THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

My parents are the type of parents you see in the movies. The kind that are so ridiculous, so much larger than life, that when you tell people about them they can’t believe they’re real. If you looked up the concept of ‘helicopter parenting’ their smiling picture would be right next to it. My picture would be underneath; scowling but obedient, frustrated but resigned.

My mother is the type of mother who refused to let my friends and I play in our backyard without the comforting presence of a walking talkie. Every five minutes we would hear a chirp and then my mother’s voice, calling, “Children? Are you still alive?” And so we would come running back to wherever the walkie talkie had fallen, laughing and tripping and scrambling over each other’s feet. “Yes,” we would answer. “We are indeed still alive.”

Her helicoptering was not confined to this. She is also the type of mother who, when my amused younger self told her about a girl who insulted me at school, could be found bawling her eyes out in the bathroom an hour later. I remember standing in the doorway feeling truly lost and telling her that I, um, hadn’t even been upset? It is memories of moments like this that have made me careful how much of my internal struggles I reveal to her. She has always felt my pain far more keenly than I have. To say that while I was growing up I frequently found her both baffling and ridiculous is an understatement. To say that I love her anyway is nothing but the truth.

My father is different. He is the type of father who is extremely relaxed about anything, until he suddenly really, really isn’t. He is the type of father that tells you when your three years old that only country girls wear socks and yet a few years later refuses to let you leave the garage without a pair of shoes on. You can never tell when one of these moments of random stubbornness will appear.

My relationship with my father is less than ideal, maybe because in some ways we are more alike than we’d like to admit. We are both stubborn, a little selfish, and prideful. As a result we are always clashing, slamming against each other like we are in a particularly violent game of bumper cars. Swerving together and repulsing each other just like the way magnets reject their twins.

Growing up, he was just self serving enough to jump on most of my mother’s bandwagons. Sometimes, he even actually agreed with her. Sometimes it was he sitting across from me on the couch, snarling through gritted teeth at me what I could and couldn’t do. My mother was always better with words.

Throughout my childhood, teenagehood, and early adulthood they have stood together as an everlasting barricade between where I am and where I’d like to go. No matter what activity I choose to do, with however many people, with whatever degree of safety, somehow they always find fault. Somehow they always manage to look at me, hands on hips, eyes pitying, and say, “But you can’t! You’re going to get raped and murdered.” I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have heard this phrase growing up. There are times when the mere mention of the phrase drives me so crazy that I have a sudden and intense desire to take a sledgehammer to their smug, overprotective barricade. Most times, I take a deep breath, love them despite themselves, and just slip around it.

A few weeks ago the phrase appeared again. I grinned at them from the safety of my favorite chair as I told them about the job interview I’d just gotten after months of applications and the terror of being unable to pay my bills fast approaching. They asked me how I planned to get to work, and I told them that at least part of the time I would be riding the metro. The same metro that hundreds of women ride every single day to their destinations. The same metro I’d ridden numerous times with my mother as a child to visit my father at work. The same metro I’d ridden as an adult with friends to go visit museums and watch fireworks burst behind the Washington Memorial. The second I saw their faces I wanted to take the words back, but it was too late.

“You’re going to get raped and murdered!” They proclaimed, voices twining together in a rather discordant harmony. I put my head in my hands. Chaos ensued. I won’t bore you with the details, but there was yelling, a good deal of exasperation emanating from my direction, and a lot of sulking emanating from theirs.

“Good God!” I told them. “I haven’t even gotten the job yet! I haven’t even interviewed yet!”

My mother walked upstairs, entrenched in her sulk, and I was left alone with my dad. He glowered at me from the adjacent couch. I wasn’t fazed. It wasn’t like this was a new experience. But then he told me a story that was supposed to prove their point. A story that was supposed to make me afraid. A cautionary tale. That’s when he told me about the girl on the train.

“She looked about your age,” he said, and all at once my stomach curled into itself. In that moment my body knew what was coming before my mind even began to suspect.

He told me that the girl was pretty, that she’d been doing homework as she sat in the metro car by herself. He told me he was the only other person there, tucked a few rows away with his eyes out the window. He told me that since their ride had begun it had grown dark outside and while the train was moving the sky flew by so fast he couldn’t even see the light of the stars. Well, he didn’t say that last bit. But that’s how I’ve imagined it.

Soon after the darkness fell, he told me, a group of men climbed into their train car. They were laughing, shoving at each other, obviously men who had just gotten off of a physical job. He said they looked at the girl, eyes studiously averted, and that’s when it began.

It was just conversation at first, he told me. The five of them crowding her with bodies as well as words. She answered them, her smile strained, trying desperately to be polite. Trying desperately to hide her discomfort. He told me that when her stop came she rose eagerly from her seat, smiling in truth now, relieved.

“Well, this is my stop,” he told me she said, her voice cheery.

And then he tells me that the men rose, eerily in sync, smirks forming on their faces. He tells me they said: “Us, too.”

And then he ends the story by telling me the fact I find the most disturbing of them all. He tells me he sat and watched her go, the men surrounding her like crows to carrion, into a station he knew was abandoned and a parking lot that was dark and dangerous. I see it there, the truth in his face: the fact that he still doesn’t realize it wasn’t just her story but his own.

It’s days later and her story won’t leave me alone. It’s such a small thing, a snippet of a life, and yet I can’t let it go. I can’t stop thinking about the true end of her story. What might have happened after. I sit in class and suddenly my eyes are full of tears and my stomach is curdled with nausea. Every time the story resurfaces I get a little more angry, and immeasurably more sad. It makes it so I can’t think, can’t concentrate on anything more than the feelings clouding my mind. I don’t want to remember her, but I do.

I know it isn’t fair to be angry at my father, but I am. So many people sit in his position and do the exact same thing he did. So many people value their own safety over the safety of others. Who is to say if I had been on that train it would have been any different? Who’s to say I would have been able to overcome my fear and help her? But I can’t help but think I would have. I can’t imagine ever being in a position with strength like his, with the knowledge he had, and doing nothing. I can’t imagine watching a girl walking into a dark parking lot with a group of men surrounding her and danger in the air and doing nothing. I can’t help but see myself, arm threaded through hers, calmly dialing 911 and holding the phone up so it glowed bright in the darkness. I can’t help but hear myself say hello to the operator when she asked what my emergency was, and I can’t help but see the men fade back, confused and angry, as we walk toward her car and climb into it. I can’t help but see us, shaking but smiling, safe, becoming friends in a moment full of terror.

And so I am angry. I am so unbelievably, incredibly angry. In the moment he told me the story, it felt irrational. There was no moment of thought, no true understanding of why I felt what I felt. I felt like I could tear him apart with my bare hands. I felt like I was shaking so hard with all my feelings that I would vibrate apart, pieces scattered and discarded on the rug.

I try to imagine what went on in his mind in that moment. I try to make sense of it. But I can’t. I can’t imagine how he could look at her face and not see mine. What I can imagine is the voice in the back of his mind, so quiet that he doesn’t even know that it is there. The voice that said, ‘Stupid girl. Should’ve known better.’ The voice that told him that he didn’t have to care. The kind of voice that is so insidious that even after I started to yell at him, even as I stood up and left the room, even as I slammed my way through the front door and climbed into my car, coming apart at the seams, he never realized that he did anything wrong.

I wonder what he would do if I told him that the very reason I live without fear is because I’ve already lived it. If I told him that I walk into the dark with confidence because I was hurt in daylight. If I told him that the reason I feel comfortable alone is because I was hurt in a house full of my friends. If I told him that the reason I wear whatever I want is because when it happened I was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants.

I wonder what he would do if I told him that I am angry because I listened to him; that I protected myself in every way possible, that I made the right choices at the right times with the right people, and that in the end it didn’t make the tiniest, most minuscule difference. If I told him that despite their hovering and the incredible anxiety they’ve instilled in me, that the danger found me anyway. I wonder what he would do if I told him that I choose to empower myself the best I can and then to put the fear aside, because living with it isn’t a life at all.

I wonder if he knew all those things if he could have watched her walk away, possibly about to experience something that would tear her life to pieces, and do nothing. I wonder if he would still feel comfortable pulling out her story as a comfy little anecdote of why women shouldn’t feel free to live their lives without fear. If he could still look at me, a smirk on his face, and say “That’s how the world is, honey.” I wonder if he’ll ever see that it is men like him, who sit in silence, who empower those who would hurt us. I wonder if he’ll ever see that sometimes heroism is a quietly offered hand and not a lifted fist or a harsh flurry of words. I wonder if he’ll ever feel the way I do every time I stumble across another story like hers, deafened as the silenced screams of all of us who have been broken echo in my ears. And I wonder, most of all, if he will ever see my defiance to hide behind the safety he so strongly believes in as a strength instead of a weakness.