Commuting

Commuting

By: Vee Weeks

Nyari usually kept her eyes glued to her phone on her way home from work, just like everyone else on the 2 train, but tonight her battery was dead. That left her to either stare at the maniacally laughing drunk guys on the other side of the subway car, or at the advertisements plastered over every inch of the walls. The ads wouldn’t get any stupid ideas if she fixed her brown eyes on them, so that’s what she chose. But that didn’t mean she had to like her choice.

Living in a low-income neighborhood in probably the most expensive city in the world sucked on many levels, but the subway ads always felt like the biggest punch in Nyari’s gut. They were all targeted towards either the rich elitists who lived in the famous, “proper” part of Manhattan, or the rich elitists who commuted into the famous, “proper” part of Manhattan from its surrounding suburbs for work every day. This one purple poster across from her read, ‘Skip the Commute. Hotel Tonight’, an ad she’d been seeing more often lately. She didn’t really understand what the ad was even for, but it included a picture of a fancy-looking hotel on a street crawling with cabs and encouraged people to “skip the commute”, so it was probably geared towards those suburb commuters.

Are you a regular Wall Street guy with more cars than kids at home, and you just want a break from Metro-North and your nagging wife, Nyari thought. Stay at this hotel that probably costs its housekeepers’ entire salaries! And don’t forget to get respectably drunk at the bar downstairs since you don’t have to worry about being on the last train to Scarsdale.

She snickered at her little parody. She herself had two kids waiting for her in their one-bedroom apartment, kids who were supposed to be in bed but definitely weren’t. Between that whole situation and her incredibly un-stimulating job as a McDonald’s cashier, she didn’t get many opportunities to laugh. But, she supposed, serving Big Macs and fries to the Wall Street guys on their lunch (and dinner) breaks was the reason she had so much knowledge of their feelings and spending habits. Above all else, they hated their commutes, even more than their nagging wives and screaming kids. If only she could skip her commute. Her subway ride from the McDonald’s in Manhattan to her apartment in the Bronx was about as long as theirs, but no one was making ads for a solution she could afford. The other ads around her were the same deal. “Go-to-this-expensive-luxurious-place” or “Get-a-timeshare-in-the-Hamptons-and-escape-the-city-life” or “Join-Seamless-now-and-get-$5-off-your-order-even-though-the-bodega-is-right-across-the-street-and-cheaper.” Nyari yawned as the subway made a slow, squeaky crawl to her stop, tucking her loose strands of long, black hair back into her braids. As it came to a full stop and that automated man announced all the bus transfers departing from this station, she stretched her legs and stepped out onto the platform. But on the way to the turnstiles that would eject her into her neighborhood, Nyari’s ratty, black sneaker slipped on something. The slip wasn’t hard enough to make her trip or fall, but it did get her annoyed attention. Was it really so hard for people to just pick up their gar—

But it wasn’t garbage. It was a small, black notebook, blending so well in the darkness of the subway station she almost didn’t see it. She wondered if it was someone’s diary, but then why would they randomly discard it? Maybe it was some notebook some kid used for school and now they were done with all the information in it. But it looked too artful and stylish to be someone’s school notebook. Nyari knew, in the back of her mind, it was just a notebook. But her commute didn’t usually take exciting turns like this, and maybe she was a little sick of her screaming kids, too, and wanted to prolong coming home to them, just a little longer. As she scooped up the notebook and opened it, she really hoped it wasn’t someone’s diary with their private thoughts.

It wasn’t a diary at all. Or maybe it was. Nyari didn’t take time to read the faint, scripted handwriting, as she was preoccupied with the mounds and mounds of cash currently fluttering out of the pages and onto the subway floor. She gasped, almost dropping the notebook, trying to count all the money as it fell, definitely seeing a good amount of hundreds in the mix. The sweet, green cash flow was endless, leaving a stunned, wide-eyed Nyari to wonder who would leave all this money here. It couldn’t have possibly been an accident. The air electrified as the next subway screeched down the tracks, preparing to let off more people at this station and making her jump into action. If she didn’t gather up the cash and get the heck out of here, she’d end up sharing it with others at best and fighting others for it at worst. She clawed at the dirty floor, tucking every last bill into the notebook and closing it tightly. It looked thicker, now that all the money was directly behind the cover and not individually tucked into each page, but Nyari had more pressing matters to worry about. She bolted from the station just as other shadows cast themselves over the platform.

She ran all the way home, hiding the notebook and its treasures inside her black, leather jacket, trying not to look suspicious as she passed the occasional cop car. It was only after double-bolting her apartment door, yelling at her kids to go to bed and then collapsing onto the living room couch that she slept on, that she had a closer look at the money and the notebook. It took her an hour to count it all, and when she finished, she had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming. Twenty. Thousand. Dollars. She had twenty thousand dollars in her possession. There was more money on this bed than in her bank account. She could deposit this money into her bank account. But she reminded herself to take it slow. She couldn’t do anything with this money until she figured out how it ended up on the subway platform. It seemed unlikely that someone would accidentally drop it, but maybe it had been left there for someone else. Some of the people in this neighborhood were unpredictable, and Nyari didn’t want to risk getting in the middle of some complicated business.

The notebook turned out to be completely blank, except for the first page with the faint handwriting. It was a letter.

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Maisy. I am ninety-six years old, and for my entire life, I have been a selfish woman. I grew up in New York City— the Bronx, to be specific— although this was decades ago, and everything looks quite different now. We were a big family, my two parents and my five siblings and I, and we were a poor family, although I’ve recently learned that “low-income” may be a more socially acceptable word to describe my situation. In any case, like any poor or low-income kid, I was determined to change that, and when I turned eighteen, I seized every opportunity I had to move up in the world. I became the first woman in my family to attend college (on financial aid). I majored in accounting because there was always job availability (at least back then) and it paid well, and I even started at a full-time job before I graduated. From there, I really took off. I stayed with this accounting company for forty years, and I made sure I was noticed for every minute of it. I completed all my tasks, and was eager to learn new technology and other things, and was generally a good, loyal, capitalist worker. And my work was rewarded. I slowly but surely moved up the company ladder until I reached the top. I oversaw the entire company, and I was delighted to begin the expansion projects that were set in motion. But I did some very selfish things to get there, like stomping all over coworkers instead of praising them, and other, worse things, but I won't bog you down with the details. I know that you, dear receiver of this letter, probably don’t care about any of that. You want to know why you found $20,000 on a subway platform.

Well, I was selfish with my money, too. By the end of all the corporate climbing and corporate expansions, I had amassed a considerable fortune and had no husband or children to support with it. I had such a high income, in fact, that I rented a skyscraper apartment in the middle of Times Square and bought the most luxurious car available at the time. What I’m trying to say is, I spent my money entirely on myself, and after I retired, I was determined to spend every last penny before I died, just to ensure no one would get it who hadn’t earned it. That was the mentality I had for my entire adult life, that I had worked hard to make a fortune for myself and I wouldn’t just give handouts to people who didn’t want to put the work in. I am sad to say this mentality extended to my parents and siblings. I left that life of poverty behind me, and I wasn’t about to be sucked back in by giving money to them. I never gave to charity, never even advocated for poor families and never thought twice about it until I ended up in a nursing home. You see, I became too old to take care of myself, and I had no family to look after me. My parents were dead, I had no children or grandchildren and my siblings had long since stopped talking to me (those who were still alive). It was a very nice, state-of-the-art, privately funded nursing home and I quickly made friends with the other old ladies there, but it was through them that I started to re-think my stance on poverty. They were lucky enough to be in this nursing home, but some of their friends and family weren’t so lucky. They had to go to public, government nursing homes, where the underpaid staff didn’t care about them and it was just a place to die instead of having a meaningful last few decades. And this was after a lot of their friends had to work “retirement jobs” to afford all the prescriptions they needed, and after working at jobs that underpaid them as adults and didn’t give them opportunities to advance.

If you use social media at all, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Getting Facebook and Instagram is what really gave me a change of heart. Seeing all these posts from young people about the flaws of capitalism, the discrimination that people face when applying for jobs and even at their jobs, how people who start out with no money aren’t always able to work their way into a fortune like I did, how people who do start out with money have a headstart on people who grew up poor. And as I kept hearing different stories and seeing different posts, I wept when I realized how selfish I’d been. If I had taken the time to understand others, and reexamine my own past, maybe I could have helped a lot of people. Including my family. It’s too late to help what’s left of my family now, but I’ve decided I will use the last of my money to help people who need it. Lord knows I won’t be needing it very soon. So I got a nursing home worker to escort me to my bank, because you can make anything happen when you have money, and I withdrew every last dollar I had in that account. I divided up the cash into clumps of $20,000 each, bought a bunch of little, black notebooks at an office supply store and, well, the rest is history. And, I thought, what better place to spread these gifts around than the very place I grew up in, where my journey with poverty and wealth began.

And that, dear receiver of this letter, is what you should consider this sum of money — a gift. Not because I pity you, or even really because of you at all, but because this makes me feel better. I spent my entire life obsessed with money, and now I’ve been purged of that obsession. I will die with nothing, but I hope I at least gave some people everything. May you use this to buy drugs, or pay rent, or buy food, or buy some nice clothes for yourself or your children, whatever you see fit to do. It is yours.

Nyari kissed the paper until it was moist. Then she tucked the cash back into the notebook, and placed everything in the top drawer of her nightstand, under junk mail and magazines. As she drifted off to sleep, her mind whirled with the 20,000 opportunities that had just been given to her.