It was 5 or so stops from the last stop where I got on the train to go home from school. It marked the first leg of the first lap of my commute home from school. I had just gotten my nightcap on for a long ride, when any of the stalwart travellers who got on with me were getting off to shop. The skirts would be wheeled up and the things that made us look like Catholic School girls were shed by the time we got to 86th Street. I was too much on a mission to concern myself with the style of things, in those days. I had a long, long ride to go. There were no photo ops on 86th Street for me. Anyone who stayed on after 86th or got on after that point were usually the real commuters. They weren't doing riding the subway for fun, they were doing coming from work. Why was I commuting? It wasn't money, that was for sure. It wasn't fun, by that point I was whipped, tired. I had had a long day of school and was heading home for alot of drama, most days. I can't tell you how many times I fell asleep and found myself in some unknown stop, where the lights were not bright and from where I didn't know how to get home.
Are you going to 86th today? I would overhear them say. That meant they had money and would be shopping. I could not even imagine such a thing, nor, if I had money would it have woooed me to get off at 86th St. I had the fear of Dad upon my heart and soul and would no more veer off the beaten path on purpose, than jump in a lake.
Not one of the "good girls" who were imitating the naughty on 86th St., there was no category for me, in those days. I had one uniform skirt and I kept it at or below my knees. I walked and lived in the fear of my father all of the time. Other girls could relate with that. They all had fathers who would "kill" them for this or that. I guess that is what it meant to go to private school, it was a father's intense investment in the life and education of his daughter. It meant that he loved her enough to beat her to death, rather than let her get taken advantage of by someone else. He loved her enough to discipline her mind and heart before she got grown. In that way, we were all good girls. We were all carefully aimed to be good wives and mothers and workers and politicians and thinkers and we mostly got to where we were aimed, but for that brief moment we were children. Children attempting to test the bounds of the bars of the prisons that we were in. How far and what can we get away with? The people who got on at 86th St were grown already and I had absolutely nothing in common with them. But the girls who got off at 86th St were the girls that we were being groomed to a common goal.
Once, we were verbally accosted by some public school girls. You girls think you are something, don't you? (more words followed, with threats and pushes). In my day, I would have taken that challenge to street fight. Not now. Now, I had a higher challenge. We let them do their threatenings and it never went past their 10 or 12 black girls on the train in "civilian clothes". I am sure that they were loved and aimed, just as much as I, but the only time we were in proximity to them was, in their threatenings. This doesn't make for good PR for public school people. They didn't have an identity to uphold, it seemed. No one would know where they went to school, if they got into trouble. Our clothes marked us that we had to be "good", or try to be "good", or somebody would be telling the school that we were wreaking havoc.
We all wanted to be bad, or look like we were bad, but we could get put out of school for representing the uniform poorly and our fathers would-- as it were "kill" us. So we had to try to be "good". I was the only "good" girl still on the train, after 86 St. it felt like.
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