A French Connection.

Sitting through four stops on the number two line was a final short stretch in my hour long commute. I used it to sit and appreciate how soon I could sit down in my room for an hour before dinner. I used it to watch hundreds of people everyday whom I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. Then there were the days when I didn’t watch the other people, just let my mind wander. That’s what I must have been doing on this particular day when someone actually spoke to me. I was sitting in my preferred seat, one of the ones which folds out next to the door but you have to stand up if it gets too crowded, she clambered through the door at the Alexandre Dumas stop and sat down next to me. She was not unlike many people I saw on the number 2 line which goes through the north east corner of Paris. She had gray, flyaway hair, few teeth and lots of layers, the sort of woman who probably isn’t nearly as large as she seems simply because of her mannerisms. I paid very little attention but at some point I must have laughed at something I was thinking about. I don’t mean a riotous laugh, just a little smile and inward chuckle, but she jumped on it. She cackled outright and exclaimed, “You saw it too didn’t you?” I looked at her startled but she went on cackling. “Can you believe it?! Some people! No one else saw it. Just us two!” I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about but nodded and forced a bit of a smile. “We’re alike, you and I.” I could not really see what it was that made us alike, even if I had seen whatever it was that she was on about but I continued nodding and then turned to gaze out the window. She continued talking to me, and as I was still new and she spoke quickly I only understood about half of what she was saying. She asked where I was getting off. “Ménilmontant.” She looked surprised and asked why and what I was doing there. I told her I lived there. She told me she was getting off at Belleville. She kept laughing at whatever it was she had seen and telling me that we were alike, that we were both wise and observant. I began to feel that perhaps she was a kindred spirit and enjoyed watching and laughing subtly at the little things people do when they have a moment to themselves on the subway. This made me start to feel guilty that I hadn’t been living up to my claim that I did in fact enjoy people watching on the subway, as I had missed such an apparently fabulous event. And then we arrived at my stop and I got off, leaving her laughing to herself.

-N. Maldari

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