The War for Couth Continues

So I mentioned the ferret-faced woman in my last post, and how a month or so went by until I saw her again.

When I got on at Civic Center this time, someone was in the window seat next to the chair I usually go for, so I sat an aisle back. The train got crowded quickly after that, and I noticed an elderly couple  looking for seats together; they might have been Indian immigrants. They hesitated by that open aisle seat before passing me by. Just then I saw ferret-face get on the train, looking for her best opportunity.

Behind me I heard a woman offer a seat to someone, and then an Indian-accented voice politely decline. Ferret-face passed me by, then began demanding someone move.

It escalated enough that people around me turned to look; I turned to look. A heavyset, shabbily dressed African-American woman sat with her back to the window, her legs across two seats, her feet touching the armrest. The elderly couple had passed by, but ferret-face had heard the black woman offer the seat, she demanded the black woman move so she could sit down.

The black woman refused. It became an argument, and ferret-face decided she would force the issue, she would sit down on the black woman’s ankles.

Enough of the moral laxity of the world! Men who do not rise graciously out of her way, or women who won’t sit properly in their seats!

When she lowered her kester on the black woman’s ankles, the black woman began to scream. “Oh, my fractured ankle, my fractured ankle!” Ferret-face popped up out of the chair like the weasel in the nursery rhyme.  The whole brouhaha grew in volume. People around us got up out of their seats and fled the train car.

Directly across from me, a tall, strawberry blonde got out of her seat and came back to referee the drama. Or maybe the comedy. Okay, I’ll admit, I found it more the latter.  Ferret-face was demanding that she move, as she had offered the chair to someone else. The black woman kept howling about her fractured ankle. Confronted by a second white woman, she exclaimed, “Leave me alone white people! Leave me alone white people!” And then, “Leave my family alone!”

There was no sign of her family in the vicinity. I’ve no idea where that family bit came from, except as some vestigial civil rights protest, or perhaps a sign of mental unhingement. 

Ferret-face gave up, but the blonde continued to hover. The black woman kept protesting, until someone behind me suggested that, if the blonde would perhaps return to her chair, the request for Caucasians to leave the black woman alone might end.

The blonde did, explaining loudly that she was just standing there to make sure it didn’t happen to someone else.  As we were hurtling along through the TransBay Tube at this point, what new riders she envisioned was hard to understand, but whatever.

The inability to make the world conform to a proper moral code is certainly irritating, if not downright infuriating for some. Meanwhile, I have to admit, I was kinda chuckling to myself. The look of conflicted horror on ferret-face’s mug was priceless. On one hand, she knew what was proper, correct, decent. On the other, she had appeared to wound an already-injured woman—how mortifying!

When I got up to get off the train in Oakland, I looked back. She was standing two rows away from her victim, and had her face buried in a book. She might even have been able to focus on it, for all I know. The black woman had her eyes closed, and still sat with her legs stretched across both seats, with the very smallest smile on her face.

Fractured ankle, my foot. No, I did not stride back through the car, tap ferret-face on the arm and grin, “Remember me?”

I figure she had been through enough.