He looked at me with the same suspicion my father did when it took me so long to learn how to ride a bike, or when I preferred to shine shoes for a quarter downtown, or fuss about my mother’s hair when she would let out the rollers and toss the newly formed curls carelessly about her head. I wanted to care for those curls. I hated baseball and marbles, and even when I was a paperboy once I learned to ride a bike, I’d fold each paper neatly and place it perfectly in whatever piece of property it belonged. Charlie watched me suspiciously, like my father did. Like Phillip, as if the careful rolls of newspaper could never hide the telltale flutter in my walk. I was a sissy. And they all knew it before I did. And I was trapped longer than I cared to know in my mother’s hamper heap of bras and panties and flowered blouses. Trapped in imitation silk and rosewater, with no exit from the mirror frosted with the breath from my dance. No doubt this was what Phillip saw in his suspicion, and this was probably what Ruella knew and feared, that the confused look of fathers or brothers made you realize you could love them more fiercely and more dangerously than any woman could.

There was danger in the subway lights, whizzing by. Suddenly the screech of brakes and a long wail echoing through the dark. We must have been around Lincoln Center, the West 60s, judging by the amount of time that had passed. The train stopped dead. People shifted about nervously. I was afraid. The lights went out. Burning metal and the sharp odor of electricity rose through the car. Smoke pricked at my eyes. A gravelly voice came over the loudspeaker saying something no one understood. The doors wouldn’t open. The smoke got thick.

People coughed. From somewhere came jitters and laughs. A child started to cry. “Goddamn train,” someone said. “Must be a fire somewhere.”

“God, no,” said Ruella, her voice raspy in my ear. She clung to me tighter.

That started the near panic. No one could move. I tried to stand. Legs jostled, bodies pushed and shoved. We could go nowhere.

I remembered the signs, “Subway tracks are dangerous… Follow the instructions of train crews or police.” But there were no police, no crews, no motormen, no instructions. The smoke curled into our clothes and cramped bodies.