I was told I wasn’t having the typical subway experience. “Last time we were here, there were so many people on the train there wasn’t anything left to hold onto except the bars at the top,” Mom told me. “And guess who was squished in the middle?” My mother is five foot nothing. To hear her tell it, she can barely reach her own head. It was 11:00 in the morning and the subway to Midtown held only a handful of people in our car. “Well, it’s almost noon,” I said. “Most people are at work, I imagine.” “True.” We sat down. The car was peppered with posters, though none that I can remember from that first trip. I think I was daydreaming. I took a moment to snap a picture of the doors across from me. We stopped somewhere to let other people on, but no one was waiting. The doors closed, and as the subway began to pull away I noticed a large sign on the wall outside that read, “Safety is everyone’s responsibility. It only takes a moment to realize if something’s not right.” We grabbed the bars as the subway jerked. I spread my feet apart to gain enough balance. My grandmother nudged me. “How’d you like to be down here if a terrorist blew this thing up?”
Our second subway ride was actually the path train from Jersey City into New York. Before, my grandfather had bought our tickets from an agent sitting in the booth, but this time we had to buy them from a machine. I took out two dollars from my purse and approached the box. Start. Cash. Single ride. Ticket. Well…that was easy. I took my ticket and waited for everyone else. My grandfather was the last to be done. I looked over to his machine. Several people had lined up behind him. He tapped on the screen, exiting out of something, then started over. I wondered if I needed to help him, but before I could decide he was pulling his ticket from the distributor and walking toward us.
A waft of heat hit my face as we walked down the stairs to the trains. There were several televisions hanging up from the ceiling. On one a notification scrolled on the bottom of the screen telling us the path train to New York would arrive at 9:23. When we got on, we had to stand. “Hm, maybe we should be going towards Journal Square,” Mom said. I looked up at the map. “No. If we go there we’ll be going backwards. We need to go towards 14th St.” As we rode further into the city, more people hustled on and off. Two girls in shorts cut just above their bottoms walked on – one with pink hair, the other with blue. As I looked at them, I thought, “I would be so self-conscious wearing shorts that short out in public. I have those bumps on the backs of my legs.” I reached down and gently ran my fingers across the back of my right thigh. Why did I have to have such sensitive skin for shaving? A couple of times as we rode, I found myself staring out the window of the door across from us. Pink and Blue were standing there in front of it, Blue facing the window. Twice, I readjusted my vision and caught her watching me. Or, she caught me. I wasn’t intentionally staring at her, but she made sure to hook me with a nasty glare. I looked away. For a place always brimming with humans, it was odd to be so near them, to look at them. Moments were still awkward if someone made eye contact. I guess it’s a human commonality. Everyone is always moving, even when they’re not.
I think that train ride was when I began to empathize with Carrie Bell. Her obligation to stay with a damaged fiance was symbolic of my obligation to stay with my family, and I appreciated more her ability to run away to this city, even if some thought it was wrong – cruel even. But I was jealous. I wanted to be these people. I wanted to sit alone, yet among, as I took the subway to Uptown where I lived with two other New York hopefuls. I wanted to be the woman skimming the magazine, doing the crossword puzzle in the Times, reading a book, going over numbers from work. I imagined sitting there, as though I were one of them. What would I be doing? Scribbling shaky stories in a journal? I thought of Carrie and how she sought out Kilroy on her first day in the city. Attending the art show with Simon. Signing up for fashion design classes. Selling her car. Roaming the streets. Getting to know the place. Getting to know her place.
On our last ride in the path train, my grandfather sat across from us next to a Pakistani man in black scrubs. In front of my grandmother, mother, and me were an Asian woman and white couple who were neighbors coming in from work and dinner.
“Hi, neighbor!” The couple said. They exchanged greetings. “We’re coming in from dinner with friends. We met them in the city.”
“You’re the couple across the hall with the little girl and boy?” The Asian woman asked.
“Yeah,” the other woman said. “Jenny and Bosni.”
“Oh, they’re so cute. I’ve always been so impressed at how well behaved they are. A lot of couples in our building have noisy kids.”
“Yeah, our kids are typically good,” the man said.
“There’s one family down the hall whose little boy is just awful.”
The other woman looked up. “Tommy? Yeah, sometimes we can hear him. He cries a lot.”
On the other side of the car my grandfather was talking to the medic. He raised his hand, spreading his fingers into a high five and gestured toward my grandmother. Later she would say, “I didn’t know what he was doing.” “I was just telling him it will be our 50th anniversary this year,” my grandfather called to her. The train squealed and I plugged my fingers into my ears. As we walked the streets, I could swear I heard them screaming from below.
“So what do you do?” The Asian woman asked.
“I’m a writer, and he works in computers.”
“Oh, what’s your topic?”
“Well, I’m freelance, so it varies. I’ve published beauty articles and have also done parenting.”
“One time she wrote an article on dinner parties,” her husband said. “She’d never done a dinner party before, so she arranged one for our friends and wrote about it.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, our whole honeymoon was writing articles. We got a free trip because she was doing work for a travel magazine at the time. It was really neat.”
Silently, I hoped they actually got to enjoy their honeymoon.
“Do you see this guy down here?” My grandmother leaned towards my mom. A few seats down on the opposite side from us was a skinny, bald guy with tattoos patterned across his face.
“I mean, I don’t care what you look like, as long as you’re a decent person and not trying to harm anybody,” I later complained to Emily. “It pissed me off they kept pointing out every ‘weird’ person they saw.”
My grandmother leaned over to me. “Do you see that guy down there?”
“Yeah, I saw him.” My voice sounded more clipped than I’d intended. No, that isn’t right. It sounded just as irritated as I’d felt, but for a moment I wondered if it was right to use that tone with one’s grandmother.
During one of our other subway rides, my mom asked me how I felt about them. “I honestly don’t see why y’all made such a big deal out of it,” I said. “It’s just a means of transportation. It’s how people get around. You just do it.”
“Young people adapt so much quicker and better than we do,” she said. She said that a lot during our two days in New York. I liked that I was able to adapt; that I could make myself a New Yorker if I had to, if I wanted to.
