Subway Garlands

A blind woman, white-but-yellowing shoulder length frizzy hair, tapping white cane and glaringly white summer jacket got on the subway last night as I was headed home. She sat down to the right of me. I was leaning on the metal rods that separate the seats from the standing areas. Like a corral. Though without gates. Late at night, the subway always seems to be bumpier, faster, physically less comfortable and safe. I didn't really mind the chill metal digging in to the softish flesh of my upper right arm as I stood, fiddling with my phone, annoyed that I had nothing to read, thinking about the conversation I'd just had with a friend in a humid bar. Knew it would bruise, but didn't care - at least the cold of the metal separating me from the blind woman reminded my skin that it was going home to an air-conditioned, quiet, place.

It took a little while for me to notice what she was doing with her hands. Peripherally, I'd seen her twisting and turning pieces of white paper. Hadn't thought much of it. Thought maybe it was like fiddling with half-dampened tissue paper when you're nervous. Or like peeling the labels off beer bottles, just without fratboyish friends making goofy jokes about sexual frustration. Or like how I, when I find receipts in my bag, fold them into a concertina pattern and slowly rip them into the sort of strips you use for traditional farmers' carpets in Sweden. My mother swears she will never, ever cut strips like that again from any used clothing - she had to help out when she was a child, for the carpets the women in my family would weave to sell in the village. She had a tiny pair of scissors especially for cutting these strips, even though she was too young to really be allowed to handle sharp things. The scissors were shaped like a flying crane, the beak its blades. Really made for cutting fingernails, but fit a little girl's fingers fine. Years and years later, to amuse me, my grandmother taught me how to make carpets and the long strips of cut up material you need for them - a practical anchoring activity for an overly dreamy child. My mother cracked a plan to sell old Swedish carpets to unsuspecting Americans, who think them quaint and rustic. Now her daughter unconsciously, automatically, shreds receipts in the patterns she hates I was ever taught.

But the blind woman next to me didn't seem to be shredding paper unconsciously. Still standing, I tried to look down to see what she was doing. She seemed to sense this; looked up. Her cane, hanging on the bottom of the bars that were still eating in to my right arm, had multi-coloured hairbands around the top. I tried to see if there was a pattern there. To see if i could work out how blind she was - the hairbands were all the same kind, would, I thought, have felt the same, so if there was a pattern based on colour, maybe she wasn't that blind? I couldn't tell if there was a pattern. Despite the fact that what I joke about as MY "blindness" became possible because I could detect patterns in the eye-charts at school, so I was never busted for being shortsighted.

Maybe she really was blind. Somehow she'd sense me looking. Even though I was hardly looking at all - I didn't move. Would just drop the sight from my right eye, these days covered by the contact lenses that repulsed me for years, into her lap. She'd look up. Not at me, directly, but straightening her back, rocking her head back slightly, sensing something not quite right: me, looking at her. I'd look back to my phone, half-heartedly bouncing a virtual ball against equally fake "bricks".

When she'd relax her head, I'd look again.

She'd notice.

I wondered how'd you'd show that interaction on film. If you could capture the two of us interacting with each other through the lens of a third perspective. And how you'd write stage directions for it. "First you look and then she looks and then you look but neither of you really look". Doesn't quite cut it.

But then she took her left hand and fished some more white paper out of her white pocket. (Can she see contrast? If so, my black-and-white face was pretty unsuited for spying on her. I should have called in a darkskinned blonde). She'd unwind what she'd made already, and add the new paper to what looked to be a garland. Then she'd change it - make the baubles larger. Take a piece of paper away. Put it back in her left coat pocket. Her garland looked a bit like hops: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Mz2AU9jVPTr0eoTJ5LUtBvz4guEd-Ii8VAdb5Q8m3MbNOhpuT3j3UJ4ZBLHuywciHtL93K2NP_PvZAEy4qwxk_4UkvTKRuQcwuz78jWkKJrFC9NCYX8UvQZKjrGam3V1tvbZlZsz6jca/s400/humle.jpg


The train rolled in to her station, a few stops before mine. She slipped her made and remade garland into her pocket. Stood up. "Jean?" a large, dreadlocked black man sitting a-ways away asked. "Yes," she replied across the din, the screeching midnight subway brakes, "I thought I heard your voice." And got off.