Dear F,
You are reliably late. You know this. But still, you seem stubborn in your dedication to toying with a city of people who so vehemently detest the act of waiting. This city does not breed patience.
Instead, this city breeds tall girls shaped like bobby pins and men in dark grey suits and sneakers, and mothers with canvas bags stuffed with graham crackers baked of a grain that allegedly cured type-one diabetes in a small village somewhere in South America. It breeds old men in newspaper caps with scarves draped uselessly around their shoulders leaving their necks exposed, and middle-aged women in sensible shoes reading newspapers in Mandarin while shepherding daughters with identical pairs of Velcro sneakers. They hail from Fort Hamilton and East Broadway and then Columbus Circle and East 61st street, and they all denounce your predictable tardiness. But I have always reluctantly enjoyed the ways in which you make things difficult.
Anyhow, do you remember me when I was very small? We knew each other then too. In those days, we played “capture the flag” in your Prospect Park precincts. We divided 16th street in half at the point between 464A and 466, just past your entryway, and that dotted line felt something like the equator. We had a whole city right there, just over the bridge, just past the corner, and yet, we spent our Saturday afternoons sprinting through the yellowed light of your dim, cavernous tunnels. The flags were just symbols, hand-me-down T-shirts and war-torn table cloths, but you were the real thing. You were wins and losses and locomotion.
When I was old enough to commute on my own, I mapped the city as a collection of your stops. I arranged Brooklyn and then Manhattan in my head around the little line that wound its way like an orange vein through the paper subway maps that were iron framed in all of your cars. I knew geography only relative to your collection of strategic stops and starts.
On my sixteenth birthday, I kissed a boy in your tiled sub-sidewalk alleys just by the stairs at the 14th street exit, dressed in your dampened light. I’d told him I loved him and I’d been lying. He’d said it first and I had grown tired of being disagreeable. Later that month, he had held my hair in his fists at the nape of my neck while I vomited sugar and rum onto your tracks. I cried and said cruel things and he wiped my chin with the sleeve of his winter coat. You were late. We were waiting for you.
Some time last year, I sat with you just across from a woman I used to know. We were shimmying our way down Ocean Parkway and I could see her counting third rail clicks with her pointer finger against her thigh. I knew the tap-tap of that human metronome well: She had taught me to play the piano when I was a little girl. Her house smelled like raw honey mixed with rainwater and cherry cough drops and she was taller and softer than my mother, with broad shoulders and plump, sturdy legs. I did not say hello because years ago, maybe centuries, I had quit piano unceremoniously to learn three-chord Ramones songs on the guitar, dressed in black and pink Converse high tops. I could not remember telling her goodbye. There were new lines like commas, folded into the corners of her lips and the edges of her eyes — you had watched her grow older in my absence. And so I sat still, counting stops out in 2:4 timing, and I hoped she wouldn’t see me.
This past June, we brought my kid brother home from school in the afternoon. I told him about a book I had been reading all about television screens and alcoholics and boys who play tennis. Something about postmodernism and worst case scenarios. He told me something he had learned that morning in his sixth grade science class about honeybee blood. He explained that the honeybee has a tiny heart, the size of a hole punch, polka dotted with five pin prick valves that pump bee-blood, keeping time in its fluttering amber chest. It bleeds a wheaty antique gold, the color of straw. It has blood with no oxygen — none of the molecules that dye our insides sticky red. But the honeybee heart, unlike that of most creatures, pumps insect blood into all of the bee’s anatomical edges; no tubes or capillaries or veins, simply a collection of organs free-floating in a tub of milky yellow. I thought about how you must have heard this before. How you’d heard of all things honeybee, and of the state of the Dow Jones index, and of all the book reports due the following Monday. How, at your Smith-Ninth Street station, when you launched above ground, we were all just free-floating in the same bath of sunny gold.
Each morning, en route to high school, I rode in your second car. I knew well the winter coats of your most consistent passengers; I knew when they finished their novels and began new ones. I knew which days the little girls packed their things for their dance classes and when the women got haircuts. I did not know their names or their professions but I knew how much milk they put in their iced coffees and how likely they were to check their cellphones the moment you emerged at Fourth Avenue.
On Sunday I took you to a funeral for a man I knew. We called him Jaysie, which sounds like Daisy, and when I was small I thought his name was a flower. I had a front stoop and I knew little of gardens and the things that grew in them. His house was the fourth from the corner of 12th street and the park, and his buzzer sounded like an angry cicada trapped in a water glass. He waited for you at the 9th street station every morning, too.
Of late, I’ve been meaning to tell you this: Thank you.
We have in common much of a life spent under ground; hours spent navigating New York from underneath. You watched me fall one fourth of the way in love, and you watched facial hair sprout on my kid brother’s chin. You carried my father to work and my piano teacher back to her rain water-honey living room. You carried Jaysie when cancer was chewing its way through his bones and my sister to ballet before she up and quit Brooklyn. You have held most of the things that matter most to me.
This morning, I wrote you a letter while I waited for you, huddled in my own delicate anticipation. My city taught me to move quickly, but you taught me something about preserving the fragile space that exists at the half way points.
You taught me something about the graceful cursive of human motion — the turning of pages or the adjustment of ties or the finger-combing of a child’s hair. Gentle arcs, connected in full. You taught me something of the frantic business of living a life here – of acknowledging all of the marvelous particulars of a world shared with so many other elegant bodies. You taught me to preserve certain things in brine and in salt and in notebooks — of hands and of haircuts and of balancing on moving ground.
Sincerely,
Eliza M. Dumais
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