Stranger on a Train

by Jenny Diski

  ‘That was nothing,’ a woman behind me said as we were bustled along by the porters as if being late was our fault. ‘I once waited in the Chicago yards for eight hours.’

  I understood the silence of the others on the train. It was sheer terror of what could be.

  Expending Nerve Force

  The Empire Builder left on time at 2.10 p.m., picking up speed through the yards and beyond, through the steel and smoke of the factories, past the suburbs, heading west, its engine pulling energetically out of the industrial north-east, tracing the dreams of the nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneurs of constructing a mechanised way to deliver civil society and all its subsequent unquenchable and profitable needs further and further into the westward wilderness. Did I care? Not then. Not one bit. I hadn’t had more than twenty minutes’ sleep and now I was shown to my deluxe sleeper. I had got the last late-booked possibility of a bed – deluxe: a double-sleeper with its own shower and lavatory at a hefty premium – or it was up and sleepless for the next two nights. I would have paid anything for horizontality. The conductor introduced himself as Chris and before he had a chance to tell me about the complimentary coffee and morning paper, I asked him to make up my bed so I could sleep, which I did until 5.45 p.m. When I woke and examined my deluxe accommodation, I found that not only was my bed twice as wide as the regular sleeper, but I had an armchair and a decent-sized table as well as my own mini, modular bathroom. The single sleeping compartment was essentially a lofty coffin, an enclosure almost exactly the width of the narrow bed with head room but no standing room. Even the slightest degree of claustrophobia would make an overnight trip impossible, quite without Edgar Allan Poe-ish horrors of feeling buried alive. I, however, have no degree of claustrophobia. On the contrary, I particularly like the small, just-so fit of confined spaces, so I was perfectly happy in spite of the contortions and wrigglings required to change clothes while sitting cross-legged on the bed, or the inevitable spillages of essential creams and lotions that I had managed only with difficulty to find while hanging upside down to reach the overnight bag wedged in the slim space under the made-up bed. To me, it all added up to cosiness and was, in any case, infinitely preferable to a night of insomnia in a public coach. This double compartment, though, was spacious enough to swing a cat in – not a large cat: I had a mental image of a small kitten swirling around at the end of my arm – but it was extraordinarily roomy as sleeping compartments went. Pity I had to leave it immediately for a cigarette.

  On the way to the smoking coach I stopped at the bar to get a coffee and found myself queuing in front of an Amish woman and her son of perhaps eight or nine years old. They were everywhere on the rail system it seemed, the Amish. Was anyone back on the farm leading the horse-driven ploughs and hand-churning the butter? The boy stepped back as the train jerked and trod firmly on my foot. I responded with a yelp of complaint – he wasn’t a small child. When he turned round and saw me I pointed down to my foot and made a caricature grimace of pain. He was delighted by my mock anguish and his plump, owlish face, topped with the regulation pudding-basin haircut, creased into a great grin, hugely but shyly amused at his achievement. I raised my eyes in cartoon hopelessness, and he started chuckling. His mother turned round and looked at him, smiling benignly down at the boy, and then nodding politely at me. They got their order and sat at one of the tables, and the boy glanced up at me now and then, still amused as he sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way. Even so, feeling we had been introduced, or at least that I was owed one, I sat down with my coffee on the opposite side of the table.

  ‘Is that all right for you?’ the woman asked the boy in a hushed, concerned voice that had a foreign but indefinable lilt to it. ‘It is good?’ She was like one of those mothers you only see in old Hollywood films; a little old lady well before her years, utterly beyond womanhood, beyond sexuality, a matron who had done her reproductive duty and had no further need for allure, even of whatever minimal kind the Amish permit. She was unadorned, with a skin almost silvery with cleanliness. Wisps of grey hair strayed from under her starched white bonnet. Her wholemeal dress was light grey, rather than the blue the Amish women on the last train wore, but just as smooth and neat. There was something almost wizened about her – though she couldn’t have been more than forty or so – as she bent down every few moments to the boy and murmured to him to eat tidily, stroking his hair, adoring him, asking if he were enjoying his extraordinarily unAmish-like meal, as it seemed to me. She was devoted and anxious about his well-being and contentment to a fault, completely absorbed in loving and worrying about her son, but she took the time to be well mannered and asked where I had come from.

  ‘England.’

  She didn’t respond to this with any greater (or lesser) interest than if I had said Pittsburgh, but nodded distractedly, more interested in how her boy was doing. ‘How is the weather in England?’

  It wasn’t at all clear to me that she knew where in the world England was, but she certainly knew, as all Americans do, that the weather there should be referred to. I assured her it rained a lot and she seemed satisfied to hear it. The world was as she thought and there was an end to it. And where was she going, I asked.

  ‘Home to Libby,’ she told me, and hugged the boy.

  After a moment she seemed to notice that more was required. She spoke shyly and quietly, rather rapidly as if to get communication over and done with as quickly as possible. She said no more than was absolutely necessary to say to a stranger asking questions, but she was not unfriendly. She and her family had been to her son’s wedding to a girl from an Amish community in Massachusetts. He was the fourth of her boys to marry, and she had two married daughters: they all lived with their wives and husbands in Libby. She spoke as if Libby were New York or Paris; as if I couldn’t fail to be familiar with the place. Then she clammed up, looking a little flustered; demure and girlish, and slightly guilty, as if she had already said too much to an outsider. She flushed even pinker than before and dipped her head down to murmur at her son, who nodded his satisfaction in answer to her queries and grinned at me from time to time with hotdog-filled cheeks, like a happy hamster. It was clear that any further curiosity would have been intrusive. For all my fascination, I couldn’t find a way to enter into a real conversation with this woman so locked into her regulated contentment that any question about it from an outsider could only present a challenge. When I got back to my compartment and checked with the schedule, Libby was in Montana, just past Whitefish in Glacier Park, and we were due to arrive there at around 11 p.m. the next night.

  I discovered that in spite of my luxurious sleeping accommodation, I was back on an old-fashioned train with a proper punishment smoking coach exactly the same as on the Sunset Limited, even down to the cigarette burns on the floor and the severe warning not to bring food or drink or to stay more than the fifteen minutes designated for smoking a cigarette. A kind of contentment came over me, a warm familiarity, a coming-home to the blue-grey fumes, the grime, the neglected scruffiness and a total absence of the irony and nostalgia of the glass smoking box on the Empire Builder. ‘You want to smoke? Right, here’s a filthy hole to smoke in. So smoke.’ Much better. And here too was humanity and yet more opportunity for me to be a part of it. My eagerness to socialise had reached a critical low. Whatever it was about the human capacity for story that had engaged me on the first accidental journey had evaporated into a wish for stillness and silence as America passed by. I entered the smoking coach only because of my urgent need to smoke. I rather hoped it would be empty. I had no desire to break into a new social round. Apparently my increasing weariness of human company was not unique. In a memoir of train travel in 1878, Helen Hunt Jackson suggested that she had experienced a similar trajectory of social exhaustion:

  Be as silent, as unsocial, as surly as you please, you cannot avoid being more or less impressed by the magnetism of every
human being in the car. Their faces attract or repel; you like, you dislike, you wonder, you pity, you resent, you loathe. In the course of twenty-four hours you have expended a great amount of nerve force, to no purpose.

  Far from being empty, the smoking coach contained the intensely sociable joys of Big Daddy. He was a bulging Southern gentleman in his early sixties, with the rolling accent and moustache of Rhett Butler, an elaborately floral embroidered waistcoat and a cowboy hat with a wide curved brim. His face was dark, deeply bronzed; he might have been black, or sunburned, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps it was just his name (from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I believe) that made me think he bore an uncanny resemblance to Tennessee Williams. He was loudly admiring a large black woman’s T-shirt that had ‘The Cardinals’ emblazoned across her billowing breasts in cardinal red.

  ‘That T-shirt is really something. I’d like one of those.’ He turned to acknowledge me as I sat down, offering me his hand and his name. ‘Big Daddy, ma’am. Those are very fine pants you’ve got on there. I do think highly of those pants.’

  ‘Hey, Big Daddy.’ The T-shirt woman squealed with laughter. ‘You go on like this and you’ll have a full set of clothes.’

  Big Daddy was on his way to Whitefish, in Glacier Park, the Alpine skiing and fishing resort in Montana. He took regular holidays by himself, leaving his woman at home, he told me, allowing me to understand that he bestowed his charms wherever they might be wanted and that both he and those who succumbed to those charms generally found the outlay worthwhile. He was an ageing, old-time gigolo, still available to amuse. Once he heard I was a writer from England he chatted and charmed me with local information, telling me what I needed to know about the upcoming places of interest.

  ‘Let me help you with your task, little lady…’

  Shelby, for example, which we wouldn’t be reaching until teatime the next day, was somewhere I should watch out for. Not that it was of any interest these days, but it was once famous for the gala World Heavyweight Championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tom Gibbons, arranged for 4 July 1923. Thousands of fight fans hired trains to get them out west, then, a few days before the fight, Dempsey’s manager Doc Kearns cancelled the match. The fans cancelled their trains and then at the last minute Kearns agreed that the fight could go ahead after all. There were 7000 spectators with tickets and 17,000 gatecrashers, pandemonium, of course, and while all the excitement of the bout was going on, Doc Kearns quietly slipped out of town with the $300,000 purse. Dempsey got nothing for his win over Gibbons, and four Montana banks went bust.

  ‘And that’s the story of Shelby, my deah. Now, soon we’ll be crossing a bridge that a local man called Geary kept free of snow during the winter with his snowplough, the one and only snowplough in town. He was a rowdy fellow, this Geary, who liked his liquor, and one day after a real bender and whole lot of broken streetlamps he was hauled in front of the judge who gave him thirty days in the local jail for drunk-driving and banned him from driving for six months. When he got out he had to visit the probation officer to show he had changed his ways, so he got in his snowplough and drove there. “How did you get here?” the probation officer asked Geary. “Why, I drove here,” says Geary. Well, Geary went right back to jail for another thirty days for driving without a licence. But by then the snows had arrived, and all through those winter days while Geary was back in jail, and while the driving ban was in force, every single train crossing the bridge had to run slow, real slow, at walking speed because the bridge wasn’t being cleared of snow and ice, not being beautifully maintained by Geary who was in jail, warm and comfortable and well fed. And the snowplough being Geary’s snowplough and the only one in town, no one else was permitted to drive it. The railroad company complained, but the law was the law.’

  Big Daddy’s entertaining stories came thick and fast. Strangely mythic, strangely inconsequential. A train guard was taking a smoking break on the seat opposite and enjoying the tales, nodding and smiling. Big Daddy grinned at him. ‘Great job, you got, huh?’

  The guard’s smile turned sour. ‘Used to be,’ he grunted. ‘Time was. Hey, don’t get me started. Now … It’s all run by management and friends of friends. It ain’t professional like it used to be. These guys don’t know how to run a railroad. They ain’t professionals, they’re businessmen and cronies. They sit in their boardrooms with charts and it’s me who gets the customers shouting because they’ve oversold the train and it’s late and it’s broken down. Then they send you to charm school instead of fixing the problems, so you can learn how to calm the customers down. Keep everyone sweet but don’t deal with the problems. It’s the liberal way. The big liberal lie. They’ve taken over everything in this damned country. The government. The railroads. They’ve ruined everything with their big lie. The great socialist lie.’

  His fury had grown to federal proportions.

  ‘What big lie?’ I asked.

  ‘You know. The Big Lie. The Big Socialist Liberal Lie.’

  I looked baffled and asked him for more detail, but he was at a loss to know where to start, it was so obvious. Hell, everyone knew about the Big Lie.

  ‘They just tell lies. Socialist lies. Socialist double-talk. Political correctness. Like they don’t say you have to pay higher taxes, they tell you you’re making contributions. And they shoot their mouths off about gun safety and freedom when what they’re actually doing is making gun law and restricting our freedom that was enshrined in the constitution of the United States of America. The right to bear arms. That’s where our safety and freedom is ensured. Those are the kind of lies they tell, the socialists. The liberal lies that don’t say what they mean. Hell, they mean the straight opposite of what ordinary folk understand by their words.’

  He paused, as if waiting for applause, but no one seemed eager to support him, or urge him on further, though we listened politely. Neither Big Daddy nor the black woman in the Cardinals T-shirt seemed very interested.

  ‘Hell,’ he petered out. ‘Don’t get me going on the liberals. Just don’t get me going.’

  And he retreated into silence and soon muttered that his break was over and left. It was the first time that politics had come up on my train journeys.

  By now it was early evening and my name was called over the tannoy system, summoning me for dinner, which occurs at a very early hour on the railroads. Lunch and dinner were served at set times and everyone had to reserve a slot and keep it. Lateness was frowned on. The dining car, if not the train, ran on a strict schedule. By nine it was cleaned and emptied, and if you passed through it there was always the head steward with receipts and a calculator totting up the takings, reconciling the pieces of paper. Paperwork seemed to be a major activity in the dining car, and the diners themselves a bit of a nuisance, to be dealt with as quickly as possible so that the real business of adding and subtracting and keeping the ledger straight could go ahead. I waved to my smoking companions, and then made my way to the dining car. It turned out that politics was going to be the theme for that evening, as if in travelling west, we were also moving politically to the right. The waiter seated me opposite a smoothly groomed, respectable-looking middle-aged couple, who smiled politely enough as I joined them. We said good evening and exchanged regulation information on our origins and destination. In a few moments a fourth member of our table was seated by the waiter. I had seen her earlier making her way between the seats through one of the coaches. She was a very slight woman with unkempt grey hair, in her fifties, wearing tapered twill trousers and a practical shirt with a leather bag strapped across her body. She suffered from some medical disorder that caused her continually to jerk and tic on a grand scale, and I remembered seeing her careering along the aisle of the moving train like an irate windmill. As she began to speak, her words were interrupted so that she could perform a wide arc with one arm and a series of staccato twitches of her neck and head, seemingly in a prescribed order. When it was done, the words could come.

  ‘I’m Glenys,’ sh
e said as she sat down neatly before performing another set of ticcings and then relaxing. ‘What are your names?’

  She was clearly much more used to being Glenys and taking it for granted than were her dining companions. The couple opposite looked alarmed; I tried not to, which amounted to the same thing. Glenys had a proper understanding of her condition. She allowed her twitches full rein, to blossom and then to die down before she attempted to reach for the salt, or put a forkful of food in her mouth. Her activities and conversation fitted into the intervals between her ticcing – or perhaps it was the other way round, and the tics took their opportunities as they may between the pauses in eating or talking. In either case, she and her condition had accommodated, and cohabited, as they had to, each giving time to the other.

  ‘Are you on your own?’ the man opposite asked Glenys, in a frigid voice that was too loud, over-carefully enunciating each word as one might talk to a foreigner or an idiot.

  Glenys explained that she was having a two-day vacation in Whitefish, to see the mountains. She had never spent time in mountains, but she couldn’t afford to stay at the resort longer than the two days, not on her fixed income from her disability pension. The woman opposite had absented herself from the table. That is, she was still sitting there, but she had withdrawn her social self from what was an impossible situation, apparently, so that her attention was entirely given over to her plate and the movements of her knife and fork. Her husband had another way. He glared at Glenys with unconcealed repugnance, as if he were looking at something that had landed by some mishap in our midst; something filthy that was without consciousness and had no capacity to see or look back at him. I have rarely seen one human being look at another with such naked disgust. For the rest of the meal, he addressed himself exclusively to me, as if there was no one sitting beside me. Glenys asked me where I was from and what I did. We exchanged information. She worked for an educational group which lobbied for special schools for the developmentally disabled, she explained. People I knew in England with disabled children were battling in the opposite direction, to get their children taught in the mainstream sector. Glenys was firm, her position was radical and separatist. Disabled people were always at a disadvantage in mainstream schools where they stood out and their particular needs were not catered for. They were in a minority and inclined to measure themselves against a norm that was normal only by virtue of greater numbers and unachievable by them. Only schools that specifically catered for disabled children, where they were the norm and the majority, gave them the sense of their quality and rights in the world, and in both development and education children had been shown to perform much better in schools with specialist teachers and dedicated design rather than piecemeal structural adaptations. The move to close special schools and colleges down was, in her opinion, reactionary, regressive, a way of saving money, not a way of giving the disabled the best education and the ability to explore their full potential. She made a passionate case, all the while gesticulating and ticcing up a storm as if her strong feelings increased their intensity.