Heart of Glass Read Free

only just being whispered about, and the baths were still going strong. The corner of St. Mark’s and Third Avenue seemed to belong to the Ramones—four hunched-over, pale guys dressed identically in white T’s, jeans, leather jackets, and black high-top sneakers. They were there all the time that fall, their dark hair long over their eyes, which were hidden behind sunglasses—as if they were vampires shutting out the light of day.
    I’d stopped at the Kiev, a grimy Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue, to pick up a bagel and a coffee to go for breakfast during the screening. I had already scoped out other inexpensive restaurants in the neighborhood. The Veselka, a Polish place a few blocks away, had huge bowls of borscht or chicken noodle soup that came with big buttered pieces of challah that would easily fill you up for the whole day. The Dojo, which I walked by on my way to school on Eighth Street, had a brown rice and vegetable plate that came with a delicious salmon-colored tahini dressing for a couple of dollars. I was a girl on a budget but quickly discovered I could eat well and cheaply on the Lower East Side. The simple food in heavy rotation became my version of a normal family’s weekly menu, butinstead of Meat Loaf Monday and Taco Tuesday, it was Tahini Thursday and Pickle Soup Sunday. The flavors and smells, chipped china, and fat-­fingered waitresses were the grandparents’ house and family dinner I’d never known growing up.
    Crossing on Eighth Street over Lafayette and Broadway, I walked past the huge, black, metal cube sculpture in Astor Place that groaned as you spun it around on its axis. In the morning, the cube was surrounded by backpacking traveling kids in their sleeping bags, with a few homeless people strewn about snoozing. This encampment was usually broken up by the police midmorning, only to return later at night, after the drunk kids wandered home.
    I cut down University Place. The theater where my class was held was on the far side of Washington SquarePark. Passing the elegant town houses with their gated stone staircases and shiny doors flanked by pristine window boxes of artfully arranged geraniums and ferns, I felt as if I were entering an Edith Wharton novel. But when I crossed the street and walked under the huge marble archway into the park, I left the genteel 1800s behind and entered a gritty, nefarious world straight out of Serpico . The lawns were bald and brown, trampled by stoned drug dealers and desperate addicts looking for a fix. Busking musicians, young couples making out, old men playing chess, and groups of black kids beating on upside-down white buckets for donations rounded out the park regulars. The rest of us—students, professors, and old Greenwich Village retirees—clutched our bags and moved swiftly across the sidewalks, trying not to stare. At night, we’d just walk around the park.
    When I reached the south side of the square, I dashed up the stone steps to Vanderbilt Hall, where the movie theater was. I pushed the heavy swinging door open and felt an immediate calm. The familiar hush of the auditorium seemed to stop time. I settled into a shabby red-velvet seat in the back and waited for the lights to go down. It made me think of sitting in the audience with my sister when we were little, at Lincoln Center or the West End of London, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, squeezing hands until the moment darkness slowly fell and the show— The Nutcracker or Mame or a Shakespeare play our father was acting in—began.
    â€œKeep your eyes peeled on the lights,” we’d tell each other as we waited for Daddy to come onstage as Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or as Trinculo in The Tempest .
    My parents had split up when I was seven. My father was an actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and my mother left him for one of the founders, a wealthy producer named Oliver Rea. We lived in the Dakota and on Park