After a busy Saturday afternoon of stocking shelves and ringing up scores of Tangee Lipstick, Pond’s Cold Cream and Blue Waltz Perfume, I stood staring, glassy-eyed, at the black and white dollar sign atop the mahogany cash register on my counter at F. W. Woolworth’s on 138th Street in the Bronx. At the end of my counter stood my boss, Mr. D’Amboise, pronounced Damboys. His fat belly, hidden by a mustard-colored polyester jacket, hung over the four-inch glass that enclosed the merchandise. Glaring at me with his pig-like eyes, sweat rimming his upper lip, thin hair flat on his bullish head, he said, “Haven’t you anything better to do?” I cringed.
“Well,” I said, Mr. Damboise, “I filled in all the missing items on my counter, straightened out all my under-stock and dusted. Since I can’t leave my register unattended, what else am I suppose to do?” He sniffed and waddled, dragging his big feet in his brown loafers, toward the soda fountain where I was sure he would consume any food inventory that hadn’t sold.

As I was punching out at six P. M. in his cluttered office, next to the wire cages filled with parakeets and canaries, Mr. D’Amboise stood smiling and clucking, his belly as full as Templeton the Rat’s. He asked me how I had liked West Side Story, my first Broadway play, which I had attended with a  coworker the week before.

“It took my breath away,” I said.

“Would you like to see a ballet?” he asked, in a high-pitched voice too thin for his large body, his white teeth gleaming. He had bicuspids so long that all my friends who worked for him called him “Fang” behind his back.

“I’d love to see a ballet,” I said, inching my way out of the office.

“Okay, I can get you free tickets. My brother Jack is a featured dancer at City Center.”

“Right,” I said. I was too chicken to add, “In your dreams, Porky,” visions of a hippopotamus flopping about the stage in a blue tutu dancing in my head.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, I don’t, Mr. D’Amboise.” I left the office, my legs throbbing from standing for eight hours, my head pounding from listening to “Oh, Susannah” playing every time a toddler decided to ride the horse next to the candy counter. As I walked home, I laughed to myself, thinking only a schmuck from Queens would fabricate a story about having a brother, a grown man, who was a ballet dancer.

The following Friday afternoon, as I deposited my Latin and Trig books on the oak table in the office, Mr. D’Amboise, grinning like he had swallowed one of the goldfish from the huge tank outside his office, handed me a brown envelope with my ten dollar pay check and two pink tickets for the ballet. “You’ve got to use them Saturday night,” he said.

On Saturday afternoon, after work, I ran home, donned my tan linen dress, ribbed in black, and heels, tied my long hair back with a black grosgrain bow, grabbed my brown patent leather bag, and my less than willing sister, still gagging on the roast beef she was chewing from dinner, and we both caught the Lexington Avenue Local to fifty-ninth Street, walking distance to the theater.

And when, in the middle of the second act, the dancer, aware of his power, grace, and elegance, suspended in air, spun about and flashed a smile, bigger and brighter than the lights on the Brooklyn Bridge at his cheering fans, I saw the family trademark, the long bicuspids, the fangs shining like north stars in the mouth of my boss’s kid brother, Jacques D’Amboise, which he pronounced the French way, Dambwa, who was soon to become one of Balanchine’s most famous dancers.

Liz Dolan’s second poetry manuscript, A Secret of Long Life, was nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, was published by March Street Press. A six time Pushcart nominee and winner of The Best of the Web, she has also won an established artist fellowship in poetry and two honorable mentions in prose from the Delaware Division of the Arts. She recently won The Nassau Prize for prose. She has received fellowships to attend residencies at The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha’s Vineyard. Liz serves on the poetry board of Philadelphia Stories. Her nine grandkids, who live one block away, pepper her life.

Whenever I would barge into his room, as is the universal act of annoyance of every sister, I noticed that he would be kneeling or sitting by the closet. When I would ask him, “What’s up?” he would give me a sly smile. Sometimes he would just start to laugh. Determined to find out what was going on, I began bursting into his room often.

One day, I broke in and shouted, “Ah ha!” only to find him on the floor maneuvering his miniature toy soldiers in battle. He looked at me as I stood inside the doorway to his room, and we both started laughing hysterically.

“Come on tell me. What are you hiding? I swear I won’t tell Ma,” I pleaded.

“Nope. There is nothing going on,” he said.

He watched me as I scanned his room squinting my eyes like the detectives do on television when they don’t believe a suspect. My eyes moved from a Hulk poster to a Spiderman one. I surveyed his bureau, and looked under his bed. I walked over to the closet and opened the bi-fold doors, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to be found. My brother grinned at me and swung his head to the side, moving his brown wavy hair off his face. Defeated in my quest to discover his secret, I walked out of his room.

But sisters are a determined lot, so one day when Mikey was out of the apartment, I went into major snoop mode and performed a more thorough reconnaissance of his room. My first move was to his closet, which revealed nothing but a few games, clothes, baseball cards, and some sticky candy wrappers. I moved onto the chest of drawers where after glancing at my blonde thin self in his mirror approvingly, I ransacked his clothes, and unrolled all of his sock pairs. I shoved his bureau with the side of my body in order to look behind it. Once again, there was nothing.

Then one day, after he had come in from outside, I hid and waited quietly in my room. My ear to his wall, I listened and heard the doors of his closet rolling on their tracks. Tiptoeing down the hall in my bare feet, I flung open the door to his room.

My ten - year -old brother was sitting on the floor by the closet with a brown paper shopping bag full of money. There were ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and one hundred dollar bills mixed loosely in the bag. My mouth fell open.

“Where the heck did you get that?” I asked excitedly.

“You swear you won’t tell Ma,” he said.

“I promise,” I replied.

He said, “Me and Paulie were playing hide and seek in George’s house, and when we were hiding in his mother’s bedroom closet, we found it. Paulie has his bag and this one is mine.”

“Oh man, you mean there is more,” I said incredulously.

“Yeah, so don’t tell Ma!” he shouted.

I picked up a fistful of money and said, “Don’t you think somebody is going to come looking for this? Aren’t you afraid?”

My brother said that he’d had the money for a month, and had seen the kid whose house the money had come from plenty of times since.
He added, “His mom either runs the numbers or sells drugs.”

“So they don’t even miss it? Oh wow! How much is there in this bag?”

“Ten- thousand.”

“Oh my God! So what are you gonna do with it?” I asked

“I dunno.”

“You better be careful!” I said.

“Promise you won’t tell her,” he said again.

“I aint telling her nothin. She’ll tell Antny and he’ll gamble it away,” I replied.

In DNA only, Antny was our father. He was also a convicted felon, and a compulsive gambler. He physically abused our mother, never supported us and came and went as he pleased. Neither one of us could stand him.

So there was no way either one of us was going to tell our mother about the money because we were afraid of the consequences. We figured, she would either try to give it back and unwittingly make my brother a marked man or tell Antny who would then gamble it away in a flash.

But a few days later, as Mikey and I were sitting on the floor of his room staring at the bag of money and dreaming of the fun that might be had with it, our mother charged into the room. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed a change in my brother’s behavior.

My blonde, big-boned, stern mother made an imposing figure as she stood over us.

“What is this?” she asked wide-eyed in astonishment.

My quick thinking brother said, “I found it stuffed in between the big bushes near the A&P behind the houses down the block.”

The A&P in the neighborhood had recently been robbed at gunpoint while I was there, so this was not that far fetched of a story. My mind raced back to the scene where three guys wearing ski masks had come in with sawed off shotguns as I stood waiting in line with a half gallon of milk.

“So this is the robbery money,” said Ma.

Snatching the bag by its handles, our mother walked out of the room and contacted Antny.

My brother pleaded with them to buy a car or do something other than gamble the loot away. But under the guidance of Antny, all of the money was lost at the racetrack in one week.

My ten – year - old brother would have done a better job of spending it.

Andy is being a serious cocksucker and holding onto my money. He won't give me any. He says it's for my own good and that I'll just go and spend it on drugs. He's right, but it's irrelevant. It's my money! He's my brother, not my father. He'd be a better father than Pops is, but that's a different story.

I'm in withdrawal. I've felt it before, but never this bad. My bones are aching and I'm freezing to death. My whole body hurts. It just fucking hurts. Not any one place in particular. All over.

Sometimes when you're in pain, like when you have a headache or a stomach-ache or something like that, you can move around, get into the right position and maybe you'll feel a little bit better. This isn't like that. It's more like I'm uncomfortable being in my own skin. You apply that logic, the idea that if maybe if I can just get into the right position it will feel a little bit better, but it doesn't help. It just makes things worse.

You think, "Oh, ok I'll try lying down." So you lie down and it feels worse than when you were just sitting there. So you get up and go and get a glass of water or something but it was better lying down. With each movement, big or small, it just gets worse and worse and worse.

And all I can think about is dope. Dope. Dope. Dope. Dope. Dope. Dope is what would really feel good right now. That would really put a lid on this whole feeling like shit thing. My bones would stop aching and I could think about something besides going out there and scoring some dope. I could maybe do some homework or something. Or just watch TV or do anything, really. Anything but sit here and think about dope.

We're in the living room area of our unfinished loft, watching TV. Andy gives me $5 to go down and get us some beer. I run downstairs to the grubby little bodega on our block, which is still open because it's not 7 o'clock yet. I grab a couple of 40's and some chips and head back upstairs. We watch TV and I drink my 40 as fast as I can. It gives me a buzz but now I'm just drunk and sick. It's miserable. Just fucking miserable.

"Andy, please just give me ten bucks man. I feel like shit! Let's just go to the bank machine. We're going to need cigarettes soon, anyway."

His eyes are all squinty from the cigarette smoke and smoking weed resin from the bong. He exhales like he's tired of hearing it, which I'm sure he is. "How many fucking times do I have to tell you, Dean. I CAN'T go to the bank. They put a hold on Douglas' check. It's not going to clear until at least tomorrow and maybe not even then. It might be Friday before we'll be able to get anything out. I've got like $7 here, we need to get a pack of smokes and some pasta to eat or something. I feel like shit too. I sympathize, believe me. We just gotta hold out till tomorrow. So quit asking!"

I try to sit still, but I can't. The beer and the resin from the pipe aren't cutting it. I'm gonna fucking die if we can't get some money. "What about cd's? Lets go sell some." I can't believe it didn't occur to me earlier.

"It's eight o'clock at night. Nobody in Brooklyn is gonna buy cd's now. Most of the good ones are gone anyway. The ones that are left, I wanna keep." He says, not taking his eyes off the TV. He's right. Brooklyn is shut down for the night.

I can't just sit here like this. I light a cigarette and pull on my jacket. "I'm gonna go walk around or something." I say.

"Where? What are you gonna do out there with no money? Just relax man. We can pull together some change, enough for some more beer and some food anyway."

I can't do it. If I sit in front of that miserable television sick like this I'm gonna go insane. "I can't sit still. I'll be back later. I'm just gonna take a walk." I say on my way out the door.

It's a ghost town outside. It's cold for November. Shit December. It's already December. There are very few people out walking the streets. The ones that are out are Hasidic Jews and they just pretend like you aren't there anyway. I walk down to the subway station on Broadway and not much is open as it's getting late. It's just a couple of bodegas and the shitty pizza joint. I think about trying to panhandle change from people getting off the subway, but it's not really an option. I've tried before and the working stiffs getting off the train don't exactly radiate sympathy for a white kid with dreadlocks.

I could hop the train and head into the city, maybe I could beg for money there, but the idea sucks. I haven't got it in me. I know I don't deserve other people's money, so I have trouble making a convincing case for them to give it to me. I could go see Dave at his brother's place but he'll just give me hassle. He'll know what I want the cash for and he'd be right.

The dope sickness is just getting worse by the minute though. I'm fucking freezing to death even though it's only like 35/40 degrees outside. I just want to cop some drugs. It's all I can fucking think about. Andy should have warned me we were so tapped for money. I don't know what I would have done about it, but maybe I wouldn't be down here on Broadway freezing my ass off.

A couple of black kids come out of the store, dribbling a basketball and eating candy. I make eye contact with one of the dudes by mistake and he gives me a hard look. I nod and look away. I don't want any trouble.

"What you looking at, bitch?" he says.

"Nothing." He doesn't know who he's fucking with. I don't want to fight but if push comes to shove I will go to fucking 11. I put my hand in my back pocket and finger the knife I keep there. I don't want any trouble but man, he's got me on a bad night if he wants it.

"That's what I thought." I hear as they shuffle down the block. The dudes are laughing and joking with one another. There aren't a lot of white people living in this neighborhood. Not beside the Hasids anyway. Are Hasids white? Who gives a shit. Andy wanted to move this far south so we'd get more space for our rent money. He needs the space for his tools and shit. We are definitely in the first wave of gentrification around here. A few blocks North it's a different story, but for now white people are the extreme minority around here.

I walk down Rodney, to the little park by the BQE. The regular kid who works the night shift at the drug spot is hanging out. He knows me. When he sees walking towards him, he nods. He's got a huge puffy winter parka on (it's like 4 sizes too big for him) and he wears Timberland boots perfectly unlaced. I step up. He makes a point of not looking at me when he talks. He can't be more than 13 years old.

"S'up? How many?" his voice is still boyishly squeaky.

"Yo man. I need a couple bags on credit. I'll get you back double, tomorrow."

"No credit. Keep walking!" he practically shouts. His raised voice startles me. I can't tell if he's acting hard for his boss' benefit, wherever he is. My face goes flush. I need to get right. I need to stop the sick. No way I can go all night without a hit. My instinct is to elevate the situation. I could pull the knife or just punch him and take what I need, but he's not out here alone. There's a lookout around here somewhere. Doing something like that would be a good way to get shot, never mind getting myself frozen out of the only consistent dope spot in the neighborhood.

"C'mon man. You know me. I'm good for it. I'll make it—" I hear myself, going weak.

"Said no credit. Get walking son!" louder this time.

"Seriously--"

"I said walk!" He's yelling. I feel the adrenaline surge through me. I don't have a choice here. I walk. I'm having trouble thinking straight as I make my way across the highway, towards home. I alternately fantasize about scoring and beating up Andy. I don't get how he can just sit around drinking beer when he's feeling this bad. Maybe he doesn't feel this bad. As I get further from the dope spot and the adrenaline wears off, the aching cold resumes its place. My will is weakening by the minute; I'm completely focused on my need to get normal. All I can think of is getting more dope. So fucking depressing. Nothing else exists. No way I can keep going like this.

As I open our building's front door, I just kind of crumple as the door shuts behind me. I fall against the wall in the small, barely lighted stairwell. I pull my knees up and start to cry. How fucking embarrassing! I'm crying! I feel like shit and it's just getting worse. Maybe things would be different if this feeling was just starting to ease off, instead it's going the other direction. It's getting worse! I can't think more than 30 seconds into the future. All I have is need. The thought of joining Andy upstairs is impossible. I feel the folded knife in my back pocket pressing against my ass bone and I get an idea.

I walk over to the pile of bicycles by the mailboxes. I unlock the padlock on the heavy chain around my one wheeled bike. If I had two wheels I'd take the bike out and sell it, but there's only the one. It's a heavy chain. I put the padlock in my front pocket, gather the chain into my inside jacket pocket and head back out onto the street.

***

I'm about a third of the way across the bridge when I stop and take a look out over the water. The wind makes it feel 10, maybe 20, degrees colder out here. The East river so far below, is just black, a void between the brightly lit shores on either side. It's got to be at least midnight and there's nobody out here, which shouldn't be a surprise I guess. I'm about as alone as you can get up here. I know there's no turning back from this. I've never felt like a decision I had to make has had actual consequences, but this one must. Big events in my life up until this point have always just happened to me. Here I feel like I'm stepping off a cliff. I'm aware it's a cliff but it doesn't matter. I have to do it. Feeling this way, getting worse than this, just isn't an option.

The first people I've seen in about 10 minutes pass by. It's a couple walking with their arms around one another, braced against the cold. When I first got to the bridge's pedestrian ramp a couple of bike riders flew past me, but since then there's been no one. I keep walking. Maybe I'll step onto the island of Manhattan sicker than when I went up the stairs in Brooklyn. Then far off, high on the arch of the span I see a shape in the lamplight. The sick in my bones goes to my stomach. I get butterflies like I'm about to go over the first big drop on a roller coaster or like when I kissed my girlfriend Justine for the first time.

I try and remember my plan, which was to hide until the person passes by me, but I realize there's no way anyone is passing another person on this bridge without seeing the other. The walkway, which is probably 10 feet wide makes it impossible. There's nowhere to hide. So I wait, burning a few seconds by looking out over the water as the human shape approaches. I feel for the chain inside my jacket. I finger the heavy iron knots and pull an end so it hangs out of my pocket. I keep checking the walkway back towards Brooklyn and there's nobody there. There was a police callbox a ways back but I don't think I need to worry about it. It's a long way off. When I look back to the figure, I realize it's a dude. He's still a good 100 yards away. It almost looks like he's swaying though. He's not walking in a straight line.

I put my hands in my hair and shake it out so my dreads hang over my face and start walking quickly towards Manhattan and the stranger swaying in the lamplight. I make a point to not to look at the dude as the distance closes between us. When I'm able to make out that the guy is white I feel like crossing myself, like you see people do in TV and movies. I was hoping for a young, white kid and it looks like that's what I've got. I don't know what crossing yourself really means, I never went to church when I was a kid, but it seems like people do it when something lucky or serious happens. The dude seems small and the closer he gets, the more apparent his swagger becomes. He must be shitfaced. Talk about lucky! Let's just pray he's got some money on him! Dumb ass! What's he doing out here alone this time of night!? He's tiny. And he's drunk.

I finally take a good direct look at him as we pass each other. He turns towards me and I see that he looks just a couple years older than me. He doesn't seem fearful. His eyes don't seem particularly quick, like they aren't focusing properly. He must be fucked up. He's wearing those big black metal-shop style glasses. I pull the chain out of my jacket and pull it tight between my fists. I try and spin as quickly and quietly as possible. He's turning his head. Everything is happening in slow motion. I raise the chain and pull it as tight as I can around his neck. He grabs the chain, grunts and I try and force all my weight to the side. He stumbles and gets a bent knee under himself as I push him, facedown onto the wooden planks. It's weird, my motions are slow, but at the same time the whole thing happens faster than I dared to hope. He's barely fighting back. After a quick stumble forward, he's lying prone, flat on the walkway. I jam my knee into his back, pull the chain and shout louder than I'd meant to, "The Money!"

This is strange. It's too easy. My adrenaline is pumping but he's not fighting. He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and tosses it onto the ground. I don't know whether to drop the chain or not. I take a chance and grab the wallet and pry it open with a single hand. I see money. Any green paper is good enough for me. I pull the chain out from under him and step on him. I thumb through the wallet real quick and grab a thin pile of bills with a $20 on top.

"Count to 100! Don't get up until I'm out of sight! If you do, I'll split your head open!" I turn. "You hear me?"

I hear a stunted, "yeah." I stuff the cash into my front pocket and toss the wallet at him. As I'm leaving I kick him in the ribs. Hard. I'm not sure why, but it feels good. I take off running, back towards Brooklyn. My heart is beating like crazy. The wind whipping past my ears and the traffic down below the walkway gives me the feeling that I'm underwater or something. I try and slow down and turn around to see if the dude has gotten up but it's hard to run and look back at the same time. I end up neither running nor looking backwards particularly well, so I stop. I squint into the distance and it looks like he's still down on the ground. I run full speed until I'm off the bridge. When I finally get to Bedford, where there are a few people around, I slow down and try to fit in. I keep heading North and then when I don't hear any sirens I start a circuitous route back towards the dope spot.

Jared Mazzaschi gave it a shot but doesn't have what it takes to be a real New Yorker. He is a comedy writer who lives the soft life with his adorable wife and lovely dog in the human-friendly climes of Los Angeles. He blogs at http://whydontyoulikeme.com/

While scanning for the progress of skyscrapers I wasn't thinking about development. I wasn't thinking about gentrification. I was just a kid who was rooting for my hometown. New York was big. I wanted it to get bigger.

At the end of the day I would bike home to the Upper West Side, past those apartment buildings on Broadway, West End Avenue and Riverside Drive that seemed to have been there since the Pleistocene era, permanent fixtures forever unchanged.

It was understood that while negotiating midtown and its construction you would have to endure the rough, gritty, catacomb like environment of a scaffold beneath a construction site. What I can not recall is scaffolding being part of so many residential neighborhoods, which is where things seem to stand today. All those old buildings need to be re-pointed, or waterproofed. There are regulations concerning this issued by the city. I am sure there are good reasons for these regulations, but they have some magic power by which anyone who deals with them directly is immediately transformed into a raving libertarian.

New York's pedestrians suffer all sorts of insults but scaffolding is particularly undignified-- you can't feel like you are striving through the world's greatest city, with its striking juxtapositions of buildings and sky, when you are forced to spelunk through a dank, temporary hallway from which you emerge feeling like you have been misted with silt and grime.

Scaffolding is rickety, ugly, and temporary, but it is the worst kind of temporary--the kind that never ends. This used to be true for Sixth Avenue. For most of my twenties they were digging up sixth avenue. They would finish one section, then move onto another, and then, like someone who forgot their wallet and has to rush back through the front door and drag every single thing out of the front closet looking for it, they would come come back to the section they finished and tear it up again. The people of Second Avenue have been suffering for years with epic scaffolding, substrata explosions, and the puffs of white smoke - of the non-papal variety - but at least they are going to get a subway. The improvements being made up above that scaffolding don't even seem like improvements. They are usually a nebulous form of maintenance. No one likes to suffer for the cause of the status quo. It's a bitter pill.

This being New York, everyone has their own scaffolding story. One friend, a poet who works at the American Irish Historical Society on Fifth Avenue, oversaw a painstaking renovation of the Society's old historic brownstone to its original form, only to have it grievously injured by scaffolding falling from the neighboring building. Another friend writes with a lament that may be particular to investment Bankers, who nevertheless have feelings, too: "I notice a lot of scaffolding with the a banner that says There is a Chase Under Here, which always pisses me off because it's a constant reminder of the ubiquity of the omnipotent JP Morgan Chase banking evil empire against whom I compete daily."

Scaffolding, like some Kafka-esque joke, has proliferated to the point where it has engulfed the most unlikely victim. Or maybe the most likely. Josh Gilbert, the filmmaker, had an office on Broadway and Chambers street in a building that was covered in scaffolding. He hated walking under it. No one was ever working on the building. And so he decided to complain to the Department of Buildings. Which is how he found out the Department of Buildings was located in the building permanently encased in scaffolding. Josh made his complaint but nothing came of it. He has since moved out. It's now years later and the scaffolding is still there.

Hosted by Rob Williams.

“I’m so hungry.” A woman said. “I want to get home and eat.”

“I told you.” A mother said to her young son. “You should have listened to me when I told you to sit.”

That’s when we started to see the police and emergency workers, tons of them, pouring into the station, big men in uniforms and helmets. They walked the length of the platform, shining flashlights under the train.

It occurred to me then that we might have hit someone. But I quickly decided that this was unlikely because we were on one of the two center tracks, far away from the platform, and because, just last week, I had been on another train out on Long Island that had been stalled for a least an hour after an earlier train hit a commuter (I was told later by a taxi driver that I had just missed seeing the body on the tracks). What were the odds of me being at the scene of two commuter train accidents in the space of a week? Not good. I flexed my toes and shifted in my spot. My feet were aching in my heels. I was hot in my suit and down jacket so I took off the jacket. I thought about taking off my shoes but decided against it. I had some almonds in my bag and thought about eating some but decided against this also. No one else was eating and I didn’t want to be the only one. I wondered if there was a bomb scare. I wondered if we were in the midst of a terrorist attack. I remembered newspaper reports from years ago of Sarin gas being set loose on a Tokyo subway.

One man realized we had cellphone service. “They gots the NYPD and the firemen and EMS and the FBI and the CIA and the secret service and the Army and the Air Force and the Marines. They gots damn near everyone in here it looks like.” He said into his phone.

The conductor came on the intercom again and told us what he had been telling us for the past 40 minutes, that someone had activated the emergency brake, that it was being investigated, that he would tell us more when he had more information.

A woman came up from the back, pushing through the crowd. “Excuse me! I have to get to the front of the train! Excuse me!” She was young and had a thick Staten Island accent. She had a little notebook and a pencil – a reporter, I thought. Someone asked her if she knew what had happened. “Someone is injured.” She told us.

I texted the babysitter and my husband to let them know that I was stuck on the train, that I might be there for awhile. I typed, then erased the words “I think we hit someone” and “I hope we didn’t hit someone” so as not to make it true and so as not to bring bad luck upon us.

The conductor came on the intercom again. “This train is going to be evacuated.”

EMS appeared at the open door at the back of the car. “We’re all going to walk through to the back. Just be patient. It will only take 15 minutes, half an hour.”

On the platform, we could see emergency workers bringing a big ladder. “Is that for us?” I said out loud.

Finally, the crowd started to move, flowing toward the back. One by one, we climbed through the open door into the next car. Down below, on the tracks, several EMS workers were carrying small pink plastic bags. One worker was digging around between the tracks with a shovel. I stretched myself to see and saw a black body bag on the ladder that was now laying on the tracks; it had a few of the pink plastic bags in it.

“They’re taking him out in pieces.” The man behind me said.

Do I look? I wrestled with myself. Some side within me won, the side that was always scolding the other side for not being more daring, and so I stretched further toward the window. We all did. We were right above the EMS workers now. Directly across from us, on the platform, NYPD and EMS, maybe twenty of them, looked on grimly. I went right up to the window and looked down. That’s when I saw him – the man wedged under the train. He was face down, wedged alongside the track. I gasped. It was an older man – he was balding and had only faint wisps of hair. An EMS worker crouched by the train and tried to move him but he was wedged in – it was clear he was dead.

There was a big cop at the end of the car, bellowing. “RESPECT FOR THE DEAD!! STOP YOU’RE GAWKING!!” He was furious. “HAVE SOME RESPECT FOR THE DEAD!!” I felt ashamed and shrank back and flowed with the others past him, not daring to look again.

They had pulled a local 1 train into the track beside us and had set up a little bridge between the two trains. I followed the crowd through the two trains and onto the platform, filing past all the cops and EMS, my eyes cast downward. All of a sudden, the men on the platform erupted at once. “PUT AWAY THE CAMERA!!! NO CAMERAS!!! PUT IT AWAY!!!” And, again, that same cop, bellowing. “HAVE SOME RESPECT FOR THE DEAD!!!” The men were all yelling at us.

Outside, there were more police and EMS, cops cars and emergency vehicles, yellow tape strewn around the top of the subway entrance. There was a great crowd of people watching a blond newscaster interview someone in front of a camera. My home was almost 30 blocks away but the buses were packed so I walked. When I thought no one was looking, I did something I don’t do very often – I crossed myself and said a silent prayer. I thought maybe I should do something more but there was nothing to be done.

The next day, I learned from The Daily News that it was a teenager who had been struck, a young man who had been celebrating his 18th birthday who had, on a dare, tried to run across all the tracks with two friends. The two friends made it. The 18 year old didn’t. Why had I thought he was an older man? What had happened to his hair?

Claudette Bakhtiar holds a MFA in Fiction from Columbia University's School of the Arts. She received a NYFA Fellowship in Fiction in 2004 and served on the fiction judging panel in 2008. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, The L Magazine, Gigantic, and Time Out NY. She works part-time as an attorney and lives in Manhattan.

This is the scene that comes into my mind when I was asked about a favorite gift from my mother. My first response was, “My mother never gave me any gifts.” These words were followed by a generous helping of self-pity: that sickish sweet, oily syrup that somehow encourages the tongue and the palate to demand more and more. I try to stay away from its allure, and so, when I feel it coming on (particularly when its source is my mother), I seek alternatives. I begin by going the route of Marx or Freud: my mother was working class, the child of immigrants, her young womanhood was lived out against the backdrop of the Depression. Or: her childhood was difficult; she was the oldest of nine children of a harsh mother, she was stricken with polio at the age of three, an affliction which made it impossible that she would love her body. She was a single working mother, a widow, living with her grief-stricken child, her demanding mother, her jealous sister: she of the gimlet eye and viper tongue. And so, finally, I push both Marx and Freud into the background and settle on a simpler explanation: She was worn out. She was tired.

One of my mother’s most treasured ways of identifying herself was to let everyone know that she wasn’t like other women. She spoke of everything connected to the traditionally feminine with a lacerating contempt. The decoration of houses, the preparation of food—even the discussion of food—hair, makeup, clothing—all these were the property of a category she referred to as “lightweights.” I have come to understand that this was a complicated defense against what life didn’t give her, what she couldn’t have. Her polio meant that her body would never be acceptable by conventional standards. It was probably easier for her not to look at it too closely; buying clothes would have required this kind of self-scrutiny, a scrutiny that was, for her, a very bad bet indeed. Better to say she was above all that, beyond all that. To relegate that to the “lightweights.” As she relegated cooking and interior decoration because she never had the kind of marriage (my father earned no money; his contribution to our financial life was to get us into debt) that would allow the kind of leisure that attention to cooking and decoration might require. So she relegated the domestic realm to lightweights as well.

What was the opposite of a lightweight? It wasn’t a heavy weight. It did not mean a person who was earnest or even serious. These people were rejected out of hand as “sad sacks” or “pains in the ass.” Humor was the coin of the realm. Its products were her treasured capital. 
 Jokes were important, jokes were essential; a satiric commentary on the follies of one’s fellow humans was a pearl of great price. Some things, though, were of critical importance. Anything having to do with the success and superiority of the Roman Catholic Church was always welcome. Anything pointing out the inferiority of the Republican Party was just fine. But jokes, religion and politics –where could you buy them? How could you wrap them? What color would be preferable? Did you want them large or small? All the things my mother prized, being incorporeal, did not make themselves available as gifts.

You may wonder why my mother didn’t buy me books. The answer was simple: she didn’t trust her taste. My father was the reader and writer in the family, and she realized when I was very young (my father taught me to read at three) that books were his province, his and mine. We were the superior inhabitants of a superior realm, a territory she wouldn’t have dreamed of trespassing upon. When he died, when I was seven, she left the selection of my reading material to two of her closest friends, both of whom had been to college. She had only finished high school, and though she knew herself to be intelligent, she was fastidious at granting intellectual pride of place to those with what she considered superior credentials.

And so, I have come to understand why she never got me presents, and this failure was the objective correlative of her inability to give me any useful guidance on a good way of being a woman. This too, has been a cause for generous lashings of self-pity when I drink the hemlock of deprivation and regret for what I have not had, or what I had to earn or win myself, through luck or labor.

I thought no more about the question of my mother and her gifts, or lack of them. And one day—it was a sparkling late afternoon in the middle of May–I was in a cab driving down the West Side Highway. The sun glimmered on the river; coin-sized patches of light danced along the Hudson’s silver skin. My eye fell on a rather unprepossessing boat; I heard it’s cheerful, workmanlike tooting. I saw the sign spelt out in white along its sides. CIRCLE LINE, it said.

Immediately, I am back more than fifty years. It is a spring day, but an earlier one: the beginning of April. Easter vacation. My mother has taken a day off. “We’re going on a little adventure,” she tells me. She has booked tickets for Circle Line: the boat that takes people around Manhattan Island.

I remember, driving next to her in our two toned blue Nash-Rambler, a high sense of rightness, but a rightness whose exaltation nevertheless felt entirely secure and safe. My mother was driving me on “an adventure.” She had taken a day off. We were going to the city. Not only to the city: we were going on a boat. No one we knew had ever done this. It was something people talked about doing, but never did. And we were doing it!

I don’t remember how long the voyage took. I remember sitting next to her and eating ham sandwiches we’d brought from home. I remember bringing her a coffee from the bar inside the boat; I selected, for myself, a lemonade. The air smelt wonderfully of salt and the larger world. “There’s the Statue of Liberty,” my mother said. We picked out the Empire State Building. Neither of which we’d ever actually visited, or, being New Yorkers, were likely to do. I was so proud of her, and of myself as her daughter. She had taken a day off! She had had this wonderful idea! She had made everything possible. Everything that no one else could have done.

It occurred to me that day, fifty years later on the West Side Highway, that this was a very great gift indeed. Better than a Ginny Doll or an angora sweater or a poodle skirt or a heart- shaped locket or a gold bracelet or my first pair of high heels. She was giving me the gift of the larger world. And the belief that it was something that could be reached. If you just thought of it, and figured out how to make it happen. This was the reward for not being like other women. This was our reward for not being like other mothers and daughters. An adventure on the water. The sight of the glittering city. The possibility of the greater world.

“The Circle Line” is from What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, just out from Algonquin.

Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments, Spending, and, most recently, The Love of My Youth; of two memoirs; of The Stories of Mary Gordon, winner of the Story Prize; of Reading Jesus; and a biography of Joan of Arc. She is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College.
 

I’m a creature of habit, or at least I was. I liked walking to Regina’s Bakery for bread or to Babbo’s Books to see what book I might want to read. I loved everything about my neighborhood – that little strip of Prospect Park West that united Windsor Terrace with Park Slope. The street began with Connecticut Muffin and Oak Park Pharmacy and the Holy Name of Jesus Church and Le Petit Paris restaurant at the other. Further down (at least in my own geography), Windsor Terrace began in earnest. That street was my hometown, my small town in the big city. I waved to the old man in the Korean market and chatted with the continually changing young Indian men at the convenience store. These kinds of connections made me happy, made me feel I was home. And I was.

As much as Prospect Park West gave me a community, Prospect Park gave me back my soul. The gift Olmsted and Vaux gave the city has only grown deeper and richer with time. Having had that green space, that bit of nature that was beautiful and sumptuous in every season was a grace in my life. It calmed and healed me. It soothed my weariness of living a New York City life that was lived underground or in boxes rushing from here to there (or trying to rush from here to there if the MTA lets you.) Prospect Park was my Beloved, the light of my soul. How could I think of leaving her? On summer nights I would come home from work, pull on some yoga pants and sneakers and throw myself into her arms. How could I leave my apartment? All I had to do was cross the street. I thought of my ex-boyfriend Joe who had to make the trek up from Fourth Avenue – up the slope to the park and then down again.

It was Joe who had brought me to Brooklyn in the first place. I had been to Park Slope before. I had a friend from college who had lived above Little Things on Seventh Avenue and a man who had invited me to his apartment on President Street, but wouldn’t sleep with me when he found out I was a virgin. Joe and I had met in 1998 in a week that would change my life. I had met him and been offered an exciting new job at iVillage. I saved my money and started planning my move. In the early days of our relationship, he wanted me to move in with him. But I had never lived alone. Mostly, I had lived with my family and in college with my roommates and then later with aunts and cousins in Italy. I wanted my own space, my own castle. It seemed right to me and Joe understood even when I turned down his offer and the roommate situation he had heard about from one of his neighbors. I wish I remembered her name now, but I do remember her dog’s name, a sweet German shepherd named Poppy Jay.

Have you ever looked for an apartment in New York? Have you ever looked for an apartment on a budget? Of course you have. You know all the odd, weird spaces. There was a place in Fort Greene that was so cheap that I knew I had to see it just to find out what was wrong with it. That’s a typical New York thought about real estate – not wow, I am so lucky this will be a steal, but what is it about this place that is just not right (and will I be able to handle it?) On an industrialized block next to an abandoned lot stood a red building. The real estate agent and I climbed up the five flights of stairs (no, that’s not why it was so cheap) and explained it was a one bedroom that just came on the market.

“It’s certainly under market,” I said.

“Well,” hesitated the realtor, “you’ll need to see it.”

Yes, because seeing is believing or disbelieving, as the case may be. The building had “settled” and one side of the apartment was about a foot higher than the other, giving it a weird funhouse effect. It felt like I was on a movie set and after about 10 minutes I began to feel an odd sort of vertigo and nausea. I needed to get out. This wasn’t for me. I don’t know how people find apartments in a week or on a deadline in New York. It took me five months. In fact, I had seriously started thinking about looking for a place in Queens when Joe told me he wouldn’t date me if I moved to Astoria. Only in New York do you become geographically undesirable when you live less than 10 miles away.

In the end, I found two places about seven blocks away from each other. The apartment I moved into was my first choice. It was the best apartment I had seen in the best location. If it hadn’t been love at first sight, at least I could see myself there. Getting it wasn’t easy. I had to interview with the landlord, a large, brusque Russian man who would not shake my hand when I left. I called my realtor in a panic.

“He doesn’t like me,” I cried, “he didn’t even shake my hand.”

My realtor was concerned; I could hear it in his silence.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll wait and see.”

I got the apartment. My father would be the guarantor and I moved in. It was my place. For the first two years I lived at Joe’s. It was only after we broke up that I spent two nights in a row there. It didn’t feel like home. Breaking up with Joe introduced me to myself, my likes and dislikes and my own home. I’m not sure if I liked it, but it became a refuge. Joe and I had an on-again-off-again thing, but for the most part I lived in my apartment with the small kitchen and the lack of direct sunlight except for about an hour in the afternoon in my bedroom. The other windows were barred and looked out over the airshaft.

 I started to work more and more and bring more and more stuff in. I didn’t have enough space for my books or my clothes.I started feeling that my life was too big for my small space, but what I was really trying to do was to fill an empty life with stuff so I could feel full. I know I should have moved out at year four, but I stayed for seven more – partly from laziness and partly because looking for an apartment had been so traumatizing the first time.

“Why is there a large puddle in the middle of the kitchen?” I asked at one place.

“Oh, what a big closet,” I had said at another, only to find it was the door that led to the boiler.

I had loved my location on Bartel-Pritchard Square. I had loved my neighbors – and we’re still friends today. Leaving from the front door, I had loved everything about where I lived. Coming home was another story. It was more than time to hand in my keys, to give up something I loved (but not enough) to find something else, something new. And if I was lucky, something that I loved even more.

Alba Brunetti was born in Italy, raised in NYC and calls İstanbul home. She has had a rollicking internet career writing, editing, and producing for companies such as iVillage and AOL and startups like Virtual Communites and others you have never heard of that went crash, boom! Now she balances her time writing, looking for freelancing opportunities and appearing in Academy-Award-winning films. (I was an extra in Skyfall and you can see me on screen for a full 1/10th of second!)

Instead, all we had so far accomplished was: me naked to the waist, my half-hinged belt hanging phallically, one shoe and sock off, and Hana crying in my arms. The more I bounced to calm her, the farther my corduroys slipped down, eventually completing the still-life image: Clown With Babe in Arms, Pants at Ankles; or, Paunchy #3.

At A Certain Upper East Side pool you can bring your child any night of the week for Open Swim, and it’s just ten bucks — Just don’t say you’re planning to get in the water, because that’ll cost you another thirty-five. Our upstairs neighbors hipped us to this. They had been taking their son there pretty regularly over the past few months and we figured it was time to join in.

“I mean, you’re just going in the kiddie pool. Technically you aren’t swimming,” Andrew said. I could only agree. “So here’s the thing. When you get to the counter, just say ‘open swim for her,’” he looked at me in the rearview mirror. We lived just five blocks from the pool but it was too cold to walk back with wet hair, so he’d offered to drive. “The clerks are pretty much clueless,” he said. I nodded. “Okay, so they’ll say ‘ten bucks,’” he went on. “Don’t say you’ll be in the water with her. Obviously, you will be, you’d have to be, she’s two, right? But again, clueless.”

My daughter and Andrew's son, Oliver were already having a good time in the car, which is the nice thing about kids — they don’t even know, much less care, when the fun is supposed to start.

“The last thing, though,” Andrew said, “is that they will give you a bracelet for her. DO NOT put this on her. DO NOT have the bracelet on her when you get in the water.” The bracelet was the keystone to the grift. As with most fandangos, success lay in the details.

I personally like getting away with things like this in New York, since the general level you have to pay just to not spend your life huddled and starving on a street corner is so high. Useless credits like these keep some internal ledger in check, and allow lots of other inescapable debits to slide by less painfully.

Walking toward the desk, I felt a bit nervous. “I’ll go first,” Andrew said. He told the clerk the story, which I thought he oversold a bit, but she only asked him for ten bucks, which he had ready. His wife, Mary, had added in the ride over, in a thick Irish accent that only increased the intrigue: “Just have the money ready. We don’t need all that fumblin’ around.” He paid, wrapped the bracelet around Oliver’s wrist, and moved along.

My turn.

“Ten dollars,” I said. The girl looked at me. “I mean, swim.” I cleared my throat. “Just her. Open swim for her, my daughter,” I said, sorting myself out. I had Hana in my arms and turned her toward the girl, in an evidentiary sort of way.

“Sure thing,” the girl said. “That’s ten dollars.”

I handed it over and she gave me — THE BRACELET.

“I usually just take it off him when we get in the change room,” Andrew had explained. “The thing is, non-members, which is what we are, have to wear bracelets during open swim. If you’re a member you don’t pay for open swim. You just show your card and go in. But,” he held up his finger in the rearview mirror, “here’s the thing: if she has the bracelet on, and you don’t, the lifeguard might notice. They’re generally pretty clueless t0o,” he said, “but obviously if you’re a member your kid would be, too, right? So someone’s gonna wonder — Why is she wearing a bracelet, but you’re not? So, don’t have it on her.”

A few moments passed as we waited at a red light, during which the car took on the shape of Andrew considering the one glitch in the scheme, something he smoothed over when the light turned green. “The desk and the lifeguards aren’t in any kind of communication with each other,” he said as we pulled forward. “None.”

Tearing the bracelet off seemed inelegant to me, so I’d decided to add my own wrinkle. “I’ll just put it on her once she’s changed,” I said to the girl. “This big coat, and everything,” I made a gesture indicating seasoned parental experience with such things. “She’ll just get upset if I start fumbling now.”

“Sounds good,” the girl said.

Once we got into the water, I noticed that no one had the bracelet on. Maybe the scam was rampant? A kind of whispered truth that had spread across Manhattan, gathering flocks of high-rent-paying parents who wanted to catch a tiny, ridiculous break. A little kick at the wall. Or maybe these were all proper parents who just joined and paid the monthly fee (which was astronomical of course) and were done with it. They swam at 6am before work, then brought their kids here at night to splash around. Someone had seen Martha Stewart there the other day, and I doubt she nibbled the bracelet off her grandkid's wrist before open swim.

Anyway, I didn’t care. Despite all the layers that suggest otherwise, New York is a helluva fine place to raise a kid. The sheer contrast of going a few blocks and getting into warm water as easily as this made the point for me. The minor obliquity merely sweetened the deal.

Splashing briefly in the warmth, in the middle of Manhattan, on an otherwise freezing night, all was briefly right in the world. Finding a moment like this, particularly here, is perhaps the greatest scheme of all. It’s certainly nice when you manage to pull it off.

I held Hana around the waist and briefly let her go. Her face showed worry and then pleasure as she found her balance and righted herself in the water. She reached forward a second later and threw her arms around my neck, flashing me this particular look she has, which says, roughly: THIS-CAN’T-REALLY-BE-THIS-GOOD, CAN-IT?-NO,-WAIT,-IT-REALLY-IS-THIS-GOOD!-NO,-WAIT,-ACTUALLY-IT’S-EVEN- BETTER!!

And so it was.

Trevor Laurence Jockims has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and he teaches at New York University. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Descant, Anderbo, Kino Kultura, and elsewhere.

We’ll call him Michael, for he preferred not to be called by his full name. I never had him for a student, but I knew him from the literary club, where I served as an adviser. When he wasn’t busy editing the school’s newspaper or acting in a play, he was the lit club's star writer.

At fifteen he was already turning in work equivalent to that of a well seasoned adult. His essays were smooth and polished. They had integrity, insight, and incredible potential. In fact, his writing was so far and above the other students, who mainly attended for slices of pizza and socializing, he would only quickly stop by, drop off a new piece, and be on his way. He could have stayed to show off, but Michael had no interest in that.

So we began to edit his work privately, sometimes in person, often in the margins of papers handed back and forth through busy hallways. I wanted to show him the power of editing, removing some of those seductive adverbs and adjectives that sway so many young writers. I told him about a professor I had in grad school, a brilliant essayist who could edit student papers by simply closing his eyes and listening. The man’s sonorous voice remains in my head to this day. I wanted Michael to hear someone’s voice when he wrote.

The years went by and the kid only got better. We combed over Regents essays, college applications, and new material for the literary magazine. In his junior year, at a school pronounced dangerous and failing, he sat down to take the English Regents exam and recorded one of the highest scores in the state.

By senior year Michael was so immersed in extracurricular activities that I often saw him only in passing. One day I handed him a flyer from one the city’s many teen writing contests. It was sponsored by a gay and lesbian organization that wanted themes specifically geared to their community. I presumed Michael would write something about marriage equality or perhaps gays in the military. I still recall the way he turned in his finished piece. He was neither nervous nor overly dramatic. He passed it to me with the same matter-of-fact confidence as usual, the fierce self-assurance the truly gifted possess.

Michael’s essay was about growing up in a strict, first generation American family and what it was like to openly discuss his sexuality with his father for the first time. He wrote about his initial trepidation. He wrote about the acceptance and understanding they eventually came to share. Michael had discovered his own voice and he was proud of it. He won that contest, of course; polished it up some more then got it published in a well known anthology for teens.

We lost touch after that. Graduates could no longer visit an alma mater that was almost gone. Besides, all his favorite teachers had been "excessed" from the building. I still drive by the old place from time to time, always before dawn, admiring its majestic architecture and contemplating my old classroom. But there is no longer any present - just a high school of the mind receding deeper into memory, growing smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror. I even look over Michael’s essay occasionally; recalling him and all those countless others, their spirits swirling high above the school’s hallowed bell tower forever.

J Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and the Mr. Beller's Neighborhood anthology, Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The student in this essay appears under a pseudonym.