If you get off the N train — and you will be sure not to take the W, because although it runs along the same tracks it only stops at certain stations and nine times out of ten will whisk you right past where you need to be in a blur of black-and-white signposts and molded plastic seats, and you will be sure also not to be confused when an old New Yorker calls it the “el,” because that’s short for elevated, not L train — if you get off the N train at Broadway in Astoria, a neighborhood of Queens, which is a borough of New York City (go back to that old New Yorker who still calls the above-street-level trains els and ask why these cities within the city — Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island — are called boroughs, and while you’re at it, ask why only the Bronx gets its own article, for these 2 things are lovely simple mysteries that should be unraveled), if you get off this train at this subway stop, you have to make your way down two stories of clanging metal stairs to an intersection of constant shade. Most often the sky above you, if you edge out from under the el to see it — it somehow didn’t actually feel any closer when you were up on the windy platform — is gray, though it could be anything from a 103-degree muggy gray to a slushy just-below-freezing gray depending on the time of year. It all looks more or less the same, and fits the scene at street level as if that bit of sky were specially tailored for the bit of earth over which it hovers. That bit of earth is littered with fliers for the furniture store two blocks over and smells of fresh-baked everything from Parisi Brothers’ Bakery on the corner, which doesn’t look like much but smells like a great deal at any time of day.

If you walk west on Broadway you will probably want to start out on the north side of the street, because that’s where Parisi’s is, and a block after Parisi’s your nose will lead you to Dino’s Pizzeria and further ecstasy of the olfactory variety (purchasable for only $1.75 a slice, $8.00 for the pie), but if you can ignore the smells of the place and brave the sporadic traffic to cross over to the south side of Broadway, you will walk past the red and yellow C-Mart grocery store before too long. Sitting on a blue plastic milk crate outside will be a bearded, vested, and very polite homeless man. Sometimes he races matchbox cars against the foot traffic, sometimes tells riddles, and once, at least, proposed to you as you walked past, reassuring you of the quality of your future life together with the four simple words that all young lovers really want to hear: “I have food stamps!”

If you can resist such a tempting proposal and keep walking, you will go down blocks that switch between shabby industrial — graffitied drug stores, dental offices, coupon-strewn supermarkets, pizzerias — and residential — short, squat stucco apartment buildings, brownstone-type houses that have been divided into several flats, some with cast-iron lined balconies, a senior citizen’s home — but each storefront and front door will be so much more to you, because you know by experience or telling that the shoe store advertising cheap Reeboks, together with the video rental place next door, used to be a bowling alley, and that the kosher Indian restaurant was the Walkens’s bakery, and how the Kowalskis lived on the second floor of that duplex and the rent was so low, being next to a liquor store and all, that when Stevie got married he and Anna almost moved in below them. In this way you are really walking down 2 or 3 simultaneous Broadways, and you especially see the change in the flower stalls over the years — you never used to be able to find gladiolas when you needed to. All this until 22nd Street, where you can turn left and walk a block on the west side of the street, past a Laundromat and take-out Chinese restaurant, to the break in tall brick buildings and fenced-in parking lots that allows you to enter North Queens View Cooperative Housing, and you will know from before you reach the dumpsters which of the windows above you have had sog bombs — clumps of soaked paper towels — thrown from them and which have been broken by off-course baseballs.

The newest thing you will see there is a small rock and wildflower garden with a plaque engraved with an American flag and words commemorating the events of September 11, 2001, and every time its newness and relevance is a jolt, and it feels more like a dire premonition than a quiet remembrance. Everything else, the benches, the fenced-in playground stranded in a too-blank sea of asphalt, even the lawns and elms and squirrels have a film of time draped about them, so that it is not hard to imagine that the parents of the child pumping away so laboriously on the swings crunched their way through the same dead leaves that now level off the uneven contents of the sandbox.

If you can leave the gray-brown city squirrels to the ages and pick out building 14 from the other fourteen-story red brick buildings — they claim to be 15 stories but each is conspicuously missing its 13th floor — with their external air conditioning systems protruding from one window on each floor, you will find that its lobby is, except for the blue-painted ceiling and chrome mailboxes, completely covered in very small blue tiles of varying tints. There are two elevators, one for the even floors and one for the odd, although they’re off after the missing 13th, but the very narrow brown emergency stairway is infinitely faster, even though you’re going all the way up to the 7th floor. Besides, the less time you spend in the lobby the less chance that a dentured, spectacled person will remind you of a vast portion of the past 50 years while you nod and smile and grope for a name, just one name, in that young brain of yours.

The 7th floor is beige, so if you come out on green you know you’ve gone one too high and if you step into pink you’ve stopped one too early, and the doors there, like every door in the building, are painted a thick shiny black on the outside. The door to apartment 7A is an unexpectedly unscuffed matte white on the inside. It’s heavy, the upper lock is confusingly oriented even though it looks normal, and the hinges no longer like to be disturbed, but if you can get past all this and open the door you will find that the bigger obstacle is lurking in the cream-carpeted hallway, about 4’10’’ with brown loafers and huge rose-rimmed spectacles. It will be hard to tell which is more surprising: her ability to deliver a jaw-cracking hug from way down there, or the rapidity with which she will be able to ascertain whether you have eaten recently, or perhaps more accurately, whether you can still possibly eat another bite and what your preference might be, because as the gently shaking voice will tell you immediately, “I have knish and pasta and Maia brought over some wonderful soup yesterday. She always brings too much, you know, and if I can’t finish it right away then I freeze it. So, okay, so I freeze it, but it’s so much better fresh, but then again I also have sandwich things, so what can I give you, katchka?”

“If I want something I can get it for myself, Bubby — don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, I’m happy to — ”

“Then don’t be so happy.”

If this gentle teasing and the second hug that comes with it works, you may make it into the living room, assuming she does not force you directly into the kitchen anyway, “just in case.” This is actually a bit easier for her these days, ever since she got her little black and silver cane which, when your older brother, her second-youngest grandchild, isn’t busy taking it apart and re-assembling it, adjusting the height and hiding away the foam handle cover, can act as an extension of her already-long arms and thereby become an excellent herding device. There is a constant faint hum and breeze throughout these front rooms of the apartment, because the temperature is never quite right on its own. Maybe it’s just that Bubby nearly always wears long sleeves to cover the scar on the inside of her left elbow from the time she fell in her daughter’s garden upstate — the doctor informed her with a smile that it would be gone completely by her one hundred-tenth birthday — but in any case there is always a heater on or a window open, or a fan whirring away to itself on an end table. In the living room, adjacent to the kitchen and divided only by the change from cream carpet to tan linoleum, your impulse will be to sit on one of the two brown, armless loveseats, and you will quickly remember that they are more or less like the hallway hug: warm and familiar, but a little too low and small for true comfort, because it is not fun to feel like a hulking giant among old and fragile things.

These couches are two of many pieces of furniture that have been there so long that they seem to be necessary parts of the room, elements so essential that if they were removed or even rearranged the whole place would likely come crashing down. The back wall, for example, would certainly be unstable without the built-in bookshelves, or even if the very old and very perfect curving driftwood on the top shelf were to disappear, and it is inconceivable that the pale wooden end table could remain standing without the red and black chess set that rests upon it.

The Bubby and Zaidie chairs may be excluded from this powerful alliance of essential furniture, though you do think how nice they are, so much newer and cozier looking than everything else, but then remember they are not so nice. Though one is named after him, they are among the only things in the apartment that were not built, assembled, refinished or refurbished by Zaidie, so that though you know his hands have touched them they are never quite right for you keep them separate in your mind from furniture of the good days, of the little workshop and neat tools and strong hands. Yes, they are lovely pale green armchairs in their own right, soft and neat on their dark wooden legs with a large square footrest midway between them, just reachable from either seat, but they show too clearly what is missing here, that element the absence of which may not have actually stopped time or destroyed a universe but did prove the fallibility of 7B, did prove that always painting the walls that careful white is no insurance that all within them will stay the same (you knew this anyway, never liked the white paint, but that doesn’t mean that you like to be reminded of its failure).

When there are no visitors to sit next to on the loveseats Bubby does like to sit in her Bubby chair, to doze off reading or doing a crossword puzzle, but without visitors there is no one to look at the clock as the sky darkens and the lights and headlights flicker on outside of the big uncurtained windows and decide that it is time to ease himself out of the opposite chair — the Zaidie one that shows you now why things should never come in pairs — and pat her knee and pick up her glasses and shuffle down the narrow white hallway to the room at the end with her (there is not always someone there to help finish the soup or search out red gladiolas for the February 10th wedding anniversary, either).

The big platform bed with the attached bookcase at its head dominates that room, and besides that there is only a tall standing lamp, a chair, a dresser, and a closet door. The room has always had a certain quality of light and a scent of lavender that gives this simplicity, this space and bareness, an enchanting elegance. For all its potential grandeur, though, only half of this bed is used; Bubby sleeps only on the right side though the left remains empty, and as long as she takes to murmuring and shuffling about the smooth tile floor in her worn black slippers after you have said good night and retreated to the twin-bedded room that was your aunt’s, your uncle’s, your father’s, it is hard to imagine that she talks only to herself.

If perhaps you choose to escape this murmuring you may slip barefoot back down the hall, past old family photographs and the linen cabinet that you know, because you looked in it, still stores Zaidie’s spare razors, into the kitchen, a place that maybe you like best when its quiet in that way that apartment buildings have when they hum just slightly with muffled activity and manage to trick you into believing that they are still and calm. It is quiet in this way now, glowing a dull orange from the streetlights that wiggle in through the windows here on the east side of the building. You can lean into the glow and look out over the parking lot and Laundromat you passed, and up Broadway but not so far up, and sometimes you wish you could see farther, could see the 8 blocks up Broadway to the elevated N-train tracks, not because that’s where it all began, but because that’s where it could end, where you could get on a train and not see through its windows the buildings of compressed brick and time where even the squirrels knew your parents and the Bubby and Zaidie chairs will never be just right.