Subway Love (5 page)

“He’s totally going to get tossed,” Jonas said, turning to Nick.

“Where?” Nick said, looking around. “Where?”

Jonas lifted his chin slightly to indicate where the kid was standing, or where he had just been standing, the kid who had stepped over the ropes. A security guard was bound to show up any second, and maybe there’d be a scuffle or something exciting to liven things up, but he was gone.

“Where? Who?” Nick asked again.

“Nothing.”

They hung around awhile, but there were no pretty girls, or at least no pretty girls who seemed interested in anything but the paintings. “It’s better in the summer,” Nick reminded them both. “More European girls on vacation.”

“Let’s go,” Jonas said.

Nick agreed. “Falafel?”

“Sure.”

HER
dad hadn’t started dinner, Laura was glad to see. It meant she could have some input, maybe make the whole thing herself, as long as Mitchell was busy doing something else, like watching TV. For a hippie, he sure liked
Adam-12
and
Mission: Impossible.

On her way back downtown to the apartment, Laura had passed a couple clinging fiercely to each other. They were young, and the smell of patchouli and marijuana lingered after she had passed them. He wore a military jacket festooned with yellow fringe, and striped bell-bottoms, and she a long, velvet tie-dyed dress, but it was the way they walked, so closely connected, that stuck in her mind. It was weeks ago already, and no chance she’d ever see that boy again, from across the subway platform. He had also been wearing an army jacket. His didn’t have the brass buttons or the yellow fringe, though, and come to think of it, she had no idea why she was even remembering him again.

“I’ll start supper, Dad,” Laura called out.

She took out three TV dinners, her favorite: Salisbury Steak. She peeled back the thick aluminum foil and stuck them in the oven. She opened a jar of Mott’s Applesauce, all blended like baby food, sugar and all. Her mouth was already watering. She put out three glasses, a container of milk, and the ketchup (her dad liked ketchup on everything, a habit he claimed had resulted from his years serving in Korea).

“I met this guy named Spike today,” Laura said out loud.

The apartment was small; there wasn’t really anywhere you could go and not hear someone talking in the kitchen, but no one answered.

She started talking to herself: “He’s Spanish. He’s an artist. I met him at the museum. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Her dad came out of the bedroom. The door to the guest room, where Laura and Mitchell had folding cots pushed against opposite walls, was closed. Mitchell must be in there, doing God knows what.

“Yeah, he was really cool.”

Her dad took a cigarette out of his pack. He tapped it on the counter, put it to his lips, and struck a match. While he smoked, he leaned against the sink and looked out the tiny window to the window across the way.

“You know better than to talk to strangers.” He drew in on the smoke and exhaled slowly. Marijuana smelled — skunky, earthy, and sweet — but tobacco just plain stank.

“That’s bad for you, you know, Dad,” Laura said. “It says so right on the box.”

Her dad smiled. “It says it
may
be bad for you, sweetie. It hasn’t killed me yet. I’ve been smoking since I was eleven.”

“All the more reason to stop.” Laura pulled open the oven to check on their dinners. The triangle side dishes of mac and cheese were just about to bubble. “Anyway, it doesn’t say that. It says the surgeon general has determined that it
is
bad for your health. Look.”

Her dad picked up the box from the counter and turned it over thoughtfully in his hand. “Hmm, so it does. And what does that have to do with talking to strangers? What were you doing way up there anyway?”

“Nothing. Walking.”

“So you decided to go to the Met?” Her dad took another drag of his cigarette. He turned his head and blew the smoke away from Laura. His whole body relaxed. When she was little, her dad used to take her to openings, galleries, and museums all over the city. He held her hand, she held tightly to his, and she listened to his explanations for the squiggly lines and the big blotches of color on the canvases.

“I did,” Laura answered.

“And this Spike was there?”

“Yeah.”

He was. He had been studying the paintings like an art student, his face as close as he could get, right up to the canvas as if singling out each brushstroke, the delineation between colors, the gradation of tones.

“I know you.” Laura stood beside him.

“Yeah?” The boy didn’t seem surprised.

“You’re Spike.” She could see his name scratched into the wall of the subway car.

Now he turned to her. “How do you know that?”

“I saw you,” Laura answered. “On the subway. Are you an artist?”

“I’m a writer.” There was an aggressiveness to his voice. Laura instinctively took a step away.

The boy softened. “I mean we’re called writers, not artists. You saw my tag?”

Laura nodded.

“Good,” the boy said, and started to walk away. “You’ll see more of it. I’m getting up all over. Keep an eye out.”

“I will,” Laura called after him.

He was kind, not dangerous. Laura had felt that. She suddenly wanted to tell her father about Bruce. Things are not all that they seem; people are not what they seem. Her dad would want to know that, wouldn’t he?

Her dad stubbed his cigarette out in the sink. It hissed.

“Why don’t you go and tell your brother dinner’s ready. I’ll take these out of the oven.”

But the truth was, people just wanted to believe what was easiest, that a line from A to B was straight. There is no one behind the curtain.

“Sure, Dad,” Laura answered. She knew her father didn’t want to walk into the guest room and smell something he’d have to address. He looked tired; Laura was sure he didn’t feel like getting into a conflict.

A to B is easier.

THE
absolute ironic truth was that she had been the one who introduced her mother to Bruce in the first place. It was just after her parents’ split, after her mom moved the three of them to Woodstock. Richard Nixon was president of the United States, and Apollo 9 launched the first lunar module. They made everyone in school crowd into the library to watch the redocking on closed-circuit TV that afternoon.

Laura’s mom had rented a normal-looking, average
Brady Bunch
ranch house on a dirt road that ran off from the very top of a horseshoe street a few miles from town. The mailman didn’t drive up the dirt road, so four plain mailboxes had been set up on a wooden plank at the top of the street’s curve, plus one that was wildly psychedelic.

Painting that mailbox had been Philip’s idea. Philip was Laura’s mother’s first boyfriend after the divorce. In hindsight, which is of course twenty-twenty, Laura wished she had liked Philip more. She didn’t dislike him, but the whole thing was so weird, and it seemed to have happened so quickly. One year her mom was sitting, her hair curlers covered with a plastic dryer cap attached by a hose to a roaring box of hot air, watching Jack LaLanne on television, and the next she was outside in overalls and a tank top, painting yin/yang symbols on their new mailbox while her blond long-haired boyfriend rubbed her shoulders.

For the newcomers flocking to Woodstock in 1969, it may have been another Summer of Love, but for the teachers, the parents of the other third-graders, the principal, the mailman, the town librarian, and all the other grown-ups that Laura came in contact with, it was business as usual. It was “America, Love It or Leave It.” This hippie movement was an unwelcome, un-American annoyance, and if not downright dangerous, then certainly unhygienic. The town may have been invaded by musicians and
longhairs,
but the school was having none of it. Once you entered the doors of Woodstock Elementary School, you’d never know there was a zealous revolution going on outside. Laura never could have explained this to her mother.

The disparity began a game of survival.

Laura picked out Jamie Stein immediately at the Woodstock Sunday picnic, the final town picnic before school began. Her black hair was flying wild. She wore work boots, untied, no socks, and a long patchwork dress. Jamie looked like a miniature version of all the grown-ups hanging around on their Indian-print bedspreads, passing joints, except that she was running. Laura followed Jamie into the woods, along the worn paths that bordered the town green.

“Wanna go on the swings?” Jamie called out. This wild girl seemed to embody what being a hippie could or should truly be: free, loving, and willing to befriend anyone. It was just what Laura needed, moving into a new house, a new town, and a new school; she needed a guide, someone on the inside and the outside, someone who seemed to straddle both worlds.

Laura didn’t really have to answer, just keep up. She could barely see the green lawn through the trees as the path wound farther away. Her experience up until now had been laid out in squares, concrete squares — Warren Street, Clinton Ave., Remsen Street. Three sides of the square got her to P.S. 8. Across one street and two more straight lines took her to her friend Denise’s brownstone and so on. Anything farther than that had to be negotiated by an adult and usually required getting on a city bus or heading down into the subway and emerging somewhere totally different.

Now the ground below her sneakers was dirt, but Jamie seemed perfectly comfortable among the low bushes and high branches with sunlight filtering down from the sky, surrounding her.

This is the daughter my mother wants,
Laura knew. She is the flower child, free and happy.
Nothing like me.
Maybe Laura could be more agreeable, less trouble, less square. Less Jan Brady and more Laurie Partridge. Maybe, with a friend like Jamie.

“Wait a minute.” Jamie stopped suddenly.

Laura was quiet. The sounds of the town picnic were far away. If she had to, she could probably find her way back. Jamie moved off the path, a few steps into the bushes, and hiked up her skirt.

It wasn’t as if Laura hadn’t peed in semipublic before — once, at Jones Beach when the line to the girls’ bathroom was so long. But her mother had been there, holding up a towel and shielding her. And as far as Laura could tell now, Jamie wasn’t just peeing.

“I bet you’ll be in my class this year,” Jamie chatted away. “I hope we don’t get Mrs. Crutcher. She’s the meanest sixth-grade teacher.”

Jamie reached out and tore some leaves from whatever vegetation was growing beside her low crouch. “I heard that from my brother. You have an older brother, don’t you?”

Laura nodded.

“I saw your brother,” Jamie went on. “He’s cute.” She stood up, but Jamie never pulled up her underpants. Laura realized she hadn’t had any on to pull down in the first place. Jamie leaped back out onto the path and started off.

“C’mon. The playground’s right over here. Hopefully no one will be on the swing.”

As luck would have it, a week later Laura
was
assigned to Mrs. Crutcher’s sixth-grade classroom. Her mother left her school records with the main office, handed Laura her lunch box, and ruffled her hair.

“Be groovy” was her mother’s advice.
Nobody
really
used that word, did they?

“We have a new student this year.” Mrs. Crutcher had her hands on Laura’s shoulders, and it didn’t feel pleasant. She would let go when she wanted Laura to sit down, when she decided
where
she wanted Laura to sit, and not a minute before. “Her name is Laura Duncan. Can everyone say hello to Laura?”

Except for the fact that everyone was white in Woodstock Elementary School, the class looked fairly familiar. Boys and girls sitting at desks; cubbies and a metal sink at the back of the room; a blackboard and erasers; and the teacher’s desk at the front. Mrs. Crutcher wore a plain cotton dress and nylon socks, the kind that came to about calf height and then squeezed the fat around her leg.

Laura looked at the faces looking at her. The boys had crew cuts. The girls wore dresses and kneesocks. They probably all had mothers who sat under hair dryers at night, and fathers who went to work in the mornings. Except for Jamie Stein.

Jamie had a leather headband tied around her forehead, which she would be, later in the day, requested to remove. She was smiling widely and waving her hands.

“Well, then, Laura, I see you have a friend already.” Mrs. Crutcher released her grip. “You can take the desk behind Miss Stein.” Laura wasn’t sure that was the best idea after all, but she sat down and smiled.

And Bruce was the boarder. He rented one of the rooms in the huge house that Jamie’s mother owned. He stood in the doorway to his room the first time Laura went to visit. Laura didn’t look at him very closely. She was taking in the overwhelming smell of incense, the strings of beads hanging in the doorway, the abundance of pillows, the wooden bowl filled with marijuana (
Mary Jane,
as Jamie identified it) that sat on a stand in the center of the living room. But she would always remember his presence, dark and quiet, and in her mind, Laura would torture herself with the knowledge that it was
her
friendship with Jamie that had brought her mother to this house, that had made it possible for her mother to meet Bruce, then promptly dump the blond-haired Philip. Adding to the irony, Jamie’s mother sold their house a few months later and left Woodstock. They moved to New York City to open a head shop down in the village.