Bridge of Sighs

kind of store that wouldn’t make a pauper of you the first moment your attention slipped.
    “You can have it,” Sarah said, “if you want.”
    “But you worked so hard on it,” my mother objected.
    “It’s your store,” Sarah said.
    My mother must’ve seen that Sarah was proud of the drawing and also that she wanted us to have it. “How about we put it in a frame and hang it up by the register where everybody can see it? That way, when you visit, you can see it, too.”
    The store got busy then, so it was later that afternoon, long after Sarah was gone, that I finally had a chance to inspect the finished product and see that she’d added people to the drawing. A female figure, clearly my mother, could be seen bending over to slip a salad bowl into the meat case, the door to which was held open by Uncle Dec, recognizable by his shiny black hair. The man behind the register, by the bearlike slope of his big shoulders, was obviously my father. Also, she’d given Ikey’s some business, an idea she probably got from me. The day before, sitting at the Woolworth’s counter, I’d confessed our continuing anxieties that Ikey’s might fail, so she’d given us three customers. The nearest, his back to the viewer, was about to enter the store, and his opening the door gave us that privileged glimpse inside. The two people at the register, a boy and a girl, seemed to be completing a purchase. Only when I looked closer did I realize they were Sarah and me. I was identified with a few tiny strokes expertly representing the plaid shirt I was wearing that day, whereas Sarah, half a head shorter, was identifiable by her dark, curly hair. On closer inspection, I saw that we were holding hands.
    She had drawn us together. Which was how I learned that we were.
             
     
    T HAT DRAWING STILL EXISTS. As promised, my mother got it framed, though my father insisted that mine be framed as well, so people could compare. He thought mine was every bit as worthy, a minority view. Both renderings hung above the register at Ikey Lubin’s for years, and Sarah and I have marveled more than once at how she captured in an hour or two our world as it then existed. After the fact, of course, it seemed not just a drawing but a prophecy. In her innocent depiction, Ikey’s seemed prosperous, and for a while it was. For most of the next four years, it appeared our store would succeed, an illusion fostered in part by the failure of so many other neighborhood markets, among them Tommy Flynn’s, whereas we had found our niche. I always maintain that Ikey’s never failed, not really. It was our luck that did, and that only for a time.
    Sarah’s drawing of this happy, cheerful, hopeful place also marked some sort of passage, at least for me. More than anything else, it meant the end of junior high’s worst terrors and social anxieties. I wasn’t the only one who felt this change. The first time I ever really saw Sarah was in the theater manager’s office, where she had been the very picture of fear, and I sometimes think she began to conquer that fear the day she drew herself as a member of our family, for that was what she quickly became. No surprise, she was a favorite of my father’s. I remember his eyes filling when I told him what Sarah had said about him—that he was good all the way down. Uncle Dec teased her unmercifully, like he did every female, reminding her that he wasn’t as old as he looked, and one day, who knew?
    I could tell my mother was fond of Sarah, too, though she was also wary. We were young, she reminded us all through high school. It was great that we were such good friends, but the world was large and we shouldn’t discount that just because we as yet had no notion of it. Sometimes, when Sarah and I were together, I caught my mother studying us—or was it just me?—with perplexed concern. I couldn’t imagine what caused this, which may be why it troubled me. Sarah’s father never overtly objected to our friendship, but I could tell Sarah had been right. He wasn’t fond of me. When I told my mother, she said it was probably nothing personal, that no boy would ever be good enough for his little girl. He was a Jewish father, and I shouldn’t let his opinion worry me. Somehow, though, he’d learned my nickname, and he enjoyed calling me by it, always in an ironic, joking way, but still.
    By the end of eighth grade Sarah and I were, just as she’d portrayed us, together and inseparable. It