Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

“Yeah,” she said, then added, upon consideration, “No.”

As the train pulled out of the station, we were joined by two new passengers, who ignored the other empty seats in the car and chose the bench across from us, forcing me to change my position and point my knees at an uncomfortable diagonal. The woman was pale, with gray hair and fuzzy eyebrows the color of dried cornstalks. The boy, who looked to be slightly younger than Jody, was Black. He wore a baseball cap backward on his head, and for some reason he wore mittens, though it was summer. His features were bunched in an expression of pure rage, as if he were just looking for someone to provoke him into a fight.

“Did you know a brontosaurus weighed like seventy-seven thousand pounds?” Jody announced out of the blue. Instead of addressing me, she spoke directly to the boy across from her, who only glared in response.

“Really?” I tried to make up for the boy’s icy manner with my own enthusiasm. “That’s incredible!”

“Yep. And it only ate vegetables!”

“You mean it was a vegetarian?”

“It loved to eat. It ate all day.” She was still talking to the boy, who, in his quiet seething, appeared to take every word as a direct offense. I crinkled my newspaper in an attempt to distract Jody, but she kept chatting. “It just ate and ate and ate and ate.” She made tearing and chewing motions with her mouth. “It mostly hung out in the water near the shore. Wanna know why? Because it was too fat to stand up on land. What a fatso! Except not for its brain. Its brain weighed, get this, just one pound.”

“Just one pound!” I echoed.

She bounced on the cushion and in her excitement kicked the woman, who glanced coldly at me to register her indignation.

“Jody,” I whispered, taking her wrist. “Please.”

She fell back into her seat, and I released her and returned to the newspaper. The train was rolling slowly, grinding along the track past repairmen. Jody waved at them as we passed. One of the men waved back. The train inched along. I absorbed myself for a few minutes in an article about the rising prices of real estate. When we came to a full halt, I looked through the circle on the window. We had stopped in an underpass; on the concrete wall someone had spelled out the word HERO in dripping orange paint.

My attention moved to Jody, and I noticed only then what was happening. Jody was staring at the boy across from her, and the boy was staring back, the children locked in a contest that I worried could only end badly, the two of them barely breathing, the woman in charge of the boy making notations in her notebook, oblivious to the children as each tried to make the other blink, both of them set on nothing less than a victory that could only be humiliating to the loser.

“Jody,” I said in a low voice. “Jody, if you don’t want to go to the zoo, where do you want to go?”

The woman across from me busily scratched away with her pencil; the train started moving again with a jerk; the two children went on staring, rigid as statues.

“Jody!” I hissed.

She refused to acknowledge me. I watched in dismay as she filled her mouth with a gradual intake of breath, bloating her cheeks and forcing her pupils together in cross-eyed concentration. She held the pose for so long that she grew red in the face. I feared that she would cause herself to faint, and I was about to offer a friendly poke in her cheek to deflate her when the boy suddenly erupted, throwing himself backward against the seat and squealing with uncontrollable laughter. And then Jody was laughing, too, wiggling and bouncing and laughing. The sight of two small children laughing hysterically caused the woman across from me to giggle, and then I couldn’t help it, I was laughing too, and then the couple across the aisle from us started laughing, and then the conductor passing through to collect our ticket stubs joined in the laughter. The whole train car was shaking with glee as we pulled into a tunnel, the darkness forming a backdrop behind the window, the interior light illuminating the dust lines of the smiling face on the glass.

By the end of the journey, my ribs ached from all the hilarity. I composed myself, folding the newspaper and checking my purse to make sure it was snapped shut. I gave a friendly nod to the woman across from me to indicate that she and the boy could enter the aisle ahead of us. She reached for the boy’s hand and inadvertently pulled off his mitten. I looked quickly away, but a glance had been enough to see that the boy’s skin was badly scarred with swollen raw-pink crescents, most likely from some terrible burn. The boy was too happy to care about his injury right then, too carefree to be self-conscious. He was wobbling his head and sticking out his tongue at Jody as the woman tucked his hand back in the mitten. Jody laughed again, and the boy laughed. He was still laughing as the woman tugged him along the platform, and they disappeared into the crowd.

“If you don’t want to go to the zoo, where do you want to go? Jody? Hello, Jody, earth to Jody.”

We were strolling aimlessly on the sidewalk, surrounded by women carrying shopping bags, packs of teenagers all wearing embroidered bell-bottoms, couples holding hands. It was a holiday weekend, and the stores were advertising sales. A horse-drawn carriage shared the street with taxis. There was cigar smoke, exhaust, and the smell of manure in the air.

We stopped to buy a hot pretzel, and I convinced the vendor to sell it to us for a quarter instead of the thirty cents he tried to charge us. I wanted to show Jody how business transpired in the city, to teach her to be savvy and prepare her for the tough competition in life.

We had just crossed a side street when Jody stopped. I thought she was bending down to tie her sneaker. No, she was leaning toward a homeless man propped up against the wall of the building. The two stumps of his legs, amputated at the knees, extended in front of him. Draped in an army overcoat, he was holding a sign: HUNGRY. His upturned baseball cap on the sidewalk was already full of coins.

Back then I was working as an editorial assistant and during the week commuted into the city. I kept loose change in my purse just so I wouldn’t have to fumble with my wallet when I wanted to help out a panhandler. Usually I would make some paltry contribution and move on as quickly as possible to avoid contemplating humanity’s inequities. But that day with Jody, it didn’t occur to me to reach for change, because I was too appalled by what Jody was doing. Before I could stop her, Jody offered her half-eaten pretzel to the man, a gesture that I was sure would be registered as insulting and provoke, I predicted, a barrage of obscenities, or worse. I grabbed her arm and led her away.

I was as wrong about the man as I’d been about the boy on the train. The man held the half loop of the pretzel high, as if in victory. “Bless you, child!” he called to Jody. With his free hand, he blew Jody a kiss. Jody stretched out her arm as if holding a baseball mitt, then made a show of tucking the kiss she’d caught safely in the back pocket of her overalls.

It was Jody who decided she wanted to visit the Cloisters that day. I was surprised that a little girl would choose the Cloisters over the Children’s Zoo, but I didn’t try to talk her out of it. We took the M4 uptown, and we were inside the museum by noon, sitting at a table in a stone corridor, eating self-service cheese sandwiches and looking over a map of the galleries.

We started out in one of the gardens, where Jody spent a long time sniffing the different herbs growing below the quince trees and comparing their fragrances, trying to decide which she liked best. She admired the wild creatures that were carved into pink stone capitals. In the Glass Gallery, she wondered about the roundel depicting a king perched atop a patchwork horse. She thought it funny that the king was pointing at something ahead of him while his two servants were looking in the opposite direction.