Just then, the conductor reached them, “Good evening, ladies,” and took their tickets. Her companion said, “Good evening, kind sir,” leaning forward a bit as she reached for her ticket, which was wedged into a corner of one of her bags, and then bringing her head up too close to his belt buckle. She looked at Sally as she handed her own ticket to the man and then shifted her gaze back to the trainman’s blue pants, nodding, as if Sally should consider what was hidden under the gabardine.
She had an image of the woman’s wriggling wet pinky, writhing in the darkness, and felt herself blush again. She turned her face to the window.
“Did you ever read The Teenie Weenies?” the woman asked her in what suddenly seemed a pleasant, conversational voice. “They were in the Sunday funnies? Adorable little pixies, they were. Little spools of thread for chairs and chestnut leaves or some such for clothes. Did you ever see it?”
Sally shook her head. “No,” she said.
“It’s really quite charming,” she went on. “I’m a great reader of the Sunday funnies. I love Orphan Annie, being orphaned myself. Almost like you. And that big Daddy Warbucks with his beautiful bald head. I also love Li’l Abner. Do you go to the pictures much?”
“Sometimes,” Sally said.
The woman turned her head, doubling her chins, and cast her eyes over the girl once more. “You really want to go through life all alone, without a man to protect you?”
Sally shrugged, smiled. Instinct told her not to squander her belief on this dirty woman, but still she struggled with the impulse to say, Betrothed to Our Lord.
The woman was studying her. “But you’re just a baby,” she said without waiting for a reply. “You’ll see what I mean soon enough.”
Then the woman reached up to unpin her hat, getting further settled. She fluffed her hair. “I’m going to go bleach-blonde when I get to California,” she went on. “I think it will suit me. Do you think it will suit me?”
Sally smiled politely—it was the response she’d been trained for—and said, “I think so,” wanting once more to turn away from the woman, toward the window, both to see where they were going and to put this conversation to an end. But she was uncertain about how this was done.
“Of course, the muff gives it away,” the woman said. And again she touched her elbow to Sally’s side. Sally, still smiling, shook her head. Her mother had once found a white muff made of rabbit fur in the donation basket, but Sally had refused it—she was old enough by then, maybe ten or eleven. She had, by then, become aware of the haughty eyes of other girls, on the street, even in church, when they saw her wearing their own outgrown clothes.
But the woman was nodding toward her lap, speaking to her as if she had suddenly lost her hearing. “A muff,” she said. “Don’t you get it? Down below. I’m not about to bleach that.” And she laughed into the air, once more moving her bottom from side to side to get more comfortable in her seat. Her arms were too short for her body. She crossed and then uncrossed them over her broad chest. “The way I figure it,” she went on, “by the time you’ve got a man eye-to-eye with your muff, he’s not worried if you’re a natural blonde or not.”
Sally shook her head, uncomprehending, and the woman laughed again, panting still. “Oh, you baby,” she said, all-knowing. “You’ll find out one of these days.”
Sally turned her burning face to the widow. The train was moving through the flat outskirts of the city. There were still tenements and long avenues in the distance, lights coming on here and there, although the sun had yet to set. She was vaguely aware of the woman leaning forward again to arrange her bags, pushing them out into the aisle, drawing them back in again, over the high insteps of her small feet.
And then her voice was at Sally’s shoulder again. Hot puffs of words on her neck. “One time,” the woman said, “I was riding the train from Chicago and a man came down the aisle selling nuts. Have you heard this one?”
Sally shook her head—misunderstanding once again.
“He was selling nuts, yelling out, Peanuts, roasted almonds, cashews. So I said to him, ‘Do you have any pecans, kind sir?’ And he said, ‘Pee cans? Back of the train, lady.’”
She laughed. Her exhalations gave a taste to the air between them. “Do you get it? Pee cans. Toilets.” She waved her little hand. “What I’m saying is, I’m going to go find the pee can,” and Sally, the habit of politeness so well engrained, smiled and nodded, as if their conversation thus far had been refined. Suddenly the woman gave her a long, penetrating look, not kind. “Keep your hands to yourself while I’m gone,” the woman said. “Lay off my stuff.”
She had some trouble maneuvering out of the seat. Once again, the way she moved—shuffling, heavy-bottomed—gave the impression of great age. As she moved away, the man across the aisle lowered his newspaper and looked at Sally with a kind of amused sympathy. He was an older man. Or maybe a young man made old by the vague shadow of his hat brim over his eyes. Her face flushed again to think he had overheard.
A small child appeared in the aisle beside her. Or small-bodied, thin-limbed, but with a large and dirty face. His head was unevenly shaven, down to white scalp in some places, prickly with dark hairs in others, which made his skull seem battered and misshapen. There were scabs on his scalp and on his chin and nose. He stood beside her for a moment, a bit wobbly because of the movement of the train. And then he put his hand on the armrest of the empty seat and smiled, his crooked teeth nearly green. She smiled at him and said hello. He said hello. “Are you going to Chicago?” she asked. He shrugged. There was a fine white crust around his nose. “Would you like a piece of chocolate?” she asked him.
He raised his pale eyebrows. She noticed another maroon scab along one of them. It seemed to crack dryly as the skin moved. She reached into her bag for the dinner her mother had made, and just as she put her hand on the chocolate bar, another hand, reaching upside down and backward from the seat in front of her, clawed the air until it touched the boy’s arm, then his collar, and then pulled him out of sight, nearly off his feet. She heard a woman’s voice say “Sit,” and the crack of a hand against flesh. No sound from the child, but the man across the aisle again looked up from his paper, observed what she couldn’t see, and then again looked at her and shook his head sorrowfully.
The dirty woman was some time in coming back, and when she did return, and once more maneuvered herself rear-first into her seat, the unwashed odor beneath her violets and cooking oil was vivid.
Sally had taken out her missal by then—much as she would have preferred opening the novel, she feared what conversation it might lead to—and the woman leaned over elaborately to see what she was reading. Then she sat back again.