from the tyranny of stratigraphy
Fanny was really very angry when they finally got to the train. It wasn’t the kind of anger that she expressed openly to John. She didn’t do that. She only expressed anger, or better yet frustration, to John when it was directed at others. And she thought that she was always careful to examine her feelings, to question the validity of her feelings, beforehand. They’d only been married for a little less than four years. They had Reg. Reg was just over three, and another was coming. Fanny had put on a few pounds with Reg and her life was not quite as she expected it to be. She was certain that John was a fair and good husband. He was still strong and slightly built, though tall. He was blond and perhaps striking. Fanny thought he was striking. And because of all these things and Fanny’s genuine good nature, she was still very careful to examine her feelings before expressing any anger at all to John and in those few cases it was always anger directed toward others which actually appeared.
John had been late and, just as they were about to leave, Reg needed a change. Reg would have been all right and made the ride the whole way if John had not been late. The change made them later still and John had to drive a little too fast which he always enjoyed but left Fanny always a tad overly concerned – with a sense that he wouldn’t be reckless if he was as caring as she would like him to be. They had to drive by the agency on the way. Fanny’s father worked there early on Saturday nights and Fanny was concerned that her father would see John flying by in their car, which her father would recognize easily, and he would take it up with John the next day. John had become surprisingly quick to anger with any visit with a negative connotation from her father. He never expressed that anger to her or to her father, but she was aware of it and this would trouble her until it passed.
They arrived at the train with only a few minutes to buy tickets and board and had to take two seats for the three of them right in the mid-section of the single passenger car, equidistant from the two coal-fired stoves which burned hot on both ends of the old car. Just as they were sitting, an elderly woman – she appeared elderly to Fanny and John but she was only about fifty – the elderly woman beside the stove at the front of the train said into a microphone,
“Ooo Kay kids what do conductors say when the train is about to leave the station.”
“All aboard,” said a small blond girl standing in the aisle and dodging away from her father, who was trying to catch her, without getting up himself, and to pull her back to her seat.
“That’s right kids. It’s ‘all aboard’. So when the train starts to go – and we will sure know when it starts to go – when the train starts to go, I want everyone, the kids and the grownups, to yell as loud as we can, yell ‘all aboard,’ Ooo Kay?”
As she finished saying this the train lurched slightly forward and a great roar of, “all aboard” rose up from the many aggregates of small families and the one large knot of twelve who sat in the back against the rear stove. Fanny yelled this very loudly and John barely said it and said it a little after everyone else. He was just becoming situated, handing Reg to Fanny, and taking the video camera from his shoulder as he lowered himself into his seat. The elderly lady who was only fifty at the front stove began again as John thought about removing his jacket and thought again about it because it was already a little bit cold there in the middle of the train and the train had just only then started moving.
“This train is very old. Who can guess how old this train is?” said the lady at the front.
“Seventy years,” said one child near the front.
“Eighty,” said the blond girl who was still in the middle of the aisle but was now firmly held by the large hand of her father.
“One hundred and two,” the woman said. “It is much older than anyone on this train. How about that?”
I’ll say, every year the same, John thought as he first noticed the couple seated in front of him and Fanny and Reg. The man in front of them was probably forty. His hair was graying and he wore a dark gray tweed jacket. Tweed struck John as a little unusual. The man’s face was slightly fleshy and a little red. John thought that the man would surely be cold later in the night as the train moved further into the lower part of the valley and back again. The woman beside the man was blond and had exquisite features. John caught a short glance at her profile as she turned to her husband. John noticed in that instant that her mouth couldn’t be more perfect. It was full and the lower lip was fleshy in the middle and the edges naturally dropped slightly and perfectly. And her eyes were very large and wide and a dark green almost black which were perfectly juxtaposed against her pale skin and blond hair and diamond earrings. She was wearing a black leather jacket and had the look and feel of a woman who knew just what she wanted and needed in life and knew just exactly how to go about getting it.
John imagined that she worked for some sort of magazine. As a photo editor or someone who managed models – who had been a model once herself and now was a little too old and little to wise to continue being a model. He pictured her reading a Russian novel on satin sheets after a long day at the office, or a long day flying back from Paris. He pictured her running water into the bathtub, a large bathtub with jets. And he pictured her undressing and slipping beneath the bubbles in the bathtub. He could imagine the smells of damp skin and lavender because that was the way Fanny smelled after she bathed. She sometimes used a lavender bath salt that John had gotten her for Christmas two years ago.
Fanny was listening to the elderly woman in the front and responding appropriately whenever the woman requested a response. Fanny was also noticing the garlands of tinsel and very small Christmas lights which ran above the cars windows, hanging on old small brass coat pegs between each window and drooping down over each window. These gave off a faint romantic light and caste small spidery shadows from the tinsel along the sides and roof of the train.
Then the elderly woman said,
“Does anyone know what was moved by this train over one-hundred years ago? Besides people, something else was taken on this train. It is the reason that they built the tracks for this train.”
Fanny looked at John because his family was from this valley a long time ago and she knew that he would know the answer to this question. She noticed then that he was not paying attention to what the elderly woman said and was instead looking at and thinking about the blond woman in front of him. She noticed that as the blond woman put her arm around her husband’s tweed shoulders – Fanny thought this was more of a placement of the hand rather than an affectionate gesture, as if the husband were merely a place to rest the woman’s arm- that the woman, as she did this, looked back at John and merely caught his eye for a second, noticing perhaps that John had been staring at her. And then the woman’s eyes dropped ever so slightly to the middle of John’s body and up again, concluding with another flash of eye contact and the smallest almost imperceptible smile.
Fanny handed Reg to John. John hadn’t smiled back at the woman. He simply looked confused. It was a look that Fanny knew well. Whenever John was in any way uncomfortable he looked as though he was confused. Fanny noticed from a small glance at the side and partial front of the woman’s face that she was wearing contact lenses, that her hair was cut very straight and well with no split ends and that her hair was dyed in a very expensive way with very small clusters of blond hair interspersed with a lighter blond and then again more clusters which were darker and almost black. The blond hair ran almost all of the way from the woman’s scalp with only a tiny gap, less than a centimeter, where the hair was entirely dark, but not as dark as the almost black strands below. When Fanny had finished looking at the woman’s eyes and hair she thought, three hundred and fifty dollars, and she looked back at John and smiled in a weak way intended to show him that she wasn’t pleased. He no longer appeared at all confused but instead seemed to be contented, looking at Reg. Reg smiled up at John and John smiled back at Reg, and John looked at the elderly woman again. She was saying,
“Today we’re all taking a very special trip. The most special trip of all. We’re on the Polar Express to the North Pole. And who lives at the North Pole?”
“Santa Claus,” all of the children, and most of the adults, yelled.
Fanny was carefully watching John now without appearing to be looking at him. She saw his eyes wander away from elderly woman to the blond woman and then to Reg and then back to the elderly woman.
What is she doing here, Fanny thought, Why take the Polar Express without a child? And what is a woman that age doing without children. She doesn’t look as though she’s ever had children.
“We’re going to the North Pole and Santa is there. Mrs. Claus is on the train to meet him and Santa will be riding back with us,” the elderly woman said. Fanny had noticed Mr. and Mrs. Claus stopped at a gas station, sitting in a red minivan, just as Fanny and John were pulling into the parking lot to catch the train.
“The Claus’s must have been even later than we were,” Fanny said and she thought that she noticed that John wasn’t paying attention to her or to the elderly woman. Then Fanny thought that she noticed that Reg saw this also. It was the first time she’d seen Reg on John’s lap without smiling and being the center of John’s attention. John’s eyes were on the hand of the woman. She was toying with her husbands hair. Spinning it ever so slightly with three delicate fingers. Fanny noticed the manicure. Crimson. Perfect. One hundred dollars, she estimated. Then she imagined the woman’s toes.
The rails were closely spaced and the train moved jerkily and very slowly. When they’d first left the station it was still a kind of waning daylight. The sun had just then gone down, but because it had been a cloudy and gray day and the ground all around them was covered with snow, the amount of light entering the windows of the train had been almost the same as if it had been the middle of the day. As the train moved away from the station the snow around them began to darken into deeper shades of gray and violet.
Reg noticed the way the lighter steam spread out laterally from the front of the train across the darkened snow as the train swerved and leaned into the first bend, but Fanny and John did not. Now it was almost dark with the moon hidden somewhere, imperceptible in the clouds or behind a mountain. The train had once crossed open and empty fields but now it crept past small modern houses. Some of these were well lit with Christmas lights. At one, which they passed almost within an arms distance of the back porch, Reg noticed that an entire family of eight or ten children and the parents were all gathered on the steps of that porch and were waving and smiling at the train.
Fanny noticed that the blond woman had glimpsed again at John – just a casual glance while she twirled the short hair at the back of her husband’s neck. John had made contact with the woman’s eyes and then as a reflex looked at Fanny and met Fanny’s eyes. He smiled at her and reached down and touched her hand. He looked confused again. Reg noticed that the elderly woman at the front of the car had stopped talking and he stood up on John’s lap to see what was going on. Two teenage girls who looked as if they were sisters and were dressed in green with pointy hats were handing out large thin story books. One copy of each book was given to each pair sharing a seat.
“Book now,” Reg said as he stretched out forward over John’s knees and placed his hands on the back of the tweed husband’s seat.
“Book now,” he said a second time with his face pressed almost against the man’s ear. The man turned, and moving his head to the side to look past Reg, he said, in a quiet but firm voice,
“Excuse me, sir.”
The blond woman retracted her arm from her husband’s shoulder. She looked at John again as she reconfigured her long frame into the small seat. Fanny reached over and pulled Reg from John’s lap and began staring out of the window. They were passing through a narrow spot where the train would stop and the train’s engine would soon decouple and move to the other end of the train and begin to pull them back to where they’d begun. Fanny had ridden this train at least a half dozen times since she was a very little girl. It had once gone almost twice as far and down a winding canyon, along a river with high peaks on both sides. Fanny knew without being able to see that on the opposite side of the train from her was a smooth empty plane of ice over a small reservoir and on her side was the beginning of an enormous mountain. She could only vaguely see an outline of the mountain.
One of the teenage girls handed Reg a book. She handed it to John, but Reg had sensed it coming and reached over, took it aggressively, and then held it upside down. The train stopped. The blond woman looked out the window. She pulled her lips back into a tight sort of smile, which thinned her lips, and examined her teeth in the reflection. Then she looked back toward John again and caught Fanny’s countering glance, firm and a little angry. Quickly the eyes of both darted away. The woman’s arm then snaked back across the shoulder of her husband and again she turned her head slightly and her eyes fell on John and the glance did not dissipate but became a curious and reciprocated stare.
John noticed that woman was even more beautiful when she smiled. Only Reg noticed the steam engine, that had just pulled them in one direction. It was churning noisily and brightly past them on a parallel track, to pull them back again. The elderly woman began reading the story. Reg, emptily and alone, attempted to follow the story, pretending to read the incomprehensible letters and punctuation, those adult symbols beyond his few years, diagonally cross-wise and upside down. Then Fanny put her hand firmly on her husband’s arm and said, “John, it’s cold here by the window. Why don’t we change seats.” And then as the car jolted slightly and began to move slowly in the reverse direction, Fanny stood, handing Reg back to John and moved her thick form past him. John pulled his knees to one side and Fanny’s belly rubbed against the head of the blond woman’s husband while the blond woman retracted her arm. Then Fanny was standing in the aisle. John, with Reg in his arms and the colorful book in Reg’s hands, slid over to the seat by the window. It was quite a bit cooler there; and as Fanny sat, Reg and the big upside-down book were handed back to her.
The train moved slowly back to the station, back past the reservoir and the small houses and the snowy fields, all then in considerable darkness. As they went along a little jerkily, more so than when they had come the other way, the elderly woman finished reading the story and the Christmas carols were sung. John was disappointed, but couldn’t show it. With the blond woman directly in front of him, for the remainder of the trip, he could only stare at the back of her head. She couldn’t glance at him without her leaning forward and completely turning around. He tried to catch her reflected eye in the window beside her but she didn’t notice him or had ceased playing the game.
As they left the train, Fanny handed Reg down to John. He had stepped down the small narrow metal stairs in front of Fanny for that purpose. Fanny then came sideways down the stair holding the railing very firmly. John didn’t notice as all of the other passengers who had climbed down that stair or the other set of stairs at the back of the car melted into the night. But Franny watched as the blond woman, who had been walking in
front of her husband and just in front of John, pulled a cell phone from her purse and began talking as she led her husband without touching or speaking or gesturing across the parking lot.
Away from the train, John and Fanny both felt a sudden and gripping chill. They hurried to the car. On the way up the hill and past the agency, where the light was still on, it was Reg who felt it. The heat never worked very well in the back seat of John’s small car. Fanny and John were whispering loudly to one another, and for the first time ever, neither one of them had remembered to zip up Reg’s jacket. Reg thought of the cold and only the cold then. Not remembering the warmth of the coal stoves on the train or of the pretty colorful book.