is when the girls show me—their ring fingers. If a twelve-year-old black girl shows you her middle fi nger, you know what it means; but what does it mean if she shows you—her ring finger? So, after a brief moment of racial disharmony in America, the three girls run away, up the platform, laughing. Their escorts watch them vacantly and then look at me vacantly. If you spend enough time as a teacher, especially if you are as subtle a disciplinarian as I am, then you develop a certain indifference to these things. I can see that the boys’ opinion of the three girls isn’t much higher than my own—and then I realize I have accumulated one teaspoon of romantic courage. So I put on my jacket, pick up my attaché, and stride down the subway car toward the woman with the beauty spots, determined to silence that jeering alarm.
Now. A digression on the nature and construction of the cars that run on the Lexington Avenue line. Redbirds, I think they may be called. Anyway, a digression:
At the front right and rear left of every redbird car are the emergency brakes, each of which consists of a little handle shaped like an upside-down letter T, dangling on a wire. The brakes aren’t very sturdy, apparently, because to prevent anyone from yanking one down accidentally, they are protected by metal covers, hefty boxes with hinges at the top that have to be lifted before you can gain access to the brake. If you lift the metal cover, an alarm goes off—or not an alarm so much as a high-pitched electric buzzing, a crude, piercing whistle. Nnneeennneee. It’s flat of A sharp. Nnneeennneee. The alarm doesn’t mean that the brake has been pulled—it means the cover has been lifted. A sharp bump in the tracks will sometimes jolt one of the covers open, setting off the emergency siren until some gallant and savvy rider—par exemple, moi!—has the mind to slap the brake cover back into place. End of digression.
So! I stride down to the emergency brake, and I draw to a stop in front of the beautiful woman. Her eyes are closed, but they flutter open when she hears my footsteps coming. I draw to an emphatic stop—and administer a single, decisive whap.
The alarm falls silent. The woman looks up. For one twinkle, I enjoy her pretty eyes. She is about to say something, presumably thanks, when a drop of sweat from my wrist falls onto her pristine white handkerchief. We both watch it fall together.
“Pardon me—I just meant to—ah.”
Because I am who I am, I had paused dramatically to demonstrate what I was doing. I had frozen in place with my arm next to the brake box, to show my gentlemanly intentions. So there is time, while I am stuttering my apology, for—a second drop of sweat to fall on her handkerchief. Gah! She gives me a crushing look—a look that means, in Manhattan, Stay away, you crazy—a dumbfounding look when delivered by a woman with two ideal beauty spots. It was as though I’d spat on her while asking her to spare me some change.
So I retreat. And I think to myself, as I retreat, What is this beautiful woman doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M.? But I retreat. I retreat, and I take a seat, and I sweat, and I straighten my hat, and I settle my defeated face into a frown. At which point, in a rage, looking for her culprit, enter the subway conductor.
JENNICA GREEN fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M. (early August 2000):
I was going to buy a six-hundred-dollar cat. Which, I know. But hear me out.
I live on the third story of a red brick walkup on Cark Street, in the West Village. You’ve seen these sorts of buildings. The kind with tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor of the entryway and coppery mailboxes. Where the copper has this gummy feeling from the scraps of glue left behind where the previous tenants have taped up and then torn off their names over the decades. With a narrow cinder-block stairway painted chocolate brown … like, Hershey-quality chocolate brown. I have a rear unit, with a view of the backs of some brownstones and their gardens and some ailanthus trees in the alleys, and with a fire escape leading down into the courtyard. Which supposedly makes my apartment ideal for burglary. I moved in, and my mother said … like, forget that the apartment is spacious and bright, and has parquet floors except in the kitchen and bathroom, and has some redeeming features even if it is too expensive … like, forget all that, what my mother said was:
“It sounds ideal for a burglar.” I said:
“That’s why I have renter’s insurance, Mom.” And my father was like:
“Those policies are a scam. And insurance can’t protect you from a determined rapist.” It’s like, Thanks, Dad, for reminding me.
Anyway, the six-hundred-dollar cat.
On Monday I got home. It was seven-thirty, about. And it was one of those dusks in July and August where the sky is thick and white, the color of a poached egg. I had walked home from the subway slowly, so that I could look at everyone in their heat-wave clothes, and when I got home, there in my copper mailbox, I recognized her handwriting immediately, was a letter from Nadine Hanamoto.
Nadine Hanamoto, who was my best friend in San Jose, California, in 1989, and who was my first cosmopolitan friend. And, okay, cosmopolitan in San Jose, California, in 1989 … so, cosmopolitan with caveats. But Nadine Hanamoto, who I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long, and whose feelings I think maybe I unintentionally hurt. So I start reading her letter before I am even up the stairway as far as the first landing.
Dear Jenny,
She’s the only one who ever called me Jenny, so already it’s kind of poignant, right?
I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.
She said she called my parents to ask for my address. She was so happy and impressed that I was still surviving in New York City. What was my neighborhood like? What was my apartment like? Was it “illustrious”? The letter was handwritten in green ink, six pages long, and so I flipped through it, just assessing the volume of it. And on the back Nadine had drawn two blue-ink boxes around one green-ink paragraph, to make sure that one paragraph would catch my eye, if nothing else did.
George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.
My parents apparently told Nadine I was single.
I’m reading this as I open my front door. And, I leave my air conditioner off while I’m at work, to conserve electricity, so when I walk in, my apartment feels like, whatever. Poached. But I put my bags down and sit on one of the barstools at my little rolling kitchen island, and I’m reading Nadine’s letter in the heat. So it’s absolutely silent in the apartment, no air conditioning, no television, no loom construction going on next door. Even my refrigerator, which is so huge and so poorly insulated that it spends twenty hours a day in the summer rattling its fan, just to keep my whatever, my mixed salad greens from wilting … even my refrigerator was quiet. So I’m reading in silence, and then there is this noise. Like, a burglar in my apartment.
MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN discuss their daughter’s aspirations to illustriousness (early August 2000):
M: She was reading those particular books that high schools still think teenagers need to read, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. And she came away with the lesson that we as a family had done something wrong that there wasn’t more intrigue in our lives. She read Madame Bovary, and the lesson she came away with was that Emma Bovary was a perfectly reasonable woman.
S: What she really enjoyed were all of those books by J.D. Salinger.
