The Matzo Ball Heiress Read Online Free PDF Page B

on Norfolk Street is now the nightclub Tonic. The owners have turned the old wine kegs into booths for groovy customers like Sean Lennon and the aging hipsters from Sonic Youth.
    My cab also passes Lansky, a restaurant in a former speakeasy named after Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. When the restaurant had just opened, in a red-hot incarnation called Lansky Lounge, it was ridiculously hard to find. It was hidden in the ass end of Ratner’s, the legendary dairy restaurant where generations of my kin ordered cherry and cheese blintzes.
    In those embryonic days, the gossip columns often ran beautiful-people shots of Madonna at Lansky Lounge, slumming it downtown, sipping a pink cosmopolitan. Lansky Lounge’s popularity soon eclipsed Ratner’s and for maximum profit, Ratner’s has shut and the bar has taken over, graduating into Lansky, a swanky place that fills both of the old spaces. For a while, the new owners tried to keep the two establishments going so that the older customers would still come to spend money. They changed Ratner’s menu, from kosher to “kosher-style,” a fuzzy hyphenation that means they shed rabbinical supervision. Dairy-only Ratner’s is, or should I say was, a BIG tradition, and no one who cares about such things was pleased by the bastardized version, not even my usually apathetic mother. She called in shock when a neighbor told her about the changes: Ratner’s is selling steaks! I had to laugh, considering that she’s not even remotely kosher. A presidential election determined by faulty polling machines, a mayoral election bought by a billionaire and a war that in my humble documentarian opinion was more about protecting our oil source than securing human rights—none of that elicited even a grunt out of her. But you would think they tore down Yankee Stadium the way Mom carried on about the addition of meat at Ratner’s.
    The cab lets me out in front of our factory, and when I put away my wallet I stroll over toward Upsy Daisy, a vintage boutique a few doors down. An adorable keyhole-neckline polka-dot dress in the window display has caught my eye. Behind the glass, a salesclerk in blond pigtails and a faded Madonna T-shirt (“Like a Virgin” era) is desperately trying to catch my eye through the glass door, pointing at a brown disco boot. She looks panicked, like she’s been held up—but I don’t see any customers inside.
    I push open the door to check. “Are you okay in here?”
    “Ohmi- gawd . Help me, please!” My grandfather’s lingo, of the Dem bums and Toidy-toid and Toid variety, has largely gone the way of Ye Olde English language, but so far the new century has brought little change to the mall-girl lilt that first reared its cartoonish head back in the mid 1980s.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “A rat’s in, like, one of the Gucci boots. Crawled in when the last customer was here.”
    “Why don’t you tip it out?”
    “Are you kidding? What if it bites? Rabies!”
    Rodents have never agitated me. When your family owns a food factory, an encounter with a furry visitor is no big news. I’d place a sure bet that the rat crawled over from the factory and into the boutique. I say a silent prayer to the Rodent Goddess (M-Isis?) that Steve Meyers doesn’t see any critters when we do our interview. Greenblotz factory rats are especially robust from the abundance of flour to feed on. Dad used to call them “Elvis” rats: they’ve got such heft that their hips sway from side to side. The factory has two fat and happy cats helping in the crusade against rodents: pitch-black Moses, and the tabby, Elijah.
    “Open the door,” I say authoritatively, and the terrified girl gladly complies. Or is she a woman still peddling cutesiness past the age of twenty-five? With those pigtails, it’s hard to tell.
    I grab the boot, run out to the street and tip it by the lone oak tree in front of the store, the one with a painted-green wooden-plank border that my grandfather planted as a