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Shorts
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| metro | |
| By robokent | ||||||||||||||
| 27 April 2006 | ||||||||||||||
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Trains are good settings for stream of consciousness pieces... There were two little Asian children begging cookies from their mothers sitting across the aisle from me. Though one of the mothers had told them they had to wait until after their meal, eventually she caved in. She handed over a long box of store-bought cookies, hard-looking chocolate things, probably tasteless and unsatisfying. The French are good at a lot of things, but a homemade cookie is not one of them. The smaller of the two children smiled at me as he bit into his treat. I thought about making a funny face or something, but I just looked away. The train rumbled on in the darkness. A pretty but sad-looking girl rested her head against the window, the reflection making her look like she was a set of identical conjoined twins, sharing some deep melancholy. I wondered what had happened to her to make her look so tired, so worn down, so exhausted by life. I tried not to think about it too much. Near the doors, another pretty girl was trying to avoid the disturbed man yelling at her. In a mixture of French, Arabic and English, he called her names. ‘Vous avez shit dans la tête. Donkey.’ An Arab woman with arms weighted down by heavy bags yelled at the man. I don’t know what they said to each other. I don’t speak Arabic. She got out at the next stop. I wanted to ask the crazy man why he was yelling at the girl. I didn’t. At the next stop, he got off. A black man wearing an old jacket the color of army green, got on. He had a guitar in his hand. He started playing that old Bob Marley song where he asks the crowd to ‘help me sing this song of freedom’. He sang for a couple of stops. No one helped him sing. And I didn’t see anyone give him any money either. I thought about checking to see if I had a few centimes. But I didn’t check. A university student started flirting with a couple American girls carrying those heavy backpacks they use to trek around Europe. While he spoke in strongly accented but quite good English, I tried to determine from their accents where they might be from. I should have just asked them; they looked nice enough. Instead I just guessed to myself that they were from the Pacific Northwest, not so much from their accents, but just from they way they dressed: hippyish, but not so hippyish like they were trying to be hippies, but more like they do in Seattle or Portland. The Asian mothers ushered their children off, leaving a seat full of crumbs which a couple brushed onto the floor before sitting down in their place. They seemed in love. They held hands and whispered quietly to each other. I hated them immediately. But then I thought of that Doisneau photo, ‘The Kiss’, and how this couple on the metro here could do the modern, updated version of that famous picture. I almost took the digital camera out of my coat pocket, but I was too embarrassed to try and take their picture. They’d probably think I was some kind of nut. A woman sat down across from me, talking loudly on her cell phone. I thought to myself, ‘How come my cell never works in the metro? What carrier does everyone else have that makes their cells work in the subway? Seriously, am I the only one with Orange? There can’t be that many different carriers in France, can there? There must be someone else who uses Orange. Do they have the same problems when underground? Or do all the other Orange customers just drive?’ That reminded me of a funny story. I had been at dinner with a couple of French friends, and one of them had tried to get me to admit that French women were superior in beauty to American women. I had not wanted to wound his French pride, nor slight my own lovely countrywomen, so I told him, ‘Well, I agree with you that it does seem that I see a lot more pretty women when I’m walking the streets or in the metro. But I think it’s because here I’m exposed to them more. In America, I drive everywhere. Everyone drives. You just don’t see people as much.’ He just grinned and said, ‘Ah, but you should see the women in our cars!’ I couldn’t help but crack a little smile at the memory of his wit. My gaze went from the blackness of outside the window to the sad girl, her head still firmly connected to her reflection. She glanced at me. She looked away quickly. She probably thought I was smiling at her. She probably thought I was trying to flirt or something. I wasn’t. I just… oh, what difference does it make? She was already looking back out the window, into her own portion of the blackness. People got on the train. People got off. At some stops, it seemed like everyone got off, and another whole batch of ‘everyone’ got on. I wondered if I rode long enough whether the Asian women would get on again with their cookie-muncher kids. I promised myself if they did, I would return the little one’s smile.
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