Two-cent chunks of chalk the width and length of plum tomatoes were great for street artists, and the rough gray sidewalks of Shepherd Avenue provided an unlimited canvas that was washed clean after every rain. I was a better chalk artist than Mel. She was spirited but untalented, and loved to draw horses. I pointed out flaws in her drawings - she made them with hind legs bent in the same direction as the forelegs.
"That's wrong," I told her. "The hind legs bend the other way." I rapidly sketched a horse. In Roslyn I'd always done well in art class.
"See?" I said when I finished. "That's how the legs are."
"You're nuts," Mel said. "They ain't like that."
We ran to find a copy of my grandfather's Racing Form, which had a drawing of a horse on it.
"See?" I said triumphantly, tracing my finger along the legs. "Told you."
Pow! A punch to my stomach, and I didn't see her again for days. Then she reappeared, as if nothing had happened.
On days Mel and I were apart, Connie sometimes got rid of me by sending me shopping with Grace Rothstein.
The worst thing about Grace was her eyes. They were blue but unattractive, because they bulged and seemed to jiggle, like eggs in boiling water. Her wild blonde hair was pulled back and stabbed into a ball at the back of her head with a bunch of hair pins, the wide kind that don't pinch closed.
Cooking was all she seemed to care about, and her husband's deli was an excellent focus for her obsession. It was a tiny place but Angie insisted it was a gold mine for that "Real German." Being a real German had something to do with being passionless, having a capacity for cruelty, and a love of gadgetry: flashlights, precision drills, and all things battery-operated.
Once I was having a catch with Mel in the driveway when she cut her hand on the ragged Cyclone fencetop. Blood pumped from the wound as Mel ran screaming to our basement.
While everyone else yelled and tripped over things Uncle Rudy set down his coffee cup, grabbed the arm, and briefly eyed the wound before pinching it closed with his thumb and forefinger and teaching for his coffee with his other hand.
"No need for a doctor," he said. "A bit of pressure seals the wound."
He was right, but he didn't endear himself to anyone. Only a Real German could have stayed so calm.
He had been a deli man all his life, and I imagine that during their courtship - a German-Jew and an Italian-Catholic, now there's a combination — Rudy must have figured he'd found himself a workhorse. Grace could slice a cucumber without a cutting board, using her callused thumb as the base. Without even looking at the knife she churned out an even shower of slices that fell like coins.
Angie took me with him once to fix a pipe at Rudy's. Rudy stood in front, behind the counter, his red wavy hair neatly combed, iron-rimmed glasses pressed into the flesh pockets around his eyes. His full-length white apron looked stiff — you got the impression that his body had been sprayed lightly with a coating of clear glue.
It was twenty degrees hotter in back, where Grace worked. Had the Real German stepped back there for a moment he'd have lost the starch in his apron. Grace sweated away at a cutting board, while a wonderful smell rose from a sizzling pan on the stove. The pan contained thick patties, and at one point Grace stopped cutting, scooped them out, and laid them on a tray lined with paper towels.
They looked like flat meatballs. Grace handed one to me, and when I bit into it my salivary glands became waterfalls. I sucked on my fingers when it was gone but Grace offered me no more, on account of Rudy, no doubt. The Real German made a face at the empty grease spot on the paper towel: lost business.
What ingredients went into those patties! Scraps, nothing but scraps. Pork butt ends, heels of ham and bologna loaves, curled bits of Swiss cheese, stale Italian bread - all stuff that got pushed off tablecloths and landed in most American garbage pails.
Grace all but swept the floor to catch every crumb. She raked her hand over the rough pile of food, then chopped it into dust. After that the contents went into a mixing bowl. She dripped oil into it and mixed it up with a wooden spoon.
Raw, the stuff looked like wet cardboard. Fried, it became "meat."
In warm weather the store fan blew out through the screen door toward Shepherd Avenue. By noon the smell of those patties would lure day laborers from all over the area, including the men working at the hamburger-joint site.
Connie threw a fit when she learned I'd eaten a patty. Angie protested his innocence, having been under the sink when Grace fed me.
"Never eat anything they make there," she warned me. "You don't know what they put in it."
I did know, but I didn't make a point of it. "It's delicious," I answered, but Connie waved me off.
"Never mind. Lots of stuff tastes good but it's crap. Learn to schieve."
"What's that?"
"It means look out for germs. Wait till you get home, where you can eat without gettin' poisoned."
"What about lemon ice?" I said, knowing she loved the stuff.
She hesitated. "Willie's okay, but that's all."
"Okay, but sometimes I get hungry."
"You ain't gonna starve. If you get hungry, come home." Home! Was it fair to call it that?
Seconds later she was on the phone to Grace, speaking in a shrill dialect she used only when she was truly frantic. The only thing I caught from the conversation was the English sign-off: "If you give him something, at least let it be wrapped!"
The rules were different for stuff Grace made at home. I once held a starfish-shaped cookie she made, studying it before gobbling it. She had brought over a tin of such cookies to enjoy with coffee: reindeer, bows, bunny rabbits. The cookie I held was glazed yellow with egg yolk and pebbled with dots of colored sugar. When the light caught it right it gleamed like crystal.
It looked like the creation of a fairy godmother working with a magic wand instead of an oven and a cookie sheet. I sat across the table from Grace and held the cookie up to her face, closing one eye so I could see the woman and the cookie in the same dimension.
It seemed impossible for a woman who looked like that to have made such a thing of beauty. She caught me looking. "Hey. What are you starin' at?"
I opened my other eye. "This cookie is pretty, Grace."
She blushed to the salt-and-pepper roots of her hair. "I like pretty things," she said, so softly that only I heard her. "Thank you, sonny."
Mel was visiting an aunt on Long Island. Angie was working with Freddie. I sat in the basement, watching Connie make pasta.
She beat flour and eggs into dough, rolled it into thin sheets, and sliced them into noodles. These she laid on the table edges. If she was in the right mood and I washed my hands three times, I was allowed to lay them in place.
Grace came in, a bag under her arm. She took out a cookie filled with crushed figs and raisins.
"For the bowels," she announced, handing it to me. It was oven-warm. I bit into it, the fruits swirling on my tongue in a sticky sweet mess.
I was about to compliment her when she said, "That mother of yours never fixed you nothin' like that."
The cookie went sour in my mouth. What brought this on? Hadn't I been nice to her? "She was too sick to cook," I said.
"Shut up, Grace," Connie said, though not harshly. She'd probably been thinking the same thing.
"I guess your father had to cook a lot, huh?" Grace asked. A vulture of a memory landed on my brain, those greasy diners we went to after visits to the hospital.
"We did fine."
"Yeah?" Grace wouldn't let it go. "Tell me what you ate."
"Lots of stuff. What do you care?"
Connie grinned. I'd done all right, hadn't betrayed either parent. "Eh, he's restless today, with the girl gone," she said. "Take him to the store."
The A & P was a few blocks away. We passed Zip Aiello going the other way, a Santa Claus-sized burlap sack of soda bottles on his back. He was on his way to redeem them someplace on Atlantic Avenue.
"Ho
ward Hughes!" Grace called out. "A millionaire in nickels and dimes!"
Zip wrinkled his face as if he smelled something bad, hitched his sack higher on his shoulder, and clinked away.
"What a nut. He never stands straight. Always bending down to pick up shit on the street. Bottles. Pieces o' metal. You watch, they're gonna have to bury him in a curved coffin."
"Why?"
" 'Cause he's always bent over. Slow down, this ain't the Kentucky Derby."
She kept calling me back, the way a person would summon a puppy. One of the wheels of her cart was bent, so Grace had to give the thing a straightening yank every fifteen feet or so because it kept bearing away from her.
We passed under the elevated tracks just in time to meet a train roaring overhead. It made the ground tremble and then it was gone, striped sunlight back on the street. Grace reached for the back of her head.
"Madonna, my hair." She grabbed at the blond snakes of her hair. The train breeze faded, diminishing to the puff of a child's breath on birthday candles.
"That train scared you," Grace said when we were in the store. She hefted packages of chicken, poked her finger through the cellophane, and sniffed the flesh.
"I wasn't scared," I lied.
"Hey, lady, don't do that!" a man in a bloody apron said. "We spend all morning wrapping and you make holes?"
Grace pointed a bony finger at him. "You sold me a rotten bird last time. Don't threaten me. This is the only way I know it's good."
She moved like a general to the freezer case, dug around, and yanked out a TV dinner. "I bet your mother used to buy these."
"She did not," I said hotly. Why was Grace doing this? Because my mother threw crumbs to sparrows instead of turning them into ersatz meatballs? Because her salads were lettuce and tomatoes instead of spinach and exotic greens? Because she'd died young and had no chance to grow as ugly as Grace?
The air conditioning seemed arctic. Sawdust under my feet felt like snow. I followed Grace around, watching her cart fill with groceries. Cracked eggs topped the pile.
"They're cheaper, why pay more when they're good for baking?"
When we got to the checkout line I said, "The only time we ever had TV dinners was when she was in the hospital."
Grace's eyes glowed with triumph. "So you did have 'em."
"Yeah. What are you gonna do, put it in the newspaper?"
"You lied before."
"She never bought them. My father bought them."
Grace ignored the technicality. "Pass me the eggs. Be careful you don't break them."
"They're already busted." The people behind us laughed. Grace looked as if she meant to spit at me. I knew she wasn't through with me.
We turned right when we came out of the A & P. "We live the other way," I said.
"I know," Grace said. "But let's take a little walk first." Something fishy was up - like Mel had told me on my first morning in Brooklyn, nobody around here walks.
When we'd traveled three blocks the buildings grew seamy. Puerto Ricans sat on stoops shaded by the elevated tracks, sipping from bottles of neon-colored soda. Sheet metal was nailed over many of the windows. Other houses were burned out. Missing windows gaped like toothless mouths.
"Grace, let's go home."
She puffed against the weight of the cart. Her slippers slapped the broken sidewalk. "One more block."
She stopped abruptly in front of a yellow brick building with rusty fire escapes. The house beside it was rubble.
"This is where she lived," Grace said, grinning, and I understood in a flash that I was being shown the former home of my mother.
I could see all of Grace's teeth, long and brown, like those of a roasted pig. She knitted a stitch in her side with her bony fingers: the extra few blocks had taken their toll but oh, the expression on my face was worth it to her.
"The two of them," Grace said. "Oh, they were a pair, all right."
"Two?"
"Your mother and your grandmother. Your other grandmother." A flash of those brown teeth. "I used to see your other grandma going to work in the morning, wearing those big hoop earrings." She made circles of her thumbs and forefingers and touched them to her earlobes. "An actress, she wanted to bet Some actress."
I'd never even seen a snapshot of my maternal grandmother. "She was an actress?"
Grace cackled. "Oh, that's what she wanted you to believe. She sang, she danced, she went to auditions. Always this far away from the big break." She held thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart. "But she was just a waitress at some Howard Johnson's on Broadway."
My face felt as if it had been needled with an anesthetic. "You didn't know that, Joey?" she asked, her voice strangling with phony sweetness. "Oh, yes. She moved here from Iowa when your mother was a baby. She was divorced from her husband. Hey! Maybe your other grandfather is alive somewhere."
I felt dizzy. "You're lying."
"Why should I lie?"
"Because you don't like me."
"That's true, but I ain't lyin', kid."
I licked my lips. "What else?"
"That's it. Hey, I wasn't friends with her," she said coldly. "I just remember when she died, right on the job. They say she was puttin' a plate of food in front of a customer when a vein popped in her head."
Grace put a bony fingertip to her temple. "Boom, and she was dead a minute later. Fell down in the food. Mashed potatoes all over her face. Your mother quit school and went to work. One day she met your father on the train, and that finished him. You know what happened after that."
"But -"
"I don't wanna talk about it no more," Grace said, faking a yawn. "That's the whole story. I figured you didn't know, so I told you."
My bones felt as if they were dissolving. I imagined myself melting under her gaze, like the wicked witch did in the Wizard of Oz. But Grace was that witch, not me; she should have been melting.
"You stink, Grace. You're . . ." I struggled, trying to think of something to say. "You're the worst person in the world." It was the best I could do: my vocabulary didn't contain four-letter words, and for the first time in my life I felt frustrated by it. She laughed at me.
"Tough guy. Who do you think you are, anyway? You think you can just come to this neighborhood and be a wise guy?" She pointed at me. "People gotta pay for the things they do."
"What's that mean?"
"You'll find out some day, wise guy."
"So why don't you tell me?"
"I don't gotta tell you everything. Ha! A little punk like you, from Long Island." She jerked her thumb in the direction she believed to be toward Long Island. "Who wants to live out there, anyhow?"
Her anger was random, insane. "I want to go home," I said, surprising myself by calling it that. Grace caught my arm with fingers that seemed to have retained the chill of the groceries she'd handled.
"After you, mister, there couldn't be any more," she said, squeezing at the word "mister."
I felt my pulse throb against her fingers and yanked myself free. Her nails clawed my skin.
"She hadda stop havin' babies after you. Something broke in there." She patted her flat belly that had yielded no children. "You broke somethin' in there. Why do you think you got no brothers or sisters?"
"I broke something?" I hated my feeble voice.
She nodded gravely. "You kicked so hard when you were in there you killed all the other seeds. Seeds for the babies. Ask, ask your father. If you ever see him again. Maybe he dumped you because of what you did."
She hiked a stork-like leg and waved her foot: kick, kick, kick. "Like that, you went."
The slipper fell off and I picked it up for her, an automatic polite response I'd been taught. I'd have done it for Hitler. She slid her foot into it like a knife into a scabbard.
The door to the apartment house opened. A Puerto Rican with a green cap and a thin moustache came out, carrying a transistor radio. Grace put a hand between my shoulder blades and tried to shove me inside.
"Okay, kid, she lived on the third floor. Let's climb."
I pitched forward but scampered back as soon as my balance returned. In the instant that door had been open I'd seen enough - feeble light, smashed-in mailboxes, cracked linoleum worn through to the black.
"Eh, come on, I ain't got all day," Grace said merrily. She was bluffing - no way she would leave precious groceries on the street to climb those stairs. She stroked her hair. "I'm waiting, Joey."
"You go to hell!" I screamed. My vulgarity would have been enough to fix her but I grabbed the cart, backed it up a few feet, and slammed it into the side of the building. The frame buckled as oranges and dripping eggs littered the sidewalk.
Grace was screaming but I ran away, not looking back. I ran home but kept going past the house, flopping behind a hill of dirt at the construction site. I watched the heavy traffic on Atlantic Avenue and thought about jumping into the midst of it. I climbed the hill and looked into the hamburger joint's deep foundation, a giant grave.
I knew I had to return to the building that had been my mother's home.
I walked slowly along Atlantic Avenue, so I wouldn't run into Grace. The sun was setting, making the discarded wine and whiskey bottles on the street glow as if they were precious.
I entered the apartment house and climbed stairs, linoleum creaking under my feet. I smelled bug killer, wet laundry. Somewhere overhead a baby cried: did he know, even at his age, what a dump he lived in?
On the third-floor landing there were three doors to choose from. I picked the one nearest the stairwell. It was peppered with dents — someone, maybe a jilted lover, had kicked it dozens of times at foot level. Someone had painted "3-A" on the door with cheap red paint, or maybe it was nail polish.
No bell. I knocked. My small fist barely made a sound on the dull metal.
But someone heard me - sliding, scratching, the snap of a lock. The door opened a crack, still bound by a chain. A man with dark eyes and a handlebar moustache looked out at me, the chain cutting in front of his chin.
Shepherd Avenue Page 5
