outer borough

by Yaron Dotan

Abraham didn’t know how to make your wife love you. He didn’t know how to make your kids do right. And fixing the ozone? But he could help you choose the best easy chair for your tired bones. Fitted, contoured, robust support for total relaxation, better than your chiropractor. And when it came to mattresses, he could talk springs with the best of them. No goggles–no lab coat. Just a furniture man, plain and simple. You came to him because something was missing in your home. Maybe you needed a fresh start, and in that case, he could help you with everything whatever your budget, from artfully grained walnut to waferish particle board, from fine Belgian linen to run-of-the-mill polyester, furniture made in Mexico, made in Malaysia, made in Milan, made in wherever you wanted it made. The 90s were boom times. Containerships were mooring and unmooring around the clock. Had there ever been a better time to buy furniture?

Dzykowitz & Son. That was his business.

Enter the Farooqis, Samir and Zaweela, newlywed husband and wife. Yes, Abraham was charmed by their genteel Pakistani manners and Oxford accents. That’s what those things were made for. But was that any reason to try so hard, a man of his advanced years and accomplishment, so close to retirement, like he had something to prove? They were wet behind the ears, and he had hair in his. They were worldly but not of his world. They didn’t understand the centuries-old forces at play, the deep currents that lifted them unsuspectingly over the East River and washed them onto these gritty shores.

But Abe did.

Abraham first saw them standing in front of an idling town car, gazing up over the display window, no doubt mystified by the shortage of vowels in the name on the sign. They stared at it, as if at some vanishing point, oblivious to the music thumping from the van with the Puerto Rican flag, the Polish grannies shaped like apples, and the lingering stench from the sewage treatment plant. The man wore a tan double-breasted suit with cognac-hued loafers. His wife was taller than him, slim but well built, fitted in a modest but expensive Prussian blue dress. They lowered their gaze and spotted Abraham watching through the glass. He was darker than your average European Jew, more Comanche than Ashkenazi – except that the lines of his face were creased by smiles instead of ferocity.  The woman turned back to the idling car and the driver stepped out. But Abraham was faster. He dashed outside in his sensible shoes, his palm over his heart, touching the short sleeve button-down from Dee Dee, three to a pack. “You came to the right place.” He removed his hand from his heart only to gesture at the welcome mat, crushed by the comings and goings of ten thousand shoes. “Please. There is something here for everyone.”

Samir brightened at Abe’s reckless hospitality. His face grew rounder with his smile. “The world could certainly do with more places like that.” He was naturally likable in spite of himself. “But why so far from Midtown?”

Abraham grinned back at him. “We must start somewhere.”

Zaweela looked on imperiously through dark eyes. Her velvety lips concealed a tight mouth. She had a pointed chin and a curtain of black hair falling over the pedestal of her too-long neck.

“Please,” Abraham invited, opening the door and kicking the door stop. Samir tugged at his wife, but she was as stiff as a statue. He let go and she stepped in on her own. He followed her, smiling bashfully.

Abe flipped a switch as they stepped through, turning on a hundred bulbs at once, a whole canopy of lighting fixtures, luminous fruit, magnified and refracted through dangling crystals. “My son-in-law,” he said, gesturing proudly over his head. “He has a factory across McGuiness.”

“I work across the river,” Samir said eagerly, causing his wife to flush, “at the United Nations.”

“You don’t say. Are you a diplomat?”

“No – not as a representative of my country, but as an employee of the agency itself.”

“You’re a man after my own heart,” Abraham said, reaching to shake Samir’s hand.

“We have come to look at the sofas,” Zaweela interrupted.

“Ah!” Abe clapped his hands. “I think you’ll like our selection.”

“We come at the recommendation of our doorman,” Samir added.

Oh no.

“The nametag says Tommy.”

“Sure-sure, Smolenski,” Abe said weakly, trying to smile. “I know Tommy. Tomasz.”  

Zaweela looked on skeptically. 

“He said that you were an honorable man.”

Abe lowered his chin humbly. This was the same Tommy he had so famously cracked in the nose.

Abe was sure that Tommy made a fine impression at work in his epaulettes and aiguilettes, standing tall under his peaked cap. He’d been in the business long enough. But by the time the whistle blew, and he climbed out of the Greenpoint Ave station lugging a bellyful of beer, his hat was dangerously askew. His wife Sławomira usually waited for him at the subway exit. She barely spoke English, but she was a practical woman. Keeping his uniform clean and ready for the following morning was her responsibility. If she didn’t wait for him, he hassled the Puerto Rican women; and when he was genuinely blotto, he swayed and tumbled headlong into the gutter. Then Sławomira had a real job on her hands. Oddly enough, no matter what his condition, he never failed to cross himself when he passed St. Anthony’s. Of course, none of this was Abraham’s business except that the man was also a deadbeat. He ignored every plea to pay for the by now stained and worthless mattress he had purchased once upon a fading time, till even Shirley, Abraham’s methodical and persistent wife, put the invoice to sleep. Then one summer when a blistering heatwave settled over Brooklyn, turning drywall into flypaper, Tommy came in desperate for an air conditioner to cool his top floor walkup on Box Street. Abe stiffened. There was no way he was getting burned a second time. Besides, he was preoccupied with breaking news on the TV display, a compound eye of Sanyos and Zeniths set to the same channel. Air France–Uganda–astonishing developments. The hijackers were separating Jews from gentiles. In hindsight maybe Abe shouldn’t have refused Tommy, strictly on humane grounds. Maybe he could have set an example. Or at least given him the courtesy of looking in his boozy eyes, instead of past him at the newscast – especially when the man’s throat constricted. But before Abe could isolate his better angels Tommy discarded his with a crooked smile.

“I wish those Arabs came here to collect you.”  

The man’s nose never looked the same again. Never again would he smell the mashed plantains and fried garlic wafting from Rosie’s off Norman or the melting butter and ground poppies from The Old Poland. Abe didn’t feel very good about his reaction, however deserved. Worse still, this one impulsive act triggered a ripple effect that never stopped rippling. Tommy got perverse pleasure out of recommending the store to Muslims – tell him Tommy sent you – and there was nothing Abraham could do about it. It wasn’t their fault. Most of them were greenhorns. Abe benefitted but was uneasy.

The Farooqis came for a sofa, a four-seater, not the whole megillah, not the causal sequence, not the story of fate, destiny, the once and forever clash of Pollacks and Yehudis. No one needed that. Just be grateful that a helping hand was waiting on the other side. An invisible, morally committed hand, like the one on the news today in Oslo serving tea to Arafat and Rabin. If they could bury the hatchet, then so could the rest of us. And in some dark recess of his conscience, Abe hoped that by taking care of the Farooqis he might erase the ghastly capillaries dotting Tommy’s nose.

He led the couple up the narrow stairwell to the second floor, where couches of every shape and size were arranged like cars in a parking garage.

“There has never been a better time to buy a sofa,” he declared, gesturing grandly.

The couple glanced at each other. “Ah, yes, why of course, how wonderful,” Samir responded in an unexpected falsetto.

Goodness, Abe slowly comprehended, his face reddening. This man thinks I established trust just to revert to cheap salesmanship. But that did not reflect Abe’s intention at all. He knew the history of furniture and the facts were indisputable. Why, back in the Dark Ages the best you could hope to sit on was a hard-backed piece of wood – even if you were a king. And cushions? They filled them with hay, at least according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. But now, thanks to the invention of flexible polyurethane foam, the seat conformed to you instead of the other way around.

Abraham led them through the showroom staying a step ahead – almost running away, till he brought them to the sectionals, the I, the C, and the L configurations, marvels of the modern age. What? – you think Homer and those other Greek machers sat any better? Abe had been to the Met, had seen the vases with the pictures. Those chairs were spindly nothings, glorified folding chairs. Today’s advances in furniture design allowed us to sit side by side on the same soft surface, a little miracle that we take for granted but shouldn’t. They brought people together. And what was more important than that?

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. His dogs wouldn’t stop barking. Abe glanced at the Farooqis just now catching up, Samir with a conciliatory smile.

“Why are they all beige?” Zaweela asked.

“These are just floor models. We use them to see how comfortably a customer’s spine, shoulders, and muscles rest against the cushions. I have a man who reupholsters them with any material you like, leather, silk, velvet, chenille, cotton, twill. We keep a library of colors and patterns. Believe it or not it’s cheaper that way.”

While Abraham spoke, Samir’s attention wandered from the scratches on the old linoleum tiles to the exposed wires along the cinderblock walls. He found a perverse relief in these dingy details, so different from the boutique in Soho Zaweela had taken him to the previous week. It was a white-walled high-ceilinged loft that looked like a racquet ball court. There were only three items in the showroom, halogen floor lamps that looked like minimalist sculptures, presided over by a well-heeled graduate student. The lamp Zaweela liked stood tall, a thin black pipe that incandesced at the tip like a magician’s wand. Two thousand dollars! Maybe his friend Hamid could afford such extravagances, but that’s not who she married. As it was these town cars were costing Samir an arm and a leg. Zaweela refused to take yellow taxis and the subway was out of the question. Not in her condition. That’s why he was so grateful when the doorman recommended Abraham’s store.

But there was more to it than that. This place reminded him of the shoe store Grandfather owned back home in Karachi, heavy with the smell of cured leather and rubber. The shoes were displayed on the floor, row upon row of footwear, like the shoes of the faithful outside of a mosque. He could still see Grandfather reaching for a pair with a long metal grabber so as not to disturb the arrangement.

Samir’s father, Islam Farooqi, peace be upon him, was the one who expanded, who franchised, who became the Shoe King of Zaibunissa Street. He was a force to behold, a natural salesman. It was his ability to pinch and squeeze with gentle authority, show grand compassion for each toe, to inhabit a stranger’s shoes as he stepped toward the mirror, that made the business so successful, that privileged his son with the best boarding schools – that’s where he met Hamid – then university abroad and law school.

Hamid’s father was an old-time landowner. He owned a cricket team and collected luxury automobiles. People were constantly in motion around him, nervous, as if trying to read his mind and please it, while he barely moved at all.

Father Farooqi on the other hand had shaggy eyebrows, fleshy lips, and a big belly. He was animated, overly familiar, forever spewing homespun wisdom. He felt no shame in hooking his arm around a stranger’s waist and telling him that a man without a family was like a man abandoned by God. Samir was mortified by him. In idle moments he found himself wishing his father away. The worst was that his father only meant well. Samir did his best to extinguish his feelings, managed to keep them at a low simmer, but his father’s gregarious affection never failed to add combustible fuel. Then one evening Father heard the call for Maghrib and rushed off to mosque. He prostrated himself for the Salah and never rose again. Samir was overwhelmed by crushing guilt. Father valued family, and what had Samir done at every turn but debase the coinage?

Only after Father’s death did Samir discover the power of the man’s empathy. It was an unusual quality in the upper-class circles he subsequently came to inhabit, and he swiftly put it to inspired use. It elevated his examination of the law from an intellectual exercise to an earthy, human realm of feeling, which captivated the imaginations of his jaded professors.

What wouldn’t he now do to have Father embarrass him with hokey maxims?

His revery was interrupted by the appearance of a short, jaundiced man with a drooped mustache, arms too muscular for his frame, and long dark hair rubber banded into a ponytail.

“Mr. Abe?”

“Just a moment, please,” Abraham said, leaving Zaweela with a heavy codex of patterns, “What’s up, Juan?”

“The police is here.”

“Again?”

The couple looked up, suddenly alert.

“Oh, no,” Abe laughed. “It isn’t what you think.”

“And Miss Shirley been calling you,” Juan continued. “They deliver the Whirlpools to the front of the store instead of the warehouse. Now I gotta haul them out back but I can’t find Bill.”

“Who gave the driver instructions to unload out front?”

Juan shrugged. “I checked Jaroslavski’s, but Bill’s not there.”

“Why are you so wet? Are those soap suds?”

“Somebody left the door open. The dogs run away again and hide under a truck. Miss Shirley had me get them, but they were majorly dirty with oil slick, so she had me hose them.”

Abraham sent Juan off to Little Mikey’s, the other dive, to find out if Bill was there. If he was passed out on the bar again it might be a problem. Washers were heavy, and it took more than one man to make sure they didn’t end up in the reduced-price section.

Abe turned his attention back to Samir. “Not easy to find a good delivery man.”

“Ah, yes, a fine fellow, I’m sure.”

“Only you have to be careful around him. Sensitive. You say one wrong word and off he goes, stamping across the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s a terrible inconvenience.” Abraham saw the young man’s eyes lose focus. “But let’s not distract ourselves. Tell me more about the UN. You must be so proud.”

“Well, it is only a junior-level position, but I do have ambitions. My real passion is the abolition of international aggression.”

“God bless you,” Abraham said, and shook Samir’s hand for the second time.

Zaweela’s throat reddened. She burrowed into her purse, removed a high-end Sony Walkman, unfolded the delicate headphones, placed each over a sculpted ear, and walked off playing Iron Maiden at the highest volume.

The phone started ringing again.

“I do believe it’s important work,” Samir sighed, still holding Abraham’s hand in his, “but to be honest, my days are continually encumbered by strong personalities and byzantine bureaucracy. Speaking with you today captures what I’ve always imagined the true spirit of the U.N to be.”

“Just a moment.” Abraham reached for the phone, but instead of picking up the receiver, he turned off the ringer. This brought the dog barks into sharper relief. He returned to Samir with his full, focused, caring, profoundly interested attention. “It takes real character to try and do what you are doing. I am not so naïve as to believe that human relations aren’t infinitely complex, but if we might only recognize each other’s humanity, look each other in the eyes, brother to brother, and realize that we are all hurtling through space together on this tiny planet we call home – a home, you see – I think that universal peace is not so very far behind. And let me tell you something else – there isn’t a theory or law or religion that makes this happen. It all starts with –”

“No wonder we can’t reach you,” a sharp voice interrupted. A middle-aged woman stepped in wearing mismatched plaids and meticulously misapplied makeup. “The ringer’s been turned off.”

“This is my cousin –”

“Ha-da-ssah. Pleased to meet you.”

Samir took her hand gallantly. Zaweela removed her headphones.

Hadassah looked the couple up and down and smiled. “What, did Tommy send you?”

“Leave’em alone, will ya?” Abe said, instantly annoyed.

She turned to him. “You know Sergeant LaBrut is here, right? He’s on another special assignment.”

“I know, I know,” Abe said, shaking his head. “I’m gonna have a talk with him.”

“And your wife is driving me crazy downstairs.”

Abraham smiled sheepishly at Samir. “Our Passover holiday is this evening, and there is always so much preparation involved. But it’s nothing my wife hasn’t done so many times before.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Hadassah said, “but if you didn’t keep her up all night reading entries from your encyclopedia she might be in a better mood.” She turned back to the Farooqi’s. “He drives his kids nuts too. The sign outside may say Dzykowitz & Son, but –”

“How can I help you, Hadassah?” Abraham asked.

Hadassah’s decade-long attempt at husband-rustling had concluded years earlier with bouts of depression followed by a complete nervous breakdown. Abraham’s beloved mother Raizel, of blessed memory, a woman of deep compassion, rewarded her for this with a job for life. Unfortunately, Hadassah suffered from daily lapses of judgement combined with unwavering confidence.

“Well, you know,” she said, turning back to the Farooqis, “I always go out of my way to help, but no good deed goes unpunished.”

Abraham wanted to draw Samir away from his cousin and laugh and agree that everyone had one like this in their family. But instead, he stood there scratching his elbows till his psoriasis was on fire.

“So, what happened already?”

“What happened? There was an outstanding invoice on Shirley’s desk. Week after week it sat there, and she never followed up.” She turned to Zaweela again. “I believe that obligations should never be neglected.”

“What invoice?”

“Sansevero.”

“You called Joey?”

“No – the wife.”

The color drained from Abe’s face. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

“How was I supposed to know it was for a mistress? In my opinion, if he’d given the vanity set to the wife, he wouldn’t have to seek affection elsewhere. I mean, am I right or am I right?” she asked, poking Zaweela commiseratively.

Abraham excused himself and scrambled downstairs, past the linoleum rolls stacked like Lincoln logs, past the blinking television display, past Juan, lugging a washer on a hand truck all by himself, past his two barking dogs, Kelev and Zorro. Just as he was passing through the narrow hall that led to the office the bathroom door swung open, blocking his path, and Frank LaBrut’s brass-buttoned, blue-shirted belly preceded the rest of him, obese in his police uniform.

“Mr. D., whad’y’know? You okay?”

“I need to get to the office.”

“Sure-sure. Don’t let me get in your way. But I need to talk to about the girls. You know it’s been a while since we got them new beds. We need something good, but –”

“Can’t talk now, Frank,” Abe said, looking past him.

“– just not bunkbeds this time. Heidi has a bedwetting problem and –”

Abe’s son David first brought Frank LaBrut over when they were young boys, a short-lived friendship. But Frank never stopped coming. He felt an affinity for Abraham and treated the store like a second home. Day after day, year after year. He was oppressively needy. Abe tried his best to be kind.

Then the smell of Frank’s bowel movement reached Abe’s nose like an evil mist.

“Chrissake, Frank, this is a place of business!”

Abraham squeezed past him and burst into the office, where Shirley, close to tears, was holding the receiver inches from her ear.

“Where were you?” she pleaded.

“Let me handle this.” He took the phone from her. “Joey – Abe here.”

Joey Sansevero was married to the daughter of ‘Garbage Man’ Caputo, a devoted family man with perfectly manicured fingernails. He didn’t think much of Joey, but he loved nothing more than his little Concetta. In order to please her he had given his son-in-law a cushy job in the carting business. It was no small secret that the ‘Garbage Man’ would never let his daughter suffer disgrace.

“We had an understanding,” Joey reminded Abe with not-so-muted fury.

Abraham leaned against the corner of Shirley’s desk and assured Joey that there was a solution to every problem. All he asked for was the man’s faith. Then he put Joey on hold and called Concetta. When she picked up, Abraham could tell that there was a cigarette pressed between her lips. She inhaled a deep breath of smoke when he identified himself. “Joey thinks he can hide behind you?” This was followed by a rapid outward expansion of dynamic force. Abraham knew that for the most part people just wanted to be heard, so he waited for her to exhaust her not unjustified hysteria. God knew what Hadassah was saying about him upstairs. In the meantime, he caught sight of Juan abruptly releasing the handles of his hand truck. The brand-new washer toppled over with a floor-shaking BOOM. Then Abraham watched helplessly as his deliveryman bent down to examine the tip of his high-top. He rubbed vigorously at a scuff mark that was surely visible only to himself. The appliance now lay on its side, askew, suffering internal injury. Abraham gritted his teeth. Now what? Juan might as well save himself a trip to the warehouse and deposit it in the reduced-price section. But Juan had no intention of taking it anywhere. He stood up and scampered out the door, past the haphazardly placed washers on the sidewalk, in the direction of the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Hello-o – anybody home?” It was Concetta. Abraham explained that his well-meaning cousin had made a terrible mistake. Now that he had the invoice in front of him, he could see that the purchase was actually made by the Smolenskis of Box Street, Tommy and Sławomira, not the Sanseveros, and the unfortunate error was a combination of near-sightedness and good intention. He would be more than happy to compensate her for the unintentional grief with a top-of-the-line Whirlpool.

Photo of Yaron Dotan

BIO: Yaron Dotan has a BA in English from Queens College and an MFA in Drawing from Tufts University. He spent his Dickensian childhood bouncing between Yeshivas and in his adulthood he devoted his time to integrating Yemeni immigrants into the NYC public school system. He was even on the last plane to leave a war zone. These experiences have contributed to the themes of his short stories and novels.