He reaches in his pocket and fishes out a buck, a dime, and a quarter. We
study them. Figure coffees for a dime each, and the total check ought to
be $1.95. We’ve got $2.35 between us. We can still squeak through with bus
fare if we only leave the waiter a dime, which is pretty cheap.
At that moment he comes back and refills our coffee cups and asks what we
will have for dessert.
“Uh, nothing, nothing at all,” I say.
“Couldn’t eat another thing,” says Ben.
So the waiter brings the check and along with it a plate of homemade
cookies. He says, “My wife make. On the house.”
We both thank him, and I look at Ben and he looks at me. I put down my
dollar and he puts down a dollar and a quarter.
“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. Come again,” says the waiter.
We walk into the street, and Ben spins the lone remaining dime in the sun.
I say, “Heads or tails?”
“Huh? Heads.”
It comes up heads, so Ben keeps his own dime. He says, “We could have hung
onto enough for _one_ bus fare, but that’s no use.”
“No use at all. ’Specially if it was yours.”
“Are we still heading for Fulton Street?”
“Sure. We got to get fish for Cat.”
“It better be for free.”
We walk, threading across Manhattan and downtown. I guess it’s thirty or
forty blocks, but after a good lunch it doesn’t seem too far.
You can smell the fish market when you’re still quite a ways off. It runs
for a half a dozen blocks alongside the East River, with long rows of
sheds divided into stores for the different wholesalers. Around on the
side streets there are bars and fish restaurants. It’s too bad we don’t
have Cat with us because he’d love sniffing at all the fish heads and guts
and stuff on the street. Fish market business is done mostly in the
morning, I guess, and now men are hosing down the streets and sweeping
fish garbage up into piles. I get a guy to give me a bag and select a
couple of the choicer—and cleaner—looking bits. I get a nice red snapper
head and a small whole fish, looks like a mackerel. Ben acts as if fish
guts make him sick, and as soon as I’ve got a couple he starts saying
“Come on, come on, let’s go.”
I realize when we’re leaving that I don’t even notice the fish smell
anymore. You just get used to it. We walk uptown, quite a hike, along East
Broadway and across Grand and Delancey. There’s all kinds of intriguing
smells wafting around here: hot breads and pickles and fish cooking. This
is a real Jewish neighborhood, and you can sure tell it’s a holiday from
the smell of all the dinners cooking. And lots of people are out in their
best clothes gabbing together. Some of the men wear black skullcaps, and
some of them have big black felt hats and long white beards. We go past a
crowd gathering outside a movie house.
“They’re not going to the movies,” Ben says. “On holidays sometimes they
rent a movie theater for services. It must be getting near time. Come on,
I got to hurry.”
We trot along the next twenty blocks or so, up First Avenue and to Peter
Cooper.
“So long,” Ben says. “I’ll come by Wednesday on the way to school.”
He goes off spinning his dime, and too late I think to myself that we
could have had a candy bar.
12
[Illustration: Dave holding up lizard for Ben by pond in woods.]