At Penn Station’s track announcement board, there is a man in slippers shuffling back and forth in front of us. I can see another man near the exit being gently kicked out by two plainclothes officers. Behind us there’s shouting. I want to draw a temporary little home for us there on the floor, and make some rules. Not In My Little Circle, I want to say.
I have arrived at the station primed for impatience. We had guessed we should go to the old Penn, but there’s a new one, too, called Moynihan, so we aren’t sure where to go. Maybe departures to Albany go out of Moynihan, and can’t be accessed from here? We—my teenage daughter and I—are foot-sore, thirsty, tired, maybe getting sick. Our phones inform us we’ve logged more than 21,000 steps in nine hours. In the old Penn, everyone there for the Albany train would line up more or less politely outside the Hudson News, because the train would reliably arrive on tracks five and six, whose entrance is beside the store. But now, a woman tells me, “That train comes on random tracks.”
And so to staring at the board, waiting for the moment when the line that says Empire Service, Albany-Rensselaer will jump upward far enough that the blessed track number will appear at the far right, so we can move in the direction of sitting down. The only other person waiting there is a tall blond man with glasses.
“Help me get sumpin’ to eat?” The pacing man is stopped at me now. He’s tall, stocky, and young, with short dreads, a blue parka and pants held up with a scarf like the kind Grace Kelly would wear to hold down her hat. “No,” I mumble, and turn back to the board. He shuffles off to our right, approaches the blond guy with glasses. I hate saying “No” to the man, who seems very gentle, and disoriented, and just needing help. But it also feels impossible to say yes, because, I tell myself, there are dozens of other homeless people here asking for money, and how can you say yes to one and not everyone, and what good does it do someone to give someone drug money? I tell my daughter I wish we had meals to hand out. But I am also starting to feel quite vulnerable. I have in mind snippets from various stories I’ve read in recent years, of women getting punched in the face, spat on, pushed onto train tracks. It’s been a long time since I had to think defensively.
A hacking cough approaches my left shoulder, followed by a gravelly voice, right at my ear, asking, “Got any money for me?”
“No.”
Then a woman appears from nowhere in front of us, and she’s muttering something that has nothing to do with money, though I can’t make out the words.
“No,” I say.
She’s not deterred. “Mutter dutter?” She looks at my daughter, who figures out her question before I do.
“Yes, mother-daughter.”
She nods. She looks at me. “Nice, mutter dutter?”
“Yes, it’s very nice,” I say.
I can see her calculating whether or not she has a willing conversationalist in me. But I’m calculating the likelihood of her having an accomplice waiting to snatch my backpack while I’m distracted by a strange conversation.
“Yuh…” she starts, but I turn back to the board. She shuffles off and seems to melt into the crowd.
“BITCH!”
I jerk to my left, to a tall, bedraggled man in green and white pajama bottoms stumbling beside a woman talking on her phone. He turns and walks backward, the better to get in her face.
Where are the two plainclothes guys whose jobs is to protect passengers? One has disappeared, and the other is leaning against a railing, rubbing his eyes. But the woman on the phone actually seems to be successfully ignoring the man cursing at her. She holds the phone and appears to just be chatting. Maybe this is their regular routine each afternoon on her return commute. The man gives up and moves into Hudson’s. His next stop, I figure, will be us.
“Give us the track, just give us the track,” I beg the board. Empire Service clicks up one level, but still Boston and various New Jersey destinations are the only lucky ones for the moment.
A group bearing large suitcases approaches the board and stops there to our right, beside the blond man with glasses. The group seems to be made up of a young woman, her tired parents, and a little girl, her daughter or niece, using her blue suitcase to glide back and forth across the floor. The young woman, the guide of this group, is staring at the board, turning back to her parents, trying to interpret what information she needs to know that the board contains. But she can’t decipher it.
I’m distracted then by the reemergence of the belligerent man in pajamas, who seems to be heading in our direction. But no, he turns instead to join a line of walking passengers. A couple from that line makes the mistake of stopping, and he stops beside them. I can’t tell what he’s saying, or how they are reacting.
“Sucio! Mira, Gigi, il piso es sucio!”
I turn back, and the woman is trying to explain to the little girl that the floor is dirty, and she shouldn’t play on it. The blond man is now talking with someone on the woman’s phone. He has a British accent. He is explaining that he has tried to explain to the woman that she needs to wait until the track number appears for her train, and then go downstairs to board it, not upstairs. He hands the phone back to the woman, who then listens to the friend on the other end intently and asks a series of rapid fire questions in Spanish to clarify.
“Ah, ok, ok,” She says. “Gracias.” She hangs up. “Thank you,” she says to the blond man. He asks her a question I can’t hear. “Oh, no thank you,” she tells him.
He walks away, toward Hudson’s.
There’s something going on now to my left. The man-half of the couple accosted by the pajama man has broken off from her and him and is striding angrily away. His distraught partner is chasing after him, running desperately, trying to get ahold of his jacket. What could pajama man have said, I wonder, to make this man treat her so harshly? He tears her hand away, and shoves her back. This plays out again. And again. He finally strides away toward the exit, and she stares after him for a moment, before running after him. They struggle at the bottom of the escalator for a minute. As they disappear out of sight, she’s hanging onto the back of his jacket with one hand.
My God, I think, I’m watching a movie reel of human pain and conflict.
But coming back toward us from the direction of Hudson’s is the blond man, his arms full of water bottles and a child’s drawing book. He dispenses the waters among the family members, who open the bottles and drink. “Gigi!” he calls to the little girl, still gliding across the smooth floor back and forth on her suitcase. On top of the suitcase, he opens the book, gives her a crayon, and shows her how to use it. Is he speaking Spanish to her? I wonder. Yes, he must be, she seems to be listening carefully. It strikes me—I’d been so distracted and wary up to this moment—that this is likely a migrant family arriving here for the first time from far away. It strikes me that, unlike me, this man did not focus his energies on drawing a protective circle for himself in front of this board.
I look up at the board again. Empire Service, Albany-Rensselaer, Track … 5W. Our attentiveness has paid off. We hustle off and are the second ones to reach the door to track 5W. As we descend our escalator, I look backward up at the line of people behind me, hoping to find the kind British man, and the family he became part of for a few important minutes. They aren’t there.
