(18 of 26)
Benjamin, age 8, climbs up into the kitchen sink for his eve- ning bath, as his sister Daisy climbs out. Rose throws a towel over Daisy, shampoos Benjamin, tells Davey and Joey to get pajamas on the twins.
"I got two dogs too. Out back. You can see 'em at the window. Hear 'em too. Hah. That's Rocky and that's Bam Bam. Bam Bam will not let you near my kids."
The four smaller children file in from the outer room to present themselves to their mother before going to bed. They stall, ask for snacks. Benjamin whines about a cut finger.
"Benjamin, I'm going to shock you," Rose tells him. "I believe you're going to live."
Rose's apartment has two rooms, the kitchen and an all-purpose room where the seven of them sleep. Benjamin, Daisy and Sabrina sleep in the bed. Davey, Joey and Dino sleep on the floor. Rose takes the couch. They have no phone; the bathtub leaks; the ceiling is splotched with water stains. Yet this is the best place they've ever had. For a month before this, Rose and the children lived in a car, and bathing was carried out in Rose's girlfriend's apartment. Compared with then, Rose says, the sky's the limit these days. The kids go to school regularly, and they take part in the Center for Family Life's after- school programs. Rose too gets help from the center, mostly advice in practical things, like her welfare payments. She goes to school now too, to learn how to be a beautician. "I even signed up the girls for ballet lessons." When she smiles she looks baby-tough, like an East Side Kid from the movies of the 1930s. A plate hung above the kitchen door reads GOD BLESS THIS LOUSY APARTMENT.
She glowers at the lot of them: "You're getting on my nerves, and you know what that means. Yesterday I went to school without my homework done. O.K. ? And I got yelled at just like youse would get yelled at. Now I'm telling you, not asking you. Get in bed and do not move. Good night."
She pushes aside a garbage bag full of laundry and plonks down on a chair, warily eyeing the kitchen door. "It isn't paradise, but they don't go hungry. When I was a kid, I didn't eat the best either. I was raised on french fries and macaroni because that's what my mother could afford. I loved that stuff. I love it today. And I'm a healthy little woman. And macaroni is good. I say that because (she raises her voice deliberately to be heard in the next room) some of my kids with silver spoons in their mouth think that macaroni three or four times a week is too much." She grins and winks.
"My father died when I was nine. I lived with him in Coney Island. I don't know why I lived with my father and not my mother. He couldn't take care of me, and I remember eating hero sandwiches every day from the luncheonette, and my clothes were wrinkly, smelly, in the corner with mess and garbage. Anyway, he dies when I was nine." She glares at the door. "Sabrina, that's enough!
"My mother was sickly, very sickly, with cataracts on her eyes, diabetes, heart trouble. Name it, she had it. I played hooky a lot. I wasn't on drugs or nothin', so she didn't care. In junior high, I told my mother I didn't want to go to school anymore. The school was going to throw me out anyway. They said I was taking space. And I couldn't read, I couldn't spell. I still can't read good or spell good.