In the Apple

Chapter 6

​I began to wander in search of a place where I could sit, stare and plan my next move. Letting instinct lead me, I made my way diagonally across the station, away from the rows of enormous gated windows behind which ticket sellers and information agents passed their workday lives. The huge area outside the row of windows was knotted with hundreds of people patiently or wearily waiting their turn. Intimidated, wondering how anyone could make their way through that dense crowd, I aimed for a part of the station that seemed slightly less populated. As I moved along I felt, in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, as though I were growing smaller by the minute. Surely I would soon become invisible. In fact, I thought as I looked at the blank faces of the people flowing past me in all directions, perhaps I already was. At that moment, I spied a row of benches in the distance, and pushed gratefully towards them. Moving through the crush of people was a bit like wading through a marsh; it seemed to take much longer than it should have to arrive at a bench, but I finally did, and sank down on an empty seat with relief. I sat as I'd been taught to sit in public - feet firmly on the floor, knees together, back straight, handbag held vigilantly on my lap. Further along the bench sat a dark-haired foreign-looking woman with two young children clinging to her legs and a baby in her arms. She gave me a tentative, shy smile. I smiled back and relaxed a little, feeling oddly reassured by her presence.

I sat and wondered what to do next. Clearly, I was out of my depth. If I felt awed by Grand Central, what would I feel once outside? Where, exactly, did I expect to go? What did I even know about New York City? As I pondered the question, a pair of tie-dyed hippies walked past, the man with long, streaming hair and John Lennon glasses, the girl wearing a granny dress and flowers in her hair, and the answer came to me. 'Greenwich Village,' I thought gleefully. 'I want to see Greenwich Village!' My shoulders slumped. 'But where is it? How do I get there from here?' I thought of running after the hippies and asking them, but they were already too far away. I recalled the huge, round, marble information centre in the middle of the station near the ticket booths, and smiled. Of course. I would ask there. My exploring spirit felt somewhat revived by the plan, and I looked around me, trying to improve my sense of place. To my left, I noticed a ladies' room and decided it would be a good place to visit before embarking on the next phase of my adventure. I went in, splashed cold water on my face, washed my hands, and combed my hair. I noticed a drinking fountain and gratefully took a long drink, pleasantly surprised by the fountain's sparkling cleanliness and the sweet coolness of the water, my previous experience of drinking fountains having been the unsavoury ones in the halls at school, dotted with chewing gum and bits of junk and giving out a minute stream of unpleasantly tepid water. Refreshed, I somewhat reluctantly left the sanctuary of the ladies' room, and turned back towards the main hall. An unusual, singsong voice in my ear startled me, and I looked up at a tall, slightly rotund black man with a round, open face who was smiling at me, waiting for a response to whatever it was he'd just said. 'Pardon?' I asked. He spoke again, unintelligibly, and I shrugged and shook my head. We were nearing an enormous raised bench where five men sat in a row reading newspapers, feet on small rectangular platforms, each ignoring a black man who knelt at his feet, shining his shoes. I stood, rooted to the spot and momentarily upset, wondering if this was racism like I'd read of in the South, and wondering, if it was, how it happened to exist so far North. As I stood fretting over this potential flaw in my fantasy of the golden city, an elegant black man took his place among the customers at the bench, whipped out his newspaper just like all the other men, and began to read while his shoes were shined. I breathed a sigh of relief, still slightly puzzled by the fact that all of the shoe-shiners were black, but willing to accept that there was nothing sinister to it.