Jim and I just spent a couple of weeks in Queens helping our daughter Annie and her husband Juan Carlos after the birth of their baby. Juan Carlos encouraged us to take a Saturday break for site-seeing in Manhattan. We never run out of places to visit there, finding them this time in a Carnegie Hall tour and a journey up to the Met Cloisters.
We make good use of the subway. Despite its scary aspects, nothing else approaches its convenience, especially with Annie and Juan Carlos’s station a five-minute walk away. From there it’s a straight shot over a handful of stops to mid-town Manhattan.
Jim’s and my subway safety regiment involves standing back from the tracks while waiting in case a lunatic tries to shove us in front of approaching trains. This does happen occasionally to New Yorkers. Another protocol is scanning for unhinged occupants before boarding the cars.
We’ve also learned to avoid eye contact and not engage with other riders unless there’s sufficient reason to do so. This is New York subway etiquette, born from decades of strangers having to co-exist in tight spaces. But if a need arises, these very people will come through for you. I’m senior enough that if I don’t find a seat on a bumpy train ride, New Yorkers will offer me theirs. And these saints are young women, in my limited experience.
On our trek back from the Cloisters, we had to change trains deep in the bowels of Times Square, ground zero of strangeness in the city. We’d just missed our connection to Queens, with the reader board indicating a 14-minute wait. Fortunately two spots had just opened up on a reasonably-clean wooden bench right there. We sat.
A couple minutes later, a petite young woman, maybe 19, bee-lined toward us, looking me squarely in the eye. She was nicely groomed and accompanied by two ladies whom I’m guessing were Mom and Auntie. She’d garnished her black hair with streaks of purple.
Purple-streaked gal (“PSG”) indicated the armrest next to Jim on our bench. “Ma’am, can I sit here on the end?” PSG asked so softly and swiftly that her request melded into one utterance.
“Sure,” I answered.
PSG studied me, eyes narrowing. Another question. “Can I touch your hair?”
Before I could respond, PSG dug in. She went to town on my hair, stroking the blonde tendrils framing my face. This sounds dirtier than it was but actually dirty in other ways my brain still hasn’t fully processed.
“I’d rather you not,” I mumbled, too late.
To my relief, PSG’s mom whisked her away.
“That was weird,” I whispered to Jim.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” PSG boomed.
Oh, crap, I thought. I’m gonna get attacked on the subway in a whole different way.
Jim feared the same, I later learned. We both kept our gaze low. I prayed that Mom would keep PSG in check.
She did. We returned to Queens. I washed my hair.
I don’t curl my hair and have never had a permanent. My locks just do their own untamed thing with the encouragement of a blow dryer and a dab of mousse.
Friends regularly say they can easily locate me in a crowd with my unmistakable blonde head. Once while out with a group of gals, the waitress offered everyone else a glass of wine. When she got to me, she suggested a margarita.
Not everyone appreciates my unkempt style. A grandchild, my late elderly dad, and a friend with low filters have all mentioned that it looks like I don’t comb my hair. I just laugh and let them wonder.
But this episode of subway hair fondling reached new territory for me. I may need to utilize hats or even a flatiron before venturing underground again in this city famous for its building called the Flatiron. Just another item to add to our New York subway safety list, I guess.
Jim says he entirely missed PSG’s hair stroking, despite sitting at my hip.
“I had my eyes down,” he explains. “I was following subway protocol.”