by Lily King
“Sometimes it looks like the window of a train, don’t you think?” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m on a train. Or maybe I just want to be.”
I stacked dishes and brought them over to the counter. Her eyes struggled over the pattern of buildings and passageways on the opposite bank that mine could follow effortlessly. It had never seemed like a train window to me.
The kettle screeched to a boil. I reached for it, eager for her to make tea and be on her way. But she lingered at the window, letting the steam from her teacup thread its way up into her face. She stepped closer, into the space between the sink and counter, then pressed her forehead against the pane. She let her skull roll hard to one side, then back, and I could hear the bone bump and the glass rattle in its casing.
I wondered if something had been revealed in their bedroom the night before, if they’d had a fight, if Marc had spoken in his sleep, if Lola had crept in and told her, and if now Nicole was creating this moment for my confession. Her neck exposed, her head lolling, loud against the glass—it was as if she were reaching a hand down my throat for the words. I wanted to give them to her, to pull her back from where she was drifting, to put something at stake, to find out if anything could ever be at stake for her. I wanted to make her truly want what she already had, for she had so much and I hated her for not knowing it. But if I spoke, I would lose forever what she had allowed me to share. If I spoke, she would make everything seem bland and predictable, and it was that, more than anything else, that stopped me. She would take it in with a look of terrible pity, as if I’d been badly duped. This was her way, to make it seem that her emotion, the one she had at any given moment, was the only appropriate one.
I told myself it was because I had to clean the kitchen that I remained and didn’t walk away, but this wasn’t true. As much as I resented and envied and scorned Nicole, I stayed there at the counter, trembling slightly but refusing to confess, because she intrigued me, and because I dimly sensed movement, as if the ground beneath us were about to shift.
“It was a happy month in my life, on that train.” She pulled back from the window and faced me, the cup of tea warming the bone between her breasts, the spot Marc had claimed, as he kissed mine, was the center of your soul. Surely he’d told her the same thing at some point. Maybe she’d told him. “I was just a little girl. Our schoolhouse was being repaired, so all the kids from Plaire were supposed to go to the next town over for a month. But that town was Protestant so my father sent me to a nun’s school three towns east. At six every morning he drove me down in my blue-and-yellow uniform to the train station, bought me a ticket, and put me on the regional to Alt.” Her gaze went back through the glass.
“I’m not sure my father ever knew,” she went on, after a long sip, “and I surely never told him, but it wasn’t a commuter train. This one at six-ten ran from the Spanish border straight across France through Italy, so it was full of travelers—foreigners. At first I was frightened to get in a compartment with all of those faces so different from what I had ever seen. Plaire was small and everyone looked pretty much the same.” Her face flushed a coppery color, from her tan and the tea and the memory. “Women wearing baggy pants and men’s hats. I couldn’t believe my own father had put me on this train. Women sleeping with their heads in men’s laps. Groups of four or six or eight, young men and women—no older than my sisters—traveling together unchaperoned, sitting outside the bathrooms sharing cigarettes when there were no seats, and me standing among them. I got used to it all within days, and pretty soon I was seeking out the most exotic people I could find.”
I wished she would stop. I looked down at the dishes in front of me, hoping that she would apologize and let me carry on. But I’d never seen her apologize for anything. Whatever she did was calculated. She had probably never regretted one thing she had ever done in her life.
She went on. “When I boarded the train every morning, I stepped out of the only world I knew. My father would have driven me the whole way if he’d ever found out, so until the train pulled out, I just sat in the window, if one was free, looking straight ahead and sleepy, but by the time the train arrived in Alt, I’d be playing cards with some Moroccans or teaching a group of Italians the ‘Marseillaise’ or eating bratwurst. The foods I ate on that train! People were always rustling through their paper bags to feed me.”
I don’t want to know these things, I thought, but I heard and saw without listening or looking. It was like reading a book and losing consciousness of the barriers of pages and words—being shoved right to the edge of the scene. I could see Plaire at dawn through the window, the yellow platform lights, her father opening the door of his truck, giving a last wave before he got back in. I could feel the movement of the train, smell the odor of sleep in the carriage, hear the sound of a little girl’s step in the aisle.
“I remember one couple vividly. They were Dutch. They had been working in Rhodesia and were traveling to Athens. She was reading Chekhov. She’d read a passage aloud in Russian, then translate it into French for me and Dutch for him. She had long legs that she had to stretch across his lap to the window ledge. The passage was about death, I remember.” She smirked at the window, then turned toward me with a quick, unfamiliar shake of her head, as if trying to dislodge the images.
I wondered what shades of blue and yellow the uniform was. I wanted to be able to picture more than just the train station in Plaire. When she spoke, I could feel how it must have been to have a hometown and a childhood in which solitary events stood out in stark relief against the comfortable monotony of years. “Did you ever tell anyone?” I asked softly, coaxingly, before the topic was scared off like a skittish animal.
“Yes, I had an aunt—not really an aunt but a friend of my mother’s.”
There might have been lots of aunts and uncles and cousins and, on top of that, people you called your aunts and uncles and cousins. There would have been people always watching over you, guiding you, loving you. You would have been part of something large and alive and important. You wouldn’t have had just one sister, and when you lost her you wouldn’t feel like you’d lost everything in the world.
“I told her because I couldn’t keep it to myself, and anyone else would have told someone in my family. I told her everything.”
I tried to imagine a Nicole who couldn’t keep things to herself, who was bursting with life, and who wore the bright, eager, illuminated face that was showing now, dimly, through the adult mask. This was the second time I’d ever heard her speak of the past, and even now she spoke reluctantly, as if something was pushing her on. This wasn’t calculated, I realized, and it had everything to do with Spain. The trip had loosened things inside her. And something else had happened there, something perverse and unsought and terrible: Nicole had come to trust me.
“She’s still alive, that aunt. She writes me,” she said, and I knew then that those were the yellow envelopes she read in private, “although her writing—” she put out a trembly hand to help me understand the word, frémit, she was about to use.
With this gesture, I felt a wave of resentment and suffocation; she knew precisely the borders of my comprehension. The feeling came back to me, the suspicion that she could not be deceived, that she knew not only my vocabulary but the very contours and possibilities of my mind. And the old feeling conflicted with these other newer emotions, this strange affection for her, and my unworthiness of her attention.
“She lives alone. I don’t know how she manages now. She must be close to ninety. In Spain, I had a nightmare that I went to her. I could never go back there. But she is so alone, and in the dream I was finally going to help her. I’d promised to take care of her rotting garden and clean her filthy kitchen. I was going to make her delicious, well-balanced meals. But I never arrived. I got in the car and drove, but I could never reach her. Days and days, and I never left Paris. It was such an awful dream because it’s the way I feel all the time.” Her lips quivered as she spoke these last word
s.
Was I being manipulated again? Had Nicole orchestrated all of this—the rolling of her head, the memories, the painful remorse—in order to bring me to this point? I didn’t care if she had. This was it, my chance for absolution—and escape. I had to take it.
“Let me go,” I said. “Let me go be with her.”
“Don’t be silly, Rosie.”
“I want to go. I want to leave here.”
I was easily replaced.
The new fille arrived a few hours before my train left. She was Austrian and her French was already quite good, for she had been in the city with another family since the rentrée, and I found myself speaking as quickly and colloquially as possible while I took her through the rooms and explained the routine. It was evening—my train didn’t leave till midnight—and the house seemed small, and faces and furniture close and oversized. The new fille kissed the family smoothly, chatted blithely, and tucked a short curl of hair behind her ear whenever she paused for a word to come to her. She seemed so young, so young and so well rested. Of all the fresh, uncomplicated qualities I perceived in this new girl, it was her well-rested face I envied the most.
Nicole had arranged things in a letter to the old aunt and had told the rest of the family about my departure. How she explained it to them I never knew, for she vacillated between feelings of deep gratitude and hostile abandonment. As the day drew near, she settled on the side of abandonment, frequently complaining about the great disruption of training a new fille.
Of the children, only Odile had expressed any genuine sadness. Guillaume had come to me immediately, asking if I was sure I wanted to go, but in the same breath he wondered about the new fille and where she would be from and when she would arrive. Lola hadn’t mentioned it at all. But Odile seemed truly affected. Because I’d been the only one to support her recent breakup with Alexandre, she had taken to talking to me more freely since we’d been back from Spain.
A few days earlier, I’d gone to set the dining room table and found Odile in her father’s seat, writing in a notebook. She put it aside to help me, and as we went around the table together with place mats and silver, I said, pointing to the three women washing clothes in the foamy sea, “I’ll miss that painting.”
“Why?”
“Because of the color of the water.” I stepped closer to it. “And the song they’re always singing.”
Odile smiled, not the snide, dismissive smile she’d given me most of the year but an unexpected pleased and prideful smile. She placed her finger in the bottom right corner of the canvas, just below the tiny initials: O.T.
“May I read you something?” she said, before I had time to express more than surprise.
She shut the door into the kitchen and the door into the living room, then went over to the notebook. “Dear Aimée,” she began, slowly and softly making her way through one page, then another. I understood then, not from the contents of the letter but from the tender way she read her own words. It was a description of spring along the river, of buds and nests and rising water. I had noticed none of these things. Odile’s face was brilliant but also vulnerable as she looked up from the last page. It was the face Nicole had worn when she’d told me about the train. Why, at the moment I’d proven myself utterly untrustworthy, were people now clamoring to confide in me?
Odile came to my room that last evening to say good-bye as I was finishing packing. She kissed me on both cheeks, and I asked her if I could give her a big American hug. Odile laughed. There was a chance Lola would never tell her, and I held her tightly, with the hope pounding through me that to Odile I would always remain innocent.
After she left, I zipped up my suitcase and sat on the bed. The new fille was sleeping in Lola’s room that night, and I could hear them through the wall. Guillaume was bouncing from his room to theirs and Lola shouted at him each time to stay out. It was way past his bedtime but I was done with discipline and the new fille hadn’t begun, so he remained at large. Eventually he bounced into my room, panting and flushed with hysteria.
“Good-bye, Rosie,” he said, putting his sweaty face up to be kissed. It was clear that Odile had told him to come do this.
“Good-bye, Guillaume.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
He looked around the empty room. “It’s hot down south.”
“I know.”
“Are you taking everything?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s moving in here?”
It was as if he’d never had a new fille before. I thought of the first day when he and Lola had imitated a whole slew of them, and how I’d wondered what they would remember of me. I was certain now Lola would make sure they forgot me. It was like writing in the sand, my life, each segment necessarily washed away.
I lifted him up by his scrawny, scarred arms and gave him an exaggerated squeeze. He yelped as I knew he would, and I dropped him.
“I’ll miss you,” he said again, this time sincerely.
Lola had told me to come say good-bye just before I left for the train, but I knew how heavily she slept and how awkward it would be to get to her with the Austrian in the trundle bed below, so I went to her room directly after Guillaume left mine.
They were sitting cross-legged on Lola’s bed. They stopped talking when I came in, and it seemed to take several minutes for me to cross the room to them. There were the usual posters on the wall—the French soccer team, Paul Belmondo lighting a cigarette, a lion carrying three cubs by their napes—and the usual smell of artificial flavoring and rubber erasers. I had spent far more time in this room than in my own, and it seemed impossible that these were my last moments in it.
“She has a boyfriend in Vienna,” Lola said.
I tried to smile at the girl, who was wearing Lola’s Snoopy nightshirt. “Don’t you have a nightgown?”
“Yes, but it’s in my bag, at—” She hesitated, looping that curl around her ear.
“Au fond,” Lola and I said at the same time, but Lola wouldn’t acknowledge it. Her face was implacable.
“Good-bye,” Lola said in English, with her perfect British accent, when I stepped closer.
I leaned down to kiss her stone cheeks. I hugged her clumsily and got nothing back, but just as I began to pull away, she gripped me hard. It felt so good.
“I’m sorry,” I began, “I’m so—” but was politely pushed away.
“Hasta la vista, Señor Perez,” Lola said, when I was back across the room. They were still laughing, Lola and the ignorant new fille, as I shut the door.
Marc was to drive me to the station since, Nicole had said, we were the two insomniacs. But she was still up when it was time to go.
We said good-bye in the coatroom.
“You can leave this on the train when you get there,” Nicole said, helping me on with my wool jacket. “It’ll be too warm.”
I nodded. So much of my clothing had always embarrassed her.
I was desperate to be free of her, yet I stalled now, fastening each button as if it were winter, asking if there was anything I could send her from Plaire or any messages I could deliver. Not a thing, Nicole told me, watching with impatience as I struggled to push the top button into its too-small hole.
Finally she reached over, shoved the button through with one thrust of her thumb, kissed me, and thanked me for eight months of invaluable something or other. I didn’t understand the word and was pleased Nicole was too distracted to know this. Marc was somewhere behind me, closer to the stairs, waiting beside my bags.
Then Nicole was the one to stall. “You know it’s the Gare de Lyon, not the Gare de Sud,” she said to Marc.
“I know,” he said, coming closer.
“And it’s the train to Avignon. It won’t say Plaire or Alt.”
“Yes.” He was smiling at her. “Is there anything else you’d like to mention a few hundred times?”
She shook her head. It seemed almost coy.
There w
as a strange thickness there in the coatroom, but it wasn’t like the thickness that had spread over us in Spain after lunch. It wasn’t easy or warm; it was debilitating, as if none of us could speak or move without tremendous effort. I wanted to turn and go, but I felt there must be more punishment than just leaving. I wanted Nicole to slap me, or Lola to come running in, screaming out the truth. Instead there was only silence and a sad, grateful expression on Nicole’s face.
“It’s time,” Marc said.
Nicole brought the loose watch on her wrist around to where she could see it. “It is.” She raised her eyes to meet his over my shoulder. Her expression changed. Yes, she seemed to be telling him, I’ll wait up.
Marc held his arm out toward the stairs and I climbed them obediently.
The house sealed up behind me as I stepped off onto the quai. The long row of windows on this side of the barge were all dark except for the master bedroom at the far end, and this became, as we drove away, the only part of La Sequana that remained in sight from the avenue above. It was as if the rest had broken off and all that remained was that square of light which held, unseen but vivid, a woman waiting up in a large room full of silk stockings laid flat in a shallow drawer, chocolate in silver boxes, a long rack of hourglass dresses, and a cookie tin of letters beneath the bed written on lemon-colored paper—the only thing that bound her to the past and me to the future.
But by tomorrow morning, the rest of the boat would be visible again, and the new fille would put jam on the table and bread under the broiler and linger at the window in silence after the children had gone to school. Traffic would begin on the river and the water would be stirred, carrying, then shattering, the reflections of gray-roofed buildings and wide-arched bridges, one after the other.
Marc and I hadn’t been alone since Spain.
