iv.
Walking is better for thinking. Sitting like this, immobile, breeds bad thoughts: rampage shooters, lawn shitters. And beneath that, the emptiness when things aren’t right with Justine. Our disagreements are at the root of nearly every foul day I’ve had since we met. She sets the tenor and tone of my existence. Why not make peace? Apologize? But I can’t. I can’t say why. If it’s only because I know that if our situations were reversed, she’d find some way to justify her behavior, I’m being childish, petty. If this is the only reason I’m resisting, I should say sorry and have done with it. But I’m not feeling reasonable.
Market East Station is next, and that’s my stop. I reach into my pocket and play with my phone. I’m tempted to call out of work. After the lawn shitting and the cold shoulder my wife gave me, I could use it, but it doesn’t seem worth it. What would I do? Go to the movies? What I want is to drop off the grid, to call out and go to New York, visit the Whitney or Met, have lunch in Central Park, wander around The Strand. And I could have done this pre-Sadie. I could have taken the train to Trenton, hopped onto Jersey Transit, gone to New York. I’d be back in time for dinner, too. But now, with a child, I have to stay close to home, to let Justine know where I am. Which isn’t bad. But I want a day to myself, a day no one knows where I am, a day when I’m free.
It’s one of those things I miss about being single, moments to myself. I’d like to call out, hop a train to New York, and Justine, if I ran it by her in a better mood, might approve. She’s encouraged me to visit friends in Brooklyn. But this lacks impulse, spontaneity. Asking for approval saps the sense of adventure. I don’t want out of marriage or fatherhood. But after the work I put in, day after day, raising my daughter, traveling to the office, putting up with office politics, coming home, cooking, giving baths, reading bedtime stories, getting shunned because I ate the last potato, all I want is a day. But these are the choices I’ve made. I have to be home by five to get Sadie.
Besides, I’m sitting in the quiet ride car. If I try calling out from here, I risk getting yelled at by other passengers. You have to be dead silent on the quiet ride car or people lose their minds. I’ve seen it happen. It begins with dirty looks. Someone boards who doesn’t know it’s the quiet ride car and they’re talking on a cell phone. A wave of disgruntled grimaces fans out around them. Eyes shoot up from books. The passengers who know the secret code exchange nods. It’s rare someone bothers to approach the offender and explain the situation. Instead, outrage takes over. The mob gets riled up. The quiet passengers sigh heavily and shake their heads until one cracks. “SIR, THIS IS THE QUIET RIDE CAR! YOU CANNOT DO THAT HERE!” And this never fails to make me laugh, although I don’t say anything either. I could head it off, be the one who walks over, whispers an explanation. But I don’t because I find it amusing. Fury without the threat of repercussion is comedic. What, beyond snapping, can the offended riders do? Call the quiet ride police? Even if they summon the conductor, what power does he have? The talker paid for a ticket. I’m not even sure the conductor could throw them off the train if they refused to shut up. Of course, anyone who refuses to cooperate, after being told the rules, is an asshole. But most assholes don’t care what other people think, which is what makes them assholes in the first place. Nine times out of ten, a measured explanation would work better than shouting—just like me and the Danish-eating woman in her Kia. But people prefer to be upset, outraged. Self-righteous is the default mode. We enjoy expressing disapproval, falling upon the outsider, the sense of superiority it gives us. Even my glee at seeing it unfold was a sort of superiority. We act without thinking beyond pre-established roles—the many against the few; conformists against non. Even those who don’t buy in go along with it, keep quiet. It’s how the masses work, how we turn on each other for minor indiscretions.
The train hits a tunnel, and darkness engulfs us. The lights inside the train flicker. They always do when we hit this part of the tunnel. The electricity cuts out. A dead zone of darkness, then light. I hate to travel but love it too. The atmosphere of cities refreshes me. Traveling to a new one helps me gain perspective on how static my point of view can be when it’s mired in routine. The mind opens up, breathes. But getting places gives me anxiety. Buses and trains. Air travel. Cars. The passive listlessness of sitting as a passenger, the uncertainty of where the next stop might be, the next comfort, next restroom.
During my early twenties, fear had crippled me. I’d had my first anxiety attack while traveling to my twenty-first birthday party at a small Moroccan restaurant called Marrakesh off South Street. I was with my friends Lex and Jim in a car on Lincoln Drive with its sinuous twists and turns, and all the twisting and turning sent waves of nausea through me. I’d tasted bile rising in the back of my throat. My mouth had gone acrid, sour. I’d pressed my head to the cool glass of the passenger side window. “I need you to stop,” I told Lex, who was driving. “I’m gonna be sick.”
He took the turns close, looking for a place to pull off, but the road didn’t allow for this. I pressed my palms to the glass. “I need to get out,” I said. I tapped against the windowpane. My body went savagely cold, tingled all over. My head spun, every nerve firing off. Yet, the road went on, the guard rail to our right keeping the car locked in our lane. Beyond this, a cutoff of trees descended into woodlands. My bladder was full, and I feared I couldn’t hold it long. I crossed my legs, as another wave of nausea struck. I swallowed and shut my mouth tight. I tried to roll down the window but couldn’t find the lever. My feet ground into the floor. My heart was beating too fast. I couldn’t catch my breath. I found the lever for the window and opened it and hung my head out. I didn’t care if I got decapitated. I wanted this to end. I closed my eyes, and Lex cut the wheel. He’d discovered a picnic stop at the side of the road, and I ran out and circled the table. I leaned behind a tree, but rather than throw up, I unzipped my pants and pissed on the ground, watching the steam rise from the cold November earth. My body was trembling, knees shaking, but when I got back to the car, I insisted we go on.
I toughed it out that night, but over the next few weeks, it got worse. Any ride longer than fifteen minutes caused the same reaction. Whenever I stepped on a train, it would start. My bladder, even if I’d used the restroom a moment ago, would fill. I’d tremble, become nauseated. One day, I almost passed out and fell down a flight of concrete stairs at Fern Rock station. I’d gotten off the train when my trembling became too much and ran for the stairs and started walking up. When I got halfway, my vision fogged. Spots hovered before my eyes, my head felt light. My knees buckled as I spun and grabbed the railing and lowered myself to the ground.
“Are you all right?” a woman asked.
She’d stopped next to me on the stairs, and at that moment, her question meant everything. That someone had stopped, cared.
“Maybe you should go to the hospital,” she said. And I thought, maybe I should. But I didn’t. What could they do? I knew what was happening. I didn’t think going to the hospital would help. It wasn’t a medical emergency but a psychological one, and I could fix it myself. I inched down the stairs, holding the railing. I boarded the next train and got to school. I had three months left before graduation, and school was the only place I left the house to go. It was senior year of college. This was part of what triggered my attacks. In three months, I’d have to look for a job, figure out what to do with my life. Before now, there’d been a clear path, another level of school toward which I was working—elementary to junior high, junior high to high school, high school to college. How would things work once those obvious pathways were gone?
I’d been satisfied, while in school, to wash dishes in a nursing home kitchen. But after I got out, I’d have to find a new job, something that justified my degree, something that required the skills I’d learned in four years at university. Publishing, I assumed. I’d studied English. But I hadn’t taken the courses to teach, so this was the other option. But publishing where? What if I applied and no one wanted me? My instructors had told us we could get a job anywhere with an English degree, that employers need effective writers, communicators. But I wasn’t sure about this. My parents couldn’t help. Neither had been to college, so I hadn’t asked their advice.
I lived with them to save money, pay off school, and as the attacks got worse, I didn’t see friends or accept invitations to go out. Still, I had a plan. I met with the head of the English department and asked to drop a class. She agreed to bump my internship from three credits to four so I’d have enough to graduate, and after that, I planned to move to the city where I wouldn’t have to travel. Everything in town was close. The subway ride from West Philly to Center City was five minutes. One of my friends out there needed a roommate. I mapped the public restrooms in Center City, which were the cleanest, which had the most fragrant soaps, which required purchase for use. And I managed my attacks by avoiding the situations that caused them. I’d gone to a doctor to get valium for when I had to take long car rides—since these were unavoidable for weddings, funerals, birthdays—but mostly, I relegated my existence to a forty-block stretch from my apartment on 44th street to my office on 4th. And I would have continued this way if I hadn’t met Justine.
One day, not long after we started dating, she said, “I like to travel, and if we’re in this for the long haul, it means you’ll have to travel with me.” We were on the front stoop of my apartment. I now lived alone, further West on 49th, a two-bedroom apartment. It was a semi-run down, low-lit, but livable space that I adored because I didn’t have to share it with roommates. The building was four stories, red brick with a stoop out front, granite pillars between which my friends and I would sit on sunny days. I could deal with commuting by trolley. It was ten minutes from there to Center City. But I still had trouble with cars. Justine and I had gone to a friend’s wedding the month before, and I’d had an attack on the way. Justine had been driving and she’d had to pull to the shoulder of the road repeatedly. For a moment after she said this, I watched her to gauge how serious she was. I knew that if I wanted to be with her, I’d have to return to therapy.
I’d gone to see a psychiatrist soon after the first attacks occurred, after I’d almost fallen down the stairs. My friend Jim suggested it. He noticed I wasn’t coming out of the house, and he showed up one day and told me I should get help. I saw my physician, and he’d recommended a psychologist. I went to five sessions but found him uninspiring. He lacked insight. The questions he asked were obvious, his suggestions facile, and I stopped going. I took Zoloft for a while, but after I found a job and moved to West Philly, I stopped. I didn’t like being on medication, and once I’d gotten myself situated, I saw no need for it. I had a social life, a circle of friends, a series of girlfriends that led to meeting Justine. But with Justine’s ultimatum, I tried again. I saw three separate psychiatrists until I found one I felt comfortable talking to.
“From what it sounds like,” she said, “you have issues with control, a fear of losing it.”
And though this was the same thing my first therapist had said six years back, the obvious insight that had turned me away for him, my new therapist didn’t say it with his air of breakthrough, as if she’d startled herself by putting obvious fact one with obvious fact two. Rather she seemed to be connecting the obvious to encourage the most obvious solution. It was a matter of delivery. And I was more receptive now.
“How did it start?” she asked.
I told her about being on Lincoln Drive, my twenty-first birthday. I told her I didn’t have a license, that I’d always been scared of driving.
“Maybe getting your license would be the first step toward taking control,” she suggested. “Maybe if you’re sitting behind the wheel, it won’t be as frightening.”
The therapist prescribed medication, recommended some books on how to manage attacks, and once I’d learned to control my breathing, I was able to subdue the rush of adrenaline that caused them—most of the time, at least. Then one day, I stumbled upon such an obvious solution, I was surprised it hadn’t occurred to me before.
I was taking the train to the suburbs to visit my parents for dinner. When I boarded, I felt all right, but after ten minutes, it started. I was so tired of this happening that I slumped back into my seat. Fuck it, I thought. Piss yourself. Piss yourself and get off the train. Go home, change your pants, try again. Do your worst. Destroy me if you want.
The train stopped at Fern Rock, the station where years before I’d nearly tumbled down the stairs. I considered getting off but forced myself to stay. Go ahead and do it. Get sick, vomit in front of all these people. But I couldn’t. I tried to let it happen, to urge on the panic, bring it to a head, but something intervened, shut it down. Like a disobedient child I’d given permission to rebel, once it discovered I didn’t care, it lost interest. Each time I felt it coming on, I did this, gave it permission, and somehow, this made it stop.
So we traveled—Justine and I—in the early years of our relationship. We drove to Washington D.C. for the cherry blossom festival. We spent an anniversary in New York City, gone to the Met to see Aida. We’d flown to San Diego to visit her brother and attend my friend Jasper’s wedding. We’d taken a cruise up the eastern seaboard to Montreal for our honeymoon and gone to London during her first trimester pregnant with Sadie. She’d forced me out of that forty block radius, and during that trip to San Diego, she’d lain down another ultimatum. If I didn’t get my license, she wouldn’t marry me. Now that we have a child, I understand. I have to drive to dentist and doctor appointments, get Sadie from daycare. I have to run out for milk, pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy. If I couldn’t drive, all of this would fall to her.
On the train, I look up and notice a woman staring at me, smiling. She smiles and I smile back, though I’m not sure she’s smiling at me. Is she? I look around, but I don’t see anyone looking back at her. She’s cute, too. Bookish, with glasses. But cute. I want to think she’s smiling because she finds me attractive. She must be smiling because she wants me. But no, that can’t be it. My book. I’m holding a book. Maybe she’s smiling because she recognizes it. Maybe she’s read it. She can see the cover. That must be it. Smiling your way doesn’t necessarily mean she wants you. Maybe she’s zoning out. Maybe she’s thinking of someone else. Should I move my hand up? Flash the ring? No, that’s foolish. She turns away, but I keep staring. I want to see if she’ll smile again. When she looks my way I glance out the window but sneak a surreptitious peek from the corner of my eye. She’s smiling.
As the train stops, I rise and get in line to leave. She sits and looks up and smiles again. So it is me. She’s looking directly at me. I’m not going to do anything about it. I might be mad at my wife for being mad at me, but I still love her. I don’t expect to resolve any deep-seated existential crisis through an extramarital affair. I’ve read enough midcentury American literature to disavow myself of this notion. But why am I thinking this, going full-scale smile equates to she must want me? It was a smile, nothing more. Yet, I’ve seen this type of smile before. In clubs and bars. I’m rusty, of course. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but I don’t think so. It’s the way most of my ex-girlfriends smiled at me pre-introduction. The first smile means she noticed you. The second that she noticed you noticing her, and all you need to do is walk up and say, “How’s it going?” Ask a few questions, keep your own side of the small talk to a minimum, and good things can happen. So the smile delights me, even if nothing will come of it. It gives me confidence. If I had space, I’d leap and click my heels together, throw one hand aloft and high-five it with the other. Instead, I file out of the car, alive with the first real jolt of energy I’ve had all morning. And even if that smile wasn’t meant for me, I’m holding onto it. It’s the only thing that’s made me happy today.