In a New York Minute(2)
Conversations around us were muted and whispered, but the panic was tangible. Most of the office was under thirty, and almost half of us were now out of work, sent into the wilds of the New York City job market with whatever severance we’d been given. I’d spent four years plugging away at a job that maybe hadn’t always stimulated me creatively, but it had paid well, and my coworkers were fun and easy to be around for nine hours a day.
And now, like me, they were reduced to shoving what was left of their time at Spayce into a sixteen-inch cardboard box. A cube-shaped crystal award for Best Digital Design Start-Up. A small green turtle figurine my coworker Raphael had brought me back from Mexico. The framed photo of Keanu Reeves someone had left on my desk as an April Fool’s joke. The branded stainless-steel water bottle everyone at the company had gotten last Earth Day.
The last four years of my life, packed up in ten minutes, ready to be lugged home on the subway.
With my vintage bejeweled purse on one shoulder and my canvas Spayce tote bag still packed with my lunch of pasta leftovers on the other, I grabbed my box, mumbled some hushed goodbyes, and headed to the elevator, pressing the neon-blue call button with my knee.
We were in the middle of a heat wave in New York City, one of those bizarro stretches where it goes from sixty to ninety degrees in the middle of May. At seven thirty in the morning, just hours earlier, a billowy blue-green tank-sleeved silk dress (my best friend Cleo called it my “fancy sack”) paired with black high-top Chucks had seemed like a perfectly reasonable outfit choice.
But huffing the three blocks through Times Square while weighted down with all this crap turned me into a sweating tangle of bags and clothes, armpits damp and sweat beads clinging to my curls. And a blister was rubbing itself into existence on my right heel.
After what felt like an hour of digging around, I found my MetroCard and gave it a swipe through the large metal turnstile at the station. By the time I’d made it down a flight of stairs and maneuvered around the late-morning wall of humans still rushing to work, I was a seething, irritated mess. I walked toward the downtown 2/3 train, only to be greeted with a sign by the stairs that declared NO DOWNTOWN TRAINS AT THIS STATION DUE TO CONSTRUCTION.
Everything that could possibly go wrong today was happening. I shifted directions, grumbling curse words under my breath, and headed toward the Q train. This would at least get me to Brooklyn, and then I could loop back on the 2/3 from Atlantic, which would suck. God, I just wanted to get home.
As I tried to catch my breath, I inhaled the pungent stink of the subway that was set free the second warm air descended upon our fair but smelly city. “Oh my god,” I muttered, holding in a gag.
And then I heard it: the squeal of brakes, a sure sign that my train was arriving at the platform, which was down yet another flight of stairs in front of me. I dared to breathe through my nose—ugh, everything smelled like urine—and took off jogging, the tchotchkes in my box bouncing with every step. I hit the stairs and caught a glimpse of the silver glint of subway car. It was still in the station.
Ding ding, the subway doors announced. Any New Yorker knew what that sound meant. It was time to run.
“No, no, no!” I shouted, and sprinted onto the platform just as the doors were, mercifully, opening a second time. The train was a blur, but I could see through the scratched-up windows that it was packed—bodies next to bodies next to bodies. An entire barricade of humans stood just inside the doors.
“Excuse me,” I huffed, wedging myself next to an older woman with a wire grocery cart, who shuffled forward into the center of the car, and a giant of a man who was long and lean and all suit.
“Sorry. Thank you,” I said, angling myself sideways to squeeze on. There was no way to shrink myself with this stupid box in my arms. But still, I was inside, with inches to spare. And I was finally heading home to escape this god-awful shit show of a morning.
As the train lurched forward, I sighed with relief and leaned my back against the doors of the car. Wrapping my right arm around the edge of the box, I reached my left arm for my purse, hoping to grab my phone so I could text Cleo and Lola with my news. Just as my fingers grazed the hard plastic of my phone case, I felt a firm tug behind me.
“What the hell?” I muttered, trying to shift again. But I couldn’t move. It was like something had pinned me to the doors of the train, securing me in place. I stepped forward, inadvertently leaning my weight against a pregnant woman who was holding on to a handrail for balance. Why didn’t anyone offer her a seat? I thought as I apologized for bumping into her. My brain was skipping around between worrying about her to wondering why I couldn’t move, and then suddenly my ears connected with something else:
The sound of my dress ripping down the back.
My heart rate picked up, beating its own chant of Oh my god, oh my god. My dress—the gorgeous locally-made-in-Brooklyn, cost-a-small-fortune soft silk dress that I’d splurged on at Alter in Williamsburg—had gotten stuck in the subway doors and ripped straight down the seam, from the back of my neck right past my butt. My fancy sack was now a fancy mess.
“Oh my god,” I said out loud.
New Yorkers are well practiced in the art of not staring, but dare to step into their personal space and their eyes turn into lasers that can incinerate upon contact. Unfortunately, no one’s personal space was safe around me as I frantically tried to grab the back of my dress with my free hand and hold it shut. At first, my elbow smacked into someone’s arm, and I was met with a “Jesus Christ” from the skateboarder who’d been on the receiving end.