While Garfield Floated Somewhere Overhead

by Susan Daitch      

My son was invited to a party Thanksgiving morning at the home of one of his classmate’s grandparents who live overlooking Central Park West. They were known to have a spectacular view of the parade and as the balloons were supposed to be flying lower than usual this year we looked forward to seeing Charlie Brown, Bullwinkle and their confreres waft past big picture windows, almost within touching distance. We had to make the trip in from Brooklyn taking one of my son’s pals who’d slept over Wednesday night. The three of us were completely jazzed for the event. Thinking we’d better get an early start because the trains would be packed, nonetheless I neglected to set the alarm, and I, not the boys, overslept. Despite this setback I managed to get the boys out the door, and we were at the 7^th Avenue F train stop in Brooklyn by 8:00 AM. 

At Broadway/Lafayette in Manhattan we switched for the D train planning to take it to Columbus Circle, then change for the 1.  Perhaps the rain had kept more people indoors.  Both the F and D were relatively empty.  So far so good. 

Until the D pulled into 49th Street.

Rockefeller Center is a long platform. From one end of the platform to the other all we could see were hundreds and hundreds of majorettes/cheerleaders, whatever, in orange Velveeta cheese-colored costumes. Behind them were hundreds and hundreds girls in powder blue outfits with white fur trim and rhinestone earrings the size of dinner plates. All were wearing clear plastic raincoats and shower caps because of the rain. The doors opened and the thousands of plastic-wrapped young women packed every car of the D, now detained to allow all of them on board. The boys and I didn’t mind so much. It was as if a section of the parade had made its way underground. Standing over the boys who occupied the double seats positioned perpendicular to those that line the car were a cluster of adult supervisors in a yellow rain ponchos. I asked them where they were from.

“Texas,” one answered.

More majorettes pushed their way into the car. I noticed one of the adults, who seconds earlier had been lively and cheery, now looking at the floor and growing quietly hysterical, sweating, having trouble breathing, clearly developing  a major panic attack  I offered her my seat but her friends said, no, it was better if she stood.

Additional Velveeta-cheese and powder blue colored girls squeezed into the train. 

“It’s only two stops to Columbus Circle,” I told them. “Try to imagine there are only sidewalk overhead, not tall, heavy buildings.”  I don’t know if that was actually helpful or not, but in the weeks after 9/11 when a train I’d been riding stopped in the middle of a tunnel it was an image I’d found calming even if untrue.

“We’re not sure where we’re meant to get off. Our leader will let us know,” one of the adults told me. They had never been on a subway before.

The woman having the panic attack seemed to gag as if she was going to throw up right on top of the boys. The train still hadn’t moved. I mentioned a strategy well known to people who ride the subway on a regular basis. If she wanted to wait for the next train, common logic dictates that a packed train is often, though not always, followed by an empty one. They assured me they needed to get to the parade; they were already late. There was no way she or any of us in the middle of the car could have budged in any direction anyway. The gagging noises continued. I felt badly for the woman and really wanted to help her. Her panic seemed to have accelerated. She was genuinely terrified.

“Look out a window,” someone said. This seemed like a good suggestion.

“No, it helps if she looks at the floor.”

“Stay calm, girlfriend. Do you have a magazine or something we can fan her with?”  One of her friends asked me in a drawl.

I hunted in my bag. All I had was a folder of student stories from a fiction writing class I teach at Hunter College, and I handed these over. One of the Texans used the stories to fan her so she could breath. The train started to move. My son and his friend were alternately transfixed by the phenomena of a train full of people in costumes, aware of the panic just over their heads, and at the same time engaged in their own conversations, a casting of a James Bond movie using kids from their class.  Finally the D pulled into 59^th Street and the majorettes and their supervisors surged out of the train.  My students’ work was carried away on a sea of yellow-orange and baby blue. Which stories were in the folder? I thought fast. There was one about a sort of playboy who turns out to be on the down low, another about a woman’s failed attempts to stop her friend from drinking a cocktail laced with a date rape drug. They were pretty graphic as was a story about child abuse by priests despite a hilarious section about boys doing acid during mass. The most innocuous one I could recall that might have been in the folder was about an impoverished couple who pasted a winning lottery ticket to a door that gets drenched in the rain, and even still I had privacy issues about non-class members reading what lay in those pages. I’d only intended to loan the stories. They were not yet intended for a mass readership. Those stapled pages were supposed to be discussed in class and ultimately returned to the students who wrote them. They were not supposed to end up in a garbage can in San Antonio, or Dallas, or Houston or to be part of someone else’s Thanksgiving Day Parade story. 

“Hey, I need those papers!” I shouted just as the folder was in danger of vanishing out the door.

“Huh?”

It was as if I and my two boys were invisible, anonymous citizens, part of the D train bench structure.

“I need those papers!” I repeated. I don’t have a very loud voice but was feeling a little desperate. In the scheme of things, lost student papers aren’t the end of the world, but often my students don’t or can’t afford copies of their work. Was the idea that the folder might have some use beyond life as a subway fan truly such a foreign concept?

“Ugh… OK…honey.” Slowly the folder was handed back to me over the mosh pit of majorettes, and we made our way to the next train.

Susan Daitch is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. Visit her website at www.susandaitch.com.