Bronx Town

Every day, two boys from my class, the rough redheaded twins Billy and Bobby, chase me down Valentine Avenue all the way to P. S. 46. I don't know why, don't know why I run, don't know what they will do if they catch me. It is just what we do.

Mama, I say, I'm scared to walk alone to school. I don't tell her about Billy and Bobby. She says, don't be a baby, you're ten years old, I'll watch you from the window. But she can't see beyond the corner no matter how she stretches her neck and so I am on my own. It is six blocks to school.

We live in the Bronx, in a small neighborhood bounded by Fordham Road to the south, Bedford Park to the north, the zoo to the east and Jerome Avenue and the El to the west. I know the streets like I am a farm girl and they are the back forty acres. Weekends and after school my friends and I play on the sidewalks in front of our apartment buildings,skip rope, bounce pink rubber balls for jacks, chalk potsy squares on cement and hop. We squander our allowances on egg creams at the corner candy store. I buy one comic book each week. Little Lulu is my favorite, then Archie.

I go on errands with my mother. She pulls a wire shopping cart behind her for groceries. We stop at the kosher butcher, the fruit and vegetable stand, the Chinese laundry, the drug store. Every side street is full of papas and mamas and Polish supers drinking schnapps in the courtyards.

The butcher saves the hen's unborn eggs for my mother because he has a crush on her. She is tall and blonde and very beautiful. She is a standout among the woman on the block. She puts the eggs, just tiny yolks at that stage, in chicken soup, a Yiddisher delicacy.

In junior high school, my friends and I use our bus passes to shuttle from one end of the territory to another. We sunbathe on the roof of my building, gaze at faraway Manhattan like it was Camelot, dirty, spiky Camelot. In between the lines of drying clothes we spread our bath towels out, grease ourselves with baby oil, tune the radio to WINS. Tiny dots of soot from the chimney fly like mosquitos through the air and speckle my arms and legs.

I splay out in the sun, the roof tar bubbles in the heat, and it is really heaven, this perfume of ash and asphalt high about the streets, high about the rumbling of cars and subways and the shrill of sirens.