“That’s disgusting,” I laughed.
“There was a pork chop on the counter. I mean, with no plate or napkin or anything.”
“Get out off the phone. The train is boarding,” Peter said, tickets in hand.
“I got to get on the train. I’ll call you,” I said.
“Okay. Have fun.”
The train would have made a great target for a terrorist attack. It was packed.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to sit together,” I said as we slowly made our way through the car.
“Shouldn’t we at least check the next car?”
“We could, but what’s the point?” I said, eyeing the car for an empty seat by the window. There wasn’t one. I collapsed in an aisle seat. Peter stood there like a wounded child. A woman in the next aisle stood up and offered him the window seat next to her.
I closed my eyes. If there was a bomb, it would be so fast. What would I feel? Probably heat and pain, and then nothing. It could happen any second. The train started bumping along. No such luck. Mom, in that big house in the suburbs slowly wasting away, always complaining of her failing body. The thought of a quick death didn’t seem like the worst thing. Age is meaner than death.
There were trees and sky, and the city receded farther and farther behind us. Another world. It was hot. I wanted to take off my coat. I thought that ten more times before I actually took it off. I’d worn my denim skirt and a red blouse. At home in front of the mirror, sucking in my stomach, it had looked elegant, but as I sat there, my fat rolls pushing against the elastic of my skirt and falling over the top button, it felt awful. My stomach growled. The worst was to feel both fat and hungry.
Peter came over. “Want to go to the dining car?”
“Yeah, okay.”
The only thing Suboxone didn’t help with was the sweats. The back of my head and neck were wet.
The windows were huge, and the air felt easier to breathe. We sat in a booth.
“Can you buy me a bottle of water?” I asked him.
“I only have two singles.”
“Just use your card.”
“I don’t know if they take cards.”
“For Chrissake, Peter, go and check. I’m dying of thirst.” He got up. Cheap bastard. Never wanted to spend a penny. He rolled his own cigarettes and refilled my old water bottles to take with him everywhere, even though he made good money. When we’d first met, he worked in the bookstore as a merchandiser and made next to nothing. “I make everything pyramid shaped,” he’d said on our first date. What good was all that nagging to get a better-paying job if he still refused to spend a dime? “But we’re making more money,” I would say. “Yeah, well, we need to save it.” I’d asked a million times but never really understood what we were saving for. He came back with a brown box and a can of beer, a bottle of water, two packs of M&M’s, and chips. He sat down in front of me. His eyes, as innocent and guilty as a child’s, tried to gain my forgiveness.
“I had to spend at least ten dollars to use my card,” he explained.
“Oh, thanks,” I said. He was trying to be nice.
“Are you mad?”
“You were just being so awful this morning.” All morning, bustling around like a maniac, sighing and cursing to himself. Annoying the shit out of me.
“I’m sorry. I just get so anxious. Can we please just try to be nice to each other? I don’t want to have a bad time.” As if I did? That was the implication, that I wanted everyone to be miserable. He popped open the Bud and took a long sip. Great, I thought, just drink. Go be fucked-up in your world, and leave me here alone to deal with reality.
Lily Tomlin once said, “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.”
“Okay, well, don’t act like a jerk,” I said.
“Can we please just watch The Simpsons on the laptop?”
He opened the laptop while I looked out the window, trying to decide whether or not to let him off the hook. My brain was tired. The sky looked so open outside of New York, not just above, but all around. A few brown trees, open fields. People were always saying how crowded the world was becoming, but outside of that window, there was so much space left.
Grace, Peter’s sister, met us at the train station. She was wearing a flowered, matronly dress and, strangely, one white glove. She hugged us. I was pissed I couldn’t sneak in a cigarette before she came.
It was colder. I zipped up my coat and buttoned it. They walked ahead, Peter carrying my two canvas bags and his one small tote.
Christ, I thought. It’s happening. We’re really here.
“What happened to your hand?” Peter asked Grace in the car.
“Oh, I burned it. I was frying zucchini in a pan and put in too much oil, and I tried pouring some of the oil out into a bowl, and it dripped down my hand.” She laughed the way girls laugh, like, “I’m such an idiot, aw shucks.”
“That sucks,” I said. Peter shot me a look. “Sucks” wasn’t the right word. Should have gone with awful. “How awful”; that would have been the right thing.
It was an unspoken rule that everyone dealt with Grace with kid gloves. Grace was the type of girl who had “victim” written on her forehead. She was so trusting and so unsure of herself.
“So, what did you think of Sue?” Peter asked. His voice had changed already. A little bit more corny.
“Oh, she is so nice. Last night she helped with dinner, and she’s so much fun, which is good for Jake. You know how serious he is.” Her face relaxed in a little smile.
Helped with dinner? Oh god, this Sue was worse than I thought. When I came to visit two Christmases ago, I hadn’t helped with anything. I caught the flu on the train down and spent the entire four days of our visit shivering or sleeping in their clapboard house. Only one small TV in the enclosed porch, which the whole family crowded around. Peter’s mother bringing bowls of chicken broth, his father not knowing what to say, eyeing me.
“I thought you liked working at the bookstore,” his father had said when Peter told them about the new bartending job I had “encouraged” him to get. Jesus, why did he have to implicate me in it? So now I was this girl who made their son work himself to death in some sinful place so he could buy more stuff for his fat wife to stare at.
At least it wasn’t Christmas. On Christmas, Peter’s mother, Sandy, sat down and asked if I knew the story of how Jesus was born. “Like, in a barn,” I had said. And then she told the story with the wise men. It was long and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Their depressing tree and his mother wearing a reindeer sweater would break your heart. I got thermals. Peter got socks. They talked with unabashed glee about how cheap the gifts they got for one another were. It was like upside-down world. “There was a bin marked 50 percent off,” Grace said as her father admired the gloves. “Oh wow, and they’re green,” someone said about their socks. You had to keep saying nice things. I wasn’t very good at it. There was a moment when my disappointment showed as I opened a present. The whole thing was so weird — to spend as little money as possible and to be as excited as little kids about receiving stuff that sucked. How was this fun? What was I going to do with these green paisley slippers made for a five-year-old? Without a word, I instantly put them on. Peter texted me; I hadn’t said thank you, so I said, “I forgot to say thank you. I love these slippers.” I couldn’t pull it off. I should never have said anything.