Subway Love

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “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 PEACENIK 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 doll
s 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.

  “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.