Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: #20

I had treated the Rhodia like it was a a sacred text, some type of New American Standard published by Amtrak and left for the taking much like the Gideons leave their bibles in every Motel 6 I've ever slept in. But the longer the train remained motionless and the more I saw the same people, even my own family, the more I felt that the notebook was dead weight. It was part of a general sense of frustration that filled not just the random, overheard pieces of conversations but the blank spaces between them. Everyone seemed edgy.

Dead weight or not, however, I refused to part with the Rhodia. I had even touched my pen to one page when I thought I would write, but I couldn't get any more than a dot of black ink on the paper. As much as anything, I needed to find a space to sit alone--not to write, but to separate myself from the other passengers. I even envied my aunt and uncle for their dark, quiet beds. I no longer knew where my father, sister, and brother were. We had gone in different directions after our poker game, something that isn't easy to do when most of the available space is linear. Margie had fended off my half-hearted attempt to give her the notebook, though she said she would like to read it after I'd written something just to try to figure out which words were mine. Now, with pieces of tissue stuffed into my ears in an equally half-hearted attempted to keep outside noises out of my head, I opened the notebook and searched for and found one of Ophelia's writings.

Pomegranates

My parents were happy with Phil, and I probably should have kept him around. But we had been together since high school, and we had wearied of each other. Not in a bad way, I guess, but just in a regular way: we both had come to expect the other be new and surprising, and we both ended up disappointed when neither could live up to that expectation. Phil was a good man, and sometimes I miss him. I have especially missed him these last couple of months, though I am not sure he would be patient with my being sick. He was never patient, and as he continued to fail with his art, he reached a point where I knew he was also not living up to the expectations he had of himself. "I hate it," he said one afternoon. "I get the paints ready, and I end up producing garbage. And that's if I'm lucky. Sometimes I end up not painting anything."

Phil introduced me to pomegranates not long after we met. We had met near the river, and he had brought a pomegranate and a knife. "Try it," he said as he held one of the dark-red seeds to me. We sat by that river and cut our way through three pomegranates. When I washed my fingers in the bathroom sink later that night, I admired the stained fingertips I held under the water.

He was prolific when we first met. He could paint anything. Even pomegranates, and somewhere boxed in my parents' spare bedroom is a still life sketch of two pomegranates in a wooden bowl. The longer we were together, though, the less he painted. He kept an easel in his bedroom, and one night as we lay in bed, he told me he hated the thing. "When we're having sex," he said, "all I can think about is what I should be painting. And whenever I try to paint, I end up thinking about sex." I told him that he was probably not atypical for a man, but he did not see the humor.

We stopped seeing each other quite simply: we just stopped. "Have you seen Phil?" my parents would ask. No, I had not.

That was it. There seemed to be several more words on the page, but Ophelia had crossed them out with strokes of heavy ink. I closed the notebook and reclined my seat. I found myself thinking about Ellen--Miss Orange County--and how she could draw anything. I wondered if she was happy. I hoped she was. I hoped Phil was, too.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #19

At some point my father, sister, brother and I found ourselves together at a table in the lower level of the observation car. My father had purchased a deck of cards, and we were playing poker using Dorritos and corn nuts as money. Keeping track of who was winning was somewhat problematic because we would now and then eat portions of our bets. My father and I had also managed to nearly empty his flask, so Steven and Maggie were playing a bit smarter.

"We're gonna die on this train," Steven said at one point.

"It's a death-train," Maggie said.

"I talked to the conductor," my father said. "He said it'll be awhile."

Maggie groaned. "What does 'awhile' mean?"

"It means," my father said as he played a flush and pulled the Dorritos and corn nuts to his corner of the table, "don't get your hopes up."

"We'll never even make it to Helper," my brother said, and it dawned on me then that my family did not know of my time in Helper.

"Did your conductor-friend tell you exactly why we wouldn't be moving?" Maggie asked.

"Something to do with computers," my father said.

"You'd think that Amtrak would've had these glitches worked out by now," Steven said. "I mean, how long have these passenger trains been running across this country?"

Glitches. That was always one of Dr. Fay's favorite words, usually along the lines similar to "you've got to learn that glitches will pop up," or, "sometimes there's a glitch in every relationship." Sometimes her lisp would get in the way of the word and she sounded as though her mouth were full of Kleenex.

"Where's the rest of the family, anyway?" Maggie said. I wondered if she was starting to get tired of being around us.

"I was wondering about that," my father said. "How could we spend so much time on this damned train without running into everyone else?"

"Why don't we write in the notebook," my sister said.

"Feel free," Steven said. "Write something profoundly medical."

I handed the Rhodia to Maggie, and she turned a few of the pages in the middle. "It's pretty full," she said, and she looked at me. "You still didn't write anything, did you."

I shook my head.

"It's your notebook," Maggie said.

"Why is it his?" Steven said as he lifted the Rhodia from Maggie's hands.

"He found it," my father added.

"It's not mine," I said. "Any one of you can keep it." I felt this, too--the thing had become a burden, a responsibility.

Steven gave it back to Maggie, who opened to a random page. "So, this Ophelia is the one who started things." She read something. "She's got a lot to say. How about if I read you boys a little story."

"What about the poker," my father said. He sipped from the flask and handed it to me. When I was done, gave it to Steven, who shook it as though measuring its contents, then poured some into the plastic cup that had once held Pepsi.

"You win," I said. "Read something, Maggie."

Maggie cleared her throat. "Here's something. Ophelia's. It's called 'Thinking.' Not an original title." And then she read.

Thinking

I want to say something to the effect that I do not know if I will be the hero of my own story, but Charles Dickens used words close to those. Maybe I should just say that I don't know my own story even though I know how it will end. For now, though, I will simply think out loud.

I woke up this morning with a pain in my side that lasted for a couple of hours. I did not know what to think of that, though I did have suspicions. I dreamed last night that my mother and I were traveling from Maine to Rhode Island in the Chevy Vega she loved so much and that had taken us up and down the Eastern Seaboard in search for a new home that was more stable the one we'd just left. By the time I was twelve I had been to six schools in three different states, and I had slept many nights in that Vega as my mother held me to the soft throat of her loneliness. I am glad that we are friends now, but there were times when I would have traded her for a sack of groceries.

I suppose that I carry as many of her stories as I do of my own--a girl learns a lot about her mother's life when the two of them are shivering at a rest stop somewhere outside of Providence. I was glad that she finally found my father, though I was not glad to learn that I had two brothers that my mother had never told me about. "Kind of slipped my mind somewhere in South Carolina," she said and, really, I found that enough. I should call my parents, and I wonder how many times they have re-read the note I left for them. Will they believe the part that I am okay?

Maggie sighed. "That's it. A peculiar ending. This girl needs help."

"She sounds fine," Steven said. "She's working things out on her own."

"Young people never work things out on their own," Maggie said.

We were getting uncomfortably close to my experience with the good Dr. Fay, something my father seemed to recognize. He took the notebook and glanced through a few pages. "Someone has to write something," he said. "Maggie's right--it's pretty full." He gave the notebook to me. "The hell with it. Let's eat the money."