The Tin Horse: A Novel by Janice Steinberg Page B

similarly decorated sign with a green
12
. “Here, you’re going to be in this class.”
    “Can’t we both be in Miss Madenwald’s class?” I said.
    “With that Miss Powell who doesn’t know anything?” Mama led us inside room twelve.
    “Hello, children.” Miss Carr had a pleasant round face. But I was already in love with Miss Powell and Miss Madenwald.
    “Elaine Rose Greenstein, ma’am,” I mumbled when she asked my name.
    “I’m very pleased to meet you, Elaine,” Miss Carr said, then turned to Barbara.
    “Barbara Inez Greenstein, ma’am.”
    “You came to bring your sister to her class, how nice,” she said to Barbara.
    “Miss Carr, I’m Mrs. Greenstein.” Mama extended her hand in its beautiful if sweat-damp silk glove. As Miss Carr shook her hand, Mama announced, “I want both of my girls to be in your class.”
    Miss Carr, clearly more experienced than Miss Powell in dealing with parents, didn’t argue with Mama. She simply directed us to the school office to talk to the principal, Mr. Berryhill.
    Mr. Berryhill wouldn’t be available for a few minutes, said the lady who spoke to Mama from behind a chest-high counter in the large, busy office. She told us to wait in wooden chairs lined up with military precision along one wall. None of us—not Mama or Barbara or me—had ever heard of being “sent to the principal’s office,” but a few minutes in those chairs, catching pitying or condescending looks from people who came in for one thing or another, and we were squirming.
    “Mama, I don’t mind not being with Elaine,” Barbara said. “I just want to go to my class.”
    “Me too,” I lied.
    “We’re going to talk to this Mr. Berryhill.” Mama fanned herself with her pocketbook. Her face no longer looked red but pale. Conceding a little to the heat, she took off her hat, but then she took out her smart new compact and peeked at herself in the mirror. “My hair,” she murmured. Her sweat-drenched bob clung to her head. She jammed her hat back on.
    A bell rang. All three of us tensed and then drooped, ashamed. Our first day of school had started, and we were late for class.
    A few minutes later, a gangly man with salt-and-pepper hair strode out from behind the counter. “Mrs. Greenstein?” He extended his right hand. “Delighted to meet you. Delighted!”
    Mr. Berryhill had a husky smoker’s voice and the brightest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He ushered us into his office—and transformed our seemingly relentless march toward greater humiliations into a treasured experience that Mama would recount for years.
    “
He was like the rebbe in my town,” Mama told Aunt Pearl later. “You could tell he understood things that you never even thought about. And the books in his office! Like the rebbe’s study, books everywhere
.”
    The principal didn’t even say the word
twins
at first. He spoke to Mama about the importance of parents being involved in their children’s education and nodded at her in her smart suit as if to say he knew that a person who had taken so much care on her daughters’ first day of school must be an exemplary parent. By the time he explained that it was school policy to separate twins, Mama was already saying what a fine idea that was, and she’d considered the possibility all along but worried that we’d be afraid.
    “You’ll be surprised,” he said. “Am I correct that one of your daughters is quieter than the other, and stays more in the background?”
    “Yes, my Elaine.”
    I stared at the floor, ashamed for not being louder, but I could feel Mr. Berryhill looking at me, and when I glanced up, his blue eyes twinkled.
    “You wait and see,” he said. “Elaine is going to blossom.”
    I felt myself blossoming right at that moment, and even more whenMama took me to my classroom with a note Mr. Berryhill had written to excuse my being late. “You met Mr. Berryhill!” my teacher said.
    I blossomed all morning, quietly, like the first shoots