The FDR Drive
When I was seven-months pregnant I flew to Florida for a friend’s wedding. After my return flight to JFK, I hopped in a cab to return home. Barreling up the FDR Drive, the cabbie was full of advice about my forthcoming baby. He told me that he and his wife had known each other their whole lives. They had been married for twenty-four years and had six kids.
I said, “Wow! Six kids, that’s a lot!”
He agreed and joked that he should have developed a hobby.
I said, “Or at least put a television in the bedroom.”
He said, “Oh, we have one. It’s on the ceiling.”
Essex Street
My Aunt Zerrin came from Turkey in July to be with me for the birth of my daughter. As a middle school teacher, she was endlessly inquisitive.
In the days before I gave birth, we visited many sites around Manhattan like the Museum of Natural History, Rockefeller Center, and the United Nations. Wherever we went, I had to translate since she was curious about everything and wanted to learn a little English.
One day, I brought her to the Tenement Museum, followed by a delicious lunch at Katz’s Delicatessen. After that, we just walked around the Lower East Side, hoping to burn off some of those pastrami calories.
We were on the corner of Essex Street and Delancey, across the street from the old Essex Street Retail Market. It was still open for business, though from the outside it looked half derelict and definitely dicey. I could see my aunt staring at the large sign on the side of the building; she was obviously trying to read it, to make sense of the words. But since the sign was so old, some of the letters were missing. Instead of reading “ESSEX STREET RETAIL MARKET,” it actually read:
“SEX STREET TAIL MARKET”
She must have come to some kind of conclusion about this; she pointed at the run-down building, and asked, “Orada neler olduğunu gerçekten görmek isterim,” which is something like:
“I’d really like to see what’s going on in there!”
Pitt Street
It was late August, and we were ten-days past the baby’s due date.
To escape the heat of our apartment, my husband and I decided to go for a walk and maybe get an ice cream. On our way out we passed the super who was trying to fix our broken intercom system.
He asked how we were doing, and I said I was craving a sweet treat, so we were off to find something yummy. He wished us luck and went on with his work.
We decided to walk around the Pitt Street Pool before finding some place for the ice cream. After a few laps, the long-awaited labor pains started. Few taxis could be found cruising around streets like Attorney or Ridge, so we walked over to First Avenue to hail a yellow taxi to take us up to the NYU Medical Center.
I labored overnight and our daughter was born early the next morning.
My best friend Meredith came bearing gifts of flowers and a box of pop tarts; later in the middle of the night those pop tarts came in handy and indeed, nothing else tasted quite so good and satisfying as that midnight snack with my little girl by my side.
Leaving the hospital the next morning, we hailed another yellow taxi and headed back down to Third Street.
Pulling up in front of our building, we got out of the cab only to see the super in the same exact spot. He was STILL working on the intercom system.
He took one look at the baby in the infant car seat and said, “Oh, I see you found your sweet treat!”
*****
Filiz Turhan’s work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, The North American Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. She has been a professor of English at a Community College for a really long time; like many of her students, she is a first-gen American and was a first-gen college student. Her academic publications explore the topics of Romantic-era Orientalism and Contemporary World Literature.
