Stranger on a Train (20 page)

‘You're a chef, huh? You make cakes? You make pound cake? I make great pound cake. In my book no one's a chef unless they make a great pound cake.'

The chef rattled off his recipe for pound cake.

‘Well yeah,' the woman acknowledged. ‘You know how to make a good pound cake.'

‘Did you doubt me? You,
chère madame,
recognise a great pound cake recipe when you hear one. I salute you. Wait. Wait here.' He rushed out.

‘Crazy guy, eh?' the woman said. ‘But he might really be a chef.'

The chef came back, triumphant, and ceremonially placed a pleated, tall paper chef's hat on the woman. ‘I declare you now an honorary chef,
madame.
'

The woman kept the chef's hat on. ‘Marie's the name. Can I keep it?'

‘Sure, I got a dozen in my bag. I'm on my way to Chicago to cook a lunch for Willie May.'

An elderly black man in the corner who until now had been silent suddenly became animated. ‘Willie May? Willie May's dead, ain't he?'

‘That's his father. The great Willie May. This is Willie May, the son. Also great. The father died not so long ago.'

‘That's sad.'

‘Yup. But this Willie May called me from Chicago, and said, “Chef, I'm having some guys round for a barbeque in the garden. You wanna come and make it?”'

‘So what are you gonna make?' Marie asked.

‘Aha.' Finger touched to his lips, hands expressing the exquisite nature of the food he was going to prepare. ‘I plan to begin with a sweet potato soup. Then Beef Wellington. You know what Beef Wellington is?' He described in detailed how he made Beef Wellington. ‘You just gotta taste mine one day. And we'll finish with a fresh fruit sorbet, lime and lemon. Good. Oh, very, very good.'

Marie nodded, impressed, making her chef hat tip forward over her eyes. The old guy in the corner nodded appreciatively.

‘Who's Willie May?' I asked.

There was a stunned silence.

‘Come
on,
' the old man said.

‘You're
kidding,
' Marie gasped.

‘No, man, she ain't kidding. She's from England,' the chef explained, racing to my defence.

‘You mean they don't know Willie May in England?'

I tried to look apologetic.

‘He was the greatest, I mean the greatest baseball player this world has ever seen.'

‘We don't play baseball in England,' I said by way of an explanation.

‘Yeah, but Willie May was something else. He was … he was great. What's his boy like?'

‘A chip off the block,' the chef said.

The old man nodded his satisfaction at the way of the world.

‘Hell, all this talk of cooking makes me homesick,' Marie said. ‘I miss my farm. I didn't want to leave my husband and my grandbabies. He and my son sent me on a visit to my sister for a birthday gift, so I had to go. But all I really want is to stay on the farm, cook up a storm in the kitchen, and bounce my grandbabies on my knee.' She laughed. ‘That must seem pretty unadventurous to you, coming all the way from England and all.'

Actually, it seemed quite exotic to me: the grandbabies, the farm, the pound cake, the contentment. I realised I'd forgotten about the musicals. Here was
Oklahoma
and
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,
and never mind that beneath the corn as high as an elephant's eye and in spite of the joys of spring, spring, spring, the plots are as dark as death, and thick with murder, rape and criminal ignorance. I was back on a sentimental, celluloid journey.

Maybe the chef hadn't just gone to get Marie a hat, because since his return he'd been more ebullient than ever, jumping up from his seat, taking everyone's hands and shaking them vigorously, his eyes glowing with something more than happiness, I thought.

‘You want to dance?' he asked Marie.

‘I don't dance.'

‘You want to sing?'

She shook her head, making her chef's hat wobble. ‘I don't sing. Sister Mary Ellen said it was bad to sing. So I never sing.'

‘No, no, it's good to sing. Forget Sister Mary Ellen. Sing out, Marie. Sing your heart out.'

‘You'll be sorry…'

‘Sing,' we all urged. ‘Sing.'

Marie stood up in her chef's hat and good travelling clothes and wailed an entirely tuneless but passionate hymn to life being grand. There was a brief stunned silence as we began to see that Sister Mary Ellen may have had reasons other than religious for preventing Marie from singing. But the chef wasn't daunted.

‘That's it, she outta the convent now,' he crowed and we all joined in with Marie to celebrate her liberation.

It was around midnight by now. The young man and the woman who were both cold for different reasons had dropped in a few times for a smoke; a couple of men in their early twenties, in jeans and T-shirts and with longish hair, each solitary travellers, were settled on the corner bench chatting to each other about guitars but both aware of a straggly-haired girl probably not out of her teens sitting next to them. She had got on at Syracuse. She was following their conversation, or trying to, at any rate, attaching herself to them as roughly her age and peer group. One of them clearly was going to become her lover (or whatever kind of fumbling was possible at their seats or in the lavatory), but neither the boys nor the girl had yet decided which. They were drinking beer and the girl, who was a lot younger and more displaced than she wanted to seem, was making a show of getting drunker, of being one of the guys. She was quite plain and rather grubby but sweetly wide-eyed and lost, almost certainly always lost, used to wandering and coming together briefly but not for long with new human beings. I doubted that Syracuse was where she had started her journey, I even wondered if she entirely remembered the start of her journey, and I was sure she had no idea where or when it would end. Suddenly she became animated as she recalled something she had seen while waiting for the train, something she'd been dying to tell someone about.

‘There was this sign, you know, like a warning sign, in red. It said “Live Tracks”.'

She waited for the boys to show proper astonishment. When they didn't, she helped them out.

‘I mean, like,
live
tracks. What's that supposed to mean? The sign was to stop people from crossing the rails to get to the other platform, you know, to scare them, so they wouldn't do it, but, I mean, do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that.
Live
tracks. Isn't that incredible?'

She shook her head in disbelief at the contempt with which the authorities held people. The boys darted a glance at her (as I did) to check if she was making a joke, but she was genuinely outraged. The boys didn't look at each other, but down at their knees. Eventually, after she continued to complain about the sign, one of them, very hesitantly, spoke.

‘Uh, I think it's a sort of way of saying that they're electrified. Like, electricity is running through them. They use live to describe something that's electrified.'

He seemed to be waiting for the girl to laugh at him for taking her literally. She didn't. She didn't laugh at all, ever, probably. Her mode was intense and puzzled earnestness.

‘Really? So, like, this table is dead, right?'

The boy opened his mouth to explain that it was a special use of the … but he shut it again, deciding there was no point.

‘Jesus, I wish people would say what they mean. I mean especially official people. They ought to be clearer. Why confuse us? It's like that door.' She pointed to the door of the smoking box. ‘See, it says
Out.
Lots of doors say
Out,
one side
Out,
the other side
In.
What's that? I'm always going in somewhere, whenever I go through a door I'm going
in.
I was in this place, then I go through a door
into
another place. That's how I see it. I don't go out, I go in. It's just not truthful to say
Live Tracks
and
Out.
It's like lying.'

And although this was possibly the most profound comment on language and perception that was made during my entire journey around the States – or even maybe in the history of linguistics – we remained excruciatedly silent, because we were all wrapped up with wondering, though hardly able to bear to imagine, what the inside of this waif's mind could possibly be like and how she had made her way even this far in the world with only the capacity for absolute literalism to help her along. I felt we were in the presence of something extraordinary, a kind of idiot savant, whose absence of irony, whose complete inability to grasp the plasticity of language, might easily be mistaken for transcendental wisdom. The boys looked confused, as the question of which of them was going to sleep with her was superseded by what it might be like and whether it would be advisable to sleep with someone so innocent or of such a potentially dangerous cast of mind.

The chef, linguist that he was, who might have been expected to be interested in the problem but was too far gone in mania or drug high to concentrate on anything other than the frantic energy zipping around his body, simply maintained his own relation with the world and went on, never silent, restlessly talking, no longer listening or waiting for a response, jumping up, touching, leaving, coming back. I thought the time right to give sleep a go, and saying I'd see everyone later, in that American way I like, meaning in an hour or a year, I headed back from the smoking box to my coach.

The Filipino woman was slumped sideways in her seat, her grandson sprawled across his. I climbed over their hand luggage and her legs to get to my designated place by the window, and managed not to wake them up. The main lights were off in the carriage, just a couple of overhead lamps of those who couldn't sleep causing a dim glow. I reclined the back of the seat, hoisted the footrest and covered myself with the blanket Amtrak provided. It wasn't uncomfortable for taking a nap on a train but I've never got to sleep in a sitting position, even a half-sitting position; not in front of the TV, not on a plane, on a train, or in a car. Never, not once. Still, I lounged and listened to the rattling of the rails and the rocking of the carriages, the two women whispering a couple of rows behind me, the snoring from around the coach. I shut my eyes. Two hours later I was still awake and getting stiff. I turned and sort of curled up on my side. An hour later I was still awake. Maybe I had dozed occasionally, but if so, it was the kind of dim half-sleep where you drift off for a second and then jerk awake, as if your body has not given you permission to lose consciousness. I thought I'd read, but I was worried about waking my neighbour by putting the overhead light on. I gave up and tiptoed over legs and bags out into the aisle where I was free to make an inspection of my coach and its mostly unconscious inhabitants.

In the 9 February 1878 issue of
The Illustrated Newspaper,
Frank Leslie, travelling by railroad for much the same reason I was, noted:

From our Pullman hotel-car, the last in the long train, to the way-car which follows closely on the engine, there is a vast discount in the scale of comfort, embracing as many steps as there are conveyances. It is worth one's while to make a tour of the train for the sake of observing these differences and noting the manners and customs of travelling humanity when tired bodies and annoyed brains have agreed to cast aside ceremony and the social amenities and appear in uneasy undress. The old assertion that man is at bottom a savage animal finds confirmation strong in a sleeping-car; and for the women – even under dear little five-and-three-quarter kids, the claws will out upon these occasions. For here, at 9 P.M., in the drawing-room sleeper, we find a cheerful musical party howling, ‘Hold the Fort!' around the parlour organ, which forms its central decoration; three strong, healthy children running races up and down the aisle, and scourging each other with their parents' shawl-straps; a consumptive invalid, bent double in a paroxysm of coughing; four parties, invisible, but palpable to the touch, wrestling in the agonies of the toilet behind the closely buttoned curtains of their sections, and trampling on the toes of passers-by as they struggle with opposing draperies; a mother engaged in personal combat (also behind the curtains) with her child in the upper berth, and two young lovers, dead to the world, exchanging public endearments in a remote corner. Who could bear these things with perfect equanimity? Who could accept with smiles the company of six adults at the combing and washing stages of one's toilet? Who could rise in the society, and under the close personal scrutiny, of twenty-nine fellow-beings, jostle them in their seats all day, eat in their presence, take naps under their very eyes, lie down among them, and sleep – or try to sleep – within acute and agonized hearing of their faintest snores, without being ready to charge one's soul with twenty-nine distinct homicides?

But if the ‘drawing-room sleeper' be a place of trial to fastidious nerves, what is left to say of the ordinary passenger-car, wherein the working-men and working-women – the miners, the gold-seekers, the trappers and hunters travelling from one station to another, and the queer backwoods folk who have left their log homesteads in Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois to cross the train of the sunset – do congregate, and are all packed like sardines in a box? It is a pathetic thing to see their nightly contrivances and poor shifts at comfort; the vain attempts to improvise out of their two or three feet of space a comfortable sleeping-place for some sick girl or feeble old person, and the weary, endless labour of the others to pacify or amuse their fretted children. Here and there some fortunate party of two or three will have full sway over a whole section – two seats, that is to say – and there will be space for one of them to stretch his or her limbs in the horizontal posture and rest luxuriously; but for the most part, every seat has its occupant, by night as well as by day, a congregation of aching spines and cramped limbs. The overland journey is no fairy tale to those who read it from a way-car!