FRANKIE Frangione, standing on the sidewalk, screams up to his ma, up on the second floor in the building across the street from us.

My ma is watching him from the bedroom window. “Scream lazy walk,” she says to me. In sign language, cause she’s a deaf-mute. Translated means Frankie is screaming up to his ma since he’s too lazy to walk upstairs. All the kids scream up to their ma on account of this block having only walk-ups. The elevator buildings are on the next block up Arden Street, across from the church.

We live on the fourth floor....

“CONEY Island is a dump,” my sister said when I asked her how come she wasn’t going with us.

“It isn’t either,” I said, not because I was born there. I love how different the ocean is from where we live now, near the Hudson River in the Inwood section of Manhattan.

“You’ve never even seen Far Rockaway,” Melva said, “where the sand is all white. Ask Sidney if you don’t believe me.”

Of course, my brother wasn’t home. He was at work. Anyway, I tried to imagine a beach full of something that looked like salt but I couldn’t....

“FULL d-u-s-t,” my mother says, when I tell her I’m going to Glory’s to play. She waves her hands in the air like dust is blowing around. “No good first f-l-o-o-r,” she tells me, meaning that’s how come it’s so dusty down there. She also blames Dot, Glory’s mother. “Not enough clean,” she says about her. I should never of told her about Dot putting the glasses of Jell-O on their windowsill, instead of in the frigidaire.

I go downstairs and ring their doorbell. There are names from all of Dot’s three husbands printed real nice under the peephole. Kamahele...

MY mother believes in useful gifts, but when I saw the marionette hanging in Schiffman’s Toys on Dyckman Street, I knew what I wanted for Chanukah. She was dangling in the middle of the window, wearing a pink net tutu over a pink satin slip. Her strings were fixed so that she was doing an arabesque, her arms reaching out in front and one leg stuck out in the air behind her, a little crooked. Her hair looked soft, like orangey red cotton, pulled back into a bun that dancers wear. Right off I named her Mitzi, like the girl...

THE thing about Glory and Roy Rogers was that they weren’t too chicken to play on the roof.

I got the idea when we were at the bottom of the stoop playing Johnny-May-We-Cross-Your-River. I was Johnny and the kids were trying to cross over. “Johnny, may we cross your river?” they yelled out.

Usually I gave them colors. They could cross if they were wearing the color I said, but when I saw a balloon disappear over the top of my building, I said, “Yes you may, if you’re willing to come up to the roof.”

Right away my friend...

“SHE was homely as sin,” my big sister told me. “So plain if you passed her in the street you’d never dream she was a Hollywood star.”

“How come?” I asked, not sure whether to believe her about Jennifer Jones. In the Photoplay magazine we had open in front of us on the kitchen table, Jennifer Jones looked pretty gorgeous to me. My sister, though, had gotten to see her close up, right in our neighborhood that afternoon, because they were making a movie at the top of Fort Tryon Park.

She slid the magazine over closer to me. “Look...

THE siren sounded just as my mother and I jammed together in the window, leaning out over the fire escape, our elbows on the sill. Melva had the next window over to herself. Across the street, apartment windows got black as lights went off, one after the other. Within minutes the lampposts were out. It was completely dark, except for tiny flares of matches lighting cigarettes or the glowing embers of those already lit, from the people who hung out across the street from us.

Down the block a shrill whistle blew. “HEY! YOU! Turn that light out!” boomed my...

MY whole spring vacation from P.S. 152 my mother spent getting ready for Passover. She redid the foyer closets, vacuuming the back corners and putting in a fresh bunch of mothballs. She laid down new oilcloth on the kitchen shelves and washed the whole inside of the frigidaire. Roaches came out half dead from behind the stove where she had put a lot of roach powder.

One morning, on account of the garbage truck, I woke up early and found my mother kneeling on the kitchen floor with my father standing over her, yelling the way he does, which was...

BEFORE Labor Day, Melva asked my father for some money to buy some clothes for school. I was sitting with the cards on the floor in the living room, playing war with myself, and I saw her follow him into the bedroom to ask. I didn’t expect him to reach into his pocket and give her the money right away, but he did. So what did Melva do? She told him ten dollars wasn’t enough.

“Think me rich?” my father signed.

“You cheapskate,” she signed right back, maybe because she couldn’t help herself.

In two seconds flat he had her...

THE day before my Cousin Rona’s wedding, my Aunt Sadie called from New Jersey. “Tell Mother she shouldn’t bring anything,” she said.

My mother was by the window sewing. I had to stomp my feet a few times before she felt the vibrations and looked up.

“S-a-d-i-e telephone,” I told her in sign language.

My mother got up all excited and knocked the picture frame off the table. “Stupid, hurry,” she signed. Of course, she couldn’t hear her slippers crunching the glass.

She stood next to me by the phone the whole time I was interpreting back and forth.

“What...

USING the full length of their arms, the two women sitting on the bench closest to the entrance of Chasen Center wave at the silver-haired man shuffling back and forth past them. Lost in thought, he is looking down at the sidewalk and does not see them. Discouraged, Trudy Berkowitz drops her arm to her lap, smiles tolerantly while Marian Lowe continues to wave, making grunting sounds which no one except the blind lady sitting on the next bench over can hear. The others taking their morning air just now in front of the brown brick building for the disabled...