The world as they know it

On the subway ride home, a young woman toting a brown cardboard box boarded at the opposite end of the train and launched into a saleswoman's pitch:

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is -------- and I just turned 17 years old two weeks ago. These are my younger sisters, and we're enrolled in an after-school program to keep us out of trouble. We have here some delicious candies. It would really help us out if you would buy some of these candies, or, if you'd like, make a donation…"

It was something we'd all heard before. Suddenly conversations with neighbors became more absorbing, heads burrowed deeper into books, iPod earbuds got twisted into ears, and glances were thrown askance. I was sitting alone and had only one stop to go, and even if I had wanted to buy a candy bar, I had not a dollar on me. And so I adopted the ostrich line of defense, looking into my lap, as if not seeing them would mean they couldn't see me.

The young woman flipped on a boom box, and the familiar opening trumpet and swinging timpani of "Take the A Train" sang through the car. Involuntarily, I tapped my foot. And then events took an unexpected turn.

The two younger girls, one about 8, the other about 4, both in polo shirts dotted with blotches of brown and gray, began dancing through the train to their older sister's calls.

"That's right! Now go dance. Swing!"

The older child skipped to my end of the train and twirled around one of the shiny floor-to-roof poles. She took hold of a seat and laid out in a deep back bend, one foot on the ground, the other extended as far as it would reach into the air before her. The tinier girl came scurrying up next, grabbing the pole directly in front of me to kick and twirl and giggle.

"Now switch!" their sister cried, and they danced and pranced in a do-si-do.

A click and a clack, and the music jumped from "A Train" to the plaintive violins of "The Godfather." The girls adjusted accordingly, elongating their movements and tempering their bouncing into soft chasses.

They were loving it, smiling all the way. To them, this was playtime -- an innocent frolic on the downtown Q. I could imagine their sister selling them on the idea back home:

"We're going to dance and give out some candy! Doesn’t that sound fun?"

"Yeah!"

But I couldn't help but wonder, How long until the thrill is gone. How many years will it be until awareness creeps in to steal away the fantasy. How long until this blithe subway ballet gives way to the reality of necessity. And then my mind wandered to the book review I'd read just an hour before, an assessment by Janet Maslin of Robert Goolrick's family memoir "The End of the World as We Know It." In it, she had written:

After opening the book with glimpses of how dire these lives will become, he moves backward in time to observe his family from the vantage point of a bedazzled, seemingly innocent child. Only gradually and coyly do the hints of his later experience creep in.

I had caught these girls in their "bedazzled" childhood moment, the time of their lives in which subway hawking could still be called a game, in which they might even go to school the next day to boast of their subterranean adventures. I found myself hoping that for the sake of their future sanity, this memory might remain pure -- that this subway gambol might become something to look back on fondly, instead of fodder for a tale of life going, as Maslin writes, "very, very sour."

Comments

[colleen]

this makes me think that i ought to live in nyc. every time i've been there, i've never experienced any of these random weird things that happen to residents and it makes me (even more) want to BE a resident....

[gs]

I'm inclined to believe much of the random beauty in New York is lost because people's eyes are too often closed to it. Obviously the writer of this blog possesses keen vision for the extraordinary.

[Ray]

I’m sorry. I just have a different take on this: revulsion. Maybe it’s because I saw so many kids in Colombia being used by sisters and mothers to beg for money on the street. All I can think is that the kids you saw are in a more familiar context and so somehow for many of the observers this familiarity “softens” the act of an adult using a kid to help garnish spare change. In reading your post, I just couldn’t get past my visceral reaction to the exploitation of children by their own family. It just sickens me.