Free Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman Page B

achieved anything. In fact, I felt exactly the opposite: like I had lost something, but I had no idea what.
    I kept walking for a while until I came to a subway. I went down to the platform and, looking around, realized that my surroundings seemed familiar. The slab walls were cracked and grimy, letters were missing from the tile plaques that spelled out the name of the stop, and filthy water, leaking from eternally broken pipes, was pooled around the train tracks. But even though the station had probably not looked quite so dismal when I’d last been here, I knew exactly where I was. By random chance, I had found myself in one of the older stations that served as a hub for several different subway lines—a place where I had waited with my parents to change from one train to another when we were on our way to Rockaway. The routine, for our family, was that Avi drove to Rockaway in his Impala with my grandmother in the seat beside him and the rest of the family’s belongings packed into the trunk, with the overflow stashed in the back seat. My parents and I met them after riding the subway, specifically the A train, for the longest distance possible to cover, point to point, on the entire system: from the northwest Bronx to the end of the Rockaway Peninsula.
    I was still feeling edgy and out of sorts. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of what felt like an endless afternoon sitting around in my cold apartment, but I didn’t have anyplace else in mind to go, so I left my next move to fate. If the E train arrived first, the line I needed to take to get home, then that was where I was going. But if the A train did, I was going to get on it and ride, once again, to the end of the line.
    No train at all came for quite a while. But finally, leaning over the edge of the platform, I saw a pair of bright yellow headlights appear in the tunnel. As they came closer, I could hear the screech of steel wheels against the steel track and feel the great, sighing wind that precedes a train as it pulls into the station. As the first car finally emerged from the darkness, I saw the round, illuminated circle above the conductor’s cab framing the letter “A.”
    I got on and found a seat in a middle car. It was a long ride out to Rockaway; about an hour and a half as the train plowed along, first crossing under the East River into Brooklyn and then making what seemed like every stop in the borough before heading into Queens. Eventually, the train emerged from underground and became an elevated line, traveling along tracks that ran above old immigrant neighborhoods where you could peer into the windows of apartment buildings as your car rushed past someone’s kitchen, someone else’s empty living room looking bleak and lonely in the middle hours of a gray afternoon.
    When the train left Queens, it made a hairpin turn around a bend in the track, and began heading toward Rockaway. After a while, it crossed over a trestle bridge that spanned Jamaica Bay, where I could see, in the distance, planes coming and going from the airport where, on most any other day, I would be just about arriving for work. Once it traversed the bay, passing by a line of ruined bungalows built on a crumbling pier, the train turned east to follow the shoreline of the narrow peninsula. Now, outside the window, I could see the Atlantic Ocean. The water was the dull color of graphite, and when the doors opened at the first station near the beach, I could hear the waves; there was not much surf today, so the ocean sounded like it was mumbling to itself as it rolled a few choppy breakers toward the shore.
    I couldn’t even count how many years it had been since I’d set foot in this place. Though I had heard about how badly the area had declined, decimated by changing times, I was still not prepared for what I saw as the train rolled on. My parents’ working-class generation had been grateful to be able to afford a few weeks in a boarding house by the shore, but