The girl on the train had just about every gossip magazine you could imagine tucked into the seat in front of her. I sat down next to the window and opened up the manuscript I was supposed to be diligently reading for work, with my head down, absorbed, like any good New Yorker would be, not acknowledging anyone else around them.
Truth is I didn’t want to sit next to anyone. I didn’t want to get stuck next to the guy who ate the whole time, or the girl who talked on her phone, or, god forbid the person who wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want someone to ask me questions about myself and go through the typical travel bonding that people go through, thinking that just because they’re going to be sitting next to someone on a train for the next 2.5 hours going to the same destination, that suddenly we’re comrades in battle, old acquaintances, or come to it, friends.
In the end call it cynical or whatever you want, but I simply want to be left alone. And I could see out of the corner of my eye the late-comer travelers doing what all late-comer travelers do – scoping out who is the least terrible person to sit next to. With all window seats taken they look, assess who is the least offensive person, the least attractive, the least likely to smell, and they make their choice.
Kathleen chose me. She sat down reading with a box of Good ‘n Plenty, a candy which I have never thought to be neither good nor plentiful and about twenty minutes into the ride upstate decided she’d gotten enough information about the status of Nick Lachey and his new girlfriends, enough about the Dateline interview with Matt Lauer and Britney Spears and how she’s now white trash and should seriously reconsider the length of her skirts, and the latest about Brad and Angelina and that old looking dude from American Idol. Twenty minutes into the ride she decided she wanted to be my friend.
Kathleen, or Kathy if you will, is a sophomore at Pratt who is obsessed with Sex and the City, going to clubs, Midori sours, Spring Break in Miami and great literature like “Oh my god have you even read Bergdorf Blondes? Its only like the BEST BOOK ever written! I mean I don’t like to read but that book like made me want to read again. You have to read it!”
She can’t wait to graduate and come to New York and be like Carrie Bradshaw. When I told her how I came to New York from Boston she said, “Oh my god that must have been so hard. How did you do it? I mean I want to do that but I don’t know if I can, it’s like, so scary. I mean, alone?” she asked. She thought it was “fabulous” that I live in the Upper East Side, she thought it was “amazing” that I occasionally work with celebrity authors. She liked my sunglasses and my shoes and my outfit and asked me that if she ever gets to New York would I’d take her out to the hottest clubs and the hottest bars and introduce her to the hottest guys.
As callous as people may think I am, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my life isn’t as fabulous as she thinks. I didn’t tell her that her perception of great literature was making me slightly nauseous. I couldn’t tell her the truth about life and money and shitty New York (or anywhere) men. And then I realized that sometimes we can go through life not really seeing our lives the way other people see them. Some people, such as myself, are our own severest critics, and it is the Kathy’s of the world that can help us see we don’t have it so bad after all. Some people (gasp) even aspire to be like us. Now while that might make Kathy certifiably insane, and if she really got to know me she might entirely retract that thought - but for those 2.5 hours she thought I was pretty great and I couldn’t help but love her for it.
On the way back to the city this morning, reading the still unfinished manuscript half asleep with sunglasses on, a man sat down next to me, said hello, read half of Newsweek and fell asleep – just the way I like it.
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