For some reason it was a long trip back to the Bronx. How long had I been away? I had no idea, I felt I was coming home on a furlough, like a doughboy who’d been in France for a year. Everything looked strange to me. I got off a stop early and walked a block west to Bathgate Avenue. This was the market street, everyone did their shopping here. I walked along on the crowded sidewalks between the pushcarts on the curb and the open stalls in the tenements, every one of the merchants competing with the same oranges and apples and tangerines and peaches and plums for the same prices, eight cents a pound, ten cents a pound, a nickel each, three for a dime. They wrote their prices on paper bags which they hung like flags on wooden slats behind each crate of fruit or vegetables. But that wasn’t enough. They shouted out their prices. They called Missus, look, I got the best, feel this grapefruit, fresh Georgia peaches just in. They talked they cajoled and the women shopping talked back. I felt a little better now in all this innocent, urgent, only slightly larcenous life. There was chatter and in the street the horns of trucks blowing and kids darting from one side to another and overhead from the fire escapes men who were out of work sat in their pants and ribbed undershirts and read the papers. The aristocracy of the business had the real stores where you walked in and bought your chickens still in their feathers, or your fresh fish, or your flank steak, or milk and butter and cheese, or lox and smoked whitefish and pickles. In front of the army-navy stores suits hung on hangers from the awning bars or dresses hung from the racks wheeled out the front doors, and clothes were bargains too on Bathgate, where for five dollars or seven dollars or twelve dollars toy got two pairs of pants with the jacket. I was fifteen years old and I had a hundred dollars in my pockets. I knew without question that in that precise moment of the daily life of subsidence I was the richest person on Bathgate Avenue.