HOW WE COPE
A New York Minute

Cynthia Yoder

He didn’t have to squeeze. Another train would have come. But he pressed his knees into mine, and his hips into the backpack I was holding in front of me, and pushed through the door, squishing me into the back of the woman standing behind me. She couldn’t move, and we stayed back to back, like opponents setting out for a duel.

I was glad for the backpack. If it hadn’t been there, I’d have been groin to groin with this man who had shoved me into the sea of subway riders. He had a nondescript face, the kind you see in the business section of the newspaper. It was the kind of face that said he looked all day at numbers or some other commodity that made his eyes dull and his cheeks puffy like jelly donuts.

There was no room to move. I thought of the time I had ridden a Matatu in Kenya five years back. We had been so pressed together, I hadn’t noticed when someone dug deep into my front pocket and withdrew my cash.

Back in New York, someone shifted beside me, generating a six-inch pocket of space I moved into, but that created a new problem. It was a hot day in New York. The A/C hadn’t been on at my Madison Avenue office because it was the first week of May, and it wasn’t supposed to be 90 degrees yet. I’d worked all day at my computer, sweating in front of fans, trying to talk on the telephone like I was scrubbed up and pretty, the way they would expect someone to look at a Madison Avenue office in May. The problem now was that I had grabbed onto a bar above my head for support, and directly before my armpit was the dainty if oversized nose of a woman.

I thought about my deodorant, a new kind made from French green clay. It wasn’t as effective as Tom’s of Maine. I vowed to switch back. She, of course, could have turned her head. Why didn’t she? Maybe she liked animal smells, the way I like the smell of salt on my son after he’s been playing all day in the back yard. Or maybe it was the catch-22 that if she had turned she would have been admitting that my French green clay wasn’t very effective, making things worse for both of us.

Maybe, I continued to reason, maybe she’s like me, cooped up in front of a computer all day. Maybe it makes her happy to be doing something real, like jostling in the subway with the smell of a girl’s sweat mixed with clay. Everyone has her way of coping with the grind daily life can sometimes be.

Like what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to bolt when that door opens at 34th, and tear down the stairs, part of the leading pack, sprinting through the underground corridor, smashing the turnstile with a hip, and weaving in and out, up the ramp that leads to the New Jersey trains.

I’m not in a hurry. I have six minutes to get there, but I bolt because my legs like it. My lungs like it. I run until I pass the man with the xylophone billy bopping out a jazz tune, then I run to the music, like someone important, like someone who’s going somewhere in a movie, perhaps to meet a lover she hasn’t seen in twenty years. I run all the way down the escalator to track number eight, and I run down along the silver edge of the train until I get to the front car. If I didn’t have a son at home, waiting in his blue and red train pajamas to kiss me goodnight, I’d run clear out into the yard.

—Cynthia Yoder is author of Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life (DreamSeeker Books, 2003, an imprint of Cascadia Publishing House), and her work has appeared in such literary publications as Parabola, The Cortland Review, The Sarah Lawrence Review, and Mennonite Life. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.