No.2 WhiteFish.

was darkly stenciled, not as a simple identifying label, but as an irreproachable judgment and an unimpeachable statement of fact.

I would leave before noon, so there was no need to hurry, the matinee didn’t begin till one and though I knew the route better than my own toes, I looked in all the windows as if someone were undressing just in back of the glass. Manikins might move in the right light, my face swim away in a flannel suit. I always started out prepared to be surprised, but the unexpected was, in fact, quite exceptional. I was witness to an accident once, when a bread van struck a neighbor’s trike which had rolled, unridden, into the road, and one of its red wheels flew through the air like a Frisbee. A Frisbee . . . memory sees what I saw so differently. Another time a man keeled over outside the Malt Shop, blood spilling from his nose; and an ambulance with flashing lights raced twice through the Palmers’ wide semicircular drive for no reason I could ever accept. The Palmers were wealthy, we thought, because their son, Dickie, played golf at the country club. Garages, swollen with what I imagined were shiny black Packards and shimmering Cadillacs, guarded the rear of the finer homes built along Market Street for that elegant half mile, but behind them were modest frame houses of the common kind I lived in, mostly inexpensive five- or six-room rentals now that there were so many people without a job or on strike at the mills. Tramps, if they had no luck with the sassy servants at the big back doors., would come to ours asking for some sort of work, and my mother would trade a raked front yard for a can of tomato soup she served with crackers, a paper spoon, and rum and Coke in a Dixie cup. The Concord grapes, which everybody’s grandmother had planted.,.-now sprawled over dilapidated arbors, and were eaten by small boys and birds. In forty years I haven’t seen a buckeye (shiny as a nigger’s nip, we said), or one of those big yellow and black butterflies too beautiful to be real and too delicate to survive, or an oriole’s nest hanging loosely from a limb like a snagged sock. Folks watched their asparagus and rhubarb with a zealous eye, and were mean and vindictive about stolen fruit. Despite our landlords, who clutched a flat purse, properties were neat and carefully kept. We were all rich in hours off, if nothing else, and everyone puttered and rooted and diddled about, even the dogs. There were some broken back steps nearby, including one of ours, with treads about as rigid as a ripe banana, a perilous condition which further bespotted the neighborhood’s wopsloppy Dalmatian name, my father said. There were a few rusty gutters, some cracked and slid shingles, and a lot of sudsy paint, but the windows were whole and well curtained, if too chintzed; gravel drives were raked, front walks stiffly broomed. Privet was the principal hedge; grass generally was coarse and crabby; most of the soft maples had crotch-rot and too many dead limbs (I knew from climbing them); while forsythias were often tangles of bloomless stems. Indeed, a shabbiness I neglected to notice, since it had come on as gradually through my miserable teens as my occluded complexion, had settled over the entire town like the smoke did when the factories were fired up. No one enjoyed our sweet, clean, sky-blue sky anymore, and complaints about soot on the sheets or furnace fumes in sweater wool went the way of that second cup of coffee. Still, sidewalks were shaded, the lawns mowed, the porches occupied by rockers and swings; summers were moist, hot, and quiet, the tar soft in the streets, their bricks warm as a cheek even well into evening.