Work Text:
On the subway every morning she sees the same series of advertisements across the aisle. Despite growing up in West London, she never got used to the tube and staring blankly at the space eighteen inches in front of her face in order to avoid looking at anyone. It’s worse in New York – either she doesn’t exist or she exists too much. Two days before she had looked up after putting her gloves away directly into the eyes of the man across the car. He had been wearing a stained red sweatshirt that was probably inappropriate for the snow and ice above ground. Jess had looked away as soon as their eyes had met, but she’d known the damage was done. She’d acknowledged him and rewarded his fixation with something that could be perceived as interest. He stared at her all the way under the river while she studiously examined the ground, tracing the way her shoes intersected the textured flooring. She sprang up at her stop and tried to notice, without actually looking, if he got up to follow her, but the only person who got off at the platform was an anonymous man in a suit who she hadn’t noticed in the car. As she’d gone up the stairs out of the station to the bustling street she’d felt her heart rate slow down and couldn’t remember when it had sped up.
Most mornings there is no man on her commute from her tidy Brooklyn neighborhood to the tightly-packed anxious mass that is central Manhattan. She looks at the adverts above peoples’ heads, the bright colors and block letters nauseatingly familiar, but she hasn’t memorized them yet. There is a loud, blue panel offering legal aid for service workers complete with a bloated stick figure with a cast on its leg. Sandwiched between that and T Mobile’s extended 4G coverage there is a sickly, badly printed picture of Battery Park below a sentence from the New York City Parks Department in comic sans. She thinks idly about the park at home, the way it had looked in the mornings when she had gone out for runs before the boys had shown up. Her chest clenches painfully, but before she can stop it the guilt floods out of its carefully created mental confines. Her nephew is almost twelve and she hasn’t seem him since before he started school. The monthly box of things her parents send from home, usually food and all the other surefire ways to make her homesick, is late and she can’t tell if she’s relieved or devastated. Tony has stopped talking about home in his emails unless it’s about football and even then it’s brief and stilted text. She stares at the Pepto-Bismol pink of the T Mobile ad.
She feels her phone buzz against her wallet and keys in her purse and hears the accompanying, hesitant beep. The woman she went home with over the weekend keeps texting asking to get drinks. She had wanted to talk about sex over their bananas and granola bars the next morning. Jess had immediately made an excuse and gone to the pool. It’s probably her upbringing, but she’s always been a horrid prude about sex. It still fills her with nervous embarrassment and shame that’s partially residual parental judgment and partially the things she and Jules did in college that had mortified her even as she did them but she hadn’t known how to stop. She closes her eyes tightly to push away the way Jules’ hair had fallen across her shoulders and her fingers had splayed over Jess’s stomach. The train stops at DeKalb Avenue and she opens her eyes to watch the people get on.
At least her parents are proud of her job, she reminds herself. At least there’s that. They like that she makes more money than anyone else they know and she’s on television sometimes, even if she only talks about football, and that, for a brief period, there had been a woman paid to follow her around and fix her makeup. The woman’s name had been Charley and she’d had great cleavage. She’d also had a tendency to wear low-cut tops and Jess would stare down them while Charley stood next to her and dabbed foundation over her cheekbones. The action combined with the warm scent of Charley’s perfume always made Jess flush, prompting Charley to compliment her skin on a biweekly basis. Then the world cup had moved on and Charley had been shuffled back to the baseball guys.
The girl from the weekend had been a Charley type – dark haired and curvy – a body toned by yoga instead of the lean, hard, boyish bodies she’d known through her twenties. She isn’t sure what’s prompted the shift in interest. It could have been the discomfort about her own body softening and her switch from swimming to running because her knees hurt in the mornings or perhaps she had gotten fed up with only being able to talk about football with her dates. Her therapist would call it disassociation or denial or something equally belittling. She had been very insistent that Jess needed to reconnect with the defining points of her past, but Jess hadn’t seen why that was necessary since most of it was a subscribed google update on her phone.
There are whispers that Jules will retire soon. She’s still playing for a team in Germany, but Jess can tell, even from the brief clips that come across her desk, that she’s tired. Jess hopes she’ll bow out and give it up and go coach somewhere like they always planned to, but she knows better. One of their old teammates from school was in her office the week before doing a guest spot for a big game. It’s always a demoralizing appearance – they’re brought in by name recognition and never asked for any real analysis, just drama and old war stories. Jess always feels bad for them and winces to think about the way Jules would eat it up, talking fast and loud with her hesitant, gawky smile. The old teammate took Jess out for a drink after work and they poked at the olives in their martinis while comparing notes on the various college squads, not talking about Santa Clara and not talking about Jules. When they say good night, they promise to keep in touch. Jess knows they won’t.
She stares back at the Parks Department ad and thinks how nice it had been to just be able to play the game and be part of something far away and magical she hadn’t known how to touch yet. The subway sways to a stop at Columbus Circle and she gets up, lifting her bag off her lap and on to her shoulder, and steps out of the car.