He traveled with her on the Empire Builder from Oregon to Chicago. He reveled in long-distance train trips when he was 22 because of the gentle sway of the lounge car at 2 AM, surrounded by cow fields, and because of the frequent opportunities to blow smoke into the night, and the rhythmic kissing of the wheel and the rail that traveled up the seat struts when he was reclined and reminded him of the way his father looked at his mother when he was small.
He took the long train home, even though it was a days-length journey with his heart broken over somebody like always, because he’d found there are few expectations on the train—except for the ones we bring with us—there’s just enough space and comfort to pretend you’re not surrounded by people, if that’s what you want to do. Even at the beach, when they’re half-naked and turning colors, he prefers to count his monsters, collect metaphors, shuffle sand between his palms and imagine, rather than interact. If pressed, he would very likely admit that he is afraid of them and of what they might demand with sad eyes.
Which is all to say that he wasn’t immediately interested in the woman across the aisle.
Twice his age, she had tired shoulders like his mother. Her dark hair was streaked with fading locks of purple and red and there was a feather stuck into her braid, up top, near the pink scalp. She must have taken it out every morning when she took down her hair in the tiny train bathroom and brushed it out and braided it back up and looked at herself in the mirror. There aren’t many unsuspected surfaces in a train bathroom speeding through Malta, Montana. He imagined that she pulled a strip of cheap thin toilet paper, laid it out on the baby changing table she’d unhooked from the wall, and set her feather on top of it while she washed. She slept with it in.
At first, they only inhaled together on smoke breaks in Spokane, in Havre, in Wolf Point. Standing just a few feet apart, they took in the bleak industrial world around the Amtrak stations, bared their teeth around their precious nicotine, dared the world to try it and imagined how it would. They shared ten or fifteen words at most, over days, shallow, passing noises. Her accent is what, in the South, they call “hillbilly.” There’s not much honey in it, no money at all. The sounds fell from her lips and broke their backs below and no one, as far as he knew, cultivates that kind of accent.
Still, they found, too, small and tenuous bonding-points. He showed her how to recline the seat. They laughed quietly at the drunk man behind them, slurring, slushing up and down the aisle, searching for something he never found. They communicated with optimistic hand signs after improvised baths in bathroom sinks so small that they could barely fit their hands under the tap to cup some water and bring it to their faces.
Her possessions, as far as he could tell: two large mason jars of strong homemade sweet tea in a green backpack with a tear near one strap, a dog-eared thriller she didn’t seem to like much, a book of number puzzles, a blue pen, and a tiny brown suitcase she only opened in the bathroom, if ever. When her second jar of tea spoiled unopened, the sweet turned tired and bitter, she bought a box of Capri Suns at a train station in Stanley, North Dakota and then gave the young man five of them because, as she said, she had lost the taste for them. He thanked her sincerely—thought that was very kind—and drank them all over the next half-day, though he also hated them. They were too sweet and somehow too thin; drinking them made him feel thirsty and sad. He wanted to cry for her, them, everybody. Spend your last bit, hoping for a little joy…
So, he drank all five of them, questing in the vacuum-pack for the last synthetic drops. He thanked her twice, and he liked her, in a general kind of way. But he wanted to be alone, so he was. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know. Not even her name. Which is, of course, unforgivably rude. See, when he was a little boy he felt like he could hold up everyone, shield them, change everything with that chilled diamond spring inside of him. But he’s grown up so much weaker, smaller than he’d hoped. And on that particular trip, 22 and unsure, he felt full-up on sadness. He didn’t know if she thought she was keeping her sadness in the small brown suitcase or in her braid or where, but he felt it, lumped and braided too, pushing out from between her shoulder blades, painted across her mouth. So he softened his one-word replies with a smile, and then he turned away.
In North Dakota, long after the luscious, magical green of the Northwest had evaporated into the night and just past the mesa embarrassed by the dump, chunky with lumped off-white mattresses, that was flowing down its front, a man sat down beside her. He had a magnificent, yellowed handlebar mustache and a military bearing gone to seed. She, understandably starved for friendship, greeted him happily, and within minutes, she and General Custard were swapping complaints, recipes, and stories, flirting in the halting, embarrassing way that widowers and outcasts and lonely people flirt, especially when they think there’s an audience. The young man smiled out the window while they talked and laughed through Devil’s Lake, through Fargo, through St. Cloud, Minnesota. He paused his music, though he left his headphones on.
After so many hours of train wheels, stuttered rhythms, days: a person who will meet her eyes.
One last smoke break in St. Paul, during which he didn’t see her at all, and then the train cleared and quieted, and General Custard lugged his mustache and his suitcase up a row. They all had room for silence, then, but from time to time she would lean forward or the General back, and they would repeat mantras from their intimate time earlier, when their heads had been touching, practically.
The long journey, the young man’s fiercely protected solitude, was nearing the end. He had read novels and magazines, written some self-pitying love poetry, filmed himself looking out the train window for no reason except to try to capture his mood (I’ve never used the footage for anything; it was useless). He had thought, again and again. He had written letters to his mother and his grandmother and to that guy, of course. None of which, for vital, hazy reasons, were ever mailed.
The pop-click rain of trays being put away rained down all around as he took down his small, stained bag. A tinny voice announced that they were very near Chicago now, but they didn’t need the voice. They all felt it looming and humming, barely perceptible but impossible to ignore, ahead. He pulled off his headphones as they passed under the lip of the city and snaked through the final palomino darkness.
At the liminal twilight edge of Union Station, she began to speak again to General Custard and to the gathered shadows, and maybe, even, to him. He could tell that this was something completely new, the kind of topic that can only be broached near the end, in a dancing half-dark. The train hushed, just a few hundred feet from the platform.
“She’s in graduate school right now,” she continued. “She’s finished up college already and is about to go on to get her graduate degree. After that, maybe she’ll go on and get the doctorate. And she’s engaged to a man who’s going to chef school. He’s going to be a very high chef someday.”
There was an emotion he couldn’t identify playing between her twanging consonants. Colonel Mustard mumbled something through his mustache that the young man couldn’t hear, even in the quiet, because of the hum of Chicago in his ears.
“She’s real good,” she said softly. “She knows she’s wealthy. Sometimes I wish I had given up my son, too, because then he could be that way. But he’s happy, and that’s important.”
“Well,” General Custard replied, “a regional manager at 20. He’s doing real well.”
“Yeah. He’s happy, that’s the important thing. He told me. He is happy.”
“Where in New Jersey does your daughter live?”
“That, I couldn’t tell you.”
A soft and poisonous sound, a malignant hissing, danced down the length of the train.
“Do you talk to her often?” the older man asked. He began shrugging on his overcoat in the mostly-dark and craning his neck to look out at the platform.
“Well, no. She’s ain’t got nothin’ but good news, and I ain’t got nothin’ but bad news, so it’s…”
They all waited in the dark. General Mustard, standing already, stared markedly at the platform, huffing. The silence stretched and stretched.
His last glimpse of her, this woman who smiled at him for two days and took his hints with kind aplomb and gave him vacuum-packed drinks and slept near him and had a rebellious fading dye job and who wondered if she should have given away both of her children instead of just one, was as she smoked illegally on the train platform inside the station. She caught his eye when his toes touched Illinois and he planted his feet, though there were people massing behind him, though a briefcase was courting the back of his knees. He planted his feet and looked her in the eyes.
It was a momentary irritation, a passenger being selfish, slowing progress. There was a shining apology woven in it, and a flood.
Soon enough he was smoking, alone again, like he always wanted, on the dirty sidewalk. It was warmer than he thought it would be. But, after all, it was summer in Chicago, summer somewhere in New Jersey.
John M. Parker is a freelance editor, a used bookseller, a forest-based off-grid homesteader, and a little bit odd. He grew up in Arkansas and graduated from Reed College in 2010.
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i just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading this piece. I thought it was really well written and it evoked so many images. Thanks for sharing it. Iris
Stunning essay. Extraordinary detail.
Hi John:
i just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed reading this piece. I thought it was really well written and it evoked so many images. Thanks for sharing it. Iris