Part Four: The Smile
At Sox–35th the construction worker got off, and I should have gotten off too. That was my stop; I had a shift starting in twenty minutes. But I sat there with my coffee and my paperback in my lap, because something had just become very clear to me, and I wanted to see if I was right.
A woman took the construction worker’s place: a slender woman in her thirties in a gray coat with a laptop bag, who sat down carefully with her knees together and her bag on her lap. For about thirty seconds, nothing happened. Then, slowly, as the train swayed out of the station, that knee began to drift outward again. An inch. Two inches. Until it was resting heavily against her thigh.
She glanced down at it and shifted toward the aisle. He noticed her discomfort. I watched him notice it. And he smiled.
That was when I understood. It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t that he didn’t know how big he was. He knew exactly how big he was, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He’d folded himself up as small as a pocketknife the moment a man bigger than him sat down, and he’d unfolded again the moment that man was replaced by a woman. He wasn’t taking up space because he needed it. He was taking up space because he could, because he’d figured out a long time ago that most women would rather stand than fight, and he enjoyed watching them choose.
I’ve treated men like that in the emergency room. Not physically like him, but in the way they move through a room. They’re very polite to the doctors and very rude to the nurses. They call the male residents “Doc” and call me “sweetheart.” They know exactly whose discomfort they can afford.
I looked at the old woman with the cane, still squeezed against the partition, her plum beret slightly askew. I looked at the woman in the gray coat, now perched on the edge of her seat with her laptop bag clutched to her chest. Then I looked out the window at the gray October morning sliding past, and I took out my phone and did some quick arithmetic in my head.
It was 7:22 on a Saturday. The next stop was 47th, then Garfield, then 63rd. And on the third Saturday of every October for the last six years, I knew exactly who would be standing on the platform at 47th Street at 7:26 in the morning, because I’d ridden with them a dozen times and cheered for them twice that many. I sent a quick text, and I got an answer back in under ten seconds, because my daughter has never once in her life been more than three inches from her phone.
Part Five: Would You Trust Me?
At Garfield, I stood up.
He watched me rise from my seat, and his smirk came back. “Finally leaving?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
I crossed the aisle, holding the pole as the train lurched, and I leaned down toward the women on either side of him: the elderly woman with the cane on his left and the woman in the gray coat on his right. I spoke quietly, but not so quietly that I was hiding anything. I wanted him to hear that something was coming. I just didn’t want him to hear what.
“Would you trust me,” I asked them, “for two minutes?”
The two women exchanged a look across him, the old woman’s pale blue eyes meeting the younger woman’s brown ones over the broad expanse of his navy quarter-zip. I saw something pass between them, the silent conversation women have been having across men for about ten thousand years. Then they both nodded.
I leaned closer and whispered one thing to them. Just one sentence. The old woman’s eyebrows went up under her plum beret. The woman in the gray coat put a hand over her mouth, and I saw her shoulders shake once.
The man laughed. “Oh, this should be good,” he said. “What are you doing, lady? Organizing a protest?”
“You’ll see,” I said, and I went back to my seat across the aisle and sat down with my coffee.
He kept smirking. He tipped his head back against the window and closed his eyes, the very picture of a man who had never lost an argument on public transit and did not intend to start now. His knees stayed exactly where they were, spread wide across three seats’ worth of plastic.
The train slowed for 47th Street. Through the window I could see the platform sliding into view, and on it, right where the sixth car would stop, a crowd of young women in matching navy-and-gold warm-up jackets, with duffel bags over their shoulders and their hair pulled back in tight braids. A few of them were holding cleats tied together by the laces. One of them was carrying a ball shaped like an oversized egg.
When the doors began to open, I winked at the two women.
“Ready?” I asked.
They nodded.
