Rules for 50/50 Chances

by Kate McGovern

  “You’re a dancer, then?” Jay asks, shading his eyes from the harsh glare of the near-dusk sunlight against the cement platform.

  I blush a little at the question. “Sort of, yeah.”

  He smiles. “It looks like more than ‘sort of’ to me—was that a pirouette?”

  “A chaîné. But you were close.” He isn’t really, but it doesn’t matter.

  “You’re practicing for something?”

  “I have an audition in San Francisco.”

  Just speaking the words out loud makes my stomach feel like an ocean in the hours right before a hurricane hits. Churning.

  Jay looks intrigued. “What’s the audition for?”

  “Oh, it’s just a—it’s nothing. Not a big deal.”

  “All right,” he says, eyeing me like he can tell I’m not telling the truth. “Break a leg, then—do they say that in dance, or just the theater?”

  “You can say it in dance, too.” I roll my ankles around one at a time. “I probably won’t get in, though.”

  “That’s a bit pessimistic, isn’t it? You’ve got the same chance as anybody else. Better, because you’ve got the luck of the Zephyr behind you!”

  “Is that a thing?”

  “Of course it’s a thing! Everyone knows the Silver Lady is a good luck charm. Ask Mary in the dining car. She’s a big believer.” Jay gestures toward the train door. “All right, get yourself back on board. We are moving out.”

  I grasp the handle on the train door and step back up. I can’t say I’m a big believer in the “luck of the Zephyr” myself, but I guess I’m not currently in a position to turn it down.

  * * *

  For my first Zephyr dinner, I’m seated across from a young French couple—one tall and dark-haired, the other smaller and blond—who are touring the States from New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Los Angeles, with one big train ride in the middle. Next to me, there’s an older man with leathery skin, a worn red flannel shirt, and a cowboy hat. He used to be an insurance agent, he tells us, but now he’s a volunteer park ranger.

  “Americans eat so much corn?” asks the blond Frenchman, who speaks better English than his boyfriend. He nods at the cornfields—probably the fifth straight hour of them—flying by out the window.

  “Mostly we eat corn syrup,” I tell the French guys. They look at me quizzically. “Sugar,” I say. “It makes sugar.”

  “Ah! Ah! Of course! High fructose,” says the English speaker, nodding enthusiastically.

  Our booth for four is decorated with a white tablecloth (heavy paper masquerading as cloth) and a pink carnation in a plastic vase. Two waitresses, Mary and Dyllis, call loudly to each other across the car and crack jokes with the passengers. Mary is instantly my favorite. She calls everyone “young man” or “young lady,” or occasionally “gorgeous” or “handsome,” thoroughly amusing the many senior citizens on board. I consider asking her about the luck of the Zephyr, but decide against it—the dining car is crowded and she’s hustling, expertly balancing trays of meals without spilling them as the train heaves from side to side.

  The insurance agent / park ranger / cowboy recommends the steak (he orders his rare), and the French guys follow his lead. I peer over their shoulders toward the kitchenette, trying to imagine the remote possibility that they might be able to effectively grill a steak back there, and order the roast chicken instead. But when Mary brings our meals out, my dinner companions’ steaks are nicely pink on the inside, and topped with a dark wine sauce that looks pretty good.

  “So tomorrow, you’ll want to get to the observation car early,” the cowboy tells us. “Fills up real fast, comin’ out of Denver.”

  “The views—they are nice?” asks the blond.

  Cowboy nods, his mouth full of steak.

  “Have you done this route before?” I ask, when he’s finished chewing.

  “I’ve done every route,” he says, wiping his mouth. “The long ones, anyway. I’m working on the shorter ones. The Zephyr beats them all.”

  So the cowboy is a real train buff. I wonder what Mom would want me to ask. Would she want to know about the stretches with the best scenery? Or about the conversations he’s had like this one, over meals with strangers?

  Our drinks shudder in their plastic cups, like we’re in the middle of an earthquake.

  “Why do you ride so many trains?” I ask finally.

  “Why not?” He considers for a moment while he works a toothpick around in his mouth. Then he looks at me. “Nobody talks on airplanes.”

  The last time I was on an airplane, I was eleven. My parents sent me to visit Gram in London over April vacation, and I was mad because I had to miss four dance classes. “Don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t work for British Airways,” Dad told me when he handed me over to a flight attendant with a smile straight out of a Crest Whitestrips ad. On the plane, I put my headphones on, turned on a movie, and didn’t speak to anyone until we landed at Heathrow.

  But the cowboy is right—here, it feels somehow natural for the four of us to be chatting, like the train has cracked something open between us. I wouldn’t normally predict that an old-school-American-rail-buff cowboy and a hipster gay couple from Paris would find themselves making cheery dinner conversation, but here we are, upending all my expectations. Mom would love this.

  * * *

  “Knock, knock,” Jay says, peering his head into the open door frame of my roomette around ten o’clock. “Ready for me to make up your bunk?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to,” I say, hopping off the seat and standing awkwardly in the tiny space. It feels weird to be served like this. How hard can it be to make the bed?

  As if he can see what I’m thinking, Jay smiles and shakes his head. “It’s trickier than you think. Trust me. Let me do it. I have nothing to do otherwise.”

  “Somehow I don’t believe that,” I say, but I let him do it anyway. We trade places—there isn’t enough room for both of us to stand in the compartment while he’s pulling the cushions aside and popping the two seats down into a flat position. I watch him pull the thin mattress, already made up with sheets and a blanket, from its storage spot on the top bunk. Jay lays the mattress down across the flattened seat cushions and steps aside.

  “All set!” he says, revealing a perfectly cozy single bed. He steps back out into the corridor. “Have a very good night, Rose.”

  Tucked into my tight bunk, with pitch-black flatlands whizzing by out the window, I send Caleb a text. “Crossed the Mississippi, ate dinner with strangers, saw a crapload of cornfields. This is a big-ass country.”

  I open my laptop and start Strangers on a Train, the Hitchcock classic. I downloaded all the train-themed movies I could think of before I left.

  Caleb writes back as the opening credits are starting. “Duh. Big-ass country. Meet any crazy people yet?”

  “A few,” I reply. “Apparently cross-country train rides are the thing to do for singles over sixty. Remind me of that if I miraculously turn out to be a healthy old person.”

  “Healthy, yeah,” he writes back. “Single? Doubtful.” Plus a winking smiley face.

  I put the phone down on the edge of the mattress and tug the thin blanket closer around my chin. It’s like tucking in under a paper towel, but I feel pretty warm anyway.

  Twenty-one

  The observation car “does what it says on the tin,” as my grandmother would say. The windows are huge, rising up to the ceiling on both sides of the car and arching over our heads to meet almost in the middle. There are swiveling blue seats, singles and doubles, facing the windows. The whole car is full of the light that pours in from every direction.

  Outside Denver, a little before nine a.m., we chug along through the foothills of the Rockies, slow-rolling brown hills dotted with trees. The mountains come into view in the distance, tall and snow-peaked. As we ascend farther, the observation car jams with passengers, all straining to take pictures out the right-hand side of the train, which faces out toward
the mountain range. Not knowing any better, I’d grabbed a seat on the left, which now hugs the mountain, so mostly all I can see is jagged rock faces practically pressing against the window, blocking the sky. It’s not the best view, but it’s still awesome, in the literal sense of the word. Full of awe.

  The landscape that rolls by out the window over the next few hours tells a thousand stories. In contrast to the Rockies and the canyons that follow them—so beautiful they look almost fake—there are also stretches that look unreal to me in other ways. Or maybe too real. One town we pass through has no cars or people in sight, just a whole stretch of boarded-up storefronts. In another, I spot a shop with a sign out front that reads simply “GUNS” in neon pink spray paint.

  I’ve never been to one of those wildlife parks where you stay in a jeep and travel along a track while giraffes and zebras wander by, even though you’re in New Jersey or wherever. I always thought that seemed like a strange thing. But suddenly I feel a little bit like that’s what I’m doing—passing through a world that’s completely unfamiliar, viewing it from the outside in. It shouldn’t be surprising, I know. I mean, it’s not like I expected everywhere in the country to look like Boston. But the contrast is more striking than I expected it to be: All this land, so much open space between houses, towns that aren’t bursting at the seams. And no water, anywhere. I can’t fathom growing up without the ocean.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, the landscape looks pretty different than it did this morning—flatter and sandier, the mountains farther in the distance. Maybe we’ve crossed the line into Utah now—state lines don’t mean anything from the Zephyr, which has no way of marking them. I think of Caleb, telling me not to hop off and set up shop in Salt Lake City. He was kidding, but it’s beautiful here. I can see the appeal.

  As we speed through a junction, I hear the Zephyr’s whistle blow. Two little boys with one bicycle between them are playing in the street by the railroad crossing. One rides the bike in circles, yelling something over his shoulder at his brother, or friend—they look alike, white kids with buzz cuts. The one relegated to traveling by foot climbs on top of the railroad crossing and straddles it, one leg on either side.

  For a split second, it looks like he wants to hop the barrier and run toward us. I take in a sharp breath and am almost out of my seat—not that I could do anything to stop him, of course—but then he doesn’t. He just straddles the barrier, swinging his skinny legs and bare feet, and waves at us.

  * * *

  I check my phone for texts, but the service is in and out and I can’t get anything. Watching the little boys, I feel suddenly, urgently alone. Even with all these people to talk to, it’s strange without Lena or Caleb, or my family, to share the bizarre world-within-a-world experience of the Zephyr. It makes me feel like none of it is real. Maybe that’s why I keep telling little lies—my grandparents are picking me up in San Francisco; the audition is no big deal. If I wanted, I could be someone else entirely on the Zephyr. It’s like living in my mother’s mind, where nothing is as you thought it was.

  * * *

  At seven, I dine with an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a blue-and-white checked button-down and a big knit cap covering his hair. He doesn’t say much, but when he does speak, he introduces himself as Carl, and I pick up a slight Caribbean accent. Our other companion is Kathy, a woman in her sixties with a decidedly upstate New York accent, who talks compulsively about the various medical events her family members have suffered through in recent years. Her husband self-diagnosed a kidney stone on a drive from Toledo to Albany, she tells us, causing them to pull off the road into a hospital in Cleveland where (after waiting twelve hours to see a doctor) he was diagnosed with not only a kidney stone, but also a massive pancreatic tumor. Her sister has recently had a corneal transplant. Kathy herself has suffered from vertigo and various kinds of panic attacks, which are partly to blame for why she now rides the train: she developed an acute fear of flying after her husband was bumped, unbeknownst to her, from a flight that ended up crashing. She was at home with the kids, watching them run through the sprinkler, when she heard the news: the flight she thought her husband was on had gone down in a field in the middle of New York State. There were no survivors.

  Kathy’s been talking for about fifteen minutes nonstop. “I still can’t comprehend life without him,” she says, now referring to her father, who’s recently died. “He served in World War Two. He was just a wonderful man…” She pauses and wrestles with a Paul Newman blue cheese salad dressing packet.

  “You know, he had triple-bypass surgery when he was seventy-nine years old and even that didn’t stop him.” Kathy shakes her head. “When he was eighty-five, he told his doctor that his only complaint about his meds was that he was having trouble getting in and out of the canoe by himself. Can you imagine? The canoe!”

  “The meds affected his movement?” I interrupt.

  “No, no, not the meds!” She smiles at me, like I’m a kid who doesn’t know a thing about these so-called “meds” of which she speaks. Of this “illness” thing.

  “No, the disease. He had Parkinson’s. It was the disease that affected his movement, and the meds were supposed to help. But he still struggled with the canoe—which was a joke, of course, I mean, most Parkinson’s patients his age shouldn’t have been walking, let alone camping.”

  I know about Parkinson’s. It’s not so far from Huntington’s—a brain disorder that affects motor skills. It’s degenerative, ugly. Not as ugly, but ugly.

  Kathy is still stabbing at her salad dressing packet, unable to wrench the dressing from the plastic. Without saying anything, Carl takes the packet gently from her hands and tears it open himself. He passes it back to her in silence.

  She goes on (and on, and on). Her father’s tremors kept getting worse, eventually giving way to dementia that turned him into someone unknown to her. Parkinson’s doesn’t always end in dementia, she tells me (though I already knew that); her father was just particularly unlucky.

  She’s making very little headway on her steak—so little, in fact, that I wonder if I’m ever going to be released from this meal. Carl gives me an apologetic smile, finally, then drops a few dollars’ tip on the table and excuses himself.

  “Don’t let me keep you here,” says Kathy, who is sitting on the aisle side of our booth, trapping me. But even though she’s offered me an out, I can’t quite bring myself to take it.

  * * *

  Nearly an hour later, Kathy finally finishes her steak and her story. I make my way back to the roomette and find Jay to make my bed up, even though it’s barely nine o’clock. Under the thin blanket, I pull my phone out again and turn it on and off, hoping for a signal. Finally I get one—weak, but there—and dial home. Dad answers, confused.

  “Yeah?”

  “Dad?”

  “Rose?”

  “What time is it there?” I don’t even know what time zone we’re in.

  I hear Dad rustling on the other end, hunting for his cell phone to check the time. “Quarter to eleven.”

  So we’re still in mountain time. “You’re already sleeping?” I picture them in the dark, in bed. Nothing wakes Mom; she probably didn’t even hear the phone.

  “We’re old, remember. What’s happening? Are you okay?”

  I want to tell Dad that I’m fine, great, that I’m having so much fun. But that seems too straightforward to be the truth. “Can I talk to Mom?”

  “She’s sleeping, Ro.”

  “I know, but—I need to talk to her.”

  Dad sighs, and then I hear him whispering in the dark. “Ellen. Ellen. Rosie’s on the phone.”

  “Rose?” Mom’s groggy voice is even more slurred than her awake voice. “Wwwhere are you?”

  “I’m on the Zephyr, Mom. The train. I’m in my sleeper compartment on the train.”

  “The train,” she says, almost dreamily. “Hhhhow is it?”

  “It’s—it’s just like you said
it would be.”

  “Mmmm. Wwwhat did I sssay?”

  We’re passing through pure blackness, except for the stars. I lie back on the flat pillow so I can see as much sky as possible. “You said it would be different than anything I’ve ever done, or seen. You said planes give you a bird’s-eye view, but trains give you a people’s-eye view. That’s exactly what it’s like.”

  For a moment, like the tiny pinprick of Derek-the-man-nurse’s needle, it stings that Mom isn’t here to see this journey she read about and dreamed about for all those years. I said it’s just like she described it, but the truth is that it’s even more than that.

  She doesn’t respond. “Mom?” I say after a moment of silence. There’s more rustling.

  “Sorry, Ro. I think she fell asleep,” Dad says. “What were you saying?”

  “Nothing. It’s okay. I’ll call you guys from San Francisco.”

  “Okay. Love you. Be safe. Don’t talk to strangers.”

  I laugh. “Dad, strangers are all I’ve got right now.”

  “Oh, right. I guess that’s true. Well, you know what I mean. Be smart.”

  By the time I put the phone down next to my head, I’m almost asleep.

  Twenty-two

  I wake up antsy, both ready to get to San Francisco and get the audition over with and also anxious about leaving the Zephyr. Like somehow I’ve been cocooned here and now I’m not sure I can function in the real world anymore—Stockholm syndrome with a train instead of a kidnapper.

  By early afternoon, we’re somewhere outside the “biggest little city in the world” (that would be Reno, Nevada) when Jay comes through the observation car and pauses by my seat to say hello.