Back in Manhattan my new workplace was called Solidaridad Humana—Human Solidarity. It was a giant shipwreck of a public school on Suffolk and Rivington Streets, long abandoned and vandalized before being commandeered by militants and mural painters with barely enough funds to clean the graffiti. The temperature inside was ridiculous even in March: we had no heat from oil. But there was plenty of heat from enthusiasm. The students were all recent arrivals from the Dominican Republic. Their population in New York was still small then, and they were breathtakingly ambitious. I had the vague sense they worked in shady places for illegal alien wages, and I knew they wanted clean labor in bright offices and big auto repair shops run by Americans. I knew because those were the jobs whose vocabulary I was supposed to teach them. And these were the words we used. We never talked about how they made a living in the meantime.

 I was young and cute with Jewish chick hippie body hair, and the female students kept saying, “Miss! You need to clean your eyebrows!” They didn’t mean it as an insult; the overarching vibe at Solidaridad Human was that everyone was beautiful—and since everyone was so hopped up on the place, that sentiment was heartfelt. The girls were curvy and had names like Leydy. The boys were polite and adorable. Even the old people were sexy, the men in their baggy tango suits on Fridays when we all stayed late and ate big squares of Dominican cornmeal pudding—majarete—and put salsa music on a boom box and danced; the matron-aged, worried women with makeup nonetheless, and heroically bared old cleavage.

 I ran a tight ship but a fun ship. “Teacher,” a student said once when I had them sing Joni Mitchell, “In this class it’s not just about how to work or how to buy a subway token. Teacher you love the English language!” Once during a punch-card lesson, I was thinking about last night with my boyfriend and the students saw my face and started laughing. Then Leydy announced she was marrying Joanny. Maritza started going with Rafy. It was hot in my class—there were even rumors that the hottest girl of all, a gloriously tall, rouged-cheek-boned 22 year old named Altagracia, was very ardent about Elvis and Emmanuel, and the class was so warm and mellow that the guys weren’t fighting over her but instead were sharing. A triangle? “Wow,” I thought, “The Lower East Side is burning!”

 One day in late March I got a new pedagogy idea. I would tape-record some stuff off WNYC, bring it into class, and play it—over and over and over if need be—so the repetition would drum my students with gradual and indelible comprehension.

 We started with the weather. “Blah blah blah blah blah rain blah blah,” I imagined them hearing at first, and I was right. “Rain teacher,” Elvis said. “I hear ‘rain.’

 “Good, class!” I chirped. “Let’s listen again.

 BlahblahblahtodayMarchtwenty-fifthblahblahrain.

“Today, March 25!"

"Good, class! Now let's rewind and replay."

 Blah rain blahblahrainyforty-oneblah blah.

 “Rain today windy forty-one degrees!”

 And so on, through about 14 repetitions, until they had the whole report burned in their brains, complete with grammar points like the future tense and even a few modals such as “should carry your umbrella.”

 “OK, great!” I chirped again. “Now let’s try something more interesting. The news!”

 Blahblahblahblahanniversaryblahblahblah.

 “An anniversary, teacher!”

 “Blahblahwomenblah….”

 “Women in factory, teacher!”

 Blah blah blah.

“Women in factory fell.”

 Blah blah. I was really into it, with my eyes scrunched up, feeling like such a good, innovative teacher. Then I looked. And listened. There was no more English and Altagracia was crying.

 “Ay dios mio todas murieron calcinadas?” she was saying, over and over in Spanish, just as I’d wanted everyone to do in their new language. “They all burned to death? They jumped? They burned! They jumped!”

 Everyone was weeping, and not just from sympathy, I suddenly realized. On the faces of the women I saw stark fear.

 “Teacher,” Altagracia said, and her tears rolled down. “We work in these places. We sew clothes. The doors are still locked! We ask for them to be unlocked and we’re refused!” She broke into sobs.

 Elvis and Emmanuel moved toward her. Till now, whatever they had done to her or with her had been out of class and merely rumored. Now, wanting to comfort her, they risked mutual exposure and their cool. They stared at each other. The class stared at them. Everything felt dampened as it never had before.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling like a terrible teacher and desperately wanting to redeem myself. “Shall we talk about the danger and what to do about it?”

“There is nothing to do,” one of the older women said frostily in Spanish, as though I was a nice teacher but an idiot one. “Nothing except to improve ourselves. No more news tonight. Let’s do the lesson about data-entry words.”

I felt terrible for the duration of the class, and terrible when I walked in next day. The students, though, seemed fine. Leydy and Joanny were planning their wedding, mostly in Spanish but a little in English, too. Maritza was making eyes at Rafy. Altagracia, as usual, was holding court with her flushed cheekbones and smoldering rumors.

Debbie Nathan lives in Upper Manhattan. Her book, Sybil Exposed, about the making of the 1970s bestseller Sybil, is due out in October from Free Press.
 

Middle-aged white New York woman with long, dangling earrings: No.

This is the Number 1 track. Number 2 trains, they're all express. Over on that track. A Number 2 just pulled out.

French man: Oh! I just got off that train! A girl on that train, she tell me to get off because it was express and I need a Number 2 that is local.

Woman: I tell you there's no such thing as a Number 2 that's local. Where are you going?

Man: Here, I show you [opens large, MTA map]. One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. That girl on the train said there was a 2 Local.

Woman: Harlem. You're going to Harlem?

Man: Yes.

Young white New Yorker man wearing black yarmulke in hair: There IS a Number 2 train that's local!

Woman: No there is not! There's not. I don't think there is. Lemme me see that map.

NY Man: Where are you going?

French man: One Hundred and Twenty-fifth. Right here on the map.

NY man: Harlem???

Woman: He's going to Harlem.

NY man: This Number 1 local here, at Broadway and 125th, is also Harlem.

Woman: No it's not! It's Manhattanville! Morningside Heights! He wants to go to Harlem!

French man: Is there something wrong with Harlem?

American man: Oh no. There's nothing wrong with Harlem.

Woman: He wants to go to Harlem. Let him go to Harlem!

French man: That girl on the train, she said there was local Number 2. That girl--

Woman: Forget that girl. You want Harlem.

French man: Yes, Harlem!

Woman: Here's a 3 train coming right now. Take it! Take it! It's just like the 2. It takes you to Harlem.

French man: Harlem.

American man: Harlem?

Woman: Harlem!

Debbie Nathan lives in Upper Manhattan and is working on "Sybil, Inc.," a book about the making of the 1970s bestseller Sybil.
 

It sounds like Harlem when black people in New Orleans talk, but way more so. They open their mouths and cane syrup sounds roll out. “Awright, Sugar. Heego, dawlin’,” said the steam table lady serving shrimp as I lunched at a conference that brought me recently to this gorgeous, mangled city. I asked where she was from. “Law Naan,” she said.

She meant the Lower Ninth Ward, a historic, working-class black neighborhood that was virtually wiped out by Katrina. White people from New Orleans pronounce it this way: “Lowuh Naynt.’ Perfect Brooklynese – an echo of Bensonhurst or Bay Ridge or Sheepshead Bay. Yo! What’s up with that?

“Yeah, we tawk like New Yawk. I hea’ dat a lot,” laughed a cabbie. With his pink, hard jaw and sandy hair, he could pass easily for FDNY or NYPD. He couldn’t explain the accent, but as he described how his house had blown over in the wind, I had a Pavlovian urge to tell how my teenage daughter watched jumpers from Twin Tower 2. Then he said he has no insurance to rebuild, and the government won’t help at all. The levees broke nine months ago, he’s still sleeping on his brother’s floor, the world has forgotten New Orleans, and what can you do. His talk sounded different from post-9/11 talk. In shame I kept my own mouth quiet.

“It could be because they’re not just long time Cajun – they’re also Irish and Italian, a lot like New York,” said my friend (also white) who moved to New Orleans a few years ago. She knows a historian at Tulane. He says that way back when, the city’s races more or less got along. A different scenario than in New York, where the Irish rioted in 1863 and massacred dozens of African Americans. “That was from job competition,” my friend said. “But in 19th-century New Orleans,” she speculated, “people were working instead of fighting.”

Not nowadays.

“See dose projects?” pointed out another white cabbie. We were cruising past blocks of low-slung public housing, inhabited until last year by thousands of impoverished – and mostly black — New Orleans residents. Now the buildings were water-stained, moldy, boarded up, vacant. The Times-Picayune had front-page articles about tents pitched at projects like these throughout the city. The tents are full of people who want the boards off so they can come back from places like Houston. But the city says no. So did my driver.

“As bad as Katrina was,” he commented, “it did one good t’ing. It got rid of d’ element.” He waved again toward the projects. “D’ bad element. Dey cawsed all d’ crime. Now dey’re gone, an’ good riddance. Thanks to Katrina we can make a new start. Widdout ’em!”

My friend got tearful that night, telling me over beers that she’s drinking too much. When I saw her a year and a half ago, she was looking for Mary Jane shoes to go with an outfit she assembled for Mardi Gras 2005. She’d been accepted into a parade crew of some two dozen black grandmothers who’d been marching for years in baby doll night gowns. Many were from the Lower Ninth, and many were scattered by Katrina. Only seven reunited for Mardi Gras 2006. Meanwhile, my friend’s neighborhood has lost its bus service, and she spent months without mail delivery or a nearby supermarket. Most houses in her neighborhood still have that ominous, Passover-Angel-of-Death “X” marked on them, with kabbalistic letters and numerals spray-painted in the four quadrants.

We took a walk one night near her apartment. A white, middle-aged neighbor woman sat on a lawn chair by her FEMA trailer – it was anchored on her driveway, beside a house that was gutted. The woman sported the tasteful clothing and svelte habitus of a society matron. She had the mouth of a Long Island mafiosa.

“Wanna see how we fucking live now?” she asked, and led me into the trailer. It was so cramped that her professional-class husband, lying shirtless in the matchbox bedroom, was a dead ringer for what Southerners of his station call “trash.” “Look at this shit,” the lady said, slamming a plywood kitchen drawer that had popped off its hinges. “Goddamned government.”

“Welcome to the insults of US welfare,” I thought, but she didn’t see it that way. “As bad as Katrina was,” she said, “it did one good thing.” And so on and so forth, including that New Yorkese mantra again: “D’ element.”

Close your eyes and it could have been Canarsie years ago, or a more recent Howard Beach. Open them and it was hibiscus and grits and beignets, gentlemen in summer suits, houses with dreamy colonial porticos. The baroque of old Dixie racism, tricked out in newer carpet bag. On the plane home, my seatmate – who hailed from yankee-ized Washington, DC — boasted of having spent the last few days in the Lower Ninth, measuring every single lot for a company that’s amassed $30 billion to rebuild the ward. The plan, he said, is to bulldoze all the damaged, workingman’s dwellings and replace them with new homes in the $100K to $150K range. Unaffordable for former residents, he admitted. But that’s OK, he said cheerfully. After all, “Katrina did one good thing.”

I’d just bought a New York Times at the airport. How timely: A piece on the National pages talked of recent Census data. It shows that since Katrina, New Orleans has lost giant chunks of its black and poor demographic. Meanwhile, the numbers have jumped for whites and higher-incomes.

The whole thing tempted me to bombard my seat mate with more linguistic New Yorkish. “Drop dead,” I practiced silently, but could not say it aloud. After all, our five boroughs constitute one of the most racially segregated areas in the country. But no one here talks openly about kicking out “d’ element.” Instead, they’re dealt with politely, via sky-high rents and doormen. Meanwhile, disaster is an act of Muslims rather than God or the Army Corps of Engineers. With demons like ours, even d’ element gets tea and sympathy.

So I kept my accent quiet, but wonder what New Orleans will sound like in a generation. Will a dark, dialectal molasses still sweeten the ear? Will even the dese’s and dose’s survive? Or will an influx of out-of-town whites and moneyed yuppies turn the whole place to Network Standard?

Hard to say. I guess it depends on whether brave little community groups like Common Ground (http://www.commongroundrelief.org/) and ACORN (www.acorn.org) can get support – locally and nationally – to rebuild for all the old residents of New Orleans and not just for those with wealth. If democracy prevails, that city will still resound with weird echoes of Harlem and Brooklyn. With people who don’t know why we sound alike, but who want to keep talking in the place they always have.

**

Tuesday, August 30.

Today is “compassionate conservatism” day at the RNC, when delegates from every state are urged to visit soup kitchens and other non-profits that comprise unfettered capitalism’s mop up detail, to show how caring and faith-based-charities and thousand-points-of-light Republicans can be. The Texans are heading out from the Hilton, over to the Passaic River to pick up trash.

But first, a speaker says, everyone should check to see if they’ve used up the complimentary 60-minute calling cards they got in their RNC goodie bags, courtesy Verizon, or the complimentary bus and subway passes provided by the city. If they are still good, the delegates are instructed, “Give them to April and she’ll give them to the Salvation Army to help those who are less fortunate and can really use them.”

The mass, high-pitched “Oooooooh!” and applause that follows is exactly like what happens when a yellow-duckie receiving blanket is unwrapped at a baby shower. I consider telling April that 60-minute cards last far less than an hour when you’re homeless and lack a cell or residential phone — when you use a Verizon pay phone in New York, a calling card gets docked 15 minutes even before you get a dial tone. But I keep quiet.

**

Oh, that troublesome nanosecond when English speakers grope unconsciously for the proper word! Most buy time with “uh” or “um” or “you know.” (College students and professors – particularly those plugged into the deconstructionist and social constructionist disciplines – often use “sort of”). Then there’s the Texas delegation.

At a sumptious breakfast in their honor, sponsored by Halliburton a man giving the invocation demonstrates the Christian fundamentalist, GOP version of “um.”

It is “just.”

As in, “Lord, we just pray for the police officers. And we just thank you for the great country we live in. We lift up the New York Police Department, and we just thank you for their leaders. In Jesus’ name amen.”

**

Out on the street after breakfast, not far from the Hilton, across the street from the horse-drawn carriages and park so gorgeous that it might be that non grata nationality for Republicans: French.

On the side with all the luxe hotels there’s a chilling absence of people except for cops cops cops and more cops, and pedestrians in male and female power suits, their big RNC credentials hanging on grosgrain like royal dog tags.

Well, there are a few others. For instance, the two fellows shaking their fingers at a credentialed couple of a certain age – she with still slim ankles, silver hair and expensive reading glasses on a chain, he just as tasteful and patrician. “Go back South where you came from, fucking Republicans,” shouts one of the men. “Goddamn hicks,” adds the other in a voice dripping venom.

The RNCers look stricken, perhaps not so much by the verbiage as by the demographic of their hecklers. No smelly, raggedy kid anarchists: Both are pushing forty and wear Docker pants and nice sport coats. Both have good, recent, blonde haircuts. If not patrician, certainly tasteful enough. The social equality of their fury is breath taking, and the Republicans choke as they scurry to a carriage.

That evening there is a gigantic party for the Texans at a ballroom on 34th and 9th Avenue.

Two days earlier, when I was walking on Broadway and 95th Street, someone stopped to admire my “NYC to RNC: Drop dead” button and confessed to managing the catering company that agreed to work this gala. “My employees are FURIOUS!” complained the manager. “Some of the chefs are joking about poisoning the food. We were asked to serve – get this – PIGS IN BLANKETS! Well sure, we know how to make pigs in blankets; we use kosher hot dogs. The chefs want to wear tee-shirts under their uniforms that have something anti-Bush on them.”

The T-shirts remained hidden and the food was not poisoned.

**

Inside the Hilton, a button seller had set up shop on the plush, quiet carpet of the mezzanine hallway. There’s the usual inventory: “Bush and Cheney,” and “W for President.”

But I’m drawn to the girl material. One button says simply, “Woman Republican,” bordered all in sweet, art-deco flowers that look just like those femmie courageous posters that hang in the waiting rooms of … abortion clinics. “All my men are cowboys,” says another button, with a picture of the president in a ten-gallon. And then there is: “I only sleep with Republicans.”

My absolute fave shows a red-white-and-blue elephant straddling a donkey, fucking it. “Keep Bush on Top,” it says. “Hey,” I say to no one in particular, “Here’s the sex area!” No one seems to think that’s cute — a couple of Texan women wince and turn away.

Sotto voce, the vendor delivers a lecture about how he’s a button-history expert, and the elephant/donkey sex motif is almost a hundred years old in U.S. political iconography (first attested during a Teddy Roosevelt campaign, he intones). I want to buy that button but do not wish to donate $3 to the Republicans. “Do you sell at Democratic conventions, too?” I ask.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, still confidential-like.

“Do you do protest buttons?”

“Uh yup,” even quieter.

Turns out he’s just a button guy from Kalamazoo, Michigan, trying to make a living. I plunk down the $3 and pocket my RNC bestiality souvenir.

Most of these students had come during the summer from Tehran. They weren’t like American Jews, whose last names reveal ethnicity and whose first names conceal it in a few generations. The Iranian Jews’ family names were pure Persian, marks of millennia in that country — twisting with phonetics as sinuous as the names in the news: Khomeni, Bazarghan. The cheater’s last name started with L and sounded something like the English word “ululation,” but with many more syllables. It was gorgeous and it was a problem. In other countries, my students told me, the Jews try to be citizens of their adopted nations, but their oppressors say, “First you are Jewish.” Here, we try to be Jews. And the INS says, “First you are Iranians.”

L. said his last name meant “from a beautiful garden,” and I suspected he was trying to charm me into grading his test. He laughed while translating the name, mocking my ignorance of its meaning and the meaning of his cheating.

He also mocked the Lubavitchers of Williamsburg, who sponsored the Iranian students’ immigration, crewcutted the young men and enrolled them in yeshivas. By autumn some were trying to weasel out of the deal and had struck a compromise with their sponsors by enrolling in City Colleges. They came wearing yarmulkes in hair too short to anchor them, and bobby pins kept splattering on my classroom floor.

As fall passed their hair grew back and the skullcaps disappeared. In September they’d said they wore them because here they could be Jews without fear of Muslim repression. Now L. told me he’d gotten his own apartment; now he didn’t have to wear the kepah to please the crazy Hassids. He sneered at their funny dress — as he sneered at the cancer of the Shah and at Princess Farah, grown ugly in exile; at the Ayatollah Khomeni, whom he called “Imam” while rotating an index finger near his temple. The Lubavitchers were the real problem, though, because some yeshivas wouldn’t send academic records to the City Colleges, and many Iranian Jews were studying without student visas.

It was hard to know much more about L. In my beginners class, we were still using flashcards with words like “snow,” “wife” and “true.”

“Mr. L.,” I said as he grinned at me and the empty classroom. “If you cheat you’ll never learn English. No, I cannot grade your exam.”

“Alright. We speak of test later,” he wheedled. “But please, where is this store?” He held a battered Diario-La Prensa, covered with heel marks and subway floor dirt. He pointed to an ad in which he had circled in red ink a product called the Clairol TenderTweez, wholesale to the public $10.97, with plug, plastic chassis and two shiny prongs. It looked compact and fastidious, like an instrument of torture from the SAVAK.

“I like to buy this electric tool for my sister in Iran. Where I can go to get it?” he said. “She has many hairs on face, legs. This will take away forever.”

“Well Mr L., you’re right. It is electric. But it doesn’t remove hair forever.”

“Not forever? No, it must. It’s expensive American. Forever.”

“No really. It’s not.”

“I don’t believe. I want to send this to Iran,” he said, his eyes shining. “Here. Here is picture of my sister.”

He showed me a passport photo. The girl’s brows, lashes and hairline, like her brother’s, were so dark as to appear burned into her face. There was a suggestion of moustache. It had clearly been tweezed, and her features were chalked over with cheap pancake makeup that suggested her hidden hairiness all the more. I envisioned that feminine hirsuteness said to please the men of Italy and rumored to drive eccentrics of other cultures wild with yearning. To look at this Oriental Jewess, her face plucked of all spontaneity, was to recall the ironic kindness of the veil.

L. pointed to the Diario-La Prensa ad. Quita los pelos sin dolor, it says. “What it’s mean, sin dolor?”

“Without pain,” I answered.

“Dolor, it means pain?” He started to write the word in his notebook.

“No, no, don’t put it on your vocabulary list! It’s Spanish.”

“Spanish! Ah, I was worried. I didn’t understand any words in this paper. Except Nueva York.” He sighed with relief as I checked his other notes.

“Put an E at the end of tweez,” I told him.

“E? Why? Ah, I understand. Tweez, that’s Spanish.”

“Mr. L.,” I insisted. “Isn’t it natural for women to have hair? On their legs? Even a little on their faces? Anyway, isn’t it a lot of trouble to try to send a TenderTweez to Iran right now? Especially when you’ve got more important things to worry about?”

He suddenly glared and fumed, realizing how things were with me.

“More natural, yes. But without hair, more beautiful. With hair, ugly! Natural? Hah! I am not Ayatollah! I am not Imam! Natural? The veil, never! We are here, we Jews, in Nueva York, not to be crazy. Not to be maniacs! And now, teacher,” he hissed with smoldering eyes. “And now you will grade my test.”

I saw possible proof by the curb. The glut was so thick on 51st and Third that I couldn’t look ahead, so I looked down – at trash. Someone had disposed of a torn plastic bag. Dark green file folders spilled out, and long hanks of human hair. The hair was brown-red and copious but not shiny. It was dull and quite matted, like hair from a white kid who messed around for months with dreadlocks. Then what happened? Did the white kid attend the anti-war demonstration, pass by an office near the UN, and realize that world peace needed him to work there, even if it meant getting a suit and a haircut? Alternatively, did someone in the office go to the demonstration, forever abandon paper pushing for street action, and dump the green files?

By 3 p.m. the claustrophobia was impossible, the cold had numbed my limbs, and it no longer helped that I’d gone without coffee. I plowed and shoved and suddenly found an edge: Europa Market, somewhere in the low 50s by Lexington. On a normal East Side Saturday, customers would have been sitting at the blond tables with their fruit-yoghurt cups and muffins, staring absently at the decorative flasks with dried legumes, worrying about shopping or work or Code Orange. Today it was all anti-war. Forests of signs were propped by the cute tables, with words like “A Bush, A Dick and A Colon: No Wonder Things are Bad.” A family in jeans and lumpy hats huddled on the floor by the gourmet salad area, singing Pete Seeger songs and munching granola from jiffy bags. People with scarves and glazed eyes caressed their beverage cups, trying to transfer the heat. Everyone drank coffee.

Which of course drove them to the bathrooms. Europa Market’s have marble sinks and doors labeled with burnished brass: Ladies, Gentlemen. Normally they are clean and decorous, with fat rolls of paper and no waiting. Today there was a long line and it was unisex. If you were male and someone exited Ladies, you went in. Likewise if you were female and space opened in the other room. Going to the stall, females passed males at the urinals with their penises barely covered. In Ladies, males latched themselves into little rooms, divided by only a wall from females they’d never met whose pudenda and buttocks were bare.

Some people were matter of fact. Others tried their best. “I have been around the world,” said an elderly South Asian man with wire rim glasses and only half of a smile. “Around the world and I think I have never seen men with women in a public bathroom, and women with men.” A thirtyish American in rectangle glasses emerged from Ladies. “I don’t like it. Not at all,” he said and scurried off. A woman peered into Gentlemen and backed away, shuddering. An eight year old in a snowflake-pattern hat rebelled at first. He stepped gingerly into Ladies but bolted, wailing, “I can’t!” “Jacob!” his mom ordered, “just go!!” He slunk back.

My turn came and I ended up in the ordinary place. Still, there was a man next door, and I thought how he could hear my sounds, the prim cataract of a strange woman on a porcelain bowl. I finished my business. But on second thought I didn’t, because I am 52 years old already and who knows when this experience will come again? I got back in line and it worked out. For the first time in my life I strolled past occupied urinals, slowly, gazing without shame at men with their backs to me, meditative, captive, gentle, like cows at a milking machine. I went to the stall, though physiologically speaking I didn’t need to. I sat on the toilet Like my comrade cows at the urinals, I meditated. About change and Peace Now and a half million, Ladies and Gentlemen, mixed up too much now to be ignored

Today I am teach in Bronx, my students from the Rep. Dominicana, from Mexico and from others Latinoamerica nation, many in this country too many years but they still speaking too less English and that English, it is just like this. Three hour a day three day a week, it student English have it own sabor it will get inside a teacher head and duration there even after class is finish. Inmigrant English living in the teacher mind even if teacher is no want.

My student they are too intelligent even student they got no too much education in they country. José from Guatemala by example. In he country he was farmer now butcher at Hunts Point, working here fourteen year. He have only little bit of opportunities for study English, but he know all words of Gettysburg Address also read maybe all books in English, every one, on construccion the Brooklyn Bridge. He was only person from his town to inmigrate. José, he have cassette player he play music from “Rocky” too many times, he say because when he first come to USA in 1988, walking through Mexico, crossing to LA over hot desert cold mountains, “Rocky” is still popular music in he old country and now he in new country want to remember that especial time of challenge and hopes for surpassing in the life. In New York he marry once but only for green card. Loved her too much anyway, but she no loving him, he not married now, living by heself, he getting up 2:30 a.m. to go to work, work overtime because boss say he have to, no extra pay, if he say no he be fired. Lonesome he say, and his back hurting, bad neighborhood the boys outside in summer with marijuana it coming smell through the window he cannot sleep! Still, he no have plans return his country. Very difficult, life here but still better than Guatemala.

I ask Jose: he have one problem cutting up animal? No, he say, because in Guatemala on farm he kill the pigs and others similar. The pigs screaming, the baby goat screaming this was hard, he thinking many things. But here at job in New York, he just playing “Rocky” on headphones while he cut the meat, and anyway already dead. Already dead, José tell me. And I am not exact know who he meaning dead – pig, goat, or he?

Vicente is from Ecuador, he worrying too very much about correct language. “Teacher,” he say, “What is mean ‘Yo’? Is OK to use, or is bad, angry talk? And it’s black people talk only?” I tell it is OK, not angry, is not just black people either but also white. Vicente is not believing. “Teacher,” he say, “I want to talk like a University but all day at work on train on bus I hearing only street English. People saying yo, maybe they going to fight. And a man on TV say ‘The couple was making out.’ Teacher you say ‘make out’ mean only kissing and hug but I know the TV mean real sex so teacher please don’t tell class other thing because it sound ugly if I use wrong, maybe I offend someone maybe I no get better job.”

Vicente back when in he country he have a small business, computers. Now he working night shift in one box factory in Brooklyn. “Teacher,” Vicente say, “I try on the subway talk to American women and they no talking to me. Teacher, what is? They afraid? This is racism? Or what?”

“Teacher,” Vicente say, “I am be frank with you: I no like the Unite States so much. I have friends in France. I thought U.S. is going to be like France it is not. Teacher: We see Enron. Martha Stewart. U.S. policy to Iraq starvation the kids. Being bully in all place, dishonesto to the people. Nine Eleven — of certain manner, I believe the U.S. is deserve it. I only being frank with you teacher.”

I no say nothing to Vicente about Martha Stewart and Nine Eleven, just listen him. But I worried about what he say about TV talk, this “make out” thing. At home after class I ask my daughter-she a student at Cooper Union, never go to Bronx but very young, still having good ass, knowing how the English sound in street and others places. “You ever hearing one person or any peoples say ‘make out’ when they meaning not just kiss, hug — but real sex?” I ask. She say yes, she do hear. She laugh at me say “Mommy, you’re too old – you don’t know slang anymore. It’s not what it was 20 years ago. When it comes to teaching ESL you’re over the hill!”

I am don’t believe her. I am published writer too many year. Often I watch the TV. I reading. I am pay too much attention to our cultura. How it’s possible I do not knowing all of English? I lie in bed sleep not good. I wonder if students noticing not my ass but other thing about my age, thing like I not knowing some English they need. I toss turning all night.

On bus next day a man say ‘yo.’ He is young, black man. Say to other black man. I listen I get nervious. His ‘yo’ it is friendly or unfriendly? I no can tell but keep think about Vicente. He say ‘yo’ is black people talk and is angry. I feeling I want to get off bus. I go to class. Vicente he have new haircut, new glasses. ‘Very fashion, teacher,’ he say. “Fashionable,” I say, smile. But no say nothing about ‘yo.’ I come home miss another sleep.

I decide write one letter to William Safire on New York Times Magazine, ask him who exactly say ‘yo’ in these days and why they saying. Does mean yo “Hello?” It friendly thing? Unfriendly? Hip Hop? Only black?

I am tell students I writing important New York Times person with Vicente question. I wait too many days then same letter back in my mailbox – I not put enough stamp, $0.34 but price change to $0.37. My daughter laughing again, “Mommy,” she say, “Didn’t you read the papers about how it was going up 3 cents? You’re the one who needs the English lessons!”

I read letter again see words misspelled, not one but two. Maybe good it come back, I think, and plan to fix, mail next week.

Not so important though because before I have free time, Vicente disappear from class. “Where is Vicente?” I ask others student. No one heard from he, but soon I reading about INS raid at box factory in Brooklyn. This article not in New York Times, this article in Daily News. Daily News no have articles about right language wrong language. But maybe have the news about Vicente.

Well I hoping he safe wherever he is. Hoping he not very angry. Hoping he no hate my English. Wanting he understand ‘Yo.’ Wonder he think teacher ass.

The building sucks, but who can be picky? The young lawyer in Park Slope who’d offered us a sublet bailed at the last minute without telling us. These days in New York, the rent increase for new tenants is so fat that landlords advise people like the young lawyer, “Why bother subletting? Just break the lease.” We’d already loaded our things and our kids into a van in Texas. Now we were facing homelessness. Then some luck: a friend got a job out of town and bequeathed us his place in Morningside Heights. The landlords were an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family named Kleiner with a realty office on Fifth Avenue in midtown. I learned later that they’re notorious slumlords, which you see in our place. It hasn’t had a paint job in forty years and the old jobs are thirty layers thick. Daily, the dog’s bowl disgorges drowned roaches. The living room parquet is bald with splinters. We arrived in June. In July there was the fire.

The time I asked Manny about it, his wife put her hands on her hips. “No hables con ella!” she muttered. She didn’t want him dissing his employers to a tenant.

But Manny had a conscience. A new one, Mara said. “He used to be a big pothead, and mean,” she told me after our first tenants union meeting.”When he was smoking he was a space case, just useless as a super. Even when he wasn’t high he mostly refused to fix anything unless you left lots of notes in the basement and threatened to withhold rent. Dealing with him was one big snarling match. He changed a couple of years ago. All of a sudden. I heard he had a born-again experience. He got a lot nicer about fixing things. Though he sure hasn’t helped me lately.”

The first time I saw Manny with a Bible was after we’d talked about religion once and he went off about Jews. That was just after we moved in. He was by the SUV. It was a pretty morning in June and already we had problems. A hole had opened in the bathroom floor; you could see the downstairs neighbor peeing. “Old Mr. Kleiner,” Manny said. “He’s dead now but he was very judío always wore that thing on his head and the black coat. Always came around to take care of things himself. He would have had me fix your floor right away. But very greedy, like all judíos. They all get rich from the greed. Mr. Kleiner died and his daughter is also very judío but never comes around here and things are going to the dogs with her new generation of bigger Jewish greed.” I made the obvious points. I’m Jewish and I’m not rich. Lots of Jews aren’t rich. I’ve heard socialism is big in the Dominican Republic, where Manny was from, so I mentioned that socialism was led by Jews, maybe started by Jews, and socialism sure isn’t for the rich and greedy. Furthermore, women in realty offices on Fifth Avenue who wear ugly wigs and ignore holes in tenants’ floors: this is not my brand of judío and mine is just as popular. I tried not to be pissed off.

A people’s lawyer came from the West Harlem Tenants Council — idealistic, not so young anymore, haircut like Carl Sandburg, last year’s clothes. We held the meeting in the vestibule, leaning on the mail boxes. Some people talked about the fire and about how the electrical system hadn’t been worked on since 1907. A guy in frayed cords who went to Manhattan School of Music a long time ago spoke. The guy’s instrument was trumpet: you could tell he never left home because all day you heard his playing through the walls. He mentioned that every time he turned on his living room light switch, his hand got a big jolt. “Shit,” another tenant said, “the same thing happens to me!” We voted Mara president.

But Mara did not want to talk about fire. “My shower,” she said, “is covered with creeping black mildew. Mildew with red stripes, and the stripes appear to be eating into the tile. The tile has become more and more virulent in the past month, and I ‘m convinced the mildew is making me sick. Last week after I took a shower, I felt anxious. All day afterward I had trouble breathing. The doctor said yes, it’s possible I have a problem with mildew. Shana Kleiner won’t let Manny do anything. She says mildew is harmless and I should just get Ajax. I want to know if everyone else has mildew in their apartment! And if you’re getting sick! We need to organize around this!”

People looked blank. Mara turned and saw Manny standing at the front doors. “Out, Manny!” she said. “You’re just spying for the Kleiners!”

“I am not espying,” said Manny. “I am preocupado.”

“Out!” said Mara. “You got born again and you got nicer. But what did you do for my mildew?”

“Manny, how come you were at the meeting?” I asked next day. “Were you spying for the Kleiners?”

“No way,” he said. “I am worried for the tenant, very worried. This is mildew we’re talking about! I’ve been reading the Bible. Mildew is an abomination. A curse according to the most fundamental Laws, along with the commandments against sodomy and pork. And so, even though the Kleiners are greedy, as judíos I cannot understand why they won’t let me make the repairs. Why do they ignore this sacrilege?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. That’s when I saw his Bible for the first time. It was a Spanish version of the “Good News” edition, leatherbound, fat, with satin ribbons streaming like frou-frou from a baby girl’s hair. Good News was published in the 1970s. Its vocabulary is modern, and effortless to understand. “I shall not want” in King James’ 23rd Psalm becomes “I have everything I need” in Good News. “Why do the heathen rage?” turns into “Why do the nations plan rebellion?”

Good News Leviticus, Chapter 14 does have much to say about mildew. If the Lord sends mildew into a house, you are obligated to immediately tell a priest. The priest is ordered to scrape the interior walls, then leave the city to dispose of the contaminated plaster. All who have been in the house must wash their clothes. Everything is to be ritually purified. And so on and so forth for twenty verses or more.

When I checked my King James, the word mildew was missing. In its place was “plague.” I couldn’t imagine what kind of plague would destroy plaster. Could this be merely symbolic? I asked Manny if Leviticus Chapter 14 might really be about, say, leprosy. Or just plain evil.

“Who ever heard of leprosy eating bathroom walls?” Manny said curtly. “Or evil, for that matter? The Bible is talking about mildew. I’m a super. I know. I’d like to pull the old tile out, treat the subsurface with a good fungicide, then calk everything over. But the Kleiners say no.”

“Why get worked up over mildew?” I said. “If you want drama, go all the way to the end of the Bible and try the Book of Revelations. Fire mixed with blood. A third of the earth burning. Stars falling to earth, endless smoke from an abyss, sulphur. “

He wasn’t interested. “I spent my life hearing the Bible from priests. One of these days I’ll do the New Testament. But now that I’ve found life in The Lamb, I must start from scratch. No more priests, no more Catholics. My wife hates that I’ve left the Church. Hates it! But the Templo Evangélico has it right. First I will do the Old Testament. On my own. I’ll read with my eyes and think with my own mind. After that maybe I’ll get to Revelations.”

By September Manny had made it to Deuteronomy and the tenants union had fallen apart because Mara was only interested in her shower, whereas everyone else wanted to focus on electrical. I saw Manny on the stoop on the 12th, with the Good News open to Revelations. He was weeping and you could smell the air from Lower Manhattan. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “I wanted to finish the judío Bible first.”

A few days later he had a stroke. The wake was at Funeraria Ortiz on 190th. The little plastic cards with his name and born and died dates also had saints, which I think he would have disliked, but that was the family’s choice. The Kleiners did not show up — it was Friday night, they couldn’t drive on shabbos, and they certainly didn’t live close enough to walk. Their absence felt like a stain; after all, this was the death of their super, who tended their building for twenty-five years. Mara came, and shifted from foot to foot like she wanted to say say something redeeming but felt too embarrassed. Her silence also left a taint.

Only his wife seemed to come clean as she clung to the bier. “Manolo! Manolo!” she wailed, speaking his name in the old way, scrubbing the air with her grief.

They were just mestizas, the kind who were raised in their own big cities and nowadays are all over this one: those moon cheeks on high cheekbones, lax black hair, proper gold earrings and mild, careful eyes. Each had on jeans and a femmie tee with pastel ribbon at the neckline and big writing on the chest about nothing. The jeans and shirts were so polyester that if a set had been bought with a twenty, the cashier would still give back change. Snug clothes, and the girls’ breasts were high, though one had a stomach that comes after babies. Each stood by a big and intricate arrangement of cardboard, a table-like thing draped in a big square of faux silk and quickly collapsible. A set-up like this is made for instant disassembly and permanent abandonment with no regrets after a lightning escape. The sides of the “silk” can be grabbed on a second’s notice and bunched at the top, making a sack that’s easy to run with

But when I got there the tables were still up and the cloth still laid with goods. There were “amber” necklaces — chunks of tiger-striped, see-through acrylic — strung on slim, fake suede thongs. Bracelets of tiny, razzle-dazzle glass rosette that aren’t really glass. Plastic turquoise and plastic coral on plastic brass: a big, cheap joke to some, yet perfect for the bare arms and summer collar bones of the low-paid young females of New York, their skin every smooth shade of coffee-truck coffee with varying cream. The baubles were still arranged just so on the “silk,” supine and perfect like women on sheets.

Shoppers were still looking and asking for prices.

“Sorry ladies,” the cops said. “Store’s closed.”

The mestizas were street vendors without licenses. In the whole city just a few hundred permits exist, compared to thousands of sellers who need them. These vendors were two of the criminal thousands, so today they were being fined and their wares seized. “Put your stuff out of sight,” one cop said in English, pantomiming to make himself clear. Each vendor took a long overhang of “silk” from the front of her table and folded it backward. Now the jewelry was covered.

One officer was baby-faced, with hair and eyes too dark for his skin, like a black Irish. The other, also a man and bigger, was simply black. Neither was much older than the shoppers or the vendors. With their navy, boxlike jackets and their guns, they looked way too serious for the job at hand. They stood by the tables writing $50 citations.

The vendors stood, too, with their backs to the trains and rats. Their torsos were stock still and their heads cast down, but their eyes were all over the place. I saw they wanted to use their hands, but one couldn’t. She belonged to the black-Irish cop, who was efficient and stern. While writing the ticket he hardly looked at the paper. Instead, he monitored his mestiza constantly and unconsciously, like a driver who knows to check mirrors.

The African-American cop was different.. His eyes were doing a wistful, even philosophical dance around the vendor with the post partum stomach. Slowly, head down, he would write a few lines on the citation. Then he would rotate toward the opposite train track, which removed her from his line of vision, and write a little more. Next he turned, slowly again, but still excusing her from his sight.

She, too, was slow, but also fast. Each time her cop looked away, she crept a hand under the “silk,” stealthily extracted a bracelet or necklace, and slipped it in the left back pocket of her jeans. When the left pocket was full she switched to the right. By the time the cop finished the ticket, her jeans looked like a child’s story about squirrels storing acorns for winter.

Which isn’t to say she saved everything. Far from it.

It’s unsettling, seeing a loving display of women’s jewels — even the paste kind — swept up by ham fists, then crammed and crushed in a plastic evidence bag. Like expensive gold chain, even plate knots so it never unknots. The leaden tangle inside the bag molded it to the black-Irish cop’s palm the way a firm feather pillow molds to a head, or the bodies of babies settle on mothers. The black-Irish cop squeezed air from the bag. He twisted the top and locked it with a sawtooth tie. The bag was transparent though, and by now the jewels somehow resembled those touring, Never-Again displays of toothbrushes and eye-glasses from the German camps. “What’s going to happen to it all?” I asked the cop. He was already walking away and didn’t slow down.

Free again, the mestizas stared dully at their citations, then folded their cardboard tables.

“We didn’t see them coming this time,” one said.

“Porque venden aqui donde hay tanta vigilancia?” I asked. “Why sell here where there’s so much security?

“When it comes to police, the Times Square subway is the most dangerous place in the city,” she said. “But it’s also the best for sales.”

“Cuanto valio lo que acaban de perder? Dos cientos?” How much did you just lose — $200 worth?”

“Mas.” She gave the same philosophical look that I’d seen in the eyes of her cop.

I spotted them a month later in the same place: the mestizas, that is. Customers were still everywhere, oohing and ahhing, shelling out bills in low denominations. There was still the cardboard, the dazzle, the goods with their names in quotes.

The cops weren’t around, and I hurried on since I was in a rush. I’d just bought some “amber” — a piece with an “ant” in it. I’d paid a buck for it to a vendor on Canal Street. I’d sped off then, too, not wanting to witness what the real price might be.

This doctor is so good that he topped the list in a special in New York magazine issue about the best MD’s in town. He’s got an office in a dowager apartment building, a secretary who’s a male with dreadlocks, and examining rooms hung with pop music “theme” photos. When I brought my cute teenaged son in because he was having growing pains, Dr. Jewish-food-name put him in the “Rolling Stones” room under a gorgeous, Avedonesque picture of Mick Jagger. My daughter went for morning-after pills and was directed to John Coltrane and Billie Holiday.

But I ended up in the nothing cubicle, the one whose only picture is a chart explaining gallstones. As I stared at the sad yellow pebbles, the doctor barely suppressed a yawn. He was reviewing my cholesterol readings and listening to me complain about my constant urge to pee.

“Estrogen deficiency,” he said as he riffled through my file. “Your bladder tissue is losing elasticity because you’re nearing menopause and your hormone levels are decreasing. Still, I hesitate to start you on estrogen. The question is, how long can you wait?” (He looked like he’d rather be in the British Invasion room.) “It’s entirely up to you and your personal comfort level. You can stay off hormones as long as you can deal with the feeling of having to urinate. Get dressed, come back in six months, we’ll talk more then.” He snapped the chart shut and headed off to “Some Girls.”

“Sure, I can deal,” I thought as I pulled on my jeans. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s shy about finding a bathroom when I need it, and barging my way in if necessary. Life for a middle-aged woman in New York City is a private, inner map. The free toilets are marked by McDonalds, Taco Bells, public libraries, Macy’s and good hotels. Certain pizza joints and most china criollas are equivalent to cheap coffee — the purchase of which allows you entrée to the can. And there is that expensive, obnoxious fallback when nothing else is available: Starbucks.

Being in a new part of town is always a challenge, but one tries to look on the bright side: the relentless urge to pee becomes part of the adventure. Not that it seems adventurous while it’s occurring. There’s the fullness, the twinge, the out-and-out ache, and the gnawing fear of being stranded in a bathroom-less outback. Yet something always comes up, because you have no choice but to let it. You have to enter the Ecuadoran dive on Roosevelt Avenue, even if you can’t bear to see another lonely Latino fellow without papers staring into his beans. And when you do go in, the waitress turns out to be from a place you’ve been in Mexico, and she likes to talk. Ditto for the fried chicken place on 125th Street, where the help look mean through window, but really aren’t once you go inside, and the jukebox turns out to have Howlin’ Wolf. Of course, at other places the help is less than nice, and the jukebox sucks, not to mention the coffee. But one’s urges become more and more urgent and they will not wait. At that point, one does what one must.

The urge was bad last year, in Brooklyn. The family and I were headed down Atlantic Avenue to Sahadi’s, the store with all the Middle Eastern nuts, dried fruits and falafel flour in barrels. We were still many blocks away when I got the twinge. It came so suddenly that I could have peed right on the street. I was swaying with shame and worry. I needed swift relief, but still had too much pride to ask for favors. I only wanted — only needed — a joint with some coffee and a john. I picked the place that looked cheapest and told the husband and kids to wait outside.

It was on the Muslim block near Nevins. Storefronts done up in Arabic line Atlantic here, their windows filled with bright liquids, black soaps, head coverings for women, and inscrutable books that appear at once frightening and holy. Unfortunately, none of these places looked like they would let walk-ins use the bathroom. Until I saw one with the word “paradise” on its sign. “All take-out $3,” a piece of cardboard said. I walked in and was hit by lamb smells, chickpea smells, olive oil smells, and — yes! — the odor of 50-cent coffee. A dark-skinned youth in a counterman’s apron grunted at me politely. I placed my order: regular, with one Sweet-n’-Low. They had the Sweet-n’-Low, which was a surprise, since I could not imagine the other customers using it. Every one of them had a beard and a fez-like hat, and each was dressed in something that hung to his knees, if not to the floor.

It was a little daunting, but then, I’ve always had a soft spot not just for frozen blintzes and soups, but also for beards and hats and long somethings on men. So, both emboldened and agitated, I made my move.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I said, in my best “I-don‘t-take-‘there’s-no-bathroom-here’-for-an-answer” voice.

“You. Can use bathroom next building,” said the counter boy. “Through back. Door on right.”

“Thank you.” I trooped past the little formica tables and their fraternity of men only, scooping various stews onto pitas. None of them looked at me — in fact, they seemed to studiously look away. I pushed through a set of cheap, Casbah-shaped doors that resembled the entrance to a Shriner’s Temple. I took a right and opened another door. And suddenly I was in a mosque.

At least, that’s what it said — “mosque” — in black, makeshift letters on a wall. The wall was unpainted plaster. It stretched down a long, bare hall into darkness. Maybe there was a prayer room somewhere to the side, but I didn’t see it. All I noticed were big posters wheat-pasted to the wall. They were all identical, and they showed a photograph of a 12-year-old named Muhammed, the boy who had died days before in his father’s arms in Gaza, after rocks were thrown at Israeli soldiers and the soldiers fired back in response. The picture was painful and awful and repetitive. The writing on the posters was mostly Arabic and thus incomprehensible. But I could tell it had nothing kind to say about people like me.

Still, the men next door were letting me use the bathroom. That was very nice of them. And what a bathroom. It had the usual stalls, but instead of individual sinks there was a large, cement trough with a water spigot that never turned off. “Attention,” said a sign, in English, above the flowing spigot. “It is the holy duty of each woman to perform the ritual ablutions to Allah, the Most Holy, the Most High” and more sacred instructions that made me wonder if it was OK for someone like me to be there. Could a Muslim use a mikvah? I wondered. But I was not there to wonder, I was there for my urge.

I stumbled into a stall and peed. My God, what relief! Then I approached the trough, did my ablutions, and got out ex post haste. On the way back were the same posters, with the same dead Palestinian child and the same unreadable, furious script. Out on the sidewalk, my husband said I seemed a little odd. I had the same look on my face, he said, as that time we went to Boro Park on Saturday and I found the kapote — the Chassidic black men’s caftan — in a garbage can.

“Yeah well, guess what? I was just in a mosque! The only woman around, much less non-Muslim woman!” I felt more like a derring doer than a middle-aged pisher. I vowed to spend at least another five years without estrogen, and made a note to myself: “Cancel six-month appointment in the gall bladder room.”

That all happened in Fall, 2000. The next time we got a yen to go to Sahadi’s was about a year later. It was Labor Day — or to be more precisely New York, West Indian Parade Day. It was a glorious September afternoon, eight days before the day that everything would change for the city. After watching the floats, we caught a bus to Atlantic Avenue. We’d barely gotten off when I got the twinge. I started my search, but this time it was a breeze. There were the Muslim stores again, and the café calling out with the word “paradise.” I had urges, sure. Terrible ones, and the only place to vent them was full of males and ritual and anger. Still, this place was on my inner map, as solid and comforting as Mount Rushmore.

So I started replaying the routine.

There was the same take out sign, the counter boy, the smells, the bearded customers, the same total absence of women. I bought the coffee and took the Sweet-n’-Low.

“May I use the bathroom?” I asked, readying myself for the mosque. But this time things were different.

“Bathroom in back,” said the youth.

“OK.”

“But no through door. Only here in back.”

“Only here?”

“Here.”

I went in the direction of the Casbah doors, but before I got there I saw the john. Nothing special, just a normal dumpy room like you find in a normal dumpy eatery. It had the international logo for “man” on it. There was no room or international logo for “woman.”

And you could tell it was a men’s bathroom. The seat was up, the toilet paper dispenser was empty, and the mirror was broken. I wondered why I could not use the mosque anymore. I missed the trough and the ablution signs with their distaff instructions. I even missed the angry, tender posters. But there wasn’t time to wonder. I had to pee so bad that when I sat on the toilet, I almost moaned.

I had barely finished and pulled up my jeans when a furious knocking sounded on the door. I unlatched it and a robed customer almost fell inside. I was shocked: here was a man in a place that was normally pure of women, yet he was so anxious to get in the bathroom that he practically pushed himself at me. What had happened to his pious reserve? What urges had obliterated his temperance? Would he find the means to express those urges? And if so, how?

I scurried from the bathroom, feeling somehow less human, even less feminine. I wondered if I should start taking estrogen. I thought about calling my doctor, whose name is like good, frozen glatt.