I never remember, on the way to Penn Station, how much I love taking the train. On the way to Penn Station, I have to concentrate very hard on other things, things like not running over anyone else’s feet with my suitcase, and on not running over my own feet with my suitcase and scraping my shoe off and falling out of said shoe and tripping over said shoe and pitching face-first into a stroller in the middle of the crosswalk, only to come to moments later with an infant perched peaceably on my head, offering commentary along the lines of “ah ah bah?” while his furious nanny tries to divorce my suitcase from the baby carriage and eighty-eight cabs run over my shoe and turn it into a leather envelope, and there’s also the little matter of not letting my suitcase get stuck in the garbage spilling out of the bags at the curb in Koreatown and pick up putrid fragments of shredded cabbage, one of which will insist on hiding waaaay the hell up in the wheel well somewhere, therein to fill an entire train car with the rancid stench of previously-owned kim chee — provided I even get to Penn Station in a timely fashion, trapped as I tend to find myself behind a slow walker for whom every building and fire hydrant and parked car is a sight worthy of slowing down in sheer wonder because it’s just not true that if you’ve seen one black Town Car in midtown Manhattan you’ve seen them all, like, yes, you can buy a belt on the street in the city that never sleeps, and although I can certainly see how the easy availability of affordable waist-wear might shake your world to its very foundations, said shaking should take place well out of my way. Navigating Penn Station itself doesn’t exactly fill me with the wonder and romance of riding the rails, either, given that any attempt by John Madden and his electronic-chalkboard technology to follow the trajectory of a given passenger through the crowd that stands like a herd of drunken sheep under the big departures board would cause his head to melt inwards on one side like a candle in a strong wind in about five minutes flat.

But once I get on the train and get settled, sitting with a magazine as other passengers shuffle by with briefcases and bags and pallets of lumber and geese in wicker cages and…okay, lady? Hi. Can I ask you a question? Do you have a single possession that is not with you right now? Like, if I went over to your house, would the house have anything left in it, at all? Because that duffel bag just will not fit into the overhead compartment, possibly because it contains every single item of clothing you own, all of your countertop appliances including the microwave, that chandelier you said you hated when you first moved in, seven doorknobs, a bowling ball, three of your four children and all of their clothes and action figures and asthma inhalers and whatnot, your husband’s college yearbook, the Soloflex machine from the basement, a busted lawn flamingo, and an extra roll of toilet paper, and nobody has ever accused me of packing lightly, but the express doesn’t stop in That Town Where You Can’t Buy Crap You Would Never Need On Vacation Anyway Like A Stapler Or A Can Of Corn Or Something Because The Town Has No Stores And No People And No Stuff Of Any Kind And In Fact Is Not A Town At All Per Se But A Conspiracy To Deprive You Of The Ability To Eat Corn And Staple Papers Together At A Moment’s Notice Hey You Never Know Right?, because no such town exists, actually, so why not leave the novelty ice-cube trays that shape the ice into little pumpkins at home next time? The skycap needed a backhoe to get that bag down to the platform. No, before the combined weight of your collective worldly possessions opened a fault beside the tracks and sucked him and the backhoe into a cindery grave at the core of the earth. It’s called “a moving van.” Rent one. In fact, rent two, because I’ve seen a few all-encompassing socket-wrench sets in my life, but yours takes the cake. Hey, mind if I use your Mr. Coffee?

Mmm, coffee…did I have a point here? Oh, right. Once the train pulls away from the platform, the passing of the terrain lulls me into a strange nostalgic semi-trance, no matter what that terrain might look like — the Hudson River, the industrial fields in Jersey, suburban back lawns, anonymous Pocono foothills. It’s not what I see out the window; it’s the fact that it’s passing in a string of glimpses. I see stories, beginnings and ends of stories, in the scraped dusty lots, the women walking through the parking lots with their hair blown to the side by the train going by, the neglected back entrances of stores, the gravel roads that tail away into the woods to an unseen house or a bigger road or maybe wind down into dirt and then nothing at all, the detritus blown up the side of the hill by the freight cars — wrappers and bottles and glinting junk, mostly, but now and then a shoe or a plastic toy. I wonder what brought it all there to the edge of the tracks, and I feel an inexplicable longing but I don’t know what for. To fill in the rest of the stories? To tell them?

A moment always comes on the train when the towns disappear for a few minutes and it’s only trees and marsh and curving track. If I position my head right, I can see out of both sets of windows at the same time, and as the country slides by on either side of the train, it reminds me of the last passage of The Great Gatsby when Nick talks about the “fresh, green breast of the new world” and the ghosts of Gatsby’s parties that he still hears. Fifteen years after reading it for the first time, I still haven’t finished with that passage — or it hasn’t finished with me. I know what it’s Supposed To Mean, of course. I wrote my paper on the green light at the end of the dock, and I got my A-minus for it. But that sadness — the mourning for the things that get erased, the things you can’t know, the things you can’t un-know — Fitzgerald couldn’t quite put a name to it either. The closest I can come to a name is to stare out the window of a train, and maybe it doesn’t have a name anyway. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning –”

Even if it had a name, I couldn’t write the name down. Attempting to commit a sentence of cursive writing to paper on an Amtrak train is the dictionary definition of “exercise in futility.” My handwriting looks like a terrible collision involving a glass bong and a Spirograph. Restless and bored, I decide to try writing anyway, and when I open my little notebook, what should flutter out from between the pages but a gift from the universe — a pristine Xerox copy of the photo page of my passport. I haven’t the foggiest idea why I made that Xerox, or when, or how it came to live inside my Clairefontaine, but I squeak with glee anyway. I exist! An American citizen — that’s me! What a stroke of luck! Except for the picture, which the photocopy format does not improve! But that’s okay! Older and wiser, I will not fall prey to a boatneck top in my next set of passport photos! Nor to that wretched haircut, which one of my so-called “friends” at the time should have talked me out of, but hey, no problem! I have a better haircut now! It doesn’t look like a rotten banana peel is resting uncomfortably on top of my head, plotting its next move! Usually!

Yay!

I need a cigarette.

The sun is almost done with setting. Soon, I won’t see the saplings or the forgotten buoys stashed in the lake alcoves or the silent schools with that one last pair of girls still on the monkey bars, so I do my “brooding on the old, unknown world” while I can. Outside, the day is at that in-between time on an autumn weekend — the day is over, but the night hasn’t started yet — and as it gets darker, I look into windows instead. Houses. Diners. Gas stations where men read magazines and listen to the radio and smoke cigars, every night the same. Trailers lit by staticky blue. Cars and their kisses in the front seat hello and goodbye, framed and then gone, framed and gone, framed and gone.

Then I look at my fellow passengers. Across the aisle, a thirteen-year-old traveling alone and actively resenting the conductor’s frequent checks on him. He has a child’s face, but a man’s hands with heavy knuckles, and he’s just starting to use that wolfy look on women. He uses it on me — quite courteous of him, really. Behind me, an epic tale of that last elusive Cheez-It, told in angry crinkling. Two rows up, the top of a proscenium arch of perm-fried hair. Everyone else got off the train at Albany-Rensselaer, and it’s just us now.

The next day, in Syracuse, the weather turns raw. A rainy fall day in New England is colder somehow than the middle of winter; the chill crawls up sleeves and pantlegs and settles into the spine. I sit under an eave outside the hotel and smoke, thinking of the same weekend ten years ago when I drove to Canton to visit Maria Jesús and Doris Day, through Wuthering Heights weather like today’s. The whole weekend, the cuffs of our pants never quite dried, and we’d stand outside the parties where they wouldn’t let us smoke and work on our smoke rings and kick the curled-up leaves that held swallows of rainwater. Inside, I left my hat on. We spent the Saturday in a drafty living room, six of us in a dog pile on a defeated couch, watching a movie with Judd Hirsch in it and laughing and smoking, and the sound of boots on wet gravel always reminds me of that weekend — of the sheer contentment of curling up and digging my feet in under Doris’s butt to warm them up. The best thing about the cold is knowing how it’s going to end.

Later, I will dress, and Wing and Glark and I will go down to the wedding, and the bride will look as perfect and warm as a candle. We will eat and drink and giggle about phallic bread. Later still, Wing and Glark and I will come up from the wedding and change into stretchier clothes, and we will lounge about with snacks and TV and our feet underneath us, and on Sunday the cocoon of their car will take me back to the train station and I will look out the window at the Empire State passing by, all the windows, all the stories.

But that’s no matter — tomorrow I will run faster, stretch out my arms farther…

October 21, 2002

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