Their clothes are cheap and colorful. They all look like children's book editors. We head farther out. We pass neighborhoods of houses with yards, swaths of endless tenements, industrial parks, more shade-covered neighborhoods. The people on the train are African, Korean, Russian, Italian, Jewish, black, white, prosperous and down and out.
Nobody pays any attention to anyone else.
A young Russian girl reads an adolescent novel in English, occasionally turning to ask her father something in Russian. The crowd in my car of the Q has thinned out. A man with a thick Slavic face, unshaven, splays his legs, holding a gymbag between them. His t-shirt is dirty and his expression is blank. The Russian women from DeKalb remain, gesticulating and talking fast.