get married,” Mel said, in the same flat tone she used to say the Yankees would win the World Series.
Two-cent chunks of chalk the width and length of plum tomatoes were great for street artists, and the rough gray sidewalks of Shepherd Avenue provided an unlimited canvas that was washed clean after every rain. I was a better chalk artist than Mel. She was spirited but untalented, and loved to draw horses. I pointed out flaws in her drawings — she made them with hind legs bent in the same direction as the forelegs.
“That’s wrong,” I told her. “The hind legs bend the other way.” I rapidly sketched a horse. In Roslyn I’d always done well in art class.
“See?” I said when I finished. “That’s how the legs are.”
“You’re nuts,” Mel said. “They ain’t like that.”
We ran to find a copy of my grandfather’s Racing Form, which had a drawing of a horse on it.
“See?” I said triumphantly, tracing my finger along the legs. “Told you.”
Pow! A punch to my stomach, and I didn’t see her again for days. Then she reappeared, as if nothing had happened.
* * *
On days Mel and I were apart, Connie sometimes got rid of me by sending me shopping with Grace Rothstein.
The worst thing about Grace was her eyes. They were blue but unattractive, because they bulged and seemed to jiggle, like eggs in boiling water. Her wild blond hair was pulled back and stabbed into a ball at the back of her head with a bunch of hair pins, the wide kind that don’t pinch closed.
Cooking was all she seemed to care about, and her husband’s deli was an excellent focus for her obsession. It was a tiny place but Angie insisted it was a gold mine for that “Real German.” Being a real German had something to do with being passionless, having a capacity for cruelty, and a love of gadgetry: flashlights, precision drills, and all things battery-operated.
Once I was having a catch with Mel in the driveway when she cut her hand on the ragged Cyclone fencetop. Blood pumped from the wound as Mel ran screaming to our basement.
While everyone else yelled and tripped over things Uncle Rudy set down his coffee cup, grabbed the arm, and briefly eyed the wound before pinching it closed with his thumb and forefinger and reaching for his coffee with his other hand.
“No need for a doctor,” he said. “A bit of pressure seals the wound.”
He was right, but he didn’t endear himself to anyone. Only a Real German could have stayed so calm.
He had been a deli man all his life, and I imagine that during their courtship — a German-Jew and an Italian-Catholic, now there’s a combination — Rudy must have figured he’d found himself a workhorse. Grace could slice a cucumber without a cutting board, using her callused thumb as the base. Without even looking at the knife she churned out an even shower of slices that fell like coins.
Angie took me with him once to fix a pipe at Rudy’s. Rudy stood in front, behind the counter, his red wavy hair neatly combed, iron-rimmed glasses pressed into the flesh pockets around his eyes. His full-length white apron looked stiff — you got the impression that his body had been sprayed lightly with a coating of clear glue.
It was twenty degrees hotter in back, where Grace worked. Had the Real German stepped back there for a moment he’d have lost the starch in his apron. Grace sweated away at a cutting board, while a wonderful smell rose from a sizzling pan on the stove. The pan contained thick patties, and at one point Grace stopped cutting, scooped them out, and laid them on a tray lined with paper towels.
They looked like flat meatballs. Grace handed one to me, and when I bit into it my salivary glands became waterfalls. I sucked on my fingers when it was gone but Grace offered me no more, on account of Rudy, no doubt. The Real German made a face at the empty grease spot on the paper towel: lost business.
What ingredients went into those patties! Scraps, nothing but scraps. Pork butt ends, heels of ham and bologna loaves, curled bits of Swiss cheese, stale Italian bread — all stuff that got pushed off tablecloths and landed in most American garbage pails.
Grace all but swept the floor to catch every crumb. She raked her hand over the rough pile of food, then chopped it into dust. After that the contents went into a mixing bowl. She dripped oil into it and mixed it up with a wooden spoon.
Raw, the stuff looked like wet cardboard. Fried, it became “meat.”
In warm weather the store fan blew out through the screen door toward Shepherd Avenue. By noon the smell of those patties would lure day laborers from all over the area, including the men working at the hamburger-joint site.
Connie threw a fit when she learned I’d eaten a patty. Angie protested his innocence, having been under the sink when Grace fed me.
“Never eat anything they make there,” she warned me. “You don’t know what they put in it.”
I did know, but I didn’t make a point of it. “It’s delicious,” I answered, but Connie waved me off.
“Never mind. Lots of stuff tastes good but it’s crap. Learn to schieve.”
“What’s that?”
“It means look out for germs. Wait till you get home, where you can eat without gettin’ poisoned.”
“What about lemon ice?” I said, knowing she loved the stuff.
She hesitated. “Willie’s okay, but that’s all.”
“Okay, but sometimes I get hungry.”
“You ain’t gonna starve. If you get hungry, come home.”
Home! Was it fair to call it that?
Seconds later she was on the phone to Grace, speaking in a shrill dialect she used only when she was truly frantic. The only thing I caught from the conversation was the English sign-off: “If you give him something, at least let it be wrapped!”
The rules were different for stuff Grace made at home. I once held a starfish-shaped cookie she made, studying it before gobbling it. She had brought over a tin of such cookies to enjoy with coffee: reindeer, bows, bunny rabbits. The cookie I held was glazed yellow with egg yolk and pebbled with dots of colored sugar. When the light caught it right it gleamed like crystal.
It looked like the creation of a fairy godmother working with a magic wand instead of an oven and a cookie sheet. I sat across the table from Grace and held the cookie up to her face, closing one eye so I could see the woman and the cookie in the same dimension.
It seemed impossible for a woman who looked like that to have made such a thing of beauty. She caught me looking.
“Hey. What are you starin’ at?”
I opened my other eye. “This cookie is pretty, Grace.”
She blushed to the salt-and-pepper roots of her hair. “I like pretty things,” she said, so softly that only I heard her. “Thank you, sonny.”
* * *
Mel was visiting
