It was one of the hottest days I had witnessed in New York since my arrival, during the summer of 2005. So an invitation to dinner in Brooklyn Heights, where my college friend Sara lived and grew up, was a pleasurable escape from the traffic of smells, pollutants and sticky bodies that had characterized my experience in Manhattan over the past few weeks.
I was accompanied to the dinner by another friend named Claire, a New York native, who, with her reckless dress and demeanor, characterized the Upper West Side. Both of us were dressed for the occasion in light-weight summer dresses, sandals and a pair of heels in tow, since there always seems to be a last minute invitation to doll-up in New York.
Conversation at Sara’s first turned to the weather, as it usually does at dinner parties, all of us wondering if the humidity, thick enough to cut with a knife, was a sure sign of rain, which would have soaked straight through my new white summer dress .
Sara’s mom Babette, who was cooking in the kitchen when we arrived, had put on some jazz in the parlor where several of our friends sat on love seats, velvety ones that had been loved, it seemed, for quite some time. We sipped on our drinks and conversed in our dresses, with our legs crossed, about the various opportunities that had been showered upon us this particular summer, the celebrities we had seen on the street and recent pieces we’d read in The New Yorker.
In the parlor, over the fireplace mantel, was a portrait of Sara’s family, in which Sara, as she herself later noted, was made to look red-headed, anorexic and pointy-featured, when in fact she was a shapely blonde with a button nose. Sara added that perhaps the artist hoped that the magnitude of the portrait would eclipse any notice of its inaccurate details. This room and this occasion in Sara’s home was a distinctly different environment from our unkempt apartments and drunken escapades at school. Yet it was one which brought us all closer, being in the childhood home of someone that we all held so dear.
As we finished up dinner, loud blasts began pouring through the open kitchen windows, inciting fear in everyone but Babette, who led all of us girls, some barefoot, on a mad sprint to the East River. As we ran through the streets, giddy with excitement and girlish unknowingness, other front doors started to slam open and shut and soon the streets were filled with people running down to see what we found was a fireworks show on a barge in the middle of the East River.
Suddenly the lazy tempo of the night was put into motion, marked by hoots and hollers, the sound of feet smacking the hot pavement and an adrenaline that the heat had been suppressing all over New York.
The scene was romantically small-town, and out of place in the same way that the sound of a passing train reminds you of your grandparents’ memories of the good old days. Children were being hoisted on their parents’ shoulders, cars below the terrace where we stood were pulling to the side of the road to see the show, everyone was clapping and jumping and looking at one another for approval of their excitement and childlike demeanor.
Everyone except for Sara’s mom Babette, who stood in her own world with her graying, blunt cut, chin-length hair, her worn face absent any make-up and a large grin, gripping the railing of the terrace with more vigor than any of her neighbors or their children, and bouncing strongly on the tips of her toes as she gazed upward at the fire-lit skyline.
