Overheard: Verbal Schooling

One day last week I was on my way home on the Orange Line. I had gotten a seat a few spots away from the doors, so I was reading a book and not paying attention to the goings-on in the train car. At some point I noticed a verbal skirmish going on nearby, as the voices of the two people involved had gotten louder. I wish I had heard more of it, because the brief snippet I caught was pretty entertaining.

I was able to discern that a middle-aged woman standing by the door was trying to lean against the bulkhead at the end of the row of seats, and the metal bar that's positioned a couple of inches above it. Another woman, quite a bit older, was sitting in the end seat, resting her left arm on the edge of the bulkhead,  and holding a travel mug. The standing woman wanted the seated woman to move her arm off the edge, and the seated woman would not yield because she wanted both to rest her arm and hold her beverage at a convenient position for sipping. (This is a lot of setup, I know, but trust me it's worth it.)

They traded some snappish remarks with each other, the standing woman eventually resorting to the tried-and-true Bostonian solution of flinging assorted curses at the seated woman. The older woman then proceeded to mock the younger woman because she wasn't clever enough to come up with anything more clever than calling her a selfish bitch, or along those lines. At this point I was smiling to myself, impressed by the older woman's resolve and wit.

I missed a couple of lines, but eventually the standing woman, knowing she was losing, already embarrassed by the seated woman's cutting remarks, and getting a bit desperate, said something along like, "why can't you just let me lean here?" The response was, "I don't want your butt on my arm. I don't know where that behind has been."

I started to laugh out loud at that one, then quickly clapped my hand over my mouth and turned my  noise into a fake throat-clearing, because I did not want to betray evidence that I had been listening. But that was the final blow; the standing woman gave up with a sigh. Had this been happening on a TV show, the older woman would have done an imaginary mic drop, and for once that overused gesture would have been entirely earned and appropriate.