He unlocked a door and led her inside. She realized she was getting the dining room, and it was huge, at least compared to what she was used to.
“You take this room. There’s other tenants in the back room. You share the bathroom. One bathroom on each floor. Every first of the month, I’ll come collect the rent. You’re late, you’re out.”
The tables were gone, and the walls needed a paint job, but even with that one boarded window, the light was marvelous.
“So what happened to the window?”
“I’ll fix it later.”
“Why’d you close the restaurant?”
“You people don’t eat Chinese food.”
“Whatchu talking about?” she exclaimed, sitting down on her suitcase. “I love Chinese food. Those egg rolls? The best food I ever tasted!”
Paying her no attention, he scrunched down on the floor to examine a stain on the wood, then straightened himself and dusted off his hands.
“No dogs, no cats—I don’t want animals damaging the wood.” He motioned her over to the kitchen appliances. “You turn the lights out when you go to work and you make sure the faucets are off. Water’s not cheap. Make sure the gas is off when you leave the house. The ceiling fan works, but don’t keep it on the first setting. I don’t want the ceiling to fall down.”
He suddenly turned to look at her, his narrow eyes narrowing farther.
“You got kids?”
She closed her lips, breathed out through her nose.
“Not one child,” she replied dryly.
“No guests. I don’t want to hear about guys coming in and out all day and night. You’ll get me in trouble with the city.”
“Sir, I can assure you, there won’t be no men.”
The two waited as the train screeched into the station, and then Mr. Wong put the keys on the kitchen counter and descended the stairs without a nod goodbye.
In any case, Lina wasn’t giving up the apartment. She would paint the walls. Yellow and pink, fruit salad colors. She lugged the rest of her stuff up the stairs, then took a slower, self-guided tour of the apartment. On the back of the door, she found a red knot with a long tail of silk tassels, and under the kitchen sink, a pot shaped like the bell of a horn. In the bathroom, there was a wall calendar. Someone had etched five little dots between March 2 and March 7, and then another five dots twenty-eight days later, from April 4 to April 9. For several minutes, Lina stared at the dots. Then she realized it was a language she knew, a language known to half the world.
Mr. Wong had a sister, or a wife.
As she danced around the apartment and planned out her wall murals, she stubbed her toe on a piece of plastic: a tiny, white-clad, yellow-skinned nurse doll with a medical cross on her removable cap and a head that could be rotated through a series of facial expressions.
She opened her suitcase, threw off the dress, unhooked her bra, and changed into her paint-splotched jeans and Danny’s T-shirt—her baby brother was exactly her height, and she often stole his clothes.
Her next-door neighbor didn’t answer the door, but she managed to introduce herself to the two households on the top floor and the two on the bottom. In 3R lived fortysomething-year-old siblings, Sam and Sylvia Jenkins, both fresh up from Florida and on the superstitious side—they didn’t like the black cat that climbed up the fire escape and peeked in the window. In 3L lived old Patricia Taylor, who wasn’t fretting over no fire escape cats, and her six grandchildren, who enjoyed feeding the cats one another’s hash browns. On floor one, Lina met Harry Eugene, a WWII veteran with an amazing memory, and also John Coleman, “Daddy J,” from Baltimore. She offered a hand to everyone.
Up and down the sidewalks of Livonia, trash bags formed a human-high barricade—it had been over a week since the Sanitation Department had acknowledged Brownsville’s existence. She waved to a group of children playing stoopball, then at the old man in the window whom everyone called Jewish Pops, since he was one of the few left.
A white lady in a tan dress suit knocked insistently on the Garcia family window at 80 Livonia. Child welfare, Lina figured. She hoped the woman had not come to break them up. It had almost happened to the Rodriguez Armstrongs back in East Harlem, about a dozen years earlier. Lina had answered a few questions, then realized what they wanted and slammed the door in the social service worker’s face.
Even if Evelina had her issues, Lina thought, those kids were better off in the reach of people like Mr. Angel Rivera of the Puerto Rican Organization of Brownsville and East New York, or like Ms. Delores Torres from Christians and Jews United for Social Action.
But the Garcias didn’t answer the door, and the white woman made a mark in her file and descended the stoop. Lina took a deep breath and continued on her way to Mr. Dachensky’s deli.
When she reached it, there were three kids trying to insert rocks into the gumball machines. She gave them quarters, then headed down the produce aisle.
“Cabbage?” said Mr. Dachensky as he rang up her items. “I thought you said you hated cabbage.”
Mr. Dachensky liked to tease her.
“No, sir, I like the taste,” she corrected. “It’s the shape that’s the problem. Like I’m cooking someone’s head!”
