The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen
dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August.
Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the
city doesn’t take care of it.
Real paper money, at this time of year especially, is very cheering. I
head up to Sam Goody’s to see what records he’s got on sale and what
characters are buying them. Maybe I’ll buy something, maybe not, but as
long as I’ve got money in my pocket, I don’t feel like the guy is glaring
at me for taking up floor space.
Along the way I walk through the library, the big one at Forty-second
Street. You go in by the lions on Fifth Avenue, and there’s all kinds of
pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the
back, where you can take out books. It’s nice and cool, and nobody glares
at you unless you either make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take
books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which
is handy.
Sam Goody’s is air-conditioned, so it’s cool too. There are always several
things playing on different machines you can listen to. Almost the most
fun is watching the people: little, fat, bald guys buying long-haired
classical music, and thin, shaggy beatniks listening to the jazz.
I go to check if there are any bargains in the Kingston or Belafonte
division. There’s a girl standing there reading the backs of records, but
I don’t really catch a look at more than her shoes—little red flats they
are. After a bit she reaches for a record over my head and says, “Excuse
me.”
“Sure.” Then we catch each other’s eye and both say, “Oh. Gee, hello.”
Well, we’re both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at
Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we’re both
a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn’t one of the two giggly ones.
It’s the third, the one that liked Cat.
We’ve both forgotten each other’s names, so we begin over with that. I ask
her what she’s been doing, and she’s been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks,
and then she earned some money baby-sitting. So she came to think about
records, like me. I tell her I’ve been at Coney once this summer, and I
looked around for her, which is true, because I did.
“It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.
“Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here
by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was
going to Coney alone.”
Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art
exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows
I’m not going to get lost.”
I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother that didn’t worry about you
all the time.”
“Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You should have heard her when I said I
liked _Gone With the Wind_ and I didn’t like _Anna Karenina_. I pretty
nearly got disowned.”
“What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face,
and we both laugh.
I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I
eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about
to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”
Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be
nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and
all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”
This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary
picks up the record of _West Side Story_ and says, “Gee, I’d like to see
that. Did you?”