A Ride to the Ballgame

“Do you know what I’ve come to realize?” The girl spoke like a woman with years of experience and not a college freshman. She was posing the question to her mother, whose baseball cap and blonde ponytail matched her own. “Riding the subway is just like taking an elevator, but horizontally.”

The mother smiled. She nodded and looked around. She did not want to let her daughter see her confusion, her lack of understanding, her fear.

“Because no one knows where to look. Like, you can’t look at anyone. You know?”

The mother darted her eyes down, then up, then closed. She realized she’d been looking at people this entire ride: the woman whose hair was so greasy it seemed to be turning green at the roots, a man in a purple track suit carrying a bag over his shoulder filled with wigs (or so she hoped), an elderly couple who wore tinted glasses and yelled at each other in Spanish. She worried this was her daughter’s sensitive way of pointing out her mother’s faux pas. How gentle and mature she had become after one semester away. But when she opened her eyes, her daughter had already moved on to another topic, pouring out about some mishap her roommate had trying to pick up dry cleaning.

The mother smiled again. She tried to think of the last time she was this close to so many people she did not know, people to whom she did not speak, not even a ‘hello.’ So close she could feel their breath on her skin and see whether or not they had cleaned the dirt from under their fingernails.

She wished they had just taken a cab. But her daughter said this was the best way to get to the baseball stadium. And who was she to argue.