Rules for 50/50 Chances (24 page)

Dad comes downstairs with his coat and hat, all ready to go, not yet recognizing the familiar, building tension in the room. “Tally ho, ladies. Rose, your chariot awaits.”

Mom's reddening face and increasingly jerking head and extremities means she's getting worked up. Then it all explodes.

“It's n-n-not your train! It's my t-t-train! My train! You're always t-t-trying to s-s-steal my fucking things!”

Gram chuckles, as if Mom's just kidding. “Well, technically it's not your train either, is it, El? Unless you're the bloody CEO of Amtrak.” She's trying to lighten the mood, but I can tell Mom's already too far gone to be brought back with humor.

“El, come on.” Dad puts what he intends as a calming hand on each of Mom's shoulders. Sometimes it works, but not this time. She shakes him off violently.

“Just st-t-top t-t-treating me like a child!” she growls. “You”—she points at me—“you have no r-r-right to make
my
life … your life.”

I don't even know what to say anymore. If only she still understood irony, she'd hear the ridiculousness of what just came out of her mouth. As if, under any circumstances, I would want to make her life my own. If there were anything I could possibly do to avoid that, believe me, I'd be doing it. Unfortunately, that's a choice I don't have.

“Mom, I'm going,” I tell her, not giving an inch to the rage boiling in my gut. “Bye. Love you, Gram, I'll call you from the road. Or track, or whatever.” I plant a quick kiss on my grandmother's cheek, grab my suitcase, and make for the car. By the time I get buckled in and see Dad heading out after me, closing the front door behind him, I've already wiped the tears from my cheeks and taken a deep breath. Done. Ready to go.

Twenty

The long-distance Amtrak waiting room is in the basement of Chicago's Union Station, an unfortunate, low-ceilinged room hiding under what is a quite majestic train station upstairs. The floor is lined with threadbare blue carpet, and big luggage lockers line one whole wall. There are a lot of bored-looking people waiting for their trains with their feet propped up on coolers and suitcases.

Lena, Caleb and Dad booked me what Amtrak calls a Superliner Roomette, which is the smallest of the sleeping compartments. When they call “All aboard” for the Zephyr—and they actually do call “All aboard”—a woman in a navy vest and hat directs me to the first car on my left, and a man in the same uniform takes my ticket at the door and points me up a staircase barely wide enough for Mom's suitcase, to room number three on the upper level.

The California Zephyr isn't exactly the old-fashioned Orient Express—complete with a steam engine and red velvet seats—that I was picturing for my epic train ride. “Room three,” it turns out, is basically two single seats facing each other with barely a foot of floor space between them, and a silver door with a glass panel that slides closed just to the right of the seats. In other words, a closet with two seats stuffed in. But there's a big window, and a table that folds out from the wall, and since there's only one of me I can prop my suitcase on the backward-facing seat and sit facing forward. There's a tiny bottle of water resting by each seat, and I noticed coming in that there's also a selection of juice and a coffee pot right by the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Not too shabby, this Amtrak thing.

By the time I get settled in my compartment, I've almost cleared my head of the exchange with my mother. Almost. Dad and I drove pretty much in silence to the airport. As we pulled off the exit ramp for Logan's Terminal C, he said out of nowhere, “It's the disease. It's not her.”

“I know. Obviously. I get it.”

“I'm sorry, Ro. That's not how I wanted you to start this adventure.”

“It's not your fault,” I told him. “It's the disease, remember.”

He pulled over by the American Airlines entrance. “You're a good kid. I love you.”

“You're a cheeseball. Love you too.”

Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially irritated about the particular genetic mishap that may or may not have happened to me before my birth, I remember that Dad didn't even inherit this crappy luck. He married it. And you can't divorce the woman with Huntington's disease, even if you want to, because that makes you a massive asshole. Not that I think he wants to leave her—but maybe sometimes, I guess. It has to be enticing, to think that you could just put it all behind you and start over.

I click a few pictures of my temporary home with my phone. Just on the other side of the narrow corridor, an older woman with a slight hunchback is getting situated.

“Hiya,” says the woman, calling over to me. Midwestern. “This your first time on the Zephyr?” I nod. “Mine too. I'm going to Sacramento. Where you headed?”

“All the way to the end. San Francisco.”

“Oh, wonderful,” says the woman, dreamily. “Are you all by your lonesome over there?”

Actually, now that I'm getting settled in the roomette, it does feel a little strange to be alone. Which is unexpected. I figured it'd be like last summer, when I went to a two-month summer program at New York City Ballet. I was away from home by myself for a lot longer than three days. But that time, my parents delivered me right to the dorm, helped me get my bags upstairs, and put sheets on the bed. Not that I can't put sheets on my own bed. I can. But still, it's nice to have your parents do it for you, sometimes.

“By my lonesome,” I say with a smile.

“Me too,” she says, returning the smile, but she looks almost concerned.

“My grandparents are picking me up on the other end.” I don't know why I tell the lie. Just to make this stranger feel better I guess, like my life is all good. It's normal.

The same Amtrak-uniformed man who directed me to my compartment appears in the corridor. He introduces himself as Jay.

“Rose,” I say, shaking his hand, which swallows mine. He's handsome, in spite of the unflattering polyester he's forced to wear, dark-haired, with the most incredibly well-coiffed beard I've ever seen—every strand looks like it's been individually combed and placed exactly where it is on his chin. He doesn't speak with an accent, but his English is textbook-precise in a way that makes me think he learned it in school, not at home. He explains where the lounge car is, and that the dining car attendant will be around just after departure to take our preferred dinner reservations (really, reservations), and that he'll be around to fold down our beds any time after dinner until eleven o'clock.

“That's when I turn in for the night. I'm right here in room one if you need anything in the meantime.”

At two o'clock on the dot, the train pulls slowly out of the station, and I watch the tracks coast by out my window. I text Dad first, to let him know I'm off, and then send Lena and Caleb the first few pictures I've taken. Within fifteen minutes, the high rises and shabby, boarded-up brick buildings of train-track-adjacent Chicago give way to flat, dry cornfields, and we're on our way.

 

 

They make big states in the middle of the country. Sounds obvious, I know, but I'm used to being able to drive across Massachusetts in three hours or less. In the middle of the country, we spend hours passing through shifting landscapes without crossing state lines. The flat land goes on for ages. It's beautiful in its own way, dead brown cornstalks for miles—it isn't really corn season yet, I guess—and dotted with tiny towns along the train tracks, ranch houses, above-ground pools, churches and schools with American flags flapping out front, scrap yards and recycling centers. And flatness.

Once we're moving, I explore the train from end to end: My sleeping car is the last on the train, followed by three other sleepers, the dining car, the observation car, with windows stretching to the ceiling, and three coach cars. The coach cars in particular are full of uncertain smells, each one slightly different from the last—one like someone's McDonald's hamburger, the next like disinfectant, the next like the toilet's not quite working. A few passengers are trying to sleep, even in the middle of the day, with T-shirts or masks draped over their eyes, which strikes me as a little defeatist, considering that the ride has only just started and there's plenty of interesting stuff to check out. At the end of one of the coach cars, a group of scruffy twentysomethings are sitting on the floor, wearing pajama bottoms and drinking Sierra Mist. One of them strums an acoustic guitar quietly, which strangely doesn't seem to be bothering anyone sitting nearby.

Somewhere still in Illinois but hours from Chicago, the Zephyr stops long enough that passengers who are continuing on are allowed to get off the train and stretch our legs—a smoke stop, they call it. I step outside and jog up and down the platform a few times. I guess I can't really blame Lena and Caleb for not considering that fifty-two hours in a tin can wouldn't do wonders for my pre-audition body, because honestly I didn't think about it either. I'd pictured a sleeping compartment big enough to stretch on the floor, but the reality allows no such thing. So on the platform, I mark out a short combination we learned last week in class, trying to ignore the stares from Jay and my fellow passengers.

“You're a dancer, then?” Jay asks, shading his eyes from the harsh glare of the near-dusk sunlight against the cement platform.

I blush a little at the question. “Sort of, yeah.”

He smiles. “It looks like more than ‘sort of' to me—was that a
pirouette
?”

“A
cha
î
n
é
. But you were close.” He isn't really, but it doesn't matter.

“You're practicing for something?”

“I have an audition in San Francisco.”

Just speaking the words out loud makes my stomach feel like an ocean in the hours right before a hurricane hits. Churning.

Jay looks intrigued. “What's the audition for?”

“Oh, it's just a—it's nothing. Not a big deal.”

“All right,” he says, eyeing me like he can tell I'm not telling the truth. “Break a leg, then—do they say that in dance, or just the theater?”

“You can say it in dance, too.” I roll my ankles around one at a time. “I probably won't get in, though.”

“That's a bit pessimistic, isn't it? You've got the same chance as anybody else. Better, because you've got the luck of the Zephyr behind you!”

“Is that a thing?”

“Of course it's a thing! Everyone knows the Silver Lady is a good luck charm. Ask Mary in the dining car. She's a big believer.” Jay gestures toward the train door. “All right, get yourself back on board. We are moving out.”

I grasp the handle on the train door and step back up. I can't say I'm a big believer in the “luck of the Zephyr” myself, but I guess I'm not currently in a position to turn it down.

 

 

For my first Zephyr dinner, I'm seated across from a young French couple—one tall and dark-haired, the other smaller and blond—who are touring the States from New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Los Angeles, with one big train ride in the middle. Next to me, there's an older man with leathery skin, a worn red flannel shirt, and a cowboy hat. He used to be an insurance agent, he tells us, but now he's a volunteer park ranger.

“Americans eat so much corn?” asks the blond Frenchman, who speaks better English than his boyfriend. He nods at the cornfields—probably the fifth straight hour of them—flying by out the window.

“Mostly we eat corn syrup,” I tell the French guys. They look at me quizzically. “Sugar,” I say. “It makes sugar.”

“Ah! Ah! Of course!
High fructose
,” says the English speaker, nodding enthusiastically.

Our booth for four is decorated with a white tablecloth (heavy paper masquerading as cloth) and a pink carnation in a plastic vase. Two waitresses, Mary and Dyllis, call loudly to each other across the car and crack jokes with the passengers. Mary is instantly my favorite. She calls everyone “young man” or “young lady,” or occasionally “gorgeous” or “handsome,” thoroughly amusing the many senior citizens on board. I consider asking her about the luck of the Zephyr, but decide against it—the dining car is crowded and she's hustling, expertly balancing trays of meals without spilling them as the train heaves from side to side.

The insurance agent / park ranger / cowboy recommends the steak (he orders his rare), and the French guys follow his lead. I peer over their shoulders toward the kitchenette, trying to imagine the remote possibility that they might be able to effectively grill a steak back there, and order the roast chicken instead. But when Mary brings our meals out, my dinner companions' steaks are nicely pink on the inside, and topped with a dark wine sauce that looks pretty good.

“So tomorrow, you'll want to get to the observation car early,” the cowboy tells us. “Fills up real fast, comin' out of Denver.”

“The views—they are nice?” asks the blond.

Cowboy nods, his mouth full of steak.

“Have you done this route before?” I ask, when he's finished chewing.

“I've done every route,” he says, wiping his mouth. “The long ones, anyway. I'm working on the shorter ones. The Zephyr beats them all.”

So the cowboy is a real train buff. I wonder what Mom would want me to ask. Would she want to know about the stretches with the best scenery? Or about the conversations he's had like this one, over meals with strangers?

Our drinks shudder in their plastic cups, like we're in the middle of an earthquake.

“Why do you ride so many trains?” I ask finally.

“Why not?” He considers for a moment while he works a toothpick around in his mouth. Then he looks at me. “Nobody talks on airplanes.”

The last time I was on an airplane, I was eleven. My parents sent me to visit Gram in London over April vacation, and I was mad because I had to miss four dance classes. “Don't talk to anyone who doesn't work for British Airways,” Dad told me when he handed me over to a flight attendant with a smile straight out of a Crest Whitestrips ad. On the plane, I put my headphones on, turned on a movie, and didn't speak to anyone until we landed at Heathrow.