Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112151

The Truck Across From My Apartment Is Not A MetaphorThat Korean-war-era Army dump truck must have come while I slept. It has a parking ticketon its windshield, probably from the alternate-side rules, 8:00 to 11:00 this morning. Somethingcovered by a tarp sits in its bed, a mound of dirt or possibly bricks.I'm not sure why it didn't wake me. I sleep lightly and my bedroom faces on the street, and atruck as heavy and old as that should be loud. (I could sleep in the room at the back of theapartment—the apartment's true bedroom, where the closet is—instead of this front room, but Ineed quiet when I work more than I need uninterrupted sleep.)At two o'clock I go downstairs to check the mail. I've become like an old woman,organizing my day around that little break. On my way through the lobby I ask the super, who'staken the front off the garbage chute to poke down some unseen blockage with a pole, if heknows the story with the truck. He says no, and I carry my credit card bill and magazine renewalnotice back to my apartment.The next day there's a crack in the windshield, one I'm reasonably but not totally sure wasn't

Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112152

there before. Then nothing for three days. The truck collects another ticket but isn't towed.Maybe it's too big for the city wreckers. Meanwhile I collect two rejection letters and a check from my best publishing-house client for the last book I'd copyedited. Much needed but still toosmall. The rejection letters are for my foodless stories. I write stories with food in them that aresometimes published, but the stories without food never are.The food stories started because a friend of mine, also a writer, likes to complain. He saysthat the only way to get published is to write about your immigrant parents or grandparents, orabout how your parents or grandparents at least migrated from somewhere else in the country,like the South, or rural New England. And it especially helps, he says, if you throw in handed-down recipes and big family meals at holidays. As a lark we each wrote one, and mine wasprinted. And then another one was as well, and another, and another. The only four acceptanceletters I've ever gotten.I'd have liked to keep on looking down on editors' tastes, especially since they wereapparently so easy to manipulate. But lately I couldn't help suspecting that the magazines wereright, that the food stories were better than my usual. Maybe the discipline of a voice, a theme,and an organizing principle not my own had freed me, the way the structure of a sonnet or avillanelle could do for a poet. If that was true it was awfully depressing, because I don't feelanything for the food stories' characters. If anything I dislike them a little. They're all youngJewish women rediscovering their identities through borscht and matzah brei, and they're allinsipid. They're trapped in dilemmas whose ultimate resolutions, achieved some time after a

Joshua Malbin307 12

St. Apt. 8Brooklyn NY 112153

final, portentous period, bore me, and I find their fascination with their heritage an obviousattempt to deflect certain basic existential questions into bubbling pots of tsimmes andcomforting childhood memories. They also make me feel guilty, because after all, to make themI mine my own Jewish childhood for details. I'd rather they weren't my best creations.Nevertheless, I

proud of them; it's impossible not to be at least a little proud of anything Imade.The next street-cleaning morning I go to the window to see whether my truck has gotten athird ticket, and it's gone. The police must have finally called in one of those big wreckers madefor semis.A minute later, though, I see that's it's only moved to the other side of the street. It's off tothe right now, facing away, and I can see into the bed. It is bricks under that tarp, a cubic stack of them.Again I can't understand how I could have slept through that 50-year-old engine startingright under my window, and through all the gear-gnashing back-and-forth when it turned aroundand reparked. I also can't understand how the driver could have been so lucky as to findalternate-side parking for that behemoth, in this neighborhood, on the night before sweeping.Three days later the truck switches again, back to its original side of the street, and then oncemore a few days after that. I take my latest copyediting job, a new selection of the letters of D.H.Lawrence, to my bedroom, so I can sit on the bed and watch for the truck's owner. I still go to