October 30, 1938

The night Martians landed in New Jersey my father was just across the Hudson River asking for my mother’s hand in marriage. My grandfather is supposed to have said You can have all of her. Then they drank a schnapps, toasting life, toasting my mother pacing in another room, and sat on the sofa listening to chaos rising from the street.

It was a Sunday, getting late, getting dark, and all my father could think about was why such traffic? He had to be awake by four, open his market by five, it was already late to be driving back to Brooklyn.

As he stood, someone cried out on the fire escape above. A radio crackled with static as the wind shifted and rose, making scraps of newspaper drift past the window. He thought about all my mother wanted— the honeymoon in Cuba, aproned maid, ritzy apartment on a top floor, his thick hands washed clean of blood evenunder the fingernails before he ever entered their home—and knew himself to be in an alien world. But he was thirty, she was twenty-eight, and it was time.

He walked out into the cold and saw on a stoop across the street a woman wearing ragged slippers and a mink stole kneeling in prayer as the crowd rushed east. One carried a canary in its cage. A man grabbed my father’s arm. It’s happeningright now! Tears streaked the man’s face as he said They’ve got heat rays and poisongas. You’ll never make it and my father thought, But I just did. His car was surrounded, a couple in evening wear draped across its hood, a child perched on its rear bumper holding a stuffed platypus. The Martiansare big as skyscrapers and fast as expresstrains. Jersey’s gone. They’re coming this way.

My father unlocked the door and looked back a moment to find my mother framed in her window, arms akimbo, face turned away from him as she watched neighbors flow out of sight. He knew it was going to take all night to find his slow way home.