You catch glimpses of her between the shifting, swaying commuters: a pilled fleece jacket draped over a candy cane spine. White skin, white hair. Even her clothes are faded with age. You think at first that you recognize her – something in her expression, the set of her mouth, the pattern of lines on her face – but she’s just an old woman riding the subway, as familiar as an archetype. She could be anybody’s grandmother, anybody’s widow. She could be anyone.
She gently stretches out her fingers, and you wonder if they ache. You wonder if she recognizes her own hands: the tissue-paper skin, roped with veins and dotted with liver spots, the arthritic knuckles that make it impossible to wear rings. The band she used to wear on her left ring finger probably sits in an antique saucer on her nightstand, along with a handful of small shells from a long-ago vacation. Her nostrils flare, as if she can still smell the seawater and sand.
Her apartment will be cold and dim when she gets home this afternoon. You imagine her walking through the empty, echoing rooms. Ghosts linger in the corners, but they never answer when she talks to them. Her voice, if you could hear it, would be as soft and cracked as old leather, but it doesn’t matter, since only ghosts are listening. Her phone, the same black rotary that sat on the counter when they moved here, is coated with dust. Her life has shrunk and contracted like her spine, curled into itself. You wonder if she will shrink down to nothing, and if she will mind.
As the train leans around a corner the old woman shifts slightly and uses her legs to secure the shopping bag at her feet. You can’t see inside the bag, but you are certain that it holds dozens of cans of cat food. The cats – she has eight, you’ve decided – will swarm her when she returns home, curling themselves around her shoes so that she must shuffle across the floor, wearing cats instead of slippers. Decades-old newspapers and circulars are stacked on the floor like towers; her apartment is a maze of newspapers and cats. She’ll open half a dozen cans for dinner, some cat food, some tuna. She and the cats share everything.
You wonder what the old woman sees when she looks at you. You feel the obviousness of your own youth, how you wear it like a comfortable jacket, how you flaunt it without meaning to. You wish you could buy the old woman a cup of tea and listen as she generously shares the wisdom of her age: Grab on to love when you find it, she would say. Never let anyone else determine your self worth. Invest in a good cast iron pan and it will last you a lifetime. Don’t rely on the man to take care of birth control. It’s surprisingly easy to change your car’s light bulbs, so never pay a mechanic to do it. If you get stung by a jellyfish, don’t let anyone pee on it; that’s a myth. The old woman leans back in her seat, her eyebrows knitted in concentration. She mentally catalogues the herbs in her cupboard, the vials of snake venom and frog blood, the insect eyes and chicken feet. She invents a recipe for sweets that will lure the children to her doorstep, as plump and helpless as overturned turtles.
The train jerks, startling you back to your senses. You look at the old woman, who is just an old woman riding the subway. She sways gently with the movement of the train, her eyes heavy-lidded, her face as blank as a drawn curtain.
The train shudders to a stop inside a tunnel. The humid air envelops you like a warm washcloth. The lights in the car blink on and off, and the people standing in the aisle shift so that you have to crane your head to see the old woman. She’s thinking, “If we don’t start up again soon I’m going to be late for my paintball game.”
She thinks, “I have to remember to get my circular saw back from the neighbors so that I can install that trap door.”
She thinks, “I wish the juice bar on the corner served kombucha; I am so over kale smoothies.”
Briefly, her eyes meet yours from across the aisle, and she thinks, “I am not your goddess or your crone. I am not you fifty years from now. You don’t know my name, and I will never tell it to you.”
Jennifer Hudak lives in Upstate New York, where she writes and teaches yoga. Her work has appeared in RunnersWorld.com, TueNight, and Literary Mama, and she is currently working on her first novel. She tweets as @writerunyoga.