He joins with his fellow commuters in croaking a hymn he didn’t know he knew, like when he was a child and prayed in Latin, never really understanding the words or what it was for which he prayed.
Brisket
Their pale, plump skins scorched almost to bursting, the Thuringers invited a plaster of brown mustard.
The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors: blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.
There was corned beef awaiting horseradish, kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis, tukus , house hickory-smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes—thin kasha and golden squares of potato—slaw, paprika-dusted potato salad, fried onions and schmaltz, green tomatoes, kaiser rolls, baguettes, pumpernickel. I’d been walking around all day in the cold and it all looked good. But finally, when my turn in line arrived, I decided to invest my last few dollars in the garlic-kissed brisket on rye.
“Young man, I’m going to make you a very nice sandwich,” murmured the old, bald server, wearing a stained white apron.
He said it conspiratorially, his lips barely moving, drawing me toward him in order to hear, as if it were something he’d rather the owners of the establishment not get wind of. A secret between the two of us, not for the ears of the others behind me in line.
He glanced up into my eyes and held them as if he’d taken a personal interest in me, which was more than I could say for the secretaries and interviewers in the personnel offices where I’d spent the last six weeks filling out applications for jobs while my money ran out and I moved from friend to friend, crashing from apartment to apartment, sleeping on sofas and floors as if I’d never grow up if I stayed poor. His face, crosshatched in lines, was set in the comically tragic expression he’d practiced until it had become his permanent physiognomy. He must have been making sandwiches for a long time, must have seen a lot of hungry faces staring back at him from the other side of the glass partition.
Maybe he’d learned to read faces at a glance and could read in mine that a desperation I’d never felt before was setting in. That I needed a helping hand. That I’d caught enough of a glimpse of what it meant to be down, homeless, jobless, walking the streets hungry to last a lifetime.
Or maybe to get through the day he allowed himself now and then to take a liking to the face of a perfect stranger. A face that perhaps reminded him of himself when he was young, or of someone in his past, the way that, riding the subway and watching all the people with jobs filing on, I’d sometimes see a woman who would remind me of an old girlfriend in another city, a city I should have stayed in, a girlfriend I should have stayed with. That same girlfriend who once told me, “You’ve got a working-class face.”
Maybe he thought so, too.
“See?” he said, surgically trimming off the fat with the tip of his carving knife, and then scraping the trimmings across the cutting-board counter, leaving a trail of grease. That’s when I noticed the numbers tattooed on his wrist. I’d seen the faded marks of the death camps on the wrists of tailors in that neighborhood before. Those tattooed numbers still shocked me into a sense of dislocation. The brutal reality of history crowded out the mundane present. I wondered what he thought when he looked at his wrist every day. What horrible memories did he overcome each morning? When I saw those numbers I felt ashamed. Here I was spending my last few bucks—big deal! I would survive.
“How about some nice scraps for your dog?” he asked, gesturing with his knife to the pile of trimmings that he’d been accumulating from mine and other sandwiches. Attached to the fat were hearty-looking ribbons of brisket. There was at least another meal there.
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, still with that confidential tone as if something preferential were going on between
Brisket
Their pale, plump skins scorched almost to bursting, the Thuringers invited a plaster of brown mustard.
The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors: blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.
There was corned beef awaiting horseradish, kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis, tukus , house hickory-smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes—thin kasha and golden squares of potato—slaw, paprika-dusted potato salad, fried onions and schmaltz, green tomatoes, kaiser rolls, baguettes, pumpernickel. I’d been walking around all day in the cold and it all looked good. But finally, when my turn in line arrived, I decided to invest my last few dollars in the garlic-kissed brisket on rye.
“Young man, I’m going to make you a very nice sandwich,” murmured the old, bald server, wearing a stained white apron.
He said it conspiratorially, his lips barely moving, drawing me toward him in order to hear, as if it were something he’d rather the owners of the establishment not get wind of. A secret between the two of us, not for the ears of the others behind me in line.
He glanced up into my eyes and held them as if he’d taken a personal interest in me, which was more than I could say for the secretaries and interviewers in the personnel offices where I’d spent the last six weeks filling out applications for jobs while my money ran out and I moved from friend to friend, crashing from apartment to apartment, sleeping on sofas and floors as if I’d never grow up if I stayed poor. His face, crosshatched in lines, was set in the comically tragic expression he’d practiced until it had become his permanent physiognomy. He must have been making sandwiches for a long time, must have seen a lot of hungry faces staring back at him from the other side of the glass partition.
Maybe he’d learned to read faces at a glance and could read in mine that a desperation I’d never felt before was setting in. That I needed a helping hand. That I’d caught enough of a glimpse of what it meant to be down, homeless, jobless, walking the streets hungry to last a lifetime.
Or maybe to get through the day he allowed himself now and then to take a liking to the face of a perfect stranger. A face that perhaps reminded him of himself when he was young, or of someone in his past, the way that, riding the subway and watching all the people with jobs filing on, I’d sometimes see a woman who would remind me of an old girlfriend in another city, a city I should have stayed in, a girlfriend I should have stayed with. That same girlfriend who once told me, “You’ve got a working-class face.”
Maybe he thought so, too.
“See?” he said, surgically trimming off the fat with the tip of his carving knife, and then scraping the trimmings across the cutting-board counter, leaving a trail of grease. That’s when I noticed the numbers tattooed on his wrist. I’d seen the faded marks of the death camps on the wrists of tailors in that neighborhood before. Those tattooed numbers still shocked me into a sense of dislocation. The brutal reality of history crowded out the mundane present. I wondered what he thought when he looked at his wrist every day. What horrible memories did he overcome each morning? When I saw those numbers I felt ashamed. Here I was spending my last few bucks—big deal! I would survive.
“How about some nice scraps for your dog?” he asked, gesturing with his knife to the pile of trimmings that he’d been accumulating from mine and other sandwiches. Attached to the fat were hearty-looking ribbons of brisket. There was at least another meal there.
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, still with that confidential tone as if something preferential were going on between
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