Track 33
by Jean M. Kane

Always she reappeared, just when Zilla had almost forgotten about her.  She was almost a feature of the station. 

Zilla noticed only the time. Once again, she’d gotten to the Grand Central before her track number had even been posted. The long arm of the clock on her kitchen wall, a plate rimmed in red, shoved Zilla out more violently early every year.  

She tucked herself in beside the swoop of the staircase railing opposite the big board for the Hudson Line. Underneath it the old ticket windows were shuttered. Her eyes slid over the heads bobbing by. Lately they’d seemed less various, peeled of their surface variety. The blank plump of a big toe in different shades. 

“The faces of New York,” she proclaimed when she’d arrived in the US for grad school decades before. She liked to repeat it every so often. 

“Footnotes of catastrophe,” Rudy would have added if he’d been there with her. 

Theirs was a more ordinary disaster, maybe even just misfortune. They had been occasional pals at Columbia, but he went to California for some short-term teaching job. Finally he’d gotten sick of waiting for a secure teaching job and came back to New York to work with a foundation. They were both surprised to become lovers. Something had shifted in each of them in the meantime: he’d dropped his slight arrogance to show sweet boyishness tendencies. She had finally ended a back-and-forth relationship. When he put his hand on her back or touched her arm, her desire startled her; his open affection won her. Big brown eyes that drew her in more deeply. He once met her train at Grand Central with a bouquet and his cocker spaniel. He stood at the end of the platform in a loose-belted winter coat, the swarm parting around him. 

Finally track 33 flashed up on the departure screen. Zilla grabbed the handle of her small roller bag and wheeled around the staircase steps. Head down—she knew exactly where the doorway was without looking up—she saw a cheap-jeweled slipper poke into the marble square beside her. Zilla looked up. But it wasn’t attached to the right person.

Zilla realized that she hadn’t seen the L-shaped woman for some weeks. Kyphosis from calcium loss pushed the woman down so severely that her face turned to the floor. Seeing her circling the stairs, slowly dragging a grocery cart, Zilla had wondered what could be done. The  L wore an old housedress, sometimes with a thick, light-blue cardigan, and pulled a grocery basket stuffed with plastic bags, paperbacks, and stuffed animals behind her. She’d probably never seen the station’s restored ceiling, aqua blue strung with gold zodiac figures. She’d have to swivel her head up beyond reach. But she pursued her own slow orbit, around the block under the Vanderbilt entrance stairs again and again, or down a platform past where Zilla could see her any longer. 

The woman never asked for help, never attended to the rush around her. Anyway, once, not that long ago, Zilla was sure she’d seen the L-shaped woman getting off the train, violently bent as always but dressed in a plaid pantsuit. Perhaps Zilla had it all wrong; perhaps the L-shaped woman was making her own way, and Zilla was the one who fixed her into a dreaded object. 

How long had it been? 

“How many times do you think you’re on the same train with the same person?” she’d asked Rudy. “Or subway. Maybe that’s harder.”

“Ever?” Rudy asked. She remembered the conversation because it was late summer, a few weeks after the semester began, and they’d had the usual argument. Gold, oval leaves began to heap in the gutters, floating abandoned in black puddles. 

“You’d have to make an algorithm,” he said. “I bet more than once. Especially if people stuck to the same routine obsessively. Like you.” But he didn’t smile or look at her when he said it. The argument was about the demands of her job. Even though he knew its demands when they got together—he’d taught university himself and he knew—he’d become increasingly irritated with it. “I’m tired of looking at your back, even when you’re here,” he grumbled. He thought she should commute daily. She knew she couldn’t, not and get tenure. She’d have to leave before he got up and return to see him for a couple of hours before bed.

That November Rudy’s mother died. He went back to London. There he settled into a depressed inertia, as if staying would make her reappear or dissolve his resentment toward Zilla, who was somehow, in the end, at fault. Hadn’t she kept him here? Wasn’t her job to blame?

“Move on,” her old friend Petra had said to her. Rudy had been gone for three years. She went to see him several times, but he was deflated and inert. Her trips became less frequent. He wanted to stay with her; he said she was his only constant. He didn’t want to split. But he seemed adrift in an era she didn’t belong to. 

“That’s very American of you,” Zilla replied. “I have plenty of friends and plenty of work and the city. He still wants the marriage. I—”

“But he’s stuck, Zilla. It’s been three years. Whatever you do legally, you should get out there.”

“I detest that expression too,” Zilla said. “Are you reading a lot of self-help out there in Arizona? And anyway, who’d he have to blame if not me?”

Petra laughed. 

When the board lit up with all its destinations, the doors of the carriages would open. Zilla could install herself in a rear car and finish preparing for her Monday European history class. 

But the board wasn’t lighting up on schedule. No one seemed to be taking care of things on the platform either, no conductor pacing or signal appearing. Impatient, Zilla looked over at the plaque next to the blank screen. She’d seen it hundreds of times but never read it—a thick slice of gold with a rounded top, a box with its own small cupola. The Civil Engineering Society of New York had mounted it in honor of William J. Wilgus. He’d supervised the construction of the terminal. Its levels and ramps, the intricacy of its shepherding of people, was a marvel, it said: service never ceased during its construction. 

Zilla looked away at the high grilled windows, where a shape—a bird? —beat a shadow back and forth, trapped or searching. Where, where. Maybe they’d all shuffled off, the L-shaped woman, Rudy, never ceasing but never manifesting. Maybe she had misunderstood. Keep moving. Stop waiting. That’s what this place was always for. Zilla arrived too early but never early enough to catch them as they hurried away off, constantly rotating, never broken by the clock hands when they held fast at the horizontal.

THE END

Jean M. Kane’s creative work has appeared in numerous US publications, including Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction online, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Courtship of Winds, Indiana Review, 3:AM, Hotel Amerika, Euphony Journal, Fogged Clarity, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The MacGuffin, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Nonconformist Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Pine Hills Review, Posit Journal, Rue Scribe, Slab, Word For/Word, Doubly Mad, Isele, and the Ginosko Review. Her book of poems, Make Me, was published by Otis Nebula in 2014. She received the Otis Nebula First Book Award, and was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review. She is a professor of English and women, feminist, and queer studies at Vassar College. Find her online here.

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