Chapter Five
Margot Ginsberg grew up in the apartment directly below the Irwin family on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. As an only child, she spent countless hours with her best friend, Gloria (Gicky), and, more often than not, Gicky’s kid brother, Morty, too. When the weather was good, they would play sidewalk games in front of the building, under the watchful eyes of all the grandmothers (Margot’s included). There was a lot of yelling in Yiddish and Italian, which the kids understood to mean the same thing—stop having fun. When the weather was bad, their play comprised sliding down banisters or messing with the buttons on the elevator. Bad weather shenanigans were often followed by a one-sided game of hide-and-seek with the super. And just when it all felt stifling, or at least redundant, Margot’s grandmother took Margot and Gicky by the hand and indoctrinated them into an entirely new world.
She taught them how to cross the Grand Concourse.
Navigating the bustling multilane thoroughfare that was loosely modeled on the Champs-élysées was a rite of passage that divided a Bronx kid’s life into before and after. When the after began, so did their future. And though Gicky was often saddled with helping Morty with his homework and having dinner ready when her dad arrived home from work, the girls had plenty of fun. There was Napoli’s pizza place, where they had their first taste of pork sausage. And the bowling alley where Gicky had her first, equally nonkosher, kiss with Bobby Benedetto. There was the corner deli where they bought their first pack of Lucky Strikes and the platform of the Jerome Avenue el train, where Gicky’s dad caught them smoking. And neither Margot nor Gicky ever forgot seeing their first R-rated movie, The Graduate, at the Loew’s on Boston Road, with its giant vertical marquee and plush red seats. It seemed nothing could get more decadent than the young Benjamin Braddock’s affair with Mrs.Robinson, until one steamy August day in 1969, when a powder-blue Plymouth Road Runner pulled up in front of their building. The Who’s “My Generation” was blasting from the radio.
Morty was still at sleepaway camp in the Catskills at the time, leaving Gicky to feel a sense of freedom she had never experienced. At eighteen, Margot and Gicky had already aged out of camp and were left to sweat out the summer in the concrete jungle. They were sitting on the stoop in front of their building, Gicky sipping a Fresca, Margot, a DrPepper, when Heshie Friedman, a kid they went to high school with, arrived in his dad’s car. His best friend, Mo Price, called them over from the passenger seat.
“We have two extra tickets to a concert in the Catskills!” Mo yelled, waving them out the window for temptation.
It worked. The girls stood up to investigate. Margot snatched one from his lanky fingers and read it out loud: “Woodstock Music and Art Fair.”
“That’s right near camp!” Gicky blurted, as if that made considering their invitation less outrageous. Margot shot it down with a foreboding look, but it didn’t work. Gicky jumped into the back seat of the car and never looked back. She wasn’t even wearing shoes.
It was in that moment that everything changed.
By the time the powder-blue Plymouth drove out of sight, Margot was already regretting her decision not to go with them. And when Gicky came home, by all counts, much cooler than when she had left, Margot regretted it even more. Trying to close the chasm that had developed between them and sick of hearing sentences that began with “At Woodstock, we…” she had a little adventure of her own.
Margot lost her virginity to her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Stanley Sacks, in the back seat of his Ford Torino. One month later, she discovered she was pregnant. Two months later, Margot and Stanley were married in the rabbi’s study. And by the time the baby was born, they had moved into a small split ranch in Valley Stream, Long Island.
Gicky took the railroad out to see Margot in her new home and painted her first-ever mural on the ceiling of the nursery as a gift for the new baby. She visited a couple of times after the baby was born, but Margot didn’t remember her visiting after that. What she remembered was how the two women, who had stayed up all night on childhood sleepovers simply because they had too much to say, spent that last visit navigating awkward silences. While Gicky regurgitated the words of activists like Abbie Hoffman and Gloria Steinem, Margot was busy quoting the famed pediatrician Dr.Spock. She even had photographic evidence of the disconnect—a picture taken in the driveway of her house. Margot was dressed in a knee-length skirt and matching blouse, her hand resting on the baby carriage. Gicky wore bell-bottoms and a halter, and her hand was raised above her head in a peace sign. Margot carried the photo with her always.
The two old friends had drifted apart quickly after that, until one Sunday in the early aughts, when fate placed them across the aisle from each other at a matinee of Wicked. They locked eyes shortly before Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth’s final duet, “For Good.” During the curtain call, they met in the middle and clung to each other. No words were necessary. The two divas onstage had said it well enough when they crooned, “Because I knew you / Because I knew you / I have been changed / For good.”
Their reunion brought a staunch promise never to let so much time pass between them again. Even though they were around fifty then, there was plenty of time left to get reacquainted. At their core, they were still the same two girls playing ring-a-levio on a Bronx sidewalk. After that, Margot began visiting Gicky every summer, first with Stan, and when he passed away, for longer stints on her own.
Margot was with Gicky in her last days at hospice, feeding her ice chips and playing sixties music on her phone. They had already spoken ad nauseam about Gicky’s estate. Leaving the house to Addison gave Gicky peace—making it the obvious choice in the end. And though Gicky never said it, Margot knew that in her heart, the thought of her brother’s daughter living there went a long way to healing the rift between the siblings. Gicky wanted to add a stipulation that Margot be allowed to continue her weeklong summer visits, but Margot declined. This would be her last trip, she thought. It would be too hard to be there without Gicky.
Standing on Gicky’s front stoop now, she pulled the picture of the two of them from her purse and spoke right to the image of her hippie friend as if she were there.
“I’ll tell her all about you,” she said, “just like I promised.”
She looked at the photo one more time, put it back in her purse, and knocked on her best friend’s front door.