31 Hours by Masha Hamilton

going fast. But my God, it goes fast.” Carol took a deep breath. “I have a boy, too.”
    “Yes?” The woman looked at Carol through narrowed eyes. “How old?”
    “Oh, old. Old. But I still remember. . . . We change, but they change more.”
    Carol suddenly couldn’t say anything more; her voice would have been drowned out anyway by two trains approaching on parallel tracks, each going the opposite direction. The trains shuddered to a halt and paused before the doors swung open simultaneously. The woman was headed one direction, Carol the other. “You take care, now,” the woman said.
    These unexpected intersections of lives: she loved them. Did it make her pathetic that at least once a month, a conversation shared with someone on a subway ended up being the highlight of her day? She loved the subway, too, for being such an equalizer. Some moments couldn’t be romanticized: the morning the hungover young man, slumped in a seat across from her, suddenly straightened and threw up on her shoes, for instance. Nevertheless, it was the world’s finest people-watching gallery and a classroom in tolerance. Where else could a suited businessman sit between a homeless derelict and an immigrant Chinese tailor? Forget Broadway and Times Square. It was the subway that displayed New York at its best, its forbearance, its liveliness, its effort to overcome the Tower of Babel collapse of a common tongue. For all its flaws, the subway was the city’s jewel.
    The train was nearly full, but she got a seat next to a teenage boy listening to music through earphones. Many of the passengers, by chance, were parents with children—or maybe she just found herselfnoticing them. Across from her, a father with a broad, Irish-looking face sat next to a little boy who looked very much like his miniature, both of them expressionless. Next to him, a woman in traditional Islamic dress held a babe in arms.
    Initially Jake had been the one who’d pressed for a baby; Carol had wavered, her concerns like stripes on a feminist flag. What if she lost her independence? What if she became just someone’s mom? What if her own work vanished beneath diapers and report cards and high school dances? But then: Jonas. He’d been such an empathetic child, feeling everything from Carol’s pain at the breakup to the loss of a belly-up goldfish that had to be flushed.
    So of course, with all this sensitivity, when he reached adolescence, he began questioning. He went through periods of doubting the values of everyone around him, from the principal of his school to the director of his theater group to the artists Jake represented, and finally to her, his mom. And she was fine with that. She could stand up to a bit of close examination, she told herself; she wasn’t that bad. Besides, how much worse if she’d raised a little Republican who bought into it all without any reservations?
    Still, it was hard to see him so confused and then disturbed and ultimately angered by the compromises people had to make in order to get along in the modern material world. At least, the compromises they made in the West, and in America, and in New York City, and on his block, and in his home.
    “We’re all terrorists,” he’d told her a few weeks ago in what had been their last real conversation. “Every single one of us. The only difference is, some of us recognize it and others don’t.”
    She’d started to disagree with him, to explain the falseness built into the very extremity of that viewpoint, how it held many accountable forthe actions of few and failed to take into account the moderating influence of community and family, let alone one’s own personal honorable efforts to control rage, be kind, make amends. Then she’d decided not to argue. This perspective sprang from nothing more than the rashness and absolutism of youth. He’d outgrow it. She thought about getting him a T-shirt imprinted with the slogan: “I’m twenty-one. This isn’t who I really