Thursday, February 24, 2005
Wednesday Night
Yesterday I posted a vignette about a woman on my morning ride last week. This one is about my ride home that evening. I tell ya, some days the 38L is pretty boring, and some days it isn’t. As the busdriver himself told me not long ago, “This line is always a heavy ride.”
It’s Wednesday evening and I’m on the evening bus, riding home again. It feels like my jaws have been clenched for hours; I’m finally asserting control over my world by having chosen, again, my favorite seat, where I sit with my tablet in my lap. I’m writing about that morning’s bus ride and the woman who realized she’d forgot something and was sad, and I wonder idly who’ll sit in the open seat next to me. It’s usually some gruff businessman or an ambiguous younger guy with overly-attended-to facial hair; sometimes it’s an elderly Chinese lady laden with odiferous plastic shopping bags. The cuties never sit next to me, I grouse, and my jaw locks a few degrees more grimly down.
By the time the bus pulls out I’m writing writing writing away my tension by parasitically exploiting the anguish of another. And I don’t care, it’s refreshing to wallow in someone else’s anguish for a change. The bus drives on, begins to fill, and the seat next to me remains, as if often the case, one of the very few available seats on the bus. People are starting to stand in the aisles rather than sit next to me. But near Union Square a mass of riders climbs on board. As is typical in these precincts, many among them are young pretty women. One of these inexplicably opts to take my neighbor seat.
With practiced subtlety I try to get a read on her as she moves in. Short, slim, nice denim jacket, nice denim pants, black knit turtleneck; straight brown hair cut to a line at her shoulderblades, parted neatly over her forehead and framing a well-proportioned round face; pale base makeup and dark red lipstick. She clearly projects intelligence, confidence, and an intense desire for privacy. She takes her seat with crisp efficiency - not shifting around, managing her large purse with authority, keeping her legs out of contact with mine. Once she’s properly seated and arranged, her eyes drop immediately to her purse (leather, black with a pink accent) from which she pulls a small office-issue pad of legal yellow notepaper, flips rapidly to a fresh sheet, and starts to write with a furious burst of rapidity. She’s a rightie and she’s to my left so her hand is in my way and I can’t really make out much of what she’s writing, but some words I can discern: “angry,” “punish,” “disappointed,” “bitter.” Her penmanship is florid; she crosses out at least a third of what she’s written as she pursues le mot juste and evident literary exorcism.
Within several minutes she’s filled several pages, and her face, so composed and paraprofessional before, is now like a road from which the blacktop has been ground off, removing all evidence of the journeys made on it, leaving only the rough bedrock of possibility. She pauses, then flips the notepad closed, holds it tightly in a fist that, it seems to me, wishes it could punch something. Something, perhaps, in particular. Her eyes close and her lips form a brick wall over her mouth. She does not move again until her stop is announced, and then she stands up quickly and strides out and away as if she were quitting her job.
