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Susan Aizenberg Memory from Childhood after Machado High summer and the unforgiving noon sun boils the blacktop. Monotony of wind, flung grit assaulting our eyes and ears through the open car windows. We are escaping Brooklyn. Behind dark glasses, my mother wrestles the un- wieldy, ink-stained map. My father smokes and speeds, watches for patrolmen. Ash stars from his Luckies stream past my face, my bare legs stick to vinyl. I’m dreaming someplace green and cool, imagining my father won’t detour to the dog track, my mother’s face unfrowned. I am pretending the place we are headed is not where we are going, even though I know I am wrong. High summer and the unforgiving noon sun boils the blacktop. Monotony of wind, flung grit assaulting our eyes and ears through the open car windows. We are escaping Brooklyn. Red Goose . . . the lowliest of my assigned duties was the one I liked most, dusting off the sample shoes in three brightly colored sample rooms each morning . . . Tennessee Williams Still just Tom at thirty, he’s one more unskilled laborer clocking in and out six days each week, his life’s brief measure of hours lost to work numbing as the old-time sermons his mother drags him to for spite— payback for ungallant Sunday hangovers — the world’s largest shoe factory itself a vast, cacophonous machine, rough thunder of metal presses insistent as migraine, shrill of whistles that signal time to come, to go, time to eat, to stop eating, until he wants to retch, to lie for hours in a shuttered room, chilled compresses smoothing the lines from his forehead. But that’s his sister’s luxury, and so he hides each morning, as long as he dares, among the dazzling showroom mirrors and high-polished shoes, like dark exotic fruits, displayed on stacked glass terraces, dusting, dreaming a little. Was he plotting already his escape? His desertion of Rose? I like to think he was, that he imagined, perhaps, a landlocked romantic’s Cuba, conjuring brown-skinned boys in straw hats, soft lilt of Spanish — alma, mi corazon — on the air, machetes gleaming hot equatorial sun. Beyond the fields, a cool ocean, gator green. White sail boats like doves shimmering the horizon.