There are no kids on stoops in my  neighborhood, only grandmothers in folding chairs. Once maybe there were kids making time in front of the houses, back when the grandmothers were girls. When everybody’s parents and cousins lived on the same
block and you couldn’t get $25 a month for my apartment. Before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway severed the bulk of Italian Williamsburg from Bamonte’s Restaurant and Mount Carmel Catholic Church.

Nowadays the kids gather at the corner park below my window, flirt on the benches, blast J. Lo from their SUVs. Others wander, smoking, up the abandoned part of Jackson Street, where their parents and grandparents forbid them to go. The house fronts are for the old ladies now. I get off the L at Lorimer, cross Conselyea to Leonard, and they’re all there in small clusters, wearing flowered muumuus. I speak with each of them. It’s like a receiving line at a wedding, except it’s too hot to press their hands. Sometimes one husband or another sits out, too, reading or dozing or listening to the radio, his chair a little distanced from his wife and her friends. If he looks up, I greet him, too, but mainly there are women.

I have this thing: old women love me, and I love them. Maybe because I’m short and freckly and harmless and buxom. Maybe because when I was four my Granny was my best friend and she played Batman and Robin with me on my swing set in the Miami heat, and let me be Batman. Maybe I just radiate granddaughterliness. I can’t account for it, but in my neighborhood I’m exempt from the smirks bestowed on other new Williamsburgers who shimmy past with instrument cases and portfolios and wafer-thin cell phones. I’m the thoughtful one who asks after the daughter in Manhattan, the good girl taking wine home to her laid-off, dot-com man.

With the ladies closer to the subway, I exchange only a few words. We complain about the weather. They mop their brows with folded hankies. They shift their skirts and cross their ankles demurely. The closer I get to my apartment, the longer I linger, heedless of my husband, who may already have started the water for the pasta. We are poor now that he has lost his job, and consequently are experimenting with the disheartening, old-fashioned practice of eating at home.

My apartment comes into view as I reach the three sisters near the corner, one visiting from Florida, and they call to their friend next door who doesn’t know much English. "Bambola, bambola," they say, and I think maybe it’s the friend’s name. I’m relieved to know it because she told me once and I immediately forgot it, and it seems rude to ask again, two years later. 

She rushes toward me from her steps, her white hair curly and wild, her upper lip gleaming with sweat. 

"What a Bambola," she says, kissing me on the cheek, and it’s clear she’s not talking about herself. "In English, it means doll," she explains, wrapping her arm around me for a moment. I hug her back.  Then she hoists her muumuu a little and sits on her chair. The sisters laugh, wipe their brows.

"You’re not hot? You look so freshy-fresh," says the oldest sister, the one with the cane and dark glasses.

"She’s used to it. She’s from Miami," says the middle sister, the one from Florida.

"Your husband passed before with the pasta," the oldest one says. "Did he find a job yet?"

"Not yet."

"I pray he’ll find a job soon," she says.

"Always with the praying, this one," says the youngest sister, the one whose son lives in Gramercy Park.

"Pray away," I say. "It can’t hurt."

"What a shame it’s so hard for you kids today," she says. We complain about the economy. And then someone says, "Don’t let us keep you from your husband."

So I say goodnight, and they talk in Italian as I walk away. I only understand one word: bambola.

Some days, when I've had too many cocktails the night before, for instance, the pressure to be everybody’s good granddaughter is too much. To avoid my old ladies, I get off the L at Graham instead of Lorimer and slink down Jackson past the slow-moving throngs of
kids.

But there are grandmothers on this route, too, and despite myself I smile at them. They smile back.

"Good night," we say. And I feel good, even though I know I am cultivating a new group of grandmothers, fine, kind old women for whom I will have to be a bambola. 

Author's Biography

Maud Newton grew up in Miami, Florida, where she was frequently mistaken for a 
tourist because of her unearthly pale skin.

Although she still spends part of each year in Miami, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. By day, she works as an editor in Manhattan, and at night she pursues a Masters’ in Fiction Writing from the City College of New York.

Maud holds a B.A. in English from the University of Florida and is the Editor-in-Chief
of http://www.miamistories.com.

E-mail Maud at maudnewton@hotmail.com

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