Bronx Noir

White trash by Jerome Charyn

Claremont/Concourse

Prudence had escaped from the women’s farm in Milledgeville and gone on a crime spree. She murdered six men and a woman, robbed nine McDonald’s and seven Home Depots in different states. She wore a neckerchief gathered under her eyes and carried a silver Colt that was more like an heirloom than a good, reliable gun. The Colt had exploded in her face during one of the robberies at McDonald’s, but she still managed to collect the cash, and her own willfulness wouldn’t allow her to get a new gun.

She wasn’t willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn’t steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She’d had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn’t appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that’s what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn’t out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.

The cops had caught on to her tactics, and her picture was nailed to the wall inside post offices, supermarkets, and convenience stores; she might have been trapped in a Home Depot outside Savannah if she hadn’t noticed a state trooper fidgeting with his hat while he stared at her face on the wall.

Pru had to disappear or she wouldn’t survive her next excursion to Home Depot or McDonald’s. And no book could help her now. Travel guides couldn’t map out some no-man’s-land where she might be safe. But Emma Mae, her cellmate at Milledgeville, had told her about the Bronx, a place where the cops never patrolled McDonald’s. Besides, she hadn’t murdered a single soul within five hundred miles of Manhattan or the Bronx. Pru wasn’t a mad dog, as the bulletins labeled her. She had to shoot the night manager at McDonald’s, because that would paralyze the customers and discourage anyone from coming after her.

She got on a Greyhound wearing eyeglasses and a man’s lumber jacket after cutting her hair in the mirror of a public toilet. She’d been on the run for two months. Crime wasn’t much of a business. Murdering people, and she still had to live from hand to mouth.

She couldn’t remember how she landed in the Bronx. She walked up the stairs of a subway station, saw a synagogue that had been transformed into a Pentecostal church, then a building with mural on its back wall picturing a paradise with crocodiles, palm trees, and a little girl. The Bronx was filled with Latinas and burly black men, Emma Mae had told her; the only whites who lived there were “trash” — outcasts and country people who had to relocate. Pru could hide among them, practically invisible in a casbah that no one cared about.

Emma Mae had given her an address, a street called Marcy Place, where the cousin of a cousin lived, a preacher who played the tambourine and bilked white trash, like Prudence and Emma. He was right at the door when Pru arrived, an anemic-looking man dressed in black, with a skunk’s white streak in his hair, though he didn’t have a skunk’s eyes; his were clear as pale green crystals and burned right into Pru. She was hypnotized without his having to say a single syllable. He laughed at her disguise, and that laughter seemed to break the spell.

“Prudence Miller,” he said, “are you a man or a girl?”

His voice was reedy, much less potent than his eyes.

Emma Mae must have told him about her pilgrimage to the Bronx. But Pru still didn’t understand what it meant to be the cousin of a cousin. His name was Omar Kaplan. It must have been the alias of an alias, since Omar couldn’t be a Christian name. She’d heard all about Omar Khayyam, the Persian philosopher and poet who was responsible for the Rubaiyat, the longest love poem in history, though she hadn’t read a line. And this Omar must have been a philosopher as well as a fraud — his apartment, which faced a brick wall, was lined with books. He had all the old Modern Library classics, like Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, books that Pru had discovered in secondhand shops in towns that had a college campus.

“You’ll stay away from McDonald’s,” he said in that reedy voice of his, “and you’d better not have a gun.”

“Then how will I earn my keep, Mr. Omar Kaplan? I’m down to my last dollar.”

“Consider this a religious retreat, or a rest cure, but no guns. I’ll stake you to whatever you need.”

Pru laughed bitterly, but kept that laugh locked inside her throat. Omar Kaplan intended to turn her into a slave, to write his own Rubaiyat on the softest parts of her flesh. She waited for him to pounce. He didn’t touch her or steal her gun. She slept with the silver Colt under her pillow, on a cot near the kitchen, while Omar had the bedroom all to himself. It was dark as a cave. He’d emerge from the bedroom, dressed in black, like some Satan with piercing green eyes, prepared to soft-soap whatever white trash had wandered into the Bronx. He’d leave the apartment at 7 in the morning and wouldn’t return before 9 at night. But there was always food in the fridge, fancier food than she’d ever had: salmon cutlets, Belgian beer, artichokes, strawberries from Israel, a small wheel of Swiss cheese with blue numbers stamped on the rind.

He was much more talkative after he returned from one of his pilferings. He’d switch off all the lamps and light a candle, and they’d have salmon cutlets together, drink Belgian beer. He’d rattle his tambourine from time to time, sing Christian songs. It could have been the dark beer that greased his tongue.

“Prudence, did you ever feel any remorse after killing those night managers?”

“None that I know of,” she said.

“Their faces don’t come back to haunt you in your dreams?”

“I never dream,” she said.

“Do you ever consider all the orphans and widows you made?”

“I’m an orphan,” she said, “and maybe I just widened the franchise.”

“Pru the orphan-maker.”

“Something like that,” she said.

“Would you light a candle with me for their lost souls?”

She didn’t care. She lit the candle, while Satan crinkled his eyes and mumbled something. Then he marched into his bedroom and closed the door. It galled her. She’d have felt more comfortable if he’d tried to undress her. She might have slept with Satan, left marks on his neck.

She would take long walks in the Bronx, with her silver gun. She sought replicas of herself, wanderers with pink skin. But she found Latinas with baby carriages, old black women outside a beauty parlor, black and Latino men on a basketball court. She wasn’t going to wear a neckerchief mask and rob men and boys playing ball.

The corner she liked best was at Sheridan Avenue and East 169^th, because it was a valley with hills on three sides, with bodegas and other crumbling little stores, a barbershop without a barber, apartment houses with broken courtyards and rotting steel gates. The Bronx was a casbah, like Emma Mae had said, and Pru could explore the hills that rose up around her, that seemed to give her some sort of protective shield. She could forget about Satan and silver guns.

She returned to Marcy Place. It was long after 9, and Omar Kaplan hadn’t come home. She decided to set the table, prepare a meal of strawberries, Swiss cheese, and Belgian beer. She lit a candle, waiting for Omar. She grew restless, decided to read a book. She swiped Sister Carrie off the shelves — a folded slip of paper fell out, some kind of impromptu bookmark. But this bookmark had her face on it, and a list of her crimes. It had a black banner on top. WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. Like the title of a macabre song. There were words scribbled near the bottom. Dangerous and demented. Then scribbles in another hand. A real prize package. McDonald’s ought to give us a thousand free Egg McMuffins for this fucking lady. Then a signature that could have been a camel’s hump. The letters on that hump spelled O-M-A-R.

She shouldn’t have stayed another minute. But she had to tease out the logic of it all. Emma Mae had given her a Judas kiss, sold her to some supercop. Why hadn’t Satan arrested her the second she’d opened the door? He was toying with her like an animal trainer who would point her toward McDonald’s, where other supercops were waiting with closed-circuit television cameras. They meant to film her at the scene of the crime, so she could act out some unholy procession that would reappear on the 6-o’clock news.

A key turned in the lock. Pru clutched her silver Colt. Omar appeared in dark glasses that hid his eyes. He wasn’t dressed like a lowlife preacher man. He wore a silk tie and a herringbone suit. He wasn’t even startled to see a gun in his face. He smiled and wouldn’t beg her not to shoot. It should have been easy. He couldn’t put a spell on her without his pale green eyes.

“White trash,” she said. “Is Emma Mae your sister?”

“I have a lot of sisters,” he said, still smiling.

“And you’re a supercop and a smarty-pants.”

“Me? I’m the lowest of the low. A freelancer tied to ten different agencies, an undercover kid banished to the Bronx. Why didn’t you run? I gave you a chance. I left notes for you in half my books, a hundred fucking clues.”

“Yeah, I’m Miss Egg McMuffin. I do McDonald’s. And I have no place to run to. Preacher man, play your tambourine and sing your last song.”

She caught a glimpse of the snubnosed gun that rose out of a holster she hadn’t seen. She didn’t even hear the shot. She felt a thump in her chest and she flew against the wall with blood in her eyes. And that’s when she had a vision of the night managers behind all the blood. Six men and a woman wearing McDonald’s bibs, though she hadn’t remembered them wearing those. They had eye sockets without the liquid complication of eyes themselves. Pru was still implacable toward the managers. She would have shot them all over again. But she did sigh once before the night managers disappeared and she fell into Omar Kaplan’s arms like a sleepy child.

Gold mountain by Terrence Cheng

Lehman College

He knocked on the door and waited. A voice called out in English. Usually it was a white man, older, wearing glasses or with a beard or both. Usually the older white man looked into the bag, then at the bill, then went through his wallet for money. Usually the tip was a dollar or two, sometimes more. This did not happen often and he did not expect it.

He heard footsteps and then the door opened.

He stared at the man as he fumbled with his wallet; he was not white and not older, but Chinese — not Japanese or Korean, he could tell right away from the pallor of his skin, the shape of his eyes and nose and mouth. In his mid-thirties, he thought, he wore glasses and a blazer, a pair of dark pressed pants, and shined shoes. A few small moles dotting his right cheek, otherwise his skin was light, his hair longish and wavy, swept back as if blown by wind.

The man gave him a twenty and said, “Keep it”; he could not speak English, but this phrase he had come to understand. He nodded, turned to go. Then he heard the man say in his own dialect, “You are from Fuzhou?”

He stopped, did not turn back right away. When he did he said in his own language, “Yes. Are you?”

“No,” the man said, “My family is from the north. But I’ve traveled.” He paused, then said, “Is my pronunciation okay?”

“Yes, very good.”

“I’m a professor here. I teach history.”

“Right,” he said. “Thank you.” He turned and went downstairs and out to the fence where he had chained his bicycle. He looked at his watch. He had two more deliveries across campus, had to hurry or else they would call the restaurant and complain.

The orders coming from the college had picked up since the end of August. Now there were people everywhere — the faces black, brown, white, most of them young, some older, even old. Many pensive, serious, many jubilant and smiling. There were Asian faces as well, but only a few, and he did not stare at them too long or try to make eye contact, did not want to seem conspicuous. Most of the buildings were gray and blocky, others weather-blasted with regal columns and stone carved façades. He liked riding by the baseball field, watching people jog along the gravel track or playing ball in the midst of all that green.

The rest of the day he could not stop thinking of the professor who had given him the good tip and the chance to speak in his own dialect, and not Cantonese (to the other delivery men) or Mandarin (to his boss). On sight he had known the professor was Mandarin, northern Chinese, but he was speaking Fukienese and so he had to ask. Maybe his father had been from Fujian province, or his mother. He wondered why and how much traveling the professor had done to acquire a dialect so different from his native one, how he too had wound up in a place like this.

He rode and kept his eyes roving. Too many times during the summer he had almost been clipped by a speeding truck or car while enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back or a cooling breeze in his face. For this he was teased by the other delivery men.

“Pay attention or you’ll get run down like a rat,” said Fong. He was in his forties but already quite bald, one front tooth capped in gold, a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips. He had been in the U.S. for over ten years and liked to brag that he could navigate the streets of the neighborhood with his eyes closed. The other delivery man was Wai-Ling, twenty-one or twenty-two, a few years younger than himself, small and quiet with bushy eyebrows and beady eyes. He laughed at whatever Fong said.

Not long after he had arrived, the boss, Mr. Liu, gave him the college campus and neighboring streets as his delivery area. “Can you handle that without getting killed?” Mr. Liu had asked him. He was a wiry old man, originally from Beijing, who ran the restaurant with his small but angry wife. They gave him a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket as Fong and Wai-Ling laughed.

“Like a schoolboy,” Fong said. “Don’t get lost!”

When a delivery was wrong or late he would be yelled at and sometimes cursed at — he recognized the loud sharp tones, fiaring in the eyes. Times like this he was glad he did not know what was said. He would just hand over the delivery and a few times the food was taken with a door slammed in his face, leaving him empty-handed. He thought Mr. Liu would scream at him for this, but he didn’t. “It happens sometimes,” his boss said. “Better not to make enemies.” He thought Mr. Liu was right, but in the end he knew that none of it would matter if no one knew who he was, which was why he had told no one his real name.

After his last delivery of the day he returned the bicycle to the restaurant and counted out with Mrs. Liu. His tips for the day had been poor, except for the professor who had given him almost four dollars. He left Fong and Wai-Ling smoking out in front of the restaurant. As he walked away he heard Fong shout at him, “Don’t get lost, eh?” The same joke every day; he heard Wai-Ling snicker and laugh.

He lived close to the restaurant in a stone and brick building, a steel gate in front trimmed with razor wire. His apartment was small: an open kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. He had found a mattress on the street and scrubbed it clean and now it lay in the corner covered with a blanket. The black-and-white television sat on a plastic crate, and there was one rickety wood chair against the wall that he never sat in but used as a small table instead. He had his dinner in a bag taken from the restaurant — leftover rice and greasy noodles, a slop of chicken, and overcooked vegetables in brown sauce. He set it on the chair and dug in; he didn’t like the restaurant’s food, but it was easier than cooking and still the closest thing he could get that reminded him of home. Since he had come to this place his pants and shirts now fit more snugly, and there was a thickness growing around his face. Maybe it was the food, or maybe the place itself was changing him. He thought his parents, if they had been alive, would not recognize him. And maybe this was part of the luxury in coming to the Gold Mountain, where food was hearty and plentiful enough to fatten up even a skinny farm boy like himself.

He turned on the television and watched the baseball game. The score was six to two, and only from the body language of the players could he figure out who was winning. When the score became ten to two he turned it off.

He went to the closet and dug out the small suitcase hidden at the bottom beneath empty boxes and rags. He looked out the window, as if someone might be spying on him, then turned back to the suitcase and popped it open. He stared for a moment, then dug his hands down through the four thick layers of wrapped and bundled American bills. He did not know the faces and could not read the words on the bills, but he knew the numbers: 100, 50, 20. When he had first opened the suitcase, months ago, the bills had all been sopping wet, but now they were wrinkled and dry, loose inside their bands. He had never counted it all to the dollar, bill by bill, but he had counted the bundles and estimated: close to a million U.S. More than his entire village back home could have earned in a lifetime.

He closed the suitcase and shoved it back in beneath the junk and waste. Then he flopped down on the mattress with the window open and slept with the sound of the city rumbling in his ear.

A few days later he knocked on the office door again, looked at the order ticket as he waited: beef with eggplant, brown rice, egg drop soup, can of soda. He did not blame the professor for ordering this muck; the restaurant was one of only a few in the neighborhood that made deliveries.

The door opened. The professor smiled at him, was wearing a dark blue suit and pink tie. He handed over the bag and again the professor tipped him more than three dollars. Then the professor asked him, “How long have you been here? In New York.”

He said, “One year,” even though he had only been in the country since June.

“How is your English?”

He shook his head and said, “Not very good.”

The professor nodded, stood in the doorway with his brow furrowed. “Have you thought about taking classes?”

He glanced behind the professor into the office, did not see anyone else in there with him.

“No time for classes. I’m always working.”

“If you are interested I can make a few suggestions. I know it can be hard not knowing the language.”

“Right,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I have to go. Thank you.”

The professor nodded again and closed the door.

That night before the dinner rush he sat in front of the restaurant smoking. Fong and Wai-Ling kept to themselves because they were Cantonese and thus did not like him; and because he was originally from Fuzhou, they knew that he did not like them either. He watched cars pass by, admired the curvy women with long braided hair sauntering down the avenue. Eventually, he started thinking about the professor and what he had said. A part of him was offended; they didn’t know each other, and yet he had presumed that because he did not speak English and because he was delivering food that… that what?

Had he meant to be disrespectful? To speak out of place to a stranger back home might cost you. But this was not home, and maybe he was just trying to offer some advice, one countryman to another. But were they even countrymen? Here, in New York, in the Bronx, it might appear to be so, a bond in the shape of the face and eyes. They were from China, but certainly they both knew that there were different Chinas — like the U.S., there was the top of the Gold Mountain, and then the rest.

He decided to take a quick walk, turned off the main avenue, and passed a small party happening on the street in front of the cluster of brick buildings that lined the road. He had seen these parties all summer: There was music, smoking food on a grill, even dancing. The smells intrigued him. People drank beer from big bottles and laughed. Girls wore short shorts and tiny tops, men in baggy shirts and shorts that came down past their knees, some with bald or close-cropped heads or even big tufts of bushy black hair. Everyone wore pieces of glittering gold — around their necks, in their ears, on their fingers, and around their ankles and wrists — so that with each movement they seemed to glimmer and shine.

All the voices, the bodies, the faces, so new. The skin of one so dark and smooth like a fine leather, and then another so light like rays of melted sun. Men with gold teeth, women with firm bodies, thick in the legs and butt. It was not just a different place, but a different planet, and only by not being there anymore could he sense how thick and smothering his life in Hong Kong had become: the rush and hum of constant millions buzzing his senses, ready to shatter like a crystal cage and crush him. Here he felt free, could move, think, listen. It did not bother him that he did not understand what was being said around him. When he stepped out into the streets there was maybe a woman with a child in a stroller, another in tow; or a small gang of dark-skinned boys cajoling and roughhousing, making their way down the block; or girls walking tall and brazen, whispering to each other and shaking their heads and waving their fingers as they spoke back to the cat-calling boys. On every other corner was an old man or woman with a big umbrella and a two-wheeled cart selling paper cups of crushed flavored ice in the slate of summer heat.

He went back to the restaurant, found Mrs. Liu looking for him. He took the new orders, hung the bags on his handlebars. His first drop was to one of the bigger buildings in the neighborhood, where he buzzed and had to wait for the person to come down. A young woman opened the door. She had dark half-slanted eyes, her skin like a pale chocolate cream. She was his height, but seemed taller because she was so thin, her arms and neck stretched, scrawny. If her face, like her body, had not been so sucked out and sickly he might have thought her beautiful. He took her money and handed over the bag. Her hair was long but stringy and tangled, and the skin on her arms and face and neck was mottled, blotchy. A stained sour smell came from inside the door. He counted the money; she was short more than two dollars, but he looked at the woman and smiled and said, “Okay.”

That night in his apartment he kept thinking of her, the woman with the scrawny wrists and neck.

He finished eating, then took a shower, put on a clean shirt and fresh pants, combed his hair, and went out.

He knew his way, though he never made deliveries in this area north and west of the college, which was Fong’s area. The roads were mostly quiet and empty, the murmur of traffic on the expressway nearby, the occasional screech and rattle of the train that snaked overhead and through the neighborhood. When he had first arrived he would kill hours on the trains, would pay the fair and ride them end to end. Either the 4 train or the D — he preferred the 4 because it ran above ground in the Bronx, past the enormous stadium with the bright white lights. The trains were much dirtier here than they were in Hong Kong, but this did not bother him. He liked the tossed feeling of motion, liked to think that he was traveling from one end of New York to the other.

When he got to the building he went to the pay phone on the corner. From his wallet he pulled a business card and dialed. Then he stood at the phone booth and waited, knew he was being watched now through an apartment window. It was like this too in Hong Kong, when he went to one of those places, being watched at the front door by a camera or spy making sure he was not a policeman or vagrant or gangster who could not be trusted. He counted to fifty in his head, then he went to the front door and was buzzed in, took the stairs to the fourth floor. He knocked on the door and it opened just a crack. He saw her eyes, the dark painted lashes, then she unlatched the lock.

The place looked exactly as it had the last time he had come. Neat but spare: a flowered curtain, candles on the table, the smell of jasmine and incense. He looked at the woman, short and small, older than he, her breasts squeezed into her low-cut blouse. She had long flowing hair and light gold skin, and from a distance one might think she was ten years younger than she was. He had found her randomly one night. It had been late and he had been wandering, trying to learn this new place so that he did not get lost. She had walked up to him and started talking to him, and by the way she smiled and ran her hand up and down his arm he knew who and what she was.

He gave her sixty dollars as he had that first night. She took him by the hand into the bedroom which smelled thick with perfume. Inside there was only a bed and a chair against the wall and he wondered if she slept on the same bed where she worked. She slid her shirt over her head and he did the same. She smiled and said something to him, but he did not know or care what she was saying. He lay naked on the small soft bed and she on top of him, and for the next thirty minutes he closed his eyes and thought of the women from home he had known and thought he could love.

When they finished he dressed quickly as she smoked a cigarette. His stomach felt empty, his legs rubbery and weak. She laughed and said something but he already had his shoes on.

Walking home he wondered why he had taken a shower to visit a whore. It didn’t make sense, but so many things didn’t make sense to him these days. He could have stayed home and watched the game, or he could have taken the subway or bus to a restaurant out of the neighborhood where he could have eaten and drank something other than the slop Mr. Liu and his wife served. But he knew the best food was all the way down in Chinatown, and there he could not go.

He walked and smoked and thought again about the sickly girl who had not had enough money for her food. It was her wrists and her neck that had stayed in his mind, and how her hair was so thin like it might fall out of her head. And he remembered the ship, the woman who had been one of the few wives on board. Three hundred of them packed into the freight, and these two men (one taller, the other very short) started to squawk over a mess made in someone’s space. He watched as they argued, did not try to stop it. They had been on the ship for over two months, and below deck, amongst the hundreds of compartments and partitioned areas they had created with cardboard and hanging shirts and towels and clothes, how could anyone tell whose mess was whose? In one corner were big buckets filled with piss and shit that were emptied each day, puddles of waste on the floor where people had spilled. In another corner on a rusted table they tried to cook with two burners and two big propane tanks, the floor littered with empty cans, filthy rags, and ripped empty boxes.

The floor and air stank with their sweat and metal and waste, but still the two men argued and accused. Then they fought.

It was not the first fight that had broken out. People gathered in a circle, some yelling, shouting. Then the tall one had both hands around the short one’s throat, choking him down to his knees until his eyes fluttered and a bubbly foam dribbled from his lips. The short one’s wife came from behind, hitting the tall man on the back of the head with double-hammer fists until he had no choice but to turn and hit her in the face to make her stop.

The short man lay there gasping, twitching. The tall one turned and looked at the woman lying on the ground. She had bobbed stringy hair, her shirt filthy, too big for her, hanging down off her shoulder. Her neck so thin like a sick bird or child. The tall one reached down and began pulling at the legs of her pants and then she was bare.

He knew he should step in, but he did not. No one did.

When the tall man finished — it did not take long — he stood and pulled his pants up, turned and saw the other man still lying on the ground. He spit on the short man, and then moved through the crowd to the other end of the hold, where he disappeared inside a wall of faces. When the short one came to and saw his wife, he gathered her into a corner where he held her and wept.

A world unto itself: no ruler, no rules.

In the morning they found the woman by the kitchen area. She had used the lid of a rusty can to carve open her wrists. Her bottom still naked, she sat with her eyes open against the wall in a wide dark puddle. The short man was dead too, no signs of trauma beyond what he had suffered during the fight. He had just stopped living. No one knew if he or his wife had died first.

They were still far enough out at sea to dump the bodies, so he was picked to prepare the woman and her husband on the deck to make sure they sank and stayed sunk. He tied them together with rope, stuffed their clothes with any random refuse or wood or metal he could find. Then he rolled them overboard and thought at least they had finished their voyage together.

When he got back to the apartment he found his neighbor knocking on his door, an old woman with white hair and leathery wrinkled skin. A few times she had offered him food — yellow rice with beans and some salty shredded meat — that he gladly accepted.

Now she spoke very fast, kept poking up the corners of her own eyes, then flashing two fingers, then pointing at the floor. She did this over and over again. Finally he took her wrists in his hands and smiled at her and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Sank you.” She took a breath and shrugged, then went back to her own apartment.

He could still smell the perfume of the whore on his skin, so he took another shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the mattress. He knew what the old woman had been trying to tell him: Two men with slanted eyes had come looking for him. This was not a shock or surprise. Since his first steps here, in this new place, this new world, he had known that they would find him, that someone would.

Here the dreams were always the same: the taste of the water, the bubble of salt and surf, smoke and gas and oil in his nose and mouth, leaking down his throat. Knowing that his eyes were open in the water and yet all he could see was black; the floating, the flash and flail of his limbs. Was he watching his own death? He did not know then, but it was what he felt now. He woke in the middle of the night and drank a glass of water. Then he sat in the chair he never sat in, sat by the window smoking and watching the sunrise over the highway.

He thought about home, the person he used to be. How he had grown up in a fishing village in Fujian province, learning to farm as well, to make a living with his hands and back. How his family had no money to send him to school; and how he had come to realize around the age of thirteen that he had no talent for the life that his family and ancestors had paved for him. When his parents died (he was twenty by then), he left.

It took him days to get to Fuzhou, walking and stealing rides with strangers. Finally a truck filled with workers took him into the heat of the big buildings, the lights, the colors, the taste and smell of so many people, so many machines. He was afraid he would be swallowed by it all, that everyone around him would know he was a country boy. He found work in a hotel restaurant cleaning dishes and taking out garbage. He worked as many hours as they would let him, slept little, saved all of his money, but still he did not feel like a rich man.

Then one day in the hotel he was relaxing after his shift. The bar and lounge were half-crowded. A man sat down next to him wearing a dark suit and collared shirt with no tie. The man’s watch shined in the lights around the bar. They began talking, and then the man said, “Have you ever thought about going to America?” His face appeared to be young but his eyes made him look old. They stared at each other.

“No,” he said, “never thought about it.”

The man gave him a card. “Call me if you want to stop wasting your life.”

The man paid his bill and walked out. He looked at the man’s card and called him two days later. He said he did not want to go to America, but wanted to stop wasting his life.

His job was to recruit, to work the city for potential clients. He was trained to spot who and what they were looking for.

“Dressed shabby, looking a little lost. You know, country folk.”

“Is that why you came up to me in the bar?”

The man stared at him and told him to pay attention.

“The police are paid off. So are the officials we need. But don’t be cocky. If you show off they will make an example of you.”

He learned to spot them in crowds, in markets, on the street. He had his pitch, all the facts that anyone in the beginning would need to know: thirty-thousand U.S. total, at least five to ten up front, the rest when you get there. “How?” they would sometimes ask, and he would tell them by boat or by plane. It cost more if you wanted passports and special work papers.

“We know your relatives, we know where you live. We are watching you on both sides. We are taking big risks to give you the chance of a lifetime. Don’t disrespect us. Don’t make us or your family lose face.”

He knew when clients were satisfied. People would find him to thank him, tell him how well their sons and husbands and fathers were doing over there, the riches they were making, the opulent lives they would all someday lead. “He’ll be a citizen in a few years, then he can bring us all over,” one wife told him. “He sends me beautiful clothes and jewelry,” said another. “We’re going to live in a big house with big cars.” He would smile and nod and later more people from the same family, the same clan, would come to him to make the journey. They borrowed money from relatives, from friends, from anyone who could afford to give just a little to send them away to find their dreams. No one talked about the ones who did not make it, who were caught and shipped back, held by police and beaten; then sent back to their villages to pay a huge fine, only to begin planning when they would try again.

He worked Fuzhou for two years, then his boss asked him to help with operations in Hong Kong. He practiced his Cantonese, learned the new landscape of police and officials, who knew what, what areas were safe to work. Now he helped to coordinate and find secure holding areas while the boats and ships and passports and payoffs were taken care of. He learned the routes that spanned the world — from Hong Kong or Fuzhou or ports out of Malaysia or Thailand, across the ocean and into South America or Europe. Groups as small as two or three, sometimes as big as twenty, thirty, fifty, more. They might wait in a holding area in a strange country for months, kept by enforcers in a house or warehouse or apartment, until it was safe to move again.

Because they did not want to wind up in the Netherlands or Peru or even Canada. America was where they wanted to go, and even though he was no longer pitching and recruiting the dream, it was still the backdrop of his thoughts — places like New York, San Francisco, cities within cities filled with Chinese; piles of money waiting to be made, the fine clothes and food that would adorn their lives, teachers and schools that would educate their children and make them citizens, so they would never have to suffer.

He had talked so much about it that even he began to believe. But he did not have thirty thousand dollars, and he wondered if he was still wasting his life.

Then he was told about the next big plan: a new shipping route, from Thailand to Kenya, then around the tip of Africa, then on to the U.S. Almost three hundred passengers, they would need extras to work the crew.

“Are you interested?” his boss asked him. “Think of it this way: You get to see the world, spend a few days in New York when it’s over.”

He did not see any way to disagree.

That afternoon he went to the school to deliver the professor’s meal. The professor handed him two brochures, one in Chinese.

“For classes,” he said. “The school is close to Penn Station, easy to get to.”

He looked at the brochure written in Chinese, on the front a picture of a young Chinese woman, smiling, a book splayed open in front of her. Learn English — live life!

The professor said, “It’s cheaper than taking classes here, which you might not be ready for anyway. This would prepare you.”

He kept staring at the brochures, did not know what to say, what to do.

The professor said, “Let me know if you have any questions, if you need help filling out the forms.” The professor reached out his hand. He looked at the gold band around the professor’s left ring finger, then shook his hand without thanking him.

The rest of the day, as he made his deliveries he wondered about the professor’s life, compared it to his own. On days off he sometimes took the bus to the movie theater in the shopping plaza, and like the baseball games, he could surmise what was happening by the the tone of voice and look on an actor’s face. Afterward he would browse through shops in the plaza, sometimes buying socks or undershirts or small things that he did not necessarily need. Other times he went to the open market and bought vegetables and meat and went home and tried to cook, but always seemed to burn his food. Then he would go to a restaurant where he would be surrounded by brown and black people — no whites, definitely no Chinese. He would look at the menu and point, a kind of guessing game, and he knew that no matter what they brought him he would eat it.

No one bothered him in these places, and was this so different from what an American might call life? He did not feel he was much better or worse off than anyone else around him. Except for when he was lonely, when he would argue with himself as to whether or not to go to the whore.

The professor, he thought, did not need to visit a whore. Nor did he wile away his time watching movies or burning food or hording money and constantly looking over his shoulder. The professor had a wife and children, he imagined; a big house somewhere in a neighborhood of identical houses, did not live within the rows of blocky brick buildings with rusted fire escapes draped top to bottom that surrounded the school. He pictured the professor’s home decorated with classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy, a shiny new car parked in the driveway, next to a green lawn where his children could safely play. He was sure he had more in that suitcase than the professor had in any bank, but the thought did not make him feel any better. What good was it if he could not spend it?

Maybe that was the problem. He could buy a small restaurant, but he knew nothing about the business except how to bus tables and make deliveries. Or he could open a store here in the Bronx that sold groceries and goods for Chinese people; but that would be silly because there were not enough Chinese. In the end he knew there was no way he could do any of these things without spending money and drawing attention to himself; and this was not like Chinatown where he knew he would feel less lonely, feel as if he were part of something again.

He remembered going just a few days after he had arrived, taking a car from the hotel into the city, all arranged by the desk clerk. (Americans, he thought, were no different than Chinese: You give them enough money and they will do anything for you.) The car dropped him off and the white driver got out and leaned on the hood, smoking and reading the paper, and he began walking toward the crowd of Chinese faces, felt relief hearing his own dialect and Cantonese and Mandarin street to street. The stores selling big crates full of herbs and spices, vegetables, fresh fish, roasted ducks, and barbecued meat hanging in the greasy windows. They sold clothes, shoes, perfume, watches, toys. He had been to a thousand markets like these in Fuzhou and Hong Kong, but here the feel of the air, the smell of the streets, even the ground beneath him felt different.

He walked below an overpass and past plain storefronts with Chinese signs advertising for workers. Here there were no blacks or whites or browns, only others like him. “You want to work? You — you want to work?” They were calling out in Fukienese, Cantonese. He ignored them, kept walking, felt his heart and stomach go slithery inside. He knew this was what everyone on the ship had come for — the chance to work nonstop every day to repay the debt that was their lives.

He went to a small restaurant on a side street and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup and small dragon buns. When the food came he did his best to eat slowly, the taste of the broth and beef slivers and noodles soaking into his mouth, his first real meal in months.

He picked up a Chinese newspaper from the table next to him and read about the ship, the Golden Venture, stranded just off the shore of Long Island, filled with illegal Chinese: two-hundred and eighty-six captured, ten drowned, six escaped. He stared at the pictures of them all on the beach, wrapped in blankets, herded like animals. He tried to recognize the faces but could not.

Six escaped.

He lit a cigarette and the waitress came over and said, “No smoking.”

He finished his meal and left. As he walked back to the car he felt the eyes of the city pressing in on him — the people, the buildings, the cars, the birds, the cracks in the concrete walls and streets surrounding. Maybe someone had spotted him and was already following, because this was America, a fast and wild and frightening place. Here, even among his own, he could feel how they were outsiders, transplanted.

On his way back to the hotel he stared out the window, remembered how he had heard the captain and the crew leader talking, how they had not received communication from shore, did not know if and when the boats would meet them out at sea as planned or if they were supposed to press on and dock.

He knew from all the muttering and murmuring that the situation was not good. They had been at sea now for three months. It had been bad from the beginning — those who grew sick and delirious right away, puking and shitting on themselves as if indigent and mad; then the fighting each day, passenger versus passenger, enforcer versus passenger; all of them hungry; breathing the air heavy with the smell of saltwater and sea-soaked metal and piss and shit and bodies festering and congealed. He dreaded his rounds below deck, could not imagine what it was like to be down there every minute of every day, as the passengers were not allowed above deck lest they be spotted from the air.

The things he had done, the horrors he had seen: the short man and the short man’s wife, letting them both die, then rolling them into the sea; swinging a club and cracking a man’s skull for stealing the crew’s water and food; a woman held down and fucked until she bled, and by the time he was inside her, her eyes were still open but she no longer screamed.

He had always thought of himself as a good and simple man, but now he knew this was not true.

He was in one of the sleeping cabins when he felt the crunch of the boat, heard the thunk and grind, thought that they had smashed their way onto shore. He was up on his feet, gliding toward the deck, heard the screaming, the footsteps and pounding, scrambling in the hold below, heard the thwack of the helicopter above, being chased by a swirling beam of light. Then he saw the flood of bodies coming up through the doors and hatches, spewing like a fountain, spreading across the deck like ants. More lights attacking, the helicopter circling, electric voices in English, boats closing in, engines ripping the water.

In the distance he could see the shore, big spotlights and smaller yellow dots maybe three hundred meters away. He looked around for his crewmates, for an escape boat or plan, but the frenzy was too much, people pushing, shoving, the twist and shriek of the fray. He heard the splashing first, then turned and saw them going over one by one near the bow, in groups over the side. He ran for the side and jumped out as far as he could, feet first into the water, flesh locking, the freeze crushing against him. He told himself that he was the son of a fisherman and that he would not die in the water. His arms and legs began to move even though he could not feel them.

Waves crashing over his head, he went under for as long as he could, kept kicking, thrashing, just trying to pull away; opening his eyes, trying to see, thinking of the boats and the helicopter and what they would do to him if he was caught. He came up for air and went under again, and when he came back up he was further away from the ship and there were more boats now closing in, but he was behind it all, off to the side.

He knew he would not make it like this, his arms and legs like lead, trying to take in as much air as he could, water in his mouth, bloating his stomach, seeping through his lungs. Then he heard a voice, saw his crew leader’s head bobbing up and down. He was holding onto something, using it like a flotation device, saw the crew leader paddling in his direction in the hard and heavy surf. They swam toward each other, and when he was close enough he saw his own arm swing up out of the water and then down, his fist landing with a crack against the crew leader’s nose, then he was wrestling the small case away into his own arms as the other man’s head disappeared. He held onto the case and kicked, kept his head on a swivel as he swam for the dark water and stretch of lights.

When he finally felt the sand in his toes it was so quiet he thought he was dead already. He saw houses with big wooden decks lining the shore. He could not stop his teeth from chattering, could feel all his bones and flesh shaking, his stomach and head filled with fire, and this told him he was not dead. He hugged the suitcase close to his chest even as he crawled onto the beach, spitting and coughing, his innards burning like oil and acid in his blood. When he looked back he saw the lights still shining, the freighter locked down. He had swam more than three hundred meters to get to shore, felt like a kind of superman, alone, freezing, but uncaptured and alive. His father, he thought, would be proud.

The sky was black, but he knew he did not have much time. He would need a change of clothes, and under the wooden deck of one of the houses he fumbled with the suitcase latch until it opened. He stared in, his blood and brains squeezing. Then he closed the suitcase and walked further down the beach along the row of houses until he had brushed himself off, could still taste the sea and sand in his mouth as he willed his arms and legs to move, his breath thin and wheezing. He made his way in between two houses, and when he came to a main road there was no traffic and no one on the streets. He looked at the signs and recognized only one in glowing neon — HOTEL. He had seen it in Fuzhou, and in Hong Kong. He took from the suitcase a handful of wet hundred-dollar bills, walked quickly through the front glass door and up to the counter.

The young man with glasses behind the counter did not look up until he was standing in front of him, waving the money. The young man stared back, wide-eyed, gape-jawed, nodding.

Two hours later he brought him shorts, sandals, a pair of jeans, T-shirts, and underwear. The clothes were big but comfortable. He gave the young man more money, and for the next three days he was brought egg sandwiches and coffee early in the morning, hamburgers and french fries and soda in the evening. All of it was greasy, salty, disgusting, but he ate it. Each time the door knocked he thought it could be the police, but it was always the young man’s glasses that shined back in the light.

After his excursion into Chinatown he knew he could not go back. Not now, not like this. In the big yellow phone book in his room he found a map of New York City, and with the desk clerk’s help (he must have given him a thousand dollars by now) figured out where Chinatown was. From the young man’s finger he then looked north, up the map, pointed at the highest part and nodded.

When he left in a car early the next morning he gave the young man another handful of money. The driver was and wore several gold chains around his neck. The car stereo was loud. An hour later he was dropped off on the main avenue. He gave the driver two hundred dollars without him asking, and the man stared back at him with wide incredulous eyes.

He found the restaurant a half hour later, walked in, and asked for a job.

“You just move here?” asked Mr. Liu.

“Yes,” he said. He looked down at the suitcase in his hand.

“You’re lucky, I just lost a delivery man. You have any experience?”

“Yes. Back in Hong Kong.”

“If you can find your way around Hong Kong you won’t have a problem here.” Mr. Liu peered at him for a few moments, then said, “You’re not a troublemaker, are you? We run a simple family business. We don’t need any problems.”

“No,” he said. “No problems. But I need a place to stay. Do you know where I can look?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Liu. “Do you have enough to cover the first month’s rent?”

He gripped the handle of the suitcase and said, “Yes, I think I do.”

After his final delivery of the day he rode back to the restaurant, the professor’s brochures folded and tucked in his pocket. He had never planned on being a deliveryman for the rest of his life, and so maybe it was fate, or a sign from the heavens that now was the time to move on. Wherever he might go, he would take classes. It was a good idea.

As he pulled up to the restaurant he expected to see Fong and Wai-Ling out front smoking, but the sidewalk was empty. The neon sign in the window was off. He looked at this watch — it was only 10, not yet closing time. He tipped his bicycle down to its side and walked up to the open front door. He peeked in, heard nothing. The two front tables were empty with no chairs. The menu signs above the counter were off, leaving only the fluorescent lights from the kitchen aglow. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys, clenched them in his fist with the tips like metal spikes jutting between his fingers.

He stepped in slowly, passed the front counter, peeked around the wall, then came to a stop, staring into the kitchen. Pans and bowls still filled with food, cartons half-open, spatulas and tongs left on the counters, as if they had evacuated in an emergency, the restaurant abandoned.

Except for the shoe in the corner by the fryer, Mrs. Liu’s shoe; and then he saw the tooth, chipped and glowing like a speck of gold dust on the floor.

He knew that when he died he would meet an army of demons who would make him pay for his sins. He was not afraid, but still he was not ready.

He rode his bicycle back to his apartment, went upstairs, and stood in the hallway outside his door for ten minutes, listening, waiting. When he finally went in everything was as he had left it. He took only the suitcase, and when he got back downstairs his bicycle was gone and so he walked with the suitcase to the whore’s apartment. He called from the pay phone and she buzzed him in. When he got upstairs he gave her three hundred dollars and she closed the door behind him.

In the morning he washed himself, wet his hair and combed it back, used her razor to shave his face. He left her naked and curled and sleeping, felt bad for her though he could not say why. He left her an extra hundred dollars, then went to the diner by the college next to the subway station and drank tea and waited.

He still had the professor’s brochures in his pocket, along with a map that he had torn from the whore’s telephone book. Around noon he walked onto campus, past the security booth and parking gate, through the roaming clusters of students. He headed into the building, up the stairs, knocked on the professor’s door.

The professor answered and said, “Hello.” An awkward smile. “I didn’t order.”

“I know.” His suitcase in one hand, brochures in the other, he said, “I had some questions about these classes. Could I ask you?”

The professor paused, looked at his watch. “Sure. I have a few minutes. Come in.”

The professor was bigger than he had thought. His pants fit him so loosely he needed to pull the belt in as tight as he could. The shoes were at least a size too big, as were his shirt and undershirt. The blazer was big enough to cover him so he did not look saggy and suspicious. All over he could smell the professor’s cologne, but there was nothing he could do about that right now.

He had left the empty suitcase in the office, had moved the money into the professor’s book bag and another bag he had found in his desk drawer. Close to the train station he found a barbershop where he pointed at a picture on the wall and the barber cut his hair down close, then closer, so when he was finished he looked like a teenager again. Inside the station he looked around and did not know where he would go. He looked at the professor’s watch on his wrist, then walked through the massive corridors of the station. With the professor’s glasses he saw things with a new clarity. He got his shoes shined, then stopped at a rack with postcards of New York’s wondrous sites: the big famous buildings, the pretty parks and rich museums, the baseball stadium with the crossed N and Y emblazoned in white over the field. He took a card out of the rack and gave the man at the counter a dollar.

A young Chinese couple helped him figure out the schedule. He paid for his ticket in cash, pulled the bills from the professor’s wallet. He would hold onto the IDs just in case he needed them, until he felt it was safe to be no one again.

On the train he kept both bags at his feet. There were mostly old white people around him, some in suits, some dressed for a day of leisure. No one looked at him or bothered him. The train car was air-conditioned and very cold. The conductor checked his ticket and nodded and then the train was rolling. He pulled the postcard from his blazer pocket and stared at the green field, trying to imagine the next mirage of his life, until they were out of the tunnel and barreling beyond the city.

Hey, girlie by Joanne Dobson

Sedgwick Avenue

Hey, girlie,” the voice rasped down at me from the fourth-floor window. “I want you should get me a coconut cake over by Phillips the baker. Make sure it got a nice red cherry in the middle. And don’t smoosh it on the way home like you do the bread.”

A coconut cake? Holy crap — Mrs. Blaustein must be in the money. It was usually a nineteen-cent loaf of Wonder Bread with her. The quarter’d come spinning down from the fourth floor, and I’d catch it in my skirt before it hit the sidewalk. Magic: money out of thin air. All I’d have to do was run the bread from the grocer at the corner of Kingsbridge up to 4-C, two blocks round trip and four flights of stairs. I got a nickel, but she always wanted the penny back.

Everyone knew Mrs. Blaustein took care of a crazy lady who never came out of the apartment. Katy-Ann Cooper said she was a maniac killer, the crazy lady, and that’s why she wouldn’t show her face. But my mother said Katy-Ann was full of shit — excuse her Irish — Miss Cohen was just a poor unfortunate who had gotten in the way of history. My mother said things like that. She liked to read, and not just the racing forms like my father, but books from Kingsbridge library. Me too. The day I bought the coconut cake I’d just come back from the library with a stack of books up to my chin, and I knew I’d finish them all by Sunday night. I flopped right down on the green couch and started The Yearling, but my mother said, “Go out and play, for Christ’s sake — it’s such a nice day. You can read anytime.”

So, I was the only one of us kids who ever saw the crazy lady. It happened this way. Mrs. Blaustein made a toss over the window guard, and I made my usual brilliant catch. This time it was a dollar bill wrapped tight around a half-dollar and held together with a big fat paperclip. I bought the best cake at the baker. It cost the whole dollar-fifty. Lemon-filled. Spinkled all over with fluffy coconut. A perfect red circle of a cherry. I carried it careful in its white cardboard box like it was the coronation crown jewels, down Kingsbridge, past the Veteran’s Hospital, round the corner onto Sedgwick, my braids for once hanging nice and straight over my shoulders like the good Lord intended instead of slapping my face like when I run with the bread.

I was younger then. Ten. I thought I was tough, but I didn’t know nothing. Anything. That was two years ago, there was a new queen in England, Maxie Isaacs next door died of polio, and Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg went to the electric chair. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that is. Not the Rosenbergs from 5-F. My mother said the judge should burn in hell for that verdict. My father said, “Now, Tessie…”

We didn’t go to church anymore, not since Father O’Mally said little Maxie Isaacs was a baby Christ-killer and that he would burn in hell instead of going to heaven like a good little Catholic child. We’re big on hell in my neighborhood. So I went to P.S. 86 instead of Our Lady of Angels, and I didn’t have to wear a uniform, and Mrs. Marrs didn’t yank my braids when she caught me hiding a book on my lap during Math.

I walked that coconut cake into the courtyard, past the stoop, up the three steps. The lobby smelled like apple kugel, the second-floor landing like Mrs. Costigan’s cats, the third like sauerkraut with weird Jewish stuff in it, caraway seed, maybe. A radio was playing piano music, but suddenly it stopped with a crash that almost made me drop the cake, then started again from the beginning. Not the radio, then. A real piano. I had just rounded the fourth-floor stairs when Mr. Schmidt came out of 4-C, Mrs. Blaustein’s apartment, with his big toolbox. “Vot you doing here, girlie?”

Mr. Schmidt was our new super. German. My daddy said all supers in the Bronx were Krauts. I hoped they weren’t all the same kind of Kraut Mr. Schmidt was, with a voice that crunched like broken glass. Mr. Schmidt scared the hell out of me. Maybe it was how big he was, fat, with fists like Sunday hams. Or the way he was always chewing, jaws going from side to side like that hippopotamus at the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe it was his daughter Trudy, the only other not-Jewish kid in my fourth-grade class at P.S. 86. She gave the nastiest Indian burn of any kid on Sedgwick, Trudy did, then batted blue eyes like an angel at the poor kid’s parents. Even Lennie Foreman walked the other side of the street when Trudy Schmidt was on the sidewalk. But not me. Not even then. If anyone even tried it I would’ve bent their little pinkie back till it snapped. Nobody messed with me — not even Trudy Schmidt — not after my daddy taught me the cop moves. Did I say he was a cop? Well he is, and a good one.

“Vot you doing, girlie?” I never knew anyone before who shaved his whole head, but Mr. Schmidt did, and the red stubble made it look like it was coated with corroded rust. Corroded. I like that. It’s a good word. Corroded.

“Just around Mrs. Blaustein a coconut cake.” The super had eyes on the cake box, but I slipped past him without another word. My mother said you had to watch out when he came around — things would go missing. Cookies or muffins. The week before, when he was working on the pipes in our kitchen, a pork chop disappeared. A pork chop! Cooked! And her with five mouths to feed. So I held the cake box tight to my chest and got past Mr. Schmidt safe, and this was the first time I was ever in 4-C. Mrs. Blaustein came rushing to the door, all out of breath, said to wait a minute and she’d get me a dime for a tip (a whole dime!), but she had to go talk to someone first. Then she went out of the apartment, fast. So I nosed around. It was a big place, two bedrooms. Nothing like our one-bedroom apartment with five people sleeping in shifts night and day. This living room was… classy. Pictures on the walls — actual paintings. A piano in one corner. Glass doors with sheer curtains leading into yet another room. Through the half-open door I could see into this second room — shelves and shelves of books, like a library. They were a magnet to me, those books. I couldn’t help myself.

At first I thought the gloomy room was empty. The drapes were closed, except for one little slit in the middle, and dust danced in the narrow light. Narrow light. Maybe I read that somewhere: narrow light. I tiptoed over to the nearest shelf. Mrs. Blaustein wouldn’t mind if I looked at just one book…

“Iss he gone yet?” It was a woman’s quivery voice.

I dropped the book and screamed.

A gasp came from right behind me, and a small woman hunched in a wheelchair spun around. “Mein Gott. I thought you vere Hilda.” Her accent was sort of like the Jewish mommas who schlepped their folding chairs in front of the building on sunny mornings and talked and talked and talked. Something like the mommas — but different. More like music. “Vere’d you come from, child?”

“From the baker.” This must be the crazy lady. She was scary, all right, one eye pulled down, a huge red puckered scar from her forehead to her chin, one shoulder higher than the other. Her eyes were open really, really wide, even the droopy one. Her head was shaking on her neck. I wanted to get out of there — bad. But I wasn’t leaving without my money. Where the hell was Mrs. Blaustein? “I’m the cake girl.”

“‘The cake girl’?” She laughed — and for a minute the air in the room got… not so heavy. At least I think it was a laugh, a wheeze and a dry chuckle in her throat, and her head stopped shaking. “The cake girl. Oh, it vould be a pity to vaste that.” She picked up a little notebook on her lap and scribbled in it with a gold pencil. Her hands were thin and very white. They looked more like they belonged to some younger woman than that horrible scarred face. “Now,” she said, “I vill write a poem about the cake girl.”

“A poem?”

“Yes. And someday vhen you’re in college maybe you vill read it and think of me.”

“College?” Me?

“That vas vun thing they couldn’t take away from me — my poetry. Do you like them?”

“Like what?”

“Poems?”

“Dunno,” I said. “They’re okay, I guess. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, / Stood the wigwam of—”

“No. No. No,” she said. “Not that drivel. That book you just dropped on the floor? Pick it up, girl, open it and read me a real poem.” She had wheeled her chair to the window, and now she pulled the drapery cord. Light came streaming in, and I could see to read.

I could also see Mrs. Blaustein standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. I cringed, expecting her to yell. But she was looking at the wheelchair lady. “Rachel, I think you might be right.” I never heard her sound so quiet.

“Iss he gone?” The wheelchair lady’s voice was quivery again.

“For now. Just off the boat last year from Bremerhaven, Esther Meyer says.”

The head started shaking again, like this toy I used to have where you turned a key and the tin Chinaman nodded and nodded and nodded. It was like the springs in her neck were broken.

Mrs. Blaustein’s lips got white and thin. She turned to me. “Girlie, do like Miss Cohen says. Read a poem from the book.”

So I opened the book and read. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—/ The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” I looked up… Pain?… Tombs? But the sound of the words seemed to calm her — Miss Cohen — so I kept reading “…This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go—”

I was still there when Miss Cohen’s visitor came. The one I got the cake for, I guess. Not many men in suits around our neighborhood. Father O’Mally. Claire Heidenreich’s father. Insurance collectors. Fuller Brush men. But none of them wore suits like this one. It fit him like he was born in gray wool. No knee wrinkles or ass sags. Just shoulders and shirt cuffs, pleats at the belt and a sharp crease down the pant legs. I was old enough to know better, but I gaped at this handsome stranger like a two-year-old until Mrs. Blaustein pressed the dime into my hand. “Here’s your money, girlie. Go on home now. Miss Cohen has to talk to her publisher.”

“You know the crazy old lady in 4-C?” I said at supper that night. “She’s a famous poet. A publisher came to see her today. What’s a publisher?”

“She’s not crazy and she’s not old,” my father said. “It’s just that they experimented on her in the camps.” He took the bowl of boiled potatoes, ladled out three, spread them with margarine.

“They? Experimented?” The meatloaf looked good. Tomato soup on top and slices of bacon.

“What’re you now, ten, right?” He took two slices of meatloaf and reached for the ketchup bottle.

“Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”

“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.

“You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez — what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”

He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.

“Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”

“Charlie!” My mother clamped a hand over his mouth.

He pushed it away and gave a short laugh. He drinks a lot of beer when he’s going on night shift. “Maybe the Irish were next, for all we know. Jews. Micks. This whole neighborhood woulda been wiped out.” He laughed again and took another drink.

I put my fork down. I’d lost my appetite.

That night there were Nazis in the closet by my bed. I didn’t know what they looked like, not exactly, but I could feel them there. Maybe my father was wrong. Maybe we didn’t win the war. Maybe…

Mrs. Blaustein called the next day. My mother frowned. “Rachel Cohen must be lonely. She seems to have taken a liking to you. You want to go have cake with her?”

“Okay,” I said. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to.

Mrs. Blaustein had set the table with a lace cloth and some nice china dishes with gold rims. Very la-tee-dah, my father would have said.

“I don’t like cake,” Miss Cohen said. “But you go right ahead.” She drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee I ever saw from what looked like dolls’ cups, while I ate two slices of coconut cake. The filling was so sweet I almost couldn’t taste the lemon, so sweet it made my teeth ache. I loved it.

Miss Cohen talked almost the whole time. About knives and needles. About acid and electric shocks. About cattle cars full of Jews. About barbed wire. About ovens that weren’t for baking cakes in.

“The day they took us away, I put on my white linen dress with the eyelet embroidery. I thought if I looked nice, they’d know I was a nice girl,” she said. “Stupid. I was twenty when I went in… a pretty girl. When I came out seven years later I was a hundred and twenty. Can you imagine it?”

I could. All too well. It was time for me to go home.

“You come see me again,” she said, “and I’ll read you some of my poems.”

“Okay.” But I didn’t think I could stand it, to go back again.

There were two more slices of cake left, on a yellow china plate. How could she not like cake? Poor Miss Cohen.

When I got home, I looked all over for my communion dress, white with eyelet embroidery, and then I buried it in the very back of the closet where nobody, not even the Nazis, would ever find it, behind my father’s old wedding suit that didn’t fit anymore. All night long something tried to drag me through thick, hot air into the dark depths of the closet.

“You been up to 4-C, ain’t you?” Katy-Ann Cooper skated around me in circles, her wheels rolling thumpeta-thumpeta over the sidewalk cracks.

“What’s it to you?”

“My daddy says just because that lady’s famous doesn’t mean she’s not a Jew and a Commie. He knows. He alla time used to listen to Father Coughlin. You should stay out of 4-C — she’s nutso.”

“Is not.”

“Is so.”

I wanted to grab that chain around Katy-Ann’s neck, the one that held her St. Christopher medal and her skate key. I wanted to grab it and twist. Katy-Ann’s big mouth was the one thing that made me decide to go back to 4-C.

Or maybe it was the two leftover pieces of coconut cake. Or maybe it was just because Miss Cohen said I should come, and I was a good girl who did what I was told.

They were horrible, Rachel Cohen’s poems, two books of them, and some in magazines. We sat in the library by a table covered with medicine bottles. Tall brown ones with skinny necks. Small fat green jars. But the poems were beautiful/horrible, if you know what I mean. Like — fascinating. That’s another good word, fascinating. Blood. Bone. Shoes and wedding rings and greasy smoke.

She read them out loud, one first and looked at me, and then another and looked at me, and then just when I wanted her to stop she wouldn’t stop. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but my mother taught me to be polite. I wanted to run out of the apartment. I got up to leave, but she kept me standing by the door while she read one about a red-haired guard named Heinrich.

It was the worst of the poems and I had my hand on the knob of the library door, but that last word kept me there. I was… snagged… by it. “What’s an-o-dime mean?”

“Anodyne. It means painkiller. I studied to be a pharmacist before the war. I learned all about the drugs you could take to ease pain. And cause it. Now I’m good for nothing but to sit in this damned chair—” she smacked the armrest. “Sit in this goddamned chair — and remember.”

“What happens to people’s souls to make them do such… bad… things?” I really wanted to know, and I thought if anyone could tell me, she could. In spite of how much her poems terrified me, I kind of admired Miss Cohen. She knew all about words.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she replied.

“But not you and me, right? We could never do anything evil, right?”

“Maybe you’d better go home now, girlie.”

I peeked in the kitchen on my way out. One slice of cake left, sitting under a glass dish. The red cherry tempted me, but I got past it okay. The faucet on the sink was dripping bad.

Outside, the sky was as hard and gray as the cracked sidewalk. Someone had drawn a potsy, but I didn’t feel like hopping the squares. The red bricks on the walls of our five-story walk-up stared across the street at the yellow bricks of the elevator building. The mommas were talking Yiddish on their folding chairs, Mrs. Yellin rocking the big black carriage back and forth. I looked at them different. The Jewish mommas knew about the camps, for sure. Was that what they talked about in their weird foreign language? Oy veh. Oy gevalt.

Oy gevalt — my mother said only the Jews could come up with such a useful cosmic summary. Cosmic. Summary.

Oy gevalt.

I said hi to Mrs. Bradford, my father’s bookie, and walked past her — right in the middle of the sidewalk as usual. No one could ever get me that way. Terrible things could happen to a little girl on her own. If I walked in the exact center of the sidewalk no one could grab me into a car at the curb or pull me into the cellar of a building. I was religious about it. Mrs. Bradford’s peroxide hair was pinned up in curls underneath that ratty green wool scarf of hers, and she was carrying a string shopping bag with a tissue box in it. Everyone knew what the box was for — she hid the betting slips underneath the tissues. Mrs. B. was breaking the law. My father said it was no big deal, but I wondered: Would Mrs. Bradford burn in hell? Would Adolf Hitler?

Usually, running to Daitch Dairy for my mother, or to the butcher or the fish store, I stayed on the far side of the street from the huge brick Veterans Hospital with its green lawn and big trees behind the iron-spiked fence. My father said the soldiers in the hospital were ones that got hurt in the war. You saw them sometimes, in wheelchairs or wandering around the paved walks with whacked-out looks in their eyes. Usually I don’t pay the place much attention, but that day I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I don’t remember crossing the street, but next thing I knew I’d grabbed an iron fence spike in each hand and was just standing there, staring in. My father said there was nothing to be scared of — the guys in that place were heroes. Some of them even went into the camps and liberated the Jews. He was in the war too, but I guess he wasn’t a hero because he’s not in a hospital and the shrapnel in his back only hurts when it’s raining out, and he never, ever, talks about it. I watched a dark-haired man on crutches move toward me across the grass. He looked like a tall boy in a robe and striped pajamas. He was walking on one leg — the other one… just ended. No knee, no nothing. The man in the pajamas was inside the iron fence, I was outside. I couldn’t stop staring at him. I couldn’t let go of the bars. “Hey, girlie,” he said. “What’re you doin’ here? God, look at you — aren’t you a little sweetie?”

I screamed and ran, and he called after me, “What did I say? What did I say?” I zigzagged across Kingsbridge Road, still screaming and almost getting clobbered by a big cream-and-red bus. The sidewalk swarmed with people. Outside a Kosher bakery I dodged three baby carriages and Julian Levine from school. “Hey, meshuggeneh,” he yelled, “what’s the matter by you?” Sister Mary Michael from Our Lady stuck out her arm to stop me, but I slapped it away and kept going. I’ll pay for that, I know, hitting a nun — even a gazillion “Hail Marys” won’t atone. So many people on the sidewalk and they were all gonna die. Could it happen again? Like the Jews in the camps? Was Julian Levine gonna burn in an oven? Was Sister Mary Michael? Was I? I whipped past the big stone armory to Jerome Avenue, then up Jerome around the reservoir, past the colleges. It was all I could do to keep from howling the whole time. My legs pumped like those wheel rods on a freight train with cattle cars. What was I running from? From the man with the leg? From Miss Cohen’s poems? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t stop. It was like something was sick in my stomach that I didn’t want to vomit into my head. No, that doesn’t make any sense. I ran like I had the Gestapo at my heels. I tripped on broken concrete and fell and skinned both knees, and it didn’t slow me down one bit. When I turned onto the far end of Sedgwick, I knew I’d never get away from whatever was chasing me so I might as well go home.

In front of our building an ambulance idled, ashy smoke puffing from the tailpipe, revolving lights turning the neighbors’ faces red and white. Blood and bone. Blood and bone. Ashes, blood, and bone. Two men in white carried a stretcher out from the courtyard. A sheet strained to cover a huge belly but missed the top of a red-bristled head. A couple of policemen followed the stretcher. One of them was my father.

I grabbed his hand. “Is that Mr. Schmidt?” I heard my voice rise to a screech.

“Yeah, it’s Henry, all right — poor son of a bitch.” He pulled the sheet from the gray face. “Looks like someone poisoned him. Vomit all down the stairs. Funniest thing — there was a big red maraschino cherry smack in the middle of it.”

But I didn’t need him to tell me that. Flecks of coconut were stuck to Mr. Schmidt’s stubbly chin with lemon goo. It looked like the unbaked scones my mother painted with egg and sprinkles. His chin was like a raw lumpy coconut scone. I never wanted to eat again.

The kids were crowding around now. “That crazy killer lady in 4-C did it,” Katy-Ann Cooper said. “Remember, you got her that coconut cake? I just know she did it.”

“Shut your mouth, Katy-Ann,” I hissed. “You don’t know nothing.”

That was two years ago. I was a kid. This morning, when I looked for the Daily Mirror, my mother lied to me. She said the papers didn’t come. Then I saw them at the candy store on the corner. Big headlines — the Mirror, the News, the Herald Tribune.

I’m looking for Katy-Ann Cooper right now. When I find her, I’m gonna give her the worst Indian burn of her whole entire life.

I think she’ll burn in hell forever.

Somebody ought to.

The woman who hated the bronx by Rita Lakin

Elder Avenue

Linda Blue came from nothing and wanted everything. With the small amount of money she inherited from the last of her soul-numbing foster parents, she was able to go to nursing school. She became a nurse so she could marry a doctor. She would marry a doctor so she could become a doctor’s wife. She didn’t have the confidence to nab one who was already established, so she played the odds; she picked an easygoing, nice-looking young resident.

Frank Lombardi, who saw himself as just an average guy, thought Linda looked like the movie star Grace Kelly, aloof and unattainable. Grace was soon to become the Princess of Monaco and he felt he’d found a princess too. He was amazed at his good luck.

Linda chose Frank Lombardi as the answer to her prayers. He would save her.

The problem was, Linda picked wrong.

She didn’t go to heaven. She went to hell.

He took her to back to the Bronx.

They’d had a whirlwind courtship. During their short engagement, she spelled out her dream, many times, in great detail. She would live in the country, perhaps near Scarsdale, in a pretty house with a little garden, and maybe one child.

He didn’t hear her.

Frank shared his goal — giving back to all those who made it possible for a poor kid to get so far. He was talking about his family who supported him through med school and his friends and neighbors who encouraged him. So he intended to heal the sick in his old neighborhood. To take care of those who took care of him.

She was tuned into her own fantasies, and didn’t listen.

She talked him into eloping. He wanted a wedding with family and friends. “I want to see my princess in a white gown.” She told him she had no one to invite and that he should save his money for setting up his practice.

The first thing brand new Doctor Lombardi did before they left Newark in June was to buy a slightly used ’50 Buick LeSabre — he thought the tail fins were nifty, and it was perfect to carry his adored wife to their new home. During the drive up from Jersey, Frank had been secretive about their destination. He couldn’t wait to see her response to the place he’d picked out. Linda could hardly wait to see her dream house.

On route, he told her they had to start out modestly until he made some money. She told him she didn’t care about money. She thought White Plains would be pretty too. She’d even thought about the new Levittown she’d read about in Life magazine. As she told him many times, she just needed peace and quiet.

On the Cross Bronx Expressway, she’d been dozing. When he turned at Bruckner Boulevard, she woke up and found herself looking at ugly brick buildings and vacant lots filled with trash and scruffy children playing in the streets. What shortcut was he taking? Was he lost? But in moments he stopped at a corner and parked. She read the two intersecting street signs, Elder Avenue and Watson Avenue.

“Where the hell are we?” she asked.

“The Bronx,” he said proudly. “The East Bronx, to be exact. On the Pelham Bay elevated line.”

She turned her face to the window and pressed her throbbing head against its coolness. Oh God, no. Not the Bronx again.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She wouldn’t look at him. “This place will be the death of me.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re gonna love it here.”

He helped her out of the car and grandly showed her around like a docent at a fine museum. “Welcome to my neighborhood. Look across the street.” He pointed to a brick two-family house directly opposite. “I grew up in that house. Mama and Papa are on the left. My sister Connie and her husband Al and their kids live in the other. You’ll meet them tonight.”

So close? No, not so soon. I’m not ready for any of this…

He fondly recollected for her. “I played stickball in these streets. I rode my sled down that hill. I played immies in these gutters. God, it’s great to be home.” She turned away and he assumed she was ready for the rest of his tour.

“Here’s our building. Six stories high.”

What she saw were over-filled garbage cans. Dogs running loose. People. So many people. So much noise.

Practically shaking with excitement, Frank turned right and walked her to a door, the only break in the brick structure. “My office! My patients will use this entrance. And…” He led her again, this time into the three-sided courtyard. “Look at our great brick courtyard.”

What she saw were little boys riding bikes dizzily around small patches of wire-enclosed dirt that looked like scraggly attempts at flower beds. The flowers were all dead. The boys shouted at one another, unmindful of anyone but themselves. Linda looked up. The sun was blocked by crisscrossed clothes lines filled with hanging laundry.

“Come on inside.” Now he navigated her through the large lobby, where he hurried her to another door. Tarnished brass letters indicated it was apartment 1A. “Ta da! Our very own private entrance. Isn’t it great?”

He took out a set of keys and opened the door. As Frank bent over to lift Linda and carry her over the threshold, they heard clapping.

“Put me down, Frank,” she said. He did.

She looked around the lobby. It was very large, and had seen better days.

The floors were black and white tiled squares. With imitation Greek columns and metal ceilings and a long bank of mailboxes against the wall next to the elevator.

There were people in the lobby staring at them. A couple of old guys were playing chess at a card table with a third man watching them. Two women with baby strollers sat on a marble bench. A woman with groceries had just removed mail from her box. They were all grinning as they clapped.

“Hey, Frankie, you’re back!” This from one of the chess players. To Linda he said, “I’m Irving Pinsky. 5F. You must be Frankie’s new wife.”

Frank waved. “Hey, Irv, it’s Doctor Frankie now. Show some respect.”

The lady with groceries said, “Welcome back from the Schwartz family too. Apartment 3D. I’m Helen,” she said to Linda. To Frank she said, “So what’s the bride’s name?”

“This is Linda, my wife, and also gonna be my nurse. Isn’t she gorgeous?”

Linda turned sharply at this unexpected piece of news. His nurse?

“Too good for the likes of you, you, pisher. Just call me Phil,” the other chess player told Linda. A man who introduced himself as Sam teased Frank. “We always had Jewish doctors in this building. When Dr. Mayer retired to Miami, we didn’t expect a goyish kop like you to show up.”

Frank laughed aloud. “I promise I’ll be just as good.”

Phil shrugged. “Who said he was good?”

“Nice people, your in-laws,” said one of the mothers, Alice. “They got great food in their Italian restaurant on Arthur Avenue. That’s the Little Italy of the Bronx,” she informed Linda.

She shuddered. Don’t tell me about the Bronx. I could tell you horror stories.

“And speaking of food, don’t mind the smell.” Mrs. Schwartz pinched her nose with two fingers to make her point. “That’s Flanagan in 1G. They always have corned beef and cabbage on Thursdays.”

“Phew,” agreed Irving. Turning to Mrs. Schwartz, he said, “And your gribbines don’t smell all that great either. That chicken fat stinks up your floor pretty good.”

She made a face and waved a dismissive hand at him.

“Hey, doc.” Irving started to take a shoe off. “One of my big toes hurts. Could you take a look at it?”

Again Frank laughed. “Call my nurse for an appointment.” He hugged Linda, who stiffened.

“What a blondie, such a cutie,” the third man, Sam, commented with a leer. “She can take my temperature any time.” There was group laughter at that.

“Frank, get me inside right now!” Linda grabbed his arm, squeezing it hard.

Frank waved again. “Gotta go. Just drove in. The little woman needs her rest.”

With that, he lifted her up and carried her into 1A to a chorus of cheers.

When the door closed behind them, Frank faced his wife, beaming with pleasure. He waited for her to say something.

Linda turned away and walked from room to room examining the apartment.

“Swedish modern foam couches,” Frank recited, following after her as she looked at the bilious green fabric covering hard-looking flat pillows that sat on wrought-iron frames. “The salesman said it was the latest thing.”

He then flung himself into one of the plastic beanie bag “chairs” in the same ugly hue. He bounced around, legs flying upward, to show the fun of them.

She ignored him and continued down the dark hall. Frank dashed after her. The bathroom was small and also dark. She entered the next room and gasped. It was a nursery. Painted in blue. No furniture yet, but toys. Little boy’s toys.

He grinned at her and shrugged. “Just thinking ahead.”

Not here, never in this place, she thought.

He opened the master bedroom door for her with a flourish. She moved straight to the windows. She was chagrined to see they faced directly onto the courtyard. One of the kids on a bicycle rode by and stuck his tongue out at her. She quickly closed the curtains.

Frank continued his spiel. “And here’s our boudoir. And there’s our honeymoon bed, sweetheart.”

Finally she turned to him, red in the face. “Shut up! Shut up!”

That night, with great trepidation, she met Frank’s family — aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings — as they introduced themselves en masse at the big dinner held in the newlyweds’ honor across the street in his parents’ side of the two-family building. Too many people pushed in close to meet her. And to offer congratulations to the son who became a doctor. Frank’s brother-in-law, Al, laughed. “Yeah, he’d do anything so he wouldn’t have to work in the restaurant.” Much agreeable laughter at that. She was offered antipasto, which she refused. And she was presented with more names she wouldn’t remember.

“Our spaghetti sauce cooks for four hours, our secret recipe,” Mama Lombardi told her proudly as she doled her out a huge portion. But Linda merely moved her fork around the plate.

“You marry a girl with no appetite?” Papa Lombardi asked, astonished.

Frank laughed. “Hey, she’s gotta get used to you guys. Get your garlic breaths off of her. Let her breathe air.”

After a massive dinner of six courses, which Linda only picked at, they finally reached the spumoni and espresso. The men lit up their huge cigars. And Mama asked the inevitable question.

“Linda, where are your folks?”

She spoke in a low, flat voice. “I have no family. I’m an orphan.”

There was a silence at that. Mama crossed herself.

Frank put his arm around his wife. “Well, honey bun, you sure have one now.”

The tense moment over, Papa grinned and said, “Welcome to la famiglia.”

Frank turned the key in the lock and made his way back through the foyer into his parents’ living room.

Knowing his brother could hear him, Vincent said, “It’s what I always said about him. Frankie’s such an easygoing guy. Ya have to kick him in the ass three times before he knows you’re mad at him.”

His sister Connie grinned. “Yeah, what a pushover. Girls always take advantage of him.”

Frank addressed his siblings, also grinning. “Thanks for nothing. You’re just jealous.”

They laughed.

The immediate family was sitting around drinking more espresso “She’s all right?” Mama offered him a cup.

“Just tired. Been a long day with a lot of new things to get used to.”

Papa said, “I like her. She’s quiet.”

Mama gave him a gentle hit across his head. “You always were a sucker for the blondes.” She patted her pitch-black hair, with the slight gray feathering at her forehead, and winked at him.

They sat quietly digesting.

Mama couldn’t resist a shot of guilt. “You had to go and elope? And disappoint the whole family?”

“Mama, what else could I do? I told you, Linda had no one to invite. I didn’t want to make her unhappy on her wedding day.” Mama sighed. “I understand. So, all right, she met everyone tonight.”

“And we saved a bundle in wedding costs,” Papa commented with satisfaction.

“And you lost a bundle in wedding gifts you didn’t get, dummy,” Connie laughed.

“I’m such a lucky guy.” Frank sipped his espresso.

“She’s not Catholic.” Mama poured Papa his after-dinner Strega.

“Well, she ain’t Jewish.” Al beckoned his mother-in-law for another refill.

Connie put her two cents in. “Not Irish either.” She pretended mock horror. “You mean we’ve got a Protestant in the family?” She laughed. “She will be so alone in this neighborhood.”

Linda was alone but not for cultural or religious reasons. Linda belonged only to the darkness within herself. In the numbing blackness of a fog that never lifted. In a mind that shut off unbearable memories. She left the apartment only when she had to. She spent her days reading forgettable books or watching mindless television. She cleaned the house obsessively and cooked simple meals that filled the belly, but not the imagination. She waited for time to pass. She waited for a way to get out of here.

For a month, Frank whizzed about in a whirlwind of happiness, insensitive to his wife’s lack of interest. Getting the office fixed up. Getting flyers out into the neighborhood. Though it seemed word of mouth was enough. Mayer’s gone, come see the new young doctor. They were lining up at his door.

“Sure you don’t want to help out?” he asked Linda on the fly. “I could really use my pretty nurse in the office.” He intended to give her a peck on the lips, but she turned abruptly and he got her cheek.

“Find somebody else.”

A week later, because it was so hot outside, Linda, carrying groceries, decided to take the shortcut through the outside office door to get to their own quarters. As she entered, a set of chimes rang out “O Sole Mio.” She thought they were annoying, but Frank liked them because they’d been a housewarming gift from Connie.

Linda was surprised to see someone sitting at the appointment desk. She was somewhat older than Linda. The woman’s long, thick black hair was piled haphazardly atop her head. Her blue eyes flashed. She obviously liked bright colors. She wore a dropped-shoulder red drawstring blouse and a multicolored dirndl. And high heels. This exotic-seeming woman smiled widely at Linda and reached out her hand. She had a husky voice. “I’m Anna Marie. I’ve known Frankie all his life. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Linda didn’t return the gesture, so Anna Marie lifted an eyebrow and placed her hand back on the desk.

Linda looked closely. A wedding band.

“I’m helping out temporarily until he finds time to get someone else.”

Linda glanced at her quickly to see if there was disapproval there. If there was, Anna Marie covered it.

Anna Marie reassured her that she wasn’t a threat to the newly wedded Mrs. Lombardi. “I’m married to Frank’s old friend Johnny. We all went to P.S. 93 together and then on to James Monroe High. Frank was the only one of us who went off to college.”

Linda didn’t comment, so Anna Marie had to fill the silence. “He got a scholarship, but you know all that…”

Luckily, Frank walked in from his examining room. He grinned. “At last the two loves of my life meet. I was mad about Anna until Johnny stole her from me,” he said to Linda with a twinkle. “But all’s well. We’re happy, aren’t we?”

Neither woman spoke. Linda was aware that Anna Marie was attempting to evaluate her.

Let her try, she thought.

The chimes were heard again as an elderly lady walked in the front door.

“Ah,” Frank said, “here’s Mrs. Green. Please get her chart, Anna.” With that he went back to his office.

“Nice talking to you,” Anna Marie said sarcastically.

“Yes,” Linda replied, and walked past her to get to the inside apartment entrance.

In her fog she learned the streets of the neighborhood. A chubby couple, Betty and Burt, ran the luncheonette, called the candy store by one and all. Everyone gathered there. The men came to schmooze and read the sports pages in the Daily News or the New York Post. The young mothers dropped in for black-and-white sodas or a two-cents plain. The younger kids hung out after school, poking playfully at one another like bear cubs. The teenagers flirted and did their mating dance. At one time or another, just about everyone checked in at the candy store for the local gossip.

Linda knew some of the gossip was about her. She imagined them asking, What do you make of her? But she didn’t care what they thought.

The grocery was next door. Murray used the stub of a pencil to add up Linda’s purchases on the brown paper bag, as other customers sized her up. Were they wondering, That Linda, who does she think she is — she stuck up or something? She imagined so.

The butcher was next, and as she waited her turn the women gaped and looked at her brazenly. “Give the pretty doctor’s wife a nice cut, Herman.” This was from a frumpy-looking housewife trying for sarcasm.

I know what you’re thinking. Linda stared back. She some kinda snob? Right? Well, gossip all you want, you’ll get nothing from me. I’ve got nothing to give.

Up and down Watson Avenue the neighborhood lived and breathed. And Linda moved like a shadow, speaking only when spoken to. She was meticulous in her dress. She wore calf-length pencil-slim skirts and simple blouses with matching cardigans. Her hair was page-boy length, her outfits in muted colors. Looking as lifeless as she felt.

Nobody knew of the cancer that grew inside her. A cancer called the Bronx.

On an occasional Saturday night, when Frank could make time to go out, they spent it with his best friends. Linda had been introduced to Anna Marie’s husband, Johnny. The three buddies were close, sharing childhood memories and private jokes. Frank worried about Linda feeling left out, but she didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes they had dinner at Johnny and Anna Marie’s apartment in Parkchester, in a fairly new development that was considered very classy for the East Bronx. Linda didn’t like to cook so it was their place or eating out.

Tonight they ate at a deli and took in a movie at the Ward Theater. Afterwards, they went for a walk. Anna Marie and Linda lagged behind the men. Typically the guys sauntered ahead to gab about sports and cars and other male subjects and the girls were expected to talk girl stuff.

The guys passed a store that featured sexy underwear. Johnny stopped and whistled at a red bra and matching garter belt. “Whooey. That’s my Christmas present for Anna Marie this year. What about something like that for Linda?”

Frank shook his head. “She’s not the type.”

Johnny finally had to ask. “What type is she — that wife of yours? What’s with her? Can’t she help out and sit in your office? What else does she have to do?”

“She’s different,” Frank told his buddy. “She’s shy and fragile.”

“Crazy. You have to pay Anna Marie a salary when you’re just starting out?”

“I don’t mind.”

Johnny shrugged “Well, it’s your funeral.”

Linda walked with Anna Marie who chatted about items in the windows. She laughed when she saw the red lingerie.

Linda gagged at the sight and stopped short. She felt faint and grabbed for a wall.

“I bet I know what Johnny was saying.” Anna Marie stopped when she realized Linda was no longer beside her. She turned. “Hey.”

“What?” Linda could barely speak. No… no, not those memories… go away…

“What? What’s with you? I’m trying to be friendly and hold up my end of the conversation and I get nothing back. You don’t talk about clothes. Or the movie we just saw, or even Frankie. What goes through that head of yours?”

Linda’s voice was so low that Anna Marie could barely hear her. “All I think about is how to get out of the Bronx.”

When Linda, to her shock, realized she was pregnant, she didn’t tell Frank. She prayed it would go away. But after watching her race to the bathroom to throw up enough times, and realizing her breasts were swollen, the doctor quickly figured it out. He was thrilled. He started calling her his Madonna. Even though she told him not to, Frank immediately announced the good news to his entire family. Of course, they all wanted to be part of it. Connie took her out to buy maternity clothes, not that she really needed them. She couldn’t keep much food down and stayed thin. Connie’s husband Al worked in a furniture store, so they got baby furniture at a discount.

It didn’t take long for the neighbors to find out, and they got into the act as well, bringing her casseroles so she wouldn’t have to cook. Frank did the cooking after work or Mama Lombardi had food sent over from the restaurant. Mrs. Schwartz brought down her famous Kosher chicken soup. Mrs. Lee from the Chinese laundry carried over her egg drop soup. Mrs. Flanagan made a huge pot of potato soup. The strength and variety of smells made Linda throw up even more. The entire building was involved in trying to keep the doctor’s skinny wife fed.

And the new baby-to-be, clothed. Bassinets were put together. Little blankets were crocheted. And infant sweaters and caps, as well. People were dropping in all the time with their offerings. What little privacy she had was gone.

Frank surprised her one day by bringing home an insurance policy on his life.

“Why did you do that?” she asked. “I would never ask you to do that.”

He kissed her gently. “Never say never.” As he was about to head to his office, he informed her, “Now that I’ll have a son, I want him protected if anything happens to me.” Frank was sure it would be a boy.

“Frank.”

He turned. “What, my darling little Madonna?”

“I can’t take pain. I’m so afraid.”

He came back and held her close for a moment. “I’ll be nearby, so don’t you worry.” Then he left.

“I can’t stand anymore pain,” she said to the closed door.

Linda was aware that all the Lombardis were in the waiting room of Monteflore Hospital the night she gave birth. She knew that Frank was pacing worriedly outside the door, as expectant fathers do. What good did it do her? Let him hear his wife screaming. He knew nothing of her pain. He knew nothing about being torn apart so badly, so many times before, that giving birth was a new pain beyond endurance.

The OR nurses tried to hold her down, but she was too strong for them. Arms flailing, the next scream was blood-curdling. “Damn you, Dyre! Damn you!”

“Push!” urged the doctor.

She pushed, her fingernails digging into the sheet, and shouted, “Prospect!” at the top of her lungs.

And at the final push, the pain more horrific than before, “Damn you to hell, Burnside!”

She fainted. When she came to, her doctor was gone and she listened to the nurses talking about her. The one bending over the bassinet that held her six-pound infant girl said, “Did you ever hear anything like that in your life?”

Her partner agreed. “In all my years they yelled for husbands, for God, or cursing, sobbing, and screaming, but I never heard anyone cry out, Dyre.”

“Or Prospect or Burnside. What do you make of it?”

“Who knows? She’s peculiar, that one.”

You don’t want to know, Linda thought. She had dared not call out their names, the ones who murdered her childhood with their foul misuse of her body. Which had they damaged more — her body or her mind? Those foster folks who promised to care for her, who debased her instead. On streets in the Bronx where she had been forced to live. Where her pain had been excruciating and her blood had spilled. She could still see that trembling nine-year-old being forced into sleazy lingerie, her mouth smeared with lipstick, and a monster bearing down on her. But she could shout out those names — that litany of shame — those Bronx street names. Places she thought she had escaped… but there was no escape, was there?

Baby Frances (no longer Frank, Jr.) was adored by one and all. Frank was driven to work even harder for his darling little girl. He was taking more and more house calls in addition to his full days at the office.

Frank came home one night, shaken, and told Linda that a doctor on Morris Avenue had been shot by a burglar who climbed in his window to get drugs. He lived on the ground floor too.

He showed her the gun he had bought. Linda was shocked. “I would never want that in our apartment. Not with a child.”

He reassured her they’d probably never need it, but for safety’s sake it was going to stay in his bedside drawer. He was going to teach her how to use it. “Besides,” he said, joking, “the gun probably won’t work, knowing Vince’s shady friends who got it for him.” And he reminded her once again, “Never say never. You never know when you might change your mind about something.”

This was her chance and she grabbed at it. “Frank, dear. Now that we have Frances, isn’t it time to leave the city? It’s getting so dangerous. Can’t we move somewhere quiet in the country where Frances will have a better life?… Please?”

“Let me think about it.”

A few days later he told her he had thought about it. He loved the city. It was a great place to grow up. Didn’t he turn out fine? Think of the good schools and the parks. The museums. And all the friendly people. Besides, he didn’t want to deprive his family of closeness to their new grandchild. So the answer was no.

Linda lost all hope.

Six unhappy months later, she was awakened from her sleep by a sound. Linda turned to Frank’s side of the bed. He wasn’t there; he’d gone out on a house call. It was hard for her to pull herself awake because of the sleeping pills she took every night. She squinted at the alarm clock. It was nearly 2 a.m. It took her a few moments to focus. There was a shadow at the window facing the courtyard. She had forgotten to close the curtains. She stiffened. Someone was there. A nosy neighbor? No, it looked like he was dressed in black. With a pasty white face pressed against the glass.

Linda felt her skin crawl. Covering her head with the blanket, she groped for the phone. With shaking hands, she dialed the operator. Her breath raspy from fatigue and terror, she whispered, “Call the police. A prowler, someone’s in my courtyard.” She gave the operator her address. Moments later, the operator said the police were on their way.

Linda’s heart hammered against her chest as she peered over the blanket. The prowler was gone. She bolted out to the baby’s room. Thank God, she’s asleep! She stared at little Frances in her crib. Her throat tightened, on the verge of sobbing. I’ll never let anyone hurt you. Never.

Why wasn’t her husband here to protect her when she needed him?

Linda had no idea how long she had been standing at the crib when the police arrived. They searched the courtyard, and all around the building, found nothing. They were blasé — routine stuff for them. They told her not to worry — probably some passing neighbor or a Peeping Tom — they’re harmless. He was probably miles away by now.

Suddenly she remembered the gun, and suddenly she wanted the police to get out. When they left, she hurried to their bedroom and removed it from Frank’s drawer and held it. She thought of the life insurance policy. Never say never, he’d said. She giggled. And Frank was always right. It’s now or never.

Moving as if in a trance, she took a towel and wrapped her iron in it and opened the kitchen window. She reached outside and smashed in the other side of the window, making sure the glass fell inward.

Linda stood in the kitchen for what seemed like hours. When she heard Frank’s key in the lock, she dialed the police again. “Hurry,” she sobbed, “the prowler’s come back!”

Frank was surprised to see her. “What are you doing up so late?” When Frank moved toward her, she raised the gun and fired.

Frank had been right about Vince’s contacts. The gun was faulty and it exploded, killing Linda as Frank watched in horror.

The family tearfully buried her in a nearby cemetery. All the neighbors came to pay their respects.

Linda had also been right. She knew the Bronx would never let her go. She would be stuck there for all eternity.