A Fair Memory

On a NYC bus hired for a trip to the 1964 World’s Fair were sophomores and juniors from a dingy, gray high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that was shaped like the letter E. It housed the middle class and the poor. I don’t remember going on any other trips, ever, with this school, but on this beautiful day we were going to Flushing, New York.

There weren’t enough seats. Some of us had to stand. I was near the well by the door, holding onto a pole facing the people in the seats nearby: one was my English teacher.
He was a young man of slight build with dark hair and intense eyes. He knew Salinger’s work well and led me to a life-long appreciation. Seated with him was his wife, so they said.
All I remember of the day to the fair was that her feet were bare
and in his lap. He was massaging them. It was an act of intimacy in public.
I didn’t know if I should look or avert my eyes. I looked.
It was the sixties.

There was a gap of years and a childhood friend whom I knew from school, from camp,
who I envied for her ability to write, for her humor and soft beauty,
appeared next to me in a writing class at C.C.N.Y. in a tattered light brown leather bomber jacket.

Somehow my English teacher was no longer married to the woman with bare feet. He was married to my friend. They became successful restaurateurs, famous, in fact, they were written about as food pioneers of nouveau cuisine in Gourmet Magazine. I wrote and she responded, a warm, joyful and fascinating written reunion. Despite all the success, all the ratings of stars and the fame, she wrote, “We do not have financial security.”

In 1997 my friend appeared again in The New York Times.
This time in the obits.
Gone from breast cancer before fifty. She left behind her two children, her two books, and her husband, the English teacher who gave me Salinger.

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