It all seemed blue.
The train went past the station into the tunnel casting a neon hue on everything and everyone. Advertisement boards for health insurance, a bespectacled man fiddling with his cell phone, a teenage girl pushing her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt as she watched the train leave the platform. They all blurred into the darkness until all I could see was my own reflection in the window.
I glanced around inside the train. Some people had headphones on, two men in suits and ties were standing next to the door and chatting, holding identical black laptop briefcases. The woman in the seat opposite mine was doing soduku, that addictive number puzzle that appeared in the city paper. But most of us were just sitting there with vacant expressions. I hear it is a universal phenomenon – people commuting in train and buses look very grumpy. As stations came, people got off and got on. An endless ebb and flow of human beings, of names, of faces, of lives. But it didn’t seem as if we were on the train for a purpose – to get off and meet a lover, breastfeed a baby, play a concerto. We were there because we were just were. Suddenly life seemed so trivial, so ragged.
It had been a tiring day for me, and being in that train I felt the weight of all my worries come crashing down on me. “How did I get myself into this?” I wondered. Without my knowing, I had drifted into a place where I felt alone, scared and extremely uncomfortable. All that was familiar was fading away into the past, and the road ahead seemed unknowable and even unnavigable. All I could manage to do was drag myself from one day to another. I didn’t even want to think about it anymore, so I turned my face away.
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Something about her earrings caught my eye.
They were large crimson danglers with glittering stones in the middle. She was sitting diagonally across from me. She was middle aged, big built but strangely beautiful – almost regal. If it hadn’t been for the frizzy braided hair, I might have thought she were Indian. She had had a long day as well.
Adina. It was an Amharic name that her parents had bestowed on her lovingly when she was three months old. Her mother was one of the many of the King’s grand nieces, though the exact genealogical relationship was never quite clear. Her father was the owner of a prosperous bakery in the heart of Addis. The bakery was known to have the most exquisitely fluffy pastries. It was also the place for the hip to be seen sipping coffee.
Adina had led the life of privilege typically enjoyed by most upper class Ethiopians. As Africa’s only nation that had escaped colonization, they had never known the degradation of slavery or discrimination. Then came the socialist revolution of 1974 and in a bloody swoop, the ivory towers came crumbling down. Cars were smashed and the streets were ablaze. Adina, her parents and her two brothers had stayed huddled together inside the house for more than two weeks. Their retinue of servants and drivers had disappeared, their kitchen closet was nearly empty but they couldn’t dare to venture out of the house.
A few years later Adina got married to a family friend’s son. The mayhem in Addis was less visible, but wars were raging on the border and drought and famine were stealthily and steadily making their way from the northern parts of the country. Every day hundreds and thousands of people with sunken eyes and exposed rib cages were walking into their city with nothing but a small sack on their heads in the search for food. Adina’s husband Souk had already begun making plans to leave the country. In fact that had been the reason why Adina’s parents had been so keen on the marriage even though they knew that, in many ways, Souk was a lesser match for their beautiful and talented daughter. After almost two years, when Adina had already had the first baby, they managed to get their papers to go to Canada. They spent four years in Montreal trying desperately to make ends meet, and then managed to move to Washington DC with the help of some relatives who had already settled there. By this time Adina had had her second child, and was pregnant with her third. She and her husband landed in the city on a grey November day with a five year old daughter and a two year old son in tow. They had three suitcases and an address written on a crumpled piece of paper. That crumpled piece of paper was their lifeline to America.
After the first couple of months of staying with their relatives, they found a small run down apartment in Virginia where all their neighbors were Ethiopian. Souk took up a job as a taxi driver and Adina found work in a new Ethiopian restaurant in U Street. During the day, she helped with the cooking and at evening she morphed into a waitress. She would wake up at 5 in the morning, cook for her family, send her kids off to school, leave the baby at her neighbor’s house and then catch the 39 D bus for work. It had been almost a decade since she had been in America. And while some of the initial nervousness of being in a strange country had worn off, she didn’t quite feel safe, didn’t quite feel at home. She still reminisced about the time when she was a nine year old girl. She would sit in the car with her father, and they would drive up to the bakery shop. She would press her face against the glass case inside were an array of cream filled pies, coconut cakes and chocolate truffles were kept. Her father would smile indulgently and ask her, “So, which one do you want? It had been such a long time since anyone had bothered to ask her what she wanted. Husbands. Children. Bosses. Customer. Bill Collectors. Now, she was the one catering to everyone else’s needs. Catering to demands of circumstances.
Just recently, Adina had enrolled in a community college and was training to become a nursing assistant. She had had enough of working for 14 hours a day in that dingy restaurant. By the end of the day her hair smelt of spices, and she could feel the raw pungency of meat used for Kitfo clinging to her fingernails. Her childhood dream had been to become a doctor. Now at 40, she was making a desperate attempt to grasp at the fraying ends of her dream. Adina was in fact on her way back from her weekly evening class. She was browsing through the notes she took in class. She would have to wake up the next day at 4 in the morning and finish her assignment. And now she would have to go home and finish dinner, do the dishes, look at her youngest son’s homework, prepare a package to her sister-in-law in Ethiopia, listen to her husband complain … Even the thought of all she had to do exhausted her. She shut her notebook and looked away.
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She saw her silky, straight blonde her and felt envious.
Casey was standing by the door holding the pole. Long blond hair with highlights, a grey knee length pencil skirt paired with a beautiful black leather jacket. She seemed to have stepped straight out of a J Crew catalog. She was young, she was attractive, she had a beautiful house in suburban Maryland, and a husband who was a corporate lawyer and a great tennis player.
A little over a year ago, Casey had had her dream wedding. Everything was perfect. She and her husband Bryan had met at a friend’s barbeque and they hit it off instantly. Casey was an only child, and though her parents were divorced they both doted on her. She flitted between Portland and Seattle, and being a west coast girl, she decided to go to Berkeley for college. She loved the bohemian and eclectic lifestyle of the place, though she always knew that she would never end up becoming a human rights activist or a starving artist. She was a liberal, but the latte drinking kind. She majored in economics and then after a few years went on to get a Masters in health administration. She had found a job at a health insurance firm and moved to DC. For Casey, the city didn’t seem as exciting as Berkeley or even Portland, but it had its charms. She could go running by the river, and hang out at the uber cool art galleries and gay bars. She had a nice cushy job and was just beginning to make friends. And then Bryan happened and suddenly the city was all that and more. “I love the fact that DC has fall and winter unlike California and I love the fact that DC is not as cold and rainy as Seattle” is what she’d tell her friends. Bryan had grown up in Potomac Maryland and got his law degree from Georgetown. He had lived outside the Capital Beltway area for short stints in London, Houston and Pittsburgh, but DC was home. He had a self-depreciating sense of humor that had appealed to Casey. And it didn’t hurt that he was tall, blue eyed and not too bad looking. When so many of her friends were single and struggling to meet eligible men, Casey felt lucky to have him.
Casey and her Mom had planned the wedding meticulously. The church, the caterers, the decorators, the dress, the flowers, the cards, the gift registry, the rehearsal dinner, honeymoon, the photographer, the cake. She and her mother would spend hours on the phone going over every little detail. Bryan would kid, “I am not sure if you really need me at all, you seem to have everything taken care of.” Beneath the joke, Casey could sense that there was a little resentment. She knew she could be a little a bit of a control freak but she couldn’t help it. She had always been that way.
Casey had planned for everything that happened in her life. She had planned how she would spend her summers when her parents broke up, she had planned which courses she would take in college, which jobs she would apply for, what clothes she’d wear. She was always making checklists and to-do lists. Her lists had all kinds of things in them – big, small, and sometimes bizarre. 1. Take a mediation class; 2. Do interval cardio; 3. Read Blindness; 4. Complete report on Medicare; 6. Talk to Larua about Kaiser’s new plan; 7. Cancel credit card; 9. Call Jared, Rita and Carla; 10 Send check to SavethePlanet; 11. Go to a party a week (even) if you are not invited; 12. Find a boyfriend by thanksgiving. 13. Drink more water; 14. Buy the green jacket I saw at Bannana (but wait until it goes on sale). And now for the wedding, she had gone into planning overdrive. Casey had even managed to drag Bryan into buying a new four-bed roomed house near Bethesda. Soon after which she opened a folder on her laptop that was dedicated entirely to do-lists for home furnishings within which she had sub-folders such as bathroom tiles and kitchen appliances. Luckily for Casey, up until now, things were going according to plan. On a sunny October day, with the most beautiful white organza and silk dress and an obscenely big diamond ring, she had become Casey Richardson Davis.
Three weeks ago, Casey walked into the house and saw Bryan sitting on the living room couch with his head in his hands. “Is everything OK?” she asked gently. Bryan looked up – his eyes were red, his face wet. He had been crying. In the three years she had known him, she had never seen him like that. “Are you parents fine?” she inquired. Her first instinct was that something had happened to Bryan’s mother who he adored. “No, everyone is OK,” he replied. “It’s me.” Bryan had seen the results of an Elisa test earlier in the day. He had tested HIV positive. It turned out that his blue eyes and witty humor had turned on many women. He had been cheating on Casey almost ever since they got engaged, though he had concealed it well through his business trips and his nice guy preppy mannerisms.
Earlier that day Casey had gone to the doctor herself. She wanted to make sure that she didn’t have the virus. Her results were fine. Due to a vaginal infection, meticulous Casey had insisted that Bryan use protection. She was on her way back from the doctor’s office. As she stood there in the train, she wondered what she would do next. She had no checklists for this. She was at a complete loss. On the one hand she wanted to walk out and never see Bryan again. But on the other hand, she still cared about him and she didn’t want to abandon him now that he had this disease. He had cried, pleaded guilty and begged forgiveness. “I always loved you; it was just a sex thing. It was stupid and wrong I know. You have every right to hate me but please don’t leave me” he said. Casey didn’t know what to do – all she knew that it hurt like hell. She just wanted to get away from it all. She tucked a strand of her beautiful blonde hair behind her ear and turned around.
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He stood at the cross-section of our gazes.
The train which was packed twenty minutes ago was now almost empty. Lost in our own worlds, we hadn’t noticed who got off and who had got on. He was gorgeous. Unbelievably hot. Warm brown skin and the cutest butt. He wasn’t muscular in an obvious way but you could tell that he had the most perfect six pack abs underneath that faded blue shirt. We all gaped at him. For a split second, we were completely distracted from our troubled lives. The blonde haired woman and I exchaged glances. The lady with the big red danglers grinned sheepishly as well. We each knew what the other was thinking.
I turned my face and saw my relection in the window again. This time I was smiling.
