October 1 - On the Night Train To...

On the night train to Paris, rural France was only registered in flashes of gray and silver out the window. The low mounds of haystacks, like a Monet stripped of its colors; the steeples silhouetted against the treetops; the stone cottages of the South, each round block fitted neatly into its counterparts like a puzzle piece. Further north the houses turned to wood, the fields changed from low stunted trees and fuzzy bunches of lavender into glimmering corn and wilted sunflowers, their faces sleeping now, their yellow petals rendered some other color by the haze of twilight.

Jennifer watched but didn’t see, images not registering beyond a flash of recognition here, a note to self of that was a farm there, each town slipping silently into the background of the humming train as it sped through the night. The old woman who sat opposite Jennifer had nodded off, her chin slipping into the lace of her collar, her jowls drooping lower and her lips puckered into a frown. When she came onto the train, there was an air of strength about her, even though her footsteps were slow and faltering, a knobby cane providing a third leg. She had purposefully extracted a slim livre poche from her purse, never meeting Jennifer’s eye, never asking her purpose or identity, and proceeded to read the entire way, all the way, at least, until the sun went down, at which point the volume was stowed back within her purse and her chin nodded down and her bright eyes lost their intensity, slipping shut behind heavy, wrinkled eyelids. Whatever strength she exuded by day was sapped with the setting of the sun. Jennifer looked away, now, embarrassed the woman might wake and find her staring so intently.

Quiet in the train car, all quiet.

Jennifer couldn’t find respite as the old woman could, as the man with a bulbous nose next to her could, a nose that produced a soft, watery snore every kilometer or so, as the young child on her papa’s lap could, her thumb stuck in her mouth and ringlets of hair matted against her cheek from where it squished into the flannel of papa’s shirt. No; she wished she could close her eyes and slip into dreams until Paris greeted her, but images of Marseilles kept flooding her vision. She didn’t want to remember this trip. Not the way Marion Jordan had collapsed into her arms the moment she descended from her train onto the quai of the Saint-Charles station. Not the way her mother’s normally impeccable appearance resembled something like confetti paper after a grade school class had gotten its hands on it, the hair frazzled, the makeup smudged, deep mascara creating war paint under eyes that had become red from crying. Not the solemn church ceremony under an unusually cold morning sky, the black of the mourners’ clothing sharp against the brown stone of the church, the white and cream of the flowers. She wished she could recall instead the good memories of past visits to Marseilles, in the last ten years since her mother remarried. Paul was a Frenchman twenty years Marion’s senior, with a deliberate accent and an even more deliberate manner of choosing his wine bottle at dinner, peering over his reading glasses at the list proffered as though life or death decisions or stock market crashes hinged on his verdict. Jennifer had never been overly fond of Paul and his careful manner, but he made her mother happy, and that was what mattered at the end of the day, right? She stifled all her complaints over the years – the way Paul went into the village to drink wine until late at night, the way he philandered behind Marion’s back, the way he sometimes spoke of her as though a small child, because she had never mastered his language and had little concept of a good ‘nose’ or ‘bouquet’ in a glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Jennifer shrugged aside all these misgivings because the old Marion disappeared once she moved to France. The new Marion had found a semblance of peace here, after her years as a washed-up divorcée who drank too much brandy and bought jewelry as therapy. Marion had found happiness in a tiny hamlet outside the city of Marseille, where the two owned a small, local vineyard and oversaw the workings of an olive grove and a lavender farm. When her mother had called sobbing with the news of Paul’s death a week ago, Jennifer hadn’t cringed because of grief, or the need to buy a last minute plane ticket to France – she was always quick to efface the hardships to herself – but because Marion would quickly come undone by this.

“Will Jessica come? Will Jessica come?” Marion had asked into the phone over and over, her most urgent question. Jennifer could only sigh.

“I’ll try and persuade her.”

Her kid sister didn’t come. Jessica was acting – a bit part – in a Hollywood film and, “couldn’t deal with the frogs right now. Ha ha ha.” Jessica always got her way, always insisted on her way; perhaps that was why Marion doted on her younger daughter so, this refusal to reform, to repent, to show up, even. Jennifer reminded herself that she was the responsible one and it was for this that she let her own troubles fall by the wayside every time she saw Marion or Jessica, either one. She listened to their tales of grief in love, grief in life, woe at work, and bit her tongue. What story could she tell, anyway? She squeezed her eyes shut as the train plowed on through the night, darker now, the gray objects muted to mere hints of shapes outside the window, vast and indistinct so that the shadows that rose up could have been anything, this place could be anywhere. The man with the big nose gave another quiet grunt in his sleep.

“May I sit?”

Jennifer looked up in surprise at a human voice after the hours of silence. He said it in English, which surprised her as well, since the accent was French. What had given away her Otherness? The owner of the voice had strong, Gallic features, a mop of unruly dark hair on his head, a bold nose, piercing eyes. Large hands. He wore an overcoat, out of place in the warm car of the train. Unsure what else to do, she gestured at the seat next to the sleeping old woman, whose head now drooped lower into her lace, so it nearly tucked into her décolletage.

“I saw you were awake.”

Jennifer nodded.

“I, too,” he said, gesturing grandly towards his chest, “could not sleep. I think, I feel, something troubles you this night.”

Her mouth dropped open. A low, keening church bell tolled somewhere outside the train’s window, one quick call to whoever lived in the anonymous village as they glided past. She blinked.

“My mother’s boyfriend – husband,” – she needed to correct herself, still, after ten years – “passed away. I came for the funeral. Not a good trip.” She tried a laugh. “A memory I’d just as soon forget.”

He nodded as if he expected exactly this tale. “Tell me how you feel.”

She blinked again. “Excuse me?”

“This man, who died, this…”

“Paul.”

“Tell me how you feel.” Jennifer’s hands twitched against the handle of her purse, clutched still in her lap after the hours of riding; she had forgotten to stow it overhead.

“My mother will be undone by this. When my father left her fifteen years ago… She had only ever been a housewife. She didn’t know how to exist if she wasn’t an appendage. And then with Paul, here, France. She was happy, you understand? But it meant everything to her that Jessica – that’s my little sister – meant everything to her that Jessica come for this funeral. She never comes for anything, you understand? And she didn’t come for this either, which means it was just me, and Mom… Mom never really paid much attention to me, didn’t notice me almost. I’m not sure she knew I was at the funeral.”

Jennifer looked at her feet, embarrassed to have said so much.

“Stop telling me about your mother,” he commanded suddenly into the silence, so that the old woman’s eyes fluttered half-way open before being dragged down again by the weight of her lashes. “Stop telling me about your sister. Tell me about yourself.”

Jennifer gave a quick laugh. “Myself?” She squinted at the train ceiling, hoping for guidance. The dark landscape outside the window could provide no cliff notes, no cheat sheet.

“Tell me a memory.”

It was the first one that presented itself to her, which made her laugh again, because she hadn’t thought of it in at least twenty years, but here it was now, the image appearing in the blurred glass of the train window.

“We’d taken this canoe trip,” she said slowly. “Lord knows why. It must have been some glorious summer day and my parents got it into their heads that we would canoe from one end of the river in town to the other. Only about a mile! It was a small town, you know? Hardly an outing, and the only time we ever did it, even though we lived in that town for nineteen years. We must have been…” She squinted again, counted seconds as the train rumbled. “I must have been ten years old, Jessica about eight.” He frowned at her, so she hastened towards her point. “So my parents canoe us to this park at the other end of the lake, where we picnic, you know? In the sun, the blanket, the basket, the pre-packaged sandwiches, the whole thing. And as we’re walking back to the canoe on this little path – through the woods, right? – Jessica – poor Jessica – she walks right over this wasps’ nest and one of them stings her.”

She looked to see if these words had any effect, but the man was still only staring, so she cleared her throat and continued.

“One of them stings her, see, but Jessica, she was so young she didn’t know what had happened. So what does she do? Instead of running to my dad who’s safely in front of her, she ran back through the wasp’s nest to my mom and promptly got stung twice more.” Jennifer could picture her sister still, her thin arms flailing, her mouth open in a wail of pain, fat tears leaking from her eyes, the panic in her expression. She shuddered, but then smiled.

“And see, I probably would never remember that outing at all if the bee stings hadn’t happened. I’d wouldn’t remember the afternoon where we were fitted for life jackets, climbed into the wobbling canoes on the river, my parents rowing in time with one another, the way they rowed back as fast as they could while we pressed the leftover ice from the picnic lemonade against Jessica’s welts, wouldn’t remember any of it at all if the pain and catastrophe hadn’t happened. Is that it?” she asked, suddenly. “Is that what it is? That we only remember things once they become traumatic, and otherwise they are lost? Because all my memories, all my…” Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. The Frenchman’s mouth had a sour twist to it. She leaned back into her seat, relieved to find the old woman was still asleep.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m no good at this. I’ve never been any good at this.”

“At what?” he drawled out in concern.

“Talking about myself.” His eyes widened, those large hands twitched. It was not what he had expected.

“Perhaps I’ll leave you,” he suggested, after a long pause. Jennifer nodded, but he didn’t see it in the dark.

“Perhaps that would be best.”