felt dizzy. “You’re lying.”
“Why should I lie?”
“Because you don’t like me.”
“That’s true, but I ain’t lyin’, kid.”
I licked my lips. “What else?”
“That’s it. Hey, I wasn’t friends with her,” she said coldly. “I just remember when she died, right on the job. They say she was puttin’ a plate of food in front of a customer when a vein popped in her head.”
Grace put a bony fingertip to her temple. “Boom, and she was dead a minute later. Fell down in the food. Mashed potatoes all over her face. Your mother quit school and went to work. One day she met your father on the train, and that finished him. You know what happened after that.”
“But —”
“I don’t wanna talk about it no more,” Grace said, faking a yawn. “That’s the whole story. I figured you didn’t know, so I told you.”
My bones felt as if they were dissolving. I imagined myself melting under her gaze, like the wicked witch did in the Wizard of Oz. But Grace was that witch, not me; she should have been melting.
“You stink, Grace. You’re …” I struggled, trying to think of something to say. “You’re the worst person in the world.”
It was the best I could do: my vocabulary didn’t contain four-letter words, and for the first time in my life I felt frustrated by it. She laughed at me.
“Tough guy. Who do you think you are, anyway? You think you can just come to this neighborhood and be a wise guy?” She pointed at me. “People gotta pay for the things they do.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You’ll find out some day, wise guy.”
“So why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t gotta tell you everything. Ha! A little punk like you, from Long Island.” She jerked her thumb in the direction she believed to be toward Long Island. “Who wants to live out there, anyhow?”
Her anger was random, insane. “I want to go home,” I said, surprising myself by calling it that. Grace caught my arm with fingers that seemed to have retained the chill of the groceries she’d handled.
“After you, mister, there couldn’t be any more,” she said, squeezing at the word “mister.”
I felt my pulse throb against her fingers and yanked myself free. Her nails clawed my skin.
“She hadda stop havin’ babies after you. Something broke in there.” She patted her flat belly that had yielded no children. “You broke somethin’ in there. Why do you think you got no brothers or sisters?”
“I broke something?” I hated my feeble voice.
She nodded gravely. “You kicked so hard when you were in there you killed all the other seeds. Seeds for the babies. Ask, ask your father. If you ever see him again. Maybe he dumped you because of what you did.”
She hiked a storklike leg and waved her foot: kick, kick, kick.
“Like that, you went.”
The slipper fell off and I picked it up for her, an automatic polite response I’d been taught. I’d have done it for Hitler. She slid her foot into it like a knife into a scabbard.
The door to the apartment house opened. A Puerto Rican with a green cap and a thin moustache came out, carrying a transistor radio. Grace put a hand between my shoulder blades and tried to shove me inside.
“Okay, kid, she lived on the third floor. Let’s climb.”
I pitched forward but scampered back as soon as my balance returned. In the instant that door had been open I’d seen enough — feeble light, smashed-in mailboxes, cracked linoleum worn through to the black.
“Eh, come on, I ain’t got all day,” Grace said merrily. She was bluffing — no way she would leave precious groceries on the street to climb those stairs. She stroked her hair. “I’m waiting, Joey.”
“You go to hell!” I screamed. My vulgarity would have been enough to fix her but I grabbed the cart, backed it up a few feet, and slammed it into the side of the building. The frame buckled as oranges and dripping eggs littered the sidewalk.
Grace was screaming but I ran away, not looking back. I ran home but kept going past the house, flopping behind a hill of dirt at the construction site. I watched the heavy traffic on Atlantic Avenue and thought about jumping into the midst of it. I climbed the hill and looked into the hamburger joint’s deep foundation, a giant grave.
I knew I had to return to the building that had been my mother’s home.
I walked slowly along Atlantic Avenue, so I wouldn’t run into Grace. The sun was setting, making the discarded wine and whiskey bottles on the street glow as if they were precious.
I entered the apartment house and climbed stairs, linoleum creaking under my feet. I smelled bug killer, wet laundry. Somewhere overhead a baby cried: did he know, even at his age, what a dump he lived in?
On the third-floor landing there were three doors to choose from. I picked the one nearest the stairwell. It was peppered with dents — someone, maybe a jilted lover, had kicked it dozens of times at foot level. Someone had painted “3-A” on the door with cheap red paint, or maybe it was nail polish.
No bell. I knocked. My small fist barely made a sound on the dull metal.
But someone heard me — sliding, scratching, the snap of a lock. The door opened a crack, still bound by a chain. A man with dark eyes and a handlebar moustache looked out at me, the chain cutting in front of his chin.
“What?” he said. I smelled whiskey.
I swallowed. “Can I come in?”
“You sellin’ somethin’, kid?”
“Just let me in, please?”
His eyes narrowed. The door slammed shut. I started to turn for the stairwell but I heard the chain slide in its groove. He’d closed the door to open that final chain, and then he opened the door wide.
“Well, come on.” He leaned on the doorknob as if it were a cane. He wore a sleeveless undershirt and polka-dot shorts and open-toed sandals.
“You make me open up, now you ain’t comin’ in?” he said. “Man, that’s some balls.”
I entered. Beer cans littered the floor. It was the same cruddy linoleum as in the hallway, just slightly less worn. There was a small TV in the middle of the room, set upon a cardboard box. Wide-open windows fronted the elevated train tracks. It looked as if you could reach out and touch them.
The paint-starved walls were the color of raw leather. Had they been painted since my mother lived here, if indeed this had been her flat? I moved to the windows, needing the air. I could smell grease from the tracks.
The
