by Riley LaShea
It was something I had noticed more after Scott left, the way Ariel and Nan got on. Despite two decades with Nan, and sharing an intimate sin with Ariel, it often felt like I knew neither of them as well as they knew each other. “We were sisters of another lifetime,” I heard Nan whisper to Ariel one day, and I pretended it didn’t make me feel more alone in the loneliness than I already felt.
With Ariel in charge of everything, once Daddy agreed to let me go, all I had to do was pack my bag and get on the train.
That morning, as Daddy drove us to the station, it was so much like the ride there with Scott, I couldn’t help but worry the same worries all over again. Instead of wondering if I would ever see Scott again, though, I wondered if I would see Nan again, despite the fact she kept assuring us she would play just sick enough while we were gone to keep Mama well-occupied.
Much in the way he’d told Scott to watch out for himself on the battlefields of Europe, Daddy told Ariel and I to watch out for ourselves on the streets of New Orleans.
“It’s not safe for two young women to travel alone,” he said, and I could tell he still didn’t like that Nan had talked him into it.
Ariel assured him she wouldn’t let anything happen to me, and it sent a feeling through me I couldn’t explain, but certainly couldn’t deny. I believed it when she said it, even if Daddy didn’t.
“See that nothing does,” he responded to Ariel, and, when his words sounded tight, it was the first time I realized Daddy wasn’t just convinced he was right about New Orleans. He was also worried. In all the times I’d heard him tell one of us what to do with no room for debate, I wondered how I had never heard the worry before. “Don’t miss your train,” he said, and the crewman calling ‘All aboard’ from the edge of the platform a second later, it was like Daddy could tell the exact time without looking at his watch.
“We’ll be back in a few days,” Ariel assured him. Since we had no return tickets, though, I knew she couldn’t know that with absolute certainty.
“I love you all,” I thought it important to say, and Daddy’s gaze dropped to the platform as he nodded.
“I’ll let your mother and grandmother know you said so,” he returned, as if he wasn’t part of the sentiment.
So, although Daddy didn’t like such displays, especially in public, I wrapped my arms around his waist and hugged tightly to make sure he knew I meant him too.
The private cabin Ariel upgraded us to after we boarded the train was small and stuffy compared to the hallway, despite the air I could feel being desperately pumped in by the ventilation system. Following her into our little oven, I wondered if we would be better served sitting upright all night.
“It will be better once we start moving,” Ariel read my mind, stepping into the tiny space to drop her bag onto one of the seats and peel her jacket from her shoulders.
Recalling the smell of her hair as if it was right against my nose as she pulled it off her neck to band it back, I tried not to think of how I would endure the night with her in such cramped quarters. Thoughts of Ariel were hazardous enough in my large bedroom with its own door at Nan’s. I couldn’t imagine the kind of hazard Ariel would pose in person as I tried to sleep.
“Where are the beds?” I asked her, inspecting the close quarters, and as she glanced up from where she’d taken a seat on one of the small benches that faced each other, Ariel seemed surprised I was trying to have a normal conversation with her.
“The seats slide together,” she explained. “The other berth comes down from the wall.”
“Do you know how to do that?” I questioned.
“The porters take care of it,” she answered, and, feeling backward and uncertain, I dropped my bag on the seat across from Ariel, though, the car still too hot, I couldn’t bring myself to sit.
“Have you ever been to New Orleans?” I asked her. Once, I would have been sure I would have heard about it if she had, when I knew of so many of the other places she’d been, but I couldn’t help but think it might be one of Ariel and Nan’s secrets, those things they’d shared I had no part in.
“No,” Ariel shook her head, and her words came as relief. As lost as I felt, it would have been the smart thing to prefer the company of someone who knew where she was going, but it was rather satisfying to find one thing Ariel wouldn’t know better than me.
“I’m sorry you have to be here,” I said when she didn’t seem all that interested in making further conversation. “I know this isn’t your job.” To serve as my chaperone, I thought to myself, because, where it once might have felt like we were two friends traveling together, I could tell Ariel didn’t want to be there, could tell she was doing it for Nan, not for me, and I was just part of her assigned duty.
“Helping your grandmother is my job,” she stated. “If this is what she wants me to do, this is what I’ll do.”
With one last long blast of the horn, the train started to roll beneath us, slowly departing the station, but I still found my feet unsteady and had to put my hand on the wall to keep from falling.
“You should sit,” Ariel reasonably advised, so I sunk, at last, into the seat across from her.
Looking up, I met her eyes, but, though I wished she would smile, to help calm some of the fear I was trying so hard not to let show, Ariel didn’t. Dropping my gaze instead, she felt separate from me, despite sitting only three feet away, as we followed the railway into the unknown.
Chapter Ten
Wherever she walked, Ariel drew the attention of men. It was possible there were women too who looked, as I did, but they knew not to be seen doing it, keeping their glances quick and obscure, or turning them into genial smiles that meant something else entirely.
There was some injustice in it, I thought, watching the heads turns as we stepped into the dining car, that the men who didn’t know Ariel at all were allowed to look so openly at her, that it was almost expected of them, while my desire, based on more than her appearance, which, though undeniably striking, was so little of who she was, was forced into hiding. Feelings that shouldn’t even be felt, let alone ever shown.
I didn’t know if Ariel didn’t notice the attention, or if she chose not to see, but I couldn’t help but see it, first with Scott, then with the men we’d encountered the few times I went with Ariel to the grocery store. At the train station. Even with Jackson. All his future affections targeted toward me, he still couldn’t help but notice Ariel when she was sitting across from him.
“Good evening,” one man smiled Ariel’s way, as if, with a little luck, he might coax her into taking a seat at his table.
“Good evening,” Ariel responded carefully, like she knew she must be polite, but being too polite would prove too encouraging. It had to be a difficult line for her to walk, it occurred to me, trying to be civil without becoming the victim of someone else’s expectations.
When she opted for the seat in the furthest corner, as if to keep herself as inconspicuous as possible, I sat down in the chair across from her and wondered if that was how things would be for me if I couldn’t stop the trajectory of my thoughts, if I would feel forever compelled to sit on the outskirts.
“We could move to the east side,” I suggested when Ariel reached for the shade to shield us from the sun starting its descent.
“No,” she returned. “You’ll want to be on this side when the sun sets.”
It was stated with complete authority, as if Ariel believed she could determine that for me, which side of the train I would prefer, and I wondered if she could, if, in some ways, she knew me better than I knew myself. The same way Nan knew me, past the person I tried to be, to the person I truly was, timid and afraid and feeble in the face of others’ demands and expectations.
“I’m sorry no one was available to greet you ladies when you came in,” the waiter came to our table with enthusiasm, his smile especially bright against dark skin. “We had a little trouble in the kitchen.” As he opened a menu and put it into my hand, I felt the same in
kling of discomfort I always felt when dealing with colored folks directly. “Is this table satisfactory for you?”
“I prefer this table,” Ariel said.
“Can I get you something while you look over the menu?” the waiter asked, and, as another waiter passed behind him to deliver dinner to a white couple across the way, I saw he too was colored.
Glancing to Ariel, she appeared unfazed at this development, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to behave. A lifetime living under Jim Crow, and sometimes it was still hard to understand the rules.
When we stood with Daddy on the platform in Richmond, the colored waiting area was clearly marked, all the colored passengers standing together in the small space allotted them. When we boarded, the colored cars were linked together at the train’s end. This car, though, was a place for both whites and blacks, apparently, and it never had made much sense to me that whether or not it was okay for the races to mix was dependent entirely upon which side of the menu a person was on.
“I’d like a cognac neat, please,” Ariel said, polite, but with conviction, and I realized I’d only ever heard Nan order that way. Most women I knew asked if they could have something - Could I get an iced tea, please? or Would you bring me a glass of water? - even in places where that was all they were there to do, eat and drink.
Looking up at the waiter, I watched his eyes struggle not to rise as he nodded, and I wondered if it was still too early for such a hard drink, or if he too was used to ladies asking permission.
“For you?” he turned the question to me.
“I’ll have the same,” I said, wanting nothing more than to put the same surprise on the waiter’s face.
“Have you had cognac?” Ariel robbed my moment of its power.
“No,” I admitted, gaze flashing uncomfortably to the waiter, who seemed to close his ears to the conversation the instant he was no longer being addressed. “I want to try it.”
Staring across the table, as if waiting for me to renounce my order and ask for an iced tea instead, Ariel glanced to the waiter again when I didn’t.
“Set hers on fire,” she told him, and, though I hadn’t a clue what that meant, I still felt my cheeks flush as a split-second grin came to the waiter’s face.
“Certainly,” he responded. “Is that it for now?”
“That’s it,” Ariel replied, and, with a nod of acknowledgment, our colored waiter headed to the bar.
Watching Ariel pick the menu up from the table, I held mine before me too, unable to decide if I was angry at her for embarrassing me, or if I was ashamed of myself for letting her get away with it simply because she was beautiful.
Sitting there in her pressed pants and tailored jacket, she looked like she knew exactly where she was going and how to get there, despite having never been, and I wondered why she had to be so exquisite. There were hundreds of nurses in Richmond, maybe even thousands. Why did Nan have to pick the one nurse who was so much of everything, so pretty and funny and smart and caring, that I looked right past the fact she was a woman to fall so stupidly in love with her?
Maybe Mama had been right from the start. If Ariel wasn’t around, things would have been easier. I never would have suffered such ungodly thoughts. I could have stayed normal. Maybe I would have even been happy at Jackson’s proposition if I didn’t have to see Ariel pass in the halls or hear her voice or remember her smell or the taste of her lips.
“Ladies, your drinks,” the waiter returned, and I flushed again at the feeling he must know what I’d been thinking. “And some water.” He shared a glance with Ariel that had some significance, I was certain, but, as Ariel thanked him and told him we needed more time with the menus, I convinced myself I didn’t care to know the secret they shared.
Tilting her menu to the side, Ariel reached for her glass, and, peeking over the top of my menu, I watched her lips close over the rim. Watching her tip the glass just enough for the deep copper liquid to get past her lips, she made it look painless, and, trying to look as if I knew exactly what I was doing, I picked up my own glass to do the same.
Though I could smell the burn as I raised the liquor to my mouth, I managed a nonreactive sip, even suppressing the urge to clear my throat when the liquid ran hot down it.
“What do you think?” Ariel questioned, eyes rising from her menu.
“It’s good,” I said, sliding my glass back onto the table, but, though it wasn’t horrible, as Nan’s brandy had been the one time I begged to try it a few years before, or like the beers Scott and I drank the night before he went off to war, it was still mostly untrue. Sweet tea was good. Lemonade was good. Alcohol, I knew, was meant for something different, so it only had to be good enough to be drinkable. “Now, I want to try yours.”
Despite the abruptness of my demand, Ariel seemed little surprised by it, looking across the table at me with calm curiosity, as if trying to gauge how serious I was, before sliding the glass over.
Determined, beyond reason, to prove something to her, though I wasn’t sure what it was I was trying to prove, I didn’t pay attention to how much more the vapors burned as her drink neared my lips until it was too late. The liquid already in my mouth, I was forced to swallow it, and it felt like fire chasing razor blades down my throat.
Eyes instantly watering, my urge to cough was out of my control, and I reached for the water, realizing I had been the punch line of a joke before it had happened.
“Setting liquor on fire burns some of the alcohol off,” Ariel explained as I blinked back tears, regretting my decision to try to be worldly and sophisticated and whatever else I was desperate to make her see in me, and not regretting it at all. Because, just before she took her glass back and lifted it for another drink, the slightest hint of a smile flashed across Ariel’s lips, and it was the first time I had seen her smile all day.
On down the line, Ariel asked a passing steward for the time and our location, and when he told her it was almost eight o’clock and we were closing in on Hiwassee, she raised the shade again.
Toward the front of the train, I could just see the colors starting to spread across the land as Ariel ordered us more drinks to give us good reason to linger at our table. When the cars before us curved suddenly southward, though, I realized why she had declared I would want to be on the western side at sunset.
Passing the open spaces of rural Virginia, only the occasional farmhouse springing up from the Earth, a thousand colors painted themselves on the trees and green crops, like a work of art coming to life against the rocking of the train, a lullaby of sorts that tempted me into a dangerous sense of serenity, as if I could be at ease in Ariel’s presence.
Convinced I felt her eyes on me, I turned my head, but not quickly enough to catch her. Ariel’s eyes on the window, it was like they had never abandoned the hues that deepened over the field. It was an ongoing lesson I just had to accept - if Ariel didn’t want to be caught, she wouldn’t be. So, though I knew she had looked, that her gaze had been on me only moments before, I had no proof but the sensation of her on my skin.
Not long after the sun was done putting on its dazzling performance, Ariel and I went back to our cabin to settle in for the night. Removing her jacket the instant we were back inside, Ariel pulled out a magazine, so I dug through my bag for the latest Agatha Christie I was so happy to have gotten my hands on upon its release.
Sitting across from Ariel to read, though, I found nothing pleasant in more mystery or in murder, and longed for the worn copy of “Mary Poppins” I had thrown into my suitcase at the last moment because it always brought me comfort to read, but that I was too embarrassed to take out.
“Is something wrong?” I was surprised when Ariel noticed I was more absorbed in worry than in the story. Book held before me, I thought I was doing a decent job pretending. Of course, it occurred to me as I looked up at her, it might have been beneficial to actually turn a page every once in a while.
“No,” I shook my head.
“Do you nee
d something?” she asked, and I needed all sorts of things, some that made sense, others that didn’t, but I knew those things went beyond the depth of Ariel’s question.
“No, I’m fine,” I uttered.
“Something different to read?” she offered, glancing toward the book that, in light of being found out, I had abandoned next to me on the seat.
“No,” I shook my head, the red cover fueling my anger as I looked at it. Why, I wondered, did I ever waste time in such pursuits? Staring into sunsets that would change nothing. Reading fiction that had no consequence on real life, the present, or the future.
In fifty years, who would know Agatha Christie? Hercule Poirot? Miss Marple? Who would remember Mary Poppins?
Thinking of Nan, dying, hopefully as slowly as possible, back in Richmond, I knew what she would say if I asked her those very questions. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she would laugh. ‘What point is there to anything of beauty? Who remembers Shakespeare? Who remembers Michelangelo?’
“It’s been a long day,” Ariel said in Nan’s place, because she was there and Nan wasn’t, and, soon enough, both would be gone. “We should get some sleep.”
When she insisted I take the top berth half an hour later, with a sigh of acceptance that Nan had put her in charge instead of me, I climbed the ladder and tried not to crack my head on the too-close ceiling.
“All set?” Ariel asked, and, nodding, I watched her walk to the door to double-check the lock, before flipping off the light.
Darkness falling over the space, for a moment I was blind to her, to everything, but at the rustle of fabric against fabric, I squinted harder until the moonlight leaking around the edges of the shade revealed the form of Ariel in her nightgown. Having seen the robe before, on rare occasion in the halls of Nan’s house, but never what lie beneath it, the thin sleeveless fabric that sculpted Ariel’s body seized my senses.
