adopting the Mets warm-up jacket. For, if a grown-up hippie in 1969 had to care what their sign was, a minimally functional verging-on-teenage male at Sunnyside Intermediate, whether black or white, had to choose from two other constellations of gods. Quick: Who was your favorite Met? And who your favorite Apollo astronaut? Cicero had his answers ready, even if they were for the wrong reasons. Tom Seaver had beautiful thighs and an oversize ass, for a white man. In Cicero’s study, starting pitchers often had the proportions he relished. The fetishy analysis of a pitcher’s windup and delivery justifiedmany hours of active lascivious fantasy on Cicero’s part, hidden in the plain sight of the consideration of his father’s
Herald Tribune
sports pages, or the exchange of baseball cards with his classmates, or the viewing of Tom Terrific’s starts on Rose’s prize color television. Seaver was celebrated for the length of his stride, the dip of his knee to the dirt at his delivery’s utmost point, the mound-smudged clue left behind on his uniform. Cicero liked to imagine himself in place of the mound when the pitcher’s thighs bowed earthward.
Though their costumes were not nearly so flattering, Cicero’s taste in astronauts—Buzz Aldrin—oriented along similar lines.
“Screw it, let’s go get your fortune told the
right
way,” said Miriam, once they’d delivered themselves from the patchouli fog of disappointment and stood in the hustle of the midday Chinatown sidewalk. “Anyway, I’m starving—you like dim sum?”
“Sure,” Cicero lied. Whatever global doubts the secretive boy entertained, Cicero felt seduced into awe and gratitude at Miriam Gogan’s attentions. “What’s the right way?”
“By means of
chicken
. C’mon. But first we’ll eat.”
Miriam yanked Cicero by the hand into Chinatown, splendidly impatient to move him like a pawn across the mental chessboard of her city. The operation wasn’t so different from Rose’s, dragging her chubby black ward through her block-watcher’s rounds in Sunnyside. Mother and daughter each made a version of Carroll’s Red Queen, running to stay in place. Each marked urban spaces like a pinball bouncing under glass, trying to light every bumper before gravity drew them into the trap waiting below. Only Miriam’s rounds were animated by exultation, the outer-borough kid’s connoisseurship of a Greenwich Village culture that was her inheritance if she demanded it be. Rose, paranoia her precinct, stalked Sunnyside like it was a zoo’s cage. Rose kept score. Burned grudges for fuel.
Cicero was already a connoisseur, too, of styles of female power.
Dim sum, at least as Miriam unveiled it to Cicero this afternoon, was merely Chinese soul food. Miriam passed over the trays full of the fussier-looking delicacies, pink pods like saltwater taffy, shrimp in glistening translucent wrappers, in favor of a grease-stained white bag loaded with what turned out to be shreds of pork barbecue, hidden in doughy white buns the size and tenderness and deliciousness ofCicero’s mother’s own biscuits. Each bun also concealed a delicious squirt of barbecue sauce, secret incentive to gobble it entire; this was barbecue such as the Apollo astronauts might carry on their voyage. Together, reaching into the white bag again and again as if it might be bottomless, Miriam and Cicero threaded sidewalks narrowed by vendors’ stands full of unrecognizable vegetables and cross-eyed fish in tanks, sidestepped the Tom Thumb women with carts. Miriam chewed and talked. Cicero chewed and listened. When they’d emptied the bag, gummed their back molars with dough and threads of pork, Miriam located a dusty Jewish deli hidden somehow in the midst of the exotica and purchased two Orange Crushes in beaded bottles so they could rinse it all down.
Somewhere in this feasting, the dam broke, the last of Cicero’s reserve swept away. He fell in love. Cicero didn’t find women sexy, but
Herald Tribune
sports pages, or the exchange of baseball cards with his classmates, or the viewing of Tom Terrific’s starts on Rose’s prize color television. Seaver was celebrated for the length of his stride, the dip of his knee to the dirt at his delivery’s utmost point, the mound-smudged clue left behind on his uniform. Cicero liked to imagine himself in place of the mound when the pitcher’s thighs bowed earthward.
Though their costumes were not nearly so flattering, Cicero’s taste in astronauts—Buzz Aldrin—oriented along similar lines.
“Screw it, let’s go get your fortune told the
right
way,” said Miriam, once they’d delivered themselves from the patchouli fog of disappointment and stood in the hustle of the midday Chinatown sidewalk. “Anyway, I’m starving—you like dim sum?”
“Sure,” Cicero lied. Whatever global doubts the secretive boy entertained, Cicero felt seduced into awe and gratitude at Miriam Gogan’s attentions. “What’s the right way?”
“By means of
chicken
. C’mon. But first we’ll eat.”
Miriam yanked Cicero by the hand into Chinatown, splendidly impatient to move him like a pawn across the mental chessboard of her city. The operation wasn’t so different from Rose’s, dragging her chubby black ward through her block-watcher’s rounds in Sunnyside. Mother and daughter each made a version of Carroll’s Red Queen, running to stay in place. Each marked urban spaces like a pinball bouncing under glass, trying to light every bumper before gravity drew them into the trap waiting below. Only Miriam’s rounds were animated by exultation, the outer-borough kid’s connoisseurship of a Greenwich Village culture that was her inheritance if she demanded it be. Rose, paranoia her precinct, stalked Sunnyside like it was a zoo’s cage. Rose kept score. Burned grudges for fuel.
Cicero was already a connoisseur, too, of styles of female power.
Dim sum, at least as Miriam unveiled it to Cicero this afternoon, was merely Chinese soul food. Miriam passed over the trays full of the fussier-looking delicacies, pink pods like saltwater taffy, shrimp in glistening translucent wrappers, in favor of a grease-stained white bag loaded with what turned out to be shreds of pork barbecue, hidden in doughy white buns the size and tenderness and deliciousness ofCicero’s mother’s own biscuits. Each bun also concealed a delicious squirt of barbecue sauce, secret incentive to gobble it entire; this was barbecue such as the Apollo astronauts might carry on their voyage. Together, reaching into the white bag again and again as if it might be bottomless, Miriam and Cicero threaded sidewalks narrowed by vendors’ stands full of unrecognizable vegetables and cross-eyed fish in tanks, sidestepped the Tom Thumb women with carts. Miriam chewed and talked. Cicero chewed and listened. When they’d emptied the bag, gummed their back molars with dough and threads of pork, Miriam located a dusty Jewish deli hidden somehow in the midst of the exotica and purchased two Orange Crushes in beaded bottles so they could rinse it all down.
Somewhere in this feasting, the dam broke, the last of Cicero’s reserve swept away. He fell in love. Cicero didn’t find women sexy, but
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