The Tin Horse: A Novel (21 page)

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.”