SARAH LEE falls in love every time she takes the subway, so she’s started taking the bus instead. The L train from Williamsburg to the East Village is killing her, with all these cute young boys, with their lovely young skin and doe eyes and mussed-up hair, mussed up just so and their vintage-store winter coats, some military style, stiff and serious-looking, some more textured and glamorous, as if they should be walking the streets of London circa 1932; and all kinds of crazy kicks on their feet, expensive tennis shoes of vibrant colors, sturdy walking boots, and lately, cowboy boots with heels, but those are worn by the gay boys, so she just admires their feet and ignores the rest. And they are all reading books, worn paperbacks mainly, she imagines they’ve borrowed from roommates or girlfriends, or listening to their iPods on shuffle. Some of them are checking out the girls—their glamour-puss counterparts, equally casually yet strictly attired—looking at their asses or their hair or their new shoes, wondering what those shoes would look like wedged between bed and wall of their crappy, crumbly apartment, their naked bodies splayed out in some uncomfortable, pornographic position. They are wondering what it would be like to fuck them, Sarah Lee firmly believes. And while she doesn’t want that, want them to only want to fuck her, she wishes, still, that they might glance at her. But they don’t. They look anywhere but at her, in the old winter coat she bought at the ninety-nine-cents-a-pound Salvation Army outlet in Seattle, fading pink wool with childlike bejeweled buttons she sewed on herself, not as tough as it used to be, sometimes coats just die, she needs to admit that to herself one of these days; and even if they looked beyond the coat she knows she is too old and not cool enough for them, and sometimes she still speaks with a stutter when she meets new people (though it is much better now) so that even if they could see something in her, once she opened her mouth they might move on to the next person, pretend like she didn’t exist, until suddenly, she simply didn’t. And there is nothing worse than not existing.
So she takes the bus into the city instead, the B39 across the bridge, from the Southside of Williamsburg to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She likes to think of her bus stops not by streets but by proper names, as if she were traveling from one kingdom to another, or at the very least, from one town to the next, so that she feels like she’s really going somewhere very important, and not just across the bridge to work. On the bus, she is pretty again, a pretty thirty-two-year-old woman with nice waves of brown hair that go past her shoulders and cover her oversized ears (she has finally learned to cover them), and a full, healthy face, shiny like a silver dollar, with a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that make her look a little bit younger than she is, though not much. Enough to confuse the guy checking IDs at the door sometimes. She likes to think. She likes to believe.
The people who live in her neighborhood, she wouldn’t consider them her neighbors. They, too, ignore her, won’t meet her eyes as she walks down the block. She had tried greeting people the first month after she moved to the Williamsburg sublet, cheerful morning hellos that used to work sometimes in Queens, and in Oakland, and in Eugene, and in Portland before that, and in Seattle, too. No one wants to say hello to her, except maybe the deli guys who call her “Sweetheart” and “Mami,” and serve her first when there’s a long line, or the car-service drivers idling on the side streets who call out to her as she’s walking. Sometimes she forces the Hassidic women working at the grocery store to interact with her, just so she can hear the sound of her own voice, asking them how they’re doing, telling them to have a nice day. Are they timid or do they dislike her? She can’t tell by their quiet responses, but she’ll take them anyway.
On the bus she is surrounded by these so-called neighbors, the Dominicans from the projects, young women in sharp lip liner gabbing on cell phones while their children in tow suck quietly on hard candies, older women smoothing back their hair and sadly fingering the buttons on their coats, and young, agitated men who seem wired, pacing the aisles sometimes, checking pagers, waiting for information, waiting for something to soothe them.