Subway Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “Where?”

  “Just out. I want to shoot some film. Look.” Jonas pointed to the large south-facing window. In another hour the sky would be dark, but at that moment it was yellow: winter yellow. “The light is amazing. I’ll be back soon.”

  Nick sat up. “But this is your house,” he said.

  MITCHELL stopped going to visit their dad. He just stopped. Last month he was nowhere to be found when it was time to leave for Kingston to catch the bus into the city. This week, Mitchell stated he didn’t want to go, and no one bothered to question him.

  “But I can’t find Dad’s apartment by myself. Find the right subway,” Laura said. She stood in the kitchen.

  Her mother was washing dishes. “Sure you can.” She shut the water off. “Hurry and get your stuff.”

  “Now?” Laura froze.

  Her mother turned to face her, her hands still wet. “Laura, where is your head? It’s Friday. It’s your weekend to see your dad. Now, get your stuff or leave without it.”

  It was Friday? It was hard to keep the days straight. Sometimes it was hard to keep anything straight — names, days, homework, especially directions. Living with Bruce had forced upon her a sense of being on high alert that made it hard to focus on the present. Laura got lost a lot or, at best, temporarily turned around everywhere, walking to school, walking in school, and she certainly would walking in New York City by herself. And then there was the experience she was feeling now, panic. She didn’t want to go.

  She wanted to stay where she was. A body in motion stays in motion, and, well, a body at rest needs to stay at rest. Though there was nothing restful about being home, being anywhere near Bruce, Laura felt somehow more anxious about leaving, in particular alone.

  “You’ll be fine.” But her mom looked distracted. She looked tired. She looked old, older than thirty anyway, probably because she was. Way over thirty.

  Don’t trust anyone over thirty.

  Isn’t that what they said? It was another hippie slogan that meant nothing.

  But Bruce wasn’t thirty yet, which made him the real thing and all the more dangerous. Apparently he had dropped out of college to live in New Mexico with the Hopi Indians and take peyote, and, according to him, he then traveled around California with Timothy Leary for a while, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs. Somehow he ended up in Woodstock. He ended up with Laura’s mother, in this house. He wasn’t even twenty-five years old.

  He walked into the kitchen and into the conversation. “You’ll be fine, Laura. You’re almost a woman now, aren’t you?”

  Bruce was wearing a Mexican wool poncho over a pair of cutoff shorts and nothing else, Laura was pretty sure. His beard was growing outward from his face, making his face seem larger, and he hadn’t bathed in what smelled like quite a long time. He was barefoot. It was April, that time of year when it was colder inside the house than out, but Bruce seemed immune.

  “I’m only fourteen,” Laura said.

  “Juliet was fourteen,” Bruce said.

  Laura’s mother glanced up from the dishes. She looked like she was going to say something else. “Go get your stuff, Laura.”

  The subway would be a piece of cake.

  But, of course, it wasn’t a piece of cake at all. Laura had followed the signs to the uptown 4/5/6 lines and stood on the platform, but she had no idea if it was the right platform, or which train zooming by would be the one to take her to the right stop. It was dark in the tunnel, and she was afraid to stand too close to the edge to see farther down. A train lurched and hissed and screeched to a stop in front of her.

  But Laura saw the huge spray-painted letters first: SPIKE. The rest of the graffiti on the car was black — thin letters, scrawled epithets, and nasty words — but this writing seemed to pop from the side of the car and demand attention. The vibrant colors, the subtle tones, the depth behind the letters, the edgy version of the Pink Panther leaning on the letter S and casually smoking a cigarette.

  It was so common, all kinds of mess covering a train, but this mess was different. It was a beautiful mess. S-P-I-K-E.

  I’m getting up all over. Keep an eye out.

  Laura smiled.

  She didn’t have time to ask anyone, Is this the 6 train? The crowd of bodies shifted on, and Laura shifted along with it. Somehow she knew. This was the right car.

  THERE were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone’s Facebook page and everyone’s iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.

  Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and is read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

  The sun was just glancing over the tops of the highest buildings and disappearing from the street. Jonas was glad he had thought to put 400 film in his camera. He would need to shoot with his lens wide open. He had thirty-six exposures and film was cheap. What was costly was not the shot but coming back without good pictures to choose from. The light was perfect, orange gray, casting long shadows. The city seemed to reveal more the darker it got.

  When he left the house, it hadn’t been on his mind — seeing her maybe — but then again, you never know. He tried not to think about it, to wait for her. It was so out of his control, and he had given her his name. If she’d wanted to, she would have found him. If she had been even remotely interested, she would have Facebooked him. He must have checked a thousand times.

  No new friend requests.

  Jonas held his camera in his hand and descended the stairs to the downtown subway. He had put her out of his mind as best he could, which meant he scanned the station only every other minute or two.

  Jonas could hear a train pulling into the station when he swiped his MetroCard. He pushed through the turnstile. Up ahead he could see the cars slowing, colors blurring. It was a weird mess of pictures and writing. This was the second time in only a couple of weeks, not even a month, that the subway had looked like this. In fact, the last time he saw a subway car so covered in graffiti was when he saw her. Jonas quickened his steps; he ran toward the platform.

  It was huge. It covered one whole car. Jonas thought he recognized the sly-looking feline cartoon character. The Pink Panther? And there were big bubble letters that seemed to be coming right out of the side of the train. It might have been some kind of city art project, but it really didn’t look like that. It looked too real to be a reproduction. Too gritty. His heart was pounding.

  Jonas immediately pulled out his camera and dropped to one knee. He wanted the whole view, tilted slightly upward; he wanted to capture the entire car. He checked the light. He adjusted the aperture and set the shutter speed. He was just about to take a series, hopefully click off three or four or six shots. The doors opened, and there she was. Jonas didn’t pause and didn’t think. He slipped onto the train.

  WHEN Laura was eleven years old, her mother decided to make her a dress. It felt so perfect, like something Mrs. Brady would do, until after they had chosen the Simplicity pattern.

  “How about this one?” her mother said.

  The packages were stored in bins, arranged by numbered styles: skirts, pants, jackets, dresses; long, short, midi, maxi. The paper covers depicted a sketchy drawing of a model wearing a few variations of the pattern. The size and measurements were printed in the upper left-hand corner.

  Laura looked up from where she had been flipping through the A-line skirts. Each drawing and each model looked more bea
utiful and happy than the one before. Each one made Laura’s heart beat excitedly as she anticipated the life she could have when she was wearing this new dress, a Marcia Brady life. And if she couldn’t be Marcia or even Jan Brady, maybe she could be Laurie Partridge; they practically shared a name, after all.

  Laura’s mother held up a package with an illustration of two girls on the cover, each in a variation of a tunic-style dress, one long and one short. Both girls were smiling, and the short dress was pretty enough, with the belt tied in the back and the sleeves belled out at the wrist. Laura looked down at the pattern in her hand. She slipped hers back into the bin.

  “I like it,” Laura told her mother. It would be nice enough, as long as it wasn’t the long version, and as long as she could still pick out the material, but somehow when they got home, everything went wrong.

  Laura’s mother decided the dress would look cool (or had she said groovy, again?) if the material was turned inside out. Now the colors were muted and odd, like dripping, dull paint. Nothing like the pretty flower pattern Laura had selected in the store. Her mother decided to add lace, yellowed and torn, from an antique couch to the sleeves and the hem of the dress. And she decided on the long version, the Janis Joplin–Marianne Faithfull look.

  Laura stood on the table while her mother, holding the pins in her mouth, tacked up the hem. Laura felt exposed, naked, even though she was draped in excessive, albeit drab, material, with a collar that gripped her neck, and sleeves that hung like enormous wilted flower petals trimmed with rotting lace. It was night, dark outside and not much lighter inside, so her image was mirrored in the window. In the glass she could see Bruce crouched by the woodstove, starting the fire. From time to time he looked over to where Laura stood on display. Mitchell was next to him, handing Bruce kindling, twigs and small pieces of wood, both of them most certainly high.

  In the reflection everything was far away and distant. It looked like an entirely different scene — homesteaders, like Little House on the Prairie, the whole family safe inside their cabin, sewing, making a fire. But nothing here was safe. She didn’t want this dress; she didn’t want this life. She missed her dad and she missed her parents.

  The next day, Laura got called into the principal’s office for wearing inappropriate attire to school, and Mr. Mahoney appeared genuinely surprised by her flood of tears.

  “School is not a costume party, young lady,” he told her as if she were not aware of this fact. “This is not one of those hippie communes.”

  It seemed to Laura to be the most absurd of ironies and not worth explaining. All she could do was cry.

  It was that first year with Bruce when Laura realized there were two worlds: the world within and the world without. She could exist within, she could endure, she could dream, and she could fly. The world without, where everyone else existed, including her dad, Mr. Mahoney, even Jan Brady to a certain degree, was out of her reach.

  By the time she got to high school, Laura had perfected her world within. Like in the books she was reading, the way the Jewish people survived the concentration camps, the roll calls, the hiding. Dive inside your head where you are safe. Separate yourself from the pain. Inside your head you can be in control and you can bear any pain if you know it isn’t going to last. The key was figuring out when it was going to end.

  SHE was even prettier than he remembered, different from any girl he had known or, to be honest, ever seen. Jonas didn’t really like any of the girls at his school, who were, for the most part, entitled and high-maintenance with a ridiculously inflated sense of self-worth. But it wasn’t like he was one of those guys who liked “damaged” girls. Nick had once said there was nothing better than a girl with low self-esteem. No, it wasn’t like that.

  Of course, he could be wrong. He had barely talked to this girl. For all he knew, it was the same-old same-old: She’s just not that into you.

  “Um, hi,” Jonas said. Here she was. There was no time to consider saying anything else. The train lurched forward, and Jonas had to take a jerking step, grabbing on to the metal pole above her head in order to stop himself from falling, like a newbie, like a tourist. Only tourists stumble on the subway. This wasn’t going well.

  She looked at him. “Hi.”

  So it wasn’t anything she said, obviously, but it was the way she said it. The way she smiled that let him know: It’s all OK, even if you fall on your face. It’s cool.

  “Can I sit . . . down?” Jonas asked her.

  The car was mostly empty. There was an older African-American businessman sitting at the opposite end, reading a book, and a young girl, Asian, too thin, with her hair pulled tightly back into a bun, reading nothing, looking hungry. A mother holding the handle of a stroller stood waiting for the doors to open at the next stop.

  “I saw you before,” Jonas said. He’d thought about saying met — I met you before — but if she didn’t remember him, that would seem really weird. The train was slowing. What if she is getting off here? He would follow her, he decided. This time, he would get off with her, but she didn’t seem to be shifting in that direction.

  “I remember. Jonas.”

  She remembered his name. Her gaze moved to the floor just briefly, then she met his eyes again, like she was forcing herself to be confident.

  “Jonas Goldman, Faceman, right?” she said. “I’m Laura.”

  She had a quiet voice but strong. He could smell her breath slightly: sweet and warm, like honeyed milk. She was just the right balance of shy yet poised.

  Faceman?

  Maybe that meant something? She was an antitechnology type. Or she was teasing him. But teasing is a good sign, isn’t it?

  The subway stopped and the woman with her toddler got off. Train rides don’t last forever. Everybody gets off sometime. He felt time squeezing in on him.

  “Do you live in the city?” Jonas asked. It sounded stupid. It sounded forward. Too forward? Everybody was wary — of strangers, of perverts, of thieves. There had been a rash of people stealing iPhones right out of people’s hands on the subway.

  Laura — Laura, right? — didn’t have a cell phone visible. She probably hid it. Or she was one of those Neo-Luddites he had heard about, in which case she would hate him. But more likely she was just wary. He had been too forward. She’d never talk to him now.

  “No,” she answered. “I live upstate. I’m just visiting my dad. My parents are divorced. Oh, God, did I just say that?”

  So she wasn’t wary. She wasn’t from New York, that’s why.

  Jonas laughed. “Mine are, too. No worries. I’m —”

  Still, if he got off when she got off, if he, oh, just coincidentally, was going where she was going, then she might start to worry. But he needed to do something quickly, and the Facebook thing hadn’t worked last time.

  “Can I text you? You want my cell number?”

  She crinkled her brow. Her eyes were brown and her lashes short but dark, and there were so many of them.

  “Your what?”

  “My number? So you could call me. Or I could call you?”

  “Oh.” Laura smiled. “Sure. At my dad’s?”

  That caught Jonas off-guard for a minute, like maybe she was one of those religious girls and she needed her father’s permission, or she was just screwing around with him. Yanking his chain, pretending to be interested. Pretending to be nice. Several scenarios ran through his head, but you can’t pretend to be so pretty, so he said, “Yeah, your dad’s house is good.”

  She stood up. “Is this the Fifty-ninth Street stop?” She was nervous.

  It made him feel good to answer. “Yeah, Fifty-ninth. And Lexington. Between Park and Third.” Good God, stop talking.

  For a second Jonas racked his brain for a reason he could be getting off here, too. He put his hand on his camera bag. He hoped she didn’t think it was a man purse or anything.

  “This is a camera,” he said.

  “I know,” Laura said. She started out the open doors. “So you
want my dad’s phone number?” And she gave it to him, area code and all. Just like that. He had her name. And her phone number, albeit her dad’s phone number.

  She got off the train, and as fast as he could, he pulled out his phone and keyed it in.

  New contact:

  Laura.

  HE tried every configuration. He must have typed it in wrong. Reversed a number or something. It had to be.

  “I think she was just dicking you around,” Nick said.

  “No way.”

  They were at Nick’s house because there was a chance (or a hope) you needed a landline to call another landline, and Jonas’s mom — to save money — didn’t have one.

  “OK, then, maybe it’s a 718 number,” Nick tried.

  “I tried that,” Jonas said. They sat in the kitchen where the oldest phone in the United States was attached to the wall. It was olive green, all but the warped and tangled cord that had somehow turned greenish brown over the years.

  Jonas’s mom had been exclusively cell phones and Internet for quite a while now, even though she was completely tech-challenged. She had to call Jonas every time she wanted to record a show on the DVR. She asked Jonas to set up her cell phone. She hardly used the computer at all, and if she wasn’t phobic to it before, she was now.

  Jonas couldn’t have explained, even to himself, why he had begun printing out his father’s e-mails. He hadn’t printed the first one he discovered open on his dad’s desktop, but after that, Jonas had to hack into his father’s AOL account and search for them. Was that why he started printing them? The sheer effort?

  It took only one guess to find the password: KELLY, his father’s first and only family dog. Jonas, of course, had never known Kelly, but he had heard the stories. They all had. His father talked about Kelly often, whenever they watched a dog movie, or whenever they met someone on the street with a similar-looking dog. There was even a picture on the refrigerator of Jonas’s dad as a little boy with his arm around his beloved beagle mix — or rather, there used to be.