He only thought he wanted food. He found what he truly needed right away. Later he realized she’d found him. She was old, at least twenty-five, perhaps thirty. She had thick ropes of black hair to her waist and her breasts were large and low beneath her simple white blouse. She was everything he wanted and he ached against the scratch of his new trousers. She simply walked to him and brushed her hand against him and said, “You need help with that?”

She named a price and he offered half that and she took his hand and led him into a doorway and up a flight of stairs and even as he followed the intentional flounder of her skirted buttocks and hips he’d already learned something. At the first landing she stopped and ran a hand down the buttons of his flies and took him out into her hand and he thought she’d misunderstood. Then she turned and lifted her skirts, leaning forward to grasp the railing. He’d expected a room, a bed, her face, and so stood understanding but not, looking down at the puckered breadth of her rear, the thrust of rasped hair rising into her cleft. She looked back over her shoulder at him once and then turned her head away again but reached back between her legs to grasp him hard and bring him in. He stumbled against her and a cry of pleasure or pain came from her and she pushed back against him and he came just as she was raising her voice again. When she realized he was coming the cry stopped, her work done. She stepped off his steady erection and smoothed her skirts down, turned and pressed him back into his trousers, doing up the flies. She patted his crotch and said, “You remember me.” Then she was down the stairs, leaving him there. When he went back down onto the street she was nowhere in sight.

He went away from the way he’d come. Two doors up on the top step of a stoop was a girl his own age wearing a navy waisted dress with white piping at the collar and hip pockets and hem. She sat with her knees together and her hands over them, watching him come. She had the same thick black hair, this time wound around her head in a loose blur but her skin was very pale, bright white against the dress and her hair As he passed she grinned and cocked her eyebrows at him and shook her head. He nodded at her once firmly, dismissing her, not shamed, and turned his head. At the corner he went into a café and ordered spaghetti only because he’d heard the word earlier. He’d not seen or eaten a noodle in his life. The meatballs tasted strange to him, but he ate two platefuls and mopped it with the hard crusted bread. It cost him a nickel.