Sadly, these women formed part of my earliest feminine ideal.

Listening to their gum-chewing trash talk, I'm summoned back by scents of trodden-thin grass and linden-seed-littered pavement, fumes from groaning buses, subway-platform newspaper wind, and the ozone from sparks on the subway rail. I see a mob of teenagers pushing onto a city bus, waving cardboard passes in the stuporous driver's face and shoving their books into the kidneys of anyone close by. I see myself walking to Mother Cabrini High School for a driver's ed lesson as girls in white uniform blouses crowd the second-floor window: "That boy's coming into the building!"



I'll drive you down the Bruckner Expressway, girls, there's a moon over the 241st Street station. We'll stop for a black-and-white shake at Carvel and maybe a slice of pizza at Gloria's, and you'll talk about the perfume sale at Alexander's and your classmate who's making out with the science teacher. You haven't changed a bit.