Trains

One lady looks vaguely familiar but as I look at her again and my suspicions are confirmed-she’s no one who I know. Meanwhile, a bundled up little boy in front of me fidgets and stares out the window, never speaking to the large, imposing man who sits beside him. Only the high voices of four or five other children and their parents sitting behind us, breaking the silence with words and laughter which float up to my ears almost constantly. Outside, the note the neighborhood as it flashes by, at the moment browner and drier than was promised by the weather channel. A blizzard so large my own mother tried to talk me out of going to work was supposed to hit this morning, had been predicted to start soon, but I had been assured, repeatedly, that the trains, while they would slow, would never, ever stop.
“Broadway. Access Vernon Hospital, Richardson Transport…” An anonymous and poorly broadcasted conductor’s voice shorts out as a blond haired, ruby faced, scarlet capped, and sunglass-wearing man grabs his pitch-black cane and hobbles on up to the doorway. I watch him for a minute, as he is forced to wait for a long moment before the train stops, the doors open and he steps out, walking as well as he can manage. The children’s voices, muted by the announcement for only a few seconds, continue on as before, excited by what I never figure out.
“City Hall Roxbury, access Williams University…” Finally, I’m at my stop and after grabbing my over sized and over packed bag I head right on up stairs to the blistering freezing pre blizzard weather. Though there’s minimal snow on the ground, the blizzard might still come it might not be as bad as we had been told, I find myself thinking. Still, I realize the second the wind picks up, it’s frickin’ cold outside and I hurry though the scantly populated streets, thankfully I can move quickly and that I have only a few blocks to go to get to some much appreciated warmth.
It only takes a few minutes before customers, all in a rush to buy their books before the storm, start to literally bang on the door to be let in. The store is soon a mass of semi organized confusion as people try to get in, out and on with life before the storm hits and poor Abegail, just twenty two years yesterday, has to replenish my money twice barely two hours into the day, all the while helping customers, cashiers and handling calls from the boss. Meanwhile, Zoraida, Eva and I have our hands full cashiering, handling questions and answering the phone calls that the text department has decided to ignore. It’s not always easy, and certainly not fun, but the busy morning shoots by.
...
The afternoon is slower as the snow has finally decided to come and come hard. By one o’clock, we learn of Roxbury County College’s closing and know that, because our store is next door to them, that we are not going to be long in following. Sure enough, come one thirty we're closed per boss’s orders, even though we were supposed to be open another two hours. Still, we’re all reasonable people and so no one, not worker nor customer, complains as we start to shut down for the weekend.
Counting out the register out at the end of my shift has never been easy for me at any of the retail jobs I that I’ve worked at, as math has never been my subject and organization never exactly my strong suit, and of course, both are paramount to having a perfect register quickly calculated out and balanced at the end of a long night. At night, I’m always caught between doing the count out anally correctly and slowly, or rapidly and efficiently to get out of a city that turns deadly at night. Slowly wins out this time, as it almost always does, but when my first count leaves me short a few dollars, I grab a calculator and start again. The big bills are counted and sectioned off into piles first- one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and so on and on until I’ve counted every last nickel and penny. I’m still a few dollars short, but it’s only a few dollars- I’ll have to accept that if I want to leave. I finish arranging all the paperwork-all the credit card receipts, gift certificates, checks, etc- annoyed with myself a small sliver of that ever-elusive perfection would have been mine if I’d paid attention to the work of my own hands. It’s not that hard to count and I had been ‘perfect’ on the register before this, so why not now, when it was literally in my grasp? And why can’t I let the thought of perfection ever go and why should I?
Abegail tells me she’s fine with my count, (after double checking it as is her managerial duty), and Zoraida and I help her as much as we can with the closing as the others have long since departed-can’t blame them really. I would have left a long time ago if Abegail hadn’t promised me a ride to the train station. The afternoon rapidly passes as the three of us spend some time looking for a check that had been missing for a few days. We never find it of course, but, unconcerned Abegail bustles about doing her managerial closing duties while Zoraida and I go get the last of the morning’s coffee before cleaning the pots. We sit and chat, and although Zoraida’s English is not perfect as her native Spanish, her lilting, musical accent delights me and makes me think of the warmth that must have been in her native country. Eventually Abegail is ready to go and, with Zoraida in the passenger seat, the three of us cautiously crawl the short distance to the train, momentarily encapsulated in the warmth of Abegail’s old junker of a car.
With a wave of my hand and few polite exchanges, I leave the car and start on my journey homeward. By some colossal stroke of luck caused by the blizzard, the train is there, waiting for patrons, (even after I spend I few heart pounding moments fishing around in my coat pockets for money for a ticket), and it is full of warm, chattering life. Not everyone here is a stranger to all present, and I can hear conversations about how the storm has forced many offices to close. I quickly find an empty seat and look about me, all the while basking in the warmth that so many people can bring before the door shuts and brings us one step closer on the path of the journey home. I watch as some semi frozen, red-cheeked runny nosed people trickle in and out as the train takes us from one place to another, and before I know it, I’m at my stop.
Trekking through the snow, I hear the laughter of teenage girls start and fade as I pass by a house on the corner. Oddly enough, for some reason I think they might be headed to the trains, but in the end I pay them little mind as I stomp on by. I’m a car-less girl right now and so I choose to walk in the streets because none of the sidewalks have been shoveled or cleared yet, but I’m lucky that I only have to pause only twice to let the snowplows pass. All the while I look around as well as I can, through the falling snow and edges of my hat and scarf, marveling in the beauty that is virgin snow yet uncoupled with the feelings of cabin fever. It’s only until I’m a block from my house that I permit my now frozen self to think of the glorious comforts that only a warm, quiet home, hot cup of tea, good book and favorite blanket can give, and smiling I enter my home and leave the world where it will be, if only for the night.