Movement

by Valerie Miner

  Sara had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway and it arrived in Vladivostok on time.

  The Tan-Zam Railway got to Dar es Salaam one minute early, said Susan.

  These were the same cups Sara had used on the CNR during the war.

  The first time Susan had understood what “bloody cold” meant was when she and Guy took that train to Hudson Bay.

  “Snowing outside,” Adam’s voice carried across the car. “It will be snowing when we stop at Jasper.”

  Sara remembered that the train between Montreal and Quebec City was a very long journey in 1956.

  Susan’s train from Moscow to Prague was scheduled for August 22. The Soviet troops got there first. She flew to Vienna, instead, August 22, 1968.

  The stopover in Jasper took an hour. Sara linked Susan’s arm at the sheepskin elbow. Susan took Adam’s arm. They shot photos by the bear statue and then walked around the village eating hot french fries. The Australian anxiously badgered a porter to let him check on his motorcycle which had never been exposed to such fucking cold in its life. Sorry man, said the West Indian guard, no one could enter the freight car. And if he, from Jamaica for god’s sake, could cope with the cold, so could a motorcycle. Susan suggested that they warm themselves up. The four of them, holding hands, ran around the train together.

  Susan went back to her journal, wrote a few lines and watched the snowflakes leafing from bare trees. She thought about trains passing from Warsaw to Oaxaca to Penzance. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Mombassa to Nairobi to Chartres. And now she was going home. She had never really learned another language properly. She wrote only American. She was going home on her own. For the past six years she had lived by maps. She wouldn’t need maps at home. One got on by instinct, by some kind of genetic survival code. She was going back to save her own life.

  Adam dropped by the compartment with a yellow rose.

  “I bought it in Jasper,” he explained. “When you two were in the ladies’ room.”

  So much for lifesaving instructions. She joined him for a recess in the Vista Dome.

  Late that afternoon, Susan heard Sara’s bracelets jangling behind her and turned into a warm wave of Chanel 19.

  “Sleep well, my dear?” she asked Sara, a little surprised with her own familiarity.

  “Wonderfully,” said Sara. “I dreamt I was riding on a train for the rest of my life.”

  The Australian surfaced at dinner and invited them all to his compartment for cognac afterwards. Apparently grandpa believed in lubricating the ride. It was a cozy room with everything necessary, and a few things unnecessary. A miniature apartment. They talked about different dollhouses they had each inhabited—in other train compartments, boat cabins, Volkswagon busses.

  Susan leaned back against Adam’s hand. He moved the strap of her dress back and forth. Back and forth.

  Sara was telling them about the old days on the Orient Express—about a trip she took to Bucharest with her lover Pat before the war. “Velvet cushions, porcelain bowls,” she recalled. “Tea and croissants for breakfast.”

  Rubbing her foot along Adam’s herringboned calf, Susan was lulled by Sara’s voice and the cognac. You learned so much travelling, she thought mistily, but the only moving she wanted to do now was into Adam’s compartment. Perhaps she could just excuse herself and he would discreetly follow.

  “What I remember best about that trip was Virginia Woolf,” said Sara. Three Guineas and To The Lighthouse. Since then, I’ve always taken her on train journeys. Just finished A Room Of One’s Own again today.”

  Susan caught herself staring at Sara. She felt a little dazed by the drink. By Sara’s ice blue eyes. Cognac on the rocks.

  “I’ve always wanted to read that one,” Susan said. “The novels intimidate me in their languor, but I’ve heard that book is wonderful.”

  Adam was arguing with the Australian, declaring hockey absolutely more violent than soccer. Susan leaned forward and listened to Sara talking about Woolf with the same intensity she felt for Lessing. How nice to see Sara with her guard down, her spirit up. Susan felt a sudden closeness to her, a merging.

  “Come,” said Sara. “Before we part tomorrow morning, I’d like to give you Virginia Woolf as a farewell present.”

  “Actually, I was thinking about going to bed pretty soon,” Susan said. “Or I’ll be in no shape tomorrow for the Greyhound to California.” Adam’s eyes were lost to cognac. There was no hope, no worry, about being followed.

  As they walked between the cars, the night air hit Susan like sleet. Nervous about the border tomorrow, she felt chilled, then sweaty. How she could die of her own fever sometimes.

  “Come in,” said Sara. “I’ll find it in a minute.” Susan sat on the bed which the porter had unlatched. Cold, ironed sheets. Hotel. Hospital. Prison. Train. Heavy, sanitized wool blankets. Warm, functionally warm.

  “I’m always freezing in these compartments,” said Sara. “How about you?”

  She nodded and Sara handed her a very worn Fairisle sweater. Susan was glad to stay and talk, to postpone tomorrow. She liked the Chanel 19 and Sara’s own scent that the sweater bore around her.

  “Isn’t it grand—the trees and these mountains,” said Sara, looking out the window. “Such elegant strength.”

  Susan agreed. “I’m relieved to be back West. I got so weary of sweet English countryside. Once we crossed that first ledge of mountains today, I felt we were back in the land of the possible.”

  “You do have a young, fresh optimism.”

  “Not so young,” said Susan.

  Sara put her hand on Susan’s shoulder. “You misunderstand. I value that. I covet it.”

  Susan turned to her. “If you only knew how much I admired your grace and … discipline,” she stammered. Damn. It was up to Sara to reach out now.

  “We can have both,” Sara answered vaguely.

  Susan smelled the anger in her own sweat. Anger at the cool academic distance between them. She hated Sara who could see her fever. She loved Sara, loved the fantasy of the two of them in a grey clapboard house by the ocean. She could stay in Canada; she could be loved and held here on the edge.

  Sara kissed her. She held Susan firmly, but lightly. Susan had not felt real tenderness since Pia. Aching with the need for this warmth, she reached for Sara’s breasts. Would they be fat or flaccid? Who knows how a woman weathers fifty years? Full, firm whiteness poured into the stiff red nipples.

  Sara’s cool strength had gone to hunger. Sensing the change, Susan was moved and frightened.

  “Will you stay with me?” Sara whispered.

  “How long?” Susan wanted to ask, but instead she pulled off her dress and slid between the cold white sheets wondering if goose bumps on her flesh would make her more sexy. She watched Sara drop the long, woven skirt from her waist. Her bottom was round, full. Her legs were sturdy. She longed for Sara’s experience and at the same time worried that she could not satisfy the older woman. Sara seemed to know what she wanted, running her hands softly over Susan’s breasts and stomach, licking and sipping from her vagina, circling and tapping with her tongue, licking and sipping. Then she moved Susan’s hands over her own body with gentle encouragement. Gentleness. Susan couldn’t remember such gentleness even from childhood. Rocking each other, stroking each other. The child is mother of the woman. Rocking with the train. First class compartment from Brighton to London, tired after a Sunday on the beach. Slow, hollow coach from Amoy to Hong Kong, with Japanese POW’s silent in their healed wounds. The sleeper to Edinburgh. The commute to Manchester. Toronto to Chicago to Shanghai to Montreal to Victoria to San Francisco to Antigua to Canterbury to Maputo to Vancouver.

  Susan woke from a jolt of the train and felt that Sara’s arms were still around her. Still. Perfect stillness. She worried that the motionlessness might waken Sara, might disconnect them. They turned together, Susan making a cave around Sara’s body. The train began to move again. Susan fell back to sleep.

  �
��First call for breakfast,” a harsh disembodied voice. “Vancouver in an hour-and-a-half.”

  Sara’s arms held her as they crossed the Frazer Canyon. Susan turned to Sara’s open eyes. They kissed.

  Sara said she could postpone Victoria for a few days. Would Susan like to stay in Vancouver together? Of course Susan wanted to stay, to rest safely here above the border. But she told Sara that she had to catch a Greyhound for the States today. Maybe Sara could come down to California for a visit?

  Whistles. Squeaking wheels. Baggage calls. “Vancouver in five minutes.”

  “Will you write to me Sara?”

  “Will you write about me, Susan?”

  Rain railed as the train skidded into Vancouver. They lost each other in the shuffle for bags and coats and tickets. Susan tried to find Sara outside the station. But everyone was turtled under black umbrellas. At the corner, Susan hailed a cab for the Greyhound depot. It was pouring so hard, she might have drowned just waiting for the light to change.

  Well Past

  the Weird Hour

  It was well past the weird hour, she thought, as she rode the escalator down to the BART platform. She hadn’t always been this paranoid. No, the word was “cautious.” Then her friend Clara was beaten and raped. Indeed, a woman couldn’t be too cautious nowadays. She watched a delicate man with purple punk hair running his hand along a pointed object in his back pocket. Three jiving boys heckled all the girls as they walked by the car. A strange old lady carrying two Macy’s shopping bags, Christmas 1976, was mumbling angrily. Well past the weird hour, all right. She spotted a dumpy kid studying the jackets of two classical LP’s. He looked pretty innocuous. She squeezed near him.

  “Hey, who are you pushing around?” said a meanlooking woman in a cowboy hat.

  “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t notice.”

  “Fuck that,” said the cowboy hat. “Back of the line, babe.”

  He was pretty dumpy looking. Probably no one else would want to sit next to him anyway. A safe refuge from all points of view.

  She was right. There he sat crumpled next to the window, reading the liner on his Bach cantatas. She felt sorry for him, so lonely looking. Sometimes San Francisco did seem like a big city. She pulled out a copy of Time and turned to the movie reviews.

  “Do you live in San Francisco?”

  She looked around. The boys were snickering to themselves. The old woman was slumped in the front seat, humming. It was him, Mr. Crumple.

  She nodded—no reason to be nervous she told herself—and turned the page.

  “What part?” he asked like he was making wedding reception conversation.

  “Sixteenth” she lied, hoping he would get off the train before her stop on twenty-fourth.

  “What street?”

  She gave him a long look—which neither discouraged him nor gave her any clues about his intentions. He still looked like the honest schmuck she saw at the BART station.

  “Sanchez,” she said, recalling the street where her boyfriend of twenty years ago, a quarterback, had lived.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” he said, adjusting the plastic satchel on his lap. She realized that he probably had a sawed-off shotgun in there. Come to think of it, he did look a little weird. Maybe he was one of those XXY chromosome types.

  He was silent. She returned to the article on pornography.

  “You have a New York accent,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Do you mind if I ask what part you’re from?”

  “Near Houston Street,” she said, sensing that he was also Lower Eastside Irish.

  “Me too,” he said. “Did you go to St. Mike’s?”

  “Yeah.” She wondered if he were Tommy Dunnigan grown up or Bobby Driscoll, those creeps who used to beat up her little brother George. “Did you go to St. Mike’s too?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  She looked around, but saw no other free seats. And no old people standing. The train was only halfway through the tunnel. What if he pulled something right here in the tunnel?

  “You like it in California?” he asked.

  “It’s OK,” she said.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Twenty-five years,” she said, in a louder voice, hoping to attract attention to them just in case. That punk rock guy looked like he could take care of Mr. Crumple if he wanted. Lord, she was always such a bad judge of character.

  “Do you work in the city?”

  “Yes,” she said. She fancied telling him she was a ballistics expert in the San Francisco Police Department. But even joking, she couldn’t call herself a cop.

  “I’m just here on vacation,” he said.

  “Having a nice time?” she said, in spite of herself.

  “Oh, my, yes,” he said. “And I find you Californians so friendly.” He stood up. “Well, this is my stop. Thanks for the conversation.”

  She watched him get off the train and walk to the escalator, confused, and weighed down by his airline satchel and his classical records. What kind of world was it where a big strong woman like herself was afraid of a little Mr. Crumple? She looked around to see the kids at the back of the car smoking and yelling to the fancy girls carrying opera programs. The punk man was engrossed in his fanzine, running a blue comb through his purple locks. The old woman had her head on her bosom, snoring.

  XII

  Novena

  It all came back to Susan like the rosaries, one decade after another. First her mother Mary’s story and then Susan’s own story. Sometimes Susan confused the two stories, in the sense that we are all each other’s memories and premonitions.

  Mary

  Pubic hair, dark curls against blue white skin, is all she remembered of her own mother. Mary was seven-and-a-half when the “doctor” left her mother dead on the kitchen table. They said her mother was a blonde, but Mary didn’t remember. They said her mother was French. Mary appreciated that when she was older. (Stuart romance in Edinburgh’s dour back streets.) The pubic hair, she did remember, was flecked with grey.

  Susan

  The blood on the sheets of the double bed came from her toes, Susan’s mother said. From clipping her toenails too close. But it smelled of sex and she couldn’t fool Susan with this fairy tale. Susan was already eight, so she knew she was too old to be an orphan and she remembered more than pubic hair. Susan remembered that when her father was at sea and her mother slept alone, there was blood on the ironed muslin sheets. She would crawl in next to Mom, snuggling away from the nightmares. Her mother never revealed her own dark dreams. But Susan knew, even then, that the blood was too high up for toes.

  Mary

  Mary’s mother’s photograph stood on the bookcase for four years after her death. Later, Mary could never remember her mother’s face, but she did remember all the books, each by place. Fifty years later. The Everyman volumes of Scott, the red leather Burns. And the Milton. Mary’s father would bring down Paradise Lost and read her the order of the world. He would leave her oatmeal bubbling on the stove each morning. Mary always came straight home from school and prepared his supper. They took care of each other this way after her mother’s death. But there was never enough warmth for his cough.

  Susan

  Susan’s grandma, her father’s mother, lived in the upstairs bedroom and never cried. Sometimes the “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” under her breath was more expletive than prayer, but Susan never saw the tears. Urine bottle on the lace doily. “Would you empty it dear?” Susan pretended it was orange juice and never smelled the difference. She took care of her father’s mother the way she would have taken care of her father if he had ever been home. Yellow pus oozed from her grandma’s leg ulcer as Susan changed the muslin dressings. She washed yesterday’s blood from these remnants. They dried outside on the line, slightly yellower than the double bed sheets, the stains gone from both. Susan never heard her mother or her grandma cry. Not even over onions.

  Mary

  Mary bawled with
anger. On a sunny Saturday morning riding the Princes Street trolley down toward Leith and Portabello Beach. She was going home alone from the Royal Infirmary. When they had registered the night before, him alternately choking and spitting blood, he told her not to worry. God would take care of them both. He reminded Mary that HE would always be with her. And these people on the trolley, what right did they have to live, to laugh? She would never forget him, never. He would always be with her.

  Susan

  He came back periodically. Susan didn’t remember much about her father, but she did remember the Japanese stamps, the Easter cablegram and a telephone call from Argentina just to say hello. Her mother polished the Swiss music box, dusted the ivory elephant carvings from India and the fat ceramic god Ho Tai. Susan remembered her mother being happy for days before he returned. Once he brought back three bronze busts, of women in the traditional coiffures of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, cut off just before the nipples. He would stay home for two or three months at a time.

  Mary

  Broken chocolate and the News of the World. Mary would run down Leith Walk for their treats and race back home for the two evening hours before the coal fire. Her little brother Peter was there, too. Beautiful, blond Peter. (It must have been true about her mother being a French blonde.) But she was his daughter. “Remember you’re a Gibson and I love you,” her father would say. She knew that, even the day he chased her out of St. Mary’s Cathedral with a switch. All right to play with Maria Ciotti, to eat her mother’s spaghetti, but never let him catch her again in that Papist sanctuary. She remembered for a long time afterward because the switching was so unlike him.

  Susan

  Susan’s mother taught her the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Glory Be. Susan brought home the classroom rosary beads in the belly of the statue of the Infant of Prague which opened at the bottom like a piggy bank. Sister Matthew told them that the family that prays together stays together. But one afternoon when Susan was sitting with her father watching the Dodgers smash the Giants, he told her that her mother wasn’t Catholic. She screamed and demanded he tell her she wasn’t Jewish. (Sister Matthew had warned about the Jews.) “Go ask your mother,” he teased, “go tell her you thought she was a Jew.” “Protestant,” Mary said heavily. She put her arms around Susan and told her God loved everyone. But Susan knew, then, that her mother Mary would not be saved.