Louise and The Men of Transit

New Safety

Louise smiled, "Numbers are simpler. Anyone speaking any language can understand numbers, like you two."

"We know English street names. We come here, we learn, and then you make it complicated."

Louise repeated to herself silently: I won't be confused. Numbers are better. The TTC Way is for customer convenience. She said as she walked towards the stairs rising from the centre of the platform, "We go here to change to Line Four." Louise led them up the stairs, down corridors, down more stairs, and onto the vast grey platform with its hulking concrete columns of the Purple-Red Line Four's Sheppard-Yonge station.

"Here we are!"

The two customers looked around, their heads like a swivelling TTC chair. "This is twenty-five?"

"No, no. This will take us to twenty-five."

"Okay." They crept closer to each other.

"There's a Toronto Rocket Cars waiting for us," Louise chirped, walking forward.

The two customers stepped backwards, eyeing Louise's confident back uncertainly.

Louise sensed their disappearing presence and looked over her shoulder. She reversed her course to stand before them. They were all of the same height, yet she felt taller, bigger. She pointed to the stainless steel train. "Toronto Rocket Cars," she beamed.

"Rocket?" asked the first female customer.

"It looks more like a train," said the second.

Louise felt her lips stretch as her energy began to recede from her eyes. "Yes, the TTC team held a contest. Torontonians voted to call it the Toronto Rocket Cars."

"Okay," the first one said hesitantly, eyeballing her companion, then looking back at Louise like she'd grown three heads.

"The . . . train," Louise said, caving in to their English terminology, "will take us to twenty-five."

The two suddenly trotted to the train as the chimes began to sound. Louise jogged after them and slammed into the closing doors. They fled open. She hit the toes of her right patent-leather shod foot against the edge of the train in the gap between train and platform and almost hopped backwards in pain. The doors began to close. One of the small customers grabbed her wrist and pulled her inward. Louise's shoulders hit the closing doors. Her purse swung into the right-side door. The doors slammed open. A male voice bellowed over the intercom: "Please keep clear of the doors. If you don't keep clear, this train will go out of service because these doors don't like people hitting them. Keep clear of the doors!"

Swallowing guiltily and aided by the force of the woman holding her wrist, Louise stumbled on. The doors shut behind her. "Thank you," Louise gasped. The customer smiled and let go of her wrist. The two customers walked a car length to a set of empty seats and sat as Louise limped in their wake. As Louise sagged into her seat, the customers giggled to each other and chattered all the way to the other end of the short line. After they entered and left the next station, Louise slowly sat up straight. She rotated her shoulders up and back. She reminded herself she was part of the TTC  team. She could do this. She could enact the Sixth Way; we will go out of our way to help, she repeated to herself. She focused her eyes back to reality and came eyeball to eyeball with a blue-eyed glare.

"This subway," snapped the female customer on the seat across from her, her calves precisely aligned against each other, her thick leather blush-pink Carriage handbag perched on her lap, "is too short. If that little man Harris hadn't axed it in half, I could have taken Sheppard all the way to the Scarborough Town Centre. Instead, I have to get off halfway to my destination and wait for a bus." The woman spat the last word out contemptuously. Louise felt pinned to her seat. "The TTC is an inadequate excuse for a subway. We have little men carrying on Harris's small-minded cheap ways talking about their evidence-based this and evidence-based that, and meanwhile I have to wait for an unnecessary transfer, get on a slow, uncomfortably packed bus, and somehow get home in time for my nanny to leave for her second job and for me," the woman paused eloquently, "to ensure dinner is ready for my husband. How do you TTC people expect me to get home on time waiting for extra transfers and using the slowest form of transport that stops. At. Every. Single. Intersection?" The glaring customer didn't wait for Louise to answer as she ground on: "I do not have time to wait nor do I want to transfer on to fancy-named streetcars to take me to where this subway should take me. My days are long. I work!" she snarled at Louise. "I don't want to be getting up every two seconds to change vehicles." Her plummy British tones crushed Louise into her seat. "I left a real world-class city to come to this squalid town with its tiny-minded excuse of a public transit. How your small-minded politicians could screw up subways so badly is beyond me. They not only screwed this subway, but they also can't even get the new vehicles right. Look at this!" She flung a contemptuous hand towards the other end of the long brightly-lit aisle as the Toronto Rocket Cars flew down the long, black-as-night tunnel, its lights flashing by like exclamating dashes.