What Are They Reading in 1960?

The contents of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Winter 1961, when Eisenhower gave way to Kennedy:

A. The Light in the Piazza, by Elizabeth Spencer (1921- ), a literary bestseller by a genteel Southern quarterly doyenne, author of 38 books, five-time O. Henry Award recipient.

The Reader's Digest intro says, “This is a story of how the sensual beauty and warm summer sun of Florence worked their strange alchemy in the life of a lovely American girl – a story to which each reader will imagine his own sequel.”

I love the “his own sequel.” Ninety percent of the audience must have been female.

The opening sentence:

“On a June afternoon at sunset, an American woman and her daughter fended their way along a crowded street in Florence and entered with relief the spacious Piazza del Signoria.”

In other words, the nth dilution of Henry James’ Daisy Miller.

“This little book is a gem…one of the four best novels of 1960.” Orville Prescott, New York Time

But scoffers beware! This book was made into a 1962 movie (Olivia de Havilland-Rossano Brazzi-Yvette Mimieux-George Hamilton) and a well-received, innovative 2005 musical that ran for 504 performances at Lincoln Center and is regularly performed around the world, sometimes in opera houses.

B. Half Angel, by Barbara Jefferis. Lonely young Australian boy finds a mysterious cat with a jeweled collar. Problems arise! I never heard of it, though this was the height of my passion for the New York Times Book Review: I was eight.

C. A Sense of Values, by Sloan Wilson, author of the iconic 1950's executive-suite novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (reprinted in 2002 with a foreword by Jonathan Franzen)and A Summer Place, both hit movies (Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones, Ricard Egan-Dorothy McGuire), the latter the provenance of the great song "Theme from A Summer Place." A well-known cartoonist (good choice!) grapples with the problems of success, a cold wife, a troubled son, inherited “melancholia” (a much better word for it than what we use now), and alcoholism. Flashbacks to noncombat WWII. Readably written in an intelligent middlebrow style that appeals to Connecticut residents who wish Salinger were more prolific, and which, lamentably, isn’t seen much anymore on the bestseller lists. Contains a lecture by the protagonist’s wise mentor on the dangers of success -– not original but a knowledgeable summary. Undoubtedly Wilson needed to write this after his big bestseller.

Random sentence: “Before going to New Haven that fall, I stopped at the sanitarium and visited my mother.”

D. "Warpath" “A crucial episode from Kenneth Roberts' monumental novel of Colonial history, Northwest Passage….Kenneth Roberts brings alive a little-known incident from the American past in a manner that makes it vital and exciting reading for today.”

This was an oldie even then, first published 1937, source for the 1940 movie with Spencer Tracy and for...yes, the 1958-1959 Buddy Ebsen NBC series (the latter must be why they republished it in 1960). During his lifetime Roberts (“for some time after graduating from Cornell in 1903…not until 1928 did he begin to write the great historical novels which won him a lasting fame…”) received five honorary doctorates and a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee “for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history.”

Sample sentence: “’I’ve often seen you,’ the man said, swallowing.”

C. Marnie, by Winston Graham: source for the 1964 Hitchcock movie, by the author of forty novels including the Poldark series, which was made into a hit BBC series. When you’ve got the touch, you’ve got the touch.

From the intro:

“What were the compelling forces that drove twenty-three-year-old Marnie Elmer from job to job, changing her identity each time….From the first moment his saw this strange and beautiful girl, Mark Rutland was intrigued. When her secret burst upon him with the impact of a thunderbolt, he could not follow the dictates of reason…. How Mark leads Marnie to find the key to the inner prison in which she has locked herself makes a taut, exciting story, full of suspense and sharp compassion.”

Sorry, you’re still not hitting the male audience. But to your credit, you don’t use “impact” as a verb. Today they’d write, “When her secret impacted him like a thunderbolt…” And that’s the sum total of the development of American literacy in forty-nine years.

This volume of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, one of ten on the café shelves, contains by far the most enduring novels in the group.

Outdoor Shakespeare, Eavesdropper's Heaven, Walker's Paradise

1. From the Times review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound, in Connecticut: “The audience’s enthusiasm is particularly infectious when children are present, excitedly feeding off the bouncy moments of comedy. I overheard one thrilled youngster burbling happily about having run into Puck while going on an ice cream run. Perhaps a lifelong theater lover was born in that moment.” Sweet!

2. John and Danielle are on vacation in New York. Maybe they'll get some good eavesdropping.

3. My current neighborhood in Austin has a walkability score of 45 out of 100 –- “car-dependent.” Alas, I agree. My previous Austin address gets a 77 – “very walkable.” Yeah, by American standards, I guess. The street on which I grew up in the Bronx only gets a 78, probably because of low socio-economic standing, but anyone who thinks it’s a mere one point more than any street is Austin is effing crazy; it was a 98 if you ask me. The street on which I lived in Greenwich Village from 1977 to 1979 (scroll down to Ann’s second comment) gets 100 out of 100 – “walker’s paradise.” Extremely true; from that corner you could walk between the worlds. (h/t JAC)

“Most of our isolation is self-chosen.”

A quotation from the French theologian Henri Nouwen.

Do you realize that this June’s the __th anniversary of my high school graduation? I’ll say it aloud: 40th. I intend to be continually stunned by numbers like this –- and even higher ones! -- for the next many, many years.

I went to a public high school for the gifted, and had a terrible time emotionally. It wasn’t the school’s fault or the teachers’ or my classmates’ or mine, either, it was just deep teenage blues, augmented by historical turmoil -- assassinations of father-figures, a trend for freakouts and literature-induced alienation -- that I took too much to heart. A high school made up almost exclusively of hippies and dorks, and I couldn’t tell whether I was both or neither. Adolescent males either act out or withdraw, and I was bred for the latter.

I've been staying away from that school for forty years. Never sent them my address, never got any reunion announcements.

But last week someone forwarded me a document, a file of capsule biographies my classmates have been submitting. About a hundred, out of a class of 980. I figured it was the most popular ones, or the nerdiest ones, who wrote them.

My instant reaction was, I'm not going to do that.

These people's careers have been pretty intimidating. One of us is now the director of theoretical physics at MIT. About half of the graduates who sent in their bios seem to be doctors or professors. One woman led the world’s foremost study on twins separated at birth. Another is the principal of an elementary school in Chinatown/Little Italy which she turned into one of New York City’s prize success stories, and where Bush and Giuliani held their press conference after 9/11. Many have made small or large fortunes in business. One sent in a genial report about how he wandered aimlessly through his twenties, following the Maharishi and so forth, and, by happenstance, ended up on the ground floor of the computer industry, helped develop “a bunch of new types of tech products including digital photography, advertiser supported email, healthcare information systems, information security technologies, advanced decision support methodologies and virtual world media services,” and now pursues photography. One of us is a jazz musician who played with Miles Davis in the 70s. Another had his picture on the cover of Bass Player magazine. You get the idea.

Well, that’s okay, I can mask envy with pride, but what bothered me was that so many of them wrote things like, “My lovely wife of thirty years and I have been living in Boston since I became partner at Smith, Jones...” “I met X, the love of my life, in Drama Club when he was a junior and I was a sophomore…”

How did they do it? Did they study hard for marriage they way they did for math tests? They’ve gotten all A’s in life. (One of them, in his bio, recounts how he got a 90 in his first high school test and the girl next to him, who’d gotten 100, sympathetically asked him what had gone wrong.) (I did okay, I got an A-minus average by showing up.)

When I read those bios, feelings of inferiority overwhelmed in a way I’d thought I’d outgrown. I wasn’t one of these people; I didn’t belong; they were more fortunate than me; they didn’t know I existed. I recognized lots of their names –- they were people I hadn’t dared speak to back then, because if they were male they were too hip, and if they were female they were too pretty, and in both cases too popular, too urban-mature.

I was sixteen again, in the worst way. And I wasn’t going to send them my stupid bio, I wasn’t going to be like them, nor was I going to send it in just to be snubbed by them either, look how self-satisfied they all were, everybody doing things perfectly in the same way. I’d send in a sarcastic bio, I’d tell them off, it would be the only one that didn’t comply with their format, and they wouldn’t know what to do with me, they’d ignore me and that would prove I was above them…

I read the bios again, to verify how dull and conventional they were -– and they weren’t. These were fine people, living skillfully and well –- they even wrote well. They liked each other and might be willing to like me. Most of them wouldn’t remember me at all; some might recall my name vaguely; but I wanted to know how their plots had turned out; I wanted to do what I’d never deigned to in high school -- learn from them.

I wasn’t sixteen anymore, thank God.

The most dazzling surprises in my life have occurred when, against all my preconceptions, I could no longer avoid seeing that people sought my friendship, that I had something to contribute to a relationship. That realization has been such discomfiting good news, I haven’t been able to surrender to it until it’s hit me again and again and again.

The lessons we most need to learn are the ones we’ve already learned.

I sent in my little bio, and it’s just like everyone else’s, not cleverer or more iconoclastic, not duller or more humdrum, either. It’s a genre piece. Its life comes from it species, it doesn’t stand out, it doesn’t have a mutant’s conceit. All it might be is an exorcism for the haunted classroom of my past.

Rags, Cupcakes, Carousels

I must have been born in the last decade –- the Fifties –- when you could hear a ragman crying his wares on the streets of New York. And our ragman must have been one of the last to keep to his rounds rather than to be settled into a retirement home by successful offspring, or evaporate into the fumes of the street along with the garbage and gasoline.

What he cried out was, “I cash clothes! I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

One jabbing note in a ringing nasal tenor that echoed metallically from the fire escapes, repeated down block after city block. He came around in the morning every few weeks -- must have walked a big circuit through the Bronx, spanning the neighborhoods, crossing the ethnic groups, returning to our street periodically. I was less than school age, to be home at that time. In my memory of his voice, the day is sunny, it’s spring, and a streetsweeper has just passed, leaving a neat swirl of gray dust behind him, his broom resting upended in his cart: he too a circler of neighborhoods on some esoteric calendrical orbit.

“I cash clothes! I cash! I take!”

His voice chilled me as delightfully as a ghost story. I rarely caught a glimpse of him -– a gray-haired man with a nose as sharp as his voice –- and even more rarely saw anyone conduct business with him. Sometimes a housewife would rush down and to catch him before he left the block, some old shirts in her hand, and receive what?, some coins, a dollar bill? Maybe the older housewives rushed down to reminisce with him about the Lower East Side in the Depression, their glory days.

I couldn’t fathom what he was doing or why. I asked my mother about it and her answer smacked of the subterranean, of sorcery performed in alleys and sewers: he went around asking people for their old clothes, and he paid them for the clothes, and somehow he earned his living by paying them. She might have hastily added that he resold the clothes –- hastily because she assumed, correctly, that I wouldn’t understand; but buying things from some people in order to sell them to others –- and such cheap things too, things no one I knew wanted –- hardly sounded like a believable way of earning a living. In my experience, parents, aunts, and uncles all earned their livings from the civil service, safe and predictable.

The years of street vendors. There was a knife-sharpener too, another occupation that absolutely stumped me. My mother sharpened her knives once in a blue moon on a little wheel of rough metal that she kept in a kitchen drawer. A man wandered the streets begging for acceptance as a substitute for that?

The ones I understood were the food vendors. The truck from Dugan’s Bakery, from which we only bought flat-topped yellow cupcakes spread with smooth fudgy chocolate. The two competing ice cream companies, Good Humor and Bungalow Bar, in trucks and hand-pushed carts: Good Humor daring us its avant-garde flavors of banana split and strawberry shortcake, but Bungalow Bar kindly offering my favorite, the chocolate malted popsicle. Sometimes, infrequently enough to always be a surprise, a carousel truck came by, with sides and roof of rusty orange wire and a bullhorn playing brain-grinding merry-go-round music, us little kids jumping down the apartment building steps and thronging the driver, quarters in hand. Then there were trucks my parents never bought from, though I pleaded: the seltzer truck with its wood crates full of blue siphon bottles; the dairy delivery man with milk, eggs, butter. My mother had her worldview down pat: seltzer delivery was for other families.

I didn’t notice when the ragman stopped coming around. And the delivery trucks disappeared gradually, probably into my college years, though there's been a mild fizzy trickle of retro seltzer delivery in recent years, staking out a route for customers who’ve heard of such things from their grandparents. Oh, no, there's one that delivers to Marin County -- and wouldn't you know it, seltzer delivery helps the environment!

Right now, I’d like a Dugan’s cupcake and a Bungalow Bar chocolate malted popsicle, melting all down my fingers.

My Bully

It was an age when stereotypes walked the earth. There were kids called Four Eyes, and rough kids and fatsos, there were boys who spoke with lisps and boys who wet their beds, there were dumb kids and walking encyclopedias. Anyone could be summarized in a phrase, and every neighborhood had the same population of simple phrases, with different faces attached. The fat kids seemed in our imagination –- and I have to call it imagination although we saw them every day –- not just large or overweight but balloonlike, globular, as if they belonged to a different species, and in the animated feature that was our street life they came complete with pendulous drooling lips and silly pompous voices.

I was a skinny malink. Whatever a malink was, I was informed in the most authoritative tones that I was it. My malinkhood, not to mention my protruding ribs and twiglike forearms, were proof that I could be made fun of with impunity. But everyone made fun of everyone else with impunity, and I was among the swiftest and most skillful in jeering at fat boys and running away, or calling out, “Thufferin’ Thuccotash,” when Stewie Silverman -– Thtewie Thilverman -- lisped.

My bully hadn’t achieved true circularity yet; he was large and pudgy on a realistic scale; but his older brother was a foremost blimp who, somehow in conjunction with that, had tremendous amounts of schoolwork that prevented him from going outside to play. My bully never spoke about his brother but they were inseparably joined in my mind. My bully’s name was William Goldschmitt, and you could tell he was on his way to alien-species roundness because he was never called Billy like a normal boy, always William.

The Goldschmitts lived in the apartment directly over ours, my family on the ground floor and his on the second: we were friends by propinquity. The strange thing was what good friends we were when he wasn’t beating me up. We walked down the street together for fifteen-cent slices of pizza, chatting enthusiastically about dinosaurs and astronauts, stamp collections and Jerry Lewis movies, despite the fact that when I was in company with my other friends, my normal friends, we shouted, “Pizza Boy!” at him because he ate three slices at a sitting. (He was eight years old, me six.) Often I ran upstairs to play board games with him. William always got the new games a few weeks before anyone else –-or maybe it was just a few days, those extra-inning days of street running and ball chasing, days as full as weeks -– because his grandfather owned a hobby shop, a little place stocked with model kits, pink rubber balls, lanyard material, chemistry sets, erector sets, terrariums, baby blocks, rhythm band instruments, and books in boys’ and girls’ mystery adventure series, as well as the games we lusted after. It was William who first possessed a copy of The Game of Life, by Milton Bradley; we must have played it a dozen times before it was available for purchase by the unconnected. To fuel the action we drank glasses of iced tea, dark moss-brown and zinging with artificial sweetener, from the Tupperware pitcher William’s mother kept in the fridge, a practice my mother sneered at as being pretentious and genteel.

The times I didn’t want to be near William were the times he came upon me in the lobby of the apartment building, where I couldn’t outrace him and no parents were around. I don’t remember what reasons he claimed for attacking me; I don’t think he even used a pretext, like my looking at him funny or anything. He just came in swinging and kept up till I was crying, which was never very long. I was going to use the word “merciless” in that last sentence but in fact it wasn’t merciless at all: he stopped as soon as I sobbed, “I give.” The rules were never spoken but they were followed. Another rule was that the little space in the corner of the vestibule, where the open front door made a triangle with the walls, was my safety zone: if I could dash into there, he wouldn’t come in after me, although if I ever felt like leaving that tiny triangle of floor space, he was waiting right there with his fists still clenched. Once or twice he broke the rule and pounded me within the safety zone, but some inner voice stopped him and he respected the rule from then on.

I couldn’t understand why someone would want to hurt someone else for no reason. For a reason, yes, that was part of the code; but I was just walking through the lobby doing nothing! In our friendly hours -– which could follow the unfriendly ones with no interval -– I asked him why he punched me. “Don’t you ever feel like fighting someone?” he asked -- a question to which I still don’t know my true answer. Then he directed me to the next board game, the next glass of iced tea.

I complained to my father: “William always beats me up.” Contrary to my hopes, my father did not beat up Williams’ father, an insurance man of dismal mien. “Hit harder,” my dad said, and looked back down at some printed matter.

I even asked William himself what I should do. “How come it’s so easy for you to beat me up?” I asked.

He explained his secret technique: don’t just punch once or twice, conduct a relentless rapid-fire barrage, punch after punch to the same spot on the belly, until the opponent –- me – is overwhelmed.

Next time we found ourselves in the vestibule together, I tried it, but I was so intent on keeping out of range that my fists couldn’t reach the target area and landed harmlessly on his arms. He stuck to his plan as always, and I gave up on schedule, believing I was incapable of mastering the technique.

As usually happens, at some point he stopped bullying me without ever saying so. Maybe it was when my family moved to the fourth floor, a larger apartment in a different precinct of the building. Ringing his doorbell now required travel with a purpose; it was no longer what I automatically did when I went out into the hall to look for a playmate. Then William advanced to junior high school -- not our district one, but a private school his mother genteelly drove him to –- and when we crossed paths he didn’t bother to say hello.

One time, William got into a fight with the son of a friend of his parents, and the boy broke Williams’ arm. William’s parents sued their friends, winning hospital costs plus emotional damages.

Years later, William’s older brother became a tax lawyer, and the neighborhood whispered that he’d lost a lot of weight and become a racquetball nut. I don’t know what William became, because by the time he was old enough to become anything I was out of there myself.

Now I’m coming to the ending, and it’s not going to be what I planned when I wrote the beginning. I’ve thought of an alternate ending, so I’m going to give you both, the theatrical version and the director’s cut. The theatrical version is that I think of William with insistent bitterness, and if I came across him lying in the gutter I’d piss on him and remind him why. In that version, William is my negative mascot, and while I love peace and have spent years meditating, practicing serenity, studying forgiveness, and I know that anytime I hurt someone it hurts me worse, I want to keep one symbolic enemy, a mental demon I won’t come across in real life, so I’ll stay grounded and not think I’m some kind of spiritual person.

The director’s cut? It’s just this: William became a good story and now we’re through. His story visited me after a lot of years and made me smile, and as it passes out of my mind, perhaps for as many more years as I have left, I see it off with a grateful wave. If I ran into him again I’d be happy to see him, and not need a reason. I wonder if he’s fatter now, or thinner, and the unknown answer pleases me.

He was always a story, and now he’s more so.

Peacock Blue

The empty envelope had my childhood address in peacock blue ink, and hers in the corner.

Empty, and with two corners slit. I’d found it in a box of old books when I was rearranging the garage. Maybe the letter was somewhere among all these boxes, with a dozen others she’d sent, but I had no idea where. Maybe I’d thrown them out in a seizure of anti-nostalgia, or they’d been lost in one of my dozen moves.

Was it a letter rhapsodizing about making love for the first time? Or pleading with me to go to the same college as her?

Peacock blue: the color of junior year of high school. Her handwriting: careful, regular, every letter standing straight. A schoolgirl’s handwriting, belonging to someone who thought that to be mature is to do things correctly.

Peacock blue. We wrote letters obsessively though we lived only half a mile apart. Outranking the late-night phone calls and intense afterschool talks, the letters were for deep, enduring questions that couldn’t be allowed to evaporate into air. They’d continued into the first year of college, traveling a thousand miles. Then they’d stopped.

The smallest souvenir can take you the furthest back.

We’d been landmarks for each other, like pencil marks on a wall to record your height. Impersonal. Not that it could have been anyone—no, we really liked each other. But we hadn’t even had selves yet to know. I didn’t know who’d written those letters, or answered them.

I tried to wonder what she was doing now, but it didn’t work. If I’d learned that she’d been married, divorced, had children—my God, by now she could have grandchildren—had this or that illness or occupation, they would be arbitrary facts, unattached to a solid form, like pushpins without a map to pin them on.

What I would have thrilled to see, what could have told me something, was, What is her handwriting like now?

Don't dream and drive at the same time.

Getting up bleary to take the kids to school: cranky mottled clouds smoky purple, cars starting up exhaust smells, gray of sleep over everything and thousands of dreams flying upwards, flocking in the sky, fleeing from the heads of their owners like bats scattering at nightfall. Only a few cars yet, and with headlights still on. Big decisions: radio on or off? Crosstown first or downtown? A Lay’s potato chip truck rushes through a yellow light: I can almost smell the chips, in the side mirror I notice the comical lean of a vehicle that’s too high for its width, and I remember how in Manhattan at this hour the delivery trucks own the streets. Though in the outer boroughs you might hear one of those immense streetsweeper trucks churning by slothslow, waking everyone as they unconsciously plead for five extra minutes, merciless rotating brushes kicking up asthma dust and leaving behind if your nose strains for it a sprinkle of fresh water. Like a hippopotamus paying for penny candy out of a tiny purse.

Delivery trucks doubleparked on the bumpy streets with ropedoff manholes and the scent of summer garbage, the stockboys barking parking instructions, steam rising from a subway grate and from cardboard cups of lousy coffee the object not to spill it on your suit as you hurry to the office, jostled against others at the crosswalk hurrying with the same goal in mind like you’re in a gameshow but what’s the prize, most everybody looking down glum silent shabby shlumpy but somehow once in a while there’s a tall close-shaven man in an expensive suit, or a woman dressed like a million bucks with not a molecule too much makeup, who stands tall and looks straight ahead as if they know exactly where they’re going. They seem to come from another planet.

Out of college I worked in the diamond district, though I worked on the opposite of diamonds, and there were guys who rode the commuter train home at five o’clock with millions of dollars in gems hidden in secret belts under their pants, and there were patient, fatigued craftsmen whose jeweler’s monocles were as much part of them as if they dentures. At lunchtime I wandered through Rockefeller Center looking at the people lunching at the outdoor tables amid lilac bushes, or the ice skaters in front of the big Christmas tree depending on the season. I’d stop in the Librairie Française bookstore and try to see what I could get out of Simenon or Balzac in French in those foreignscented paperbacks with the crazy upsidedown covers, or Jaws or Agatha Christie in translation, and there were green Michelin guides on a display rack and blue packs of sweetstinky Gauloises on the wall behind the counter. I’d take out lunch from a sandwich shop, big wonderful sandwiches of chopped liver or roast pork or homemade turkey salad with big chunk of mayonnaise-slathered dark meat from the same turkeys whose breasts they carved into slices. Walking back to the office where I’d eat gabbing and gossiping and satirizing with a couple of other bewildered graduates in a supply closet amid steel shelves stacked with typewriter ribbons shipping envelopes staples whiteout and esoteric varieties of tape. On the mezzanine of the office building there were wholesale outlets for engagement rings and silverware and china, riding up in the elevator I knew people could smell my chopped liver sandwich in its white takeout bag, and I would be wearing a navy blazer with square padded shoulders a light pink shirt a squarebottomed knit tie chino pants my hair curling at the collar the hip office underling 1974.

Going home at five the throngs flowing down the subway entrance stairs as if never to be seen again, the strangely fresh tunnel breeze as if blown in from some polluted beach resort, the air lashing out in the trainwake, the electric shriek of braking metal wheels, the crowd shoulder to shoulder how do they keep from pushing each other into the path of the monster, sniffing each other’s breath coverups, purple Sen-Sen, pink hygienic cinnamon Dentyne gum bought in individually wrapped paperclip-size slivers (this the age before supersizing) from a mirrored vending machine for a nickel, or can it really be a penny? Pressing into the car, standing swaying using other people as your leaning posts, testing yourself can you go the whole way without grasping a handrail. Your personal space constricted to where it doesn’t even include your outer epidermal layer. Silent battles over whether you can read the next guy’s newspaper, folded up thin in accord with subway etiquette but the corner of the front page wagging into someone else’s eye. Violent fantasies about what if someone tries to grope you. All the lonely people where do they all come from: from Pelham Parkway and Fort Hamilton Parkway and Bay Ridge and Woodlawn and Midwood and Inwood and Washington Heights and Jackson Heights and Astoria and Flushing and Flatbush and Bensonhurst and Ocean Parkway and Brighton Beach and Fort Totten and Fort Lee and Bergenfield and Fair Lawn and Passaic and Massapequa and Levittown and Rochdale Village and Greenwich Village and Riverside Drive.

In the jammed street outside the office building at rush and lunch hours, an emaciated roundshouldered man in a frayed greengray suit stood holding up something small and rectangular at eye level, too small to be a book unless it was something really esoteric like it might hold the secret of the cosmos or something, and he murmured in a clipped, meek, oddly ironic voice so that only if you walked very near and leaned your ear attentively could you understand what he was saying: “Wanna buy a card case? Wanna buy a card case?” Little silvered cases for calling cards, as in a Victorian novel. A rapid mutter like an unaccountably demure racing tout: “Wanna buy a card case? Wanna buy a card case?” Did anyone ever? I didn’t. Sunken cheeks, yellow olive skin, using no wasted motion as if he couldn’t afford the caloric expenditure. Knocked by pedestrians’ shoulders and kneeheight briefcases. I have sometimes wondered if at some point he starved to death.

“Okay, kids, this is it, school! Have a great Friday, see you later.”

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.