Julie A. Jacob

Kyle Torke

Red Cab, Blue Cab, Yellow Cab, Green Cab

To be a single woman living on the north side of Chicago is to stand on a curb somewhere at 11 p.m. on a humid August evening, maybe after Jammin’ at the Zoo or the outdoor movie festival in Grant Park, lifting the hair off the back of your neck, slapping at mosquitoes, and scanning the street for a cab.

To be a single woman in Chicago is to shiver at 9 p.m. on an icy sidewalk somewhere in Lincoln Park on a January night as cold and clear as vodka, arm raised in the air, the tips of your cute black ankle boots soaked from the slush, hoping that a cab will appear.

To be a single woman in Chicago is to leave bits and pieces of your life scattered in the back seats of cabs: the leather planner book stamped with your initials, a bag of leftover angel hair pasta from that wonderful Italian restaurant, a leather glove, your hat.

When people ask me "What's it like to live in Chicago?" I tell them about outrageous prices of housing, impossible parking, broken down buses, and noisy el trains—and about summers filled with Cubs games and neighborhood festivals and movies in the park and volleyball on North Avenue beach; interesting plays; museums, wonderful restaurants; the lakefront.

But if you were to ask me this question 20 years from now, when maybe I'll be married, or maybe I'll be living back in Wisconsin in a tidy ranch houses with pots of geraniums on the front porch I'll reply: "to live in Chicago was to sit in the back of cab, alone, at night, gazing out the window, sometimes marveling and sometimes despairing about the place I lived."

Eliot's Prufock measured his life in spoonfuls of coffee, but I've marked my life in Chicago by the cabs I've taken. I've ridden in, I don't know, maybe 1,200 cabs in 13 years. That averages out to about two cabs a week. When I was younger and poorer and braver, a cab ride was a treat, a last resort, a luxury reserved for after 10 p.m. or below 30 degrees. I take them more often now, after two muggings and two moves to better jobs, and write off the fare as part of the cost of big-city life.

Yellow cabs, blue cabs, white cabs, red cabs, green cabs, I've taken them all. Yellow Cab, Flash Cab, Checker Cab, Carriage Cab, Wolley Cab, Blue Ribbon Cab. I've ridden in cars from every company.

Funny, I never thought I'd become so intimate with the worn plush back seat of a cab; the stale scent like an old hotel room; the cloudy plastic seat divider.

When I was a girl, a cab ride was something exotic, an adventure that happened but once a year, when my mother, aunt, sister, and I journeyed down to Chicago for lunch and a play. We would try to keep a straight face as we took the cab from Union Station to Water Tower Place, but we couldn't help laughing, squashed four across in the back seat as the driver careened through the streets of that enormous city.

Yet here I am 30 years later, a habitual cab taker, with the numbers of Yellow and Flash Cab stored in my cell phone, a woman who taught her niece how to hail a cab. How I got from there to here is another story, a story that I still haven't quite figured out.

To step into a cab as a woman alone is a leap of faith. Each time I open a cab door and slide into the back seat, I must believe that this unknown car is in good condition, that the strange man at the wheel (of all the drivers through all these years, just one has been a woman) is a safe driver who will not hurt me and knows his way around the city.

It's all there in a cab ride, every emotion a single woman can feel in Chicago: Hope, excitement, anticipation, boredom, disappointment, exhaustion. It's all there, bundled inside a 10-minute cab ride, ready to be pulled out like the dollar bills tucked in your wallet. Cabs take us to where we want to go, or where we think we should be, and whisk us away from places we want to escape.

I've hugged friends good-bye as a cab pulls alongside the curb, happily clambered in the back seat next to a boyfriend, gratefully leaped in one at the end of an excruciating blind date, hopped in eagerly on the way to a party; flopped wearily in one at the end of a long day, and anxiously gripped the edges of the seat on the way to Union Station to catch a train to Wisconsin to see my father in the hospital.

There are many cab stories that I could tell, but this is the one that I'll tell.

It was an evening at the tail end of summer. I sat on a bench in the lobby of my condo building, waiting. I had turned on the cab light, and the timer hummed while the orange light twirled above by the door.

It was a lovely night. The moon floated above the lake; the first stars dusted the sky. I was going to a party that was going to be held on a rooftop deck, organized by a social group for adults with an enthusiasm for politics, a party where I hoped I might meet some smart, interesting new people.

A cab, a yellow one, pulled into the driveway, and I got up, smoothing my tan cotton skirt, and hurried toward it, my sandals slapping against the floor. I smiled because the night was warm and sweet, and I was looking forward to the party.

The cab driver was a balding, 50-ish man, Middle Eastern, I think, wearing a wrinkled white shirt. I gave him the address, a place on Armitage west of Lincoln Park. He glanced over his shoulder at me and said in accented English, "You are a beautiful woman. Where are you going tonight?"

"A party," I said. "A party outside on a deck." Inwardly, I thought uh-oh. It's going to be one of those annoying cab rides.

"You look very beautiful tonight," the cab driver repeated.

And you, I thought, are either hitting on me or trolling for a bigger tip. In any case, I wasn't biting. I did what I always did when I didn't want to talk to the driver. I turned my head away and gazed out the window. I watched the city slip by: the highrises along Lake Shore Drive and then, as the cab nosed into Lincoln Park, the narrow streets and brick townhouses, the coffee shops, boutiques, and sports bars.

It worked. The driver made one or two more attempts to make conversation, then gave up and started making calls on his cell phone in another language.

As the chic townhouses of Lincoln Park melted away and were replaced by the grittier buildings of west Bucktown, I found myself wondering, as I often did on these lonely cab rides, what am I doing here? Somewhere,I thought, in an imaginary alternate universe, there is an imaginary, alternate, more confident me, a woman who went after what she wanted and had met and married the right man, not pined for the wrongs as I had in this universe. At this very moment, this imaginary me in this alternate universe was at home with her husband and children. I imagined this alternate me folding laundry or making lunches for her children, while my husband—a cute, sexy, loving husband in this alternate universe—worked at the computer and the kids did their homework. I wondered what she would think of the single me. Would she feel pity for her alternate self going alone to a party of strangers, or would she wish, just for a moment, as she stood in the laundry room with an armful of towels, that she, too, was getting into a cab, escaping for an evening from the chores and the kids and the spouse? Did she, too, imagine an alternate self who had stayed single and gone after what she wanted and lived an interesting life as a single career woman in a big city?

It was a question I couldn't answer.

The driver pulled up to my destination. It was a complex of pale townhouses, set back behind a black iron gate, across the street from a currency exchange and a donut shop, a gentrified outpost in a changing neighborhood.

The party turned out to be a dud, at least for me; I can't speak for the others there. Only a dozen people showed up, not the 30 or 40 people I had hoped for. They were mostly in their 20s, a good ten years younger than me. The rooftop had long been abandoned for the living room and television set. I sat on a folding chair and sipped a diet soda, feeling like an alien life form among these confident 20-somethings. What was I doing sitting in this unknown living room, among these self-assured young strangers? Oh, give yourself an "A" for trying, I told myself.

An hour later I stood inside the iron gate, waiting for yet another cab to take me home. I had called Yellow Cab from my cell phone; the dispatcher gave me a cab number and told me to look for it in 10 minutes.

The cab pulled along the curb, right on time. I hopped in and gave the driver my address, but I noticed that the cab number on the permit taped to the divider was not the one I had been given. I didn't care. It was a way home.

This driver was young, skinny, and dark-haired, with an angular face sprinkled with acne scars. His English was accented; Eastern European I guessed.

My cell phone chirped. It was the cab company. Did the cab arrive, the dispatcher asked? Yes, I said. Was it the cab number she had given me? Yes, I lied. What would be the point of saying no? I was in the cab now, and if my driver had heard the dispatch and gotten here quicker than the cab that was assigned, then good for him.

I opened the window to the night air, still sticky and thick at 10:30 p.m.

As the cab cruised north up Ashland, the driver asked, "How are you tonight?"

"Tired," I answered honestly. I looked out the window.

"I will play some music," he said. "I think you will like this." With one hand on the wheel, he rummaged around on the seat, grabbed a CD, and slipped it into the player.

"Lady in Red" wafted through the cab.

Oh no, I thought to myself. Not this again. Why is it, I wondered, I cannot meet a nice man at a party, but every cab driver tonight wants to flirt with me? Then, I thought, why not laugh about it? After all, I’m 40, and how many more years will cab drivers hit on me before I become just another invisible, gray-haired middle-aged woman in the back seat?

And because it was 10:30 p.m., and I was tired and discouraged, I did something I rarely did with cab drivers. I started a conversation.

"What do you have to do,” I asked, "to become a cab driver?"

Maybe he sensed my loneliness, or maybe he was lonely too, on this tender September night, a night of grace and promise, a night not meant to be driving a cab, for he launched into a description of all he had to do to become a cab driver,

He had to take a class, he said, at the city college. He had to pass a test in geography and prove that he knew where all the streets were in Chicago. He had to pass an English test. And, he added, warming up to his subject, he had to learn how to help the—he hunted for the word—someone who uses a wheelchair. Disabled, I contributed. Yes, disabled, he nodded. Drivers must show they know how to help them, he said, and also know how to lift luggage into the car and reason with passengers who are angry.

"Where are you from?" I asked as the cab glided up Sheridan Road through Uptown.

"Romania," he answered

"There was a man in my martial arts class who was from Romania," I said. "Tall guy. Really good at kung fu."

He nodded.

"Do you like America?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It's fine."

"Why did you come here?" I asked.

"I studied economics at university in Romania," he said. "I lived in London for awhile and then came over here."

"Do you find it difficult to make friends with Americans?" I asked. "I met a man once when I was walking my dog, a Bosnian, and he said it was hard to make friends here."

I didn't tell him that the friendly young Bosnian man had asked to have coffee with me, and I had given my e-mail address, just to be polite, and then didn't respond to his message, although he seemed nice, because I just didn't see what I'd have in common with a man from Bosnia and didn't want to waste time meeting someone I had no intention of dating.

Another shrug. "I have my friends from Romania. My girlfriend. We do things."

"Americans are not really that friendly," I told him. "We seem friendly, but it's all on the surface. It's hard to make friends here. In fact, you don't even know who your friends really are here until you need them."

"It's different in Europe," he said. "There, a friend is a friend."

We chatted for another few minutes until the cab pulled up to my building. I opened my wallet and quickly pulled out my money. For that is another thing about cabs: when the cab reaches my destination, I hurry to pay and exit. I know the driver is impatient and wants to go on to his next fare, and, besides, it's when the car stops moving that the oddness of the situation—the unknown car, the strange driver—hits me and I want to leave at once.

"Thank you for the conversation," he said. "It was enjoyable."

"Yes, it was good," I agreed "Thank you."

And it was true. I had spent $30 on roundtrip cab fare to a party, and the most interesting part of the evening ended up being a five-minute conversation with a Romanian cab driver.

Perhaps it was fitting that the evening turned out like that. One of the challenges of living in a huge city is trying to connect with other people, with a neighborhood, with a place where you feel you belong, and it's often the cab that connects you with other people. Maybe it was right that my most interesting connection that evening happened in a cab.

Someday when I am retired and living in my cozy ranch house in Wisconsin, and Chicago is just a series of memories, something in another time and life, and going to Chicago is once again an exciting journey undertaken only once or twice a year, it is the cab rides that I will still vividly remember. Hope and anticipation and anxiety and disappointment, it's all there, waiting, in an open cab door.

Julie A. Jacob recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Roosevelt University in Chicago and works as a communications manager for a non-profit association.