I was standing in line at the crummy little cafe across the street from my mega-huge midtown office, staring with desperate longing at my cup of coffee that woman was slowly mixing sugar into. The woman right in front of me, whose husband was paying for their pancakes and who was clearly from a landlocked state, turned around, looked right at me, and then wordlessly started reaching towards the black patent-leather purse on my shoulder.
I stared RIGHT. AT. HER. Why in god’s name was this strange little pantomime happening? Why was she reaching toward my PURSE? Was she going to ask where I got it? Would I tell her the truth and say, “T.J. Maxx, baby,” or would I be a snob and lie and say, “Europe” or something? Or was this some new, direct form of pickpocketing, a postmodern commentary on theft and awareness? WHY WAS HER HAND GRAZING THE SIDE OF MY PURSE WHILE SHE STARED AT ME? WHY?
Seconds later, I realized her head was gesturing towards the serviceman with the handtruck that was trying to walk past me, that she was alerting me to shift out of the way in some bafflingly genuine and completely foreign approach to “love thy neighbor”. My startled and horrified face shifted into an awkward moment of gratitude as I moved out of the way, and our little tete-a-tete (or main-a-bourse) was over. She bought her syrup-drenched pancakes and joined her gaggle of blonde children all wearing tevos, and I got my life-affirming black coffee and crossed the street to enter the monolith that consumes my days.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the difference between the moment where I thought that this crazy country bumpkin madam was trying to either rob me or get a jump on my bargain, and the moment where she thought to gently alert a young woman to the obstacle behind her. Am I this jaded, that someone’s simple gesture of thoughtfulness causes a kerfuffle of confusion and defensiveness? What does it say that one of the reactions I considered, in that split second, was to smack her hand away, kid-from-cookie-jar style?
Or is she the weird crazy one? Who motions wordlessly to someone’s PURSE, who actually puts their fingers on another woman’s handbag, instead of simply nodding behind me with their head and USING LANGUAGE? She wasn’t foreign or non-English-speaking because I heard her ask the cashier if she had napkins, in a very midwestern nasal drawl. Did I mention how weird it was that she put her FINGERS, the tips of her FINGERS, on my PURSE? It was just surreal.
New Yorkers, in spite of and perhaps because of the close quarters in which we live, tend to keep our hands as far as politely possible away from our fellow travelers. I’ve actually seen someone fall over into a pole to avoid a woman’s protruding elbow on an otherwise absurdly crowded train. But how are tourists supposed to know this? My usual solution is to rudely shove them out of my way or cut deliberately obnoxious paths through their meandering chattering herds. When I’m not being incredibly nice to individual tourists who look lost (which, screw you, I do all the TIME), I am being passive-agressively evil to large cow-like gaggles of them.
Maybe this isn’t fair to them, though, not knowing the lengths to which we’ll go to not touch each other in the most crowded city ever. Maybe, when they fly in to JFK or ride into Port Authority, it should be one more travel advisory we give them: “Please note that the natives here do not like being touched, approached, or hugged without explicit consent. Please do not touch someone’s elbow if they’re about to walk into oncoming traffic – scream at them like any other civilized person. And please never, never, EVER touch a New York woman’s handbag without express and often written permission. Enjoy your stay.”