“Ever had a boyfriend?” she asked.
Sally turned a page and nodded with a small, apologetic shrug, as if she were too absorbed in her prayers to speak aloud. But already she was rehearsing how, if the woman pressed her, she would use the name and the personality of Patrick Tierney, whom she had known all her life, to create an image of an adoring boyfriend, finally refused. In the story she would have told the woman, had she pressed her, her imaginary Patrick Tierney was better looking than the real one, something like tall Charlie with his blue eyes, and with a flourish to his background (his father a soldier, not a doorman) and his profession (a medical student, not a laborer). She would tell the crude woman that this Patrick Tierney held back his tears—stoically—when he saw her off at the train station today, rather than, as was the actual case, merely saying last night when he came over with his two sisters to tell her goodbye, “You’ll be back, I guarantee it. That’s not the life for you.”
But the dirty woman didn’t press her. She waved her hand in the air as if she knew the girl’s nod was a lie and then leaned forward to rummage through her bags. She took a sandwich from one of them—now there was the smell of liverwurst and onion—and ate hungrily, but silently, panting as she did.
All over the car, as the world outside lost light, people were bringing out food, odors of canned meat and cheese and old apples. Cigarette smoke gathered like mist over the hats and the heads of the passengers. A shouting argument erupted at one end of the car. She saw the conductor stop in the aisle to wave a finger at the culprits. The bald-headed child walked by again as if in a trance, balancing himself between the seats. Some minutes later, when the train lurched, he let out a wail that could be heard even over the noise of the tracks and the engine. His mother, whom Sally could only see from behind, a crushed cloth hat over a tangle of thin and graying hair, was slumped against the window. She sprang from her seat and raced down the aisle in a stooped, hunchbacked way. A second later, she was dragging the boy through the aisle. He was wailing. He had his hands over his eyes, his little mouth a moldy circle. The mother threw him into his seat and dove after him. Again there was the crack of her hand against his flesh, but to clear effect this time: the boy’s outraged cries reached another register.
Someone on the train said, “Shut up.”
The woman beside her said, “Serves them right.”
The man on the aisle folded up his paper, neatly, and tucked it under his arm. Then he pulled his hat down over his eyes.
When Sally finally got the courage to get out of her seat and use the toilets, the floor there was wet. The soles of her shoes were tacky when she returned to her seat. When she went to the dining car—at the tail end of the dinner service, as the Sisters had advised—she was made to wait in the swaying corridor, and while she did so, a man, smelling of alcohol, passed by her too closely and rubbed his chest against hers, breathing into her face. A girl her own age—she was certain this one was her own age—was already at the table where they sat her, finishing her dinner. She wore a smart dark suit and a hat with a veil, and at first Sally feared she might be a rich girl, the daughter of a prosperous father, the kind who would snort through her nose, even in church, when she looked Sally’s outfit up and down. But it took no more than a minute for Sally to see the shine on the fabric of the girl’s jacket, the pale threads at the edge of her cuffs. Sally knew secondhand when she saw it. There was a tear in the veil as well. The girl had tried to hide it with a hat pin, but the material had come undone and now stood up stiffly, showing the hole to anyone who looked—as if the hat itself disdained this unworthy owner. The girl’s outfit, Sally recognized, was all effort.
When Sally ordered her tea, the girl asked for the same, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
Then she smiled warmly across the small table. “Going to Chicago?” she asked, and Sally only nodded warily. She had learned the first lesson of her first journey from home. But the girl barely registered the reply. She began talking, leaning into the table as she did, as if without it between them she would crawl, talking, into Sally’s lap. There was something endearing about the tumble of her words. She was from the Bronx, she said, going to Chicago to meet her husband, who had, at last, found work there. He hadn’t had work, she said, for two years. As long as they’d been married.
Here she straightened up to allow the waiter to set down their tea and her silver dish of ice cream. She opened the purse on her lap and began to rummage through it, talking all the while.
She missed him so much, she said. Missed him like crazy. “It’s like an itch,” she said.
Mrs. Tierney sometimes said, “An itch where I’ve never had a bite,” which always got her mother laughing.
“I’m just going crazy with it,” the girl said. “I’m so lonesome for him.”
Talking, she extracted a small perfume bottle from her purse and tipped a little of the clear perfume into her hot tea. Without pause, she reached across the table and poured some into Sally’s cup as well.
Astonished, Sally put out her hand.
“It’s good for you,” the girl said, merely as an aside to her tale.
When they were first married, she said, they lived with her mother in the Bronx, but they were always fighting because he couldn’t find a job. So he left for Chicago. (The girl licked the ice cream from the back of her spoon.) She didn’t even know where he’d been living. Her mother said he must live on the street. She wrote to ask him if he lived on the street, but he never answered. For six months, all she had was two letters that said, No luck, still looking. She said again, “I was going crazy, missing him so much.”
She sipped her tea and pursed her lips. “It’s good,” she said, and nodded that Sally should try hers. “Better than cream and sugar.”
Reluctantly, Sally lifted the warm cup. She was expecting the taste of lavender or rose water—the taste of perfume—but what hit her tongue was hot and clenching; it seemed to sear, simultaneously, her nose and her throat. Her eyes watered. She coughed.
The girl laughed.
“This is whiskey,” Sally said. She knew something of the taste of it—given to her by her mother, on a spoon, when she had a cold. Or rubbed on her gums for a toothache.