde didn’t come back. Not that he broke with Papa completely, the way he’d done with Pearl. He still came over and ate dinner with us one or two nights a week, and we saw him at family gatherings. But it wasn’t the same as having Zayde living with us. I don’t know if Harriet, born that June, ever heard his stories.

And it’s lucky I’d paid attention when Zayde took care of the fig tree in the yard. A few days after he left, I noticed the leaves beginning to wilt, and I hurried to water the tree, thinking at the time that I didn’t want Zayde to come home to a dying tree. But as his absence dragged on, I became the tender of the fig tree.

Other things changed as well. Audrey had acted giddy and heroic on the night of the earthquake, laughing as she told everyone how, seconds after she turned down Aunt Pearl’s street, all of the buildings shook, cars jumped crazily in the road, and she got thrown to the ground. “See!” She displayed her palms and knees, where Mama had washed the abraded skin and put on Mercurochrome and bandages. But for months afterward, Audrey had nightmares and wet her bed, as if she were a child of two and not seven. She was always sensitive, quick to tears, and now little things sent her into tantrums; she’d start with a sort of singing whine and build to a scream.

Papa spent a lot of time with her. He felt guilty for not having realized she was missing. And he was home a great deal; he couldn’t find any work for two months after he got laid off from Fine’s, and at first, when he did start to work again, it was only occasional jobs arranged through Pearl, purchasing shoes to go with costumes she designed for the movies. This would eventually grow into a moderately successful business that included, for big historical pictures, researching the shoes of earlier times and having a factory make dozens of pairs at a time.

Papa’s success, however, still lay some years in the future. The summer after he lost his job, Barbara and I went to work. Barbara, who’d always had a knack for organizing our neighborhood gang of kids, started a summer playgroup for half a dozen children whose mothers worked or could afford a dollar fifty a week to get the kids out of their hair. My job was at Uncle Leo’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, which sounded perfect for a reader like me—except that, instead of reading any books, I was given tasks that Leo considered appropriate for a twelve-year-old poor relation, like dusting shelves and running to the drugstore for his bicarb. Danny was working, too, at Chafkin’s grocery store. While doing his restitution for stealing, he’d impressed Eddie Chafkin by taking the job seriously; and once he paid off his debt, Eddie offered to hire him. Danny made fun of Eddie’s puffed-up manner and his constant schemes for squeezing a few more pennies out of the store. Yet he seemed to feel proud to be associated with his employer’s energy and enterprise, qualities so lacking in his father.

Our jobs didn’t end when we entered Hollenbeck Junior High School the next fall; we just switched to after-school and weekend hours. Overnight, it seemed, my childhood pals and I had become workers. And isn’t that the finest thing a person can be! Cousin Mollie said.

Cousin Mollie Abrams came to stay with us in September when the union sent her to Los Angeles to organize the garment workers. She was the silver lining in the cloud of bad things that happened that year.

Even though Mollie was our cousin, the oldest daughter of Mama’s brother Meyr, she was only five years younger than Mama, and the two of them had been like sisters when Mama lived with Meyr’s family in Chicago.

“Mollie taught me English from her schoolbooks,” Mama had told us many times.

“Mollie used to sneak her mother’s cologne on hot days, and we’d rub each other’s feet with it. We had the best-smelling feet in Chicago.”

“Such beautiful English Mollie spoke. She was going to get a high school diploma and get a nice job, something in an office.”

It didn’t turn out that way. Meyr hurt his back and could no longer handle his job in the stockyards. Nothing else paid as well, and Mollie had to leave school at fifteen and work in a dress factory. Not that Mollie Abrams was the kind of girl who’d waste any time moaning that life had let her down! In the factory, her intelligence—along with a gift for rousing a crowd, no doubt inherited from Meyr with his fusgeyer theatricals—did help her get ahead. Before she was twenty, she became president of the union at her factory. Then she caught the eyes of the leaders of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and they asked her to help them … in Los Angeles. Cousin Mollie was coming to stay with us!

She was going to have the room off the kitchen that had been Zayde’s—and either Barbara or I would share the room with her! But we had only a week’s notice that she was coming. That gave me very little time to be excessively good and prove to Mama that I deserved the honor of rooming with our guest. Fortunately for me, the way Mama made her choice was neither rational nor fair.

It had to do with my being Audrey’s chief tormentor, habitually mean to the sister immediately below me in the pecking order; Barbara, in contrast, treated Audrey like an innocuous pet, a canary or a gerbil on which she might lavish attention one day and then ignore for weeks. I was the one who pinched Audrey, made fun of her, and found her existence a frequent source of annoyance. True, I’d promised God that if He brought Audrey back safely after the earthquake, I’d never tease her again. But God never visited our secular household to hold me to my vow. And even though I felt sorry about the rough time Audrey was having, it was miserable for me, too, to wake up on a hot morning to the stink of her pee soaking the cot next to the bed Barbara and I shared. Worse, I would come home after being Uncle Leo’s slave all day and riding back on the hot bus, and there was Papa on his knees like a horsey, with Audrey giggling on his back. I’d worked hard for my place as Papa’s favorite through my diligence at his lessons and in school. For Audrey, he was willing to be a playmate.

All of that frustration went into the shove I gave Audrey when we were fixing Zayde’s room for its new inhabitant.

The room off the kitchen had sat empty ever since Zayde left in March. At first we didn’t touch the room because we expected Zayde to return. Once it became clear that his departure was permanent, Barbara and I begged to move there, but Mama and Papa were preoccupied with the new baby and with money worries; and the room needed a few repairs that no one ever got around to. The delay ultimately became part of the silver lining. Instead of the slapdash way we would have fixed up the room for Barbara and me, we were making it beautiful … for Cousin Mollie.

Papa, Barbara, and I painted the walls with fresh white paint. Mama made new curtains out of crisp fabric with a pattern of pink and blue flowers, and hemmed a square of the same fabric to drape over the orange crate that served as a bedside table. On Saturday night—just two days to Mollie!—Papa was hanging 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 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 never experienced scorn or hatred. Yet it was as if the humiliations and oppression Mama and Zayde had suffered had been lying in wait to ambush me. All it took was venturing beyond my narrow accustomed world, glimpsing myself as someone who belonged at the airport might see me.

My uneasiness lingered when I was back among my family. Harriet had pooped, but Mama hadn’t brought a fresh diaper, never imagining we would have to wait so long. Harriet stank and fussed, and Mama made Barbara and me take turns holding her. I tried to get excited again about the airplanes taking off and landing, but I just wanted to be somewhere else. Or even, like Barbara, someone else? I glanced at Barbara, who, even though she had to hold Harriet, was standing a bit behind us, keeping her distance from the fence. The way she had chattered about “Mummy and Daddy” and lied about having flown … if I tried to do that, I would choke on the falseness. As always, I marveled at—and envied—my sister’s audacity, her chutzpah. This time, though, something else stirred in me. True, I couldn’t play a role like my chameleon sister. With every inch of my skin, every thought that crossed my mind, every word I spoke, I was Elaine Greenstein. And I was glad of it! I felt the integrity (even if I didn’t have that word for it at the time) of being utterly myself, and it gave me an extraordinary sense of power; it was a way I would feel years later in courtrooms when I was at the top of my game. And Barbara—for a moment I saw past her facility at shapeshifting to her need for it … and I felt sad for her.

All of these thoughts fled, however, when a new set of lights appeared and someone shouted, “It’s Chicago!”

“Mollie!” Mama called.

The plane landed, then jounced toward the fence and shuddered to a stop. Men in coveralls wheeled over the metal stairway, and from inside the plane a uniformed arm flung open the door.

The first passenger to emerge was a matronly lady in a lumpy brown suit and green hat. My eyes skimmed past her, but Mama screamed, “Mollie!” And the matron turned into a girl as she dashed down the stairs, yelling, “Charlotte!” and not caring that this wasn’t the casual yet dignified way in which everyone else descended from planes. Mollie kissed Mama’s fingers through the fence and hurried through the gate. Then she and Mama embraced, both of them laughing and weeping.

Finally Mama introduced each of us. “Elaine,” Mollie said and gave me a kiss. “Your mama sent me the letter you wrote to the newspaper. I’m so proud that you’re fighting for justice.” She said a different special thing to Papa, Barbara, Audrey, and even Leo, and she cuddled Harriet (and didn’t wrinkle her nose at the smell) while we waited for her bags. Up close, Cousin Mollie looked a lot younger than when she’d first stepped from the airplane. She had springy dark hair like Mama’s (and mine) that poked out untidily from her stylish green fez. And her brown eyes sparkled with energy.

When we got home Mama showed Mollie her room and said, “I hope you don’t mind if Elaine sleeps on the cot.”

“Mind?” Mollie clapped her hands. “It’ll be like you and me, Char, when we were girls.”

Oh, the wonderful talks we were going to have! The secrets I would share with the heroine of Mama’s Chicago stories. But Mollie stayed up late that first night talking with Mama in the kitchen, and the next morning when I woke up, she had already left. That evening, Mama made a feast for Mollie’s first dinner with us, and we waited an hour and a half before we finally gave up on her and ate. But she stayed out until long after I was asleep. When I awoke the following day, she was gone again.

It was like that all week. The same blazing energy that drew me to Mollie kept her working for the union from sunrise until midnight. In the morning, she left by six to talk to people on their way into the factories. Every evening, she attended a meeting or strolled around the Mexican center of Olvera Street—most of the dressmakers were Mexican—or visiting workers in their homes.

I tried going to bed early, hoping to wake up and talk with her when she got ready in the morning, but as the oldest of six children, Mollie had learned to be quiet. She slept with her alarm clock under her pillow and turned it off before the ring penetrated my sleep. She was extremely tidy as well. Other than her scents—a flowery toilet water and the nasty but tantalizingly adult smell of cigarettes—she left little sign that I even had a roommate. Alone at night for the first time in my life, I drew her brush through my hair and put a few drops of her toilet water on my wrists. I wished resentfully that I were a Mexican dressmaker. Then she’d be interested in me.

I wasn’t the only one who felt slighted. Mama complained that Mollie might just as well have stayed in Chicago, for all the time she spent with us. “Your union is supposed to fight for better conditions for workers. Can’t they give you one night off to see your family?” she said as Mollie prepared to head off to yet another meeting instead of having dinner with us.

Mollie embraced Mama. “Char, darling, with the union just getting off the ground here, we can’t let up.” She gave Mama a kiss, then left.

“Twenty-eight years old, and she’s married to that union,” Mama muttered.

On Friday night, Mollie called to say she couldn’t have Shabbos dinner with us because she was being interviewed on a radio station. “What does she think this is, a hotel?” Mama said, and went to bed with a headache. Later, I awakened to voices from the kitchen. Mollie had finally come home, and Mama was weeping and talking to her in Yiddish.

Mollie took Mama out for lunch the next day, and on Sunday, though she spent the day visiting workers in their homes, she came back in the evening and joined us for a leisurely dinner. At first the dinner wasn’t what I’d hoped for. All of us were greedy for our guest’s attention, and the important things I wanted to tell her—that I was writing a report about Jane Addams, from Mollie’s own city of Chicago, and that I’d been chosen to be an editor of the school newsletter—got drowned out by everyone else. Audrey recited a stupid poem. Zayde, who’d joined us that evening, boasted about the radical meetings he used to attend in his village. Barbara talked about her playgroup and answered Mollie’s questions about the jobs held by the children’s mothers and what kind of working conditions they had.

Then Papa cleared his throat loudly. “Mollie, may I ask you a few questions?” he said. “About your union organizing?”

“Absolutely,” Mollie replied, at the same time that Mama said, “Bill,” with a warning look. Papa had been grumbling that some of the garment factory owners were our neighbors, small businessmen who were having a rough time in the Depression just like everyone else.

“I voted for FDR,” Papa said, “and I want you to understand, I’m all for unions at a big company like General Motors or in the coal mines. But why target the garment factories? You’re talking about small businessmen, Jerry Bachman, for instance.”

“You go to school with Greta Bachman, don’t you, girls?” Mama said. “Mollie, would you care for a bit more kugel?”

“Thanks, Char. I’ve missed your kugel,” Mollie said, but her focus stayed on Papa. “I met Jerry Bachman just the other day,” she said.

“Sid Lewis is another one,” Papa said. “He started out working in a factory in New York.”

“Sid?” Zayde broke in. “A penny-pincher. Minute somebody becomes a boss, they forget where they came from,” he said, smoothly sloughing off his admiration for anyone with the chutzpah to start a business.

Papa said, “You can’t tell me Sid doesn’t have sympathy for the people who work for him. He and Jerry, they’d pay their employees more if they could.”

“Bill, I’m sorry to have to tell you,” Mollie said, “but your friend Bachman is one of the worst offenders. He pays some women less than a dollar a week. Minimum wage for women in California is sixteen dollars, you know.”

“Barbara, help me clear the table, and we’ll bring out dessert,” Mama said, again trying to defuse their disagreement.

But I didn’t want them to stop. Unlike almost every other discussion I’d witnessed around our dinner table—about people we knew, alive or dead, or the minutiae of our days—Mollie and Papa were arguing about ideas! And Mollie was standing up for what she believed with no fear or apology. Not that Mama didn’t hold her own in fights with Papa, but she fought only about household issues; only rarely and timidly did she venture an opinion about politics. Not Mollie. And she wasn’t just throwing out inflammatory statements the way Zayde sometimes did, but calmly marshaling evidence, making her case. I felt as if our house—and beyond it, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and the world—had become more spacious, as if the next time I walked out the door, the streets would be wider and the figs on our tree fatter and sweeter.

Mollie paused for a second after Mama’s interruption. Then, to my delight, she plunged back into the argument.

“Jerry Bachman is violating state law,” she said. “They all are.”

Papa bristled. “That is a very serious charge to make.”

“The bosses!” Zayde said.

“Listen to all of you.” Mama laughed uneasily. And then she got into the fray. “Who at this table has actually worked in a dress factory in Los Angeles? Why doesn’t somebody ask me what I think?”

“You’re right,” Mollie said. “You’re the authority, Charlotte. Did you feel you were paid fairly?”

“I … You know, an immigrant, you take any work you can get. You don’t complain.” Flustered, she glanced from Mollie to Papa. Her eyes settled on Papa. But she took Mollie’s side! “And they know it. They know they can cheat you and get away with it.… Now, is anyone going to eat my poppy-seed cake?”

The discussion of Mollie’s organizing continued, though Papa shifted to a less contentious tone. I dug into my cake with relish, thrilled by the power in Mollie that had sparked Mama to take a stand, that galvanized all of us and made us think about things beyond our narrow lives.

Mollie galvanized everyone she met. She began to appear in newspaper or radio reports as the forceful young woman shaking up the garment industry. And she did shake things up. Only a week after she’d arrived in Los Angeles, the cloakmakers walked off their jobs.

That was on Tuesday, September 25, 1933. The next morning, Mollie must have made some noise, or maybe it was the roar of her excitement that woke me.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Are you going to the strike?”

“It’s not a strike.” She moved quickly and efficiently, buttoning a blue-and-white striped blouse.

“But the radio said …”

“Elaine, you know that what you hear on the radio depends on who owns the radio station? And that most of the radio station owners are friends with the men who own the garment factories?” she said as she fastened her hose and stepped into a brown skirt. Never wear brown with blue, I could hear Mama admonishing, even as I was transfixed by Mollie’s words. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied. I had learned that the government and the rich—though never FDR—made the rules to benefit themselves. But the radio! My family clustered around the radio as if we were hearing the word of God.

“So, what did the owners of the radio station say happened yesterday?” Mollie asked.

“That the workers left their jobs and went into the street, and they almost started a riot.”

“Lying capitalist …” Mollie forced her brush through her unruly hair. “It was a peaceful march. We sang union songs. I’ll bet the radio didn’t say that. Or that so many people came to the theater where we held our meeting, they had to open another hall.”

Inspiration seized me. “Can I go with you?”

“You have school, dear.”

“Not until nine. I can catch a streetcar at eight-thirty.” I jumped out of bed and grabbed for my clothes.

“There’s nothing to come for. There’s no strike.”

“But didn’t they leave their jobs? Isn’t that going on strike?”

“I thought you were the shy one!” She laughed. “The way you won’t let go of a point, you could be a lawyer.”

That was how my future began. As Mollie explained the difference between a walkout and a full-blown strike, I savored the astonishing new self-image she’d offered me, the transformation from the first twelve years of my life as “the shy one” to a girl who was determined, bold, a girl who could be … well, I didn’t know of any women who were lawyers. But the qualities she had attributed to me felt like qualities that described Mollie herself.

“Can’t I help you?” I said when she finished, aware that bold Elaine wouldn’t take no for answer.

She took my hands. “Tell you what. Would you like to come with me this weekend when I visit workers in their homes?”

“Oh, yes!”

That Sunday, I accompanied Mollie and a Mexican American union organizer, Patricia, to the barrio east of Boyle Heights to see dressmakers in their homes. The conversations took place in Spanish, which Mollie knew well enough not to need constant translations, so I didn’t always follow. Still, it was impossible not to feel the women’s excitement about the union, along with their terror that if they got involved, they might get fired or worse—some owners had threatened to deport them. And to see Mollie in action! She listened intently to the women, seeming to know just the right tone to take—sober or rousing or indignant—for each one. Sometimes she had to meet a suspicious husband before she could speak to his wife, and a few men refused to let her in; usually, though, Mollie won over the husband, who ended up laughing and joking with her or solemnly nodding and agreeing about la justicia.

It was impossible, too, not to see how badly the women needed help. I knew, of course, that Los Angeles had poor people, but the poorest home I’d ever been in was Danny’s, and even though the two rooms where he and his father lived were shabby and cramped, at the very least the walls stood at right angles, and the building itself looked solid. In the barrio, I entered flimsy shacks that made me think of the house of sticks in “The Three Little Pigs.” The houses were nicer inside, neatly kept and brightened up with pictures of nature scenes or movie stars cut from magazines, and many boasted a single luxury: a radio or a refrigerator. Still, the interiors were stifling on a warm early fall afternoon. And when I asked to use the toilet at one house, a blushing woman had her little boy lead me to an outhouse. Outhouses didn’t sound so awful in Mama’s stories of Romania, but she’d never mentioned the smell or the flies. I thought of trying to hold my pee, but Mollie planned to spend hours in the barrio. And I didn’t want to disappoint her or insult the lady, whose son was waiting for me. Holding my nose, I lowered myself to an inch above the seat and peed as fast as I could.

The following week, I had no trouble hearing Mollie’s alarm clock. I bolted awake every day at five-thirty when she did. Sitting in bed while she dressed, I heard about union members getting fired and the growing number of women joining the union in spite of firings and intimidation. And Mollie was starting to scout around for a building to be strike headquarters, if it came to that.

I wanted to visit the barrio with her again the next Sunday, but she gave Barbara a turn. I had talked excitedly about my experience all week, and Barbara had seemed eager to go, but she came home afterward complaining that she felt ill; she skipped dinner and went to bed with a hot water bottle on her stomach. Later that evening—when Mama and Papa were at a card party and Mollie at a meeting—she came into the kitchen wanting something to eat.

“How was it?” I asked, sitting at the kitchen table with her while she ate beef-barley soup and toast.

“I don’t know. Okay.” She stared into her soup, using her spoon to poke at a shiny blob of fat floating on the top.

“Isn’t Mollie wonderful?”

“Isn’t Mollie wonderful?” she mocked.

I fell silent, stunned by the venom in her voice. And because I always froze when someone confronted me. Especially Barbara.

She said crossly, “We talked to a girl named Teresa. She was only seventeen. She started crying, she was really scared, and Mollie held her. An hour later, I said something about Teresa, and Mollie didn’t know who that was.”

“Well, I guess …” I had noticed the kind of thing Barbara objected to, but I’d also seen that with all of the people Mollie spoke to in a day, she was absolutely present for each one; how could she do that if she was still thinking about the last woman she’d seen, or the dozen before that? Still, even if Barbara hadn’t perceived what I had, it didn’t explain her animus toward our extraordinary cousin. “Are you mad because I got to room with her?” I asked.

“Who says I’m mad?” She took a big, aggressive bite of toast.

“Why don’t we trade next week? I’ll move back in with Audrey.”

“I don’t want to trade.”

“Come on. I’ll promise Mama I’ll be nice to Audrey.”

“Elaine!” she yelled in my face. “Why would I want to room with Mollie? So I can stink of cigarettes like you do?”

“I don’t—”

“Smell yourself. Your clothes, your hair. You reek just like she does!” Barbara grabbed at my hair, and I dodged away.

“What’s wrong with you?” I protested. “You sound like you hate her.”

“I just don’t think Mollie Abrams is God.”

“I don’t, either.”

“If she told you to jump off a cliff, you’d do it.”

“That’s stupid.” I blinked back tears of frustration. Why, when Barbara argued with me, did words desert me? The same words that became my best friends when I sat quietly, pen in hand?

“She comes and treats our house like it’s a hotel. She barely gives Mama the time of day. She’s supposed to be a dressmaker, so how come her clothes don’t fit? They don’t even match!” It was the jumble of grievances we’d heard from the adults, delivered with Barbara’s natural certainty. “And she never asks anyone about themselves. I bet she couldn’t tell me one single thing about you.”

“Yes, she could,” I pushed myself to retort.

“Like what?”

“Like … I don’t know …”

“See? Know what Greta Bachman’s father calls his factory?”

“You don’t even like Greta Bachman,” I countered feebly, aware that this was a pointless diversion but lacking the skill to outmaneuver Barbara.

“Noni. He named it for his sister who died of influenza.”

How could I argue against Mr. Bachman’s poor dead sister? Then my eyes fell on the book I’d been reading. “She knows I’m reading David Copperfield! She said most novelists lie, but not Dickens. And she’s got more important things to think about than her clothes. You went with her. You saw.”

“You really liked it, didn’t you? Going with her? Seeing those dirty, stupid Mexicans?”

“Dirty? Stupid? They’re people! They’re workers!”

“See, you sound just like her! You want to be like her, don’t you?” She jumped up and ran from the room.

I sat trembling, shaken by the intensity of my own outburst and by having discovered Barbara’s astonishing rancor toward Mollie. I even spat and said kaynehora, like Mama did, to ward off the evil eye on account of the awful things uttered so close to Mollie’s bedroom door.

Another source of distress was the gap the fight exposed between Barbara and me. I understood, of course, that my twin sister and I had different personalities, and we had long ago established different interests and friends. Still, our lives were woven together so tightly, I would have sworn we held … not even the same beliefs; it was more intrinsic than that, like our speaking voices that no one could tell apart. But in the battle we had just had, along with the tussling and name-calling of our childhood fights, I’d felt stirrings of our adult selves declaring who each of us was at the core. And I was stunned to sense how profoundly unlike we were; I felt unmoored. My excitement about visiting the barrio with Mollie was visceral, like the immediate, unthinking pleasure of biting into a ripe plum. How could Barbara feel none of that? How could she loathe Mollie?

Something else had changed as well. I had stood up to Barbara. I’d found the words to make her run from an argument. The experience was exhilarating but unsettling. It was one thing to act bold around Mollie, who saw boldness in me, but to become that new Elaine all the time, even with Barbara! The change felt like the shifts and trembling that happened deep in the earth over centuries, shifts that had led to the Long Beach earthquake.

In the days to come, these nascent understandings merely whispered in the background, however. They—and everything else—got drowned out by the strike, which more and more each day appeared to be inevitable. Mollie sang union songs as she got dressed every morning, and she worried out loud about keeping any plans secret, so that neither the owners nor the rival Communist union could sabotage them.

I’d gotten used to Mollie’s predawn alarm; still, I felt sleep-drugged on Thursday, when I opened my eyes and saw her dressing by candlelight.

“Wha …?” I mumbled.

“Go back to sleep, dear. It’s just four.”

That woke me immediately. “Is this it? The strike?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes. The committee members are coming at five to get leaflets to hand out. They don’t know it, but the leaflets will tell people to come to strike headquarters instead of going to work.”

“Please, let me come.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I can help.”

“Elaine.” She switched on the light, then sat on my cot. “This can be dangerous.” Leaning forward, she lifted her hair up from her forehead and exposed a dead-white scar an inch and a half long, just below her hairline.

“Oh, Mollie.” I felt a shiver of nausea. “How …?”

“Thugs in Chicago.”

“Please, be careful,” I said.

“I will, I promise,” she said.

Then she went off to start the biggest labor action ever to hit the Los Angeles garment industry.

Once the dressmakers’ strike started, Mollie spent nearly every waking hour at strike headquarters in the garment district. In our predawn conversations, though, she confirmed things I had read in the paper or heard on the radio: two thousand people were on strike, and it was clever Mollie who devised the “publicity stunt,” as the newspaper called it, of having a dozen young, pretty strikers dress up in evening gowns and carry picket signs in front of a department store having a fashion show.

It was also true that there were disturbances on the picket lines, though Mollie said the owners’ thugs were responsible, while the newspaper and radio blamed the picketers. So did the police, who arrested some of the women and put them in jail.

“That’s terrible!” I said.

“No.” Mollie grinned. “You refuse bail until the next day, and you stay up all night singing union songs. Drives the cops nuts.”

She’d been arrested several times in Chicago and had no fear of jail. Nevertheless, she couldn’t afford to get picked up here. Since she was a union leader, the authorities might twist the law and keep her in jail for days to try to cripple the strike.

I remembered that, but not until after I’d spoken to the man who asked about Mollie one morning, two weeks into the strike. I had left home early to work on the school newsletter. I was partway down the block when the man came up and tipped his hat at me.

“Morning, miss, sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m looking for Mollie. Am I too late?”

“She left already,” I said. Any wariness I might have felt was dispelled by the fact that the man had an accent like Zayde’s and a sharp, foxlike face, a hungry face, like many of the union men whose photographs I saw in the paper.

“Oy, I knew I shoulda got up earlier. I have some news I’ve got to get to her, about the union. You’re her …”

“Cousin. Elaine.”

“Pleased to meetcha, Elaine. Stu Malkin.” He extended his hand for me to shake. “You don’t happen to know where I could find her? I need to talk to her as soon as I can. Oy, I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

“Strike headquarters,” I said—and added, eager to be helpful, “Or else she goes around to the picket lines at the different factories.”

Stu Malkin frowned and scratched his head. “That’s what, fifty factories? A hundred? They’re having a lot of trouble at Anjac, aren’t they? Or Paramount? Or Kaybel?”

Mollie had mentioned the Paramount Dress Company. It was on the tip of my tongue, but then it hit me … if Stu Malkin were really with the union, shouldn’t he have known there were eighty dress factories? And that Mollie always left before six?

I didn’t answer him.

“Well, hey, thanks anyway, Elaine. You’re a peach.” He handed me a silver dollar. It was too much money, and then I knew: I had almost given Mollie away.

But what if I did give her away? Had I shown something on my face when Malkin, if that was really his name, said “Paramount”? He’d hurried over to a brown car and driven off quickly. Was he going to the Paramount Dress Company? Would he find Mollie there? And then what would he do to her? I had to warn her.

I kept walking normally until the minute his car turned the corner. Then I ran to the streetcar stop on Brooklyn Avenue.

Wild with fear, I caught the streetcar going downtown. Once my initial panic subsided, I realized I had no idea where to find Mollie. Instead of jumping on the streetcar like a silly goose, I should have run home and called strike headquarters; the phone number was on a card pinned up next to our telephone. Too late now, we had already crossed the gully that marked the Los Angeles River (dry this time of year).

Downtown, I transferred to the streetcar to the garment district. At Ninth Street, I spotted a picket line of about twenty women half a block away. I got off the streetcar and ran to them. No Mollie! But the minute I said her name, a brisk young woman came over and asked if she could help.

As I explained about needing to warn Mollie, I took in the women marching up and down on the sidewalk—and, standing between them and the grimy factory building, a line of half a dozen burly men.

The woman, who introduced herself as the strike captain, Norma, called over four picketers and sent each one to a different area of the garment district to look for Mollie. Then she turned to me.

“You’re going to be late for school,” she said.

“Can’t I stay? Until I’m sure Mollie’s all right?”

“I don’t—”

“I’ll march with you.” I picked up a picket sign one of the messengers had left behind.

“Just like Mollie!” Smiling, Norma threw up her hands. “You decide you want something, and there’s no way to stop you.”

I basked in her words. I was like Mollie! Had Mollie brought out something brand-new in me? Or had she recognized an Elaine who’d been there all along? I proudly shouldered a picket sign and fell in line with the women, who greeted me warmly when they heard I was Mollie’s cousin. And I became more aware of the men, who weren’t just big but mean-looking.

The men noticed me, too.

“A little young, chica, aren’t you?” one of them called out.

“Ignore them,” Norma said firmly, and started up a union song. It was part of Mollie’s morning repertory, and I joined in.

Fifteen minutes later, one of the messengers came back. Mollie was waiting for me, she said, and she led me to a car parked on a side street. The only person I saw in the car was the driver, a fox-faced man like Stu Malkin, but before I could panic, Mollie bobbed up from the backseat and waved.

She opened the rear door. “Get in. Quick … No, not on the seat.”

I squeezed with her onto the floor in the rear of the car.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

I explained.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and told the driver, Ed, to take her to an address in Hollywood.

Once we’d left the garment district, Mollie said we could move off the floor onto the seats. She and Ed speculated about whether Malkin was a policeman or a process server who wanted to hand Mollie an injunction; either way, whoever had sent him must be trying to keep Mollie from speaking at a big rally scheduled for that evening, so she needed to hide for the rest of the day.

She didn’t act worried. In fact, she was jolly, as if this were a good joke. She said no cop or process server would find her where Ed was taking her. “And after that, young lady, he’s going to drive you straight to school.”

“Please, can’t I stay with you?” I begged, though I knew what the answer would be.

But, to my amazement, Mollie laughed and said, “Well, why not? I guess you’re getting an education today, aren’t you?”

When we got into Hollywood, she surprised me even more.

“Have you ever had a manicure?” she said.