Movement (20 page)

After lunch, they returned to their separate compartments. Susan returned to her journal. “What a year to come back,” she wrote. “Bicentennial year. Good god. I have no class.” She had read
Burr
to put an ironic lease on things, but the book had just made her angrier. Vidal's aristocratic distance outraged her. She really wished she were more dispassionate, or at least that she could see things from the sidelines once in a while. That's what living abroad had meant to her. Being on the sidelines. Life didn't seem to count as much in Canada or England. As an expatriate, she could make mistakes and not fail; she could fail and not sink.

But of course that's why she decided to come back. Nothing seemed quite real while she was away. Like the abortion march from Charing Cross to Hyde Park. She had watched her flatmates up there in doctors' uniforms and Pia running around with her camera and Carol leading the “Free Abortion on Demand” chants. The demonstration was important. She was with her friends. But somehow, it seemed more
real
to her that women couldn't get abortions in New Jersey. She had had the same problem when she lived in Canada. As an ardent Canadian nationalist, she continued to subscribe to
The Nation
and wanted the books she wrote to be available in Cody's on Telegraph Avenue. American was the only skin that seemed to fit. You have to go home again.

“At least for a visit,” she was telling Adam later that afternoon.

“How come you haven't gone back before now?”

“Because of the war.”

“But you weren't a draft dodger,” he laughed nervously, running his hand through that blond hair.

“There were more of us than you think,” she answered. “Anyway, I didn't feel it was fair to go back until Guy, my husband, was ‘pardoned.'”

“Do you feel absolved?” he asked.

“Absolved by Guy, in a small way.”

Time for a game of pinochle before the second sitting of dinner. Susan rested on the countryside, occasionally turning to watch Sara and Adam play. Sara's ringed hands, strong and competent versus Adam's freckled fingers, quick and keen. He would be good in bed. Outside there was more bush now. She felt easier, escaping the Prairies, approaching the West where trees and mountains and beaches were large enough, scaled to life. Now, if she could only slip below the border without drowning.

The funny Australian with the
Motorcycle Maintenance
magazine had sat down across from them at dinner.

“Rhyming slang,” he prattled. “Ain't you never heard of it? I say ‘china plate,' and I mean ‘mate.' It's Aussie rhyming slang.”

He proceeded to entertain them with tales of the travels he was making on a legacy from his grandfather. Susan tried talking with him about Britain, which he didn't like because it was too old. Now he was headed for Tierra del Fuego.

“It's cold down there,” said Sara.

“Yeah, the end of the earth. You been?”

“Yes,” said Sara mysteriously, “but not on a motorcycle.”

Susan didn't catch any more. Adam was asking why she left England.

“Because of the cold.” She told him about writing in her flat, listening to a friend's abandoned
California Dreaming
album, scared that she was going to be asphixiated by the faulty gas heater. Waiting forty minutes for the Northern Line in the sooty draught of tube stations. Working at the Cooperative Press where wind seeped through the plexiglass. After a while, her romance had turned to self-pity. The tea kettle in her flat stopped whistling; she could never quite get it up to boiling again. The inflated pound was falling into the Common Market. She was too guilty to feel uncomfortable. Then she became too sick to feel anything at all. When Susan left England, she willed the Feliciano album to her friend Pia who stayed behind.

Adam looked at her like she was Margaret Sanger. Susan found a familiar pleasure in this admiration. Sara, who had been listening silently, smiled over everyone and suggested they order another bottle of Cabernet to keep them warm. Was Sara pushing her together with Adam or was Susan imagining it? Adam talked about Margaret Atwood's sense of the Canadian aesthetic in
Survival.
An interesting discussion, Susan thought, so why did Sara turn back to the Australian?

Everyone was a bit tipsy as they climbed the stairs to the Vista Dome. There were no booths for four—only two small tables at opposite ends of the car. Susan wanted to talk more with Sara, realized that they had been apart all day, since lunch. But it seemed natural for them to split into dinner partners. She and Adam here; Sara and the Australian at the far end of the car.

Clearly, Adam liked her. He talked avidly about his last visit to the States. He told her he liked her. He held her hand. Gently, she retrieved it to sip her Kahlua Alphonse.

Susan could hear her laughter from the other end of the car. Sara's head was flung back so far that you could just see the tip of her chin. That's what Susan wanted—simply to have a good time, to relax, to get out of herself. Fucking was too complicated. The Kahlua was getting to her. It was either alcohol or the damn sugar. Susan was neither a romantic nor a prude, but sometimes these mating rituals got so gross. Goodnight, she said, rather surprising both of them.

The next morning, she woke to mountains. This was like being in a pup tent with a window, only better because you were moving. She remembered how much she had drank the the previous evening and waited for the hang-over, but it did not come. She lay with her head in the trees, daydreaming of snow. Maybe she would skip breakfast. Who would notice? The friendship had been broken last night. And she wasn't very hungry.

Sara sat across the table from Adam. The Australian was nowhere around.

“I don't know what happened to him,” said Sara. “He was on his ninth Guinness when I tottered off to bed.”

“He and I stayed up to 3:00 a.m. making rhymes,” Adam grinned. “See, you women can't hold your liquor.”

Maybe he wasn't too angry, Susan thought. Maybe they
would
make love tonight.

“So what will you do when you get to California?” asked Sara.

“Find out if I'm an American,” answered Susan. “I'm not sure what it means anymore.”

“Sounds grand,” said Adam.

“It
is
grand,” said Sara.

Sara told them that she came home to British Columbia every year after a month's holiday in Quebec. Life wouldn't be worth living without Quebec, but she would have nothing to live on there. Drawn to the melancholy in Sara's voice, Susan was disappointed that she and Adam had consumed so much conversation with their inexperience. Sara told them now about nursing in China during the Long March, about bringing a Quebec amputee back to Montreal and marrying him. They had become young Reds in the fifties. They met the RCMP on Mont Royal. And Sara was faced with an unrenewed contract at the university, a divorce, no place to go but home to British Columbia. B.C. needed professors and they never heard about things as far away as Quebec demonstrations. She had settled into a grey clapboard house by the ocean with a woman friend for a while, and now alone.

While Adam played solitaire, Susan and Sara sipped tea in the Vista Dome, floating together under the sequoias and swapping other journeys.

Susan, all by herself at fourteen, took the Union Pacific from San Francisco to Seattle to visit her girlfriends.

Sara had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway and it arrived in Vladivostok on time.

The Tan-Zam Railway got to Dar es Salaam one minute early, said Susan.

These were the same cups Sara had used on the CNR during the war.

The first time Susan had understood what “bloody cold” meant was when she and Guy took that train to Hudson Bay.

“Snowing outside,” Adam's voice carried across the car. “It will be snowing when we stop at Jasper.”

Sara remembered that the train between Montreal and Quebec City was a very long journey in 1956.

Susan's train from Moscow to Prague was scheduled for August 22. The Soviet troops got there first. She flew to Vienna, instead, August 22, 1968.

The stopover in Jasper took an hour. Sara linked Susan's arm at the sheepskin elbow. Susan took Adam's arm. They shot photos by the bear statue and then walked around the village eating hot french fries. The Australian anxiously badgered a porter to let him check on his motorcycle which had never been exposed to such fucking cold in its life. Sorry man, said the West Indian guard, no one could enter the freight car. And if
he,
from Jamaica for god's sake, could cope with the cold, so could a motorcycle. Susan suggested that they warm themselves up. The four of them, holding hands, ran around the train together.

Susan went back to her journal, wrote a few lines and watched the snowflakes leafing from bare trees. She thought about trains passing from Warsaw to Oaxaca to Penzance. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Mombassa to Nairobi to Chartres. And now she was going home. She had never really learned another language properly. She wrote only American. She was going home on her own. For the past six years she had lived by maps. She wouldn't need maps at home. One got on by instinct, by some kind of genetic survival code. She was going back to save her own life.

Adam dropped by the compartment with a yellow rose.

“I bought it in Jasper,” he explained. “When you two were in the ladies' room.”

So much for lifesaving instructions. She joined him for a recess in the Vista Dome.

Late that afternoon, Susan heard Sara's bracelets jangling behind her and turned into a warm wave of Chanel 19.

“Sleep well, my dear?” she asked Sara, a little surprised with her own familiarity.

“Wonderfully,” said Sara. “I dreamt I was riding on a train for the rest of my life.”

The Australian surfaced at dinner and invited them all to his compartment for cognac afterwards. Apparently grandpa believed in lubricating the ride. It was a cozy room with everything necessary, and a few things unnecessary. A miniature apartment. They talked about different dollhouses they had each inhabited—in other train compartments, boat cabins, Volkswagon busses.

Susan leaned back against Adam's hand. He moved the strap of her dress back and forth. Back and forth.

Sara was telling them about the old days on the Orient Express—about a trip she took to Bucharest with her lover Pat before the war. “Velvet cushions, porcelain bowls,” she recalled. “Tea and croissants for breakfast.”

Rubbing her foot along Adam's herringboned calf, Susan was lulled by Sara's voice and the cognac. You learned so much travelling, she thought mistily, but the only moving she wanted to do now was into Adam's compartment. Perhaps she could just excuse herself and he would discreetly follow.

“What I remember best about that trip was Virginia Woolf,” said Sara.
Three Guineas
and
To The Lighthouse.
Since then, I've always taken her on train journeys. Just finished
A Room Of One's Own
again today.”

Susan caught herself staring at Sara. She felt a little dazed by the drink. By Sara's ice blue eyes. Cognac on the rocks.

“I've always wanted to read that one,” Susan said. “The novels intimidate me in their languor, but I've heard that book is wonderful.”

Adam was arguing with the Australian, declaring hockey absolutely more violent than soccer. Susan leaned forward and listened to Sara talking about Woolf with the same intensity she felt for Lessing. How nice to see Sara with her guard down, her spirit up. Susan felt a sudden closeness to her, a merging.

“Come,” said Sara. “Before we part tomorrow morning, I'd like to give you Virginia Woolf as a farewell present.”

“Actually, I was thinking about going to bed pretty soon,” Susan said. “Or I'll be in no shape tomorrow for the Greyhound to California.” Adam's eyes were lost to cognac. There was no hope, no worry, about being followed.

As they walked between the cars, the night air hit Susan like sleet. Nervous about the border tomorrow, she felt chilled, then sweaty. How she could die of her own fever sometimes.

“Come in,” said Sara. “I'll find it in a minute.” Susan sat on the bed which the porter had unlatched. Cold, ironed sheets. Hotel. Hospital. Prison. Train. Heavy, sanitized wool blankets. Warm, functionally warm.

“I'm always freezing in these compartments,” said Sara. “How about you?”

She nodded and Sara handed her a very worn Fairisle sweater. Susan was glad to stay and talk, to postpone tomorrow. She liked the Chanel 19 and Sara's own scent that the sweater bore around her.

“Isn't it grand—the trees and these mountains,” said Sara, looking out the window. “Such elegant strength.”

Susan agreed. “I'm relieved to be back West. I got so weary of sweet English countryside. Once we crossed that first ledge of mountains today, I felt we were back in the land of the possible.”

“You do have a young, fresh optimism.”

“Not so young,” said Susan.

Sara put her hand on Susan's shoulder. “You misunderstand. I value that. I covet it.”

Susan turned to her. “If you only knew how much I admired your grace and … discipline,” she stammered. Damn. It was up to Sara to reach out now.

“We can have both,” Sara answered vaguely.

Susan smelled the anger in her own sweat. Anger at the cool academic distance between them. She hated Sara who could see her fever. She loved Sara, loved the fantasy of the two of them in a grey clapboard house by the ocean. She could stay in Canada; she could be loved and held here on the edge.

Sara kissed her. She held Susan firmly, but lightly. Susan had not felt real tenderness since Pia. Aching with the need for this warmth, she reached for Sara's breasts. Would they be fat or flaccid? Who knows how a woman weathers fifty years? Full, firm whiteness poured into the stiff red nipples.

Sara's cool strength had gone to hunger. Sensing the change, Susan was moved and frightened.