Don’t judge me unless you are actually happy in your life more than just every other day or so. Being happy every other day means that half your life you are miserable, or to be optimistic about it: your glass of life is half-full.

Bipolar runs in the family. I wait on an uptown track because downtown is closed and get no comfort today from prairie grass thriving in the cement cracks of elevated stations. A double oxymoron. An elevated subway. Grass grows in the cracks. Thrives. Not me. I have no ironic smile for the anti-gentrification activist who asks me, the only white woman on the platform, how she should best get downtown. Her questions pose a follow up from a kid—how I would have seethed at twenty-one to be called a kid—who wants to get to Times Square. "Go up to go down," I tell them, "the subway is broken." Then we both step over the torn Gulden’s mustard packet.  

"Believe it or not," the man’s voice says. "I just got out of jail for punchin' someone in the fuckin' mouth and I’m thinkin' bout trackin' him down and punchin' him in the fuckin' mouth again."

"Then you’ll go to jail again," his buddy shrugs. Calm. Jaded. Real. "Nah. That won’t happen." 

Neither I, nor a single other fare, helps the fat mother up the stairs with her huge stroller, though I have a one-year-old at home (who might also carry the gene to make him bipolar) and have myself often been grateful for random kindness in strangers. People open doors, and help me upstairs. They touch my child’s hair and say how cute he is. I vow to help her out on the way down despite her pierced nose and scowl, but she is headed for the tobacconist and not the subway stairs. 

The downtown train whirs with mariachi music. I wonder how these guys keep their shirts so white. And where they bought their matching lavender cowboy hats. Mayan relics in the subway. One guy makes change for a five, sings out ‘gracias senor!’ in tempo. McDonald’s wafts my way, a half-eaten burger competing with the paint reek of post-lunch Russian day laborers, picking their teeth with a shared tooth pick. I find no joy today in the man reading Richard the Third from a dog-eared book, piercing the passages he loves best with sewing pins, their bright colored heads functioning in a mysterious code. The nose-pierced mom shares my car and I have no idea how she got here. I guilt over her presence, as if it were a secretion like sweat that could permeate my clothes. 

My favorite cousin, the really happy one, is on meds. Too many meds to have the baby she and her husband crave. Two months a go she cut her med intake by half, but yesterday’s in-box held word that she’d given up after a dark, listless, lost week in bed, far too unhappy to watch videos or to read or even eat. 

I have a kid.

I have a kid.

I have a kid.

Who might be sick someday.

The baby in the stroller has beads in her hair and she sucks vermilion liquid from a bottle. How does a Mountain Dew affect a kid that age? The express pulls out just as the local’s doors chime their two-tone readiness to part. The train’s red tail light recedes down the dark, straight passage like an illuminated and hovering rat.  

Fish nets on a whore reading a torn Crain’s  Business Magazine cross and uncross at the ankle. A red umbrella and Saul Bellow fill the left hand of a capped man who meets my eye. But today I have no smile for him, either; even if the stranger were willing to fuck me in ways my husband won’t. Now that we have a baby, he only strokes me with holy hands, afraid to dive into a pool where people might have been saved. He won’t find God’s son in me. Or does he think my son is God’s and
therefore he is God? Is this the trouble with men? Given the choice, I would rather be a happy whore than a Madonna. I would rather read Crain’s, subsumed in the world of crushed money and quick orgasms and white wine with a hint of peach in the nose, steaks that bleed in their center, reminding us of the naïve cow sacrificed for the sake of our teeth. Today is my tenth anniversary.  

I have a perfect life—a downtown loft, a child, a husband to support it all—all perfectly dull. I have an empty chair at the end of this ride. I have an empty existence to deposit in the empty chair. A cup of tea, perhaps, in which to stir my loneliness. My friends have jobs and worries, mortgages, AIDS. I have a cousin who deserves my life. She has a bipolar disorder that was diagnosed when she was nineteen. Like a cancer it has spread to her ovaries. Her own sense of responsibility, her love for her unborn, unconceived child is keeping that kid safely within Nietzsche’s bosom, while hers have never felt the rush of milk, the pursed lips suck suck suck…animalistic sucking, the immense love and need vacuum. Maybe never will, all because she is too good. Too kind. Too goddamn thoughtful. Not like me, who just went ahead and fucked without protection. 

My uncle never molested me. Off his meds, he chased my saddest cousin with a butcher knife. When his only son, a celibate surgeon, was a baby, there were Christmas lights on the tree in the room where I shared part of a sofa bed with my parents. I saw my uncle, dressed in his wife’s lilac flannel nightdress, try to press the wailing child to his empty man-breast. The turtle-like pointy lipped little beak would not take, but squawked all the louder. I saw this. Saw my uncle unbutton to the middle of his hairy chest, saw him pull the flannel aside to bare a brown nipple rimmed in wiry dead cells. Saw the baby cry and turn away. There was no mother-smell, perhaps, or perhaps the boy was as horrified as I at the mute impossibility of his father’s tears, splashing on his bald little head. Where was the mother? Why were my parents still sleeping? What diehard Catholic still has the Christmas tree decorated and desiccated in March? Small houses, big troubles, sad, sad children. My favorite cousin was yet unborn when her brother turned away from her father’s breast. Her birth signaled my family’s vow never again to spend Christmas at my uncle’s house. Instead, the relations were forced to visit us in the suburbs. They set up a tent in the snow. Winter camping being a family hobby, like medication and therapy. A tent. In the front yard. For privacy. Five of them. Cars driving by all night. The back-yard was too small, they said. They had to pray together, they said, or they couldn’t sleep. How long do diehard Catholics cling to their desiccated trees? 

More McDonald’s to offend my nose. A sleeping woman curled like a cat into the Priority Seat for people with disabilities, a French fry like a cigarette dangling from her lips, the rest of the pack fallen to the floor, as if they had poisoned her. 

"This train go to Penn?" I nod neutrally at the thick Spanish accent. All my smiles have been wasted. Spent on the hope that my marriage would work. Spent coaxing my husband, whom I once loved with great passion, and now love with the ache of a torn meniscus, out of his moods. A defeatist, he. A pessimist. I hate being wrong, so stayed. Fluorescents flash as we express by the stations. The clatter of metal wheels, the scream of metal doors, a fast and furious noise that is much more a brilliant black than white, but yes, it masks the flu-like sniffles of the turbaned sheik a Pakistani and the hiss of the Walkman feeding a new language into the middle-aged ears of the old seadog across the car. My grandmother’s letters alternate between an informative chatter laced with bad poetry like a sugar pill might be laced with acid, and bleak one-page missives explaining her own proximity to death. She will welcome it when it comes. She has been waiting for twenty years to see her husband again, to confront him with the actuality of his genetics—the son and daughter who are both mad as barn chickens. Who each have children, whose grown children have children, want children. Children being a gift from God. 

The tall man leaning on the doors marked Do Not Lean On Doors has to jerk upright when these same posted doors unexpectedly open. I nearly smile. The man with the Walkman does not know that the pink highlighter in his pocket leaks. I say Sorry to avert the gaze of the guy no longer leaning on the Do Not Lean On Door door, but rather catching himself on my boot. I’m slouching is why. I never used to slouch. Once I won the Optimist Club’s sole scholarship, and I participated in a long awards’ ceremony that neither I nor my guidance counselor appreciated. She scoffed at the prize, actually, and at these thirty men who gathered in a room to be cheerful together, who had an Optimist Creed they would recite as devotedly as some people recite their illegal Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. She said to me in the confidential whisper of a real estate agent who’d just sold an overvalued house, "At Least There’s Free Food Here!" 

It isn’t that I hate my husband, nor that I particularly blame him for his abusive behavior. He has, after all, been in therapy now for seven years. Seeking change. So instead of shouting You dumb cunt, he glares and through his gritted teeth which prove his miraculous restraint he says, "If you keep that up, then this is going to get ugly." And then, when I do keep it up, he says, "I am finding it quite hard not to call you a stupid cunt, which is, of course, what you are behaving like right now." Our child will be asleep in his crib, or might be too young to understand, though oceanic eyes to see what he can’t hear. He might be better off playing with his non-cousin in Nietzche’s dark room where neither genetics nor the environment could strip him of his joy. This escalator will take me up to the fresh air, and all these thoughts will vanish with the brisk breezes. It happens. This is how I am able to move on. At home I will pay the sitter. My son will run with arms outstretched holding all the love in the world. We will have a nice family dinner if I don’t cry at the sight of him.

M. M. De Voe is a prize-winning author, whose short fiction has been published in literary journals including PRISM: International, The Spectator, SLANT, and Bee Museum. Her translations are forthcoming in anthologies in Canada and the European Union.  Her poetry has won first place nationally, and has appeared in The Lyric, America, The Idiot's Guide to Form Poetry, and The New Yorker. Her YA novel, Burn in our Hearts, was a finalist for the 2004 Bellwether Prize; she is at work on another. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, hates acronyms, loves gorillas, has a son, and lives a block from Ground Zero. In October 2005, look for her Pushcart Prize nominated story "Overheard" in an anthology titled, Stirring Up a Storm: Tales of the Sexual, the Sensual and the Erotic, alongside works by Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates. Visit her at www.mmdevoe.com.