I’d
been on the train for weeks. On and off, off and on. I’d gone
from the Carolinas up to Boston, then to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland,
Fort Wayne, to Chicago, and at last to Indianapolis. The point of the
thing had been to see old friends here and there, to hold their
children, to eat at their tables, walk their sidewalks, and curl up
on their couches.
But
thanks to the Amtrak I’d sat side by side with dozens of new
people as well. There had been the man with his headphones on the
middle of the night who closed his eyes and played jazz with abandon
on an imaginary keyboard, the woman next to me as our train crept
into Chicago who told me her husband died of COVID and asked
curiously whether I thought graffiti qualified as art, and there had
been the large Amish families, gentle, quiet, and orderly, smelling
sharp and earthy from their lack of deodorant.
These
were all small gifts of peopleishness, but it was the last leg of my
trip—the one back to North Carolina—that held heaping
treasures of raw human oddity.
Prologue:
A Station in Indiana
My
friend Hannah dropped me off at the station in downtown Indianapolis
around 11pm on a Saturday. It was combined with a Greyhound station
which my weeks of experience had taught me was the worst kind for a
woman traveling alone. But this was what I’d signed up for, so
I settled myself near a family with small kids and put my headphones
in, legs corkscrewing round each other, taking up as little space as
possible.
And
together we all waited in that place, several people asleep in
shadowy corners on the grungy flooring, other folks, the ones who
looked as if they actually had a ticket, lying blearily down to sleep
across one wire bench and then the other.
Our
train was delayed by one hour and then two and then three as lilting
folk music played in my ears. A man walked around with his shirt off,
another wandered the whole station in figure eights, talking loudly
and continuously to no one, sometimes sitting for a while and trying
to address himself to a waiting passenger, then getting up to do
another lap. He was large the way a pineapple is large and wore pants
which did not fit, held up on one side by a single suspender and on
the other by his right hand. Eventually his agitation fully boiled
over and he began to curse loudly, until the lone station attendant
patiently ejected him as if he did it every night and stood with him
outside for a smoke.
A
woman with three tiny kids who looked months apart in age carted them
from here to there around the room in a big canvas wagon. Her oldest,
who was about three, locked eyes with a little boy around his age a
few yards away and began to exchange joyful howls with him. They
giggled back and forth between unafraid hoots and then passed out
cold on the heavy wire benches. I was envious.
A
group of older black women dressed entirely in red sported the
letters of their sorority, discussed the reunion they’d just
been at and fretted gently about the delay and the bleary late hours
spent beneath fluorescent lights, their bags propped on grimy
terracotta tiles. The ceiling above us rumbled every time a freight
train passed over, reminding us of where we were not.
ACT
ONE:
We
boarded that train at three-thirty in the morning. The woman already
parked in the seat next to me muttered to herself as I sat down. She
was double face-masked and held a pink fleece blanket up past her
chin. Her sizable luggage was grouped cautiously around her feet
rather than stowed away in the racks above. I wondered if her mumbles
were sleep-talk, or something passive aggressive which she wanted me
to hear about all the noise I was making, settling into the seat next
to her in the wee hours. But then I realized she was praying: “Oh.
Lord Jesus, Oh Lord Jesus, in Jesus name” she kept saying. “In
Jesus name.”
I
prayed a bit beside her in silence and then tried to sleep while the
tide of her muttering rose and receded beside me. By fifteen minutes
into our journey, we had stopped behind a broken freight train. There
was nowhere to go, back or forward, so we spent eight hours of that
Sunday morning on the tracks.
In
this time, to my unbridled (and perhaps voyeuristic) fascination, my
seat-mate revealed herself to be an honest-to-goodness Flannery
O’Connor character. She never removed her double masks, but
snuck crumbs of snacks under them in tiny tidbits fit for a mouse, as
if to hide from prying eyes the raw truth that she needed sustenance
at all. My eyes were, however, prying and I could not restrain myself
from glancing over as she scribbled her thoughts in all directions on
scraps of paper scrambled from her purse. “In Jesus name,”
one read, “I am not single, I am married to the Lord, I am NOT
gay.” She continued to pray in an audible whisper sometimes
which kept me company for all those long hours. I racked my brain for
what friendly thing I could say to her, but she seemed impervious to
friendliness. When she went to the bathroom, she left her Bible
carefully propped upright on her suitcase as if to ward off evil.
It
was cold on the train despite July temperatures outside, and one of
the sorority women from the station the night before lent me a
blanket. (I think she regretted it later, because I had it for
several hours.) The loudspeaker rang with incessant announcements
reminding us to please, for the love, please flush
the
toilets.
Around
me, people mostly kept their cool with the conductors but not always.
I put my headphones in when they didn’t. The train eventually
began to move again and we crept through the gorgeous green of
Kentucky and West Virginia. I snacked on pretzels, and bought a
bitter hot tea from the snack bar. By sometime in the afternoon, I
was convinced I could hear bird song in the car, and kept glancing up
to the low ceiling as if a creature might be winging its way down the
whole length of the train aisle.
On
Sunday evening, my seatmate called a conductor over to ask if she
could move to one of the handicap seats with clear space in front of
it. (Her leg was in a boot, something it took me a few hours to
realize because there was so much else about her to notice.) No one
ever got back to her, though, whether out of forgetfulness, or
passive aggressive refusal, so finally she merely got up herself, and
refusing my help, lugged her neat pile of bags all the way to the
other row and away from me.
As
the night grew long again and we inched into Virginia and into a
state of utter acceptance that we would be on the train for the rest
of our conscious lives, I began to receive calls from the station
attendant in Charlottesville. His name was Jonathan. He let me know
that I would be missing my connecting train to Greensboro (there was
no way to feign surprise at this information) but that when I arrived
they would have a taxi waiting to take me to a hotel, and the next
day I’d catch another one. He called me more than once at
increasingly late hours to relay this exact same message.
ACT
TWO:
We
arrived in Charlottesville around three am, and, despite exhaustion,
stepping into the dark summer air was heaven after our long
imprisonment. There, standing outlined in the light of the station
door, was Jonathan of the many phone calls. He gathered a few of us
and put us in a cab which headed to a Marriott outside town. My
cabmates were friendly and eager to regale our driver with the
miseries that had been our travels.
At
the Marriott, we dragged ourselves into the lobby, along with our
luggage, and I approached the desk. “We’re the people
from Amtrak,” I told the woman.
“Okay,
do you have a voucher?” she asked.
Had
Jonathan failed us? “No,” I said, “didn’t
they call?”
“No,”
she said crisply. Jonathan had failed us.
Behind
me three more travelers, deposited by another cab from the station,
had wandered into the lobby, and it’s perhaps appropriate that
at this moment I stop to introduce the cast of characters. In these
situations you wait a long time to introduce yourself not because you
don’t like the people or you mean to be rude, but because you
hope that the situation which has thrown you together will be over so
soon that you won’t need to know their names, their faces, the
existence of this moment in time. So some of this I only learned
later once we came to understand that our acquaintance was
inevitable.
In
the cab with me had been a chatty couple, named Irene and Alberto. He
had grown up as a migrant worker, had lived all over and seemed to be
able to talk to anyone and she, though only forty, was already a
proud grandmother. Alongside them was William, who became our de
facto leader. He was 73 and appeared the next morning in a graphic
tee depicting skeleton hands holding a basketball, which read “Old
Baller.” He had just come from visiting one of his many
sisters.
The
more recently arrived taxi contained a tall, craggy white-haired man
in a cowboy hat, who had been on Amtrak all the way from the west
coast and kept losing his Marlboros and finding them again, but was
always very nice about it. We will call him Ron. Then there was
Christian, who was very small and slight, with a soft, questioning
voice and a large pink tattoo of a cannabis leaf on the side of his
neck. He wore heavy black goggles and his head was shaved entirely
bald except for a tall black mohawk. After introducing himself he
asked politely if I had a private roomette on the next train, because
he really needed a place to shave his head after a couple days of
travel. I told him I was sorry (and I really was sorry) but I didn’t.
The
last passenger was, to my great fascination, my former seatmate, who
hobbled on her boot over to a far couch in the lobby, gathered her
luggage and blankets around her, and sat quietly through everything
that followed.
What
followed was that the woman at the desk—who I will call Gorana,
and who despite never once smiling was highly competent and really
not unkind for the wee hours of the morning—told us that we
would need to get a credit card on file, ours or Amtrak’s,
before she’d let us into any rooms. We looked at each other
with devastation.
So
we all began to call Jonathan, and Gorana began to contact Amtrak’s
other help lines. Amtrak mysteriously was not able to maintain a
phone connection with Gorana, no matter how many times she called
them, and when William got ahold of Jonathan, he listed our woes, and
finished with the outraged refrain, “and there’s no
food,” which he would repeat many times over the next half
hour. Then Jonathan got shirty with him and Gorana said this whole
situation was apparently someone named Ryan’s fault, who had
worked the previous shift, was new and did not
know how
to input a confirmation number. Soon William had fully taken charge
of the lobby, contacting a few of his many sisters (they seemed to
answer the phone in pairs even at this late hour) to ask that they
begin demanding a refund for his trip and as well as himself
continuing to call the dubious powers-that-be over and over again.
When Gorana finally got ahold of an Amtrak representative long enough
for them to ask her name they could not seem to understand her accent
when she pronounced it, even when she spelled it out, so soon William
was actually behind the desk with her, one phone to each ear,
alternately spelling into one “G-O-R-” and saying into
the other, “And there’s no food! They haven’t given
us anything to EAT.”
The
rest of us waited. Ron chatted with me calmly, as if it were four pm,
not four am, and Christian, reconciled to the fact that he could not
immediately shave his head, laid down on a hard couch to sleep.
Finally, I know not how, Gorana managed to obtain some payment method
which would satisfy her manager, and I got the key to a room, and
slept dreamlessly in an actual bed for most of the morning.
When
I woke up I showered in blissful silence and solitude, packed my
bags, and headed out into the lobby in time for check out at noon.
Gorana
was still there—she seemed not to need food or sleep. She
offered us coffee, because there was indeed an “us” now,
and a cab took us back to the station where we were expected to wait
until the 9pm train that evening. It was the train we would have all
been on the day before if we had not been somewhere in West Virginia
instead. Jonathan was no longer on duty at the station, so there
could be no dredging up and airing old grievances, which was probably
for the best. We left our luggage with the new attendant and all went
our separate ways to see what Charlottesville had to offer us:
William to a soul food restaurant (presumably to make up for the lack
thereof the night before), Alberto and Irene off on an impromptu date
to see the Barbie movie, and Ron ambling away with Christian under
his wing, head freshly shaved. The Only exception was my seatmate
from the day before. She, true to form, entrusted none of her luggage
to the station employee, but instead planted herself on a bench
outside, surrounded by her belongings, her Bible on her lap, and
squinted out into the bright sun above her double masks, as if
waiting staunchly for deliverance from all this madding crowd.
I
walked to the university, and, after much travail, found the library,
where my sweaty self drank in the luxuries of a large, cool, quiet
space in which to write. Afterwards, I wandered back towards the
station and stopped to treat myself to a sit-down dinner on the way.
It was one of those “new American” upscale eateries and
their roast chicken sounded especially good, but I worried that I
wouldn’t have the appetite to finish a whole bird. I bravely
ordered it anyway. When it arrived it was only a chicken quarter,
which of course made more sense. I giggled into my cocktail and
wondered if sleep deprivation from the past two nights would have a
lasting effect on my psyche or intellectual capacity.
ACT
THREE:
After
my dinner, I arrived back at the station and sat with the people who
were now my friends friends. It was nice to have friends to sit with,
and this station was pleasant, a medium-small room, with white walls
and big, many-paned windows with books piled on their sills, in case
you wanted to expand your mind while you waited by reading King
Lear or The Aeneid.
We
chatted and chatted and came to find out that our train was delayed.
The thing became funny, the whole saga transformed into our own
personal comedy of errors. William, the “Old Baller,” and
Alberto, the migrant worker, and Ron, the cowboy, had all spent some
part or parcel of their childhoods in the country and compared
stories about catching crawfish as boys. After William’s
forty-seventh mention of yet another sister, Irene, Alberto’s
wife, finally asked him how many sisters he had.
“Eight
sisters,” he told her with a nod of his head.
“Oh,
how many of them are married?” she asked.
“Well,”
he said, and counted thoughtfully through on his fingers, “I
guess…none. Eight sisters, and not one of them is married…”
he concluded with some combination of glee and surprise. Then, much
to Irene’s and my entertainment, he insisted on facetiming
several of said sisters and informing them that none of them were
currently married. They said they knew that, but what made him
figure it out?
The
attendant on duty at the station was a woman named Nicki who took
responsibility for all the things she needed to take responsibility
for, and brooked no disrespect from fractious passengers. She spent
the first hour or so continually checking on a teenage girl slouched
by her desk wearing a silk bonnet and a skintight maxi dress sans
bra. She looked very young and Nicki did not seem convinced she was
actually where she was supposed to be and eventually had the girl’s
mother on the phone.
I
never saw the conclusion of her efforts with that girl, but I did see
her the entirety of another episode. We all did. A man and his
girlfriend had been sitting with their backs to us and I’d
noticed that he seemed to be frequently speaking sharply to her. Not
all of it was in English, so I wasn’t entirely tracking, but I
figured he was annoyed about the delay and taking it out on her. A
few minutes later, she got up to go to the bathroom around the
corner, he followed her, and there was a small scuffle. Nicki marched
around the corner and told him that was unacceptable, and he needed
to go outside. He tried to argue, but she kept repeating her order of
banishment, until he slunk out, tail between his legs, still whining
at a low volume.
Nicki
turned to the room at large, where fifteen or twenty of us sat, and
said with majesty, “We don’t put up with that around
here, do we?” We all shook our heads obediently. “We
don’t stand for that!” In quiet cautious tones, we all
affirmed that no, we did not.
The
man’s girlfriend appeared from around the corner. She was
shaken and crying but not visibly hurt. Nicki proclaimed to her that
her man would wait outside until she herself was comfortable with him
returning. At first the woman said she didn’t want him there,
but a few minutes later, she told Nicki she could let him back in and
Nicki stepped outside and gave him a lecture just as audible to us as
to him about his behavior, and informed him that he would apologize
publicly, because this kind of thing did not happen on her watch.
He
sidled in and up to his girlfriend and began to speak, but after a
moment Nicki interrupted, “I can’t hear you! You need to
apologize loud enough for the whole room! You can wait outside till
you can do that!” To the best of my memory, he spent the rest
of the night out on the sidewalk. His girlfriend sat inside in
cautious serenity.
After
this incident my friends began to take many smoke breaks, out of
equal parts boredom and a desire to gawk at the exile. Alberto and
Irene—Irene mostly—would return to provide updates. We
were beginning to get real loopy, and this is around the point when
our last protective adult barriers crumbled to dust and we finally
asked each others’ names.
It
was deep dark now, and Christian of the gentle voice and mohawk and
dark goggles, had spent most of the evening sitting on the other side
of the parking lot, on stairs which led up to the street. “He
really loves those stairs,” Alberto announced with all the
confidence of an expert character analyst. My former seatmate,
perhaps not surprisingly, had not stayed at post on the outside bench
for more than ten hours. I wished that it were possible to have a
conversation with her about how far we two had come together.
The
other news to be giggled at like teenagers was that a woman I’d
seen earlier with dark eyeliner and the top half of her hair bleached
to straw, was using the sidewalk not only to smoke, but to drink—and
drink a lot—of mini bottles of rum, that she was procuring from
various places on her person. She would re-appear at occasional
intervals in the station and began to announce with earnestness that
she’d made an order via Postmates for all of us.
Postmates, she said, would be coming soon. “It’s a
twelve-pack of Co-ca-co-la,” she repeated, “a twelve-pack
of Co-ca-co-la!”
I
had never in my life sat in a more interesting room, a place which
filled me with the milk of human kindness all the way up the way that
station did. If I had not needed food and sleep, I may have stayed
there forever.
Across
from me (down the way from where my friends sat to give me the latest
gossip when back from smoking) sat a man in his fifties or sixties.
He was clearly there not as a passenger himself, but to meet someone
who was arriving on our much delayed and perhaps mythical train. He
was very clean cut with a shock of white hair, a dark red tan, and
polo shirt, like the dad of someone I’d grown up with. He
seemed good-natured, but as if he had yet to entirely immerse himself
in the ad hoc spirit of our new community. So around eleven, in a
burst of warm camaraderie I leaned over and asked him who he was
waiting for.
“My
wife,” he said, then, becoming flustered, amended, “--I
mean ex-wife.” He began to try to explain the situation and I
began to try to rescue him by changing the subject and neither of us
were very successful.
At
last, around midnight, the train—our train—arrived. We
all knew from long grimy-eyed experience that when we lined up to
board they would ask us how many in our party, and that if you said
“one,” you would likely get an aisle seat next to someone
already snoring. William leaned over and conspiratorially asked, “You
wanna be a couple? You and me. Let’s board together.” I
agreed, of course.
The
woman whose boyfriend had been banished for his awfulness stepped
softly up to Nicki at the desk to say goodbye. Nicki told her to take
care of herself. I hoped she—or someone—could and would.
We gathered on the platform as the roar of the train rose in the
distance, and, on cue, then the Co-ca-co-las arrived. The woman with
the eyeliner passed them out with all the desperate eagerness of
someone canvassing for the environment. William declined, but I
accepted.
I
drank it on the train. William and I sat together, our sham of a
relationship successful, sleeping and chatting. I pulled up the maps
app and watched the dot slowly move toward home, and wondered whether
the last two days had been a dream, or whether all my life before had
been. It seemed that it must be one or the other.
I
got off in Greensboro at 4 am, disembarking from that dark train car
full of snoring and human smells and murmurings and the blue light of
phone screens. William woke up as I scooted past him, we clasped
hands meaningfully and, though I was supposed to be home 30 hours
before, a sadness came over me, a kind of missing. I walked teary to
the curb where my dad waited to pick me up and take me home.
Alice
Hodgkinsis
a high school teacher in North Carolina with a Bachelors in English
Lit and a Masters in Theology. She has always loved to both write and
to travel in her time off, and has found that the two usually go
singularly well together. Alice has published short fiction and
non-fiction as well as poetry, won various awards and scholarships
for her writing, and continues to hone her skills at
alicewithpaper.com.
