Dear Mary,
Though I’m still confused as to how you found my address, I will begin by answering your singular question: I’m getting by just fine. Life here is fast, and I have adapted.
We ride subways everywhere, pressed up shoulder to shoulder, iPods ablaze, books in hand, walking quickly as soon as the soothing voice of the subway computer announces our stop. Lots of people have proffered the idea that this public transit system acts as the circulatory system of New York. They’re probably right.
But you’ve heard all of that. That’s boring.
Much more interesting is the eyewear that we all keep on our faces. I say “us” as if I am part of the group, as if I’m pretending that I’ve fully incorporated into being a citizen of this city, but I utterly lack the Native New Yorker’s primal ability to ignore pushy elbows as I make my daily commute. When it comes to eyewear, though, I transcend. Shades on, eyes blackened, I’m no longer nervous, shaking between tunnels and staring at mile-high maps. I walk fluidly, confident. Striding across the network, a native in his native land, an expert liar on a well-worn path.
They wear sunglasses here for all the reasons that they were intended. Yes, we wish to protect our sight. No, we do not wish to risk eye cancer from constant UV abuse. Yes, New York does truly suffer the fate of being excessively “stylish” and sunglasses are an inherent part of this, effectively painting each face in both mystery and an air of distinct pomposity.
But when you plunge below ground, through tunnels and passageways into dark halls, to board subway trains that are low-lit and conducive to only the life of rats, people leave these blackened lenses over their faces. Moving in and out of the tubes, they leave the sunglasses down over their eyes, terse-lipped, faced-forward. Navigating between people, from train to train, with shades on feels like a right of passage. The fact that this behavior is normalized in this city allows a boy in a wool coat to keep looking out a window at the gray stone flying past the car’s window, darkened to black through his eyewear. He doesn’t budge as a homeless man asks him for some spare change. The vagrant moves on and knocks those without glasses to the back of their seats with his pungent begging.
One of the first times I realized I was doing it was when I rode the subway with a friend of mine out here. Evan had moved to Brooklyn about the same time as I and we were in grad school together. We’d seen eye to eye on most things, mainly because we moved for the same kind of reasons: I couldn’t stand the indifference that the Midwest was plaguing me with; he couldn’t stand that his county gave the schools a week off for the start of deer hunting season.
Evan and I had stepped out of class together in midtown Manhattan to a still-bright six o’clock on a late-summer day. Sun peaked between buildings and drenched the lush grass of Bryant Park while a stiff breeze of warm air swept down the block, aided by a bus roaring past, spewing fumes across our faces in its wake.
We crossed 42nd and bounced down two flights of stairs, walked through a tunnel, and descended again to our train’s platform. Evan blurted out, “Take those off. You look ridiculous down here.” He pointed at his face and only then did I realize, despite having descended into a fluorescent-lit, white-tiled cavern, I’d left the shades on.
I laughed nervously. The sort of laugh that anyone lets out when ridiculed for the first time by a new friend. The kind of laugh you let out when even your arms are too paralyzed from embarrassment to do anything about the sweat quickly collecting on your forehead. I looked through the lenses into the crack between the platform and a train rushing by. As dust rushed out from the blackened slit, I thought of all the things that could slip into there. Loose change. A pen. The toe of your shoe.
Where I went to undergraduate school, a girl, on a crisp spring day, was walking to class on a sidewalk, on the right side of the road. Light beat down all around her, and, as she stepped onto Chalmers Street, a bus clipped her from behind on the left side. She died instantly.
No one could figure out if she’d been distracted by her phone, found 15 feet away. Her vision was probably impaired, too; a pair of crushed sunglasses was found near the body, white plastic arms smashed, black lenses shattered and digging into her cheeks, spilling stagnant blood.
For the next three years on that campus, we looked both ways wherever we went.
I suppose my fitting into this particular New York stereotype began with my Uncle Don. He and I were playing guitar together in my bedroom. There was a family party going on beneath us. As per usual, it was less a party and more a critique of what each member was doing with their lives. We’d slipped up into my bedroom to pull out guitars and play for a few minutes. He was the youngest of three brothers and still acted the part at 45 years old.
We’d been playing for only five minutes when I kicked my head back and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a pair of Ray-Ban knock-off sunglasses I’d picked up from a gas station earlier in the week. They were the sort that mimicked what movie stars wore; the kind that, by some horrific twist of fate, both Axl Rose and George Michael had once donned at the same time.
I put them on, continued strumming. Don threw his head back and laughed with his whole body, shaking with excitement, and he never lost the beat.
At all family functions from then on, I wore the sunglasses whenever it was acceptable. They felt like some sort of secret between he and I. While my sister was downstairs, speaking to an audience that didn’t understand how she could be so successful – she was a doctor in a family firmly planted in the middle class – I was upstairs playing guitar, rearing my head back with a sort of mask over my eyes. Don began wearing the same style shades whenever I saw him. I smiled while he politely took them off, knowing he could not keep the camouflage on in front of the family. He smiled back, it was assumed. We both knew where the other was coming from – that all we needed was a few minutes in disguise and the rest of the day would be manageable.
That was just over a year ago. Both he and my grandfather were alive that day.
When I got home from his funeral, after driving back to college, back to friends who wanted to hug me constantly against my will, a lot of them asked what I was going to do. They wanted to know how I was handling having a family member die so young. Most of them learned quickly. I’d adopted the kind of personality that anyone in my situation would. Usually, my brisk pace and dark lenses made people assume it’d be better to hold their breaths and let the subject drop.
A few weren’t so observant. Sometimes I was asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. What can you do?” I’d say while I shoved the sunglasses onto my face and turned to walk away.
It was against my better judgment, always wearing the Ray-Bans in the tunnels of New York. I knew how dangerous it could be. I knew how stupid it looked.
On that same subway ride, Evan and I were sitting next to each other. My glasses were over my face and I looked straight ahead, while his eyes nervously twitched side to side as a man playing the harmonica held his free hand out for change. He stopped in the middle of the train car, took a deep breath, and let all of us riders know about his wife and child and how dire a situation they were in. It’s the most typical reason you hear out of beggars and one that I’ve begun disregarding. When the man began playing and moving toward us again, Evan reached deep in his pocket and slipped seventy-six cents into the man’s hand. I looked straight ahead when his hand fell beneath my chin, his palm open, instead of lines for fortune tellers, a network of dark black dirt, grime tracing veins and creases from years of labor.
The train came to a halt and I stood up. I brushed past the man with the harmonica, caught the look of surprise on Evan’s face, as if I was a monster, and a familiar wetness formed under my eyes. I moved to the exit two stops too early. My feet could handle the extra walk.
It’s been a hard year. Hiding from friends and moving across the country only to hide again is not easy. This is not to mention the rift left wide open back home, an almost physical property, because of two men’s deaths. But one can forget all of that, become a child pretending to be a rock star again, when the sunglasses are on and you’re walking quickly through the big city at night.
When the doors opened, I looked down at the gap between the train and the yellow platform. It was a gaping hole of only about three inches, but getting a toe stuck in it would mean your demise as the train doors closed and you were torn in half – the train plunging forward mercilessly. Glasses on or off, the hole was there, not allowing light to escape. I lifted my foot high, swung it forward, and moved quickly onto the platform. I bumped into a mother who held her child’s hand, gently whispered, “I’m sorry,” and kept walking.