Stilts
I discovered her in the basement of the house I lived during my final two years in high school. The gift she gave, misused as a boost, at times for ego; others for deviant behavior, like lifting batteries and candy bars from the local drugstore, sodas from bodegas, up to boosting Polos at the mall.
Crouched in the damp corner near the boiler where years of moisture cracked the cement an earthquake had merely shifted. A direct contrast to the wide-angled hips of fashion that form a gap, she anchored reality as people looked away, pretending not to know how long legs stunt growth, and turn promising pioneers into sport or human clothes racks.
Inner strength enabled her to overcome the pitfalls and the hurdles, easily shifting, incognito amongst accusers, wearing a smile and carrying a slight inflection. While I may never know how she crossed over onto this track, I am glad she volleyed her right to have a ball as a young dancer, determined to find a safe landing path.
On the platform that first day, only to vanish for weeks, leaving her silhouette in my memory, she reappears indiscriminately at the transfer point, then rides to the place where we get off.
Slits
Once-over over with, she returns to head-nodding, as one glance, a snapshot becomes a digital film. Messy hair, wedding band and crossed arms. Sandwiched between two others, transforming the right one into a support beam. Though the passage could be seen as the reverse of freedom, civility is required. The fellow riders understand how fatigue drains those who can be thought to be sleepwalking through life.
Gone are days when paradise was a garage, before womanhood turned out to be a short, straight dotted line. From in front of a greasy pan whose heat sent smoke, way back to lessons where mother explained how to roll dough for a warm broth.
With two kids and a husband who hugs twice a day, not to cop a feel, but because the children are the result of emotions laid bare.
We cross a landscape, suspended hundreds of feet over water. Her head nods further to the right, the leg moves left, further widening the slit in the middle of a khaki skirt. By the way she hunches her shoulders, she manages to make knee-high leather tan boots reserved.
The rattling of steel wheels disrupts her nap. She checks her surroundings with quick peeks then resumes her dreamscape. As I prepare to get off, I am content to have learned why we kiss with our eyes closed.
Lip Gloss
The rumbling from the other side of the tracks adds to her agitation. Standing like a teenage starlet looking to do a cameo, pouting lips, knees pushed back, until she resumes the constant pacing from the wall to the edge of the platform.
“From Madam Walker’s beauty shop…” Her hairstyle is a hint she could be jailbait. This generation fashion and sexiness know few boundaries. Height has to be discounted ‘cause a date being carded once angered and baffled me, at the assumption I would swim in the kiddie pool.
The retro black jeans take me back to the 1980’s of lockers in hallways, lip gloss and mini-skirts, Coney Island on Easter Sunday to show off your wears, and cotton candy on top of the ferris wheel. When the world was abstract, and had yet to develop a recurring theme.
How this hour, sectioned in a portion called evening, when the distance between two car doors serves either as a barrier or time machine. To recover a decade, perhaps two, forgetting that some older dudes claim to shy away from dimes in their twenties.
I concur whiny voices, even when explaining chemistry, sound like fingernails across a blackboard. Yet, the allure of lip gloss on pouting lips makes subway crooners tolerable.
By walking into the last door of the preceding car, I hope to quiet the thoughts with help from a quartet…plus one more, of DooWop songs by sexagenarians.
They got off at the next stop, not realizing I would have given change had the tune in my head not been
“she was only seventeen…”
Turquoise
She looked like the naughty librarian, in her utmost fictional incarnation. The profile partly rooted in myth, a throwback of American culture in the 1950’s, where it was taught and thought that good girls didn’t.
I would only have her for 3 more train stops. At first, we shared cursive glances, subtle contact, wondering if we were this close, would we look in the other direction. From 10 feet apart, with no more than 3 other straphangers playing the role of shelves in a crowded library.
Peek-a-boo. It was fine to look away then back, until she got a seat.
Her movements were slow and precise, a striptease done not to uncover, but to further shield her thoughts. Out of her handbag came the address book, pen and eyeglasses. Not quite horn-rimmed, but slim frames perched near the tip of her nose. She no longer took peeks, so I stared at her disguise under a blue denim jacket: cotton crew neck top, long flowing skirt to her ankles, and flats…all turquoise…
…then I had to get off.
