The Way Life Should Be (35 page)

She stares at me intently through her small round glasses. “There were little ones at home, I gather.”

I nod.

“You appear to know what you’re doing.”

As if on cue, Carmine bleats in my lap. “I think he’s hungry,” I tell her. I feel his diaper rag, which is dry on the outside but spongy. “And ready for a change.”

She turns toward the front of the car, gesturing back at me over her shoulder. “Come on, then.”

Holding the baby against my chest, I rise unsteadily from my seat and sway behind her up the aisle. Children sitting in twos and threes look up with doleful eyes as I pass. None of us knows where we are headed, and I think that except for the very youngest, each of us is apprehensive and fearful. Our sponsors have told us little; we know only that we are going to a land where apples grow in abundance on low-hanging branches and cows and pigs and sheep roam freely in the fresh country air. A land where good people—families—are eager to take us in. I haven’t seen a cow, or any animal, for that matter, except a stray dog and the occasional hardy bird, since leaving County Galway, and I look forward to seeing them again. But I am skeptical. I know all too well how it is when the beautiful visions you’ve been fed don’t match up with reality.

Many of the children on this train have been at the Children’s Aid for so long that they have no memories of their mothers. They can start anew, welcomed into the arms of the only families they’ll ever know. I remember too much: my gram’s ample bosom, her small dry hands, the dark cottage with a crumbling stone wall flanking its narrow garden. The heavy mist that settled over the bay early in the morning and late in the afternoon, the mutton and potatoes Gram would bring to the house when Mam was too tired to cook or we didn’t have money for ingredients. Buying milk and bread at the corner shop on Phantom Street—Sraid a’ Phuca, my da called it in Gaelic—so called because the stone houses in that section of town were built on cemetery grounds. My mam’s chapped lips and fleeting smile, the melancholy that filled our home in Kinvara and traveled with us across the ocean to take up permanent residence in the dim corners of our tenement apartment in New York.

And now here I am on this train, wiping Carmine’s bottom while Mrs. Scatcherd hovers above us, shielding me with a blanket to hide the procedure from Mr. Curran, issuing instructions I don’t need. Once I have Carmine clean and dry, I sling him over my shoulder and make my way back to my seat while Mr. Curran distributes lunch pails filled with bread and cheese and fruit, and tin cups of milk. Feeding Carmine bread soaked in milk reminds me of the Irish dish called champ I often made for Maisie and the boys—a mash of potatoes, milk, green onions (on the rare occasion when we had them), and salt. On the nights when we went to bed hungry, all of us dreamed of that champ.

After distributing the food and one wool blanket to each of us, Mr. Curran announces that there is a bucket and a dipper for water, and if we raise our hands we can come forward for a drink. There’s an indoor toilet, he informs us (though, as we soon find out, this “toilet” is a terrifying open hole above the tracks).

Carmine, drunk on sweet milk and bread, splays in my lap, his dark head in the crook of my arm. I wrap the scratchy blanket around us. In the rhythmic clacking of the train and the stirring, peopled silence of the car, I feel cocooned. Carmine smells as lovely as a custard, the solid weight of him so comforting it makes me teary. His spongy skin, pliable limbs, dark fringed lashes—even his sighs make me think (how could they not?) of Maisie. The idea of her dying alone in the hospital, suffering painful burns, is too much to bear. Why am I alive, and she dead?

In our tenement there were families who spilled in and out of each other’s apartments, sharing child care and stews. The men worked together in grocery stores and blacksmith shops. The women ran cottage industries, making lace and darning socks. When I passed by their apartments and saw them sitting together in a circle, hunched over their work, speaking a language I didn’t understand, I felt a sharp pang.

My parents left Ireland in hopes of a brighter future, all of us believing we were on our way to a land of plenty. As it happened, they failed in this new land, failed in just about every way possible. It may have been that they were weak people, ill suited for the rigors of emigration, its humiliations and compromises, its competing demands of self-discipline and adventurousness. But I wonder how things might have been different if my father was part of a family business that gave him structure and a steady paycheck instead of working in a bar, the worst place for a man like him—or if my mother had been surrounded by women, sisters and nieces, perhaps, who could have provided relief from destitution and loneliness, a refuge from strangers.

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn’t know until we left how much we took those things for granted.

Click here to buy Orphan Train.

About the Author

The author of the novels
Sweet Water
and
Desire Lines,
CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and spends as much time as possible on the coast of Maine.

www.christinabakerkline.com

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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P
RAISE
FOR
C
HRISTINA
B
AKER
K
LINE
AND
The Way Life Should Be

“I hesitate to call Kline a ‘serious novelist’ for fear of obscuring her easy style and fluid metaphor-making…but she’s the real deal. Kline dramatizes private life, from the charged crosscurrents of broken families to the robust intimacies of sex, with a generous, knowing appreciation of human nature.”

—
Boston Globe

“Kline keeps us glued to the page.”

—
Newsday

“Kline has a perfect sense of character and timing, and her vivid digressions on food add sugar and spice.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Christina Baker Kline has written a charming novel full of great tips about cooking, loving, and taking risks in the world.
The Way Life Should Be
is a story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning.”

—Dani Shapiro, author of
Black & White
and
Family History

“Evocative writing.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“What makes
The Way Life Should Be
worth reading is the food. Descriptive passages of Angela’s grandmother teaching her the basics of cooking Italian food; prepared with love, from scratch, they make you long for a stove and a sturdy pot. There are paragraphs reminiscent of the best cookbooks or a food writer’s memoir. Angela’s realizations about herself don’t come easy. Painful recognition of mistakes made multiple times over keep the novel on real emotional terrain, and the ending feels hopeful, not treacly…. Elevated by a good writer, this stylized form of fiction can be every bit as revelatory as a high literary novel.”

—Powells.com (Review-a-Day)

“Angela Russo is the classic New York refugee: a perpetual ‘single girl’ whose job in life has hit the dead end without a cul-de-sac. Fleeing to Maine on the strength of an ideal, Angela realizes that changing her surroundings has brought her face-to-face with her own worst enemy: herself. In
The Way Life Should Be
, Christina Baker Kline proves to us once again that she is not only a deft and snappy writer, but a true cartographer of the human heart.”

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of
The Deep End of the Ocean
and
Still Summer

“Sardonic and self-deprecating humor…. Seen through Angela’s eyes, what could have been stock characters on the road to self-discovery…turn out to be real people with pasts of their own…. Recommended.”

—
Library Journal

“She nails it. From the impressionist view of land and sea from atop Cadillac Mountain on a foggy day, to the librarian who takes such an interest in one’s reading habits that it borders on invasion of privacy, Christina Baker Kline’s third novel,
The Way Life Should Be
, paints Mount Desert Island with such accurate detail that some of us might wonder if we sat for the portrait…. This novel, replete with witty repartee, is about family, about food, about sense of place. Ultimately, it’s an examination of what it takes to make a life. At one point, Angela, the protagonist of the story, muses on Maine’s state slogan, ‘The Way Life Should Be.’ She turns it upside down, reading it as an existential question: what is the way life should be? The answer, of course, is one that each of us must puzzle out for ourselves. But in the telling of her tale of one woman’s wrestling with this central concern, Christina Baker Kline provides a road map for us all.”

—
Mount Desert Islander
(Maine)

“
The Way Life Should Be
is a beautiful story. Angela is a warm, vibrant character who faces some heartbreak, happiness, and a chance for that sought-after ‘happily ever after,’ but not necessarily in the manner she has calculated. Definitely a story for the ‘keeper’ shelf.”

—RoundtableReviews.com

“
The Way Life Should Be
doesn’t read like it’s written by a New Yorker who spends one week a summer [in Maine]. When Angela’s Maine squeeze says ‘a-yuh,’ his voice drips with sarcasm. Every detail—from the sandwiches at Ellsworth’s Riverside Cafe to the random merchandise at Marden’s—rings true. It is a lighter turn for Kline, whose previous novels,
Sweet Water
and
Desire Lines
, explore the murkier terrain of love, loss, and family ties…[but] the greater themes of
The Way Life Should Be
have a deeper resonance.”

—
Bangor Daily News
(Maine)

“Christina Baker Kline writes as if she’s sitting next to you telling you about the adventures of her friends. Empathy, sympathy, romance, and humor, mixed with Italian recipes, make for a fast, fun read with something left over for later. A
Torta al Limone
sounds like the perfect recipe for dessert. The only thing that would have made this book any better would have been to have the tart to eat while reading it. Like the title,
The Way Life Should Be
is the way storytelling ‘should be.’”

—ArmchairInterviews.com

“An enticing tale…in which the serene coast of Maine is as engaging as the main character’s love interest. [Klein] delights in exploring what happens when a woman says yes to some deep yet undefined inner yearning. A winning mix for an author who…has given readers a ticket to treat themselves to a tasty pause.”

—
Montclair Times
(New Jersey)

“Christina Baker Kline can sum up a setting, a person, a room, with a few often funny, well-chosen details in a way that make this book sing.”

—Martha Tod Dudman, author of
Augusta, Gone

“The key to this fine character study is the Italian cooking…. Fans will root for Angela as she learns that what she thought is the way life should be is not; the way life should be is what you bring to the table for others to partake.”

—BookCrossing.com

“First and most important of all, it’s a fun read—and probably should be required for all thirty-plus women out there who are beginning to feel they have a better chance of getting run down by a caravan of camels than of finding a meaningful relationship or fulfilling occupation…. The only major complaint I have about Ms. Kline’s book is that there isn’t enough of it.”

—
Bar Harbor Times
(Maine)

ALSO BY CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE

FICTION

Sweet Water

Desire Lines

NONFICTION

About Face: Women Write About What They
See When They Look in the Mirror
(coedited with Anne Burt)

Room to Grow: Twenty-two Writers Encounter
the Pleasures and Paradoxes of Raising Young Children

Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother

The Conversation Begins:
Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism
(coauthored with Christina Looper Baker)

Credits

Cover design by Mary Schuck