A Girl's Guide to Subway Etiquette

NEW YORK, N.Y. — When riding the subway, don't talk too loud or take up too much space or make eye contact. Read a book. Listen to music. Ignore people.

The doors slid open at Seventh Avenue. In walked three couples, dressed in khaki walking shorts, bright round-neck T-shirts, and white, white sneakers. Backpacks and baseball caps, too. The E train lurched forward.

“What stop do you think it is?” a woman asked. She sprawled across the bench, right next to me.

A man looked at a map. “Ground Zero is at the World Trade Center stop,” he said. "I guess."

The woman turned to me. “Is that right?” she asked. Oh no, I thought, eye contact.

“Um, yes,” I said, because it was.

“Oh good,” she said. A pause. Then:

“Do you ride this every day for work?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, because I did. I thought monosyllabic answers would prevent a conversation.

“Do you work in one of those tall buildings? I think I'd get dizzy,” her friend said. She laughed. I explained that I only worked on the seventh floor, and that it was very stable. I laughed too.

The tourists—from Louisiana—only had 24 hours in New York City, one stop on their five-day cruise around the Northeast. We discussed the ins-and-outs of the hop-on/hop-off bus. I asked if they had been to Central Park, to Broadway, or to museums. They hadn't. Not the MoMA or the Met or even the Museum of Natural History. They seemed like pretty lousy tourists.

“We wanted to see Ground Zero,” she said. They wanted to see where it happened. I hadn't even thought of that as a sight-seeing option. She asked, “Were you here, hon?”

“Yes,” I said, because I was.

“We were so sorry for you all,” she said. She reached out and touched my shoulder.

On 9/11, I was in school, far uptown. My family had moved to New York two weeks earlier. I wasn't a New Yorker, then, and it didn't feel like my tragedy. It wasn't my city—well, not yet, anyway.

A month later, my dad took my brother, sisters, and me to see Ground Zero—the cranes, the skeletons of buildings. My dad put his hands on our shoulders. We watched as machines moved, then sorted, the debris. We were tourists, too.

“We were so sorry for you all,” she said. I didn't know what to say, so I thanked her and that seemed right. Then at the Spring Street stop, I got up.

“Wait,” the woman said, “Is it true there are grocery stores in the apartment buildings here?”

“Yes,” I said, because I wanted it to be true. For them, at least. The tourists waved as the train pulled away. I waved back.


Emily C. Graff ’10, a Crimson senior magazine editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Currier House.