The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
with butter and ketchup. Fortunately, Allen Avenue caters to ambitious
bumblers like me.
There exists no consensus on when or whether the Allen Avenue area of
Carroll Hill tipped from being an authentic Italian-American enclave in
Wickenden to being merely a collection of Italian food stores, wine stores,
and wise-guy restaurants catering principally to tourists and crosstown shoppers.
Ask a resident—one of the dwindling number of second- or thirdgeneration
Carroll Hillers—and you’re as likely to get a lament as you will a
defense; ask any other Wickenden resident and he’ll probably tell you that it
was really something when he was a kid, but now only red-sauce suckers and
zoot-suit wannabes hang out there.
Of those two I consider myself more of a red-sauce sucker, which is how
I found myself in Ciavetti’s Pork Store buying some fresh arrabbiata sauce,
sweet sausage, ravioli filled with fresh salted mozzarella, two handfuls of
sweet basil, and two bottles of Montepulciano.
“You buying for a girl?” asked the old lady with the eye gleam and the
faded-beauty half smile behind the counter.
“Yes, I am,” I said proudly.
“Yes. You see, I always can tell. You gotta little bounce when you walk,
and your eyes got the light. Cook this for her, easy-easy, and she gonna love
you forever.”
“paul?” a familiar voice called down from a window above my car. “What
are you doing here?”
I looked up and saw Mia leaning out of an oriel window that protruded
from the roof of the powder blue house. She had her hair pulled back with a
rubber band and a pencil through it, like she always did when she was working.
She was wearing a Wickenden sweatshirt and glasses, which she never wore
out of the house. “Hey there,” I replied. “Since when did you live down here?”
“Since my old place was bought. The new landlord painted the front of the
house and doubled the rent, so we left. Hang on a sec, I’ll come right down.”
“No, I don’t have much—” But she had already shut the window. I tried
to look cool and disaffected by leaning against my car nonchalantly, but in
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