growing up: 1

Once I was waiting at a train station on a fall day, and the leaves were on that blade between red and brown, beautiful and rotten. I could see my breath as it floated away, these little cumulous clouds of my respiration that were the one clean thing at that dirty train stop.
I was pretty bored and pretty hungry, so I sat with my hat against my stomach to trick it into feeling full, and I watched this mother with her two beautiful daughters standing a ways away from me. They were standing in this cloud of cigar smoke from a fat bloke next to them. I felt like someone should tell him not to smoke on the platform but he had ruddy, thick cheeks and a belly like the skin of a drum, so it wasn’t going to be me. It just seemed wrong I guess to see those slithering tendrils of smoke slipping their way around the oldest little girl, who was standing closest to him. She seemed even farther away through that screen of black air.
They were such a pretty little family, too. The mother used this old-looking white veil over her face and these sad, sweet almond eyes that looked like they’d spent a whole life waiting for a train that never came. She was wearing a faded white dress with yellow water stains on the edges, but the way she stood you’d think she was wearing a purple robe. My, I’ve never seen such pride at the sheer fact of existence.
She dressed her little girls like queens too, especially the older one. The younger (she must have been around four) still wore the rumpled clothes of a child, but the older (ten or so) looked like an image growing every day to superimpose the mother. So they were all beautiful, the mother with those almond eyes and the girls with their white-blond hair and pouty lips, all wrapped up in this shifting veil of smoke from that crazy, ruddy bloke next to them.
I’m not sure why I was watching just them, but I don’t remember much more of the station. In a way, for me, once I got the little gnaw of hunger in me to go away, they were all that was there. It let me forget the cold and the slow sadness of the end of the fall and the woman at home that I knew would never be waiting for me the way those almond eyes waited. Trains stations make it easy to forget yourself, you know? You kind of surrender to your smallness, and you see the world in an inevitable way that you can never see it when you’re all bundled up in yourself.
The two little girls were playing with a doll. It was just an ugly, cheap thing made of pink plastic and glass eyes, but when the older girl dropped it for an instant on the dirty ground, the younger girl started sobbing and would not be consoled until the mother had rocked her in her frail arms for at least five minutes. The vague memories I have of other people from that moment are all twisted, angry faces. A lot of people (walking straight like a rod was shoved through them) gave the mother those disgusted, embarrassed glances that people always give the mother of a crying child. I felt apart and separate and special because I knew what had happened, and the tragedy of that hard, pink hand touching the concrete felt as intimate to me as it must have felt to the little girl. Whereas I know plenty of times in my life I’ve been one of the glaring passerby, this time I judged them for judging.
It was shocking to see how engrossed those girls were in their fantasy game. The mother sat on her huge trunk and fiddled with the brass handle, but those girls were somewhere far away, mothers to a real child, not an ugly doll. It made me try to remember when I was a child, how real all fo the fake things seemed, and how fake all of the real things were. In a way I figured that those girls were doing what I was doing as I watched them: exchanging their own menial lives for a more meaningful one, trying to stay forever in that world instead of their own. It was beautiful, this little heart of throbbing life in the death of summer.
I’m not sure how long passed. An hour, maybe. There was some problem at the next stop down, so the train was really late that day. It was long enough that I, fifty-two years old and gray, had enough time to forget who I was and where I was going. When the whistle of the train finally came, it seemed as if I was a small boy again and my brother was waking me from some pleasant dream to make me go to school. The train was beautiful, but it was nothing compared to the beauty of that small family. I didn’t know them at all; I’d never seen them before in my life. But I watched them for a few hours, and they made me remember something that every autumn in my life had forced me to forget.
When the train stopped, the mother finally stood up and grasped her trunk, and I heard her talking to her daughters.
“I have to go to work in the city for a while,” she said, seriously as if she were speaking to adults. “It is the only way for us to get money. Stay here on the platform and wait. Your uncle will come on the next train and pick you up and take you to his house.”
Their little faces looked so forlorn, so different from the way they were before. The mother turned to the older child.
“Be strong, okay, Louisa? You take care of Mary. You are the mother now.”
I was going to get on that train, but I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to my life, and it seemed wrong to leave those little girls alone. So after the mother had kissed their blond heads and wet cheeks and gotten on the train, and after the train had plodded away, I sat on the bench with my hat on my stomach, half-starved, watching the little girls.
I waited until the sun had set and the next train appeared around the bend on the horizon. At one point the younger girl wanted to play with the doll, but the older girl refused to join her. She only sat on her little suitcase and played with the brass handle. The air gold cold, and the cigar smoke from the ruddy man was replaced by the constant condensation of their exhalation whirling around them like a white wraith. Right before the train finally arrived, the younger girl dropped the doll again, and when she sobbed it was the older girl that stretched her arms around her, set back on her heels, and rocked her until the child stopped crying, and this time there were no disgusted glares from passerby. The older girl smoothed the younger girl’s darkening hair, whispered comfort in her tiny ear with a quivering voice. They were one form in the darkness, a caregiver and a baby, one barely big enough to hold the other, and when the young girl finally quieted, I could hear two voices crying.
The uncle came on the train, heaved up the little suitcase, and took them away. I had to wait for the next train home, and it did not come until the middle of the night. No matter, though. The winter came. M y girl wasn’t waiting for me. The trivialities of my life marched on. But I never forgot those two little girls and that day at the station when I finally saw it die, that thing that once died in all of us, that thing that once died in me, and that thing that must have once died in you.