M101

Lori Toppel

Photo of author by Gregory Wakabayashi

Word Count 1663

She was small and thin, hunched over, clad in a long-sleeved black shirt, mid-calf skirt, tights,  lace jacket, and a veil that draped over her forehead. Her hair, also black, looked wet and stuck to her cheeks like a child’s messy mop. Encased in her dark carapace, her face appeared chalk white. I was ten, and it was hard for me to tell how old she was, but she looked ancient, not of this world, and she was coming our way.

My sister and I were standing in the back of the bus, holding onto a pole, as every seat was taken except for the one the woman had just abandoned. The stench of glue rolled over me as she approached and began ranting about wild Indians roaming on the plains. She scuttled closer, and I glimpsed in her hand a crumpled tube of glue. I looked in her dark eyes for a few seconds, then turned away, as my sister, who was twelve, led me to the front of the bus. At 89th Street, I got off, scared and shaken, but angry too. For over a week, we had been begging our mother to allow us to take the bus to school, and now a crazy woman had ruined the trip.

My family had just moved to Manhattan from Puerto Rico, where my mother, who had never learned to drive, had her own chauffeur. For her own peace of mind, she had hired a driver to take my sister and me to our new school on the Upper East Side. Overprotective in the first place, she must have been panicked at the thought of our riding a bus or subway alone. For her, Puerto Rico was a sliver of land, and New York City was the radiant center of the universe. With such radiance came the unexpected. After one week of being driven to the school entrance where everyone could see us, my sister and I asked the driver to drop us a few blocks south. We walked the rest of the way. At night, we begged our mother to let us take the bus, and she finally agreed.  

Perhaps it was the time of morning. Perhaps the glue lady, as I came to call her, took the bus at that hour for a reason, but no matter where we sat or stood, she’d find me. I’d slip into silence, trying my best not to provoke her. She was a breathing phantom, her hands cracked and peeling from dried glue. She reminded me of the old Greek women in mourning, whose photos I’d seen in National Geographic magazine, praying in black frocks with black hoods. It wasn’t the clothes that alarmed me. It was her craziness and persistence, but I didn’t dare tell our mother, knowing she’d force us to take the car again.

What had the glue lady wanted from me? And how many times had she shadowed me? I don’t know––my memory’s shifty on that note––but the intensity of each encounter felt as if she’d been cornering me for years. Once or twice, she touched my arm, and I recoiled; otherwise, I surrendered to her tirades and waited for her to scuttle to the back where she’d sniff her glue. One morning, she followed us to the front of the bus, and I broke down. I burst into tears, ashamed to be crying in public. My sister quickly complained to the bus driver, who ordered my nemesis off at the next stop.

With that command, she disappeared from my morning. Was she prohibited from boarding the bus, or did we take another route? She might have been gone, but she was resting in my psyche, and in the months to come, whenever I took the bus, I’d look around for her. When summer came, I was falling in love with the varying rhythms of the city, and I forgot about her. It was the Seventies. Crime was escalating in the city––addicts squatted in abandoned buildings, the police force had been cut, the news of another murder or rape grew deafening––but I was infatuated with the city’s grit and dazzle and soon discovered that if I had anyone to fear, it would not be another woman. I became watchful of men.

There was the man on the subway platform who stared at me while I waited for the train to go up to a class at Columbia. I walked away from him, but he followed. The train came, and, relieved, I got on, but he did too. I ran off, and he jumped through the doors just before they closed. He followed me upstairs where I told the ticket booth attendant about him. I said the guy was just a few feet away from me. Three young men, in line for tickets, overheard my plea for help, marched up to the man, and told him to leave me alone. He left the station. Rattled, I thanked them and rushed to catch the next train.

There was the man––I recall his heft––who swung open the driver’s door of a cab I’d just climbed into. The light was red, and the man grabbed the driver and reached for a bag on the front seat. The driver pushed him off, and I opened the door into the traffic and slid away.

Then there was the man, another cab driver, who, hours after midnight, accelerated after I asked him to cross the park at 72nd instead of 79th street. As we rode through the park, he suddenly spoke: “I could take you anywhere. I could keep driving and no one would know where I’m taking you.” The doors of cabs back then automatically locked. I was silent until we reached Central Park West when I told him, as nicely as my fear would permit, to drop me at the corner. He unlocked the door, said nothing, and I walked up the avenue close to the doormen who lingered outside until I was sure the cab was gone. Then I jogged the few blocks home, adrenaline flooding my bloodstream.

The sizzling anger I felt from some men: a predatorial musk that all women feared. Although my memory of the glue lady marked the moment in my childhood when I first felt like someone’s target, I was more afraid of her otherness than her capability to harm me. Quick on my feet, I was more capable of knocking her down. I was also, at age ten, blind to her circumstances and the possibility that she might be living in fear. In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf describes how time may neutralize a childhood trauma and provide an explanation: “...it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances.”

Is that why, at 61, my glue lady is surfacing again, and in full regalia?

I’m ambling through the Dior Show at the Brooklyn Museum and pause at a bone-white mannequin dressed in a puffy black chiffon dress and a small black hat. My glue lady comes to mind––something about the abundance of black fabric. The outfit strikes me as preposterous, a work of art, yes, designed to be worn by someone who doesn’t stroll through my everyday world, an  evening gown symbolizing all that my glue lady did not have. Weeks later, I’m waiting for my appointment at a new hair salon. The stylist is wearing a black lace jacket, and her black hair is unkempt. Maybe I shouldn’t stay, I think. She doesn’t look so coiffed herself. She looks like a sane version of my glue lady, and a mild wave of discomfort envelops me. An overreaction on my part, or is it the reverberation of memory, tamped down by a wedge of time?

That otherness is the desolation behind the glamorous curtain. That otherness is the disenchanted in plain view. That otherness belongs to those who are lost and remain lost, in places I’m fortunate enough, and hypocritical enough, to overlook whenever I wish. My glue lady might have been the first catalyst that opened my young mind to the complexity of human nature and its unreachable corners. She remains a flare then, no longer as a marker of fear but as an illuminant of women who have been abandoned or forgotten, threatened by poverty, abuse, mental illness, or loneliness, countless women whom I’ll never know and a few whom I know well. “That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find...” Rebecca Solnit states. Those dark components in human nature, which I couldn’t articulate at age ten? I’ve been writing about them for decades.

Last week, I was working on yet another draft of a novel, revising a section about a twenty-something Midwestern woman, a character inspired by a close friend of mine who overdosed on heroin. I’ve fictionalized her struggle to honor her kindness and beauty but also to ignite the fire of her addiction, and the fact that I was not aware of her feeling trapped. And there you have it: I’m remembering my glue lady again.

I think if she were to approach me now, I would be most aware that she is a woman alone, a woman who might be in pain, defenseless, or desperate, and, if I were to live as she was living, my heart might give out from panic or grief. Where would I be without warmth or light? Where would I go, and what would I do as the day began? I might seek out a small girl on a bus, a young girl who boarded at the same time every day, dressed in clean clothes, a young girl who didn’t yet understand how to tell me to get lost. 

Lori is the author of the novella The Word Next to the One I Want, the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You, and the novel Three Children. Her stories and essays have appeared in literary journals including Inkwell Journal, The Antioch Review, and The Del Sol Review. Toppel, the mother of twin sons, grew up in Puerto Rico and lives in New York with her husband. More at loritoppel.com.