Big Summer(91)

He slung his laptop bag across his chest and put his backpack over his shoulders. “Lead on.”

We dropped Darshi at the subway and kept going, heading up Fifth Avenue. “We can cut across the park by the reservoir at Ninety-Sixth Street,” I told him.

“That’s fine,” he said. “It feels good to walk. It was a long bus ride.” After a minute, he said, “You’re fast.”

“Jeez, don’t sound so surprised,” I muttered, flashing back to a guy I’d met at a party in college, who’d said, You’re very light on your feet. Which I thought was code for You move well for a fat girl. But maybe that wasn’t what Nick had meant. “I’m sorry. That was rude.” I gestured at the rest of the pedestrians, hustling across the intersection to beat the red light. “You kind of have to be fast if you live here.”

Nick sounded a little doleful as he said, “I guess everyone here’s in a hurry.”

“Have you been to New York City before?” I asked.

Nick’s mouth was tight, like he’d tasted something bad. “Once,” he said. “In high school. Class field trip. We saw Cats.”

“You did not.”

“I swear!” He raised his right hand. “Now and forever.”

“That’s terrible.”

“We saw the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. We rode the subway. That was a big deal. But what struck me most was how crowded it was.” He looked around, at the verdant park, the well-kept apartment buildings, the benches that stood at regular intervals along the sidewalk. “My mother loved it here. At least, that’s what my grandparents told me. But I remember thinking that if I had to take the subway to and from work every day, I’d die.”

“The subway can be challenging.” I was remembering one December, when my mom and I had gone to the big department stores, to look at their windows and do some holiday shopping. My father was Jewish, and my mom had been raised as a Unitarian. Neither one of them was terribly religious, but my mom loved Christmas. She collected glass ornaments and saved snippets of wrapping paper, wallpaper samples, and discarded calendars all year long to repurpose as colorful garlands and wreaths and cards. Our gifts would be so beautifully wrapped that my father and I almost hated to open them.

After a day of shopping in Manhattan, footsore and weary and laden with bags, my mom and I had boarded a packed train at Forty-Second Street. The only vacant spot was between two teenage boys, each one sitting with his legs spread wide. My mother slowed down, considering the space. The boys had looked up. One of them stared at my mother’s body, his eyes crawling from her thighs to her hips to her bosom, before he looked her full in the face, and said, “Aw, hell nah!” He and his companion had started cackling. I saw my mother’s face fall. I could feel how ashamed she was as she led me to the end of the car and stood there, wordlessly clutching the pole until we reached our stop. Like she, and not these boys, had done something wrong.

Nick must have seen something on my face. He touched my arm. “You okay?” he asked. “Want to stop for a minute?”

“Sure.” He led me to a bench. We watched the runners on the track that encircled the reservoir, the slower ones trying not to get run down by the sprinters. The wind ruffled the dark surface of the water. I saw a family go by, speaking what sounded like Dutch, followed by a line of preschool-aged kids, holding a rope, with teachers at each end. I sat and, automatically, I reached for my phone.

Nick put his hand on my forearm. “Hey,” he said. His touch was gentle, but his voice was sharp. “Could you not?”

I looked at him, startled.

“I’m sorry. I know it’s part of your job.” Before I could apologize, he blurted, “I just hate when people do that.”

“Do what? Look at their phones?”

“Live on their phones,” he said, and sighed. “I know it’s a cliché. You know, that Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving picture, only Mom and Dad and Bobby and Sally are all on their phones or their iPads and not even looking at each other. But it really does bother me. I think about it a lot, especially with the kids. How are they going to learn to have real relationships when most of their interactions are online? How are they going to tolerate distress if they can just distract themselves with their phones?”

“Well, welcome to the twenty-first century,” I said. My own voice was a little waspish. “And you’re right. This is part of my job. If I don’t interact, I don’t get seen, and if my posts don’t get seen, I can’t make money.”

“I know.” Nick’s voice was low, and he was staring at the ground, not meeting my eyes. “It’s just not my thing.”

“Why not?” When he didn’t answer, I asked, “Is it the Internet in general? Or social media specifically? Or just Instagram?”

“All of it.” His shoulders were hunched, and his hands were curled into fists. “When I was twelve, I went online and looked at what people said about my mom, after she died. People who didn’t even know her, calling her a slut. Saying she slept around and she got what she deserved. All of these people, taking bites out of what was left of her, after she couldn’t defend herself. Like a bunch of zombies, eating her corpse.”

I thought of a twelve-year-old Nick, going online and seeing all of that spite and vitriol; all that hate, preserved and waiting for him to find it, because the Internet was forever. I remembered something my father had told me, about the comments I’d gotten after my bar-fight video had come out: When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they’re all online.