The Tin Horse: A Novel (46 page)

“Who do I tell them you are?”

“How about,” Josh breaks in, “she’s an old friend of yours from the USO? And I’m using her as an advisor?”

“I don’t suppose you brought a camera?” she asks him. “They’re expecting me to be a movie star.”

“In the car. I’ll get it.”

I go to the car with him and get my bag of family photos, and we catch up with her as she hobbles toward the house. “Arthritis has got to be God’s revenge against dancers,” she says.

I refuse to feel sorry for her. Still, I offer my arm, and she takes it as we go to a side door. I follow her up four steps that have solid metal bars installed on either side.

Then my sister opens the door to her home.

We enter a mudroom. Two dogs launch themselves at us, a flurry of barks and eager tongues. I laugh and let them slobber on my hands.

“You have dogs?” she says, surprised.

“I used to. Spaniels. The last one died three years ago.” I’m unbuttoning my coat as fast as I can—I wasn’t kidding about my bladder—but my fingers are numb and the mudroom tight. Besides the three of us and the dogs, the walls bulge with parkas and fleece jackets hanging on hooks, and there are enough boots scattered on the floor to stock Fine & Son Fine Footwear.

I struggle out of the coat at last. “Bathroom?”

“Dana!” she calls. “This is my friend Elaine, from the USO. Show her where the bathroom is.”

“Sure,” says a fiftysomething woman who’s been hovering just beyond the mudroom. Dana, the daughter. Despite my skepticism about the local rumor mill, Dana does look like a woman who’s dragged herself home after a messy divorce. Her skin is pasty, and her streaked hair shows an inch of gray roots.

“Are you in the movie, too?” she asks as she leads me down a short corridor; but she says it like she doesn’t particularly care.

“Yes.”

“That’s great,” she mumbles.

Dana waits for me, then leads me into a beamed living room and introduces me to George and his wife, Lynn. Kay—no,
Barbara
! I’ll call her what she wants, but I’m not going to censor the way I think about her—is nowhere in sight.

“She went to change clothes for the film,” Josh says, sensing my anxiety. “She’ll be back in a minute.”

“That’s what you think!” George has the tooth gap, and so does Dana; it must be one of those traits that bully any competing genes into submission. “You never tried to get my mom away from a mirror.”

Along with his Robert Mitchum handsomeness, George has an easy, at-home-in-his-own-skin assurance that might even be able to persuade
me
to get on a horse. He ushers me to a somewhat threadbare but comfortable chair next to a hearth that, hallelujah, appears to hold an entire blazing tree. And it hits me where I’ve seen that visceral self-confidence before—in photos of Uncle Harry.

Lynn, who manages to be both down-home and chic with cropped white-blond hair and turquoise stud earrings, matches her husband’s cowboy charm with a good innkeeper’s gift for chitchat. She throws Josh some questions about his film and me about my USO tours; I’m lucky that years in courtrooms taught me to think on my feet.

Lynn’s filling the time while we wait for Barbara. As ten minutes pass and then fifteen, even George fidgets. They’ve probably got work they need to get back to. Surely I’m the only one who’s worried that Barbara will grab some diamonds from a safe, jump onto her snowmobile, and never be seen again.

“Let me go finish making the cinnamon buns,” Lynn says. “And how about some cocoa? Or would you prefer coffee? Tea?”

“Don’t pass up Lynn’s cocoa,” George says. “She’s the reason people say the OKay has the best grub of any dude ranch in the country.”

“Cocoa sounds great,” I say.

“How about you?” she asks Josh, and he nods.

“I’ll take some, too, with real whipped cream on it, not that healthy crap,” Barbara says. She’s back, standing just inside the doorway. She’s
changed into a black suede skirt and a fringed black vest over a red turtle-neck, along with black cowboy boots. Like Barbara Stanwyck in
The Big Valley
, and not just because of the outfit; it’s the way everyone deferentially turns toward her.

“As if I’d dare try to keep you from clogging your arteries,” Lynn says fondly. “I’ll have Jen bring it in here when it’s ready.”

“Not here!” Barbara says so vehemently that her family looks at her in alarm. She tosses her head, announces, “We’ll be in my office.”

“Mom, don’t you think …,” Dana begins, then pauses. “We got the living room all ready for you to film here. The light, you know? And your office must be freezing.”

Poor Dana, having to come back home to her ranch-matriarch mother and the Western power couple of George and Lynn. I wish I could be for her what Aunt Pearl was for me. I settle for shooting her a smile.

“Josh can stay here and set up,” Barbara says. “Elaine and I have some private catching up to do.”

I force myself to stand up; I’m loath to leave the fire. But Barbara and I
do
need to talk behind closed doors.

Using an ornate cane, dark wood with silver filigree, she leads me to a newer wing of the house. We enter a spacious room with a desk at one end and three chairs grouped around a low table at the other. There’s a big picture window with a view of the mountains. It’s gorgeous. And so cold that frost coats the inside of the window. When I sit down, I let out a gasp; the chair seat is a block of ice.

But she’s adjusting a thermostat on a photograph-covered wall, saying, “It’ll warm up fast.” Then she pulls up a chair next to me and leans close, searching my face. “It’s really you. I missed you.… No, I mean it. Tell me about yourself. Did you graduate college?”

“Didn’t you ever look me up on the Internet or at the library? Weren’t you a little bit curious?”

“I tried. But computers are a complete mystery to me. And I tried ‘Elaine Greenstein’ and ‘Elaine Berlov.’ What
is
your name?”

“Resnick. I married Paul Resnick. Remember him?” I say. She looks blank as I continue, “He was a couple of years ahead of us at Roosevelt, and he fought in the Spanish Civil War.”

“So, did you graduate?”

“Yes, from college and law school.”

“You
did
go to law school! And did you become Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“I defended some people against Joe McCarthy in the fifties. Later I did civil rights and antiwar cases. And women’s issues … I got a reputation as a ballbuster.”

“No shit.” She chuckles. “I’ve heard that’s how a few people see me. But you really did all that?” She beams at me. “Lainie, you were always so brave.”

“Me?
You
were the brave one. The way you threw yourself into things.”

“I was just wild. And stupid … I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes?”

“I gave up smoking in 1964, after the surgeon general’s report. And again in 1967. And for good in 1971. When Aunt Pearl got diagnosed with lung cancer.”

“Oh.” A shadow crosses her face. Then she says, breezy again, “God, I adored Pearl. Did she ever marry the Mexican boyfriend? Or anyone?”

“No. But she and Bert lived together after she moved out of Boyle Heights and got a house in Los Feliz. And he took care of her at the end. He was wonderful.”

“That Pearl! I wasn’t as good at staying away from the altar.… I guess you already know that, don’t you?” she says tartly. “You could probably tell me things I don’t even know about myself.”

We fall into the awkward silence of people who have too little to say to each other. Or too much.

“This is a beautiful place,” I say.

“We like it.… God, it’s been so long. So … Danny, did he get killed in the war?”

“No. After the war, he moved to Israel—it was still Palestine then. He became some kind of high-up in the Mossad, Israeli intelligence. Not that he’ll ever admit it.”

“He’s still alive, then? You stay in touch?”

“We talk every few years. We argue about politics.”

“Is that why you didn’t marry him? Because you didn’t want to live in Israel?”

“I didn’t marry Danny because I grew up. And I fell in love with Paul! It had nothing to do with … anything else.” Ridiculous to get prickly more than half a century since I last faced her in Danny’s doorway, the air thick with sex and betrayal. I grab the bag next to me, change the subject. “I brought photographs.”

“Oh, I’d love to see them.”

I’ve brought several dozen pictures, snapshots from vacations and family gatherings as well as posed group photos at weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs. Going through them gives us a way to fill in the stutters in our conversation. I tell her she can keep any of the photos she likes, and she says no thanks. Still, she looks avidly at the pictures of people she knew as we aged. And I fill her in on our lives—and deaths.

As she looks at the photos I brought, I scan the ones on her walls. Most of them are of people wearing Western clothes and straddling horses or standing next to them. But some pictures don’t have humans in them at all. Her
family
. Not us but horses! Suddenly I’m seething.

Her eyes are on a shot from my wedding when she says, “Water under the bridge and all that, but I’m sorry about what happened … that day with Danny.”

“Water under the bridge,” I echo, but then I explode. “Who gives a damn what you did with Danny? But how about your disappearing without a word? How about letting Mama and Papa die not knowing where you were, that you were alive!”

“Would you have left me alone? Look at you—you have the nerve to do a background search on me, and a week after you find out where I am, here you are!”

“Did you think they were going to jump on a plane to Cody, Wyoming? Mama and Papa, in the 1950s? Or that hordes of embarrassing Jewish relatives would book vacations at your dude ranch? Is that what you were so afraid of, that people would find out you’re Jewish?”

“I’m
not
Jewish!”

It’s so preposterous, I stare, openmouthed, as she jabs her cane into the floor and pushes herself to standing. “Elaine, you don’t get it. You think I’m living some kind of lie as Kay Thorne. But Barbara Greenstein was the lie. Trying to be
her
made me feel like I was suffocating.”

Some people don’t just leave the family nest; they feel like they’re running for their lives
. I jumped down Philip’s throat when he said that, and I jump down Barbara’s now, standing and shouting in her face, “That’s the best you can do, to explain why you broke Mama’s heart?”

“Is that why you came all the way here, to tell me no explanation is good enough? Big surprise, Elaine. I was never good enough for you.”

“That’s not—”

“Shh!” She cocks her head toward the door.

“Gram?” a girl’s voice calls from the hall.

In the panicked glance that jumps between us, we could be eight years old, with Mama about to walk in on something we want to hide.

“Gram, are you okay? I’ve got the cocoa.”

“Fine!” Barbara bellows. “Just hang on a sec, Jen, okay?” She sits back down, painfully—I can almost hear the joints gnashing in her hips and knees—and shoves the photos we’ve spread over the table into a pile before she calls, “C’mon in.”

“Cocoa train,” says the young woman, wheeling in a restaurant cart. A girl who has Dana’s rangy build, along with my family’s delicate features and dark curly hair, caught in a ponytail. I look for the tooth gap, but she gives only a slight, closed smile.

“My granddaughter, Jen,” Barbara says. “And this is Elaine. A friend from the USO.”

“Right, the technical advisor,” Jen says. In her watchfulness, I see myself.

Jen transfers items from the cart to the table. There are two big cups of cocoa topped with whipped cream, a plate with half a dozen pastries, and individual plates, cutlery, and gingham napkins.

“Be sure to try one of the cinnamon rolls,” Jen advises me. “Aunt Lynn won third place in the Pillsbury Bake-off with them—as we have to tell the guests six thousand times every summer. They really are fantastic, though.… Gram, I brought you a treat,” she adds in a half whisper. From a pocket of her bulky sweater, she pulls out a flask and tips a generous amount of something into Barbara’s cocoa.

“That’s my girl,” Barbara says.

It occurs to me that this may not be my sister’s first drink of the morning.
Was that the reason for her family’s unease when we waited for her earlier? Well, so what if she drinks a bit? Here she is, living in her own home in a mountain paradise, eating her fond daughter-in-law’s cinnamon rolls. And I’ve got the Ranch of No Tomorrow’s teriyaki chicken.

The bite of envy is visceral. And familiar and comforting. Like smelling my mother’s kitchen again or hearing Papa declaim poetry.

“Scotch?” Jen asks me.

“Please.” So Scotch is Barbara’s drink, as well as mine.

When Jen leans toward me to doctor my cocoa, something gleams between the edges of her thick cardigan. Oh, can it be …

“Can I see that? Your necklace?”

Jen pulls out what she’s wearing on a cord around her neck. “I begged to have this for years, and Gram finally gave it to me when I graduated high school.”

I barely hear her. I’m staring at the crudely fashioned tin horse. The model for the ranch’s emblem. The horse Zayde made.