give me a meatball sub, and i'll give you meatball love
I don’t like to sit in the dirty looking seats, the ones with tape and stab wounds. The seat I choose is a single with blue pleather upholstery and next to the door. There’s a girl sitting diagonally behind me, across the dusty orange tiles. She’s a bit chubby, but that’s okay-I am too. The shape of her legs is nice though. A bit similar to mine, I think, and I try to decide whose calves are thinner. My head declares her winner, but her glossy black sunglasses are on and she doesn’t seem to care about her freshly won victory. Some people are just like that. Not me, I like winning, but only when I don’t expect to.
In front of this thin-calved, chubby girl is an old woman. She is chubby too, which I notice the most from her sagging second chin. It wraps around her neck like a scarf, or that old red turtleneck Mother wears every Christmas, the one with the dainty reindeers prancing along the hem. Prancing is a very dainty activity, so it only makes sense that the reindeers are not chubby like the rest of us. We could not properly prance in our current state; we would look like stomping fools. The old woman coughs with her mouth, which looks like a withered apple, and her chins gently ripple in response. Brown orthopedic sandals slouch beneath her feet, her thick painted toes peeking over the edge, and soft blue veins lie in hiding, twisting like vines around her calves (which, by the way, are the chubbiest out of us all.)
Standing between the old woman and me is a man with a backpack, his head topped off by a baseball cap. He has big bushy hair, threaded through the hole that caps sometimes have when they are adjustable. It is tied back into a bun and sprays out like a frizzy fountain. Everything about his hair reminds me of a girl I knew from kindergarten. I know her even know, but we were friends in kindergarten, and we are not friends now. We have the same birthday, but only she has a twin. She has frizzy fountain hair. I do not.
This man with memory inducing hair is not holding onto anything, even though the train is careening along the tracks, going at least 15 miles per hour, and yanking itself away from every station with considerable force. I admire his balance. He must be very sturdy. It could be because his calves are not chubby, but lean and muscular. Without warning he starts nodding, a steady, persistent motion. And then his eyes light up, like when you see someone you love after having been apart a very long time and during the past months you were lonely and confused. But everything’s all right now because you have been reunited with the only person you will believe when they tell you that everything is okay. This person that you have missed dearly must have a special knack for making you know they tell the truth, and not just placating lies. This person knows you are not a baby, this person knows you can handle whatever they have to tell you. This person you love, and trust almost completely. That’s the way his eyes were lit, and it was very lovely, if not very sudden and alarming.
He starts to laugh. It is a proud what-a-wonderful-moment kind of laugh, not at all the kind that starts out quiet and grows louder only when you feel more comfortable. I’m not quite sure what he’s laughing at and I look to where he’s looking, but it’s just the sky and trees and cars and buildings and birds and people, all transformed into our very own Impressionist painting from the speed of the train car. He is the only one laughing. Nobody else in the entire world is laughing at this precise second except for him. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s just a feeling I have, and I estimate it’s about 37 per cent accurate, which is pretty good if you consider the size of the world and how deceiving statistics can be. There is a lady reading a newspaper in Chinese, and there is a boy with shiny black, spiky hair. Neither one is laughing. He is the only one in the entire world, just this man, laughing. And he is standing next to me. I am next to the only laughing man in the world, and all I do is keep sitting. I am such a dolt. With chubby calves.
Then he turns his head around, still emitting those mysteriously mirthful sounds, and he looks at me. Me! This makes me nervous and surprised and I’m not sure what to do-I’m never sure what to do-so I just give a smile. Genuine and bewildered, but it’s still a smile and does the job. He turns back around, head returning to its neutral forward position, neck unwound. The train tumbles into the station and he gets off, carrying his boisterous sounds with him, frizzy hair bouncing in his wake. The doors close and the train roars with heated strain into the tunneled darkness, and the man’s laugh is echoing all around us. I don’t think anyone hears it, really, but they know it’s there. I can tell they know because on the faces of my thin-calved competitor and the old apple-mouthed woman, of the Chinese lady and the spiky haired boy a smile lingers playfully. On my face I feel a smile too. The train pulls into the next station and my not so chubby calves walk me onto the platform and I start to laugh.