Subway Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

firsthand accounts of the horrors people had survived — children, teenagers, girls, climbing out of bloody pits and living to tell about it. The key was to bear witness, to survive in order to let someone know.
    Three weeks had gone by before Mitchell and Laura came back to the city to visit their dad. The subway ride had been uneventful, and her dad had even lightened up on the hair-cutting issue. He was probably playing chicken with Mitchell, but it wasn’t going to work, Laura knew it.
    After she read Anne Frank’s diary in seventh grade, she had even lied about being Jewish at Rob Schiff’s bar mitzvah, telling a group of out-of-town girls that her mother was Jewish but had converted to Christianity in order to escape from Germany during World War II.
    “So, how old is your mother?” one of the girls asked.
    It was too late to try to do the math.
    “You don’t look German.”
    And the whole thing started to fall apart.
    “I gotta go,” Laura said quickly. She rushed out of the lobby back into the catering hall, where Rob’s grandfather was cutting a big loaf of bread.
    Now walking down Fifth Avenue by herself, Laura could imagine herself Jewish: a survivor, albeit a survivor who’d just eaten a bologna, mustard, and potato chip sandwich; her dad even had Wonder bread and whole milk and Nesquik. She could pretend she lived in the city. She walked with a quicker pace, as if she had someplace to go and knew how to get there.
    There wasn’t as much psychedelic fashion in Midtown as there was downtown. Here were businessmen in suits, and women who still wore panty hose and, most likely, bras. And looking into the windows of the famous department stores on Fifth was like watching a frozen television screen. Everything was perfect and beautiful on TV.
    Laura stopped in front of Saks, although she knew it made her appear to be a tourist; only visitors to the city stared into the display windows or looked up at the tall buildings, but as much as Laura wanted to belong, she couldn’t help doing both.
    A very skinny man wearing a tight jumpsuit was behind the glass, setting up a display. One of the mannequins was already dressed in a red-and-green-checked maxi dress. The other one was outfitted in the same material but was wearing a bell-bottom pantsuit. Everything reflected December and a Christmas that was still more than a month away. There was even fake snow on the floor of the display. The man inside the window glanced — or glared — at Laura, then ignored her and continued working. He was certainly not a visitor to New York.
    He draped the maxi-dressed mannequin in love beads, and on the bell-bottom girl he placed a pointy red Santa hat. Over each, he dropped a short shearling jacket. He slipped a pair of gloves between the stiff fingers of each mannequin. He then affixed a round, colorful oversize peace-sign pin to each lapel.
    Bruce, who had a bumper sticker on his VW that read I ’M A P EACENIK hit Laura the first time when she wouldn’t eat the seaweed he had served for dinner.
    “It’s food.” His face was dark and unfamiliar, as if Laura had never seen him before. She suddenly couldn’t place who he was.
    “I don’t like it,” she answered.
    Across the table Mitchell acted as if none of this was going on, as if he was sitting at the dining-room table alone, enjoying his plate of brown rice and seaweed, as if they had never lived a different life, as if all of this was perfectly normal.
    Laura hated her brother in that moment, in that moment when Bruce smacked the back of her head, thrusting her head forward. Her teeth rattled, but nothing more. No big deal. Laura felt the blow for several more seconds, fear and anger tracking along with her red blood cells, and she calculated the amount of milk needed to wash down the salty black crap on her plate.
    Where was her mother? In the kitchen? At the table?
    Had anyone seen? Had everyone?
    Laura knew Bruce didn’t care if she ate her dinner or not,