City, State parts 4 & 5

I forgot to post these last week. Here is a longer section.

The day after I’d taken my money out, I rode the train to work without a book or anything else for distraction. I wanted to see if the sort of people who take an underground route from the bottom of Brooklyn up and over the bridge and back down again through the main arteries leading to the Business District would have anything new written on their faces, if they would be more or less likely to allow for eye contact with other people. I should mention that I considered, for a long moment, whether my own job was one that, as the British say, could be made redundant. (I’ve thought this term, “redundancy,” is a perfectly dark description of the logic behind taking people’s jobs from them.) What I realized was that I had, unintentionally, over the past six years, built a client database so vast and convoluted that no one else understood or wanted to understand how I maintained it. I worked for an advertising firm of oppressively average size, parsing data from memos and sticking all of the names, fax numbers and meeting dates into otherwise vacant and expansive fields, which means that I had nothing to do with the buying and selling of advertising apart from making the bare minimum of information legible. We, the company I worked for as an incorporated whole, were expected to stay busy as the rest of the system fell apart—every day, somebody I work with pointed out at least once that people were still going to need to advertise for going-out-of-business sales, to promote their new and desperate branding efforts, etc. My vantage point, then, was one of somebody who knows with a fair amount of certainty that she is not going to lose her job, or, if she does, things will have to get worse to the point of financial apocalypse, which is to say that things in this country would have to look like things in Iceland.
I sat there—I had gotten a sideways seat by the door of the car—trying for the whole ride to guess what it was the other people were thinking. As far as I could tell almost nothing had changed. Everybody still guarded their privacies, their children if there were any. The spaces between people shrank and then expanded between stops. It was a cold day for the middle of autumn, drizzling slightly outside, and everybody seemed to be remembering that their coats and gloves gave them an extra set of inches to put between themselves and the world; people, if their fingers were covered, let their hands slip closer to the others holding onto the same pole. The train ran slowly, stopping altogether in the tunnel, and the conductor’s voice came covered in static over the frayed speaker wires. People glanced up, some pulling a headphone out of one ear, listening hard for indications, instructions, and at the same time knowing well that the conductor would say nothing in conclusion except, “We will be moving shortly.”
We, the collected lives on the train inbound, then stopped dead over the Manhattan Bridge for a full ten minutes, waiting for the traffic ahead to break up. I watched a few of the other people take their phones from pockets and purses, use their brief moments of cell reception between tunnels to let somebody else know they’d be late. My own phone rang—it was my mother. I bent low in my seat and answered quietly: “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi sweetie. Are you at work? Am I bothering you?”
“No, I’m on the train. We’re stuck.”
“Oh, do you know why?”
“No.”
“They don’t tell you?”
“No, Mom.”
“Well, what if something bad is happening? What if the train’s delayed because something is wrong?” She said this as if she knew for certain that there was a terrible and dramatic reason for my being stuck on the train, as if she was on her way to turn on the television and see the news happen before I knew about it.
“They get delayed all the time, Mom. It’s usually because somebody held the doors on a train in front of us,” I said.
“Well, I hope so.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, I called to ask about your bank. I heard it was bought out.”
“I saw that.”
“You should go there and make sure everything works out okay. I know those transfers get messy sometimes and people wind up losing their money or their paychecks don’t go through—you have direct deposit, right? You should have that turned off until everything’s sorted.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it will be fine.”
“Well, just be careful. You never know. Or, you could wind up with extra money, I suppose. On second thought, maybe don’t call them, and certainly not if you wind up with more!” She laughed.
“I guess that could happen.”
“I’m kidding, of course—you should tell them if you notice anything, because trust me, if they put extra money on by accident, they will take it back, and at the worst time, too, and I think you can get charged for it.”
“Right, Mom, I know.”
“I mean charged criminally.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Although I was thinking, maybe they’ll be extra careful with your account, after what happened. Maybe they have a system for that sort of thing separate.”
“I don’t know.” I had been on the phone too long; everybody else’s conversations were short and businesslike, vague denials of responsibility left on answering machines. I was well over the limit, breaking at least a few tacit rules, to the point I was getting actual looks from other people, glares that singled me out among a population that went to great lengths to avoid looking at each other.
“Anyway, if you haven’t checked up on things, you should. I don’t know how long it takes for these things to happen,” my mother said.
“I know, Mom, I will.” I wanted to keep her on the phone, to make everybody keep staring, and I knew, too, that she wouldn’t hang up soon.
“I was thinking, sweetie, what you asked me the other day, about Reagan? I still don’t know where in the world that came from from you, but I was thinking, you know, a lot of people now are blaming all of this on the policies of his administration and all of that. And I don’t know what you think, but I hope you know it’s not his fault, and it’s not my fault for voting for him, either.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really, sweetie. Things were different then. No one could have known—all of this housing stuff that’s happened. That wasn’t what we had in mind.”
“Of course not.”
The train started moving again and we were coming off the Bridge. My mother said, “I really don’t know much about this stuff, but I was around before a lot of this happened, of course, and if you—” I had lost my signal and looked at my phone for the couple of seconds between when her voice dropped out and the call shut off. I thought about the voicemail that would be waiting for me when I got off the train and my phone found its connection again—I knew my mother was already calling back, that she’d try twice and then leave a message, that I’d have no idea what she was trying to say. My mother was coming unraveled, I thought, at the possibility of something so large and outside of herself failing. She knew how to be anxious about her own life and the lives of people around her, but this was different; her fretful late night phone calls to anybody who would answer would not ever fix the economy. I wasn’t worried for her money—she would never see the end of it, living half-cheap to the point of allowing herself to spend one hundred dollars on dinner once every month or so, and then feeling guilty afterward. What worried me was the way I knew she would watch it, the news with the red and falling graph lines, the friends who’d lose their pensions and maybe more, and then she’d shake her head and beg everybody she knew not to blame her, when they had bigger problems to worry about. The thought of my mother behaving this way upset me; what, I wondered, made her think she was allowed to act as though any of it had to do with her? It was as simple as this: I didn’t want to hear about it.
I left the train at 57th Street, waited my turn in line to climb the stairs. There were still musicians lining the upper corridors, weeks after their counterparts had fled the Financial District, knowing better. This part of town still afforded itself its denial of the whole collapse; if it could keep on moving, everybody thought, if it could pretend there was nothing wrong, it was mathematically possible that the mess would blow right over. A few of us in the station knew better, it seemed; the editors and middle managers afraid for their shaky jobs walked with their eyes down and mouths straight, bent on getting to work on time. There were no fewer people on the train or in the streets than in the past weeks and months, I thought, maybe one or two faces I’d recognize from the rush if I saw them, but otherwise the same cold crowd in fall colors.


I checked my phone for a voice message from my mother. It wasn't there so I snapped my phone closed and then opened it again, and I did this for the whole block. I was expecting something five minutes long or more, something I would hear the first lines of and then hold the phone an inch from my ear until it all played out and I could delete it. Except that this time I would have listened, I would have been curious how many times she'd stammer a revision and say that wasn't what she'd meant. My mother's lack of commitment to any of her politics, her resilient refusal to give them up in the face of anything, are things I have lived with since I can remember. She believes, at the same time, that these politics are something she can exist outside of and still talk about, that ideals are there to be had and thought of but not practiced. Through the eighties I didn't mind this, and I was glad that my house wasn't a forum for vicious debates as were the houses of my friends, whose parents shook their heads at the evening news and whispered "Can you believe this?" when they thought the children couldn't hear. In the years when the country tried over and over to find a way not to destroy everything at once—which made up the majority of her life—my mother was content to pay more for gasoline and not mention it as she got back in the car. As long as she could keep all of the wars and poverty at some distance from her own life, she thought, nothing could go wrong, and nothing at all unexpected could happen. The trouble I imagined she was having with the new catastrophe was this: It was getting more and more conspicuous, ominous, it had gone from a television curiosity to a very real problem, and she had no way to understand it or make it into something she could ignore. I was sure at least one of her friends would have lost a pension and turned into a human interest story on the local news franchise, and that the sad affair of Mr Whomever who had to go and take a job stocking shelves at the grocery store would have been something that my mother could not find it in herself to discuss. These were the really bad tragedies, the kind that loomed over and threatened my mother in ways nothing else—the cancer everybody got someday, the illegitimate children born other people’s relatives, the condemned houses in which they found eighty-year old men among their lives’ worth of papers—ever had.
On the street corner in front of my building there was a girl and her mother, whom I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been thinking about the circumstances of my own normal and sheltered upbringing. They were arguing over whether the girl was going to get a bottle of over-sugared juice from the man in the newsstand. I listened to them while I smoked; the question was whether the girl was allowed to buy things she wasn’t supposed to have with her own allowance money. She looked maybe seven years old, the exact age, I think, when kids start to get their own spending money, when they realize, at the instant they hold the first five dollar bill, that they can use it to buy any number of things they aren’t supposed to have. My own mother had used money and the lack of an excess of it as an excuse to keep me off junk food for the early years of my life, and it wasn’t until I was well into my teens that I realized there had been plenty of money the whole time. The girl, who must have been an hour or more late for school, stood up on her toes and waved the bottle of juice and two dollars just above the counter. Her mother asked over and over again, “Is this what you want to spend your money on?” and the man in the newsstand was too busy selling gum and magazines to the tired line forming in the opposite direction to notice. I finished my cigarette and checked my phone again, staring until the girl and her mother slipped back into the crowd moving north. In the elevator, I thought about how many people in this city eat donuts for breakfast as a way of getting back at their parents, how the traders and CEOs my mother’s age make investments they shouldn’t as a way of getting back at the prudent and fearful generation before them.

My boss was a thick and greasy-haired man in his forties who believed that all the country needed was a new President, that his company would make it because of employees like me, that he and I should have gone on at least one date, just to see. When I asked him how his weekend had gone he sighed and talked about the bank merger, the one in which my bank had been absorbed by a larger institution whose debts were worth more. Our company had had an account with the old bank, and so my boss was worried that something in this transition would cost him money. He wanted somebody, me, to go in person to the branch on the next avenue and talk to somebody from the business department in the new bank, just to make sure that he, my boss, was not going to have to pay for the failures of anybody else. I kept my coat on while I checked a couple of things at my desk; somebody had left on my chair a newspaper open to the business section, which said that people who maintain databases for a living will probably not lose their jobs, at least not in the next few months. I wasn’t sure if this was a friendly gesture by one of my co-workers, trying to reassure me in case my knowledge of the financial system was keeping me up at night, or if it was somebody’s way of smugly pointing out that I was lucky and should feel sorry for everybody else. I took the paper outside with me and left it on the rim of the nearest garbage can, in case anybody wanted it.
I had thought, or perhaps just hoped, that I was going to be finished with lines at banks for a while. I still had my paychecks deposited into the same account I’d left open and empty, so I knew that eventually I’d have to go back for more money after the paper in my drawer ran out, and I’d have to write my monthly checks if I didn’t want to buy money orders or get one of my friends to do it for me. But I took my place in line again, anyway, looking at the new logos and colors, under which the same bank still stood with its structures—its bulletproof glass, its long counter leading back into the wall, its marble cubbyholes full of blank forms and dried pens—unmoved. Lorraine was gone. The first thing I asked when it was my turn at the business desk was whether somebody who had worked for the old bank in this location might have been moved to another branch in the city, might have managed to keep her job despite the merger or buyout or takeover. The woman, short and high-cheeked, said that most of the old bank’s employees were given jobs in offices someplace, answering telephones or sorting mail in a warehouse for that sort of thing, probably in New Jersey. I thought about calling my bank over and over again to see if I’d get Lorraine on the phone, about discovering her personal extension so that we could take up large swathes of each other’s days without anybody noticing that neither of us was being productive in the way we were paid for. At the least, I could tell myself Lorraine was still working someplace, maintaining the life with which she and her son were familiar, even if it meant a longer commute and no place nearby to buy a good lunch. I knew also that Lorraine would probably never have to find out that my confidence in the old bank had vanished entirely just before the takeover, that all the work we had done together in spring to keep my identity intact had become something I regretted, since all I learned was that such an identity was good for taking and nothing else.
I talked to the new woman for another ten minutes about the company I work for and the numbers that provide me and coworkers with jobs that we can call lucrative.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she said.
“It’s not me who’s worried,” I told her.
“That’s good.”
“I guess a lot of people must be worried right now, yeah?”
The woman looked at her computer screen and back at me, narrowed her eyes and leaned harder into the counter between us.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I try not to look too close at any of our business accounts. Confidentiality. It’s all going to be fine.”
“Sure,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
“You, too. And thank you for banking with us. We look forward to seeing you soon.” The wave she gave me was stiff and directionless, as if she wasn’t used to doing anything consequential with her hands. I wondered what sort of job she had had with the bank before coming here, if maybe this woman had traded jobs with somebody like Lorraine and wasn’t sure how to act when another person, a customer, could see her face and hear her talking at the same time.
I went back to the office with a set of stapled papers that matched the records our accountant kept. My boss left his hand on my shoulder for several moments longer than usual when he came up to my desk and thanked me for running his errand. I lied and said that the woman at the bank had recommended, strongly, that I or somebody else from the company make a visit to the new bank’s head office downtown, because theirs were the most up-to-date records during the transition, and if there were any mistakes to be caught, we’d find them in the records at the main office. My boss told me that I should go and do whatever needed to be done, that I was his most trustworthy employee, that he’d see me the next day, and that I should call his cell phone right away if anything looked strange.