On the L

After swing dancing I'm sweaty and disgusting and don't want anyone to look at me, and so on the L train across town, I'm focused intently on my reading. It's an essay by Chinua Achebe, for class, and on this night, I'm cheating. I'm not supposed to be reading it yet, but this packet of photocopied literature is the only thing I've got in my bag, and I have to keep my eyes focused on something, lest eye contact be made and an unwanted Interaction With Strange Someone commenced. At Sixth Avenue a bunch of bodies file on. One presses up against the armrest to my right. Out of my peripheral vision I see it's a slender body with tight jeans. I keep reading, but it's hard to concentrate. I feel a hovering presence. I raise my eyes from the page for a quick second, then turn them back down, when the woman attached to the leg speaks.

"You don't mind if I read, do you?" I look up. She's pretty and blonde and drunk and Irish, unless she only sounds Irish because she's very drunk.

"Sure, go ahead," I say, thinking, Well, if you put it that way, I don't have much of an out, do I.

I read the next half of the page without really knowing what I've read. Union Square. Third Avenue. I hit the bottom of the page and want to turn it, to let my eyes skim over new words. But I don't know if the girl is ready. Just flipping it would be rude, right? Or would it be weirder to ask her, since after all, we've only just met, and after all, she's pretty much butt her head into my business without any thought to me. Mustn't grumble. One more stop and I'll be rid of her.

We approach First Avenue and I look up. "This is my stop."

"Is that for school?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"Well good luck with that," she says, and as I rise she adds, "Just don't believe everything you read!"

What a thing to say. The piece of text she would have read was not overtly political, nothing to be believed or disbelieved. ("I have always been fond of stories and intrigued by language — first Igbo, spoken with such eloquence by the old men of the village, and later English, which I began to learn at about the age of eight.") I look at her perplexedly. "I know." But I wonder: What would make her think I didn't? And this is the question that consumes me as I walk the final ten minutes home, and as I shower and change and sit and type and continue, now, to wonder. Whereas Irish, I'm sure, forgot me and Chinua Achebe as soon as I was out of her sight. "Don't believe everything you read." I guess in the end it need only be taken at face value — the sage if fuzzy advice of a nosy, drunken Irishwoman bound for Williamsburg.

Comments

[seth]

Perhaps she should attend a remordial reading class to learn not to be a 'remora reader'. Do I get credit for inventing a new term? what if it goes viral?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remora