Category: Brooklyn

The Song We Would Sing

Our children were quite young. We were living in the walk-up in Brooklyn, near the park, when, Sonja, my older sister who I spoke with sporadically over the past few years, called. We were in the bustle of dressing and feeding them, cleaning the kitchen, and dressing ourselves.

“Your father,” she said, “died this morning.” She may have said, ‘Daddy died,’ but I don’t recall that clearly.

“I’m sorry,” I am sure I said.

A graveside service was planned for the next afternoon. We arranged for a hotel room and a rental car.

Driving across the Brooklyn Bridge that evening. The lights of lower Manhattan. Chinatown, the East River bridges, the medical centers. All of it both so spectacular and so routine. I was sad to leave, if only for a day or two.

At the grave side, beside my mother’s, Sonja brought us around to say hello to family. The resemblance among my relatives was unmistakable. People I had not seen in ten years and more. Some not since I was young. Familiar faces. Names. Familiar smiles. Some, too, I had never seen nor heard of before.

How had so many years had passed. Why?

I know the how of what happened. The why was the real issue. I’d moved away after college. Long before cell phones and email. We’d never shared numbers or addresses. I lost track of family.

All those years, benignly estranged. No arguments. Disputes. Nasty words. Just nothing.

“You remember Aunt Minnie and Uncle Fred?”

“Yes,” I said. “The dentist?”

“Well, this is Janice, their great granddaughter.”

“And you remember Ruthie? Ethel’s, granddaughter?

“Yes.”

“This is Rebecca, her daughter’s youngest child.”

“Hello,” I said. “This is Bess and these are our children.” It was so good to feel a connection there with them.

On it went. New people, children of children of aunts and uncles I knew. Cousins of cousins. Generations of births and birthdays and illnesses and new jobs. Lost. Lost to me. An old novel with chapters that kept being written after I had put it down. I wanted now to read those unread pages, though I knew it was not possible. The gaps were inaccessible to me.

We drove back home the next day. Listening to Waze. The radio. My mind present, and also wandering in the distant past.

I had moved away. Never once thinking of the consequences. Caring for only my need to be away.

The kids were asleep in the back.

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“What?” I said.

“How did you lose track of all those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever think about them? Ask about them?”

“Sonja would tell me things once in a while, but I never thought more about it. For a while all the names had faces but then they became only names.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It does. I feel terrible. I let it happen. Not once thinking about them. As if I left and they disappeared.”

“But, it was you who disappeared. Not them.”

“But my parents never…”

“Never what?”

“Never let me know what was happening.”

“And you never asked them?”

“No.”

“My parents and I didn’t talk much and then they were in nursing homes. And with their dementia it became impossible.”

“That’s not really an excuse, and you know it. There clearly were others.”

“No. Not an excuse really. An explanation. Maybe.”

“Maybe, but let’s never do that to our children, please,” Bess said. “Let’s keep them connected. Show them how important family is. What it is to be part of a family. Making family the most important thing.”

“I didn’t grow up with that.”

“But you did. You remembered your Aunt Minnie, Aunt Ethel. Harold. But then you let them all drop away.”

“I did,” I said. “I only see that now.”

Back home, we returned the car and stopped at the market on Eighth Avenue and 12th Street to pick up milk and bread. Bess put the kids to bed.

I stood by the stove heating water for tea. Mesmerized by the bubbles twisting upward. The larger ones roiling the surface. The warmth on my face. Drifting into another space.

Seeing all those others, how they were with each other. Embracing one another. How easily they embraced me as they did when I was so young.

But feeling, in that mindless space, what I had never said to myself before. I don’t think that my parents loved me. Feeling that so clearly should have wrenched at my heart, but it didn’t. It was, instead, a relief, a validation of, growing up, how lonely I was. Lost. Alone. An observer at some close remove. Awkward. Feeling as though I never had the right or reliable answer to any question. In school. At home. Anywhere. Nothing felt unjudged. Nothing felt safe. Though I can’t ever remember being aware then in those terms. As if the wrong response would be punished by further isolation.

The kettle must have been boiling for a while. Bess came up behind me. She lay her hand on my shoulder, and turned off the burner.

“How are you doing?” She said.

“I’m okay,”

“You sure? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I was watching the water boiling” I told her. “My mind drifting to yesterday. The past. Not happy thoughts though. Thinking about what it was like for me growing up. But then a song came to me, as if from the rhythm of the bubbles. One we used to sing in the car when we drove from our apartment in the Bronx to my father’s relatives in Brooklyn. The windows down, my father smoking a pipe, my mother on the front passenger side. And, she would begin to sing ‘Merrily we roll along’ and I would join in, and we would sing it a few times until we tired of it, and she would start our favorite one. The one I loved. ‘You are my… sunshine’ she would sing, and I would join in, ‘… my only sunshine…,’ and we would sing the whole song, over, and over again, ‘You make me happy when skies are gray,’ until our cheeks hurt from smiling. And then she would nod to me and slow the tempo down and we’d both deepen our voices, for this last time, the last line, ‘Please… don’t… take… my… sunshine… away.’”

Bess listened to me while she made the tea and set the cups down on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” she said.

Angie Vito Concetta

After dinner, Vito clears the table and places the dishes in the sink, plugging the drain and running warm water over them with a few drops of detergent. The water soothes his hands as he looks out into the back yard. Though they eat early in winter, the sky is full dark now. The tree trunks are lit only by the light from the window.

When he finishes the dishes, he dries his hands, puts on his reading glasses and sits at the table with the newspaper open in front of him.

Angie is on the phone in their bedroom.

He looks up from the paper. The cabinets, the appliances on the counters. The radio. He feels distant, distracted, touching his palm to his chest where the ache has been. If anyone were to ask, he’d say he doesn’t dwell on things. Angie does, he knows, but that is something he would not tell another soul.

Despite the short winter daylight hours, the days feel long now. Longer than they had been when was working. When he’d been up at four and at the Hunt’s Point market by five and then to their store on Tenth Avenue by 6:00 and opening the doors by 6:30, folding the boxes and stacking the crates, while the women with their mesh bags start to come in, looking over and touching the fruits and vegetables. All fresh this morning he’d tell them.

None of that fills his days anymore. After he sold the business to the Koreans, neither his mind nor his body have adjusted to the change. He still wakes at same time. Doses off soon after dinner. His body aches in ways now it never seemed to before. His mind wanders with nowhere to go.

You should read a book, Angie tells him. Go for a walk.

They had married right after high school. Lived with her parents in Bensonhurst and moved to President Street near Carroll Street Park when they needed more room. That was the best place, he felt. Families  strollers, dogs, people who could tell the town your family came from just by looking at your face.

It was familiar. As familiar as this street now is unfamiliar, with three cars in the driveways and closed windows and doors.  

It’s been ten years since they moved here, when people were beginning to move out of the city. Because of the schools. The cost of everything. Real estate. Before the bubble popped.

But the move was not what he expected. Not that he’s said a word about it to Angie. He doesn’t know how she feels. Maybe she has friends here. He knew the kids once did.

The uneasy quiet lasts all day now. How could Angie have tolerated this day after day, year after year? After the kids left. With no car. She never learned to drive. Only her cousin Marie in Larchmont to give her a ride when she needed one.

The Koreans gave him two-thirds of what he’d asked for in cash. He still owns the building. They pay him the rest in monthly installments plus rent. It seemed like a good deal. They had no lawyers. He thought that was best. The brokers and the lawyers take too much. And, for what?

Angie is on the phone in the bedroom with her sister Concetta. He hears her consoling voice. Concetta’s Salvatore is gone now a year. He’d left her something but not enough. Maybe it once seemed like enough. And then the COVID. The Espositos, the Santarpias, and the Ingoglias. All gone. Died or moved. Only the church is there for her. Morning and evening mass. Thank God, Concetta always says. That and her women’s group on Wednesday afternoons.

He gets up and moves closer to the bedroom door. Angie’s soft voice, Yes, I know, she says, Maybe it will get better, Con. God willing. You never know.

Hearing her voice, the caring in it, he thinks, She is all I have. All that matters. All he needs.

He should tell her that. And that there is nothing for him here. For them. They should move back to the city. Sell the house. Sublet an apartment. Cobble Hill. Carroll Gardens. Not a big place. Maybe with a back garden. Near Concetta. Maybe stay with her till they find a place. Sell the car. Who needs a car in the city?

They would have Saint Cecilia’s and the park. He would have places to walk. The smell of the bakeries. The pizzerias. Kind faces. People to talk to. The city. The constant sounds of mothers and children. Rhythmic life. He could find work part-time. Somebody could always use someone with experience.

And then of course, he thinks, when the time might come, Concetta would be there for Angie after he’s gone. Not so soon, God willing, but sometime.

Angie is quiet now. He imagines her sitting on the side of the bed. Her fingers touching her forehead. Her eyes closed. Her sister on her mind. Heavy.

He goes to the sink. Finishes the dishes. Scrubs the pots. Dries them all, stacks  and arranges them in cabinet. Pats his shirt for his cigarettes. His pants. An old habit.

This time he will ask Angie to help. She has a clear head. She wouldn’t rush into anything. She would have handled the Koreans differently. He knows that now. She’s never said that to him, but he knows. She wouldn’t bring it up. He wishes she would.

Angie comes up behind him, Vito, she says, Concetta told me the city has changed. You wouldn’t recognize Court Street now. She says the Chinese are buying up stores and the brownstones. The prices are crazy, and the Moroccans and Yemenis are moving in. Why can’t they stay on Atlantic Avenue? I told her maybe she should sell her place and move up here and live with us. You know, get out of the city. Wouldn’t that be good?”

Angie wraps her arms around Vito’s shoulders, kisses the back of his neck as she always does, and holds him tight.

The Dance

You want to go where?

To the prom.

You’re fourteen, Malachi. Who goes to a prom at fourteen? Fifteen maybe but not fourteen.

It’s the junior-junior prom. It’s kind of like a prom but only for the ninth graders. None of the younger kids can come.

They call that a prom?

That’s what they call it, Ma.

I never heard of such a thing.

I think it’s new this year.

Will they do it on zoom?

Maaa! No not on Zoom. What would be the point of that?

It would make me feel better if it was on zoom. Are you going with anyone?

Yes.

Gregory?

No, Ma. Not Gregory.

Then who?

A girl.

A girl? A girl who?

Sandy.

Sandy what?

Sandy Celestino. She’s nice.

Nice? What’s so nice about her?

She’s smart. She’s in my algebra and Spanish classes.

Anything else nice?

She has really nice eyes and her hair is pretty and dark brown, almost black. Sometimes she wears it pulled back like you do. And she has nice teeth.

Nice teeth?

Yes, and has a nice smile and she laughs like Aunt Minnie. And when she laughs, it makes me laugh too.

So, this Sandy person, is she Jewish?

I don’t know. I think she’s Italian. So maybe she could be a Jewish Italian.

Like who, for instance?

Primo Levi.

Anyone else?

That’s the only one I know. No, Laura Fermi too.

Who was she?

Enrico Fermi’s wife.

Where do you get this information?

I google it.

Is Sandy’s mother Jewish? You know that if her mother is Jewish she could legally be Jewish.

Ma, you mean there are legal Jews and illegal Jews?

Don’t be such a shmegegi. You know what I mean!

… Or real and fake Jews.

Stop, Malachi.

… Or counterfeit Jews? Pretend Jews? Or just ‘maybe’ Jews? Half-way ones? Leaning toward thinking about becoming Jews?

Okay. You’re a comedian now? So, tell me aren’t there any Jewish girls in your school?

Some.

Any real ones? I’m kidding. So, what’s wrong with them.

Nothing.

Then why not one of them?

I don’t know.

Well, I know why. And you know too.

Why? How can you know. You don’t even know who she is.

Well, I’ll tell you.

What?

Her chest. Those Italian girls get bosoms early. Before a lot of other girls. It’s a fact. They do. The Latin blood. But when they get older… you ever see this girl’s mother?

Once.

So, you know.

Ma, stop. That’s not nice. I’m just going to a dance. I’m not getting married. I just like her and she’s my friend and I asked her, that’s all. You’re making me embarrassed.

Okay, I’m sorry, but I’m telling you, Malachi, you start up with one of them and then they get expectations. That is if they even let you in the front door in the first place. You know the older ones, the grandparents, think we have horns like that statue. But the kids, probably not. But if they do, it’s not their fault. It’s just what the parents teach them.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ma.

No? Listen to me. It’s never far away. The Jew thing, with them. Everything is going along fine, you’re happy, things are good, and then when one day something goes wrong, you say something wrong, look the wrong way and, boom, you know what? All of a sudden, then you’re a dirty Jew. Ask your father. He knows. No. Don’t ask your father. I won’t say anything more about that. Don’t you say anything either.

Mama, please, people aren’t like that anymore. Not like in the olden days. You sound like grandma used to. My friends are not like that. Their parents aren’t like that.

No? Maybe not. I hope not. Maybe I should get out of the house more. Mingle. So, when is this dance?

Friday night.

Who has a dance on a Friday night? It’s Shabbos. But at least your father won’t know. He’ll be at the temple all night.

Then how could I get there?

I could call an Uber for you.

So… I can go?

Of course, you can go. What am I, prejudiced? And it’s a good thing too. If it was on a Thursday, your father would want to drive you and then he’d know she wasn’t Jewish. He’d make a big magilla out of it. But he’d take one look at her and he’d know. He’d see right away.

See what?

The bosoms.

Wednesday Morning White Boy Blues

“Get up,” she says.

“Get up!”

“What?”

“Your phone is buzzing.”

“Is there any coffee?”

“I’ll ask Higgins to bring you some. Answer your phone.”

“Who’s Higgins?”

“Yeah, who’s Higgins, you got that right, just answer the damn phone.”

“Hello?” He fumbles on the night table for the joint he started and let burn out last night. He puts his glasses on and clicks on his phone. Holds it loosely to his ear.

“Hey, Home boy, where you at? What up, my man? You coming in today? I got something I want you to do for me.”

He moves the phone closer to his ear, covers the phone, and speaks into it . “Nothing, man. Just chillin’ here. Sure, I’ll be there.” He motions for his wife to leave.

“Who is that?” she says. He waves her away. She sits on the side of the bed.

“Nothing, No one. No, not you man. I was talking to somebody else. It’s okay, man. It’s cool. Look can I call you right back?”

Word, dude! she hears before he clicks off.

“That was Benny,” he says.

“Benny Wadsworth, our boss?”

“Yeah.”

“And he talks like that? And what kind of big thing does he want you to do?”

“No, no. It’s nothing. I don’t know. That’s just his way sometimes. You know, he acts easy, chill. That’s all. Just one of the boys.”

“Just one of the boys? Which boys? Are you one of the boys? That’s silly question. Isn’t it? Because he was just talking to you that way. Does he talk to clients like that?”

“No, I don’t know. Some, maybe.”

“He’s a grown man. He runs a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more, and he talks like he’s fifteen years old wannabe with his orange pants hanging down below his ass, holding onto his crotch, waiting in line in a lunchroom upstate for a juvee he says he didn’t commit? And what kind ”

“Come on, Essie, give me a break.”

“You talk like that?”

“No.”

“But you condone it?”

“He’s my boss. I don’t condone anything. I do what I have to do. Put up with what I have to. I’m nothing without him. He calls all the shots.”

“Well, you better give that whole idea a little more thought, like what kind of shots. And you think you’re nothing? You think I like to hear that? What am I then? How am I supposed to feel when you say that? How do you think I feel when you say she’s ‘just somebody else?’ Maybe you should take a good look at all of this. We’re in this together. For your sake and mine.”

He gets his clothes on and leaves for work. He takes the subway across the river, getting off at Rector Street. He buys a coffee and a bagel from the vendor on the corner and brings it up to his desk. He connects his computer into the VPN, logs in, and he sits.

He looks around the room.

It’s seven fifteen a.m. Twenty-five other white boys like him in clean, white Succession-looking shirts and royal-blue ties, headphones over their neat razor cuts, staring at three screens lit up in front of them. Smiling false smiles and making pencil marks on yellow note pads. Following the rules. Putting in the time. Keeping in line. Doing what’s needed to do to make a dime.

Who the hell am I? What the hell am I doing?

 I pull down two hundred and fifty K and I still have to suck up to anyone one step up and two steps ahead of me just to keep that going. It’s like they own a piece of me and they do. Sometimes I feel like a shit for doing that, but my boss makes ten times that and gets good seats in Nobu, free tickets to  the U.S. Open and a season pass to the Nets and Giants every year and I wait around and treat him like he can do no wrong and see if he’ll ask me along one day.  I mean why does he get the free tickets and shit? In what world does that make sense. He makes millions and they give him free shit. I have to pay for everything. He screws anyone one he can for an extra buck. And what, he gets the free ride? And I get what?

Everything I have, the home, the car, nice clothes, kids in a good school, could be gone with one bad week. One bad day. One mistake. One slip. Gone. No one is going to care about me or what happens to me. Security walks me to the elevator. Then what do I do? I’m out on the street and who would give a rat’s ass for me?

I have bills up the ass and my marriage is desiccating. I know that. My kids think I’m old and ask me why I’m tired all the time.

I work hard. I work hard for what I have. For what we have. I take the subway every day. I’m not ignorant. I know lots of people have it worse off than me. I see that. I feel bad for them. But what? Does that make me feel any better? It doesn’t.

And assholes like Benny just make it all worse for guys like me. Because they act like misogynists and ignorant know-nothings who think they know everything, and keep others down, I get treated just like one of them when I walk into a room. No one even waits to hear what I’m going to say. Like I’m wrong before I say a word. Just for the way I look.

I feel squeezed all the time. I’m in the middle. The people on top get anything they want and the people on the bottom want to take what I have. Does that sound fair to you? I mean, I’m squeezed. No one gives me anything. And then what? I have to watch what I say, how I look. I’m white, I get that. Do I have any control over that?

And in the meantime, I get treated like I’m always the bad guy. I’m the white guy in the room with a little money so what do I know. I know history. I know inequality. But I’m a human person like everyone else. Don’t write me off and just give me the smirk and roll your eyes routine because I’m white and a man. I mean, how does that feel fair? I always give people a seat on the subway, but even then, even this morning for crap sake, I get the smirk, like I’m only doing that because of what people might think, not because I think it’s the right thing. Or I’m condescending or just performing. You think any of these other shithead grunts around me care about anything or anyone except themselves? Not chance. Make it now, they think. Screw everything else and everyone in your way.

Shit! Why me? Everyone leave me alone. Sometimes I feel like I should just quit. Leave. Go away. Pack us all up and go someplace. Far away. Start over. Take some cash and disappear. Get out of this city. Open a grocery store someplace. Shit. I don’t know. Just leave me alone for Christ’s sake.

Noodle Soup

Malachi had not seen his parents in over two weeks. In that time, he had started grad school, moved to an apartment in Morningside Heights, and started driving for Lyft.

His parents live in the South Slope in Brooklyn. A middle class neighborhood wedged in between high-end gentrification, low-income row houses, Salvadoran and Cambodian immigrant communities, two hospitals, and a sprinkling of cheap, trending rundown artist lofts.

His mother was in the kitchen.

Sit, Malachi, sit… I made noodle soup. You want?

No thanks, Ma, I ate already in the cafeteria.

You ate already? You can still have soup, no?

Ma…please.

Only a small bowl. You want some sriracha in it?

Sriracha? In noodle soup?

It’s miso brown rice ramen soup with vegan dumplings and organic greens. Your sister sent me her recipe from Mississippi. No more chicken for me. No more. You know what they do to those chickens? No? Well, don’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. You shouldn’t know from such things.

Ma… I have decided not to go to the Cousins’ Club anymore.

And that is why?

Because I have no time and they’re a bunch of self-absorbed, uninformed, ultra-privileged, dolts.

What?  All of them? My sisters’ children? They have, all of a sudden, become a bunch of uninteresting, uninformed dolts?

Not all of a sudden. And no sriracha please.

Yes, okay, no sriracha. So, if not all of a sudden, then was it just slowly? Or was it at different rates? Maybe only one at a time? The boys first and then the girls? In size or in age order? Or just by IQ in descending order?

Ma… stop.

And you? By some benevolent narrowly focused gravitational wave of dark matter from deep in the ancient universe, you happily find yourself, through no effort of your own, to be singularly immune to this unexplained affliction of acquired familial self-absorbed ignorance?

Ma. I’m serious and you’re making fun of me.

I know I am, but I’m not doing it to hurt you. You are my boy, and I love you, and I love all of them too. I am making fun seriously.

Seriously?

Yes. Tell me one thing you feel they are so ignorant about.

It’s not one thing. It’s lots of things. I want to talk about Israel and Gaza. And nobody else wants to. That’s totally off limits. And it’s not just that I want to talk about it, I think we should do something to stop sending arms to fuel the war. That’s the most important thing, but it’s the same for other things: eroding democracy, immigration reform, affordable housing, inequality, microplastics, fascism, creeping autocracy, and the list goes on. And they want to talk about kimchi, Oscar nominations, Jon Stewart, or complaining about which is better, an EV or a hybrid or plug-ins that cost over 50 grand, which none of them could afford anyway. That is the entire depth and breadth of their conversations. They’re my cousins but…

But  what, they should organize an anti-war microplastics clean-up day in the Gowanus Canal?

Well, no. Not that but ignoring any responsibility for what any of us can to do to stop the world from falling apart. If we don’t do it, no one else will. There is no one else.

And you know they don’t want to talk about these things?

No. I don’t know, for sure. Maybe they do. I don’t know.

Hah! So, how can you be so sure you don’t want a little sriracha in the soup? One drop?

No, thank you.

I know how you’re feeling, Malachi. When I was a kid, we couldn’t talk about money, politics, or religion. That was the way it was. Maybe that’s what’s going on with them. I think you want your cousins who you have known all your life, and who you share your mitochondria and protoplasm with, to also want to think and talk about what you feel is so important. And you want them to do this all on their own and not because you tell them to, or you expect them to. Is that it?

I guess so.

Maybe what you want is asking too much of them.

Ma…stop. You’re making it sound like this is more about me than about them.

And you don’t see it that way?

I don’t think so.

It’s like when you were in junior high and you liked Rosemarie Stellutti, and you wanted her to know that without you having to tell her, and you also wanted her to tell you that she liked you too, taking a risk that you wouldn’t take, and you blamed her for it.

What are you talking about? I didn’t blame her. I just felt bad.

You want them to know what you are interested in, even though you won’t give them even the littlest of hints, or the tiniest of nudges to show them. Like sort of a little peck on the cheek you should have given Rosemarie before she started going out with Frankie Todaro. Am I wrong?

I don’t know.

Well, Malachi, I want you should try some sriracha in the noodle soup but imagine if I didn’t say anything and I just left it in the cupboard and just thought to myself about how much I wish you, all on your own, would want some. Right?

Yeah?

… and then if you left without trying it, I could think to myself, ‘what’s wrong with him that he hasn’t asked me if I have any sriracha to add to this delicious soup? How could he be such an uninformed dolt about how good sriracha can make the soup taste? He should know these things. What else doesn’t he know? And here I thought I knew him so well. I thought he was so much better than that.’ You see what I’m saying?

I guess. I know. It makes sense, but…

But what, eat the soup any way you want it.

… but Ma, you’re not listening to me. I’m not blaming them or anyone. I just don’t want to have to spend two hours every other Thursday night with them anymore! I just wanted to tell you how I feel. I just wanted you to listen. No lecture. I didn’t ask for that or for any of this. You hear something and you talk but you don’t listen. I don’t want soup. And no Dr. Phil high school quiz show psychoanalysis, no jokey stories, and no sriracha. I have to go. And, no, I don’t want any soup to take home with me on the subway.

No?

No.

Okay, nicht ist nicht. no is no. Come here give me a kiss.

Pickleball? Yeah, That Sounds Like Fun or Myron’s Pickleball Altercation

So, tell me, Myron, what happened.

I got into an altercation in the park.

Did you get hurt? What kind of an altercation? What park?

The park by Brooklyn Bridge.

Did anyone get hurt? Did the police come?

No, no. Nothing.

What nothing? You look a wreck.

It got a little heated. Nobody got hurt. Millstein stepped in before anything got out of hand. Millstein’s a big guy. He stepped in.

Where did he step in, Myron. Just tell me what happened. What did you do?

I was playing doubles with Singer, and that guy Mickey something, and Rosalie.

Rosalie?

Singer’s sister-in-law, and she had to leave and so this guy comes on the court. You know, the pickleball courts by the bridge.

Yes, yes.

And so this guy I never saw before comes on and he says he’ll fill in for her and before you know it, we’re warming up doubles, and it’s not like the usual friendly game. He’s hitting smashes and boom-boom right at you. In the warm-up! And so then when we start to play, he’s telling us all where we’re supposed to stand and how to call the scores and which side we should be serving on and who goes first. And what he was saying doesn’t make any sense, it wasn’t logical at all.

Wait Myron, you have to understand, not everybody thinks like you do. Not everything has to make sense. Yes, to you it does, but not everybody. Myron, you can’t argue with some people. It’s not good for your heart. You just have to walk away. Leave it be.

I should have but I admit I was thinking I know how to play this game and who’s he to tell me? We’ve been playing all summer. Nobody said we were doing it all wrong.

And you got into an argument about some farkakteh game? Give me a break. You don’t have enough things to worry about? Now you have to worry about somebody thocking a wiffle ball at your head when you’re standing in the kitchen. Please, Myron.

It’s not that.

Then what is it?

He was serving the ball from the wrong side of the court.

And what.

So I told him and he said that I was wrong. And I told him what the rule was.

What rule?

The rule about serving from the lefthand side when your score is odd, and he tells me he’s first server and the first server serves from the right side of the court, and I tell him no and he says that’s the way it is where he plays.

And where does he play?

The Villages. In Florida.

What’s he doing playing in Brooklyn Bridge Park on a Friday morning in September?

He comes up to live with his sister in Bensonhurst for three months in the summer.

What, they don’t have air conditioning in the Villages?

I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

What is the point?

The point is that he said that he knows the rules because he plays in big tournaments and everywhere he plays they play by those rules.

What rules?

The ones about the first server. I tell him he should read the rules.

I should read the rules? he tells me, you should read the rules, he says.

Myron, listen to yourself. Calm down. Show me the rules.

Why?

Because I want to see why two grown men are arguing over something so important as a pickleball game, that’s why.

Here’s the rule book. I’ll show you.

Myron, don’t show me. Let me read the rules. Go make some tea. I’ll come in when I’m finished.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass. Myron’s tea has gotten cold. Millie comes back.

Myron, you like this game? Obviously. This game with server one and server two, but sometimes server two serves first, and alternating sides of the court, side out, side in, even, odd, a line is in, but sometimes a line is out, and what’s the score? Two-two-one? One-one-what? Who makes up a game like this. With an eighty-six page rule book, yet? You know who? People with too much time on their hands and nothing else on their minds? And they make rules so that you get into an argument with some know-it-all-from Florida yet, with a two hundred dollar uranium-coated power paddle in his hand.

Silence.

Look, Myron, I have news for you.

What.

I hate to say this, but you’re both right, I think. Both you and Mr. Florida Villages bigshot, and neither one of you is totally right. Or wrong.

What do you mean?

It’s the rules, Myron. They’re screwy. They contradict themselves. I think.

Listen to this, “Rule 4.B.2. At the start of each game, the starting server begins the serve from the side of the court dictated by the score.” Okay. Then, “Rule 4.B.6.a. At the start of each side out, service begins in the right/even serving area.” It’s starting to get confusing. And then, “Rule 4.B.6.b. When the team’s score is even, the team’s starting server’s correct position is at the right/even serving area. When the team’s score is odd, the starting server’s correct position is at the left/odd court.” That can’t be, can it?

Right. No. Yes. Right. It makes no sense. I don’t know.  

So, you can understand how someone would believe the part that doesn’t make sense to you because it’s right there in the rule book and it’s just the part that makes sense to them?

Yes. Now I do.

Listen, Myron, you go back there and if Mr. Villages is still there you tell him you’re sorry and that it’s all so confusing and no hard feelings and that he should come home with you and have a cup of tea. And, look, if he’s not there just forget about it, he’ll tell all his friends about the Brooklyn jerk he met. So what? Then next time just play with people you know and if someone new comes on the court you just say we play by the Official Brooklyn Bridge Rules, and if he has a problem with that, he should go take it to City Hall like everyone else does. On the other hand, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.

Small Plane, Blue Sky

A small plane, a prop, single engine, buzzed overhead this evening

While I was watering the garden in the heat before sunset

In this long summer drought. Smoke from the smoldering earth in the woods

Up by the quarries, drifted grey down our street in the breeze.

Another plane flew overhead once, in another September. That September with the clear blue skies

When Giuliani walked with a gas mask on, in the ash that ran down through the narrow streets.

He made himself the nation’s mayor as we rushed around him to help with the bodies.

In the evening, we walked past the black and purple Firehouse on Tenth street

And clapped our hands and some of us cried for the men and women

in their black boots who nodded back to us, and we all smelled the reek in their skin.

Soon then, on another blue day, we sat by the open window of a wine bar on Smith Street

Across the river from the copper-green statue holding a torch in the distance.

I drank a glass of Barolo, and she had a Chardonnay and the first three fighter jets flew lightning low

In close formation over the city. Why now, I thought, while we could still feel the greasy residue on our arms and in our noses and we thought about the incinerated bodies.

The Barolo was dry. And the next day I took the subway to work under the river with the copper-green statue to a tall building on 34th street near the post office and saw the troops,

Standing in twos and threes, in Penn station with their eyes fixed and their guns they held tight, muzzles pointed to the floor, fingers looped around triggers, and I looked away. We all did. Heads down, in the press of settling dread, afraid to look up.

Considering Salvation at the Corner of Ninth and Seventh

Eric Winsome was stuck. At a veritable standstill. Physically, stopped in traffic behind a late model blue Toyota Camry on 7th Avenue at the corner of 9th Street, and existentially, locked in a self-imposed worry-worn straitjacket of self-absorbed spiritual stagnation.

The light at the corner was green but a crammed B67 bus, lights flashing, kneeled, angling into the intersection in front of Smiling Pizza, picking up a line of passengers: Men in work boots with lunch buckets, women with shopping carts, drooling infants, juuling teenagers, and homeless souls with sacks of clattering bottles and cans bound for redemption.

Louise Little, the driver in the Toyota, her NicoDerm patch running on empty, held a cigarette in her taut quivering lips and a Zippo in her right fist tapping on the steering wheel to the Deep Purple Smoke on the Water guitar riff, which she had not gotten out of her head since she woke up this morning. In nine seconds, tops, she would either light up the god-damn Newport or run the yellow light the instant the lousy bus gave her a chance.

Eric’s fog-like crisis of faith was, simply, his unwavering acceptance of the Calvinist sublapsarian belief in predestination and in the decree made by God before the Fall that he would choose from among the living, those to be saved, and those not. Eric was thirty-four and he could not know within which group he’d be counted. How could anyone know? he thought. Worry and doubt consumed his every waking moment. Not the least of his worries, though, was whether Wendy, the woman he loved, and to whom he had plighted his troth just shy of seven years ago, would be in the same state of candidacy for eternal salvation as he hoped he was. He had his reasonable doubts.

“Seven years,” she had told him, “is one hell of a long time for a woman to wait for you to make a decision. I can’t wait for ever. My mother keeps asking me, will he, or won’t he?” Just this morning, waiting to brush her teeth in his apartment while he took his time in the bathroom she said, “Eric, shit or get off the pot, I have to get to work, goddamnit.”

On the corner opposite Louise and Eric, stood Lois and Irv Rothstein, an elderly couple waiting for the light to change so they could cross the avenue and make their bus for the early-bird special at Juniors on Flatbush. Though they were resigned to the possibility of missing it, they retained the hope that, God-willing, the light would change before the bus righted itself and they could flag down the driver and make it across the street before it left the corner.

Irv watched the light. Louise watched the light. Lois watched the light. Eric watched the photo of Wendy he kept on taped to the dashboard in front of him, The B67 began its slow rise. The light changed. Louise lit her Newport. Irv and Lois began their walk across the avenue, waving and calling to the driver.

As she walked, Lois’s upper body swayed slightly from side to side. It was the thickening, stiffening, of the arthritis in her hips.

Her shoulders rocked first one way and then the other. It slowed her down, and Irv, a spare man, a few inches shorter than his wife, held tightly to the sleeve of her jacket, trying to keep her moving and on an even keel. He held on to the brim of his hat with his other hand.

The walk sign flashed, nearing the end of its orange digital countdown. 14…13… 12…

“Hold your horses,” said Lois to the young woman talking on her cellphone in the car behind the bus, her grim lips holding a cigarette in the driver’s side window, but it was only loud enough for Irv to hear.

“Come along, dear,” he said to her, with concern and considerable affection.

As the countdown reached three, they had made it safely to the opposite curb and then at the precise moment that the zero flashed, Lois turned to Irv, “I dropped my glove,” she said, and she lurched stiffly up onto the curb. Irv looked back.

The glove, in a shade of green that matched her jacket, which she had been holding in her free hand, and which Irv had bought for her on sale at the Conways in Manhattan for her birthday, lay half-way across the roadway. Irv let go of her arm, stepped back into the street, holding his hand up to the path of the traffic. Lois teetered.

Louise hit the gas at the green light and, when she saw the man, only a few feet or so from his outstretched arm, she slammed on the brake pedal and twisted the steering wheel to the right to avoid hitting him.

At that moment a car horn from behind Eric blew, startling him. He stepped on the gas, rear-ending Louise’s Toyota, inflating both of their airbags and pushing her car up onto the sidewalk hitting Lois squarely in her stiff hips and crushing her against the back of the B67.

Irv’s heart exploded with the impact of grief, and he fell to the pavement.

Louise was later saved by the ‘jaws of life.’

And Eric? He sustained, with vertebrae-cracking suddenness, multiple spinal cord ruptures causing his surgical team to place him in a medically induced coma until they would be able to assess the best course of action, if any existed, leaving him with only a 50-50 chance of survival and plenty of time to ruminate, in his solitude, on his chances of salvation.

The First Fruit Fly of July

“Will,” she says to him, “I see your July sadness taking hold.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Lin,” he says.

Will is standing by the lone window in the kitchen. One of the windows they’ve decided to have replaced. All of the windows need replacing. The cold air comes through them in the winter, and the heat in summer. The humidity in any season finds its way in. He is almost as old as the house is. He feels like his own heat is escaping. A coldness seeping in.

Linda is standing beside him.

“Do you remember that small two-bedroom we lived in, next to the big Congregational church in Brooklyn on Carroll Street that one winter?” he asks her.

“Of course. With the broken tile in the bathroom and the kitchen faucets that dripped, and wood floors that buckled and sloped toward the center, and how my mother came to stay with us to help with the twins.”

“And the windows that were cracked and broken and let the snow in?”

“And all five of us slept in the same bedroom at night to keep warm? Is it the windows that you’re worried about?”

“A little. I don’t know how we can pay for them. But, no, it’s not the windows. Not really.”

“Then what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything as in everything? Me everything?”

“Not you, Lin. The world. The country. So much is going on. All at once. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. But you haven’t shaved since Friday. You’re looking forlorn. Lost, in lonely the way you get. I knew this was coming.”

“You’re acting as if it’s my problem, all of my own doing.”

“It is, though, isn’t it?”

“How can you say that.? Roe v Wade, the EPA, open carry, the separation of…”

“I know. I know. The world is too much with you. You need to take some of it off of your shoulders.”

“Us. Isn’t it ‘too much with us’?”

“Yes, us, you’re right. But I mean you and me. Not everyone worries like you.”

“My sister.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

“Yes, your sister does. And Wordsworth did.”

“And Sinclair Lewis.”

“Yes, Sinclair Lewis.”

“And you, too,” he tells her.

“Yes, me too. But I am more concerned about you, Will. When I see you get like this, I know what’s coming. It’s like when I see the first fruit fly in July. It comes in the door or hidden in a bunch of grapes, and then they’re all over everything. The bananas, the peaches, the lemons. And when, I see that the look in your eyes, the far away, sad, searching look, as is if you alone need to figure it all out, or the world will crash, I know what’s coming. You start to lose patience with people. What they say. How they say it. Question their meaning. Not always. Only when you get this way.”

“What do I or we do?”

“About which, she asked.”

“The fruit flies. Me.”

“The same for both. Clean up. Scrutinize and wash everything that comes in the house, put the bruised fruit in the refrigerator, eat or compost the rest. Maybe even buy only what you can use or read in a day. And, absolutely, stop reading It Can’t Happen Here. Now. Today.”

“But, I’m almost finished. I have only eighty-three pages to go.”

“No more pages. Fini. You don’t have to finish it. Listen, either he liberates everyone from the concentration camps and prisons and saves his family and the whole country in the end, or he doesn’t. Right?”

“I just want to see how it turns out.”

“How it turns out? Will, does that matter? It’s a book. It’s not your horoscope. Look at me. The ‘It’ in the book is happening right here. Right now, today. I see it. You see it. I know that. You know that. Anyone paying even the slightest sliver of attention knows it. But you seem to feed on it. Or it feeds on you. You read about it, talk about it, write about it, resent others for not talking about it. You drink it in. You can’t get enough of it. You need to stop.”

“I know, but it is all so horrible, so planned, so evil, so depressing.”

“Go get the book, Will. The book and the country are two different things. Similar, yes. But one you have some control over and the other, you don’t.”

He retrieves the book from his bedside table.

“Give it to me. I’ll put it in the refrigerator for you. It will be safe in there, and here, read this one.”

“The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing?”

“Yes. You’ll love it. You’ll laugh for a change. You’ll smile. You’ll nod your head. You’ll give yourself a break from the angst. Wordsworth is gone. Sinclair Lewis is gone. Rousseau is gone. Huxley and Orwell. Gone. We are here. Right now, and we will endure. I know others will not, and that saddens me. But we will endure.”

“Endure?”

Yes, is that not what we are together for? To be together here and now? To share the load? We need to have the windows replaced because we are too cold in the winter and spend too much to heat the house… we can’t expand the supreme court, or eliminate the filibuster, or save the eel grass and the Amazon rainforests all by ourselves. We can only do those things if we feel empowered, not downtrodden, defeated. Let’s give ourselves a break before we both feel like a broken, leaky, window letting in the heat and fruit flies. Can you do that with me?”

Interlopers

It is the end of December. Snow is at the curbs and on the sidewalks. It is cold. Mike Zwilling is sweating. He has loaded eleven cardboard cartons filled with dishes, silverware, books, scarfs, mittens, two computers, chargers, notebooks, pens, shirts, pants, earmuffs, overcoats, his bicycle, and snowshoes, into a rented E-Z-load U-Haul rollup rear-door van, double-parked on Thirteenth street, just below the park. Prospect Park. Park Slope. Brooklyn.

Thirteenth is a narrow, one-way street heading west, straight downhill toward the harbor. Toward the Statue of Liberty. New Jersey. Mike, too, is determined to head west. That’s the plan.

“Mike?” Angela, his wife of thirty-five years, wrapped tightly in a wool coat, arms across her chest, asks. “What, you think they don’t have pots and pans in Wyoming? Believe me, they do. Maybe even Cuisinarts. You don’t have to pack everything you own. This isn’t a Wagon Train episode. They might even have water, buckwheat, and flannel shirts. Carhartt’s.”

The Mike Zwilling is the fourth person from his block to leave the Slope for Laramie. The thirty-fourth if you count along Thirteenth, from Prospect Park West down to the Gowanus Canal.

He had told her, back in the spring, well over a year ago. “Get ready, Angie, if we lose the house in the mid-terms in 2022, we’re selling. We’re moving. We’re going to Wyoming.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The world is changing, Angie. The country is falling apart. It’s time we stop complaining and do something. Someone has to do something.  Guns. Climate. War. Abortion. Vaccines. The filibuster. Gerrymandering. Crypto. The Court. The country is splitting apart under us like we’re all standing spread-legged with one foot on either side of the San Andreas fault, looking around like we’re next on line at the bakery.”

“So? So that means we have to move?”

“So, we just have to stop talking about everything like it’s a Netflix mini-series. As if, ‘things are going to shit and so let’s just call it the new normal.’ We’ve got to take it seriously.”

“I am serious, but how does that have anything to do with Wyoming? Where’d you get that idea?

“Melanson.”

“Melanson?”

“I was talking to him. He figured it out. If we lose the House, that’s bad, but then we absolutely can’t lose the senate. If we do, it’s all over.”

“And… Wyoming?”

“Wyoming is the key, Angie. It’s simple math. Listen, Ange, do you know which is the least populated and, coincidently, the most solidly red state in the nation?

“Let me guess… Wyoming.”

“Right. Wyoming!” And, Angie, do you know how many people live in Brooklyn? I’ll tell you. Two-point-five-seven-seven million.”

“And, let me guess, Wyoming has…?”

“Bingo. Wyoming has precisely five hundred seventy-eight thousand, eight hundred and three. Total. The whole entire state. And seventy percent voted for Trump. That’s four hundred and six thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two and he won the state. And, how many senators does Wyoming have? And how many does New York have?”

“Two. I get it, Mike, two. The same.”

“So, Melanson says, New York doesn’t need us to vote. Park Slope definitely doesn’t need us. And Massachusetts. California. Vermont, Illinois, or New Jersey. They’re all in good shape. And so, if we can just get eighty-seven thousand people to move from Brooklyn to Laramie, we can flip the state. Eighty-seven thousand and we flip the whole state and we’re up two senators and they’re down two. Angie, we can be the one flapping seagull whose wings divert the tornado, the leaf falling from a tree in the forest that troubles the distant star. We can do that. It makes the greatest sense.”

“No, Mike. It may make sense to you and Melanson, but not to me. It may make sense to someone who maybe wants to see what life in Wyoming is like. But that’s not me. I can’t do that. I can’t leave here. My work. Our friends. Our apartment. This is our home. Our city. We’re here and not in Laramie for a reason. A lot of good reasons.”

“You can, Angie. Please. Think about it. We rent the apartment for few years. You can work anywhere. Write. Do your translations. Whatever. Anywhere. Work is portable now.”

“You know that’s not true. I can’t do my work just anywhere. I need people. Vibrancy. Face-to-face with the soul of a live, changing, self-critical, city. The dogs and babies in the park. The baby bok choy in market. The steam on the windows of Essa Bagel. Real pizza. The commotion. The variety. Excess. Access. The thread of a song someone is humming in the bank. All of that. No. I can’t go. I won’t go. I can’t live any place else.”

“Come. Please. You can’t know what your one part will play. The change we might make for everyone, everywhere. Maybe even ourselves.”

That was Mike then. In early spring. 2021.

In mid-November they talked again. Prices were rising. Ukraine was lost. Congress had been lost too. Despite any of the hope that had survived the primaries.

People were indeed leaving. Inflation. Selling their homes to developers. Getting priced out of anything they might have afforded a year before. Gentrification, like flowers in a desert after a rain, was blooming in every neighborhood.

“We have work to do in Brooklyn,” she told Mike. “Brooklyn politics, all politics, always flows with the money. If you leave, the big money flows in, and we get washed away. They own the politics and make the policies. There’s real and honest work we need to do here. On our very own street. I’m staying. We need to organize right here,” she told him.

Mike is sweating and shivering. The boxes are in the truck. Limo drivers are squeezing by, giving him the finger, honking, trying to get by without scraping their cars against the U-Haul.

And there stands Mike. Keys in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

“You two new riders of the purple sage head on west and write me when you get there,” she tells him.

She kisses him goodbye.

The engine clicks on.

“Wait, Mike, wait. One more thing. We don’t live here by accident. We didn’t choose to live in Wyoming or anywhere else.”

“Angie.”

She climbs up on the running board of the van. Her shoes are soaked through. She grabs onto his arm and the wide mirror.

“This scheme of yours is totally dishonest. It’s false and illegitimate. A manipulation you’d be enraged at if someone did it to you. Just like what’s happening here to us. You’d be nothing more than rustlers there. And someone is going to get hurt. My god, all I can think of is Matthew Shepard. What do you think they’ll do when they get wind of what you’re up to? Let Melanson and his kid go if they want to. Get out.”

She tugs on his arm.

“Unload the truck. Please. I don’t want you to go. I can’t let you go.”

Birds on a Wire

On the way to the F train stop by Prospect Park, Victor Maisel stopped for coffee at the Two Little Red Hens. A tiny bakery on 8th Avenue, between 11th and twelfth Streets. The morning was cold and there was a short line ahead of him. He scanned the pastries in the display case while waiting to order. 

He was unsure of what he might order or if, in fact, he would order anything other than the coffee. 

A woman wearing a long black broad shouldered cashmere coat was waiting in front of him, tapping her foot in a way Victor found annoying. She reminded him of the tall tightly wound actress in Just Shoot Me. 

He felt like saying to her, ‘There’s really nothing either of us can do to speed things up, so give yourself a break.’ But then he thought, ‘Isn’t it just as foolish of me to be annoyed with her for being annoyed?’ His mother would have told him he was just caught in the finger trap of one of his dark moods.

Just Shoot Me ordered a cinnamon bun and said, “Isn’t that one missing some icing?” “Can I have a different one?” 

“It’s the last one.”

Victor could see that. Surely she had when right in front of Victor’s eyes she had pointed to it, but perhaps, he thought, maybe not. 

“Do you want it or not?”

“Yes, but could you put a little more icing on it?”

She turned back to Victor. “They try make you think it’s the very last one so that you take it even though the reason it’s the last one there is because no one else wanted to take it. But, if it really is the last one, I want it and there’s no reason I can’t have it the way I want it, you know what I mean?”

Victor did know what she meant. One needed to watch out for oneself. No one else will. People take advantage. Treat you badly. Intentionally. Without cause or consideration. 

A middle-aged man in a newsboy hat and a gray gabardine overcoat was sitting at the window counter facing the avenue. He looked at Victor, casting his eyes upward in a theatrical ‘God help us!’ plea. Which Victor saw as recognition of the shared moment. 

Often, on passing by the shop on his way to work, Victor saw the man in the newsboy hat sitting alone with a coffee cup on the bench in front of the pastry shop or if it was cold or raining, at the window inside, as he was then. The man, who Victor knew as Benjamin, would always lift two fingers and nod as Victor walked by. 

Victor enjoyed the casual familiarity of the simple gesture. 

The young girl behind the counter went to the back of the shop, holding the bun in one hand and the bag in the other.

One morning last spring, Victor brought his coffee out to the bench and squeezed in beside Benjamin’s briefcase.

Benjamin was wearing neatly pressed tweed trousers, a pale blue button-front shirt, open at the collar, a soft brown faux-leather jacket. Eyes lost in thought.

“Oh, hello,” Benjamin had said. “I’m sorry. I was just distracted. I didn’t mean to seem to ignore you.” He moved his briefcase onto his lap.

“Oh, that’s fine. Mind if I sit here?”

“No, no. Not at all.” Which he pronounced as ‘nota-tall.’

Before Victor could think of anything to say, Benjamin said, “What do you do?”

“I’m a medical writer.”

“A doctor?”

“Not a real doctor, as some would say. No. I used to be a college teacher and now I work for a Med Ed company.”

“So, you’re not really a doctor.”

“No, not in the way I think you might mean it. No.”

“I’m a film editor,” said Benjamin.

“That sounds like such a great job.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it sounds a lot better than it is. It’s not glamorous, like you might think. I don’t know any actors or anything like that.”

“Where do you work?”

“At home. All my equipment‘s there.”

“I’d love all that independence. It must be good.”

“It could be, I guess. But it’s, you know, kind of isolating. I mean it’s good in a way. I can work at any time of the day. Start whenever. No distractions. But it’s isolated. You know what I mean?”

“Yes. I can see that.”

“I mean, sometimes there’s no work, and then it’s all high pressure, getting the dailies back at night. I mean that kind of makes it feel less creative, you know. More like a plumber knee-deep in water…” 

“I’ve never worked like that. On my own time. Take the jobs you like. Get them done. Move on. Your own person. I have to be in the office by eight-thirty at the latest every day. They watch you come in. When you leave. You have a certain number of billable hours you have to work each week. Time sheets. Project numbers. The runners bring the job folders in. You sign for them. Then they come pick them up… and it’s not really Med Ed. It’s more like Med Ad.”

“I’d love that. The hustle and bustle. Meetings. Do you have meetings?”

“Yes…”

“… The exchange of ideas. The back and forth, riffing off one another. The vibe. It sounds great.”

“… but meetings are mostly a waste. They drag on and when you leave someone asks, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ Really. And even when I go back to my area. They call them areas now, open plan, no doors or windows. I find it difficult to write, even to think, in the midst of other people, working or not working. The physical pressure of people while I am working is oppressive.” 

“Don’t you find, though, that creativity is fed by other ideas, words, images?”

“Yes, but not often enough.”

In the bakery, with two more people lined up behind him, Victor began to feel dizzyingly warm. 

The girl came back out and showed Just Shoot Me that the baker had added extra icing.

She took the bag and left the shop.

Victor asked the girl if there were any more cinnamon buns. 

She looked at him. “No, that was the last one. There’s another batch in about an hour.”

“That’s ok. I’ll have a coffee, black with sugar, and… no, yes, no, that’s it. Just the coffee.” He brought the coffee over to the window where Benjamin sat. Cars hustled by, heading toward Flatbush and the bridge. Victor tugged at his tie. Opened his top shirt button.

“Today’s my last day,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re going to let me go today,” Victor said.

“How do you know that?”

“They let the medical director go yesterday. No notice. Right after five, they called her in. Just a one-on-one with HR. She called me to tell me that I’d probably be next. No reason, they told her, just pack your things, and when she came out of the meeting, all the office doors along the hall were closed. Like everybody knew it was coming and nobody wanted to be seen witnessing it. Like when the lights flicker at midnight when someone gets the electric chair.”

“Shit,” said Benjamin. “I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah, thanks. I don’t want to go in today. I’m thinking about calling in sick and let it just end like that. I’m not putting myself through that. I’ve never been fired before…”

“Neither have I.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do. I think I’ll just sit here for a while. I don’t want to go there. To go through that charade, playing surprised and hurt and angry. They’ve seen that show plenty. I’m not playing. I’m done. I’m too old for that.”

The train rumbled under their feet. It squealed to a stop and then started up again running toward the city.

Victor lifted the cup to his lips, breathed in deeply, and took a small slow sip.

Benjamin looked at him and then looked away, out toward the traffic on the avenue.

Malachi and His Mother: The Aftermath of the Altshul Incident

“Mel Rothstein called me this morning. He had such tight anger in his voice. Like he was trying to stuff it back down. Showing me how in-control he was.”

Malachi was sitting across from his mother at the kitchen table. She had spilled some sugar as she was adding more of it to her coffee. She pushed the crystals around on the slick tablecloth with her finger as she spoke.

“What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘How could you?’ He said I had fomented an insurrection. An armed insurrection. At the temple. The ‘temple’ he called it. He said I had ruined the reputation of the whole congregation that he had worked so hard to make and that tweets or posts or whatever they call them had been posted across the internet. Pictures of me. Rage on my face. Leading a mob of radical Jews against the police. Calling them Nazis. Threatening them.”

“I saw the pictures.”

“He said that he expected more from me, which I know is a lie because he has never expected anything from me or any other woman beyond dull, mute, subservience and a look of thankful awe.”

She presses her finger into the mound of sugar she had created and picks up what has stuck to the finger into her mouth. Her lips curl, her chin wrinkling. She begins to cry. Malachi reaches across the table to toward her.

“I feel so terrible,” she says “I’m glad your father wasn’t there. I don’t know what he would have done.”

“Ma, I feel so bad for you. I know you meant well. In the most genuine, human sense, you saw a danger and you wanted to save everyone. You weren’t crying wolf, or ‘fire’ in a theater. You thought those cops were terrorists intent on shooting everyone in the room. The whole congregation was sitting like obedient sheep waiting for the doors to open and the shooting to start.”

“That’s what Rothstein called me. A terrorist. Worse than a terrorist, he said. He said I should be ashamed of myself for risking everyone’s lives for my own neurotic mishegas. He said I needed to get help.”

“Rothstein, ran out himself. He ran out without looking back, without offering to help anyone. He burst through the side door. He knocked down the officer there. He ran out of the building the second he heard you scream ‘get out!’ It’s only now that he feels embarrassed. He shouldn’t feel embarrassed. He did the right thing. You did the right thing. They had guns. They were acting like real active shooters. They meant to scare the shit out of you. Out of everyone. And, I may be wrong, but I think they got some sort of charge out of scaring the shit out a bunch of cornered Jews.’’

“Rothstein. I never liked him. But that is totally separate, Malachi. For the first time in my life, I feared for my own mortality. Not in the philosophical sense. Not just in conversation over cocktails. Not in that casual, intellectual, sense of ‘let’s all talk about death’ in some abstract, manageable, way. But in the real gripping fear of death in that very moment. Certain that you’d be shot and killed. Ripped through with bullets, and that my body, me, my mind, my thoughts, my very self, would be lost. Gone. Lost to consciousness. Lost to all reality, to all eternity. It is a fear unlike any other human feeling. That instant awareness of imminent death.”

“I can only begin to imagine how you felt, ma. When I was twelve or thirteen, at night, in bed, if I would think of the vastness of the universe or infinity. The blankness. The unending black void. I could feel my body exploding with fear. The fear of nothingness.”

“I don’t remember that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to. I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night like I needed to escape my thoughts as though they were a physical being. As if death and nothingness were physical beings. Even though the total lack of physicality of them are really what is the most incomprehensible and frightening of all. I needed to get out. Just like you did. I left my room and I went to your bedroom door. It was closed and I didn’t want to knock. I didn’t.”

“You should have, Malachi, that’s what parents are for.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want to wake you. It’s that I didn’t want to frighten you.”

“Frighten me?”

“I thought talking to you about death with you older, closer to death, that it would bring up those morbid fears for you. So, I just sat there until I went back to bed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s when I started saying a prayer at night.”

“What kind of prayer? I never taught you prayers.”

“The one with, ‘Our father who art in heaven.’ The one with ‘give us our daily bread’ and ‘the valley of death’. ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ I didn’t know if it was a real prayer. It just made me feel better to say those things. And I’d say bless my mother and father and list of all the people who I wanted to protect, and say them in exactly the right order or I’d have to start all over again to say it right, no matter how many times. And then there was one night, when I was going to bed and I’d always say ‘good night’ and ‘see you in the morgen’ like ‘guten morgen’, but instead I said see you in the morgue.’ And my god, I apologized a hundred times and then I cried and cried and all I could think of was that what I said would really happen and that you’d die because I said that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, ma. And don’t be sorry for doing what you thought was right and good, no matter how it turned out. And forget about Rothstein. He’s not thinking of you, only himself.”

They look at one another. Eye to eye.

“My coffee is cold and I spilled sugar all over the table. Sit, I’ll make us fresh. And let’s talk about something else.”

“Critical Race Theory?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. You should hear what your aunt Frieda has to say about that. Like she might know what it means.”

Malachi and His Mother at the Altshul on Garfield Place

Malachi helps his mother step into the side entrance of the shul. The tall mahogany front doors on 8th Avenue were closed. Locked tight. And so, the two of them walked around the corner and up Garfield and then up the stairs through the side entrance, down the hallway to the sanctuary.

They took seats in one of the rear pews, passing the Rothsteins, the Arbeiters, and the Edelmans seated in the front pews. The ones they paid good money for.

The room was near full. A mixed, arrhythmic, hum of voices. Air conditioners whirring. The smell of aftershave and leather shoes.

“Why didn’t dad come with you?”

“Your father? He says he doesn’t do gatherings anymore.”

“COVID?”

“No. C-R-A-B-B-Y. He says he likes people well enough but he likes them much better when he doesn’t have to be around them.”

“That’s Bukowski.”

“What?”

“Charles Bukowski, the poet, said that.”

“Don’t tell your father. He thinks he made it up.”

“It looks like the rabbi wants to start.”

“Welcome all, I am Rabbi Plosker. Let us begin. We are all aware of the alarming increase in hate crimes and mass shootings. The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the First Baptist in Sutherland Springs, the Chabad of Poway, the AME in Charleston. And while we work against violence of all kinds, visited upon people of all faiths, we must also protect ourselves with guards, and vigilance, and yes, with preparedness.”

“I have to get up.”

“Ma, wait. It’s starting.”

“I have to leave.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you stay. I thought I could do this but I can’t. I have to go. I cannot be here for this.

She gets up and, clutching her purse, walks toward the side door. The way they’d come in. A police officer is now there. She turns and walks back up the center aisle toward the main entrance.

“Ma’am,” the officer there tells her, “I’m sorry, but you can’t leave.”

“I have to. You can’t stop me.”

“Ma’am,” the officer extends his arm, takes a step to obstruct her way. “Please, ma’am. We have a protocol we need to follow and I ask you to cooperate, for the benefit of all.” 

“Malachi!”

“I’m sorry ma’am you have to go back to your seat.” He touches her elbow and points her back down the aisle.

She sits down. She’s shaking. “Malachi, please say something. Look what is happening here.”

“Ma, it will be okay. Nothing’s happening. Trust me. Look, the rabbi wants to begin.”

“The rabbi? She wants to begin? She wants to begin with the Gestapo barring the doors?”

“What are you saying? The police do these trainings all over the city. In mosques, churches, synagogues. It’s for our own safety. We need to know what to do if, God forbid, something happens, and a someone with a gun comes in.”

“Let me tell you, Malachi, open your eyes. The someone’s are already here. There are two someone’s with guns here, and one is at the front door and the other is at the side door, and the Plosker herself, invited them in. She invited them in, yet. With guns, yet. Tell me, who comes into synagogue with a gun? I’ll tell you who. My dead grandmother knows the answer in her grave. The SS, that’s who.”

“Everyone is watching us, Ma.”

“Yes, they’re watching. With their goddamn eyes closed. They’re watching but not seeing. This is the most farshtunkene idea I have ever heard in my life and, you, my own son, brings me here.”

“Shhh!”

The officer at the back of the sanctuary is holding an air horn, a large orange klaxon. He’s wearing sunglasses, dark uniform, a peaked cap, epaulets, and a COVID mask. He nods. Touches his visor with two easy fingers.

“Sergeant Petersen here,” the rabbi says, “will lead us through a training in an active shooter drill. He will show us what to do, if it should ever happen, God forbid, in the very, very remote possibility of an active shooter coming into the sanctuary. If we are prepared, and we act quickly and with intention and preparation, we can save our lives and the lives of all of us.”

“That’s right,” says Petersen. “We are here to help keep you as safe as possible. I promise you, no one will be hurt. We ask you first to turn your phones off.” He waits. Everyone fumbles with their phones. “In a few moments, when you hear the sound of the horn…”

“Malachi, take me out of here. I can’t do this. I will have a heart attack. I can’t. I can’t… I will die in this room.”

“…and as soon as you hear it, I want you to immediately do whatever you would do if an active shooter came into the room.”

Sgt. Petersen steps back out of the sanctuary and closes the doors behind him. The officer at the side entrance does the same.

A long moment of silence passes.

The doors open. Both police officers, wearing COVID masks, both with the Klaxon horns pointed at the pews, step in.

Blam! Blam! Blam! The horns crack open the air. Again, and again and again. Like a pair of monstrous screaming jackhammers. 

A woman in the rear screams. Three men in the front row stand up and look to the back, then the front. Toward the blaring sounds. The rest stand, look around, and then duck under the pews, covering their heads and pulling the others down with them. Some grab for their phones. Malachi pulls at his mother’s skirt. “Mama, get down here.”

The cracking, blasting, sounds stop. There are cries from all sides.

Petersen, holding the Klaxon in his hand like a hand gun, walks down the aisle, pointing with it from one side to the other, pointing at each one of the half-hidden, half-crouching, cowering, people.

“You’re dead! You’re dead, you’re dead,” he says to each of them.

The one at the side door explains, “The worst thing you can do is to stand up and look at the shooter, giving him a target. The next worst thing is to crouch under the pews. You make yourself a stationary target. A dead one.”

“You’re all dead. Every one of you. Figuratively,” says Petersen. Now let’s try it one more time.”

The two officers step behind the doors again.

“See, Ma?”

“See what, they told us nothing about how we should react.” she says. She stands up. “This is their new trick,” she yells to everyone.

“Please sit down,”

“Yes, please sit down,” the rabbi calls out.

“That was a sham! One crazy kid bursting through the door like Dylan Roof or Gregory Bowers doesn’t kill enough of us. That was just old-school anger. This is the new and improved U.S. version of mass killing.”

“Someone, take her out of here,” says Rothstein.

“They’re not going to let me out of here. Not you either, Rothstein. Not peacefully. They have us where they want us. They have us all trapped, totally lulled into fearful, willing, trusting fools, placated, convinced they mean no harm. Like how they convinced my grandparents to wait in line for the boxcars, carrying their suitcases and children, and then in line at the showers, for godsakes. I know what’s coming. Everyone get out. Now. All of us all at once. Make run for it. Rush them. I swear, our only hope, is to take them by surprise. Because the next time those two doors two open they’ll have AR-15s and…”

A Man’s Search for Meaning

Hello Malachi, it’s your mother. Don’t be worried.

I know it’s you Ma. My phone ringtone plays Ethel Merman singing Everything’s Coming Up Roses when you call. What should I not be worried about?

Oy! Your father is not doing well.

Not doing well? What do you mean?

I mean, I ask him, I say, Morris, what do you want for lunch? and he says, ‘lunch?’ Yes lunch. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he says. You want some herring? I say. ‘Herring, schmerring, whatever,’ he says. Come in, I tell him. And he comes and sits at the table like a cold noodle kugel. This is not like him, Malachi. First, he never used to miss a meal and second, he usually says ‘bring it in here’ so he can keep watching the television. He doesn’t watch any more. Only at night. I don’t know what to do. Morris, I say, what is wrong with you? ‘Nothing,’ he says. I tell him don’t tell me nothing. I know nothing when I see it and this is not nothing.

What do you want me to do?

Talk to him.

Ma, he doesn’t want to talk to me. I say, hi Dad, how are you doing? ‘How am I doing,’ he says to me. Yes, how are you doing? ‘How should I be doing?’ he says. I mean are you okay? ‘Okay? What is okay?’ he says. Then he says ‘I have to go, here talk to you mother’ and he hands you back the phone. That’s how our conversations go.

He used to yell at the TV. Scream, ‘Can you believe this crap?’ His face would get red. Turn it off I would say to him. ‘I can’t believe this is the country we are living in,’ he would say but he wouldn’t turn it off. Better you should have a stroke watching Wolf Blitzer? I told him. The Situation Room is not the situation room, Morris. You’re sitting in the Situation Room, I say, and you know what he says to me, ‘The situation sucks.’ My god, Malachi, I have never heard your father say that word in his entire life, not once, mind you. Not once.

Maybe he should see someone.

He should, but I don’t say anything about that. He wouldn’t do it. Men don’t go see someone, he says. They keep it in. They tough it out. He thinks he can take care of himself.

Ma, he must feel like he’s going through all of this alone. Living through every day in the same apartment. He doesn’t go out because he doesn’t want to get infected or infect you. He is losing his sense of connection with the city, his work, and his friends. He sees trouble in the streets, people being beaten, police beating others. When he was watching TV all day it was as if it would be him next being beaten, him next being gassed. Replay after replay of the same thing and seeing one man, night after night, calling for more of the same. He’s heard about this before. Hearing of his cousins, his grandparents, being rounded up and shot or shipped off in box cars to never come back. To be gassed and burned in an oven or kicked into a ditch. Viktor Frankl wrote, that when you live feeling that way, you’re shocked at first that this could be happening to you. You think it can’t continue, or it won’t be so bad, and then you wonder what will happen next and then you see that it keeps getting worse and that hoping for it to stop doesn’t make it stop. You scream at it. You’re powerless to make it stop.

Malachi, shouldn’t he be happy? We had an election. There’s an inauguration coming. There’s a vaccine. He’ll get it. He has underlying conditions.

We all have underlying conditions. Pelted each day with new miseries, new threats, new deaths, new things to fear. It wears you down. Nothing compared to what happened to his relatives, my relatives, but still, it wears you down. And what is going on now is not going to end anytime soon. It may even get worse.

I have never seen him so low.

With so many things to worry about, he’s apathetic. He’s past being shocked by what he sees and hears. The almost daily shocking atrocities have become for him, for most of us, the routine. So, you have to create a self-protective shell. You can watch police officers beat people protesting the killing of a black man for months, and bodies being piled in refrigerated trucks for more months, and then federal police get thrown down the capitol steps, hit with fire extinguishers and American flag poles, like a downward spiral that will last forever.

I know. It worries me in my heart. I want to help him.

Ma, please ask him if I can speak to him.

Hold on.

Hello.

Hello, Dad. Remember how you would always give me a book on my birthday and even on other days that were not my birthday and you’d say to me, ‘Malachi, this is a special book for a special boy on a special day.’

I do, Malachi.

Well, I am sending you a special book, because you are a special dad, and this is a special day. It will come in your email. It is an audiobook. It was written in the year you were born. And by a man whose name you might know, Viktor Frankl. I have listened to it and I thought of you all the way through, almost every line. Maybe you and Mom can listen to it together and maybe we can talk about it after. Will that be okay?

Of course, Malachi. Thank you. Here… your mother wants to talk to you. Bye.

Bye.

Bye, bye… here she is.

Sy Spiegelman Reading Proust on the F Train

It was hot. The sun, slow-walking toward the deep end of July. And Seymore Spiegelman was on the F train to work. Changing to the C at West 4th, he squeezed into the last empty seat in the car. The riders on either side were damp and overheated. He couldn’t concentrate. Opening and closing the book in his hand. Swann’s Way. Proust. Wrapped in brown paper. He thought it’d seem pretentious standing in the subway holding a worn copy of Proust. He would surely think that, if it were someone else doing that.

Proust is hard going. He’d started reading it many times before, only to nod off a few pages in and set it aside for another time. Maybe he just wasn’t up to the task. Maybe a new copy, a new translation, might give him a fresh start.

An article he’d read touted the brilliance of Proust, whose 149th birthday just passed, on July 10. One line he’d read wouldn’t leave him alone. “Even the dead,” it said, “when we least expect it, come back to remind us of their love and of our guilt.”

Death and July birthdays. His mother’s and his oldest daughter’s birthdays. One is on the twenty-first and the other on the twenty-second. It was his mother who had died, in years past.

On his run, the day before, he tried to remember which birthday was on which day, but he gave up. His wife, Bernie, would know, he thought.

So, he asked her when he got back.

“Sy,” she said, “here’s how I remember them. Your mother was born first, so her’s is on the twenty-first.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“But Dierdre is my first daughter, see. So, maybe she comes first.”

“You’re dripping. What happened to your knee?”

“I tripped on the hill down to Fifth. Cracks in the sidewalk, and it’s steep.”

“And you weren’t looking. Let me see that. Why didn’t you come right back? Look, the blood ran down into your shoe.”

“A guy on a motorcycle stopped. Asked me if I needed a ride home, but I said no. He had that solicitous look on his face. Like someone helping an old woman cross the street, leaning over, taking little baby steps, even with the ‘Don’t Walk’ light blinking and the drivers rolling their eyes as if they’re purposely walking slowly just to piss them off.”

“And so?”

“And so, I felt fine. I didn’t need any help. I just wanted to keep running. It was no big deal. He was like twenty-five and he was treating me like I was some old guy who should be home drinking tea, watching re-runs of Bonanza.”

“You’re not old. And maybe he did think that. Maybe he didn’t.”

“He seemed nice.”

“Regardless, Sy, now, when he tells the story, he’ll say, ‘there was this guy who fell on the sidewalk, who I helped get up, and then he’s like ‘I don’t need any help’ even though blood was gushing out of his knee like a faucet and he’s like some Usain Bolt has-been.’ Maybe you should’ve just let him drive you home and then he’d say what a nice old guy he helped out. The solicitous part is in your own head, not his. And, even if it was, who cares?”

“Anyway, I ran down to the Jackie Gleason building and then back up the hill by the Green-Wood cemetery. That’s like seven miles.”

“You ran into Sunset Park and didn’t bring back tacos.”

“I was bleeding.”

“I’m just kidding.”

“Remind me again, is tomorrow my mother’s birthday or Diedre’s.”

“It’s your mother’s.”

“I had a little trouble running back up the hill. Not because of my knee. I think my shoes are too heavy. Maybe I should get a lighter pair.”

“Maybe you should go see a doctor. Your shoes don’t all of a sudden get heavy.”

“I noticed it first last week when I was pushing the stroller with the kids up Second Street to the park. I had to stop a couple of times.”

“And you think it’s because your shoes got too heavy?”

“That’s how it felt.”

“You should drink more water and make an appointment with Edelman. Maybe you should go tomorrow.”

“I just ran seven miles. I really think I’m ok.”

“Your mother is dead now, what, four years?”

“Yes, I think so. I can never remember that one either.”

“At least you should remember her birthday.”

“What? Now you think I’m losing it?”

“Or, maybe it’s just your shoes.”

“Funny.”

“No, it’s just that you have trouble remembering it, not because you’re losing it, but because you have some issues there with your mother.”

“I do. That’s a different thing.”

On the train, he felt he should go home. Call in sick. He’d rarely done that. But he was sweating, feeling anxious. Proust was so hard to read. The run around the cemetery was hard. Harder than he’d said. His shoes were too old, too heavy.

He was beginning to panic. “My god,” he thought, “I feel like I am going to die.” At the 50th Street stop, he got up, took his things, left the train, and walked quickly across town to Saint Clare’s. He told the ER nurse he had chest pain. She asked him how severe. “A ten,” he said.

“Let’s take a look,” she said, and he sat down in the chair next to her desk, she checked his pressure, listened to his heart.  She picked up the phone. Held it to her ear. Punched in few numbers.

“What are you reading?“ she asked him.

“Swann’s Way.”

“Nice,” she said.

And that was the last he remembered until he opened his eyes to see Bernie standing by the bed, beside the IV pole. “What happened?” he said.

“Well, for starters, you had a coronary right there in the ER and they rushed you up, or down, or wherever it is, to the Cath lab. They put a stent in and you’re good to go.”

“My god. That’s so frightening.”

“Yeah, tell me about it!”

So, I guess it wasn’t my shoes.”

“You didn’t really think it was, did you?”

“I think I did. A little. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Likewise, Sy. Likewise.”

“So, what do you say, next year, we just pick up a garlic and onion pizza at Totonno’s and light a candle on my mother’s birthday.”

The End of the Roll

Bessie Levin waited to see the manager.

“How may I help you Ma’am,” he said. He was well-groomed, polite, and had Bernard Sopotnick stitched on the pocket of his red Costco vest.

There are nine Costco stores within a one-hundred-mile radius of Bessie’s apartment in Bensonhurst. She has spoken in-person, face-to-face, with the store manager of eight of them. She got nowhere with any of them. You name them: Sunset Park, Elmhurst, Staten Island, Bayonne. Nothing. Continue reading The End of the Roll

Malachi’s Mother, the Precipice, and the Wild Strawberry

“Ma, where’s Dad?

“I sent him to the market.”

“It’s ten o’clock. He shouldn’t be out this late. I would have gone for you. What did you need so late?”

“Strawberries.” Continue reading Malachi’s Mother, the Precipice, and the Wild Strawberry

The Golem on the X38 Bus

Simon Appelfeld was a good boy. He went to school each day. He obeyed the Sabbath. He did his homework. He brushed his teeth. He loved his parents and they loved him. He did not know how unusual he was.

One day on his way to school he saw that someone had left a book on the empty seat beside him on the bus. Continue reading The Golem on the X38 Bus

Chava Shapiro: The Fresh Air Interview

Welcome back. I’m Terry Gross and you are listening to Fresh Air. If you’re just joining us, we have been talking with the remarkable Chava Shapiro. She was recently featured in a series of short stories published on an online journal website. She is here to talk with us about those stories, writing, and being a lesser-known female author working on the edges of the publishing industry.

 For those of you unfamiliar with her most recent story, it is called The Good Life of Avrum and Chava.

Ms. Shapiro, let me ask you, in the story, the central character, Chava, is seen as sort of a ‘Good Wife.’ Why did you pick that kind of a character to write about and how close is it to your own life? And why do you call it the ‘good life?’ Continue reading Chava Shapiro: The Fresh Air Interview