Olga Dies Dreaming(30)
Only five stops separated Olga from her neighborhood of origin. As a teenager sneaking off to clubs, or as a recent college grad commuting to her first couple of jobs, she never gave them any thought, that extra distance that separated her from the buzz of Manhattan. Yet now, from as close as downtown Brooklyn, the old neighborhood felt far. Remote. The process of getting there something that required preparation. Time blocked off. A calendar invite, even.
It was such a beautiful day, she decided to walk a bit, so she hopped off the train at Thirty-sixth Street, noticing the hipsters exiting at the same stop. (Were they hipsters, even? Olga thought. Weren’t these just yuppies by another name? For surely, with such ubiquity of style, they were no longer technically hip.) As she suspected, at the top of the subway stairs the group broke right, heading west to the waterfront mall that had sprung up there, eager for a day of poking through vintage clothes and eating poké bowls. She shook her head. How had Prieto ever thought this development would be good for the neighborhood? Olga broke left, heading uphill, east towards Fifth Avenue.
Sunset Park had two main strips of retail, each of which ran from the park, at the corner of Forty-first Street, south to Sixtieth or Sixty-fifth Street, depending on who you asked. What no one debated, though, was which belonged to whom. Fifth Avenue was the bustling Latino strip, while Eighth Avenue offered one of the best Chinatown experiences New York had to offer. Olga had grown up just off Fifth, and while some of the stores had changed and the restaurants had become more Mexican than Puerto Rican, she was comforted by how little, in the way of energy and spirit, was different. There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday. In the distance, the pale green arch of the Verrazano Bridge, its arms gracefully splaying outward in embrace, presided over it all.
She walked a block past her own to Más Que Pan, her favorite bakery in the neighborhood, its windows full of lavish buttercream cakes the likes of which her clients had surely never seen: multitiered wedding cakes with a dozen plastic bridesmaid and groomsman figurines descending spiral staircases; a Ken-like doll wearing nothing but a Speedo lying in repose atop a cake intended for a bachelorette; a Barbie doll torso wearing a bridal veil popped out of a cake, her gown fashioned from mounds of cream. This one, Olga imagined, was for a bridal shower. She ordered a coffee and a buttered roll knowing that the coffee would come with frothed hot milk, the butter whipped and sweet, and that the two things would cost her $3, the price having risen a dollar in the past decade. There was no need for this snack—the idea that there wouldn’t be food at the house was utterly ridiculous—but this was comfort food. Ritual eating she needed to do to know that she was back home.
* * *
HOME. OLGA HADN’T lived here in over fifteen years, but time did not matter. It was bigger than its physical size, this house. It housed all her grandmother’s hopes and fears for her young family on the mainland, all of her children’s dreams and sorrows, and those of her grandchildren, too. Had her grandmother laid the stones and mortar herself, this place could not embody her more. When they first came from Arecibo—Abuelita, Abuelo, and their brood—they lived in a tenement in Spanish Harlem with another family. Abuelita saved her pennies, little by little, to buy their own house, but when her husband left—fed up with this mainland experiment—she had to adjust her plans. She found the rental apartment upstairs through a woman at the garment factory where she worked. How nice it would be to have a big apartment so close to her job, all to themselves. The neighborhood was Scandinavian and Irish back then and the landlord, Mr. Olson, did not want to rent to a Puerto Rican family. That he made plain. But her grandmother charmed him: she was high-heeled and lipsticked, and she had left her four young children at home. They rented there for years, living in the unit upstairs. Little by little, buying furniture, saving more money, warming Mr. Olson to their family. When he finally decided he’d had enough of Brooklyn, enough of the Puerto Rican wave flooding Sunset Park for the factory jobs nearby, he didn’t just want to sell. He wanted Olga’s grandmother to buy it. To give her a taste of the American dream. And somehow, she did it. Little by little, she used to say, everything impossible can come to pass. So, the family moved from the rental upstairs to the owner’s unit downstairs. The first thing her grandmother did, or so everyone said, was to sit her children down and tell them that no one in their family would ever have to worry about having a roof over their head again. And no one ever did. The next thing she did, according to lore, was put on her music nice and loud so that they all could dance.