Louise and The Men of Transit

New Team

In the early morning light, Louise approached the three entrance doors of the TTC's Head Office. She read the bronze plaque on their left: Toronto Transit Commission. She sighed happily. She was here. She was finally here!

She grasped the middle door's vertical narrow black handle with its vertical silver letters spelling P-U-L-L and pushed. The TTC's glass entrance door didn't budge. Through the glass and over the door's horizontal steel brace, she spotted a man head down, eyes on his smartphone, rushing toward her. She backpedalled hurriedly, her overstuffed soft-leather purse in its usual snug place slightly behind her right armpit, helping to pull her backwards; the rushing man reached forward blindly and pushed open the door with a sharp squeak.

Oh.

She had to pull.

Louise rolled her eyes at herself.

The door banged shut with an empty bounce. Its hydraulic arm was all out of oil juice, apparently. With a vigorous step forward, Louise grasped the handle again and, this time, pulled open the door. She was going to learn fast, she told herself, so that she could be one of them in no time. She stepped onto one of Toronto's ubiquitous black entrance carpets and automatically wiped her shoes. Seeing others not doing the same as they walked past her and through the squeaking, banging doors, she stopped, looked ahead, and spotted black-and-white headshots in white-matted oak frames hanging on three walls opposite her in a rectangular alcove. Louise's lips parted slightly, and her eyes expanded. People walked past the alcove, left to right, right to left. She stepped on to the enduring terrazzo floor and crept through the stream of people towards the alcove to stare at the black-and-white photos of men lining the alcove walls. She walked into the alcove, her reflection appearing in its polished stone walls, and turned to her left to stare at the nine old photos of men in hats, men in semi-profile, a ship of some sort — she wasn't interested in ships or vehicles or the inscriptions, only this image history of TTC Chairs from way, way back. A century back! She stared at every man. She read their names in the nameplates below their photographed faces. She turned halfway to her right and stared at the men from 1959 to 1979, six of them, their framed faces arrayed in an enormous mahogany frame with matching back, like the other photographed and framed faces were. She shifted her feet to the right and stared into a large display case, its mahogany-framed glass protecting its contents. Above the case, affixed to the stone wall, was the familiar red-and-white TTC art-deco style logo, with its early-twentieth-century-style letters one on top of another, proudly declaring to all that these were TTC accomplishments below it.

Squeak. Bang.

Suddenly recalling to herself that she was supposed to be meeting her new boss here, Louise turned on her heel and studied the entrance. She looked to her left. That seemed to be a station on the other side of those glass doors. She looked to her right, through more glass doors and glass side panels, the right one of which had two red lines painted horizontally halfway up them with the black letters "Toronto Transit Commission" interrupting the lines in the centre. Reading those letters, Louise wanted to squeal. She felt like a kid in a candy store. Be an adult, Louise, she sternly instructed herself.

Louise cleared her throat as, through the glass, she spotted a three-sided high desk of gleaming reddish wood and plastic-silver corners and tall base, set in front of floor-to-ceiling deep-set windows marching towards the other end of the foyer. An attractive woman stood behind the inset low counter, neat in her black suit and white shirt. Behind her, the rising sun blasted light through the 1950s-style windows. A white shade was pulled halfway down in the window directly behind her. Louise directed her steps that way. She pulled on the vertical thin black handle of the right-hand glass door. She walked through and to the desk.

"I'm here to meet Andy —," she began proudly when the woman interrupted her with an outstretched arm and a pointing finger. Louise turned her head to follow its direction back through the doors she had just walked through. She squinted into the entrance area. Nothing, only a couple of people walking in and out and through the doors she'd just entered and past her. She looked further, through the next set of glass doors and into the station where people in many colours hustled this way and that — except for one man. He was standing, hands firmly clasped behind his straight back, very still.