A flashlight sends a beam through our car, revealing grimy faces, hair like wet paintbrushes, shirts see-through with sweat. The ground is littered with empty water bottles, Tupperware containers, Clif Bar wrappers. I’m momentarily reassured to see this, to know that people were surreptitiously sneaking water so that they wouldn’t be forced to share. That’s survival instinct. It would be a glorious thing to witness if I weren’t already panting.
The click of a key against metal, then the turn of a lock, and the door at the front of the car pops open. “Please remain calm! I am Officer Gutierrez of the NYPD. I do not have any information to share at this time beyond what I am about to tell you, so please do not badger me with questions like the other damn cars did.” A low laugh responds. All right, Officer Gutierrez, good on you, banding us together against those idiots in the front cars. Screw those guys.
“We’re going to have to evacuate this car. All of the cars. We’re going to walk in an orderly fashion out the back and walk back to the Bedford Street stop along the tracks. I’ll say this more than once, and it’s important to keep this in mind—you are not in any danger. Whatever is keeping us from moving forward is not a threat to us down here; the electricity on the tracks has been turned off so there’s no danger in the third rail. There are supposed to be emergency lights, but those aren’t working. I don’t have any information on that, other than it’s dark. I’m not afraid of the dark, but my kids are, so I understand that some of you may be as well. If you are, hold hands with someone who isn’t, and walk with them. Walk carefully and slowly, anywhere you want along the tracks. Again, the third rail is off and it’s not going back on until every last person is out of the tunnel. I don’t have any more information than that. You are not in any danger.
“We still have a few cars to go. You have all been incredibly patient and I know there is help waiting for you on the surface, medical help if you need it, and definitely water. Once I get all of the doors open, I’ll start coming through again and letting you know when it’s okay to go. Everyone standing will go first, as orderly as possible. There’s no rush. I repeat, you are not in any danger. Then the people sitting will go. If you need additional assistance, I encourage you to arrange for it now while we get the doors open. Ask your fellow passengers, and we’ll make sure everyone who needs it has a guide through the tunnel.
“Everyone got all that? I’m not taking questions now so don’t ask me. I’m going to walk through and give this speech to the next car, then the one after that, and then I’m at the back of the train. One last time, you are not in any danger.”
He sweeps through the carriage, the only person who can see in front of himself, thanks to the beam of light, carried by a conductor who leads the way like a henchman, beady eyed and eager, key at the ready. At the back end of the car, the keys jangle once more, the door swings open, and we hear more or less the same speech, with the same insulting quip about the too-inquisitive car (Hey, make sure they know it’s not us, I think) and the same promise, said hoarse and rote, spoken sincerely but believed by not a single person on any of the cars, that we are not in any danger.
Paul Fenniger
Eleven Months Ago: August 14, 2009
Jenny missed her calling. She’s a spectacular editor, I know this firsthand from how she used to fix my papers in college, but where she truly would have excelled is as an interrogator. Black ops. The military would swoop in, pick her up in a chopper, spirit her away to undisclosed locations, warehouses in the bowels of the third world where, in flannel pajamas, Jenny would sit across from the world’s most battle-hardened terrorists and get them to spill their secrets. Sometimes she’ll start asking me questions, weaving her way around to the topic she actually wants to get to, luring me into a trap of my own design until (snap!) she springs and I’m left totally exposed. In this respect, she is an emotional ninja. Other times, she’ll lie in wait, still and silent, as she does now, reading a J.Crew catalog at the kitchen table as if she’s barely conscious of my existence. I know better, though, not that there’s anything I can do about it. When she’s ready, which is when I’m most vulnerable, she’ll ask the penetrating question that will make my head explode and splatter every iota of information she seeks. In this respect, Jenny Sayles is an emotional sniper. I glance over at her, beautiful and deadly, and she looks up, flashing a wan smile.
“Can we listen to something else?” she asks. I picked Erik Satie. He scores the moment, slow and achingly gorgeous in three-quarter time. It’s my favorite. My fingers dance on the air, on the countertops, on top of the chicken, once on Jenny’s bare back, playing those same notes over and over again, languid and melancholic. She doesn’t usually mind. Tonight is different. She knows I’m hiding something and she wants to keep me uncomfortable, off balance. So she changes my comfortable music. She’s brilliant. I slip a step ahead of Jenny, all the while aware that she’s going to destroy me in the end. There’s no winning for winning.
I ask, “What do you want to listen to?”
She gets up and is halfway to my computer when she says, “Anything else.”
Jenny puts on the Replacements. She hops and bounces into the kitchen. Four weeks of torpor and now Jenny has springs in her heels. She’s an awful dancer, but that’s okay. I love her for her inability to stay on time, for her reckless abandon. She doesn’t dance in public, only here, frequently in the kitchen, poking me, teasing me, rubbing up against me while I work with hot pans.
She still has the body she had when I met her, slender hips and skinny thighs. Her hands go to my ribs and I feel her sway behind me, her hair brushing my bare arms, her fingers migrating south.
It’s been so long. I’ve been so patient waiting for her, waiting for her body to recover, for the fissures and fractures of her mind to once again fuse. And she knows how long it’s been for me, her fingers teasing around my belt, pressing me, turning me toward her.
But when I reach for the knob to shut off the oven, to perform this last task before taking her into our bedroom, she grabs my hand and pulls it back. “What are you hiding from me, Fenn?” she asks.
My mouth is dry. It takes a second to form words. “What makes you think I’m hiding something?”
“Because you just stalled.” She smiles, but she’s not amused. “What have you done?”
“Nothing bad.”
“… and … ?”
“I invited some people over.”
“Fenn!”
“You’ll like them.”
She lets my hand go, like it burned her, or disgusts her. “Fenn, I don’t want guests. Not right now. I would hope you’d understand why.”
“I do. But the guy works in construction.”
She shakes her head, incredulous. “I don’t understand any of that. Where did you meet this guy?”
“At the hospital,” I say quietly.
“Oh.” She matches my volume. I turn off the oven, now because I’m fairly certain I’ve ruined dinner. “And why was he in the hospital?”
“His wife was having a …” I can’t say the word yet, can’t make the leap.
“A b-b-b-b-baby?” she mocks me. “You invited them to do what, rub my nose in our dead child? Are they going to bring their kid with them, remind me that I killed ours?”
“Please stop saying that.”
“Why did you do this? Why would you do this to me?” She balls up her hand into a fist and hits me once, pounds my chest with a gavel strike that hurts but only a little, more for the seismic change in the room. Jenny takes a step back after impact, half-worried that I’m going to clock her back, which I never would, and half-amazed at what she just got away with. Her expression goes from rage to numb shock.
“It was a surprise,” I offer. “He’s going to look at the nursery and talk about turning it into an office for you.”
She cries, and I know I won’t be redeemed for my good intentions. “I don’t want anyone in that room, Fenn. That room isn’t … no one goes in there.”
This only makes her cry harder. She doesn’t want to leave Greenpoint, or this home on Franklin Street. It took us so long to find it, longer to afford it. So instead she goes limp in my arms, lowering herself to the floor, taking me with her, until I have her cradled on the kitchen floor, both of us in tears, the oven growing cold.
Michael Gould
Present Day: July 19, 2010
10:02 AM
If hell has a chorus, the soprano section is made up of sirens. Hi-lo’s and Klaxons, horns blaring to reinforce the message. The only time I pay attention to them is when I’m driving. And now, standing on the corner of 179th and Broadway, looking north, watching a convoy of emergency vehicles head south, speeding through intersections. Fire engines wail like banshees at the vanguard, clearing the path. Ambulances follow, one after another. Dozens of police cruisers in the back. The noise concusses everyone around me. We cover our ears, a shameful line for New Yorkers to cross. We dull our own senses for no one and no thing, but the cacophony is too great, the horror of this frantic armada too powerful.
When it passes, I notice for the first time the cars traveling in the opposite direction, without benefit of siren or flashing lights. No one is around to stop them from speeding, from running the red lights, from blocking the box and preventing the flow of cross-town traffic. These are the first rats to flee the ship.
I race downtown, block by block. My phone still gets no service, and thanks to the proliferation of cell phones, pay phones are harder and harder to find. The few I’ve passed have lines twelve deep, people elbowing, demanding that the front of the line finish his fucking call because they need to check on family too. People keep waving their cell phones in the air, trying to get attention from a satellite, eyeing one another contemptuously. Must be that too many people are making calls at the same time, right? Must be you who is putting us over, right?
I’ve heard nothing concrete about what has happened, only that police have closed off midtown, that it’s gridlock from the park to the ferry. Latest speculation still has this as terrorism, but those are street corner wagers.
With what battery life I have left, I open up Google maps and try to chart a route home, but without service, I can’t get the map to expand. I’m left with the last place I was, the subway station twenty blocks up from here. A few blocks south and the picture won’t clarify, my city dissolves into terra incognita. Broadway will take me home, I think. To Central Park at least.
I contemplate waiting this out. There are diners with bottomless cups of coffee for me to sit at, wait at least until buses start running. Even if midtown is ricin confetti right now, some contingency plan will emerge. It has to.
But every second up here prolongs those other uncertainties: where Jenny is, what prompted her last text, who was standing over her shoulder as she sent it. And Rebecca and Jackson, glimpsing Manhattan from the front window. Rebecca won’t stop shaking until she sees me again; a phone call, even if I could make one, wouldn’t satisfy.
I will walk home from the tip of Manhattan back to Red Hook. It’s insane, a marathon, but it’s my duty; I signed up for it the moment Rebecca took my name and Jackson took my blood. I think that is where my feet will take me, but I have time to decide. I have literally hundreds of blocks to walk, a bridge to cross, and God knows what chaos to walk through in order to get home. That I’ve mapped it out in my head is enough commitment for now.
Standing just off from the foot traffic, I consult my amorphous blur of a map one last time. Scanning it, pinching my fingers along the screen to zoom in and out, I still see the route in my head, and there I also see the alternate route, to Greenpoint. Filing my way back into the stream of people heading south, I still have time to decide.
Michael Gould
Eleven Months Ago: August 21, 2009
Rebecca shoves a variety tray of cookies into the oven. She’s timed it so that they’ll come out as my parents arrive, if they are on time, which they will inevitably be. I watch her run the countdown in her head, as if she can see them driving over. They don’t expect cookies, and were she to have asked, my mother would be horrified that Rebecca went to any trouble on her account. Of course, ask my mother if she would ever have someone over to her house and not put out something to eat, and she’d look at you like you were raised by Cossacks.
Really venture back, far back, to a Sunday afternoon. Pre-Jackson. Pre–Red Hook. Pre-marriage. Early, but not too early in our relationship. Bar in Connecticut. Rebecca has a book open on her lap and something blanc sweating in front of her. I’m on my second beer, watching my beloved Mets on the bar’s television. Every few minutes I sigh, or grunt, or groan, vacillating between noises she connects to sex and noises she connects to leaf raking. Finally she looks up, sees that my team is losing, eight to three. I’m shaking my head, back and forth, a weary, sullen metronome.
“Rooting for the Mets,” I say, “is like rooting for my relatives in Auschwitz. All I want is for them to retain a shred of dignity before they hit the showers.”
And that’s when it twigs my girlfriend that she’s seriously dating her first Jew.
*
• • •
She presents her credentials, as if it’s a job interview. She hadn’t deliberately avoided dating Jews growing up. There were plenty of them in Connecticut, plenty at her school. She always remembered to wish people happy holidays. I still called her a closet anti-Semite. Meant it as a joke, but that light poke left a bruise. She turned the conversation serious then, to an evergreen serious topic, to Jolie.
“I had other things to worry about,” she argued. “I was eight and Jolie was getting in trouble at school. I was ten and Jolie was sneaking out of the house. I was thirteen and stealing drugs from my sister’s room so I could flush them. Managing her and managing my parents took up a lot of time and kept me out of the bar mitzvah circuit, I guess.”
She didn’t meet my parents until we moved to New York. I hadn’t met Jolie before then either. Until those fateful meetings, our families were inventions, stories we’d tell each other, almost like sharing celebrity encounters. None of her sister’s exploits seemed plausible to me within the context of the Rebecca I knew. There’s no way two such disparate people could have been raised in the same household. Rebecca apologized to inanimate objects when she bumped into them. Her sister fellated men for heroin. It took a while for me to be properly introduced to Jolie. We had to find her first.
My parents, on the other hand, were easy to find. Rebecca met them in the house where I grew up, in Midwood, one of those neighborhoods in Brooklyn that seem permanently sepia to the outside world. Racial strife existed solely among European immigrants. The deli two blocks away had the sourest pickles. The Dodgers never left.
Marty Gould worked on the subway for decades, though I couldn’t offer Rebecca anything more specific than that. He wasn’t an engineer, more of a designer, a man who devised timetables to keep the system running efficiently. “Me and Mussolini,” my father remarked jovially. “We made the trains run on time.” Thirty seconds into an explanation of his job and all eyes glazed over, so he quipped instead.
My parents settled in Midwood because of the strong Jewish community. It gradually grew more Orthodox around them, black hats and gabardine at every bus stop, shop windows advertising in Hebrew, suspicious glances at Marty’s bald, uncovered head. Miriam and Marty considered moving for the duration of one tense meal before concluding that they liked Midwood, that they wouldn’t be ostracized from their perch as community pillars. Miriam set forth with new resolve to meet her new neighbors and make a good impression. As she put it, “one thing led to another,” and my mother became a Shabbos goy for her entire block. On the Sabbath, when any number of households around the Goulds spent the day avoiding all
work, keeping the lights off, observing laws that Marty and Miriam found, at best, arcane, Miriam went from house to house, helping however was needed. She’d turn on reading lamps and heat up suppers, doing the tasks those more spiritually observant could not. She confided to us that she suspected her neighbors liked having her as their designated goy, even though she wasn’t a goy (“Not like you, dear,” she said to Rebecca, dripping with intent), because she wasn’t a schvartze, like the Shabbos goyim of adjoining blocks.
Of course, the schvartzes also did their tasks for money, whereas Miriam refused all cash payment on the premise of being a good neighbor. It’s entirely possible that a bunch of Jews used Miriam because she was free, a point Rebecca never made aloud, partly because I made it for her. “What a terrible thing to say,” Miriam chastised but didn’t correct.
Instead of accepting cash, the neighbors made sure my parents were kept well fed in Old World cuisine: jars of chicken fat, herring in cream, gefilte fish suspended in gelatin, rugelach and sundry other pastries, and disc after disc after disc of potato pancake. Marty never called a plumber, or an electrician, or a mechanic. His neighbors all knew someone who owed a favor and who took care of virtually any nuisance right away, bowing gratefully to Marty after replacing a valve, as if it were he who had done them the favor. Miriam would venture out on Friday, an hour before sundown, and she’d return late at night, kiss my forehead whether or not I was asleep, and wake up early the next morning to work again until sundown, walking house to house while I played in the yard, the only child out that day, the only one with his head uncovered, unshaved, with his forelocks uncurled, his clothes treyf, tossing a baseball to himself. My mom would return Saturday night and soak her feet in Epsom salts while my dad heated up a leftover cholent, and the Gould family wanted for nothing.
Little Disasters Page 7