It is very warm these days. Brightly so. Glisteningly so. Wiltingly so. I take naps to escape. When I wake, I yawn into the still heat.

In the late afternoons, the summer rain is emphatic, driven. From inside Café Regular, we watch the rainwater rush down the street. The storm is all bluster, and tires itself out in a matter of minutes. Then only under the trees, thick with wet leaves, do hesitant drops continue to fall.

I was finishing up an iced latte yesterday when the sky burst, and here’s me in a white dress and no umbrella. “This rain has to end in fifteen minutes,” I told Josh. “I have places to be.” It was over in ten.

At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Kat and I watched a 1930s “Pygmalion.” Kat and me and a handful of olds scattered about in the little screening room, with seats in velvet and gold. The film popped and sparked, and then the first reel burned into brown spots. It wasn’t the influenza done it in.

The thing that is especially good about our going to the Pioneer, I’d e-mailed Kat earlier, is that then we can go to Katz’s for dinner. I have spent the past so many years walking by Katz’s and never going in. Last night just before I pulled open the door, I started to get a little nervous, ’cause what if I lost my ticket? The thing about the ticket is, you enter, you get a ticket, you go up to the counter, you order, they mark your ticket. You give the cashier your ticket on the way out. If you lose
your ticket...jeez, I don’t know. You just...you just don’t want to lose your ticket.



There are various sandwich queues at the counter, and various sandwiches advertised on plastic signs above the counter. Knockwurst, corned beef, tongue. Send a salami to your boy in the army. Lettuce or tomatoes, twenty-five cents extra.

The old guy behind the counter was trying to set me up with the pastrami boy with the sweet eyes. “You single?” he asked, and put his arm around the pastrami boy’s shoulders. “You single? He’s single.” The pastrami boy blushed under his Katz’s cap. The old guy lives at Coney Island, has lived there for some twenty years. Maybe we’ll see each other on the F train sometime. I tried to get away without a pickle, but he said it was not okay. The pastrami boy gave me a plate loaded with two kinds.

Between me and Kat, our linoleum-topped table held: a hot dog, a pastrami on rye, a hard salami on rye, two plates of pickles, a bowl of matzoh ball soup, a vanilla egg cream, and a chocolate egg cream. I wanted to try the potato pancakes, too, with both sour cream and apple sauce, but it just wasn’t possible. I have a week yet in the city, and I figure, if I go back to Katz’s every day before I leave, I might be able to work my way through everything else I need to try.



Almost midnight on a summer Friday, the streets of the Lower East Side look like this: island-print dresses with gold chain belts. Shorts and little stilettos. Light cotton dresses flowing over cropped leggings. The Schiller’s sign glows against white tiles.

Almost midnight on a summer Friday, NoLIta looks like this: the boys are sharp. The girls are sharp. The girls are butterflies. In orange and blue, the girls are butterflies in party dresses.

The walk east on Houston toward the Second Avenue F stop is a walk my legs do without my head thinking about it. It is a walk like walking home, it is a walk like walking along the veins on the back of your hand. It was at the Second Avenue F stop that, once upon a time, I made a long-distance phone call, having discovered I was no longer in love with a boy. It was at the Second Avenue F stop that, once upon another time, I made a long-distance phone call, having discovered I was in love with a boy.