Reviews
Goings On About Town "Sally and Lueger walked slowly down Twelfth Street. Lueger had his arm around Sally's waist. 'That was a very fine film tonight,' he was saying. 'I enjoy Deanna Durbin. Very young, fresh, sweet. Like you.'" --"Sailor off the Bremen," by Irwin Shaw "At Thirty-fourth Street, a young man got on, and slid into the seat beside the girl. 'Hello, Helpless,' he said. "'Helpless is a kind name for it,' she said." --"Apartment Hotel," by Sally Benson "He shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing La Guardia Airport and New York City and his life and his clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents. He noticed, as if for the first time, the dirty linoleum, the assassinlike chauffeurs holding up signs with other people's names on them, the snarl of wires dangling from a hole in the ceiling." --"The Failure," by Jonathan Franzen "I got into an elevator, something I had never done before, and then I was in an apartment and seated at a table, eating food just taken from a refrigerator. In Antigua, where I came from, I had always lived in a house, and my house did not have a refrigerator in it." --"Poor Visitor," by Jamaica Kincaid "After I got my hair cut at High Style 2000 on Lexington Avenue, I was hit by a car. It wasn't even a very nice vehicle, just a blue-and-white Pinto....I kept staring at the license plate: it said 867-UHH." --"Physics," by Tama Janowitz "From a striped chimney buried in the asphalt, steam shot up into the air. A few tourists were standing around it, making low Swedish sounds, amazed by our volcanic streets." --"Baster," by Jeffrey Eugenides "The thin galoot outside Gristede's had taken a powder when I got there; that meant we were no longer playing girls' rules. I hired a hack to Wanamaker's, cut over to Third, walked up toward Fourteenth. At Twelfth, a mink-faced jasper made up as a street cleaner tailed me for a block." --"Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," by S. J. Perelman