by Joy Williams
Together, as the train began to move, the girls made their way to the Starlight Lounge in Car 7, where Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead told them they would be enjoying cocktails. They hesitated in the car where the train’s magician was with his audience, watching him while he did the magic silks trick, the cut and restored handkerchief trick, the enchanted saltshaker trick and the dissolving quarter trick. The audience, primarily retirees, screamed with pleasure.
“I don’t mind the tricks,” Jane whispered to Dan, “but the patter drives me crazy.”
The magician was a young man with a long spotted face. He did a lot of card forcing. Again and again, he called the card that people chose from a shuffled deck. Each time that the magician was successful, the audience participant looked astonished and thrilled. Jane and Dan passed on through.
“You don’t really choose,” Jane said. “He just makes you think you choose. He does it all with his pinkie.” She pushed Dan forward into the Starlight Lounge, where Mrs. Muirhead was on a banquette staring out the window at a shed and unkempt bush that were sliding slowly past. She was drinking a martini. Mr. Muirhead was several tables away talking to a young man wearing jeans and a yellow jacket. Jane did not sit down. “Mummy,” she said, “can I have your olive?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Muirhead said, “it’s soaked in gin.”
Jane, Dan in tow, went to her father’s table. “Daddy,” Jane demanded, “why aren’t you sitting with Mummy? Are you and Mummy having a fight?”
Dan was astonished at this question. Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately and, although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening. At breakfast, they would be quarreling over an incident at a cocktail party the night before or a dumb remark made fifteen years ago. At dinner, they would be howling over the fate, which they called by many names, that had delivered each of them to the other. Forgiveness, charity and cooperation were qualities unknown to them. They were opponents pur sang. Dan was sure that one morning, Jane would be called from her classroom and told as gently as possible by Mr. Mooney, the school principal, that her parents had splattered each other’s brains all over the lanai.
Mr. Muirhead looked at the children sorrowfully and touched Jane’s cheek.
“I am not sitting with your mother because I am sitting with this young man here. We are having a fascinating conversation.”
“Why are you always talking to young men,” Jane asked.
“Jane, honey,” Mr. Muirhead said, “I will answer that.” He took a swallow of his drink and sighed. He leaned forward and said earnestly, “I talk to so many young men because your mother won’t let me talk to young women.” He remained hunched over, patting Jane’s cheek for a moment, and then leaned back.
The young man extracted a cigarette from his jacket and hesitated. Mr. Muirhead gave him a book of matches. “He does automobile illustrations,” Mr. Muirhead said.
The young man nodded. “Belly bands. Pearls and flakes. Flames. All custom work.”
Mr. Muirhead smiled. He seemed happier now. Mr. Muirhead loved conversations. He loved “to bring people out.” Dan supposed that Jane had picked up this pleasant trait from her father and distorted it in some perversely personal way.
“I bet you have a Trans Am yourself,” Jane said.
“You are so-o-o right,” the young man said. He extended his hand, showing a large gaudy stone in a setting that seemed to be gold. “Same color as this ring,” he said.
Dan could still be impressed by adults. Their mysterious, unreliable images still had the power to attract and confound her, but Jane was clearly not interested in the young man. She demanded much of life. She had very high standards when she wanted to. Mr. Muirhead ordered the girls ginger ales and the young man and himself another round of drinks. Sometimes the train mysteriously would stop and even reverse, so they would pass unfamiliar scenes once more. The same green pasture filled with slanty light, the same row of clapboard houses, each with the shades of their windows drawn against the heat, the same boats on their trailers, waiting on dry land. The moon was rising beneath a spectacular lightning and thunder storm. People around them were commenting on it. Close to the train, a sheen of dark birds flew low across a dirt road.
“Birds are only flying reptiles, I’m sure you’re all aware,” Jane said suddenly.
“What a horrible thought!” Mr. Muirhead said. His face had become a little slack, and his hair somewhat disarranged.
“It’s true, it’s true,” Jane sang. “Sad but true.”
“You mean like lizards and snakes,” the young man asked. He snorted and shook his head.
“Glorified reptiles, certainly,” Mr. Muirhead said, recovering a bit of his sense of time and place.
Dan suddenly felt lonely. It was not homesickness, although she would have given anything at that moment to be poking around in her little aluminum boat with Jim Anderson. But she wouldn’t be living any longer in the place she thought of as home. The town was the same but the place was different. The house where she had been a little tiny baby and had lived her whole life belonged to someone else now. Over the summer, her mother and Jake had bought another house that he was going to fix up.
“Reptiles have scales,” the young man said, “or else they’re long and slimy.”
Dan felt like bawling. She could feel the backs of her eyes swelling up like cupcakes. She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things. Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too. Dan’s mother told Dan everything. Her mother told her she wouldn’t have to worry about having brothers or sisters. Her mother discussed the particular nature of the problem with her. Half the things she told her, Dan didn’t want to know. There would be no brothers and sisters. There would be Dan and her mother and Jake, sitting around the house together, caring deeply for one another, sharing a nice life together, not making any mistakes.
Dan excused herself and started toward the lavatory on the level below. Mrs. Muirhead called to her as she approached and handed her a folded piece of paper. “Would you be kind enough to give this to Mr. Muirhead,” she asked. Dan returned to Mr. Muirhead and gave him the note and then went down to the lavatory. She sat on the little toilet and cried as the train rocked along.
After a while, she heard Jane’s voice saying, “I hear you in there, Danica Anderson. What’s the matter with you?”
Dan didn’t say anything.
“I know it’s you,” Jane said.
Dan blew her nose, pushed the button on the toilet and said, “What did the note say?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Daddy ate it.”
“He ate it!” Dan exclaimed. She opened the door of the stall and went to the sink. She washed her hands and splashed her face with water. She giggled. “He really ate it?”
“Everybody is looped in that Starlight Lounge,” Jane said, then patted her hair with a hairbrush. Jane’s hair was full of tangles and she never brushed hard enough to get them out. She looked at Dan by looking in the mirror. “Why were you crying?”
“I was thinking about your grandma,” Dan said. “She said that one year she left the Christmas tree up until Easter.”
“Why were you thinking about my grandma!” Jane yelled.
“I was thinking about her singing,” Dan said, startled. “I like her singing.”
In her head, Dan could hear Jane’s grandmother singing about Death’s dark waters and sinking souls, about Mercy Seats and the Great Physician. She could hear the voice rising and falling through the thin walls of the Maine house, borne past the dark screens and into the night.
“I don’t want you thinking about my grandma,” Jane said, pinching Dan’s arm.
Dan tried not to think of Jane’s grandma. Once, she had seen her fall coming out of the water. The beach was stony. The stones were round and smooth and slippery. Jane’s grandmother had skinned her arm.
The girls went
into the corridor and saw Mrs. Muirhead standing there. Mrs. Muirhead was deeply tanned. She had put her hair up in a twist and a wad of cotton was noticeable in her left ear. The three of them stood together, bouncing and nudging against one another with the motion of the train.
“My ear is killing me,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I think there’s something they’re not telling me. It crackles and snaps in there. It’s like a bird breaking seeds in there.” She touched the bone between cheekbone and ear. “I think that doctor I was seeing should lose his license. He was handsome and competent, certainly, but on my last visit he was vacuuming my ear and his secretary came in to ask him a question and she put her hand on his neck. She stroked his neck, his secretary! While I was sitting there having my ear vacuumed!” Mrs. Muirhead’s cheeks were flushed.
The three of them gazed out the window. The train must have been clipping along, but things outside, although gone in an instant, seemed to be moving slowly. Beneath a streetlight, a man was kicking his pickup truck.
“I dislike trains,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I find them depressing.”
“It’s the oxygen deprivation,” Jane said, “coming from having to share the air with all these people.”
“You’re such a snob, dear.” Mrs. Muirhead sighed.
“We’re going to supper now,” Jane said.
“Supper,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “Ugh.”
The children left her looking out the window, a disconsolate, pretty woman wearing a green dress with a line of frogs dancing around it.
The dining car was almost full. The windows reflected the eaters. The countryside was dim and the train pushed through it.
Jane steered them to a table where a man and woman silently labored over their meal.
“My name is Crystal,” Jane offered, “and this is my twin sister, Clara.”
“Clara!” Dan exclaimed. Jane was always inventing drab names for her.
“We were triplets,” Jane went on, “but the other died at birth. Cord got all twisted around his neck or something.”
The woman looked at Jane and smiled.
“What is your line of work?” Jane persisted brightly.
There was silence. The woman kept smiling, then the man said, “I don’t do anything, I don’t have to do anything. I was injured in a peacetime accident and they brought me to the base hospital and worked on reviving me for forty-five minutes. Then they gave up. They thought I was dead. Four hours later, I woke up in the mortuary. The Army gives me a good pension.” He pushed his chair away from the table and left.
Dan looked after him, astonished, a cold roll raised halfway to her mouth. “Was your husband really dead for all that while,” she asked.
“My husband, ha!” the woman said. “I’d never laid eyes on that man before the six-thirty seating.”
“I bet you’re a professional woman who doesn’t believe in men,” Jane said slyly.
“Crystal, how did you guess! It’s true, men are a collective hallucination of women. It’s like when a group of crackpots get together on a hilltop and see flying saucers.” The woman picked at her chicken.
Jane looked surprised, then said, “My father went to a costume party once wrapped from head to foot in aluminum foil.”
“A casserole,” the woman offered.
“No! A spaceman, an alien astronaut!”
Dan giggled, remembering when Mr. Muirhead had done that. She felt that Jane had met her match with this woman.
“What do you do!” Jane fairly screamed. “You won’t tell us!”
“I do drugs,” the woman said. The girls shrank back. “Ha,” the woman said. “Actually, I test drugs for pharmaceutical companies. And I do research for a perfume manufacturer. I am involved in the search for human pheromones.”
Jane looked levelly at the woman.
“I know you don’t know what a pheromone is, Crystal. To put it grossly, a pheromone is a smell that a person has that can make another person do or feel a certain thing. It’s an irresistible signal.”
Dan thought of mangrove roots and orange groves. Of the smell of gas when the pilot light blew out on Jane’s grandmother’s stove. She liked the smell of the Atlantic Ocean when it dried upon your skin and the smell of Jim Anderson’s fur when he had been rained upon. There were smells that could make you follow them, certainly.
Jane stared at the woman, tipping forward slightly in her seat.
“Relax, will you, Crystal, you’re just a child. You don’t even have a smell yet,” the woman said. “I test all sorts of things. Sometimes I’m part of a control group and sometimes I’m not. You never know. If you’re part of the control group, you’re just given a placebo. A placebo, Crystal, is something that is nothing, but you don’t know it’s nothing. You think you’re getting something that will change you or make you feel better or healthier or more attractive or something, but you’re not really.”
“I know what a placebo is,” Jane muttered.
“Well that’s terrific, Crystal, you’re a prodigy.” The woman removed a book from her handbag and began to read it. The book had a denim jacket on it that concealed its title.
“Ha!” Jane said, rising quickly and attempting to knock over a glass of water. “My name’s not Crystal!”
Dan grabbed the glass before it fell and hurried after her. They returned to the Starlight Lounge. Mr. Muirhead was sitting with another young man. This one had a blond beard and a studious manner.
“Oh, this is a wonderful trip!” Mr. Muirhead said exuberantly. “The wonderful people you meet on a trip like this! This is the most fascinating young man. He’s a writer. Been everywhere. He’s putting together a book on cemeteries of the world. Isn’t that some subject? I told him anytime he’s in our town, stop by our restaurant, be my guest for some stone crab claws.”
“Hullo,” the young man said to the girls.
“We were speaking of Père-Lachaise, the legendary Parisian cemetery,” Mr. Muirhead said. “So wistful. So grand and romantic. Your mother and I visited it, Jane, when we were in Paris. We strolled through it on a clear crisp autumn day. The desires of the human heart have no boundaries, girls. The mess of secrets in the human heart are without number. Witnessing Père-Lachaise was a very moving experience. As we strolled, your mother was screaming at me, Jane. Do you know why, honeybunch? She was screaming at me because back in New York, I had garaged the car at the place on East Eighty-Fourth Street. Your mother said that the people in the place on East Eighty-Fourth Street never turned the ignition all the way off to the left and were always running down the battery. She said there wasn’t a soul in all of New York City who didn’t know that the people running the garage on East Eighty-Fourth Street were idiots who were always ruining batteries. Before Père-Lachaise, girls, this young man and I were discussing the Pantheón, just outside of Guanajuato in Mexico. It so happens that I am also familiar with the Pantheón. Your mother wanted some tiles for the foyer so we went to Mexico. You stayed with Mrs. Murphy, Jane. Remember? It was Mrs. Murphy who taught you how to make egg salad. In any case, the Pantheón is a walled cemetery, not unlike the Campo Santo in Genoa, Italy, but the reason everybody goes there is to see the mummies. Something about the exceptionally dry air in the mountains has preserved the bodies and there’s a little museum of mummies. It’s grotesque, of course, and it certainly gave me pause. I mean it’s one thing to think we will all gather together in a paradise of fadeless splendor like your grandma thinks, lamby-lettuce, and it’s another thing to think as the Buddhists do that latent possibilities withdraw into the heart at death but do not perish, thereby allowing the being to be reborn, and it’s one more thing, even, to believe like a goddamn scientist in one of the essential laws of physics which states that no energy is ever lost. It’s one thing to think any of those things, girls, but it’s quite another to be standing in that little museum looking at those miserable mummies. The horror and indignation were in their faces still. I almost cried aloud, so vivid was my sense of the fleetingness of t
his life. We made our way into the fresh air of the courtyard and I bought a pack of cigarettes at a little stand which sold postcards and film and such. I reached into my pocket for my lighter and it wasn’t there. It seemed that I had lost my lighter. The lighter was a very good one that your mother had bought me the Christmas before, Jane, and your mother started screaming at me. There was a very gentle, warm rain falling, and there were bougainvillea petals on the walks. Your mother grasped my arm and reminded me that the lighter had been a gift from her. Your mother reminded me of the blazer she had bought for me. I spilled buttered popcorn on it at the movies and you can still see the spot. She reminded me of the hammock she bought for my fortieth birthday, which I allowed to rot in the rain. She recalled the shoulder bag she bought me, which I detested, it’s true. It was somehow left out in the yard and I mangled it with the lawn mower. Descending the cobbled hill into Guanajuato, your mother recalled every one of her gifts to me, offerings both monetary and of the heart. She pointed out how I had mishandled and betrayed every one.”
No one said anything.
“Then,” Mr. Muirhead continued, “there was the San Cataldo Cemetery in Italy.”
“That hasn’t been completed yet,” the young man said hurriedly. “It’s a visionary design by the architect Aldo Rossi. In our conversation, I was just trying to describe the project to you.”
“You can be assured,” Mr. Muirhead said, “that when the project is finished and I take my little family on a vacation to Italy, as we walk, together and afraid, strolling through the hapless landscape of the San Cataldo Cemetery, Jane’s mother will be screaming at me.”
“Well, I must be going,” the young man said. He got up.
“So long,” Mr. Muirhead said.
“Were they really selling postcards of the mummies in that place,” Dan asked.
“Yes, sweetie pie, they were,” Mr. Muirhead said. “In this world there is a postcard of everything. That’s the kind of world this is.”
The crowd was getting boisterous in the Starlight Lounge. Mrs. Muirhead came down the aisle toward them and with a deep sigh, sat beside her husband. Mr. Muirhead gesticulated and formed words silently with his lips as though he was talking to the girls.