Love Saves the Day

Even back when the Lower East Side got really bad, when crack invaded in the mid-’80s and you couldn’t walk farther east than Avenue A unarmed, even then our stretch of 9th Street was a nice block. Tree-lined and leafy. In the spring, Mu Shu—the cat who lived among the interconnected basements and storefronts of our block, so named because of her passion for Chinese takeout—would leave dandelions at the entrance to the store. Summers she took languorous naps on the sidewalk beneath dappled shade. “Mu Shu’s Hamptons,” we used to call that patch of sidewalk. Working-class Ukrainian families lived in rent-controlled apartments above the storefronts. Old Ukrainian women would gather on front stoops to gossip at dusk.

In the storefronts themselves, the kids who’d lived there in groups during the ’70s, converting them into commune-style apartments, had either moved out or stayed behind to open shops of their own. Small affairs, like mine. A store where one person made and sold leather handicrafts. A clothing shop owned by a jazz musician. When the weather was nice, children played together outside. Laura and her friend Maria Elena often came to play in front of my store with the neighborhood kids, where I could have them within earshot.

Drug dealers and dime-store thugs proliferated on the corners of blocks all around us, but never on our block. Never on our corner. Never where my daughter and her friends played with bottle caps they found in the street while a pretty little calico cat looked on, occasionally snatching one up in her mouth and trotting down the street proudly with it, as if it were a trophy.

8

Prudence

WHEN SARAH WAS YOUNG AND THE WORLD WAS DIFFERENT from what it is today, it could be fun to have no money. That’s what she and Anise say, anyway. Whenever they talk about all the Good Times they used to have, one of them always ends up saying, We were so young then! The world was a different place.

If you were poor when they were so young, you got to do things like live with your best friend in a huge loft that cost practically nothing. (Peanuts! Sarah says.) It would be so big that there’d be plenty of room to set up your DJ table or for your roommate’s band to rehearse, with enough space left over to put two mattresses on the floor where you and your roommate would stay up all night talking and laughing and playing with her three cats. You could go to parties or to a type of place called a “club,” where friends of yours would play records and musical instruments for other humans to dance to. If you knew the humans who worked there, they would let you eat and drink things for free.

Besides your best friend, you would know other people who did interesting things, like being actors or artists or writers, and all of you together would have fun lying on the grass at outside parks and eating hot dogs (which aren’t really made from dogs). Hot dogs cost practically no money at all. Sometimes you and your roommate would save up all your money for one big meal at a restaurant called Dojo on St. Marks Place, where you would get “the works.” Or you might go to a place called Ice Cream Connection, where they made their own ice cream from honey and gave their flavors names like Panama Red (which is just regular cherry) or Acapulco Gold (which is peach).

I miss ice cream. Sarah stopped bringing it home, and Laura and Josh never seem to have any. Sometimes I wish we were poor, so I could get to have ice cream again.

But we aren’t poor, or even broke. At least, that’s what Josh is always saying. Like the other day when Laura came home from work with a bag of peaches she bought at the grocery store. Josh asked why she’d bought peaches instead of plums, because she knows they both like plums better. And Laura said, They had peaches on sale. He kept saying she should have gotten plums and she kept saying that the peaches were on sale, until Josh said it wasn’t like they were too poor to have plums instead of peaches if that’s what they wanted. Laura looked upset and confused, like she’d thought she was doing a nice thing by bringing the peaches home and couldn’t understand why Josh was making such a big deal about it. Finally, she told Josh there was a fruit stand right down the street, and if he cared so much about peaches and plums he had plenty of free time during the day to go out and buy whatever he wanted.