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“That looks the same,” Dylan said, watching his father finish a frame, turn to the next.
“It changes very slightly.”
“I can’t see.”
“You will in time.”
Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired as he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. Retreating from his father’s studio he’d count the whining stairs.
Downstairs was another problem entirely. His mother’s spaces-the parlor full of her books and records, the kitchen where she cooked food and laughed and argued on the phone, her table full of newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses-were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Mornings she was gone to Schermerhorn Street where she worked. Then Dylan could dwell in the downstairs like a ghost, curling over his own books or in a sun-dazzled nap on the couch, eating leftovers from the fridge or spoonfuls of dry cocoa powder directly from the tin so that his mouth became thick with a clay of cocoa, examining the half-finished crossword on the table, ru
“Ringo.”
“Children like Ringo,” she told him. “Boys do. Girls like Paul. He’s sexy. You’ll understand.”
She might be crying or laughing or cleaning up a broken dish or clipping the nails of the cats who lived in the backyard, the two who’d stayed from the litter downstairs and had grown and now killed birds regularly among the bricks and vines. “See,” she’d say, squeezing the cat’s paw to extend its claws, “you can’t clip them too close, there’s a blood vessel there, they’ll bleed to death.” She was wild with information he couldn’t yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock’s British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was u
“There he is,” they’d say, as if Dylan were always the topic just abandoned.
Then he was beckoned to the table to be met. Dylan would recall the visitors only as Rachel described them later, to Abraham at di
Then-and this was finally always the essential problem with floating downstairs-Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she’d eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street.
The second world was an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses-pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath-those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones. As far as Dylan could tell no kid ever went into another’s home. They didn’t talk about their parents either. Dylan knew nothing else to talk about, and so drifted silently into the group of children, who seemed to understand this, and vaguely parted their ranks to make room for him. Maybe every kid had drifted in this way.
Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracketed the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming house between the Ebduses’ and Isabel Vendle’s, and they would shoo away the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the block.
Henry was a black kid with a younger brother, Earl, and a front yard which was paved flat instead of a plot of ruined or halfheartedly gardened ground. The low fence dividing Henry’s paved housefront from the slate of the sidewalk was stone as well, poured cement. Henry was three years older than Dylan. His stoop and yard formed the meeting point, the base of operations. Older boys from farther down the block would arrive and choose sides. Principally Davey and Alberto from across the street and near the corner, from the house which overflowed with cousins and whose stoop was for teenagers smoking. They’d arrive arms swinging, bouncing a new spaldeen. They’d buy a strawberry Yoo-Hoo and share it and give Henry or Henry’s friend Lo