I’m dolloping the cream in, and it floats, when a thought hits me: We got to leave a tip for this waiter.
I whisper to Ben, “Hey, how much money you got?”
He reaches in his pocket and fishes out a buck, a dime, and a quarter. We study them. Figure coffees for a dime each, and the total check ought to be $1.95. We’ve got $2.35 between us. We can still squeak through with bus fare if we only leave the waiter a dime, which is pretty cheap.
At that moment he comes back and refills our coffee cups and asks what we will have for dessert.
So the waiter brings the check and along with it a plate of homemade cookies. He says, “My wife make. On the house.”
We both thank him, and I look at Ben and he looks at me. I put down my dollar and he puts down a dollar and a quarter.
“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. Come again,” says the waiter.
We walk into the street, and Ben spins the lone remaining dime in the sun. I say, “Heads or tails?”
It comes up heads, so Ben keeps his own dime. He says, “We could have hung onto enough for _one_ bus fare, but that’s no use.”
“No use at all. ’Specially if it was yours.”
“Are we still heading for Fulton Street?”
We walk, threading across Manhattan and downtown. I guess it’s thirty or forty blocks, but after a good lunch it doesn’t seem too far.
You can smell the fish market when you’re still quite a ways off. It runs for a half a dozen blocks alongside the East River, with long rows of sheds divided into stores for the different wholesalers. Around on the side streets there are bars and fish restaurants. It’s too bad we don’t have Cat with us because he’d love sniffing at all the fish heads and guts and stuff on the street. Fish market business is done mostly in the morning, I guess, and now men are hosing down the streets and sweeping fish garbage up into piles. I get a guy to give me a bag and select a couple of the choicer—and cleaner—looking bits. I get a nice red snapper head and a small whole fish, looks like a mackerel. Ben acts as if fish guts make him sick, and as soon as I’ve got a couple he starts saying “Come on, come on, let’s go.”
I realize when we’re leaving that I don’t even notice the fish smell anymore. You just get used to it. We walk uptown, quite a hike, along East Broadway and across Grand and Delancey. There’s all kinds of intriguing smells wafting around here: hot breads and pickles and fish cooking. This is a real Jewish neighborhood, and you can sure tell it’s a holiday from the smell of all the dinners cooking. And lots of people are out in their best clothes gabbing together. Some of the men wear black skullcaps, and some of them have big black felt hats and long white beards. We go past a crowd gathering outside a movie house.