Young Writers Society

Of Course

“Of course, Billy Joel was playing when Jane was born.” A disembodied voice is saying. The voice rings above the many confined, murmuring voices vying for resonance in the small space.

The small space is – incidentally – the five o’clock outbound commuter train to Pleasanton. Now – fifteen or so minutes into its route and well past the alleys and glass of downtown – the cars are packed with people. Most of them stand, shoulder to shoulder, clinging to the metal rail that runs above their heads. In their reflection in the glass they all look like revolutionaries. One fist held defiantly to the sky.

The voice weaves between all of this; floats above it, suspended bird-like on the sweaty thermals of hot human breath that fill the train. The voice is almost impossible to ignore. Or, perhaps, you have simply chosen not to try; have chosen to surrender your mind to its quiet insistence. In either case, you are not so much listening as witnessing. There is no action or will involved in your state; you simply are.

The voice continues: “so there’s birth. But anyway, as I was saying before, I went a few years ago with my good friend Linda to hear Billy play at the Addison.”

You cannot see the speaker from where you are. Tonight you’ve snagged a seat along the left wall of the train, facing inward. It is not your favorite place to sit – you’d prefer to face either forward or backward, as there is something that makes you uneasy in forging your way forward with a shoulder, especially your left – but it is a seat, and you’ve taken it.

The voice is coming from some mysterious location toward the front of the train along its right hand wall. Breaking- momentarily- your state of surrender you become curious about its origin; you are filled with a strangely immediate desire to know what the speaker looks like. You begin to experiment with the position of your head, turning it side to side, and tilting it on your neck, subtly changing your view. You find that if you tilt your head about 45 degrees to the left of center you are able to peer around the skirts and belt buckles of the would-be revolutionaries that line the space immediately in front of you, and see a sliver of the person to whom the voice belongs. They occupy the seat closest to the doors, facing the back of the train, more or less in your direction.

From the sliver you can see, you extrapolate a whole person. They are female, large and also dense. They have the look of a Native American effigy you saw once in an art museum, pudgy and columnar, composed of stacked rolls of red clay. In any other place or costume, they might look semi-divine, like Mother Earth’s own disciple put on display. But not here in the blunt and fluorescent train light. Here they just look sad. The bulk of their thighs pushes into their round stomach, which – in turn – pushes the squashed roll of their breasts (made into one entity by the pulled-taught expanse of a cornflower blue tee) up closer to their chin. On this solid shelf of flesh rest two rounded forearms.

The pose looks quite uncomfortable. The distance between rounded arms and rounded chin seems too-short and stuffy. It is perhaps a hindrance to the clarity of the voice, which is throaty, androgynous and submissive.

Still, it seems adept enough at commanding the attention of an audience. You sense that you are not the only one listening to it. A subtle static, similar to the otherworldly energy of a muted TV set, radiates toward it from all around the car.

You straighten your head to its usual position above your shoulders, and settle in to listen.

“Linda Ross,” the voice continues, “that was her married name, not her maiden. Her own name was pretty and foreign-sounding like Choiseul or Choisy or something. She was French, or her father was, I guess.” The pronunciation of the potential French surnames is impeccable, so good it is silly and nearly pretentious. It is like the speaker has momentarily slipped into another person’s life. “I’ll tell you,” they go on, “I’d never change my own name for any man, especially not for any deadbeat like David Ross. He divorced her after just three years you know, left her with two baby boys. And they never heard from him again, once she’d signed the papers.”

After a second of self-reflection you discover that some of your pleasure in listening to the voice comes from a feeling of superiority. You consider yourself to be – without a doubt – superior to the speaker. They are, you are sure, quite lacking in appropriate discretion. Imagine! Spouting the details of a “good friend’s” personal life into the sweaty crowded depths of the five o’clock train. You’d never dare.

The story goes on. “ Billy Joel was long after that, of course. By that time her boys were all grown up and living in the city, and Linda was 54. But that’s still pretty young, 54. Still middle-aged at least.”

As you listen you begin – with the same passive manner - to watch a child that is seated across from you. She is four or five years old, you guess, with wise brown eyes, and effortless blonde curls that spill down onto her shoulders. She is holding a dirty Barbie doll (well-loved, you correct yourself quickly, trying to replace judgment with a convenient euphemism) that is dressed for the weather in a bikini covered in green sequins. As you watch, her mother hands her a cookie – a shortbread seashell from a crackling, plastic three-pack. The mother has pinched the cookie free of its cellophane tube quite delicately, between a red-nailed thumb and forefinger. The Barbie doll is decisively surrendered, and the child grasps the cookie securely with both hands. She proceeds to eat it with tiny bird bites until left with about a third of the buttery thing. She then shoves the last bit into her mouth using one open palm. Crumbs shower down onto her lap. Much to your chagrin, her mother does not notice, or attempt to brush them off.

The child notices that you are watching her. She holds your gaze indifferently for a second; studies you unselfconsciously and with obvious boredom, in the way that children sometimes will, as if they already know all of your secrets. You smile at her, and she looks away.

Mildly disappointed at your inability to form a connection with the little girl (you like to think that you are good with children), you let your eyes flick off of her, up to the window above her head. The train is running parallel to the highway now. The cars are moving faster than you. Past the cars a montage of billboards and the bright signs of suburban shopping centers yell for your attention. You do not try to block the subliminal onslaught.

You realize, now, that you’ve lost track of the woman’s narrative. You begin to listen again - more actively now - as the voice is saying, “anyway,” and you are relieved, as it appears that you have only missed an anecdote. “We only stayed until he’d done ‘Piano Man,’” the voice continues, “which was both of our favorite song. By then we were so tired we could hardly keep our eyes open. We’d taken one car - hers - so she dropped me off. I think that it was raining when I got home, but it could be I added that in later. You ever do that? Change memories afterwards? It just should have been raining, if you know what I mean.”

You are reminded of a television show you saw once. Maybe it was 60 minutes. Something pseudo-intellectual. On this television show they were discussing memory and crime. And they did this experiment, or demonstration really, that is often done in college classes where you take a group of people involved in more or less the same experience - like listening to a lecture - and you interrupt this experience with something unexpected: a man runs into the room screaming and then runs out, or something like that. After everyone is calmed down, you ask each person what color the man’s shirt was. And no one can agree. Some people think the shirt was blue, and some people think the shirt was orange, and some people think he wasn’t even wearing a shirt. It happens like that every time. We remember what we want to remember, and when there are big blanks that make us feel uncomfortable, our mind colors them in with stolen facts.

“Next day Linda went to Office Max to buy some pens. And she had a brain aneurism in the check out line. A stroke.” Here the voice breaks off; falls some great distance into the heavy darkness that is those memories we bear alone. You imagine the speaker wiping a large forearm across her brow, or maybe pressing her fingertips to her eyes. There are no audible sobs or dramatics (you are somewhat disappointed), and after a moment the voice crawls back up to the surface: “She went out cold on the tile floor, and they had to call an ambulance. And a crowd formed around her and they had to push everyone back. And they asked if anyone was a doctor in the crowd but no one was. I wasn’t there. They told me all of this later.”

You wonder - a little guiltily, with half a smile at your private wittiness– if the people in the crowd could remember what color Linda’s shirt was.

“She regained consciousness in the ambulance, but she couldn’t move one side. I went to see her in the hospital right away. So someone could be with until her boys came, they were on their way. And she was trying to talk to me, but it was only coming out half way. She kept trying to ask about her boys, and I told her they were coming. I mean, I told her about fifty times that they were coming, but I don’t know if she ever understood me. She was unconscious again before they got there. They lived so far away. Then the next week she was- well, she’d passed on, you know. And she was only 54! And she’d just driven me home, and we’d danced at Billy Joel. It goes so fast, you know?”

There is a moment of silence in the train car. It is almost as if the silence has been planned, or called for: A moment of silence for Linda.

But then the murmuring voices and conversations that have been going all along edge into the air space again. And you remember that you are not involved in a common experience with all of these people. You are involved in a simple coincidence.

The train is coming to your stop now, according to the automated announcer. Its computerized and faintly female voice replaces the stuffy, but inescapably human one you have been listening to, “Pleasanton Transit” It croons.

You arrange the strap of your bag, making sure it is draped properly over your shoulder. You reach out for the metal rail above your head as you stand up; reach like your life depends on your hand making contact, like you are in some obscure Olympic event, and if you can successfully reach that silly metal bar you will win medals and set world records and have your name written down somewhere (where do they write that sort of thing? You wonder briefly) for the rest of time. You succeed. You make your way hand over hand to the door, squeezing by people with whispered excuses. You pass the pudgy, fallen, mother-earth effigy of the narrator. You hurry. You do not look at her.

You reach the doors as the train stops, and they slide open magically before you. As you step out into the summer-evening balm of suburbia you hear a new voice ring out from the depths of the car you’ve just left. And it will ring in your ears all the way to your front door. “Such a pity those boys lived so far away,” It says simply.

Such a pity, you think.