I’m sandwiched into an awkward corner of the train-car, surrounded by delirious patriotism. The gawky, slender blonde across the car wears white jeans and a garish American-flag jacket, and I wonder why I feel offended.

And is that jacket a once-yearly wardrobe choice? Where in the US is the temperature appropriate for a jacket on the fourth of July? It was certainly too warm for it back on the sticky subway platform, where relief comes every seven minutes, when a train whooshes by and then vanishes again as the last car sucks the breeze back into the darkness. I could feel the perspiration beading up and then dropping down the backs of my thighs at Clark Street.

A mother and daughter board the train at Chambers Street: the mother wears a red sports-bra, and a belly-button piercing glimmers murkily amid rolls of flesh, pushed up and out by restrictively tight black pants. Her daughter looks to be about 17, and deeply embarrassed by her mother’s choice of attire. The pair settles around me like two meaty arms in a slack embrace. Mom reaches across my body for the greasy steel pole, and I can feel their eyes tripping across my frame: hair, eyes, mouth, shirt, shoulders, pants, shoes, bag. Such scrutiny becomes unbearable at one-and-a-half feet. I am suddenly self-conscious. I look over their heads, feigning interest in a “Mitchum Man” ad.

Her arm sways with the train’s subtle motion, and bounces lightly on my chest.

It is too intimate.