The train wasn’t crowded. There were plenty of empty seats. But one boy was standing near the center of the car, holding a pole by the doors. He was 8 or so, old enough to act responsibly but young enough not to. I don’t see a lot of kids that young riding the subway here—in Washington, D.C., where the subway is called Metro—unless they’re tourists with their families. This kid was riding with his mom.
“Hold on,” she warned him.
Some kids like to stand, no matter if there are seats available. Riding the train is novel, like an amusement park ride. I’m not a kid—closer to 30 than 20—though I felt more kinship to the boy than to his mother, who was laden with shopping bags and looked worn. Riding the train was still new for me. It was a wonder, in fact, to travel through tunnels beneath the ground.
“How many more stops?” the boy asked his mom.
“Three.” She clutched the shopping bags on her lap.
“My stop is next,” he informed her, swinging from the pole like Gene Kelly from the lamppost.
I was sitting diagonally across from the woman, eavesdropping. In North Carolina, where I used to live, I sold insurance—life, casualty, car, property, etc. Now I sold mattresses, and that week, the evening the boy and his mom were on the train home, I hadn’t sold a single mattress, which meant I was behind on the whole commission thing and was digging myself a hole.
The train braked. The boy made a show of being pulled forward, his skinny arms, fully extended, his hands gripping the pole, knuckles aligned, like he was holding a baseball bat. The mom watched him clown, but said nothing.
I pretended to be absorbed in an advertisement touting the benefits of medical research. These are the types of ads they run on the Metro in D.C., aimed at policy-makers, not people who sell mattresses. But I’d been to college. I had a degree in economics. I studied the ad, but I was really watching the mom and her son.
The train was in the station. It slowed and stopped. The doors opened.
“Bye,” the boy sang.
“Don’t you dare.” One of the bags fell from her lap to her feet. He left the train with the other passengers.
“Jamie!” She clutched her bags, the ones in her lap and the one on the floor.
Now she had our attention. Her face was stricken, reflected in the window, through which I could see Jamie, standing on the platform, an impish smirk on his face. The speakers chimed. The mechanical voice warned, “Step back. The doors are closing.”
For a moment, he looked like he’d make a break for the open doors. He actually could have beaten them before they closed. But Metro doors aren’t like elevator doors. If they close on you they don’t automatically pop back open. The doors close on you and hold you. One wonders if they’ll sprout teeth like sharks, and sever limbs and torsos.
I don’t know if Jamie hesitated for fear of being caught by the doors. Despite defying his mom on the train, he was probably a good kid, the sort of boy who paid attention in class, who followed his teacher’s instructions. When he heard the mechanical voice telling him to step back, he obeyed. He watched the doors close and the train start up, while his mom slapped her hand against the window and cried his name into the tinted glass.
There’s a story I want to tell before I finish the story about the boy and his mom on the train. The summer before last I was at the beach, the Outer Banks, with Eileen, my girlfriend when I lived in North Carolina, and her family—her mom and dad and two sisters. They rented the same house every year in one of the towns south of Nags Head. I took a few days off from selling insurance and I drove down for part of the week. (Truth be told, I wasn’t selling much then, either, but my luck was better with insurance in North Carolina than with mattresses in Washington, D.C.)
Eileen fancied herself a writer. She carried a notebook, which she’d scribble in all the time. I figured I was in her stories. I hoped I was, in fact. I liked that we had a recorded life, distinct from the one I knew. I didn’t think then of our relationship as mortal.
We were hanging out on the beach one day—me and Eileen and her sisters—next to a family, a mom and a bunch of kids. They were poor, you could tell, from the mom’s language and impatience, from the cigarettes she and the older kids smoked. From the way they dropped the butts into the sand like it was a big old ashtray. They had a couple of blankets. No umbrella. The mom sat in a beach chair and drank cheap beer. The kids sat on blankets or played in the sand or the water. They had no rafts or boards. They had a few plastic shovels and cracked plastic pails. I got the sense they weren’t renting a house, they’d driven in for the day, and would turn around and drive home, the kids sandcovered in the bed of a pickup, when the sun began to set.
I was sitting with Eileen and her sisters under an eight-foot umbrella. We were reading books. Eileen’s family loved to read. They’d all get together at their parents’ house, sit in the living room, and read. They even had a name for it: parallel reading.
We were parallel reading on the beach that afternoon. At some point I lifted my face from the page. There was a commotion next to us. “It was your job,” the mom shrieked at oneof the older girls. “It was your job,” she shrieked again. A cigarette hung from her mouth. The tip bounced like a springboard until the ash fell. She pinched the butt. A cough barked from her chest. She spat in the sand.
A boy named Greg was missing. Eileen and her sisters were watching now, too. We eyed one another. Eileen dug her notebook and pen from her bag. “This is where stories come from,” she said, and began to take notes.
I wasn’t sure which kid was Greg. There was one boy in a diaper, but he was sitting at his sister’s feet, eating sand. The mom wheeled, shouted curses and called for Greg. Two of the girls stood and scanned the horizon. The oldest boy stirred from his nap, touched a finger to his burnt shoulder and rolled on his belly to go back to sleep.
“Did he go in the water?” the mom shouted.
“I didn’t see him.”
“Did anyone see him?”
Eileen scribbled, while the rest of us glanced around for a kid who looked lost.
“There he is.” One of the older girls pointed.
A boy came over the dunes. He was 6 or so, with swim trunks that hung almost to his ankles.
The mom slugged her beer and waited. When he got close she shrieked, “Gregory Winston,” and I wondered if he was named after a brand of cigarettes.
“I had to pee,” he said.
“Pee, my ass. Tell me when you run off.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him down the beach.
Later, I thought about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It was something I’d learned in college. A lot of people learn it in college. It’s drawn like this:
Need
for self-
actualization
Need for esteem
Need for love & belonging
Security needs
Basic needs within family &
society that protect against violence
Physiological needs
Food, water, shelter, clothing
An individual must meet the needs at the bottom of the hierarchy before the higher needs can be met. A person without the basics of adequate food, water, shelter and clothing must satisfy those needs before seeking, say, security. I figured Gregory Winston’s family was somewhere in the bottom half, perhaps struggling with its basic security needs, based on the whupping Gregory got from his mama down the beach. I figured I was a little higher in the hierarchy. I had a girlfriend, Eileen, whom I loved. I was only 24, but I hoped to marry her and start a family that would provide the sort of security that Gregory Winston’s family perhaps lacked. On that particular day I was in need of esteem. I sold insurance, and did so poorly. It wasn’t a good fit, and, as I think about it now, meant that Eileen, a graduate student and a would-be writer, had love and belonging plus a little extra—some esteem and self-respect, which I was lacking. Maybe this difference doomed us.
The train jerked forward. Jamie stood on the platform, watching his mom through the window. We watched him watch her, all of us now, in the car with the mother, who was slapping the window with the palm of her hand and calling, “Stay there!”
The platform sped by. She turned from the window, her face white under the car’s lights.
“Stop the train,” someone shouted.
“How?” the mom asked. We hurtled into the dark tunnel.
“Call the conductor.” There was a button you could push at the end of the car to speak with the driver. But no one explained that to the woman. Now a more panicked voice said, “Pull that lever.” A woman pointed to a red-lettered box next to the doors.
“I don’t recommend that,” someone countered. He was gray-haired and mustachioed and wore thick glasses. He was sitting across from me. He set his book in his lap. “You pull that lever and we’ll be stuck.” He crossed his long legs. There was an air of authority to him, something professorial. Maybe here was someone who’d achieved self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t actually know what that means. Maybe you can’t know what it means until you achieve it. But maybe this man’s calm demeanor and quiet confidence were its results. Or maybe he just wished to quash any delay and get the crazy tourist off the train. “You’re better off riding to the next stop and taking the train back. They run every two minutes. There might be a train there when we arrive.”
Seconds passed. Lights flashed in the tunnel. No one spoke. The man picked up his book and read. The mom gathered her belongings and stood by the door. The other passengers waited and watched, until, one by one, they too picked up their books and newspapers and resumed reading. But I watched the woman. The train slowed. The tunnel opened to a platform, a lighted station.
It wasn’t my stop. I lived near the end of the line, another eight stops. I wasn’t a hero. I was curious, that’s all. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be. When the doors opened, I followed her off the train.
The sign said the next train was due in one minute. It would take her—us—back to the station where Jamie got off. I wondered what I was doing, a voyeur to someone else’s crisis. I should have been looking for a new job. I lived in a bad neighborhood. Security was a problem. Selling mattresses (or, more accurately, not selling mattresses) was making me poor. I worried about the rent. Mattresses would have been at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Sleep, if such a thing existed, on par with physiological needs. Everyone needs a mattress. They shouldn’t have been that hard to sell.
In North Carolina, by the time Eileen graduated from her master’s program in English literature, I was starting to wonder about the stories that filled her notebooks. Then she was accepted into a PhD program at one of the UNC schools. She was leaving town. Without me.
Had it been temporary, after all? Was I a stepping stone, like her master’s degree, something she would use to launch the soaring arc of her life?
I’d been kicked down the hierarchy of needs. I was falling, rung by rung.
The mother waited. She peered at the electronic sign, which still showed one minute until the train arrived. We’d already waited that long. You get delays in the system sometimes, inexplicable delays. Five northbound trains in a row before you even see a southbound. Mechanical problems. She glanced at the sign again. Our anxiety grew.
Perhaps she’d been kicked down a rung or two. Maybe she’d been seeking purpose and meaning in her life, but now the underpinning for security was gone. She had to hasten back to the station where Jamie had wandered off the train and reclaim it. A temporary blip. Find Jamie and resume our search for meaning; that was the story we wished to tell.
The lights at the edge of the platform blinked. Headlights shone on the walls of the dark tunnel, then into the station. We got onto the train. There were seats available, but she stood in front of the doors and I stood behind her. One stop. It only took a minute. When we pulled into the station, he was standing on the platform—of course he was—looking small and scared.
The doors opened and we stepped from the train. Jamie ran to her, and she knelt to collect him. Her bags spilled on the floor. He was crying. You’d have thought she’d have scolded him, but she was crying, too. I took inventory. Security: there. Love and belonging: check. Esteem: I felt it.
A northbound train came. They took it but I didn’t. Passengers threaded past, full of purpose. The sign said the next train would arrive in three minutes. I sat on a bench and waited.
Dana Cann lives with his wife and their two children in Bethesda. He teaches at the Writer’s Center. His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Florida Review and other journals. He’s currently at work on a novel.
