It was at the coffee shop on Astor Place that I first saw them. They seemed both odd and oddly inconspicuous, if only because New York teaches you to ignore people you might otherwise recognize as characters. I came in after morning classes, and there they were, sitting at a large table in the corner reserved for handicapped customers, a large blue and white wheelchair logo affixed to the table’s side.
At first I didn’t pay much attention. With my econ exam on my mind, the fear of having done poorly on it, I shook my head and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to dwell on the things I couldn’t change, I tried to dismiss my anxieties, focus on the mundane, and so I looked back up to consider what drink I was going to get.
My mind wandered, my eyes shifted focus back to the corner of the café.
There were two of them, old women dressed all in black. Their hair was tied neatly under headscarves, only the occasional wisps of grey slipping out from underneath. Their bodies were clad in long dresses with thick fabric that stretched down their arms, then disappeared behind the table before reemerging by their feet, bunching together and sweeping up the dust on the floor. By their side sat two black suitcases, pressed up against the wall, all packed and ready to accompany them on a trip they were, perhaps, ready to embark on. One of them leaned back in her chair, holding an empty coffee cup and mumbling something to her companion. The companion, her face powdered a mime-like white, held up a small vanity mirror as she traced her lips with red lipstick.
At the counter I gave my order. I kept thinking about my test. When I got my coffee, I stood around and absentmindedly kept adding sugar until my drink was much sweeter than I had wanted.
On my way out, I glanced at them once more. The mumbling one kept moving her lips but focused her gaze right on me. The one with the powdered face, she lowered her vanity and smiled a smile that was all red lips and no teeth. It stretched up grotesquely, meeting the wrinkles that descended from her eyes.
I turned away as I opened the door. I landed on the pavement outside the café, and walked off to my next class.
---
The black clothing, the suitcases, the moving lips of the one and the clownish smile of the other, they were all I thought about for the rest of the day. That night I dreamt that I was in an airport and I spotted the two of them checking in their bags for my flight. Later I saw them at my gate, and even though they had seemingly checked their bags, they still had them nearby. Moments later I was sitting on the plane, buckled into my seat. They approached, looking for their seats, dragging the suitcases through the narrow aisle. I wanted to tell them that they weren’t allowed to bring luggage like that onto the plane, that they should have checked everything before the flight. I don’t like the idea that they will be on the plane with me. I don’t trust them. But I know that it’s too late, and I feel that something will go horribly wrong.
The next day I attribute the dream about the airport, the plane, the old women on my flight, to an over-active imagination and lingering anxiety about my test. I don’t like flying as it is, so it makes sense that my mind would subconsciously revert to it when I’m nervous about getting a bad grade.
I get my test back and discover that, for the first time in my life, I have failed at something. I’m, perhaps, not as surprised as I should be. From there, things enter a downward spiral. As much as I might try over the next few months, I can’t seem to get a handle on my economics class. I never do better than a C. My father, an economics professor at a college in Westchester, is incredibly displeased. This is not what he had in mind for his son, this is not the sort of student I was supposed to be. I request some time with my school advisor and we have a serious discussion about my choice of majors, my plans for the future. He asks me to seriously consider whether economics is really the path I should be pursuing.
I decide to become an English major. My father agrees to look the other way. I come back to the coffee shop on Astor Place several more times that semester, but I never see the women again.
---
I might have forgotten about them altogether except that, a few months later, as my train pulled into the A/C/E station at Columbus Circle, I saw them again, sitting on the wooden bench on the platform, their suitcases nearby. They both noticed me, but there were no smiles or looks of recognition, just quick glances that did not interrupt the mumbling of the one, the lipstick application of the other. I hurried past and out of the station.
Later that day, quite unexpectedly, my girlfriend broke up with me. She said we were just different people going in different directions in our lives. I wondered where this analysis had come from, since it was the first time I’d heard her say anything like this. She sighed and looked away.
“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be,” she mumbled, as if she were reading a script.
Over the next few years I saw the old women all over the City, and each sighting portended something going wrong. I came to expect their appearance in my life, often at the most inopportune moments, just when things seemed to be working out for me.
In June 2001, I passed them on a park bench in Prospect Park. Later that day I found out that a good friend of mine who I was supposed to hang out with later that night had been arrested for DUI the evening before.
In February 2002, I saw them at a bus stop near Madison Square Garden as I raced by in a taxi on my way to doctor’s appointment. After limping for the previous week, the diagnosis revealed that I needed to have knee surgery thanks to a misguided attempt at trying to slide down a handrail.
Not even two months went by before I saw them again, sometime in April. They sat on lawn chairs alongside the Farmers’ Market at Union Square. That same day I came back to news of some unauthorized charges on my credit card incurred by someone in China with a preference for Apple and Louis Vuitton.
I don’t know if I’d call it bad luck or a curse or something of an entirely circumstantial nature. But I do know that the women, over time, foretold of another break-up, a ceiling collapse in my bathroom while I was at work, the loss of my first job, the loss of my second job, a vacation being canceled thanks to an approaching hurricane, and a speeding ticket.
---
Two years had gone by since I’d last seen them and things were going pretty well, well enough that when people asked me I would say, “I can’t complain.” My writing career was advancing. My relationship with my parents, especially my father, was the best it had ever been. I was living in a nice little apartment in a part of Astoria that I loved. And after a long absence from the dating scene, I was seeing a great girl I was excited about. Things were finally falling into place and I began to feel relieved at the thought that I was leaving the angst of my quarter-life crises behind me.
It was on Christmas Day that I found myself on the subway, making my way up to Grand Central to catch a train to Connecticut where I was to have Christmas brunch with my girlfriend and her family. I don’t celebrate Christmas and I had only ever been to a Christmas meal once, so I was looking forward to seeing the decorated tree and all the people wearing cheesy holiday sweaters, the smell of eggnog and cinnamon and whatever other scents one could expect to catch in a setting like that. She insisted that I not bring any gifts, but I bought some wine anyway, and so I carried a silver-wrapped bottle, accented with gold tinsel, under my arm.
My subway car was eerily empty, with most people locked away in warm homes somewhere, huddling with families. A gentleman in a big red coat sat snoring at one end of the car and I imagined him to be some off-duty Santa Claus, albeit one with a cleanly shaved face. A homeless woman wrapped in a blanket sat a few seats down from me, rocking back and forth with a paper Wendy’s cup in her hand. I looked at her and then looked away. Just before the subway pulled into Grand Central, I crossed over and gave her a dollar bill. It seemed a pitiful way of trying to make things right.
At Grand Central I found that I had just missed my train, which meant that I would be late, which meant that the meal would be delayed on my account, which meant that I would not be making the best of impressions.
I called my girlfriend to tell her the news and she sighed her frustration.
“Why didn’t you leave your apartment earlier?”
“It doesn’t matter when I leave my apartment. You know me, I get everywhere 5 minutes late.”
“I’m sure you could have managed it this one time.”
“I tried. It’s not like I purposely decided to miss the train and wait an extra half-hour.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Fine,” I answered.
“So you’re going to be here 30 minutes late is what you’re saying?”
“Well, not necessarily ‘late,’ just 30 minutes later than planned.”
“You’re quite the wordsmith. That’s ‘late,’” she asserted.
“Maybe,” I insisted.
“OK, I’ll tell daddy.”
“OK.”
“See you soon.”
I descended the stairs to the station’s food court, hoping to find an open café and have a coffee while I waited. Instead, I found the City’s forgotten, lost men and women with nowhere to go, communing in a place of absence and lose, a place that that on any other day would have been a hub for the moving pieces of the world.
And its there, right next to a shuttered bakery stand, that I saw them.
A decade since that first encounter on Astor Place and it was as if they hadn’t aged a day. Still the one mumbled to the other, while the other considered herself in the vanity, red lips pressed together, pursed in anticipation of another coat of lipstick.
Panic griped me and I tightened my fist around the silver wrapped bottle in my hand. I thought about my life and I wondered what would go wrong with it now. Was something going to happen to me on the train? Would my relationship come to a quick and forgettable end? Would some sort of tragedy strike? I wanted to run away, I wanted things to be different. I wished I had made it to the station on time, that I had tried harder to make my train, instead of being the same person I had always been. Always just five minutes later than I needed to be, five minutes “late,” five minutes that could mean everything. Had I been on time, I wouldn’t have come down here, I wouldn’t have seen them.
Who were these women, these goddesses of chaos? Why did they continue to show up and spin my life out of control? I thought about hexes and curses and wondered who had put one on me, why I had been unfairly saddled with these specters instead of with guardian angels who could look out for my interests.
I couldn’t let this go on. I couldn’t continue down this path and just wait for them to appear again, even if the next time wouldn’t be for another decade.
And so I approached them. I held the tinseled bottle in my hand and marched up to their table. The suitcases sat against a pillar that rose up behind them and I wondered what they had inside, what it was that they shuttled along with them as they made their appearances throughout the City.
“Excuse me,” I started, before knowing exactly what I intended to say.
They both looked up at me simultaneously. The mumbling one ceased her mumbling for a moment. The other put her vanity and lipstick aside.
“Who are you?” I asked, and my voice rose sharply.
They looked at each other and didn’t seem to know how to respond. They appeared unsettled, caught off-guard.
“What are you doing here?” I continued, not waiting for a response.
“Same thing you’re doing here,” I watched the red lips say to me. “Waiting for our train. This is a train station after all.”
The other cackled in response. “This is a train station after all,” she repeated to herself.
“Why do you always follow me? Why are you following me now?”
“Are we the ones following you?” she asked. “Or are you the one following us?”
These two, they were crazy. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t deserve this,” I pleaded. “I’m a good person.”
“I’m sure you are,” red lips responded. “We’re all good people. In our own way.”
“Then why?” I asked. “Why all of this? Through all of these years. Why this curse?”
“Curse!” shouted the other. Her voice was sharp and clear and echoed against the marble columns and archways. “Blessing!” she shouted. I looked around the food court, to see if anyone had noticed me, if anyone had noticed us. But everyone just sat and stared off into the expanse of the quiet station. “There’s the one and there’s the other. Different and the same. The line is thin.”
“Please,” I told them, “please just leave me alone.” My life, its going great, I say. Don’t mess it up, not now, not anymore.
A station announcement rang overhead, my train had arrived, and it was waiting for me. I glanced in the direction of my track and feared for a moment that I had revealed where I was going, and that they would follow me again, follow me for the rest of my life.
“Please,” I reiterated before turning away and rushing off.
“Goodbye.” I heard one of them call after me. But I didn’t turn around, I didn’t look back at them. “Safe travels,” she yelled.
I ran to my track and sat by the window, keeping watch over the platform to make sure they weren’t coming after me. It was only when the train started moving that I began to allow myself to feel some relief. Maybe this was the end, I tried assuring myself. Maybe I would never see them again.
I pulled out my phone and texted my girlfriend, telling her that I was now on my way and giving a time for when she could expect me. She responded with a “” and I smiled to myself.
And it was only then that I began to go over everything in my mind, that I began to think about the encounter, about the previous ones, about the way life would play out after we crossed paths. I thought of curses, and then I thought of blessings. I thought about how different and how similar they could be. I thought of thin lines and perspectives and the ways in which things aren’t always what they seem.
The train rumbled out from under the tunnel and light streamed in through the windows. I thought of guardian angels, and wondered whether I had gotten it all wrong. Only then, when it was too late to do anything differently, I wondered whether they had been mine.
At first I didn’t pay much attention. With my econ exam on my mind, the fear of having done poorly on it, I shook my head and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to dwell on the things I couldn’t change, I tried to dismiss my anxieties, focus on the mundane, and so I looked back up to consider what drink I was going to get.
My mind wandered, my eyes shifted focus back to the corner of the café.
There were two of them, old women dressed all in black. Their hair was tied neatly under headscarves, only the occasional wisps of grey slipping out from underneath. Their bodies were clad in long dresses with thick fabric that stretched down their arms, then disappeared behind the table before reemerging by their feet, bunching together and sweeping up the dust on the floor. By their side sat two black suitcases, pressed up against the wall, all packed and ready to accompany them on a trip they were, perhaps, ready to embark on. One of them leaned back in her chair, holding an empty coffee cup and mumbling something to her companion. The companion, her face powdered a mime-like white, held up a small vanity mirror as she traced her lips with red lipstick.
At the counter I gave my order. I kept thinking about my test. When I got my coffee, I stood around and absentmindedly kept adding sugar until my drink was much sweeter than I had wanted.
On my way out, I glanced at them once more. The mumbling one kept moving her lips but focused her gaze right on me. The one with the powdered face, she lowered her vanity and smiled a smile that was all red lips and no teeth. It stretched up grotesquely, meeting the wrinkles that descended from her eyes.
I turned away as I opened the door. I landed on the pavement outside the café, and walked off to my next class.
---
The black clothing, the suitcases, the moving lips of the one and the clownish smile of the other, they were all I thought about for the rest of the day. That night I dreamt that I was in an airport and I spotted the two of them checking in their bags for my flight. Later I saw them at my gate, and even though they had seemingly checked their bags, they still had them nearby. Moments later I was sitting on the plane, buckled into my seat. They approached, looking for their seats, dragging the suitcases through the narrow aisle. I wanted to tell them that they weren’t allowed to bring luggage like that onto the plane, that they should have checked everything before the flight. I don’t like the idea that they will be on the plane with me. I don’t trust them. But I know that it’s too late, and I feel that something will go horribly wrong.
The next day I attribute the dream about the airport, the plane, the old women on my flight, to an over-active imagination and lingering anxiety about my test. I don’t like flying as it is, so it makes sense that my mind would subconsciously revert to it when I’m nervous about getting a bad grade.
I get my test back and discover that, for the first time in my life, I have failed at something. I’m, perhaps, not as surprised as I should be. From there, things enter a downward spiral. As much as I might try over the next few months, I can’t seem to get a handle on my economics class. I never do better than a C. My father, an economics professor at a college in Westchester, is incredibly displeased. This is not what he had in mind for his son, this is not the sort of student I was supposed to be. I request some time with my school advisor and we have a serious discussion about my choice of majors, my plans for the future. He asks me to seriously consider whether economics is really the path I should be pursuing.
I decide to become an English major. My father agrees to look the other way. I come back to the coffee shop on Astor Place several more times that semester, but I never see the women again.
---
I might have forgotten about them altogether except that, a few months later, as my train pulled into the A/C/E station at Columbus Circle, I saw them again, sitting on the wooden bench on the platform, their suitcases nearby. They both noticed me, but there were no smiles or looks of recognition, just quick glances that did not interrupt the mumbling of the one, the lipstick application of the other. I hurried past and out of the station.
Later that day, quite unexpectedly, my girlfriend broke up with me. She said we were just different people going in different directions in our lives. I wondered where this analysis had come from, since it was the first time I’d heard her say anything like this. She sighed and looked away.
“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be,” she mumbled, as if she were reading a script.
Over the next few years I saw the old women all over the City, and each sighting portended something going wrong. I came to expect their appearance in my life, often at the most inopportune moments, just when things seemed to be working out for me.
In June 2001, I passed them on a park bench in Prospect Park. Later that day I found out that a good friend of mine who I was supposed to hang out with later that night had been arrested for DUI the evening before.
In February 2002, I saw them at a bus stop near Madison Square Garden as I raced by in a taxi on my way to doctor’s appointment. After limping for the previous week, the diagnosis revealed that I needed to have knee surgery thanks to a misguided attempt at trying to slide down a handrail.
Not even two months went by before I saw them again, sometime in April. They sat on lawn chairs alongside the Farmers’ Market at Union Square. That same day I came back to news of some unauthorized charges on my credit card incurred by someone in China with a preference for Apple and Louis Vuitton.
I don’t know if I’d call it bad luck or a curse or something of an entirely circumstantial nature. But I do know that the women, over time, foretold of another break-up, a ceiling collapse in my bathroom while I was at work, the loss of my first job, the loss of my second job, a vacation being canceled thanks to an approaching hurricane, and a speeding ticket.
---
Two years had gone by since I’d last seen them and things were going pretty well, well enough that when people asked me I would say, “I can’t complain.” My writing career was advancing. My relationship with my parents, especially my father, was the best it had ever been. I was living in a nice little apartment in a part of Astoria that I loved. And after a long absence from the dating scene, I was seeing a great girl I was excited about. Things were finally falling into place and I began to feel relieved at the thought that I was leaving the angst of my quarter-life crises behind me.
It was on Christmas Day that I found myself on the subway, making my way up to Grand Central to catch a train to Connecticut where I was to have Christmas brunch with my girlfriend and her family. I don’t celebrate Christmas and I had only ever been to a Christmas meal once, so I was looking forward to seeing the decorated tree and all the people wearing cheesy holiday sweaters, the smell of eggnog and cinnamon and whatever other scents one could expect to catch in a setting like that. She insisted that I not bring any gifts, but I bought some wine anyway, and so I carried a silver-wrapped bottle, accented with gold tinsel, under my arm.
My subway car was eerily empty, with most people locked away in warm homes somewhere, huddling with families. A gentleman in a big red coat sat snoring at one end of the car and I imagined him to be some off-duty Santa Claus, albeit one with a cleanly shaved face. A homeless woman wrapped in a blanket sat a few seats down from me, rocking back and forth with a paper Wendy’s cup in her hand. I looked at her and then looked away. Just before the subway pulled into Grand Central, I crossed over and gave her a dollar bill. It seemed a pitiful way of trying to make things right.
At Grand Central I found that I had just missed my train, which meant that I would be late, which meant that the meal would be delayed on my account, which meant that I would not be making the best of impressions.
I called my girlfriend to tell her the news and she sighed her frustration.
“Why didn’t you leave your apartment earlier?”
“It doesn’t matter when I leave my apartment. You know me, I get everywhere 5 minutes late.”
“I’m sure you could have managed it this one time.”
“I tried. It’s not like I purposely decided to miss the train and wait an extra half-hour.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Fine,” I answered.
“So you’re going to be here 30 minutes late is what you’re saying?”
“Well, not necessarily ‘late,’ just 30 minutes later than planned.”
“You’re quite the wordsmith. That’s ‘late,’” she asserted.
“Maybe,” I insisted.
“OK, I’ll tell daddy.”
“OK.”
“See you soon.”
I descended the stairs to the station’s food court, hoping to find an open café and have a coffee while I waited. Instead, I found the City’s forgotten, lost men and women with nowhere to go, communing in a place of absence and lose, a place that that on any other day would have been a hub for the moving pieces of the world.
And its there, right next to a shuttered bakery stand, that I saw them.
A decade since that first encounter on Astor Place and it was as if they hadn’t aged a day. Still the one mumbled to the other, while the other considered herself in the vanity, red lips pressed together, pursed in anticipation of another coat of lipstick.
Panic griped me and I tightened my fist around the silver wrapped bottle in my hand. I thought about my life and I wondered what would go wrong with it now. Was something going to happen to me on the train? Would my relationship come to a quick and forgettable end? Would some sort of tragedy strike? I wanted to run away, I wanted things to be different. I wished I had made it to the station on time, that I had tried harder to make my train, instead of being the same person I had always been. Always just five minutes later than I needed to be, five minutes “late,” five minutes that could mean everything. Had I been on time, I wouldn’t have come down here, I wouldn’t have seen them.
Who were these women, these goddesses of chaos? Why did they continue to show up and spin my life out of control? I thought about hexes and curses and wondered who had put one on me, why I had been unfairly saddled with these specters instead of with guardian angels who could look out for my interests.
I couldn’t let this go on. I couldn’t continue down this path and just wait for them to appear again, even if the next time wouldn’t be for another decade.
And so I approached them. I held the tinseled bottle in my hand and marched up to their table. The suitcases sat against a pillar that rose up behind them and I wondered what they had inside, what it was that they shuttled along with them as they made their appearances throughout the City.
“Excuse me,” I started, before knowing exactly what I intended to say.
They both looked up at me simultaneously. The mumbling one ceased her mumbling for a moment. The other put her vanity and lipstick aside.
“Who are you?” I asked, and my voice rose sharply.
They looked at each other and didn’t seem to know how to respond. They appeared unsettled, caught off-guard.
“What are you doing here?” I continued, not waiting for a response.
“Same thing you’re doing here,” I watched the red lips say to me. “Waiting for our train. This is a train station after all.”
The other cackled in response. “This is a train station after all,” she repeated to herself.
“Why do you always follow me? Why are you following me now?”
“Are we the ones following you?” she asked. “Or are you the one following us?”
These two, they were crazy. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t deserve this,” I pleaded. “I’m a good person.”
“I’m sure you are,” red lips responded. “We’re all good people. In our own way.”
“Then why?” I asked. “Why all of this? Through all of these years. Why this curse?”
“Curse!” shouted the other. Her voice was sharp and clear and echoed against the marble columns and archways. “Blessing!” she shouted. I looked around the food court, to see if anyone had noticed me, if anyone had noticed us. But everyone just sat and stared off into the expanse of the quiet station. “There’s the one and there’s the other. Different and the same. The line is thin.”
“Please,” I told them, “please just leave me alone.” My life, its going great, I say. Don’t mess it up, not now, not anymore.
A station announcement rang overhead, my train had arrived, and it was waiting for me. I glanced in the direction of my track and feared for a moment that I had revealed where I was going, and that they would follow me again, follow me for the rest of my life.
“Please,” I reiterated before turning away and rushing off.
“Goodbye.” I heard one of them call after me. But I didn’t turn around, I didn’t look back at them. “Safe travels,” she yelled.
I ran to my track and sat by the window, keeping watch over the platform to make sure they weren’t coming after me. It was only when the train started moving that I began to allow myself to feel some relief. Maybe this was the end, I tried assuring myself. Maybe I would never see them again.
I pulled out my phone and texted my girlfriend, telling her that I was now on my way and giving a time for when she could expect me. She responded with a “” and I smiled to myself.
And it was only then that I began to go over everything in my mind, that I began to think about the encounter, about the previous ones, about the way life would play out after we crossed paths. I thought of curses, and then I thought of blessings. I thought about how different and how similar they could be. I thought of thin lines and perspectives and the ways in which things aren’t always what they seem.
The train rumbled out from under the tunnel and light streamed in through the windows. I thought of guardian angels, and wondered whether I had gotten it all wrong. Only then, when it was too late to do anything differently, I wondered whether they had been mine.
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