Saturday I meet my mother for Christmas Eve brunch at a spot she likes in SoHo, but when Evelyn lights up a cigarette it’s as if she pulled out a machine gun and shot the waiter. She’s forgotten that smoking is banned in most restaurants in the city, and she’s pissed as hell. I silently chant shanaishwaraya as we try another restaurant, and then another, and my mother gets angrier and angrier. Finally we walk over to an Italian place on MacDougal Street, Antonio’s, that’s small enough to be exempt from the new laws. My mother has been going to Antonio’s since she first moved to Manhattan and when the owner, Anthony, sees us he gets up from his table by the bar, where he’s flipping through a fat stack of papers and drinking an espresso, to meet us at the door. Anthony is his given name, and he was born on Mulberry Street; Antonio, the happy-go-lucky Italian with his heavy Sicilian accent, is a role he plays for the tourists When I was a girl my mother and I used to come here a lot, and I always hoped that she and Anthony would get married one day. No such luck. He gives Evelyn and me each a peck on the cheek, leads us to a table, and sits down with us
“What’s new?” he asks my mother
“This city is going straight to hell,” my mother says, lighting up “You can’t even light a fucking cigarette without getting arrested anymore.”
“Tell me about it,” says Anthony. “Everything’s different now. Remember that cafe on Greenwich Avenue, the Peacock? Gone It’s an Old Navy now.”
“Remember the tailor, over on Seventh Avenue, the Chinese guy?” says my mother “Gone. It’s a head shop now ”
I tell them about the ritzy restaurant Chloe took me to in Chelsea yesterday
“Nah,” says Anthony. “On that block? What about the hookers?”
“There are no hookers in Manhattan anymore,” says my mother. “I wonder what happened to those girls?”
“You should see where Tony lives,” says Anthony.
“He’s the oldest?” I ask.
Anthony nods “He’s a little older than you, he’s thirty-five now. He tells me he’s getting an apartment in Green-point, in Brooklyn. I tell him he’s crazy. I actually said to him, if this is the best you can afford, tell me, I’ll help you out. So I go over to visit, they’ve got everything over there! The coffee houses, fancy shops, a big organic market. You wouldn’t believe it Guess what he’s paying?”
My mother and I look at him, anticipating. Anthony draws out the moment before exploding with the answer.
“Two thousand dollars a month!”
“Unbelievable!”
“That’s nuts!”
Anthony’s excited now “We used to have neighborhoods in this city,” he says. “Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem, Carnegie Hill. Each one was like its own little world You could could turn a corner and find yourself in another city. You could walk around and find maybe a cafe, maybe a bookstore, a butcher shop, each one a treasure. Maybe a little park where parents would take the kids, walk the dogs ”
“Manhattan’s got three neighborhoods left,” says Evelyn, “downtown, uptown, and up above that You got Brooklyn, you got Queens, you got the Bronx, and Staten Island, they should secede already. There’s no surprises left in this city. They’ve got every square inch mapped out and targeted for corporate doggie boutiques. Now neighborhoods have names made up by real-estate agents: NoLita. What the fuck is that? It’s like it happened overnight; one day you had a neighborhood, a place where people knew each other, where they raised their children, where you bought groceries. Now every house in the city has been converted to co-op condominium apartments for NYU graduates. There’s no children in Manhattan anymore. Every square block has a nightclub and one of those Thai restaurants ”
“When I opened this place,” says Anthony, “people thought I was crazy for asking for one dollar for a cappuccino. This is nineteen sixty-five Last week, I’ve got a day off, I go into one of these coffee bars they’ve got now. What do you think these people want for a regular cup of coffee? What do you think you’re gonna pay?”
“One-fifty,” guesses Evelyn.
“Two dollars,” I bet
Anthony explodes “Two dollars and twenty-five cents! For a regular coffee!”
“Unbelievable!”
“That’s nuts!”
“What do you have in this city now?” Evelyn asks. Her voice rises she’s getting into the spirit now. “A goddamn Gap and a Starfuck on every corner. A bookstore the size of a city block And these people, let me tell you, these people today don’t even read. These people, they get hopped up on Mocha-fucking-chinos and go buy sweatshirts at Old Navy. They run around speed-reading their Jackie Grisham and their John Collins. They read about some asshole who climbed to the top of Mount Everest and took a crap up there. We used to read Nelson Algren, we read Flannery O’Connor Nabokov. Philip Roth, and Henry Roth, too. We read Frederick Exley and Norman Mailer, and if we were lucky we drank with them down in the Village.”
“This city is shot to shit, now,” says Anthony. “It’s going straight to hell in a handbag. Enough already. I make myself crazy. How’s life, sweetheart?”
I have the same fantasy of my mother and Anthony getting married. No one else calls her sweetheart A waiter comes over with fresh orange juice, on the house. We both order Eggs Florentine and coffee.
“Eh. My health isn’t so good,” she tells him. “I’m thinking I might retire soon.”
It’s like a blow to the head I can’t believe what I’m hearing “Mom, you didn’t tell me ”
“I’m telling you now,” she says softly, looking straight ahead.
“What’s wrong with your health?” asks Anthony
“My memory,” she says “It’s shot.”
“So, what’s the doctor say?” he asks her.
Evelyn waves a hand in front of her face. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“They never know,” says Anthony. “But retire? What are you gonna do with yourself?”
“I don’t know. Read. Go to movies. See my daughter.” She reaches over and takes my hand. Another shock.
“You’re never gonna retire,” says Anthony “Never.” He stand up and gives us each another kiss and a “Merry Christmas” before he heads back to his office behind the kitchen. As soon as he leaves the waiter arrives with our brunch as if on cue.
“So,” I say, cutting into my English muffin, “since when are you retiring?”
“I don’t know I’m not positive yet. Did I tell you I have an interview next month? It’s for The New York Times Magazine Some hotshot kid is doing it, he wrote that book, Silver something ”
“Yeah I know it Silver Moon. You’re not going to like him”
“Why?”
“He’s an investment banker who wrote a novel They’re really pushing it. I’ve got a stack of Silver Moon coffee mugs on my desk at work ”
“Anyway, I want you to come to the interview with me. I want someone to, you know In case I forget things. It’s in January sometime. So I want to decide before then.”
“You’re really going to retire?”
“It has to happen sometime “ Again she waves her hand in front of her face and that’s the end of the conversation. We spend the rest of brunch talking about work, about books that we’ve read, about people we know “You remember Nancy Sherman, she used to work for GV? You remember her. She’s got a new book coming out, a biography of Oscar Wilde It’s good, you ought to read it.”
“You remember Carol Kenton, she lived over on Tenth Street? We used to play together when we were kids, you remember. She pushed me off the swing once and I cut my knee She’s in jail now, I saw it in the paper yesterday. She held up a liquor store on the Jersey Turnpike.”
After brunch we go back to her apartment on Commerce Street and exchange Christmas gifts My mother gives me a black angora cardigan from agnès b. and a bottle of rose bubble bath. I give her a black lambswool cardigan from Macy’s and a bar of lilac soap We each pretend to be surprised and completely, profoundly, thrilled