Just plain animals.' She starts walking again. 'Would pick her up in the middle of the living-room floor and carry her off to the bed.' She stares into the middle distance for a moment. 'He actually used to take her by physical force,' she says. Her voice drops in awe of her own memory. And Zimmerman, on the other side of us? They married her off to him when she was sixteen, she hated his guts, she used to say if he'd get killed on the job (he was a construction worker) it would be a mitzvah.' My mother stops walking. 'Remember Drucker? She used to say if she didn't smoke a cigarette while she was having intercourse with her husband she'd throw herself out the window. 'Absolutely,' she says without breaking her stride. I tell her I've always thought sexual rage was what made them so crazy. I ask if she remembers the women in that building in the Bronx. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood. And I-the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image-I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside.

Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale.

They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struckwith life, but they often acted as though they knew. They were everywhere, of course-husbands, fathers, brothers-but I remember only the women. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and twenty-one. In the Bronx 'ride the subway' was a euphemism for going to work. 'Drucker, you're a whore,' my mother says.

I told him he's gotta take a shower before he can touch me.' I know that 'he' is her husband. Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apartment. My mother locks the door and says to her, 'What are you doing here?' Mrs. Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother and I come out of our apartment onto the second-floor landing.

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