The Girls with No Names by Serena Burdick

Author:Serena Burdick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2019-10-18T18:20:55+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Mable

When my mother and I arrived in New York City at Pennsylvania Station, it was like being hit by a tornado—men chugging past like they were their own small locomotives, shiny and fast in black suits and derby hats, train wheels screeching while voices rose and fell in one big shouting match. I stood stunned as air from the train blew up my skirt and I breathed the strong scent of grease and tar and sweat.

Mama hooked her arm in mine, told me to close my mouth and hurry up. She’d grown up in this and had no problem yanking me out into the bright street and up onto a trolley where I held on for dear life, the ground whipping past. Heat blew into my face and I closed my eyes and tried not to throw up, or fall off.

By the time we got off on Mulberry Street, the city grit was crusted on my skin. I read every sign we passed, twisting my head so as not to miss anything: Frank Lava Gunsmith, Ravioli & Noodle Factory, Bicycles, Café Bella Napoli. I’d never seen so much stuff in one place: cartloads of vegetables and fruit, baskets of bread and dangling sausages, people and carriages moving every which way and never colliding, as if everyone understood the same unspoken rule about space that I couldn’t comprehend. My elbows bumped into every person I passed as Mama apologized for me.

Coming to a halt, she shielded her eyes with one hand and squinted up at a drab, dark brick building. “This is it.” She pulled me down a narrow passage squeezed between the buildings, like a chute for pigs, that dropped us out into a large courtyard. The tenements in New York City were unlike anything I’d known. Clapboard siding rose up on all sides filled with windows and balconies, lines of strung laundry dangling between them. A group of grimy, barefoot boys screamed and kicked a ball that went smashing into the wall and bounced back at them. A busty woman with a scarf on her head leaned over a balcony shouting to a woman who stuck her torso out a window and shouted right back. A weary-eyed man sat on a barrel smoking a cigarette, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Another leaned against a brick wall fanning himself with his hat.

The woman on the balcony paused her shouting as Mama called up to her, “Pardon me, I’m looking for Marie Casciloi?”

The woman pointed to an open door near a stairway that rose up on the outside of the building. Why anyone would build a stairway on the outside, I couldn’t figure.

“Third floor,” the woman said, and went back to screaming at the other woman who ducked her head in the window and slammed it shut.

In time, I came to love that courtyard. As well as my aunt Marie, a short, robust woman with a soft face who wept into my hair and kissed my cheeks whenever the mood took her.

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