Love Saves the Day

13



Sarah





LAURA TURNED FOURTEEN IN THE FALL OF 1994 AND BEGAN ATTENDING Stuyvesant High School down in Battery Park City. For the first time, she started taking the bus and subway on her own every day. Once, this would have terrified me. But Mayor Giuliani had taken office by then, and he’d started cracking down on things like graffiti and street crime and the homeless guys who’d come right up to your car window with a squeegee while you were stopped at intersections. He got rid of the corrupt cops who for so many years had taken bribes and allowed the street-corner drug dealers to go about their business. There was no question that New York City in general and the Lower East Side specifically were growing cleaner and safer by the day.

There were mixed feelings about all this on the LES. Nobody liked crime, of course, and it was a relief to feel that our streets were less dangerous. On the other hand, we were rather proud of our graffiti. People like Cortes and Keith Haring were acknowledged as legitimate artists pursuing a legitimate art form. There were people who grumbled that Giuliani was a fascist. Maybe he is, I’d reply, but you know what? Drug dealers are fascists, too. Now there was nobody to menace my daughter and her friends when they walked down the streets, to tell her which corners she could linger on and which she couldn’t.

“Quality of Life,” Giuliani’s campaign was called. Many of us were in favor of it at first. But eventually we came to realize just how nebulous an expression “quality of life” is. If you wanted to, you could interpret it to mean almost anything.


Later, after the dust had settled, lawyers and reporters would try to create a chronology of what had happened on June 3, 1995. We were able to ascertain a few definite facts—that a concerned citizen’s 911 call really had started the whole thing, that there really were a few bricks that had slipped from our apartment building’s rear façade. Nobody disputed that our landlords had disregarded necessary repairs over the years. Margarita Lopez, the city council member for our neighborhood, would later confirm ninety-eight Class B (serious enough to warrant court action) and Class C (supposed to be repaired within twenty-four hours) violations on record with the City. We tenants had banded together in the past, chosen representatives, complained formally to the City. But the City had done nothing for us. All of us living there were old, or we were immigrants, or we were poor. We worked. We paid our rent every month and our taxes every year. But, in the end, we were expendable.

There was money coming to us, the lawyers insisted. Somebody had to pay for what had happened. I attended a few meetings, but my heart wasn’t in it. What difference could it make? And when we ended up getting nothing, or next to nothing, I wasn’t surprised or even disappointed. We were too broken by then. We were a group of Humpty Dumptys, and there weren’t enough horses or men in all of New York to make us whole again.





It was a Saturday morning. Laura moved with brisk purpose through the apartment, wearing a nightgown with a cartoon drawing on it of a girl who stood in the window of a tenement building much like ours. The girl in the drawing had thrown a clock from the window. Jane Wanted to See Time Fly, the caption said. It was a child’s nightgown, even though Laura had grown so much in the past year I could hardly believe she was the same girl. It wasn’t a nightgown I would have worn at her age. But when I was Laura’s age, I was already trying to be older. Laura would turn fifteen in only five months. I had been fifteen when I’d met Anise. A chance meeting a lifetime ago, in a secondhand store I’d never intended to go into. And somehow, from that day, events had unfolded one after the other and brought me here. I had a teenage daughter, and this was where we lived.

I wasn’t due at Ear Wax until the afternoon. Still, I was up early because Laura was up early, and I sang in the kitchen as I fixed toast and cereal for the both of us. Laura was waiting for Mr. Mandelbaum to return from the cramped, ancient synagogue two doors down from our building. He had gone there to pray every Saturday morning for the past fifty years. Today was different, though. It was Shavuot, the holiday that celebrates God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead, is recited four times a year. One of those times is Shavuot, and Mr. Mandelbaum would be reciting the Yizkor today for Mrs. Mandelbaum, who’d died in her sleep during the past winter.

Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t been the same since. His eyes would roam the room instead of looking at your face when you talked to him. The voice that had once boomed down hallways, audible sometimes even downstairs in our apartment, had faded to a whisper. He would forget to take his medication for days at a time. Even Honey seemed to sense the difference. She had always been close to him, always been “his” cat—his and Laura’s—but now she hovered near him constantly. Whenever we went up to see him, Honey was in his lap or sitting next to him on the arm of his chair. Her soft eyes looked anxious as they followed his every small movement. If Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t remembered to shop for Honey, to buy her food and bring her the little tidbits of turkey she loved from the corner deli, he might not have remembered to shop at all.

Laura and I tried to spend as much time with him as possible. But there were too many hours in the day given to school and to work, too many hours when Mr. Mandelbaum was by himself in that apartment filled with photos of the wife and son he’d lost. Too many hours with only his cat for company. The book Mrs. Mandelbaum had been reading aloud to him the night she died still rested, facedown, on the coffee table where she’d left it before going to bed. Laura had seen him only yesterday, heart torn at Mrs. Mandelbaum’s absence from the kitchen where she’d prepared cheese blintzes every year for Shavuot. Laura’s idea today was to take Mr. Mandelbaum for a walk, maybe to Katz’s for the blintzes they served there. Anything that would keep him from spending the rest of the day alone in his apartment.

But it was pouring outside. Laura fretted at the idea of Mr. Mandelbaum being outside in this weather, fretted also that he might not have remembered to bring an umbrella with him when he’d walked to the synagogue that morning. He was apt to forget such things these days.

It was nine when we heard the knock on our door. Laura, already dressed and hoping it was Mr. Mandelbaum, ran to answer it. I was in my bedroom, just starting to change out of my nightshirt. I heard an unfamiliar man’s voice, the upward tilt of Laura’s voice responding with a question. “Mom?” she called out. “Can you come here?”

My hands fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. “I’m coming,” I called back.

I had missed a button and my shirt was on lopsided. There were two firemen at our door. One of them, the younger one, seemed to notice my shirt but refrained from pointing it out. “Is there anybody else in the apartment, ma’am?” he asked me. Their yellow-and-black raincoats gleamed wetly, and I remember thinking their muddy boots would make a mess in the hall.

“Why?” I wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

“We’re evacuating the building,” the other one said. “Part of the rear façade has been damaged from the rain. There’s a possibility the whole building might collapse.”

I heard his words, but it was information my brain instantly rejected. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“We’re evacuating the building,” the older fireman repeated, patiently. “This building is in danger of imminent collapse, ma’am.”

“Oh my God.” I felt a vein begin to throb in my throat. My mind whirred and skipped, a phonograph needle trying to settle into the right groove. I had a sudden, unbearable image of my daughter crushed beneath a collapsed building, her body broken underneath a pile of bricks and beams. I knew, though, that I couldn’t let panic alone, or the sharp pain of my heart thudding in my chest, determine my actions of the next few minutes. I had to force that image away for a second. I had to stop and think.

It’s an impossible question to answer in the abstract, what you might take with you if somebody knocked on your door and told you that your home and everything in it could be destroyed in the next few minutes. It’s impossible because, when the moment comes, it’s always unexpected and you can’t think. Only later do you remember things like favorite albums or your grandmother’s wedding ring, or the metal lockbox of personal treasures stored on the top shelf of your closet. If you’re a mother, your first thoughts go where they always go—to what you’ll need to care for your child. Food, clothing, shelter, whatever you’ll need in the way of wallet contents and insurance papers to ensure those things are provided without interruption. And so, when my mind stopped skipping, that’s where it settled. Tell Laura to grab enough clothing for a few days, it said, while you get your purse, your phone book, and the insurance policies.

“Quick,” I said to Laura, I could hear the rain lashing at our windows. “There’s a suitcase on the top shelf of the linen closet. Get it down and we’ll—”

“There’s no time, ma’am,” the younger fireman interrupted. “This building could collapse any second.” Laura turned her face up to mine, fear and bewilderment in her eyes, but also trust. Not doubting for a second that her mother would know exactly what we should do.

It was Laura’s face that snapped me into decisiveness. “Put your shoes on,” I told her. “Hurry!” Without a word, she ran off to her bedroom. Turning back to the firemen, I asked, “Is there truly no time to bring anything else?”

“We’ll have it stabilized soon,” the younger fireman told me reassuringly. “You’ll probably be back in a couple of hours. We’re evacuating mainly as a precaution. Just take what you need for right now.”

His words eased the knot of panic in my chest, but only a little. The image of Laura in a collapsing building was too agonizing to be dismissed easily.

“Mom,” Laura said as she hurriedly laced her sneakers, “what about—”

“Everything’s going to be fine.” I tried to sound soothing. “But we have to go now.”

“But—”

“Now, Laura. No discussions.”

I wasn’t in the habit of speaking to her so sharply. She threw me a surprised look, but finished tying her shoes.

I can almost laugh today, remembering how Laura and I raced to grab keys, wallets, umbrellas. At my urging (“Quickly!” I told Laura, tugging at her arm, “Run!”), we bolted down the stairs as if the building were already collapsing around us. We were breathless when we reached the sidewalk.

Most of our neighbors were outside. We whispered among ourselves as we milled about in the rain. “A few bricks fell off the back of the building,” the performance artist from the ground floor told me. “Because of the rain. Somebody called 911. They should be able to fix it pretty easily.”

It was a comforting thought. Then the police arrived with barricades and yellow tape, and the vein in my throat began to pulse again. All this because of a few fallen bricks? A crowd, larger than the twenty-five or so people who lived in our building, was starting to gather.

It was Laura who first spotted Mr. Mandelbaum, in the thirty-year-old suit he’d worn to his wife’s funeral, clutching a small plastic bag in his hand. “We’re over here!” she called to him, waving. Laura and I angled our umbrellas so all three of us could fit under them while rain pounded staccato on the fabric over our heads. Laura’s face was pale and pinched, but in Mr. Mandelbaum’s presence she composed it into a serene expression as she quickly explained what was happening.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s eyes swept past the cops, now busily using the barricades and yellow tape to create a perimeter around the building. It stood on the corner, and the barricade extended from all the way around the corner and around back to the narrow alley between our building and the one next to it. Then Mr. Mandelbaum looked up at the building itself. The red bricks rising into gray sky looked every bit as solid as any other building on the block.

For a moment, I was pleased to see his eyes focus in a way they hadn’t in months. It was heartening, even under circumstances like these, to see his eyes flicker with life and interest. Then I realized it wasn’t understanding that focused his gaze. It was fear.

“Honey,” he said.


It’s an interesting thing to think about, how rumors get started. How a crowd comes to know something no one individual can account for. When did it happen? When was the moment of certainty? And how was it that we knew for sure?

We had been told that the building could collapse at any second, but two hours later not so much as a single brick had fallen, not one visible crack had appeared in the structure. They had told us we would be allowed back in “soon,” but by noon not one of us had been allowed back in. Police officers and representatives from the Office of Emergency Management roamed freely in and out of the building, seeming unconcerned about the dangers we’d been warned of. Many didn’t bother to wear hard hats. In hushed voices people asked one another, Doesn’t that seem odd to you?

Whispers ran among us as we all stood there in the rain, waiting to see what would happen. People talked about SROs whose occupants had been dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and scattered into the streets like cockroaches. The buildings would be demolished the very next morning to make room for expensive new condos and restaurants. There were the squatters who took over apartment buildings nominally owned by the City because the landlords had been unable to afford repairs or taxes. Buildings the City abandoned and neglected until they became crack houses. The squatters would chase out the dealers and addicts, bring in wiring, fix walls and roofs, plant gardens, make the building and sometimes whole blocks livable again. You would see children playing stickball on streets that only a few months earlier no child could have safely walked past. And then one day police would come to chase the squatters out, not letting them take any personal belongings with them. The City would “reclaim” the building and sell it for a profit.

But those people were different from us. The people who stayed in SROs had no formal contracts; they paid on a nightly or perhaps weekly basis. Technically, the squatters had no legal claim to be where they were. We held signed leases in our own names. We paid our rent every month, as formally and contractually as any millionaire with a Park Avenue pied-à-terre. What had happened to those other people could never happen to us.

Maybe it was when Mayor Giuliani pulled up in a Town Car. By then the crowd was enormous. At first people were cheered by the sight of the mayor striding confidently into that building. He didn’t wear a hard hat, either. How dangerous could the building be, if the mayor himself was entering it?

But then the murmurs went around again: Why was the mayor here? Why should he concern himself with us, with our one little building? Maybe it was a goodwill gesture, an attempt to garner votes in a neighborhood that hadn’t supported him in the last election?

But, then … why didn’t he make eye contact with anybody, or give us even a parting wave, as he exited the building and disappeared back into his car?

One of our local community board members, an architect, was circulating. “Don’t worry,” he told people. “I went around back and saw the damage they’re talking about. Two, maybe three bricks, and that rear wall’s at least six bricks deep. There’s no way this building is going to collapse.”

Few people seemed comforted at hearing this. I noted that. Noted, too, that at some point the crowd had started to lose faith in the idea that whatever was happening here today was a rescue mission. A breeze blew up and I shivered, drawing Laura closer to me.


I don’t remember all the events of that day as clearly as I should. Maybe I just don’t want to. Or maybe, perversely, too much of my memory got used up in the wrong places. Because the parts I remember most clearly are the ones I would give anything—all the remaining years of my life—to forget. The rest of it comes to me in fragments.

The crowd sighed and surged and swelled and collapsed inward upon itself, only to expand again. Rain fell harder, and people huddled under umbrellas or simply stood motionless and got wet, and then the rain subsided. Faces blurred and shifted around me, as if I were standing still in front of a merry-go-round. The Bengali couple from the fourth floor threaded through the crowd, their three children following them like ducklings in a row. The Polish woman who lived across the hall from us and took in laundry muttered something, to nobody in particular, about the clothing she still had piled up in her living room.

“Five thousand dollars I have in that apartment,” Consuela Verde, Maria Elena’s mother, said to me. The two youngest of her five children clung to her beneath an enormous flowered umbrella, still wearing their pajamas. Anger and anguish competed for toeholds on the rounded contours of her face. “All our lives, my husband and me worked for that money. All the money we ever have. We no trust the banks. And now these hijos de la gran puta”—she spat on the sidewalk—“now they will take it from us. You watch and see.”


More hours ticked by. Rain-fed puddles deepened and joined to form small rivers that rushed over feet and carried bobbing, twirling dead leaves toward drains. My stomach churned in time with the movements of the crowd, its anxious circles, the growing sense that something wasn’t right. It had been hours since the toast and cereal I’d eaten that morning. Somebody pressed a paper cup of hot coffee into my hand. But my stomach recoiled at the thought of it, so I carefully set the cup down on the asphalt beside me.

Nothing happened to indicate any repairs being made to our building. Why were we kept waiting in the rain? Why, when the building had remained standing for so many hours, couldn’t we go in and at least collect a few of our things?

A leg would grow uncomfortable from my standing on it too long, and I’d shift my weight to the other leg. I halfheartedly swung my umbrella around whenever the wind changed direction. Still, I was soaked through. I tried to re-button my lopsided shirt one-handed and succeeded only in making it more lopsided. My purse began to feel too heavy hanging from my right shoulder, so I switched it to the left. It occurred to me that I was long overdue at the store, that Noel would be worried about me. But I didn’t want to leave to find a pay phone. The thought faded. Sometimes I decided to count how many people in the crowd had blond hair, how many red, how many brown. It was easy when you could see the tops of everybody’s head. I remained within the crowd, so I could hear what was going on, and kept one eye on Laura, who stood with Mr. Mandelbaum across the street.

Laura never left Mr. Mandelbaum’s side. He sat on an overturned orange crate, and Laura held her umbrella over his head so he wouldn’t get wet. For hours she stood protectively over him, the tallest woman in the crowd aside from me. Laura’s smooth, pale hand against the black plastic of the umbrella handle. Mr. Mandelbaum’s knotted hands twisting and untwisting the plastic bag he still gripped. Occasionally Maria Elena went over to talk to her. Once, I think, she tried to convince Laura to go someplace with her. I could tell by the gestures her hands were making. But Laura smiled wanly and shook her head no, motioning toward Mr. Mandelbaum. Maria Elena disappeared back into the crowd.

I hovered as close to the barricades as I could without being completely swallowed up by the crowd. People from our building kept approaching the yellow line and the cops standing on the other side of it. They pleaded, raged, argued, wept. Those who didn’t speak English, or didn’t speak it well, brought their children as interpreters. I tried, too, to reason with the cops. Tension had become a living pain in my chest, but I forced myself to be calm. Years of working retail had taught me to speak calmly, smilingly, to unreasonable people. I had a child, I told them. My child needed clothing. She needed her schoolbooks. So many people had gone into the building all day and come out unharmed. If we could have a few minutes, only a few minutes to …

“We’ll let you back in,” the cops told us again and again. “Once the building has been deemed safe for reentry, we’ll let you back in. You have nothing to worry about.”

Every half hour or so, I helped Mr. Mandelbaum through the crowd and up to the barricades. I took him from Laura as if we were two parents exchanging custody. I held my umbrella over his head with one hand as we walked. I encircled him with the other, to protect him from being pushed by the crowd. He couldn’t be allowed to slip and fall. I had to remind myself to walk slowly, to pace my longer steps to his shuffling ones.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s whole face beseeched the unyielding cops on the other side of the barricades. Their eyes never so much as flickered in his direction.

“Please,” Mr. Mandelbaum kept saying. “Please let me get my cat out. She’s in there all alone. Please let me get her.”


More than a few times, I tried to argue on Mr. Mandelbaum’s behalf. I circled the barricades looking for different faces, cops I hadn’t already spoken to. “He’s an old man,” I said. “He has prescription medication in there that he needs to take.”

Nothing. No response at all.

“Look,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone. As if we were allies, partners on the same side of a negotiation. “The man’s wife just died. He lived here with her for fifty years. That cat means the world to him. Just let him get his cat out. She’s a living thing, too.” I repeated this sentence often, as if it contained magic words. An unanswerable argument. A living thing. “Couldn’t somebody at least get her for him? I could get his keys. I keep seeing people going in and out and—”

Finally, one of the cops rolled his eyes. “Lady,” he said in an exasperated tone, “we got more important things to worry about right now than some old guy’s cat.”


The crowd continued to grow. It became increasingly restive as the day went on—community board members, friends and relatives, tenants from neighboring apartment buildings swelled our ranks, until there were over two hundred of us and cars couldn’t drive down Stanton Street. Jostles became shoves. Murmurs rose to shouts. Chants went up. Who came up with them? How did everybody know to say the same thing at the same time? “Give us fifteen minutes!” the crowd howled with one voice, fists in the air. “Give us fifteen minutes!” Or else they chanted, “Mr. Moriarty, stop this party!” referring to OEM deputy director John Moriarty, who was on-site that day.

I did try to make Laura leave. The Red Cross had set up a relief center a few blocks away, and I tried to send her there. “No,” she told me. One hand fell to rest on Mr. Mandelbaum’s shoulder. “We’re not leaving until we know Honey is safe.”

“Laura—”

“No!” Her voice was edged with panic. “I’m not going! You can’t make me!”

You can’t make me. A child’s argument. But Laura and I had never argued. We were as close as two fingers on the same hand, she and I.


Eventually, somebody came to me with a petition. Somebody else came with an affidavit. I signed both. I was told papers were being prepared and notarized at the nearby middle school. A judge had been found who was willing to have the papers delivered to his home on a Saturday. For the first time in the nine hours since our building had been evacuated, I allowed myself to feel hope.

Suddenly Laura was beside me. She held Mr. Mandelbaum’s arm. What was she doing here, near the barricades? I had thought, I had been certain, that we’d both understood the terms of our unspoken agreement. She was to remain safely across the street with Mr. Mandelbaum. If he wanted to try talking to the cops again, I would bring him over. There was no reason for her to be here. No reason at all.

Yet here she was. “Fifty years I’ve lived here,” Mr. Mandelbaum was saying now. His voice was no longer a quiet plea. It had gained volume, agitated for the first time. “Everything I have in the world is in that apartment, but I don’t care. I don’t care! Just let me go to my cat. I’m begging you!” He dragged the wet sleeve of his coat across his face.

The cops continued to ignore him. He was only an old man, after all. They didn’t budge for him. Their eyes moved only for Laura, moved up and down, taking her in. A tall, slender, beautiful girl, wearing jeans and a red cotton T-shirt that clung to her body in the rain.

I could see Laura’s tight face, the crease between her eyebrows far too deep for a girl her age, as she fought to restrain her own tears. Tears for this man she loved, and the cat she loved almost as much as the man. I couldn’t hear her words, but I knew she was adding her own soft, murmured pleas.

A gust of wind came up. It blew Mr. Mandelbaum’s coat backward, molded Laura’s T-shirt more tightly to her chest. The cops’ eyes drifted downward. Sly grins scurried across their faces.

Something uncoiled inside me. It curled my hands into fists, set my heart to pounding so hard I could hear it inside my own ears. My body flooded with a surge of rage so pure and sharp that, for one exhilarating moment, it was indistinguishable from joy.

The crowd roiled again, chaotic now. I was pushed hard from all sides. I struggled to remain standing. I had the wild thought that I had caused this, that my rage had spilled over and seeped into the people around me.

But it had nothing to do with me. I had taken my attention away from the crowd for a second, and in that second the crowd-mind had reached a consensus I knew nothing about.

A crane had arrived.


It rumbled down Clinton Street. Its neck was yellow. Gradually the neck stretched itself up until it rose as high as our building’s roof. From the end of the yellow neck hung a brownish gray beak with a row of thick metal teeth, each longer than a man’s leg. The bottom half of the beak was a slab. It would catch whatever chunks the teeth tore out.

Large metal containers and lighting trees were maneuvered into place. It had been hard to gauge the day’s passage under such a gray sky, but I realized with a kind of dizzy surprise that soon it would be nightfall. There were sounds of machinery switching on and off. Then only the low-gear rattle of the diesel engine of the crane’s cab.

The beak opened its maw and poised over the roof, waiting.

The crowd roared and surged and broke in waves against the police barricades. But underneath the waves, in deeper places, were currents and crosscurrents. Related to the waves, yet unaffected by them.

Word was spreading. The judge was going to issue a temporary restraining order. The restraining order was on its way! Quick as light beams, from person to person, this message was communicated. Somebody shouted it to John Moriarty from the OEM. He took out a cellular phone and made a call. Nodded a few times in response to whatever the person on the other end said. Then he hung up and spoke into his walkie-talkie.

“Do it now,” he said.


The rattle of the diesel engine was drowned in a new sound—a loud, continuous hum. People screamed and sobbed. I could hear the wailing of children. For the first time, the police seemed nearly overwhelmed by the force of the crowd struggling to break through the tape and barricades.

“My cat!” Mr. Mandelbaum cried out. Tears coursed thickly down his wrinkled face. “She’s a living thing! She’s still in there! Please! She’s all I got!” The plastic bag he still held twisted convulsively in his hands as he fell, kneeling on the pavement. “She’s all I got!”

“Laura!” I yelled, bending toward Mr. Mandelbaum. “Laura, help me!” I looked up, and then I fell silent.

Laura wasn’t there.

“Laura?” I rose to my full height, stood on tiptoes. Laura and I were both tall. Even in a crowd like this I should be able to see the top of her head. So why couldn’t I? I left Mr. Mandelbaum with Hugo Verde, Maria Elena’s father. Watch him, I mouthed, pointing from my eye to Mr. Mandelbaum. Hugo nodded and leaned down to help Mr. Mandelbaum, still crying, shakily to his feet. I angled through the crowd, turning sideways to slip through crevices between bodies, using my hands to push people out of the way. I no longer felt separate from the crowd, from its terror and frenzy. I was a part of it. “Laura!” I called. “Laura, where are you? Laura, answer me!” I remembered when she was three, when she’d slipped away from me once at a block party. I’d found her that day, but I’d always had nightmares since then. Nightmares just like this. Laura was missing in a crowd, and I couldn’t find her. Anything could have happened to her. What if she’d fallen? What if the crowd was trampling her? “Laura!” The hard pain in my chest was now a black hole of panic. “I’m your mother! Answer me, dammit!”

The crane, fully powered up now, swung back to gather momentum and made its first test swing at the top of the building. The deafening crunch of metal against brick echoed over the heads of the crowd.

Then the head and shoulders of a girl pushed their way through an open window on the third floor. A fair-skinned girl with long brown hair. She wore a red cotton T-shirt. The sky was black now, the clouds had finally thinned, and the girl, the building, the metal containers waiting to swallow them on the ground below, all of them were spotlit by the blazing lights from the lighting trees. They looked superimposed against the black sky. Unreal, dreamlike. The girl waved her arms furiously. “Wait!” she shouted. “Wait, I’m in here!”

“LAURA!” I shoved my way through the crowd again, so hard this time that people fell back as I muscled past them. Dear God, what if I couldn’t get to the barricade in time? Already the crane was pulling back, preparing for another swing. Its jaws gaped, glinted in the artificial white light. “Stop them!” I screamed. I kept screaming. “Stop them! Somebody stop them!” But my screams were swallowed in the crowd. Finally I got to the barricade and clawed at the arm of the nearest cop. “My daughter is in that building!”

The cop looked at me and said something terse to the officer standing next to him, who rolled his eyes upon hearing it. The two of them motioned to a third officer to guard their post as they turned and ran into the building. The OEM official barked something into his walkie-talkie, and the crane was still.

Needle-thin raindrops darted silver through the glow of the lighting trees. The crowd, emboldened by the unexpected pause in the crane’s movements, flailed against the police barricades with renewed frenzy. My fingers curled, convulsing in rhythm to my anguish. How many more raindrops, how many more seconds, minutes, eternities until Laura was safely in my arms.

Finally, the cops reappeared in the doorway, wrangling a struggling Laura between them. They’d put her in handcuffs, the metal glinting cruelly against the soft flesh of her wrists. My heart clutched in horror. My child, my child.

When they reached the barricade, one of the officers unlocked the cuffs and pushed Laura toward me. I stumbled as the weight of her body fell awkwardly against mine, and my arms automatically rose to encircle her. My hands moved from her head to her shoulders, down her arms. Checking to see if anything was hurt, anything broken. “We could lock her up for disturbing the peace,” the cop told me. “Keep an eye on your kid, will ya?”

My jaw was so tight it was painful. “Keep your hands off my child.” I pushed the words through clenched teeth with enough force to send a line of spittle down my chin. The cop took one look at my face and backed off.

“Mom,” Laura was saying frantically. “Mom, I had her! I had Honey! Those cops scared her and she jumped out of my arms when they came for me. She ran under the bed. I know exactly where she is! Tell them! Tell them where she is so they can go back and get her!”

My arm drew up into the air, hand open. It sped down to land across Laura’s face in a resounding slap. The force of it rocked her head back and to one side. She staggered, instinctively clutching the shirt of a person standing behind her to keep from falling.

Laura’s already fair skin turned white. Chalk white save for the blood-red mark on her face, which took the shape of my hand. Her eyes widened. Raindrops gathered in her hair and spilled down the sides of her face.

“ARE YOU CRAZY?” I shrieked. Except I was the one who sounded crazy. And even as I was screaming, even as I struck her for the first and only time in her life, even then a part of my mind was thinking, Oh, my child, my girl. That you should live to see a day like this one. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled in her head. “A CAT?” I screeched. “You risked your life to save a cat? Who cares about the cat! TO HELL WITH THE STUPID CAT!”

I didn’t mean it. Of course I didn’t mean it. What I meant was, Yes, we love the cat, but you are more important than any cat. What I meant was, Please, if you love me, don’t do anything like this again. I couldn’t bear to go on if anything were to happen to you. But I didn’t say those things. Not in that moment. How could I? How could I speak calmly when I was gasping for air? When my legs shook beyond my control? When my heart was knocking so hard in my chest, it sent pains shooting through my body?

All I wanted was for Laura to leave. Every instinct in my body was screaming for her to go, to get her away, away, away. Away from the machine with its ravenous metal jaws that wanted to kill something. Had tried to kill her once already. Away from the crowd that also wanted to kill something now.

But Laura wasn’t going. She stood there with tears in her eyes, gaping at me as if she didn’t know me. Didn’t recognize me. The look of perfect trust her eyes had held only that morning was gone. And I knew, as I stood there, I knew I would never see it again. Something had changed between us. I knew it, I just didn’t understand why. How could my own daughter, the child of my own body, distrust me when I was the only one—the only person in this whole crowd—who was trying to protect her? I felt myself on the verge of hysteria. Clutching her arm, I dragged her through the crowd to where it thinned at the edges. I saw Hugo Verde helping his children and Mr. Mandelbaum into a Red Cross bus. Later I would learn that it had taken people from our building to a motel out in Queens, near LaGuardia Airport.

And then Noel was standing next to me. “I was worried when you didn’t show up today. You weren’t answering your phone. I came as soon as my shift ended.” He stared at me—my face twisted, panting heavily—and trailed off. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked uncertainly.

I put my hand against Laura’s shoulder and shoved her, hard, in his direction. “Take her,” I gritted. “Take her to your apartment. Take her anywhere. Just get her away from here.”

Maybe if Laura had cried, maybe then it would still have been okay. If she had cried, if her face had softened, of course I would have put my arms around her. I would have hugged her close and whispered, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, baby. I was scared, that’s all. I love you. I love you so much. And Laura would have hugged me back, she would have sobbed against my shoulder, and I would have comforted her as best I could.

But Laura didn’t cry. The tears in her eyes dried without falling. Her lips pressed into a thin line. Noel tried to put his arm around her shoulders, but she shook it off. “I’m fine,” she told him.

Noel threw me a look that pleaded for clemency. Give the kid a break, the look said. “Come on,” he told her softly. “Everything’s going to be fine. Your mom’s going to stay here and make sure everything is just fine.” Placing one hand lightly between her shoulder blades, he started to guide her away from the edges of the crowd.

I watched their backs recede. When they’d gotten half a block away, Laura broke away from Noel and whirled around to face me. “I hate you!” she screamed. Hurling the words at me with all the force she had.

Laura’s hands rose to cover her face, and she turned to bury both face and hands in Noel’s shoulder. Noel’s arm went around her. The two of them kept walking until they disappeared from sight.


It took thirteen hours for the crane to tear our building apart, piece by piece, to level it all the way down to the ground floor. For thirteen hours, chunk by chunk, the metal jaws of the crane ate into it and ripped it open. The building never did collapse. Those of us left to watch who had lived here and knew it well weren’t surprised. That building had stood for a hundred years.

You could see inside people’s apartments as the walls were torn off. The first massive chunk ripped by the crane sent a large Bible flying into the air. That was the Verdes’ apartment. Laura had told me once about that Bible. On the flyleaf they’d written the names of everyone in their family going back four generations.

Furniture looked exposed and naked under the lights, like people caught in the act of changing clothes. Rugs slid into cracks that opened in the floor, dragging couches and tables along with them until everything tilted and teetered at crazy angles, like in a fun-house. Kitchen cabinets were squeezed in the machine’s jaws until they vomited up breakfast cereals and silverware, wedding china and plastic bowls for children. Occasionally the white lights would catch a piece of jewelry or a shard of broken glass and beam out to blind me unexpectedly. A tiny blue sweater became snarled in one of the crane’s teeth and hung there for an absurdly long time, as if someone were clinging fiercely to the thing, desperate to stop it. Not that the crane cared or even paused. It had all night to complete its work.

I stood there and watched numbly. It was only when the crane had eaten down to the third floor, where Mr. Mandelbaum had lived, that I had to leave. I told myself I was hungry, that I hadn’t eaten all day. I went to a diner on First Avenue and sat there with a sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of me for two hours. I took one bite of the sandwich, but the bite marks my teeth left looked too much like the holes gouged out of our building by the crane. My head pounded and my face felt hot, and I bent to rest my cheek against the cool surface of the table.

“You okay, miss?”

A busboy had approached and he hovered, looking worried. “I’m fine.” My voice sounded rough, and I cleared my throat. “Is there a pay phone I could use?”

“Around back. Next to the bathrooms.” He gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “You sure you’re okay?”

My hair fell forward as I bent over my wallet, looking for a few bills to leave on the table and some change for the phone. When I lifted my eyes, the busboy was still looking at me with concern. I smiled weakly. “Just not as hungry as I thought I was.”

Someone had etched WORSHIP GOD into the metal of the pay phone’s base. It ate two of my quarters before a third produced the sound of a phone ringing on the other end of the line. Noel answered in the middle of the first ring. “How is she?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” he answered. “She passed out as soon as she changed out of her wet clothes. I was going to try to wake her and make her eat something, but I figured she needs the sleep more right now.”

“Thank you, Noel.” No matter how much I cleared my throat, I couldn’t seem to erase the gritty texture from it. I didn’t sound grateful, although I was. I didn’t even sound like me. “I’ll come by for her in the morning.”

“Where will you sleep tonight?”

I laughed—a hoarse, barking sound. “Nowhere,” I told him.

There was nothing I could do there, but I walked back to Stanton Street anyway. The crane was still at work, and it had reached the second floor. I was there to see its jaws come through the wall of Laura’s bedroom, devouring the dolls and board games that had come to live permanently in her closet as she’d gotten too old for them. The curtains Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn for her. The wallpaper we’d spent days choosing and hours hanging in that room that had once been papered in sheet music. The crane ate it all without pausing.

For years, I waited for Laura to ask me about that night. There were a lot of questions I waited for Laura to ask me, but she never did. I always thought, though, that if she were to ask about why I went back, why I stayed there through the night and into the next morning in the damp, crumpled clothing I’d worn all day, that it would be the one question for which I wouldn’t have an answer that would make sense to a practical girl like Laura. I couldn’t have explained to her why I stayed, why I had to see all of it—all of our life together—torn apart piece by piece. Why I felt like the destruction needed a witness. Not a witness in the sense that a lawyer uses the word. Not that, exactly.

I stayed for the same reason you would sit up all night by the bedside of a dying friend. Because it was something friendship required of you. And because nothing should die alone.





The same bus that had brought everybody to the motel out by the airport brought them back the next morning. The police had made a cursory attempt to retrieve some personal effects from the rubble of the demolished building. Waterlogged furniture and clothing, soggy pillows, torn photos, shattered picture frames, pots that held shredded plants, an antique silver hairbrush, yards of snarled tape from the insides of videocassettes, a guitar that had been snapped at the neck, a curling iron, a brush for a cat, endless cracked pieces of china, a chipped commemorative plate celebrating the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana. The things the cops had pulled sat in a wet mound where once our building had stood.

Noel brought Laura back while I climbed the mound, looking through it all, but I made him take her away again. I didn’t want her to see this, to see me picking through a pile of broken things on the street like a scavenger. There was only one thing I was looking for, anyway.

It took nearly five hours for me to find it, and it had started to rain again. My hands were torn and bloody by then, and I didn’t know if it was dust or tears that had clogged my lungs and made my eyes run. The rest of my former neighbors—those who had even bothered looking through the mound—had long since dispersed. I was the only one left by the time I found what I was looking for. Once I did, I went to find Laura.


In the end, those of us who lived there were compensated to the tune of three nights at the airport motel and $250 in gift certificates to buy clothing at Sears, courtesy of the Red Cross. That was all. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a home. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a life. Tenants with children who asked, But where will I take my children? Where can we go? were told they would have to check into one of the City’s homeless shelters and remain there for forty days before they could officially be considered homeless and receive government assistance. I don’t think anybody took them up on that offer. But I can’t know for sure. I never saw most of them again, except for Mr. Mandelbaum—and by the time I found him, I knew he was beyond taking help from anybody. When the building’s owners couldn’t afford to repay the City for the demolition cost, ownership of the property reverted to the City by default. They sold it to developers for millions. Condos would eventually be built there, starting at $1.2 million for a one-bedroom.

But construction didn’t begin immediately. It wouldn’t begin for a long, long time.

Laura and I stayed with Noel and his wife and two children for a few days, but it seemed impossible to take advantage of them by staying too long in their already crowded East Village apartment. We spent a few weeks rotating among friends’ couches and sleeping bags while I tried to keep my business running and waited for my insurance company to send me a check. Laura was nearly catatonic most of the time, falling into restless sleeps in which she tossed and turned and called out for Honey or Mr. Mandelbaum. And when she wasn’t silent or sleeping, she raged at me, demanding the return of some favorite blanket or cherished nightgown that she couldn’t try to sleep one more night without.

Sometimes I raged back at her, thinking she was doing this just to torment me, because she must have known how impossible it was for me to restore any of the things we’d lost, how much I would have given if I could have done so. Now I understand that she needed somebody to be angry at, so that anger would give her the strength to fight through and survive those difficult days. Mostly, though, she was exercising a child’s prerogative (for she was still a child, even if she wouldn’t be much longer) to demand that her mother do what mothers are supposed to do—make everything better.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make anything better. Our resentments grew as the days passed, although I could only guess at Laura’s. When we weren’t yelling at each other we didn’t speak, except when I told her every day how I’d been trying to get in touch with Anise, that Anise would be able to do something to help us, would do it any day now. Anise was on tour in Europe. In those days, most people didn’t have email addresses or cell phones. I left messages with her management company, who assured me they were doing everything they could to reach her at each tour stop, although it always seemed as if they’d just missed her before she’d checked out of one hotel and moved on to the next city. They probably thought I was a hanger-on and decided not to bother her.

It was five weeks before I heard from my insurance company, and they informed me that my renter’s policy didn’t cover lawful acts of emergency demolition by the City. By then Laura and I were staying in cheap hotels on the Lower East Side, and my credit was nearly exhausted. I arranged a “fire sale” at Ear Wax, selling everything that could be sold for whatever price I could get for it to the obsessive collectors who had always been my best customers. At the end of it, I turned the keys and the lease over to Noel. I still had hundreds of records left that were scratched or damaged, or that the collectors hadn’t been interested in, and perhaps two dozen that I couldn’t bring myself to part with. They weren’t worth much anyway (although I don’t think Laura, when she saw how many remained unsold, believed that), but now you could probably sell them for something simply because they’re old. All of them, along with my personal effects from the store, went into the same storage unit I’d first rented back when Laura was born. Another phase of my life had been boxed up and put away in a dark room, left there to molder and gather dust.


We were living in an SRO up in Harlem—all I could afford at that point, and more accessible by subway to the Midtown employment agencies I had applied with—when we finally heard from Anise in early August. I brought Laura with me to every typing test and every job interview—because where could I have left her?—and that, along with my lack of a “real” address, wasn’t helping my job hunt. Most of what Anise had to say about her management company—which, as I suspected, hadn’t made much of an effort to pass my messages along—was unrepeatable. She fired them a few days later, and her ousting them in the middle of an international tour over “creative differences” became a minor news item. The new management company she quickly signed with arranged for Laura and me to stay in one of their corporate apartments. Anise offered to do a lot more than that for us, but I refused to take it from her. I knew I’d never be able to pay her back.

Once I had an address, I was able to find a job as a typist at a small real estate law firm. The hourly rate was good, and I learned that if I was willing to work off-hours—late at night, for example—I could make up to double my hourly rate. I was used to keeping odd hours because of the record store, so that suited me fine.

Having a job meant I could finally fill out the reams of paperwork for a two-bedroom apartment in a Mitchell-Lama building in the East Twenties. Only thirteen blocks from the technical boundary of my old neighborhood, but still a world away. We were more or less settled by the time Laura’s school year started, although it was Christmas before I could afford to buy us any real furniture beyond the two mattresses I’d used up the last of my credit for when we moved in.

Laura was barely speaking to me those days. When I lost Laura’s voice, I lost the music in my head, too. Or it was more like the music in my head was my daughter’s voice. Laura was my music. It was like living with my parents all over again, except this time the only person to blame was me. I knew the only way I could make things right would be to find Mr. Mandelbaum, to salvage whatever there was left to salvage of our old lives.

I went back to our old neighborhood every night after work, every morning before I was due at the office. I had the photo of Laura and Mr. Mandelbaum that I’d kept in my wallet, and I showed it to people. All the hookers and squatters and street people I’d come to know over the years. Except that there weren’t as many of them anymore. How had I not noticed? I even went to the beat cops, the ones I knew from my store. Cops who hadn’t been on the other side of the barricades that day. In the end it was Povercide Bob from his usual haunt in front of Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A who—after subjecting me to a twenty-minute diatribe about how the government and the CIA were conspiring to kill the poor, and how what had happened to our building was proof—directed me to a seedy SRO on the Bowery.

I thought (foolishly, I now realize) that if I went to Mr. Mandelbaum with a plan for getting him out of that place, everything could still be all right. I told myself nothing had happened to any of us that couldn’t be fixed by time and the quiet order of a clean new home. I called City agencies on my lunch breaks, trying to find a place for him to go. I got shuffled around a lot. Eventually I was referred to the Jewish Home for the Aged, who would be able to find Mr. Mandelbaum an apartment only a hundred dollars a month more than the old place had been. Of course, a hundred dollars a month is a fortune to somebody on a fixed income. But I was making more money now, more than I’d made with the record store. My bigger paychecks, our cleaner, bigger apartment, hung in the air between Laura and me like unspoken accusations. I had to do something. I had to make it right.

The man at the front desk of the SRO pointed me to a room on the fifth floor. How did Mr. Mandelbaum manage to climb up and down five flights of stairs every day? His room was at the end of a drab corridor, next to a large plastic trash can beneath a naked lightbulb. The floors had probably been tiled at some point, although now they were no more than hard puddles of red, blue, and brown.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s room contained a single cot and an ancient wooden dresser. A plywood divider separated this room from the one next to it. Mr. Mandelbaum lay on the cot, still wearing the brown suit he’d worn to synagogue the day we’d lost our home. On top of the dresser, an ashtray overflowed. The room stank of smoke, unwashed clothing, and trash from the hallway. I had imagined Laura’s joy upon being reunited with Mr. Mandelbaum. It had been the only truly happy prospect I could imagine for any of us these past months. But I knew now as I looked around that I could never bring her to see him here.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said dully. He struggled a bit until he was in a half-sitting position, his eyes refusing to meet mine. “I wanted to give you something.” His hand fumbled along the top of the dresser pressed flush against his cot. “I bought this for Honey, but I didn’t have a chance to give it to her.” He handed me a crumpled plastic bag. “Someone should have it.”

I accepted the bag and sat down on the bed next to him, trying to think how to begin. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I finally said. I hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but somehow it did. It was the wrong way to begin.

“I don’t.” He seemed confused. “Ida made me quit thirty years ago. She’d kill me if she thought I was smoking again.”

I let it go. “We should talk about what you’re going to do now.” I tried to sound efficient and cheerful. Everything is fine, my voice insisted. It’s all just a question of logistics. “I’ve found a place for you to live through the Jewish Home for the Aged. It’ll cost a bit more than what you were paying, but I have a good job now. Laura and I can help with the rent. We want to.”

He continued to look at the wall. “I lost one home already,” he said. “I’m not starting over in a new neighborhood. Not at my age.”

“But you can’t stay here in this place.”

“What difference does it make where I die?”

“Mr. Mandelbaum …” I took his hand in mine. “Max,” I said gently. “There are still people who love you and need you. I do. Laura does, too. To her you’re like …” Like the father she should have had, I thought. “Like family.”

“Every time Laura looks at me, she’ll think of that day,” Mr. Mandelbaum said. “Better she shouldn’t remember. She’s still young enough to forget.”

Something sharp darted through my chest. If only she could! “You’re wrong. Laura needs you more than ever now. You need each other. Doesn’t she matter to you at all?” My voice became more urgent. “The world is the same place it was three months ago. There are still things in it worth living for.”

Finally, he turned to face me. “Oh, Sarah.” There were tears in his eyes, and a look of compassion. As if in this moment it were I and not he who needed understanding. “You know I haven’t wanted to live since Ida died.”

My throat closed in a hard, painful lump. There was nothing I could say.

The hand I held squeezed faintly against mine. I felt how it trembled, cold and papery and crisscrossed with thick veins. The skin slid loosely over the bones of his knuckles, as if there were nothing to connect them.

“As long as I had Honey and my memories, well …” He withdrew his hand to pass it over his eyes. “You and Laura will be fine without me,” he said. “When they buried my cat and everything that reminded me of my wife, they buried me, too.” He turned his face to the wall again. “It’s already like I never existed.”


Laura had always been a good student. But now all she did was study. She had this grim, determined air about her, like a prisoner trying to claw her way through solid earth. Although maybe that’s not as true as I think it is. Maybe Laura gossiped with friends and dated boys and thought about some of the other things pretty teenage girls are supposed to think about. It’s impossible for me to know. I worked a lot of late nights, earning as much as I could so I would have something to put away for Laura’s college. We didn’t see much of each other. We were like roommates, I remember telling Anise once, years later. Like roommates, rather than family. Two people who happened to share a living space because it was convenient and made financial sense for them to do so.

In a way, it was like living with my parents all over again. Our home was silent—no conversations, no music. I knew Laura resented my music, I knew she blamed me for loving it so much that I’d raised her the way I had. She screamed it at me once. It was a month after I’d gone to see Mr. Mandelbaum at the SRO, when I had to tell Laura that he’d died. I had gone to visit him every day after I’d found him, bringing food and soap and whatever comfort I could. I had succeeded so far as getting him to change into the clean clothes that I’d brought. But I couldn’t persuade him to leave that place altogether.

It wasn’t that Laura blamed me for his death exactly, but that she blamed me for everything—for our having lived in that building in that neighborhood in the first place. “Because of your music!” she’d yelled. “Because your music was more important to you than I was. You could have gotten a job, you could have asked your mother for help, you could have done anything when I was born that would have gotten me out of that place. But you didn’t!”

And what could I say? I had given up music for her. I’d stopped trying to be a DJ or a performer and went into the business side of it. It was only now, now when everything had ended, that I could see my mistakes. I wanted to say, I was only nineteen! Only four years older than you are now! Music was the only thing I knew anything about back then. I wanted to say, I didn’t want to be one of those single mothers who spends all day in an office and never sees her children. I wanted to spend every second I could with you. I didn’t just want us to live, I wanted us to have a life. I did the best I could, the very best I could at the time …

I wanted to say those things, but I couldn’t. The hardest thing in the world is to admit obvious past mistakes. Not because the admission of guilt is hard (I would have confessed to, would have apologized for, anything at all to win back Laura’s love). But because, in light of how stupid you turned out to have been, your defenses end up sounding like nothing more than excuses. Lame excuses, at that.

For years I thought I resented Laura for the guilt she made me carry. (As if I wasn’t carrying enough already.) Guilt for things that were beyond my control, for decisions I’d made so long ago (and for such good reasons!) that it didn’t seem fair to punish me for them now. For the first time in my life, I craved the silence I’d grown up with. I came to understand my mother better, how a woman could decide that she didn’t want to talk to her own child. There were times when I’d catch a look on Laura’s face, as if she were about to say something of more substance than Going to the library. I’ll be back later. Perhaps if I’d encouraged her … but I don’t know. I never did encourage her. I didn’t want to hear her repeat the accusations I made against myself daily. Sometimes I thought there was nothing left inside me but tears, and that if Laura said the wrong thing I’d put my head down and cry all those tears out until there was nothing left of me at all.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Laura needed to be angry at someone. Who could she be angry at if not at me? The City? The developers greedy for more land they could overprice? Those were anonymous entities, nothing more than a thousand worst-case scenarios Laura blamed me for not having thought enough about. And then one day the anger and silence become a habit. One day it’s been so long since you’ve talked to someone that it’s impossible to say the things you should have said years ago.

Maybe that’s why I blather so relentlessly at Laura when she comes to visit me now. Too late I realized how insidious silence is. I think sometimes that maybe—by sheer accident—I’ll find the one right thing to say, the one thing that will make Laura look at me again the way she used to.


After Laura graduated from college and moved away, she was no longer my legal dependent, and I had to move out of the Mitchell-Lama building. Not that it mattered much to me. That apartment had never felt like a real home, anyway.

I moved back to the Lower East Side. I had to go all the way out to Avenue B—once an unthinkable place to live, certainly for a woman alone—to find an apartment I could afford. It wasn’t exactly the same when I moved back (you can never go home again, as they say)—not even remotely the same, really. But it was the only place where I could find traces of what had been, and what might have been if not for one rainy day and a few fallen bricks.

I still couldn’t bring myself to listen to my music. But I could no longer stand the silence, either. I started watching a lot of TV. And I went out for long, roaming walks. I felt like a ghost haunting the neighborhood. It was odd to see how much things had changed in eight years. The building where Anise and I used to live was now a luxury high-rise where a one-bedroom apartment started at four thousand dollars a month for only five hundred square feet. A tall silver box divided into dozens of smaller silver boxes, none with any more personality than the other. Lofts the size of the one Anise and I shared now sold for three million dollars, which struck me as something beyond madness. The SRO where Mr. Mandelbaum died was now a high-end boutique hotel. Its lobby bar was thronged at night with young girls who were beautiful and looked very expensive.

But there are still traces of the place I once knew. The DIE YUPPIE SCUM! graffiti on the occasional brick wall. Chico’s Loisaida mural on Avenue C. Walking through these streets I used to know so well is like running into a girl you once knew at your twentieth high school reunion, some girl who’s had a lot of plastic surgery. She looks older and yet she also looks younger. Like herself and also like a different person from the one you remember.


One day I found myself walking down Stanton Street, where Laura and I used to live. It was raining, and maybe that was what drew my feet in that direction. Where our building had been was now a construction site littered with cement blocks, stacks of lumber and steel beams, and a silent crane. Gaily striped banners proclaimed that luxury lofts were being erected.

I stood there in the rain and looked at it for a while, the way I’d stood in the rain that night, watching our old building come down. I couldn’t remember the name of Mr. Mandelbaum’s cat anymore, that cat Laura had loved so much she’d been willing to risk her life for her. I tell myself all the time that I’m too young to be so forgetful, even though I have a grown daughter. I’m not even fifty yet. But my memory has become full of holes.

This day wasn’t rainy as that other day had been. After one intense, tropical burst, the clouds cleared and the sun was beating down again. Just as I was preparing to leave, I saw something move near one of the cement blocks scattered on the ground.

It was a kitten. A tiny little thing. Probably no more than a few weeks old, cowering behind something solid. The creature looked soaked through. She was trying hard to remain unseen, and for a second I did consider leaving her to her privacy. And yet—surely this was some kind of miracle, wasn’t it? That I should find a kitten—one who looked so much like how I remembered the Mandelbaums’ cat—on this spot, in this place? She had the same green eyes, the same black tiger stripes and little white socks on her paws. Surely I was being offered a second chance, to save now what I hadn’t been able to save for Laura all those years ago.

And didn’t I also need saving? Didn’t I also need someone to love? It was meant to be, a voice in my head whispered.

I crouched down, holding out my hand. “Hey, kitty,” I whispered. “Are you lost?” The kitten shrank back, afraid. Poor thing! I thought, and something in my chest that had been hard and frozen for years began to loosen. I reached out to her again, and she seemed to draw herself inward until she was a tight ball of watchful fluff, just beyond the reach of my fingers. It was probably prudent, I told myself, for such a young kitten to be wary of a strange human. As this thought crossed my mind, I remembered Anise’s cats, all named for Beatles songs, and I smiled. “Prudence?” I said. “Is that your name?”

The kitten looked at me with enormous, fearful emerald eyes. And then, without thinking about it, I began to sing. For the first time in fourteen years, I found my voice. “Dear Prudence,” I sang softly. “Won’t you come out to play?”

At first the kitten looked bewildered. I wasn’t surprised. My voice sounded scratchy, and it was deeper than it used to be. I didn’t even sound like me anymore. But as I sang, my voice gained strength and I started to recognize it again. “The sun is up, the sky is blue … it’s beautiful, and so are you …”

Timidly, cautiously, the kitten crept out from the shadow of the cinder block. She sniffed my fingers, inching forward, and allowed me to lift her. She was soaking wet, and I bundled her under my jacket, against the warmth of my chest. She pressed one paw, tentatively, softly, to my cheek. I noted what looked like a funny little extra toe.

“Let’s go home, Prudence,” I whispered. The kitten responded with a series of cheeping mews, as if she were trying to sing back to me.


One day Laura came to my apartment with the news that she was engaged. I was happy for her, of course I was happy for her, and yet I also thought, My only daughter is engaged to a man I’ve never even met. Laura tells me so little about her life. But there was a happiness, a sweetness that seemed to exist despite itself in her blue, blue eyes, so much like her father’s. I know my daughter well enough to know when she’s happy. And when she invited me to have lunch with her and her fiancé and I met him for the first time, I could see why.

I actually ran into Josh once after that, completely unexpectedly. It was at night, maybe around eleven o’clock or so, during one of my endless walks. One small club I passed had live music playing, and, impulsively, I drifted inside. It was a three-piece acoustic band, performing a cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.”

There are moments when a song hits you in a certain way. You know it’s soupy and self-indulgent, but even knowing that doesn’t stop the tears from rising. And suddenly I was so tired, a bone-deep exhaustion I’d been feeling more and more lately. I sat down at the bar, needing a moment to pull myself together.

And then, out of nowhere, Josh was beside me. “What a surprise!” he exclaimed, kissing me on the cheek. “I’m here with some of the writers from my magazine, checking out this band. Come over and I’ll introduce you. I’m sure the three of you could talk music for hours.”

Josh was only nine or ten years younger than I was. Still, he looked like he belonged in this place. Looking around at all the young faces, I was suddenly aware of my age, how far-too-old I was for Lower East Side dives where young artists played in the hope of being discovered. One day you look around and realize everyone in New York is younger than you are. “Oh,” I said to Josh. “That’s okay. I was just going to have a quick drink and head home.”

“I’ll have a drink with you, then.” He sat on the bar stool next to mine and ordered a Maker’s Mark rocks from the bartender.

“How’s your family?” I asked, at a loss for anything else to say. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”

“They’re good,” he said. “My parents still live out in Parsipanny in the house I grew up in. My dad’s getting ready to retire soon. My sister has a house near them, but she’s looking for a place in the City, closer to where she works.” His face hardened subtly. “She and her husband split up and he … doesn’t do a lot for their kids. She’s basically raising them on her own.” Then he sighed. “Oh well. It’ll probably make her and the kids closer with each other as they grow up.”

“Yes,” I said faintly. “It happens that way, sometimes.”

There was a mirror behind the bar. The Josh sitting next to me on the bar stool was looking into it. But the Josh reflected in the mirror was looking at me. I turned my eyes down and twirled the straw in my drink a few times.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you ever hear how Laura and I met?”

“No.” I tried to smile. Tried not to think of all the little ways I’d long ago stopped being a part of Laura’s inner life. “I don’t think I have.”

“She came to my office one day. Her firm represents my company and they had a meeting of some kind. Anyway, I was on my way to see somebody when I saw this beautiful woman near the elevator. She has those eyes, you know? And she was struggling with these two enormous briefcases.” He laughed. “I mean, they looked heavy. Heavier than her, maybe. So, naturally, I went over to help, but she didn’t want me to. She didn’t just say, No, that’s okay, I can manage. She really didn’t want me to carry those briefcases for her. I could tell she was embarrassed. She cared about managing those two heavy briefcases on her own.

“For days, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why would somebody care so much about such a simple thing? It wasn’t stubbornness, I could tell that, but it was something. I thought about it all the time, trying to figure it out. Finally, I called her office and asked her out.” He paused, took a sip of his drink.

“Later she told me it was her first client meeting. Apparently, it’s a customary thing for an associate to carry a partner’s briefcases when they go to meetings. I said to her, But that guy you were with was all the way back in the conference room. It’s not like he would have seen me helping you. And she kept saying, But an associate is supposed to carry the briefcases. That’s part of the job. It’s what you’re supposed to do. And I thought that I’d probably never met anybody who cared so much about doing the right thing, doing what you’re supposed to do, all the way down to the little things.

“I couldn’t have known it that first time I saw her. But I did know it somehow, you know? How sometimes you look at someone’s face, and you don’t know what exactly it is you’re seeing, but you know it’s important. Laura thinks she has such a poker face.” He laughed again. “I know how hard she works to convince herself she’s in control of things all the time. But you can tell when she really cares about something. It’s written all over her face.” His eyes in the mirror found mine. “I saw it when she looked at you at lunch,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe you think the two of you aren’t as close as you’d like to be. Laura doesn’t talk about it much. I have an older sister. I know it can be rough between mothers and daughters sometimes. My sister loves my mother, and the two of them talk all the time. But I never see in her face what I saw in Laura’s when she looked at you.”

I had to turn my head aside and clear my throat, embarrassed for Josh to see me cry. He was silent as I pulled a tissue from my purse and blew my nose. Then in the mirror, his eyes smiled at mine.

“Let’s have one more drink,” he said. “I want to toast my mother-in-law this time.”


Last week I had chest pains so bad I had to go to the emergency room. After a battery of tests the doctors came back with their conclusions: angina. Also high blood pressure. Who knew? They say it’s unusual for a woman my age, but my father’s dying prematurely of a heart attack puts me at higher risk. Sometimes these things happen. There are all kinds of things I have to do now to manage my condition. They tell me there’s no reason why, with diet and exercise and medical care, I shouldn’t live out a normal life span.

That conversation I had with Josh keeps coming back to me. And I know, somehow, that the doctors are wrong. I don’t have much time left. I don’t mean that I feel sick. I feel fine most days. And yet, as Josh said, sometimes you know a thing when you see it.


Last night I went into my closet and went through some of the things I’d taken out of storage after Prudence had given my music back to me. I pulled out the old Love Saves the Day bag where I’d put a bunch of old newspapers and magazines and, all the way at the very bottom, the crushed metal box I’d managed to find in the wreckage of our old building. I had to struggle to open it. Old, broken things don’t like giving up their secrets too easily. Hidden in the clutter of that little box was the red collar Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Honey on the morning of the day when our building came down. I put the collar around Prudence’s neck and told her, “Tomorrow we’ll get some tags for you that say PRUDENCE. And maybe we’ll have Sheila downstairs take a picture of the two of us together. Would you like that, little girl?” I buried my fingers in the ruff of her neck, and Prudence leaned her head against my hand and purred.

I know now what Laura knew already that day when she risked her life for Honey’s—that love is love, whether it goes on two legs or four. Someday Prudence will love Laura. Prudence will love her on those days when it seems as if nobody else does. She’ll make Laura laugh when nobody else can even make her smile. Prudence will carry my love for Laura into her new home and her new life. She’ll carry my memories back to Laura, too—memories of fourteen years of love and music and a life that was too good to be destroyed altogether, even by that one terrible day. She’ll help Laura find her way back into those memories—memories of all of us, of Honey and the Mandelbaums, who loved her also, and of days in a dusty downtown record store when nothing in the world mattered except a mother and daughter who were always happiest when they were together. She’ll take with her a love that never died, even if it did change forms.

I was meant to find Prudence that day. I know that now, and it seems as if I’ve known it always.

I’ve always known I was keeping her for Laura.