Weekend Words

Grand Central Station

Ruby stepped off the train to Manhattan accompanying a heavy heart, hoping that she would find work as a seamstress. She had no life experience. Ruby worked as a seamstress after her graduation from the eighth grade.

But now, she was regretting her decision to become a seamstress. She recalled what the work-experienced, soul-weary older woman told her on the train to Manhattan.

"Seamstresses running their own work in the city are a dime-a-dozen. If you want to work as a seamstress, try your hand at domestic service. You're still young. They'd take a little whelp like you in the blink of an eye."

The words were a gut-punch to Ruby, as she was expecting the older woman to praise her for her decision to find solid work in the city, like she promised her mother she would do. The bustling crowds, even on that platform in Grand Central Station, was a shock compared to the quiet village life in Manhasset.

Passing Ruby by, she heard people conversing in a language she had presumed to be French. Ruby noticed people who were from Turkey, as she picked up on one or two Turkish words in their conversation. She looked away after they realized Ruby staring. Their eyes were friendly, and the couple spoke to her in their language, but Ruby could not understand, so she shook her head.

She felt like a right fool. Their language intrigued her ever since she met Adem, the old Turkish man who lived in the village close to her old home when she was around five. Adem had immigrated from Turkey to New York some time ago and had set up a small milliner's shop where Ruby and her mother would sometimes buy fabrics from Adem. The thought of Adem and home made her heart squeeze in her chest, the almost foreign sensation like a lance piercing her soul.

As Ruby floated in and out of the crowds of Grand Central, luggage in tow, it hit her like bricks. She was in a vast sea of complete strangers. She had been in the city for five minutes and already she was having doubts. How would she survive in this place? A place that did not recognize her. She had no kin here, at least no one that would recognize her as their own.

Ruby floated in and out, trying to fly away from everything. She could find the ticket-stand. Ask for a ticket back home to Manhasset. She wanted to see her siblings again, embrace her mother again, and help her with the children. That was what her calling was, helping her family. Not this silly pipe dream where she would never find work and die alone and homeless on the streets of the city.

"No," she whispered to herself. "You've come this far, Ruby. You're not turning back now. Not after all this time."

She wiped away a single tear and took her luggage and asked the person closest to her where the exit was.