by Andrea Lee
A nurse from the local hospital who was waiting at the bus stop across the street gave me a curious look, and I drew my head down into my collar. I felt suddenly that I looked genuinely eccentric in the filthy old ski jacket, my hair pulled back formally as it had been for the burial service that morning and the smeared remains of lipstick around my mouth. What I remembered most clearly about the burial was the dismal reddish color of the broken soil, and the unpleasantly smooth motion of the mechanical device that lowered the coffin into the earth; the two images seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
Talking aloud to myself, however, had suddenly recalled my father to me: he was always talking—preaching, or conferring with parties of solemn-faced men—and when he had no one else to talk to, he talked to himself, pacing in the dining room through many sleepless nights. Once when I was very small, I had crept down the back stairs and peered at him from the kitchen doorway. Wearing pajamas, he had been walking up and down, talking in a low, expressive voice and pausing occasionally to write in the notebook he kept for sermons, his face as alert and interested as if someone were walking there beside him. Remembering that, I remembered that after his funeral I had dreamed about him. In the dream he had fallen overboard from a whaling ship—like the one in Two Years before the Mast—and had come up from the ocean still alive but encased in a piece of iceberg. Through the ice I could see his big hands gesturing in a friendly, instructive manner while he looked straight at me and said something inaudible. It was the same word or syllable I had wanted to say in answer to Stuart Penn, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.
8
When I took the train back up to Boston, a weird-looking kid got on at the North Philadelphia station and sat down next to me. He was fourteen or fifteen and had stringy shoulder-length hair that was a rich, almost metallic gold color, like the hair of a Madonna in a particularly garish religious picture. He had a whitish, pimply, pushed-in face and black eyes that looked almost Oriental; on his skinny body he was wearing a pair of faded orange bell-bottoms and a tight, cheap-looking leather coat, with the big cuffs and wide lapels that had just gone out of fashion. He pushed a very small knapsack with a Boy Scout emblem on it under the seat in front of him, and then he turned to me with such a bright, nutty gaze that I wondered what drug he was on. “Do you like riddles?” he asked me, without any preliminary, and my heart sank.
I was feeling numb and lightheaded, unable yet to comprehend what had happened to my life in the last week and a half. My mother had driven me to the station, and we had kissed goodbye like a couple of zombies, looking at each other with the oblique gaze of two people for whom pain had temporarily cut off communication.
“Listen, I really don’t feel like talking,” I said to the kid next to me, and he responded brightly, “That’s OK—I’ll just give the riddle, and if you don’t know the answer, I’ll say that, too.”
He told me an elephant joke, one of the oldest in the world, and after he told it, he gave a grating high-pitched giggle. “That’s a really good joke,” he said. “A guy gave me a ride in this incredible customized van and told me that one. Hey—I’m on my way to Vegas. Where’re you going?”
“What are you doing on the train to Boston if you’re going to Las Vegas?” I asked unwillingly.
“I’ve got a connection in New York,” he said, emphasizing “connection” in a spacy, mysterious way that suggested to me that he meant nothing at all by it. “Hey, listen, how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Crazy. I’m fifteen. I got suspended from school when me and this other guy were in shop and we put a bullet in a vise and turned it until the bullet went off. It was wild, the teacher went nuts. After that I got sick of sitting around the house getting high and watching Secret Storm with Uncle Roman. He’s my father’s brother, Macedonian, just off the boat, doesn’t speak a word of English—just ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘TV.’ Christ, what a dirt-ball. So I took off to go to Vegas and be a dealer or a bodyguard. Both those jobs make a lot of money. You name it, anything would be better than living in Linvilla, PA—Linvilla, armpit of Scranton, asshole of the world. Where are you going?”
“Back to school in Boston.”
He went on talking in a chattering rush that convinced me that he was on speed, then suddenly, in mid-sentence, grabbed his knapsack and hopped off the train in Newark, leaving me to wonder why he had said he was going to New York. After he was gone, I realized that he had never given a ticket to the conductor.
At Penn Station in New York, a dark-haired young woman got on and sat next to me. She was a few years older than I was, dressed in jeans and an old squirrel coat; there was, however, something stately and controlled about the way she moved her shoulders and head that made her clothes seem elegant. She was carrying a paperback book, but she kept glancing at me in a lively, eager way that made me realize that I was fated, that day, to have people approach me. When we started to talk, I was struck by the contrast between the vibrant expression on her face and the strange, deliberately muted way in which she spoke. After a few minutes she told me that she was an opera student and had just won a prize in a competition in Manhattan.
“The prize I won is a scholarship to study at the Salzburg Conservatory,” she said in her muted voice, regarding me with a warm, almost caressing look in her small brown eyes, as if she felt that I was partly responsible for her good fortune. “I’m walking on air, but I’m also scared out of my mind. I’ve been studying for years, but I never thought anything like this would happen—I mean, I was teaching nursery school. And my family’s ecstatic—they’re throwing me a big party at my aunt’s house in Cranston.”
Now that I knew she was a singer, I studied her strong, rather swarthy neck that rose imperiously from her red sweater; it seemed to be pulsing with life and health.
“You’ll be famous,” I said, feeling a little jealous.
“That part doesn’t even count to me,” she said, though her expression made me suspect that it did. “What matters is that something—at last—has happened to me!”
She got off at New Haven, first giving me her name—Lucy Consalves—and I settled back to stare out at the wintry beaches passing by the train windows as we continued through Connecticut. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon. The sky over the water was a striated gray, and the sea was a deeper gray, with the foam of the waves a startling, recurring flicker of yellowish white that seemed like a repetitious signal of nearly human expression—the wink of an eye or the waving of a handkerchief. A kid of about seventeen or eighteen was jogging on the sand; he was black, and I wondered briefly what on earth he was doing on a Connecticut beach. The lowering light gave the broad expanse of sea and marsh and sky around him a curiously contained, interior feeling. A few gulls skimmed the waves, and I thought of the New African Baptist Church, where the stuffed white dove representing the Holy Spirit still hung on a string over the baptismal pool, and where the people had stood crowded as close as marsh grass to witness my father’s last appearance.
The train moved past the seascape and the jogger, on toward Rhode Island, and I closed my eyes. Exhausted as I was, I had a brief new impression: that the world was a place full of kids in transit, people like the jogger and Lucy Consalves and that punk from Linvilla, PA, all of them, inexplicably, bound on excursions that might end up being glorious or stupid or violent, but that certainly moved in a direction away from anything they had ever known. I was one of them, and although I didn’t know what direction I was heading in, and had only a faint idea yet of what I was leaving behind, the sense of being in motion was a thrill that made up for a lot. I sat and squeezed my eyes tighter and hoped that it would turn out to be enough for me.
To the memory of
Charles Sumner Lee
ALSO BY ANDREA LEE
Russian Journal
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREA LEE was born in Philadelphia and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University.
Her first book, Russian Journal, was nominated for a National Book Award and received the 1984 Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Sarah Phillips is her first novel. Miss Lee is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She and her husband live in Rome.