by Gwen Cooper
I didn’t mean it. Of course I didn’t mean it. What I meant was, Yes, we love the cat, but you are more important than any cat. What I meant was, Please, if you love me, don’t do anything like this again. I couldn’t bear to go on if anything were to happen to you. But I didn’t say those things. Not in that moment. How could I? How could I speak calmly when I was gasping for air? When my legs shook beyond my control? When my heart was knocking so hard in my chest, it sent pains shooting through my body?
All I wanted was for Laura to leave. Every instinct in my body was screaming for her to go, to get her away, away, away. Away from the machine with its ravenous metal jaws that wanted to kill something. Had tried to kill her once already. Away from the crowd that also wanted to kill something now.
But Laura wasn’t going. She stood there with tears in her eyes, gaping at me as if she didn’t know me. Didn’t recognize me. The look of perfect trust her eyes had held only that morning was gone. And I knew, as I stood there, I knew I would never see it again. Something had changed between us. I knew it, I just didn’t understand why. How could my own daughter, the child of my own body, distrust me when I was the only one—the only person in this whole crowd—who was trying to protect her? I felt myself on the verge of hysteria. Clutching her arm, I dragged her through the crowd to where it thinned at the edges. I saw Hugo Verde helping his children and Mr. Mandelbaum into a Red Cross bus. Later I would learn that it had taken people from our building to a motel out in Queens, near LaGuardia Airport.
And then Noel was standing next to me. “I was worried when you didn’t show up today. You weren’t answering your phone. I came as soon as my shift ended.” He stared at me—my face twisted, panting heavily—and trailed off. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked uncertainly.
I put my hand against Laura’s shoulder and shoved her, hard, in his direction. “Take her,” I gritted. “Take her to your apartment. Take her anywhere. Just get her away from here.”
Maybe if Laura had cried, maybe then it would still have been okay. If she had cried, if her face had softened, of course I would have put my arms around her. I would have hugged her close and whispered, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, baby. I was scared, that’s all. I love you. I love you so much. And Laura would have hugged me back, she would have sobbed against my shoulder, and I would have comforted her as best I could.
But Laura didn’t cry. The tears in her eyes dried without falling. Her lips pressed into a thin line. Noel tried to put his arm around her shoulders, but she shook it off. “I’m fine,” she told him.
Noel threw me a look that pleaded for clemency. Give the kid a break, the look said. “Come on,” he told her softly. “Everything’s going to be fine. Your mom’s going to stay here and make sure everything is just fine.” Placing one hand lightly between her shoulder blades, he started to guide her away from the edges of the crowd.
I watched their backs recede. When they’d gotten half a block away, Laura broke away from Noel and whirled around to face me. “I hate you!” she screamed. Hurling the words at me with all the force she had.
Laura’s hands rose to cover her face, and she turned to bury both face and hands in Noel’s shoulder. Noel’s arm went around her. The two of them kept walking until they disappeared from sight.
It took thirteen hours for the crane to tear our building apart, piece by piece, to level it all the way down to the ground floor. For thirteen hours, chunk by chunk, the metal jaws of the crane ate into it and ripped it open. The building never did collapse. Those of us left to watch who had lived here and knew it well weren’t surprised. That building had stood for a hundred years.
You could see inside people’s apartments as the walls were torn off. The first massive chunk ripped by the crane sent a large Bible flying into the air. That was the Verdes’ apartment. Laura had told me once about that Bible. On the flyleaf they’d written the names of everyone in their family going back four generations.
Furniture looked exposed and naked under the lights, like people caught in the act of changing clothes. Rugs slid into cracks that opened in the floor, dragging couches and tables along with them until everything tilted and teetered at crazy angles, like in a fun-house. Kitchen cabinets were squeezed in the machine’s jaws until they vomited up breakfast cereals and silverware, wedding china and plastic bowls for children. Occasionally the white lights would catch a piece of jewelry or a shard of broken glass and beam out to blind me unexpectedly. A tiny blue sweater became snarled in one of the crane’s teeth and hung there for an absurdly long time, as if someone were clinging fiercely to the thing, desperate to stop it. Not that the crane cared or even paused. It had all night to complete its work.
I stood there and watched numbly. It was only when the crane had eaten down to the third floor, where Mr. Mandelbaum had lived, that I had to leave. I told myself I was hungry, that I hadn’t eaten all day. I went to a diner on First Avenue and sat there with a sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of me for two hours. I took one bite of the sandwich, but the bite marks my teeth left looked too much like the holes gouged out of our building by the crane. My head pounded and my face felt hot, and I bent to rest my cheek against the cool surface of the table.
“You okay, miss?”
A busboy had approached and he hovered, looking worried. “I’m fine.” My voice sounded rough, and I cleared my throat. “Is there a pay phone I could use?”
“Around back. Next to the bathrooms.” He gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “You sure you’re okay?”
My hair fell forward as I bent over my wallet, looking for a few bills to leave on the table and some change for the phone. When I lifted my eyes, the busboy was still looking at me with concern. I smiled weakly. “Just not as hungry as I thought I was.”
Someone had etched WORSHIP GOD into the metal of the pay phone’s base. It ate two of my quarters before a third produced the sound of a phone ringing on the other end of the line. Noel answered in the middle of the first ring. “How is she?” I asked.
“Sleeping,” he answered. “She passed out as soon as she changed out of her wet clothes. I was going to try to wake her and make her eat something, but I figured she needs the sleep more right now.”
“Thank you, Noel.” No matter how much I cleared my throat, I couldn’t seem to erase the gritty texture from it. I didn’t sound grateful, although I was. I didn’t even sound like me. “I’ll come by for her in the morning.”
“Where will you sleep tonight?”
I laughed—a hoarse, barking sound. “Nowhere,” I told him.
There was nothing I could do there, but I walked back to Stanton Street anyway. The crane was still at work, and it had reached the second floor. I was there to see its jaws come through the wall of Laura’s bedroom, devouring the dolls and board games that had come to live permanently in her closet as she’d gotten too old for them. The curtains Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn for her. The wallpaper we’d spent days choosing and hours hanging in that room that had once been papered in sheet music. The crane ate it all without pausing.
For years, I waited for Laura to ask me about that night. There were a lot of questions I waited for Laura to ask me, but she never did. I always thought, though, that if she were to ask about why I went back, why I stayed there through the night and into the next morning in the damp, crumpled clothing I’d worn all day, that it would be the one question for which I wouldn’t have an answer that would make sense to a practical girl like Laura. I couldn’t have explained to her why I stayed, why I had to see all of it—all of our life together—torn apart piece by piece. Why I felt like the destruction needed a witness. Not a witness in the sense that a lawyer uses the word. Not that, exactly.
I stayed for the same reason you would sit up all night by the bedside of a dying friend. Because it was something friendship required of you. And because nothing should die alone.
The same bus that had brought everybody to the motel out by the airport brought them back the next mor
ning. The police had made a cursory attempt to retrieve some personal effects from the rubble of the demolished building. Waterlogged furniture and clothing, soggy pillows, torn photos, shattered picture frames, pots that held shredded plants, an antique silver hairbrush, yards of snarled tape from the insides of videocassettes, a guitar that had been snapped at the neck, a curling iron, a brush for a cat, endless cracked pieces of china, a chipped commemorative plate celebrating the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana. The things the cops had pulled sat in a wet mound where once our building had stood.
Noel brought Laura back while I climbed the mound, looking through it all, but I made him take her away again. I didn’t want her to see this, to see me picking through a pile of broken things on the street like a scavenger. There was only one thing I was looking for, anyway.
It took nearly five hours for me to find it, and it had started to rain again. My hands were torn and bloody by then, and I didn’t know if it was dust or tears that had clogged my lungs and made my eyes run. The rest of my former neighbors—those who had even bothered looking through the mound—had long since dispersed. I was the only one left by the time I found what I was looking for. Once I did, I went to find Laura.
In the end, those of us who lived there were compensated to the tune of three nights at the airport motel and $250 in gift certificates to buy clothing at Sears, courtesy of the Red Cross. That was all. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a home. Two hundred and fifty dollars for a life. Tenants with children who asked, But where will I take my children? Where can we go? were told they would have to check into one of the City’s homeless shelters and remain there for forty days before they could officially be considered homeless and receive government assistance. I don’t think anybody took them up on that offer. But I can’t know for sure. I never saw most of them again, except for Mr. Mandelbaum—and by the time I found him, I knew he was beyond taking help from anybody. When the building’s owners couldn’t afford to repay the City for the demolition cost, ownership of the property reverted to the City by default. They sold it to developers for millions. Condos would eventually be built there, starting at $1.2 million for a one-bedroom.
But construction didn’t begin immediately. It wouldn’t begin for a long, long time.
Laura and I stayed with Noel and his wife and two children for a few days, but it seemed impossible to take advantage of them by staying too long in their already crowded East Village apartment. We spent a few weeks rotating among friends’ couches and sleeping bags while I tried to keep my business running and waited for my insurance company to send me a check. Laura was nearly catatonic most of the time, falling into restless sleeps in which she tossed and turned and called out for Honey or Mr. Mandelbaum. And when she wasn’t silent or sleeping, she raged at me, demanding the return of some favorite blanket or cherished nightgown that she couldn’t try to sleep one more night without.
Sometimes I raged back at her, thinking she was doing this just to torment me, because she must have known how impossible it was for me to restore any of the things we’d lost, how much I would have given if I could have done so. Now I understand that she needed somebody to be angry at, so that anger would give her the strength to fight through and survive those difficult days. Mostly, though, she was exercising a child’s prerogative (for she was still a child, even if she wouldn’t be much longer) to demand that her mother do what mothers are supposed to do—make everything better.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make anything better. Our resentments grew as the days passed, although I could only guess at Laura’s. When we weren’t yelling at each other we didn’t speak, except when I told her every day how I’d been trying to get in touch with Anise, that Anise would be able to do something to help us, would do it any day now. Anise was on tour in Europe. In those days, most people didn’t have email addresses or cell phones. I left messages with her management company, who assured me they were doing everything they could to reach her at each tour stop, although it always seemed as if they’d just missed her before she’d checked out of one hotel and moved on to the next city. They probably thought I was a hanger-on and decided not to bother her.
It was five weeks before I heard from my insurance company, and they informed me that my renter’s policy didn’t cover lawful acts of emergency demolition by the City. By then Laura and I were staying in cheap hotels on the Lower East Side, and my credit was nearly exhausted. I arranged a “fire sale” at Ear Wax, selling everything that could be sold for whatever price I could get for it to the obsessive collectors who had always been my best customers. At the end of it, I turned the keys and the lease over to Noel. I still had hundreds of records left that were scratched or damaged, or that the collectors hadn’t been interested in, and perhaps two dozen that I couldn’t bring myself to part with. They weren’t worth much anyway (although I don’t think Laura, when she saw how many remained unsold, believed that), but now you could probably sell them for something simply because they’re old. All of them, along with my personal effects from the store, went into the same storage unit I’d first rented back when Laura was born. Another phase of my life had been boxed up and put away in a dark room, left there to molder and gather dust.
We were living in an SRO up in Harlem—all I could afford at that point, and more accessible by subway to the Midtown employment agencies I had applied with—when we finally heard from Anise in early August. I brought Laura with me to every typing test and every job interview—because where could I have left her?—and that, along with my lack of a “real” address, wasn’t helping my job hunt. Most of what Anise had to say about her management company—which, as I suspected, hadn’t made much of an effort to pass my messages along—was unrepeatable. She fired them a few days later, and her ousting them in the middle of an international tour over “creative differences” became a minor news item. The new management company she quickly signed with arranged for Laura and me to stay in one of their corporate apartments. Anise offered to do a lot more than that for us, but I refused to take it from her. I knew I’d never be able to pay her back.
Once I had an address, I was able to find a job as a typist at a small real estate law firm. The hourly rate was good, and I learned that if I was willing to work off-hours—late at night, for example—I could make up to double my hourly rate. I was used to keeping odd hours because of the record store, so that suited me fine.
Having a job meant I could finally fill out the reams of paperwork for a two-bedroom apartment in a Mitchell-Lama building in the East Twenties. Only thirteen blocks from the technical boundary of my old neighborhood, but still a world away. We were more or less settled by the time Laura’s school year started, although it was Christmas before I could afford to buy us any real furniture beyond the two mattresses I’d used up the last of my credit for when we moved in.
Laura was barely speaking to me those days. When I lost Laura’s voice, I lost the music in my head, too. Or it was more like the music in my head was my daughter’s voice. Laura was my music. It was like living with my parents all over again, except this time the only person to blame was me. I knew the only way I could make things right would be to find Mr. Mandelbaum, to salvage whatever there was left to salvage of our old lives.
I went back to our old neighborhood every night after work, every morning before I was due at the office. I had the photo of Laura and Mr. Mandelbaum that I’d kept in my wallet, and I showed it to people. All the hookers and squatters and street people I’d come to know over the years. Except that there weren’t as many of them anymore. How had I not noticed? I even went to the beat cops, the ones I knew from my store. Cops who hadn’t been on the other side of the barricades that day. In the end it was Povercide Bob from his usual haunt in front of Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A who—after subjecting me to a twenty-minute diatribe about how the government and the CIA were conspiring to kill the poor, and how what had happened to our building was proof—directed me to a seedy SRO on the Bowery.
> I thought (foolishly, I now realize) that if I went to Mr. Mandelbaum with a plan for getting him out of that place, everything could still be all right. I told myself nothing had happened to any of us that couldn’t be fixed by time and the quiet order of a clean new home. I called City agencies on my lunch breaks, trying to find a place for him to go. I got shuffled around a lot. Eventually I was referred to the Jewish Home for the Aged, who would be able to find Mr. Mandelbaum an apartment only a hundred dollars a month more than the old place had been. Of course, a hundred dollars a month is a fortune to somebody on a fixed income. But I was making more money now, more than I’d made with the record store. My bigger paychecks, our cleaner, bigger apartment, hung in the air between Laura and me like unspoken accusations. I had to do something. I had to make it right.
The man at the front desk of the SRO pointed me to a room on the fifth floor. How did Mr. Mandelbaum manage to climb up and down five flights of stairs every day? His room was at the end of a drab corridor, next to a large plastic trash can beneath a naked lightbulb. The floors had probably been tiled at some point, although now they were no more than hard puddles of red, blue, and brown.
Mr. Mandelbaum’s room contained a single cot and an ancient wooden dresser. A plywood divider separated this room from the one next to it. Mr. Mandelbaum lay on the cot, still wearing the brown suit he’d worn to synagogue the day we’d lost our home. On top of the dresser, an ashtray overflowed. The room stank of smoke, unwashed clothing, and trash from the hallway. I had imagined Laura’s joy upon being reunited with Mr. Mandelbaum. It had been the only truly happy prospect I could imagine for any of us these past months. But I knew now as I looked around that I could never bring her to see him here.