Subway Love (4 page)

“Yeah, where?”

“Is that her, right there? Walking toward us?”

It was an old woman, the kind who might be a bag lady but then again might just be someone’s grandmother who wore too many layers of clothing. And carried a lot of plastic bags.

“Oh, fuck you, Nicholas. I’m not in the mood.”

“Sorry.”

Jonas slouched down on the bench. “You’re sorry a lot.”

“I guess so, but I really am. I was just trying to take your mind off your shitty dad.”

He was, wasn’t he? Shitty.
But it really wasn’t for anyone else to say.

“Sorry,” Nick said. “Again. I know, yes. I’m sorry a lot.”

“It’s all right,” Jonas said. “So am I, I guess.”

LAURA
noticed her brother had slowed his pace. The sprint he had led her on as soon as they got out of the subway ended as they turned onto the avenue and neared the apartment.

The doorman recognized them and opened the door.

“You here till Sunday?” he asked. He sat back down on his stool and swiveled around toward the phone and the switchboard. He would need to call up first to let their father know they had arrived.

Mitchell actually stopped walking to answer. “Yeah.”

They weren’t the only kids whose parents were divorced, but Laura didn’t know too many others. Maybe Mitchell was ashamed, maybe that’s why he seemed deflated as they walked into the lobby, but Laura was just sad. As much as she feared being home with Bruce, as much as she fought with her mother and lived like she had been dropped onto an alien planet, the more she wanted to stay there, the more she wanted to belong. To her mother. With her mother. There was the lure of seeing her dad, of TV and hamburgers and chocolate milk, but almost as soon as she got to her dad’s, she felt desperate to attach to her mother again, and Sunday seemed like a million hours away.

“Your kids are here,” the doorman spoke into the black receiver. He hung up and nodded to Laura and Mitchell. “Go on up.”

It would take all weekend for her to feel comfortable with her dad again, to reattach to him, to remember him and feel him as her daddy again, but then it would be just about time to go back.

Laura and Mitchell rode the elevator in silence. It was easier not to go there and start worrying about Sunday, easier to just wait out the weekend. The door to their dad’s apartment was cracked open for them to come in.

“You still haven’t cut your hair?”

Their dad’s first words.

They were directed at Mitchell, who didn’t bother to respond. Her dad wasn’t the only one obsessed with hair; it was everywhere. There were lots of jokes and comments, cartoons about not being able to tell a boy from a girl anymore. There was one
Lighter Side
comic where a guy tries to pick up a shapely-looking figure with long blond hair sitting at a bar, only to find out the girl is really a guy. Laura saw that one in
Mad
magazine.

There were a few familiar things in their dad’s apartment, furniture Laura remembered from their Brooklyn apartment: the narrow wooden side table that opened up for eating dinner, paintings that she used to lie on the floor and stare at. Her dad was in advertising. He was the art director for a firm on Madison Avenue, but once upon a time, he had wanted to be an artist; once upon a time, he
was
an artist, and it might have been part of the reason their parents split up. Their mother reminded him of everything he couldn’t be, everything he had given up. Young, for one thing.

Laura knew that before he had gotten married, her dad had taught some studio art courses at Pratt Institute. Some of his larger Abstract Expressionist oil paintings now hung in the apartment. Everything else had gone to their mother. But not the table and not the paintings.

While her dad ran his commentary on Mitchell’s long hair and blue jeans (“Only farmers wear overalls. . . . Don’t you care about your appearance . . . ?”), Laura fell into the one painting she had loved as a little girl. The colors swirled around, burnt sienna, cadmium orange. She knew it wasn’t supposed to
be
anything, but she rode a horse in the tiny bump of raw umber, and she smelled a Prussian blue flower that no one saw.

“Laura? Are you listening to me? Or are you smoking marijuana too?”

“What?” She whirled around. Mitchell had gone into the bathroom. Lucky he hadn’t heard that. He’d be out the door.

Her dad put out his arms. “Sorry, baby. Your brother’s just got me worked up. C’mon, let’s get you something to eat.”

LAURA
wasn’t Jewish, not that she knew of, but she wished she were. At least that way she’d have a history of being a victim and a history of survival. She’d have a whole nation behind her. And there would be witnesses.

It wasn’t that Laura envisioned her situation like that of being in the Holocaust. No, it wasn’t that at all, but it was something about the way the whole world had turned its eyes away, even when the whole world knew what was going on. Or should have known. Of course they knew. So every time she felt hungry or cold, or felt the dark presence of Bruce at her back, she measured it in her mind against the annex, against Auschwitz, against Babi Yar.

She read firsthand accounts of the horrors people had survived — children, teenagers, girls, climbing out of bloody pits and living to tell about it. The key was to bear witness, to survive in order to let someone know.

Three weeks had gone by before Mitchell and Laura came back to the city to visit their dad. The subway ride had been uneventful, and her dad had even lightened up on the hair-cutting issue. He was probably playing chicken with Mitchell, but it wasn’t going to work, Laura knew it.

After she read Anne Frank’s diary in seventh grade, she had even lied about being Jewish at Rob Schiff’s bar mitzvah, telling a group of out-of-town girls that her mother was Jewish but had converted to Christianity in order to escape from Germany during World War II.

“So, how old is your mother?” one of the girls asked.

It was too late to try to do the math.

“You don’t look German.”

And the whole thing started to fall apart.

“I gotta go,” Laura said quickly. She rushed out of the lobby back into the catering hall, where Rob’s grandfather was cutting a big loaf of bread.

Now walking down Fifth Avenue by herself, Laura could imagine herself Jewish: a survivor, albeit a survivor who’d just eaten a bologna, mustard, and potato chip sandwich; her dad even had Wonder bread and whole milk and Nesquik. She could pretend she lived in the city. She walked with a quicker pace, as if she had someplace to go and knew how to get there.

There wasn’t as much psychedelic fashion in Midtown as there was downtown. Here were businessmen in suits, and women who still wore panty hose and, most likely, bras. And looking into the windows of the famous department stores on Fifth was like watching a frozen television screen. Everything was perfect and beautiful on TV.

Laura stopped in front of Saks, although she knew it made her appear to be a tourist; only visitors to the city stared into the display windows or looked up at the tall buildings, but as much as Laura wanted to belong, she couldn’t help doing both.

A very skinny man wearing a tight jumpsuit was behind the glass, setting up a display. One of the mannequins was already dressed in a red-and-green-checked maxi dress. The other one was outfitted in the same material but was wearing a bell-bottom pantsuit. Everything reflected December and a Christmas that was still more than a month away. There was even fake snow on the floor of the display. The man inside the window glanced — or glared — at Laura, then ignored her and continued working. He was certainly not a visitor to New York.

He draped the maxi-dressed mannequin in love beads, and on the bell-bottom girl he placed a pointy red Santa hat. Over each, he dropped a short shearling jacket. He slipped a pair of gloves between the stiff fingers of each mannequin. He then affixed a round, colorful oversize peace-sign pin to each lapel.

Bruce, who had a bumper sticker on his VW that read I
’M A
P
EACENIK
hit Laura the first time when she wouldn’t eat the seaweed he had served for dinner.

“It’s food.” His face was dark and unfamiliar, as if Laura had never seen him before. She suddenly couldn’t place who he was.

“I don’t like it,” she answered.

Across the table Mitchell acted as if none of this was going on, as if he was sitting at the dining-room table alone, enjoying his plate of brown rice and seaweed, as if they had never lived a different life, as if all of this was perfectly normal.

Laura hated her brother in that moment, in that moment when Bruce smacked the back of her head, thrusting her head forward. Her teeth rattled, but nothing more. No big deal. Laura felt the blow for several more seconds, fear and anger tracking along with her red blood cells, and she calculated the amount of milk needed to wash down the salty black crap on her plate.

Where was her mother? In the kitchen? At the table?

Had anyone seen? Had everyone?

Laura knew Bruce didn’t care if she ate her dinner or not, nor did he care about anything else in her life. No, this was a battle of wills, his and hers. It was a personal war she waged for the freedom of her own body; for the power over who could touch her and who could not, for what food she would or would not put inside her. Often she lost. That day she lost, but she had put up the fight. She gagged down the seaweed, and when Laura looked up, everyone was gone.

Bergdorf Goodman was across the street, as was Chanel and Tiffany’s, and if she remembered correctly, FAO Schwarz was along here somewhere. Nothing in that store had ever interested her, not even when her grandmother acted as if it was a New York destination unto itself, a child’s paradise. Laura never liked dolls, but she loved her Nana, and she now owned an entire collection of oddly large and gaudily overdressed Madame Alexander dolls from around the world. Laura cringed to think how her Nana would feel if she knew that half of those expensive dolls were somewhere in the woods behind her house and the rest were naked or lost entirely. Laura tried to remember how they had gotten in that state, and before she knew it, without thinking, she had walked twenty blocks north.

“THIS
is your great-adventure idea?” Jonas asked. “Going to the Met?”

Yesterday had proved a bust when it came to finding the imaginary hippie girlfriend, and besides, after bumping into his father, Jonas had just felt like going back home. Now it was Sunday, and another adventure was to be found; at least, that’s how Nick phrased it.

“Yeah, hottest girls in New York. You know that.” They stood in front of the steps to the museum. It was one of those especially warm October mornings, the sun like a whitewash over the city. “Nothing like a babe that’s bored.”

“Babe?”

“Just c’mon.” Nick started up the steps, two at a time.

“I see those mummies really got you turned on.”

To a degree, of course, Nick was right. There were a lot of pretty girls hanging out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was fairly crowded, but then again, it always was.

Jonas let Nick buy their little metal entrance pins, a dollar for both of them.

Jonas gave him a look.

“What? It’s a
suggested
fee.”

“Where to?”

Nick pointed decisively across the lobby. “The Impressionist collection, of course.”

Jonas didn’t ask why.

The first thing Jonas always noticed in a girl was her face — if she had a pretty face and nice skin. Then her deeply colored hair, though it didn’t much matter what color as long as it was healthy-looking. A slim body, not too thin, never fat. A little rounded could be nice, athletic, strong, but the skin was important. And the face.

Then, if he wasn’t close enough to measure her against himself, he would quickly try to estimate her height. In middle school it was easy to be taller. Jonas towered over the other kids, girls and boys both, but lately, since eighth grade, maybe ninth, when he’d stopped growing in height, he had been more careful. Nothing was worse than being attracted to a girl only to find out she stood two or three inches taller and actually had to look down to make eye contact.

The girl across the tracks had had pretty skin and soft hair, dark and long. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. He didn’t bother trying, even while Nick was laying out his plan for how to pick up blasé female art students.

Jonas looked across the exhibit room. Velvet ropes hung between low brass stands surrounded each painting, creating a distinct space into which visitors could not enter. They kept people from getting too close to the Monets, the Renoirs, the Cézannes. But this dude by the far wall was standing inside, his face nearly touching the canvas. His hands were moving as if he were re-creating the brushstrokes.

“Hey, check that guy out.” Jonas nudged Nick.

“Who? Where?”

The “art lover” appeared to be a teenager not much older than Nick and Jonas, if at all older. Probably Hispanic, longish hair, retro sneakers and running clothes, an odd, floppy hat.