7. Youth and Age on an MTA bus

We got on the bus, the 103 down Third coming back from the doctors. Cathy has had a chest x-ray. Very quick, no waiting – if she hadn’t had the last appointment yesterday she could have had it done at the doctor’s there and then. No charge, just ten dollars for yesterday’s appointment. UN health insurance coverage is good.

Quite full, the bus, people standing. I couldn’t sit down, but Cathy got the last of the four sideways seats at the offside front of the bus. I hung on to a pole close by. Sitting next to her was a little girl of about 4 or 5, and next to her a middle aged woman I took to be her childminder, or perhaps collecting her from school or nursery. The girl was white; hair more fair than red but she made me think of orphan Annie. The childminder was a woman of colour, not very dark, but I guess Afro-American rather than Indian. The girl was holding a doll on her knee, a pink-skinned doll, with an elastoplast on its bald head.

“Your head hurt?" she asks her chaperone.
“Yes, it hurts.”
“Did I make it hurt?”
“No, you didn’t make it hurt.”
“Who made it hurt?”
“Nobody,” she says, philosophically.

The little girl goes back to her thoughts and I watch the shops slide slowly by, a nail bar, Starbucks, Ye Olde Vitamin Shoppe ‘serving you since 1975’, a deli, another nail bar.

After one or two more stops, a tall, well padded man, seventyish, hauls himself up the steps of the bus using both handrails. He manages to put his MTA card into the slot by the driver and turns his whole body round to face down the bus. He sees much of the corridor populated with standing passengers.

“Holy mackerel!” he exclaims, with theatrical projection and articulation. A phrase I have never heard before, only read, when I was a boy, in a Superman comic coming out of the mouth of Clarke Kent, or was it Batman and Robin?

Then, turning his head slightly to his left he notices the first sideways seat on the nearside of the bus is free. Someone had just got off.

“I’ve hit the jackpot!” he declaims, to no one in particular, and at the same time to the whole bus. He lowers himself slowly down and sighs a loud sigh of relief as his behind eventually comes to a stop on the plastic seat.

“How ya doin’, precious?” Everybody looks up, wondering who the words are aimed at.

The four-year old sitting almost across from him answers: “I’m good.”Her chaperone reproaches her gently: “Say: I’m good thank you.”“I’m good thank you,” murmurs orphan Annie.

Another few stops, a deli and another nail bar.

“Your head still hurt?" Annie asks her companion.
“Yes, it still hurts.”
“Did I make it hurt?”
“No, you didn’t make it hurt, sweetie.”
“Who made it hurt?”
“Nobody.”
“It just hurt by itself?”
“It just hurt by itself.”
“Ah.”

A couple more stops, more passengers get off and more get on. Suddenly, Annie’s minder gets up from her seat, keeps the child in hers. She has noticed before I did a tall elegant woman struggling to mount the steps. She indicates to the woman to sit down. The woman moves slowly and painfully, is short of breath. She more or less falls into the seat and throws her head back, closes her eyes, sucks in some air. Her short hair is greying blonde, not silvery but dull, it has no sparkle. The fine profile of a Vanessa Redgrave, but her cheeks are hollow, her skin a sallow off-white, more like a death mask. She may not be as old as she looks. Or maybe she is and it’s just the cut of her coat that takes a few years off her. She sighs a deep sigh, or at least as deep as her lungs will let her. A sigh of frustration, not of resignation, but recognisably a sigh of rage, of longing to be finally free of it all.

I look down at the little girl who runs her finger over the elastoplast on her doll’s hairless head.

In the meantime, the man opposite, I notice, has quietly disappeared.