This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  My déclassé tastes may be partly nostalgia for the days when food vendors would traipse over the sands of Brighton Beach with trays slung from their shoulders by wide canvas bands and resting on their stomachs, like cigarette girls in nightclubs, also a long-gone amenity. They’d stop right by your blanket: rarely has hunger been so readily appeased. Or when George the Good Humor man’s white truck turned the corner every afternoon at four thirty, scattering our punchball game and supplying pops or Dixie ice-cream cups to get us through the hour and a half until dinner. (The Good Humor truck permanently parked alongside the Guggenheim Museum can still instantly evoke my childhood, madeleine style.)

  Nostalgia is far from the whole story, though. People gather in cities in the frank and urgent desire for company. And where people gather, food must follow. Every major city has its distinctive street food: in Amsterdam it’s raw herrings, in Paris pommes frites. In Mexico City, women sit at braziers beside heaped-up tortillas like stacks of giant coins, frying them one by one and wrapping up savory fillings. But only in New York, fittingly, has street food reached such a pitch of multicultural diversity.

  If Henry James was aghast, over a century ago, at the pageant of raucous immigrants swarming his once-genteel New York streets, hawking their grubby wares in thick syllables, how much more horrified would he be at the motley bands surrounding the bright umbrellas that fringe office buildings and hospitals and universities, waiting to ease their souls with gyros or souvlaki, cheeseburgers, Afghan chicken, knishes, Philly steaks or Italian sausages, eggplant sandwiches, crushed ice oozed with a rainbow of Latino syrups, oversized bagels and doughnuts, or pretzels pimpled with salt and slathered with mustard?

  Sixth Avenue is street food heaven. Heading east from Columbus Circle, then down Sixth to Bryant Park, the ruminating walker can make a meal from soup to nuts: six varieties of soup (all natural, no preservatives) and roasted nuts whose honeyed, swoony odor wafts over a half-block radius. The fruit stands displaying everything from grapes to pomegranates for dessert are almost too virtuous to be included in any tribute to disreputable food. But virtue has its niche, even on the street.

  A curious enterprise, Potato King, raises a philosophical question. Proclaiming “Potato Is Healthy,” it adorns that humble base with chili, spinach and cheese, sour cream and, for the incorrigibly pious, yogurt or cottage cheese. The potatoes look delicious but, alas, unwieldy. I would argue that they go too far for genuine street food. As do the stands that offer whole meals: chicken and beef with rice, lamb kofta, even salad. Not to mention the soup.

  Cooking up stews and soups on the sidewalks of New York is clever and audacious, I must admit. And yet the appeal of street food is that it fits nonchalantly in the hand—no Styrofoam required. Its particular genius rests in design as well as tang: witness a moderately complex dish like shish kebab or falafel made suitable for strolling. But lamb kofta, salad on the side, demands that you sit on a stone ledge and use a fork, and while that has its pleasures, especially on warm days, it’s a far cry from a New York walk punctuated by munches. No, street food must be eaten with a devil-may-care airiness or in an absent-minded daze. It must give instant gratification with no effort whatsoever. Soup asks too much concentration.

  For all its unassuming earthiness, though, street food keeps some mysteries. Where do the carts go overnight? Who fills them each morning? How does the unending supply of rolls and sausages and whatnot fit in those small spaces? What goes into that powerful brew from which the hot dogs are speared? And exactly how long have they been floating in it? Who knows? Who cares? Bon appétit.

  Absence Makes the Heart

  A close friend moves away. Someone important. Say your life is a soup, then she is a vital ingredient. The soup will still be nourishing, appetizing, but different. Something’s missing, you’d say if you tasted it. She too feels the loss. How will she manage without your conversations? she says. Still, she goes, for reasons of necessity. Quite far, to the other end of the earth. And she doesn’t write. Nothing but a card, that is, giving her address.

  You think of what it was like having her around. Around the corner, actually, so that often you’d run into her on the street, going to her car, maybe. A huge mustardy-green sedan, one of those ancient boatlike cars. She was very particular about having passengers fasten their seat belts even in the back seat, which was out of character—she wasn’t especially cautious or finicky. Or only in certain ways. She maneuvered the car through the city with deft grace, with moderate aggression. She was good with machines, though she seemed, deceptively, the sort of gentle, elegant, sometimes ethereal person who wouldn’t be. She was one of the first people you knew to use a computer and used it with delight, long, long ago, when it was a novelty; when you asked her what something typed on a computer would look like, she sent you a very brief letter that read, This is what it looks like, then signed her name. That was in character.

  You would sit in her fifth-floor apartment with the French doors open, the breeze blowing in. The living room was cool and airy and colorful. You sat on one of several secondhand couches with print throws in muted colors, amber, lemon, mustardy colors. The room was filled, though not cluttered, with odd and distinctive objects you find now, regrettably, you cannot recall one by one, as well as with piles of books and papers. On the verge of messiness, but not quite. Neatly messy. And paintings she had painted herself, in chalky tones, of flat, disingenuous figures in rooms with mirrors and double images.

  On a table in front of the couch she would set out neatly arranged snacks, wedges of cheese, crackers, small clusters of grapes. She would snip clusters of grapes off the bunch with a scissors—this you watched, sitting on a stool in her narrow kitchen while she prepared the snacks, poured the wine or made the tea. She was fussy about tea the way she was fussy about seat belts: the water had to be boiled. Very hot was not good enough, she said. It tasted right only if the water came to a boil. In restaurants, she said, she would ask specifically that the water be boiled, but could always tell when her request had not been honored.

  Back in the living room her gentle voice murmured sly, hilarious, bitter words. Your topics of conversation were men, children, work, books, clothing, food, travel, parents, money, politics, mutual friends, pretty much in that order. She spoke so softly that it took a moment to grasp how outrageous and rebellious her words were. There was this unexpectedness in her, the subversive words belying a compliant surface. Also, unexpectedly, she was often late. Not insultingly, just mildly late, but always unexpectedly because her precision and considerateness suggested the habit of promptness.

  You miss all of this. You wait for a letter about her new life—this is before the days when email replaced letters. Finally you write; after a while she answers. You don’t know her handwriting well—there has been no need for letters before—and studying this new representation of her, you feel puzzled. The handwriting is clear and fairly conventional, quite out of character. You write back, she doesn’t answer. You are beginning to revise your naïve notions of in character, out of character.

  A year later she sends a card announcing that she’ll be back for a few months. She resumes your close friendship as if there had been no absence, and no absence of letters. You bring up the subject of her not writing. She explains that things have been difficult. In some ways. While in other ways, things have gone very well. She is so far away, she says, so stunned by the move and the distance, that in order to keep her equilibrium in the far place she cannot allow herself to think of anything or anyone from the old place. If she did, she would feel her feet were rooted on different continents and she might very well topple over or split down the middle. Therefore she cannot stay in touch. But on her intermittent returns, you can resume your close friendship just as before.

  This is odd and puzzling. But, very well.

  A year passes and again she returns for a while. Another year, another return, the close friendship once more resuming as if there had been no absence. You
try to “catch up.” But many things happen in a year, many changes. Every few months your own outlook on life shifts, you learn some hard and required lesson that makes you a slightly different person. The soup that is your life has a different taste, different ingredients, is thicker or thinner. Presumably the same is happening to her. How to take account of these shifts, let her know who you are now? You cannot sum up each lesson like a homily; you can, if you try, recount the events that led to the lessons, but that takes time and her time is limited; there is the present to enjoy; and it is tedious to narrate a series of small events whose vividness and importance are bound to the moment they took place. The pacing is what matters. The organic accumulation that is change. Had she been present to witness the small events succeeding each other, there would be no need to present the lessons in a package—they would be self-evident.

  There is of course the telephone. You can call anywhere now, easily, even the other end of the earth. But you feel she doesn’t wish to hear from you. She said it pains her to think of people from her old place. The fact that she does not wish to think of you, that she chooses to forget you for long periods and is able to do so, is painful and makes you angry. Naturally, you have passed permanently out of existence for many people, as many have for you—that is not troubling. But you cannot understand the shift taking place in her mind that enables her to banish you from existence for a year at a time, then to return and feel as close as before. This process you cannot understand shakes your sense of solidity: how odd to move in and out of existence in her mind while you feel so strongly your continuous bodily existence. This process she is capable of is what places distance between you, even more so than the actual expanse of land and ocean.

  You have, of course, other friends who live far away. But they always did. They were never part of the soup but rather a snack, a special treat. Moreover, with other faraway friends, you exchange letters, even phone calls. Or not, as the case may be. With other faraway friends, there is a tacit agreement on how to keep in touch. They do not put you out of their minds; they call or write now and then, saying, I was thinking of you and thought I’d call, or write. Or, Something important is happening that I must tell you. In this case, anything might be happening and she feels no need to tell you.

  On the next visit, when she calls to announce that she is back, happy to hear your voice and ready to resume as if there had been no absence, you respond with anger. How can she expect, and so on and so on. She cries. She has no excuse. Things have been very hard, complicated, almost indescribably so. She repeats that she cannot think of anyone or anything here, she would be in two places at once, and so on. At her weeping, your anger dissipates. Very well, you will resume as if there had been no absence. You try to tell her some large things that have happened to you and how you are a different person because of them. But you are also the same person, the person who can tell her such things and have them understood. She listens and responds in the same gentle, sly, comprehending manner, as satisfying as before.

  Still, you come away unsettled, confused about the continuity of identity, about the nature of friendship, of existence, even—the way, in her view, we can slip into and out of existence for each other. Not a congenial notion for you, though it apparently works for her.

  When she leaves this time you try with, yes, a touch of vindictiveness to do as she does, not think about her, but you do not readily succeed. You wonder about her difficulties, what her house looks like, what kind of car she drives, who are the new people she thinks about daily. She has told you some and you imagine the rest; what is missing from your imaginings are things like snipped grapes, thoroughly boiled tea, and furniture. The details that do not, by their nature, get spoken of when time is short, and without which our images of people are wan.

  After a while, though, you realize you are succeeding in your effort. You do think of her occasionally, but with an alien detachment. You think, but you do not care. It is as if she does not exist. She is not on the other end of the earth at all; she is nowhere, her life static, in abeyance until she returns next year to resume her existence. You do not especially look forward to her return or miss her anymore—the soup changes all the time, and that old soup of which she was a vital ingredient is a thing of the past—but when she returns, you will be happy to see her and to care anew, as deeply as always, to take up your close friendship as before, as if there had been no absence.

  This is a lesson. This is how you are different now.

  Meditations in Time of War

  I’ve spent a good part of my adult life unraveling the tangled weave of my childhood. I’d like to get rid of the shreds and knotty bits, the misconceptions I grew up with, and weave a reasonable adulthood out of newer, truer strands. When the mess overwhelms me, I fret that I’m wasting precious time, Penelope-like, unweaving and reweaving. Throw it all out. But maybe it’s the fated task of my adult life. Come to think of it, weaving is too delicate an image. It’s a vast excavation, a dig for the shards of my early delusions. These are no treasures I’m seeking, to illuminate a past civilization. They’re trash.

  Not that my childhood was bad. It wasn’t bad at all. Maybe even too good. The period in which I chanced to grow up, the late 1940s and 1950s in Brooklyn, New York, was a brief time warp of optimism and assumed innocence in the otherwise bloody, tattered fabric of history. It doesn’t offer much of shock value; my childhood’s shocks were delayed, aftershocks of recognition that keep coming, again and again, of how different the world and human beings are from what I was led to believe. Or chose to believe. Or still believe against all evidence.

  The default mode back then was decency, the self-satisfied, narrow, blinkered decency of the postwar years. Bad behavior of any kind was a departure from this mode. My mother, a good-hearted peacemaker, practiced virtue and was shocked at any defection, from the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor to a neighbor’s neglecting to invite her to a party: both perpetrators were forever cast out of her good graces. Her pained indignation was contagious and curiously satisfying. My response to adversity large and small became aggrieved surprise. That wasn’t how things were supposed to be. How dare anyone flout the rules? How could they go against human nature?

  Children can be notoriously cruel, and I encountered and probably doled out my fair share of cruelty. Yet even this didn’t change my notion that the world was meant to be benign. Even more, it was supposed to give me what I wanted. When the world didn’t comply, I was bewildered, resentful. It took some time before I realized that the odd component of this dynamic wasn’t the bad behavior or the world’s intransigence but my constant surprise. Even now it lingers. I can’t seem to grasp that adversity is in the scheme of things, is the scheme of things. I don’t like this bewilderment, I can even laugh at it, but it’s stubbornly there.

  I could catalogue a dozen forms of instilled delusion from those years. There was the imparting or withholding of information on an arbitrary, need-to-know basis, that is, I never told you, because I thought it might upset you. There was the assumption that it was indelicate to mention serious personal problems, so that nothing dire came to light until it reached crisis proportions and was beyond help, and then came a moaning and tearing of hair. But the delusion that feels most pungent, and may be the foundation of the others, has to do with the war. World War II, for those for whom “the war” might be ambiguous.

  Yet the war we’re presently engaged in, the war that is so much with us, the war the government with its usual verbal sloppiness likes to call the war on terror, may well come to overshadow what I call “the war.” (They’d do better calling it the war on terrorism. A war on terror, existential terror, can never be won; it is part of our human state.) Of course it is that new war that’s reviving memories of the old one.

  I was too young to be aware of the war. Friends born a few years earlier remember following the progress of battles with colored pins on maps hung on their living room walls—although I doubt that my parents would
have done that in any event. All I knew of the war was standing in the ration line holding my mother’s hand as she clutched a small booklet of tickets, and saving the wires that came wound around the fluted paper lids of milk bottles. I do remember the celebration when it was over, after we dropped the bomb, though I didn’t know about the bomb itself. I knew only that I was part of a great parade on a country road, for it was summertime and we were in the country, and I walked alongside my mother, who rhythmically shook a tambourine amid a crowd of other shakers in paroxysms of glee, and on the dirt road were cow pats to watch out for, about the same circumference as the tambourines though with no bells attached.

  With the postwar exuberance and relief came a tacit conspiracy—if conspiracy seems too strong a word, let’s say collective will—to put the war behind us, to smother it with silence, the way you hastily fling a blanket to crush a fire. To move on, as we say today. “Let it go” and “move on” are our mantras; we mustn’t cling morbidly to the past; we are a nation psychically on the move, divesting ourselves of history to invest in a future that itself will be swiftly left behind, an endless caravan never pausing to gaze back over the landscape just traversed.

  Looking back, I’m struck not only by the absence of talk about the war—and I was always lurking and listening for clues to the grown-up world—but by the clarity of the air, no thickness or foul mist hinting at what the war had demonstrated about human nature or human capacities, specifically the capacity for brutality. The capacity for heroism was public and evident: the air was sweet with triumphalism, the triumph of decency over something that remained nameless. Whatever it was, it was kept at a distance; we were safe, cocooned in our moral principles.

  What war meant and could bequeath reached me only in the most indirect, sketchy ways. My seventh-grade science teacher was a slim, dapper white-haired man with a pinkish complexion and very sharp features that appeared always on the alert, like a fox. Maybe because of his apprehensive look, or because it was true, or for no reason at all, the gossip circulated that he had been shell-shocked in the war. What shell-shocked meant, or which war, no one knew or cared. Any sudden loud noise, it was rumored, would send him scurrying under a desk for shelter. The class lived in eager anticipation of this scene, and some students took to dropping books or slamming doors in the hope of provoking it. I was curious too—school was so numbingly dull that any drama would have been welcome—but full of dread. I knew I would have to turn away if it happened, because I have never been able to watch public humiliation. But he never did scurry under a desk, no matter how many books were dropped, so I never got to see even this meager evidence of what war could do.