Two Strangers on a Train

Published in Jabberwock Review. Pushcart Prize nomination and Notable Essay in Best American Essays.

1.

I’ve never especially liked babies or toddlers, not the way a woman is supposed to. So precious. So adorable. So moist. When I was twelve, growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, my stepmother’s friend Cheree had a baby. Whenever she called to announce she was bringing him over, my family members rushed to our front window and planted themselves at the observation post like a dog’s nose glued to a crotch.

The baby soon had his very own corner of our dining room, the way movie stars have tables in restaurants. He fussed and fidgeted, gummed his thumb, kicked his feet in tiny socks—my family ate up every second. Swaddled in his bassinet, the baby gloated. But that hint of cognition was the only indicator that this thing belonged to the species, that it had any promise, of any sort. The eyes were vacant. The mouth barely worked. And getting his fingers to grasp something like a pencil and hold it for a second—that was tough.

After a few months, Cheree and my stepmother convinced me to hold the baby. They thrust the odorous bundle into my arms and turned their attention to his provisions: plastic toys, satin-trimmed blankets, bottles, and ubiquitous nipples. When he vomited on my shoulder, Cheree plucked him away as though spitting foul liquid on my favorite Forenza sweater could damage the kid’s psyche for life. As she patted his lips, she and my stepmother beamed at me. Beamed their little eyes out, as if now I would finally see what all the fuss had been about. I sensed an opportunity to milk the moment, to feign delight at this bodily function and pretend to be just like the rest of them. But I could not do it.

2.

My husband Ben and I live in the suburbs of Washington, DC, so every day I ride the subway downtown to my editor’s job at a university. One morning, a man boarded the train with a stroller the size of a Miata. As we pulled away from the station, the little girl in the stroller began staring intently, for no apparent reason, at a woman in a tan overcoat standing next to me. For twenty minutes, she scrutinized the woman’s face with an intensity I did not know a small child could possess.

The whole time I thought, Thank God the kid isn’t staring at me. If you don’t want to engage with a toddler, nothing puts you on the spot like being trapped with one in a small, enclosed space, among bored commuters with nothing better to do than watch how you react. There is etiquette on the train, rules about minding your own business and respecting personal space. I like these rules. Children flaunt them, if they even comprehend them at all.

Of course, I love my nephews, nieces, and the occasional kid of a friend. But my response to a random baby in public depends heavily on my mood. In a great mood, I might smile as some toddler rolls by in his princely wheeled throne. On a shitty day, I resent the expectation to act impressed just because I am female. My default stance is neutral: You do your thing, I’ll do mine. Just two strangers on a train.

In other situations, not acknowledging a baby feels like an affront to female bonding, so I fake it. Elevators in my sixteen-floor apartment building, for instance, when a neighbor gets on with a stroller. I typically comment on the kid’s outfit (“Love those ducks!” even though I do not love ducks), a physical feature (“His eyes are so blue!”), or size (“She’s so tiny!”), which is risky if the baby is not an actual newborn but just unnaturally small, like a runt. I prefer riding on elevators with people’s dogs. I often wish I could take a dog home with me to feed it, pet it, and let it sleep in my bed. I have never had the urge to take home an elevator baby.

Ben finds my awkwardness amusing. For a man who does not want children, he is blessed with ease and playfulness around them. He throws his four-year-old nephew over his shoulder and swings his nieces by their arms so their long hair ripples like a silky flag. When I complained to Ben about the babies in the elevator, he laughed.

“It’s not that hard. Just look at their face and make noises,” he said.

“It’s hard if you feel stupid doing it,” I said. “What noise am I supposed to make?”

“I don’t know. Goo-goo. Wave your fingers in the air.”

“I don’t want to.”

Our next-door neighbor has a baby who sleeps, or tries to, in the room adjacent to our bedroom. At first, his little whimpers caught us by surprise.

“Is that a baby?”

At first, he sounded cute. Ben and I called him The Squeaker, almost affectionately.

“I heard The Squeaker last night,” one of us would report over breakfast. “But I went right back to sleep.”

The Squeaker outgrew his nickname. He had powerful lungs, strong emotions, and no other way to express them than to violently shriek in the middle of the night. Ben and I lay wide awake in the dark, straining for the sounds of someone comforting The Squeaker, or at least moving him to another room. But it was obvious our neighbor was “letting him cry it out.” Every morning at breakfast, Ben showed me his iPhone, where an app syncs with his fitness wristband to measure his rest.

“I’m not getting any deep sleep,” he said. “See that dark orange bar? See how little it is?”

Hearing The Squeaker never prompted me to think, “I want one!” I just felt sorry for our neighbor, trapped in there with this persistent ball of endless, inarticulate need.

For most of my life, these feelings have felt like a dirty secret, like an ugly bunion hiding in a shoe. Now that I’m in my forties, I find it easier to shrug off society’s unspoken threat, that if I fail to reproduce, I will wind up miserable, bloated with regret. Actually, I am happy. My gamble of not having kids but still creating a meaningful, fulfilling life has paid off. But admitting my feelings about babies out loud, to other women, still feels risky and rebellious. It makes me an outsider, and I worry about what my mother-in-law would say if she knew.

I would love to feel a kindred connection, on the train, with another woman like me. Our eyes would meet over the gigantic stroller and the baby’s fanatical gaze, and we would have a whole conversation without saying a word.

God, this kid!

I know. I wish he’d quit fucking staring at me.

Really. Get a life, kid!

We would laugh silently, with our eyes. One of us would get off the train and tip a finger to the brow, an almost imperceptible salute. Comrade. And for the rest of that day, even if we never saw each other again, we would each feel less alone.

 

3.

When I was nineteen, in the fall of my sophomore year at the University of Chicago, I had an abortion. I was intelligent enough to get into this prestigious institution, an achievement I was extremely proud of, but naïve enough, like many young people, to think I could be reckless and nothing would happen to me. Getting pregnant was the first shock.

I did not wrestle with the decision of what to do. An abortion seemed a terrible, terrible thing, which I must have been a terrible, terrible person to do. But an abortion, I had to admit, appeared to be my best option. My high school job serving frozen yogurt had hardly produced marketable skills that would provide for me, let alone a child. Beyond that, I wanted to be in college. I wanted Aristotle and Rilke and Woolf. I loved the century-old Gothic buildings, with their gray stone and grinning gargoyles; I loved the grandeur of Harper Library, the brisk wind sweeping the quadrangle, the whisper of all the Nobel Laureates who had studied there before me. I wanted to learn, to discover who I could become, to dive deep in the becoming.

My boyfriend, who later became an attorney, did not argue. The notion that we would set up house in a roachy South Side apartment—or worse, that I might go it alone as a 19-year-old single mother—didn’t seem realistic. And that life did not call me. What called instead was my spirit, my purpose: I wanted to live. 

The appointment was on Tuesday, November 26. My boyfriend and my best friend came with me to a clinic I had found in the thick Chicago phone book. Early morning, gray sky, bitter cold, the way the city was always cold but especially that fall, filthy snow and wind as brutal as knives. We left our dorm and took the #7 Jeffery bus to the Loop. Boarded an El train to a downtown neighborhood we had never visited before.

As we sat in the waiting room, my friend scribbled furiously in her journal, page after page. Every word, I imagined, condemned what I was about to do. She had tried to talk me into keeping the baby. “I’ll help you,” she’d said. When I wondered how we—two college sophomores—were supposed to raise a kid, she’d replied, “Who cares what anyone thinks? Fuck ‘em.” Whether she turned on me then, in the waiting room, or I pushed her away in the weeks that followed, I still don’t know.

After hours of watching other women walk through a nondescript door that led to the back of the clinic, a nurse finally called my name. I entered a small white room. I remember a thin cotton medical gown. An IV in my arm mercifully took me away, to a place called twilight. A doctor’s blurry face and distant voice at the foot of the bed. Then, nothing.

My next memory is of sitting on a toilet inside a stall, still sedated. A nurse knocked on the door. “You alright in there?” I woke up. I was bleeding. Someone helped me out of the bathroom, into my clothes. The three of us walked outside to a taxi.

I sat in the backseat, my head lolling against the head rest. Through the rear window above me, I could see concrete rising into gray sky. I had been a mother for seven weeks. A mother had opened the door of the clinic, signed a paper, put on a gown. But afterward, in the taxi, riding back to my dorm, I was not a mother anymore.

When I woke up the next morning, everything looked the same: my dorm room, my desk, my black leather jacket, my copy of Plato’s Republic with passages underlined and questions penned in the margins. But I could not get back in. I had imagined, before, that I would mourn for a while but I would certainly resume my old life, probably by Christmas. The abortion would be something unfortunate and sad, but almost like something that had never happened at all. Instead, I was heartbroken. The baby was everywhere. I drowned in grief, curdled with guilt. By the middle of December, I realized this was not going to lift soon. What I considered a medical procedure became instead a psychological trauma, as stubborn as the wind shoving me down the sidewalk. I crossed the quadrangle slowly, as if wearing a heavy coat of chain mail. I struggled to complete homework, to arrange the features of my face to appear normal. I saw my classmates as if from far away, as if through gauze or a dirty window. I sank inside myself like a tiny stone thrown in a wide, dark lake.

After the holiday, I dropped out and moved to Knoxville, where my mother lived. I got a job at a diner bussing tables. The baby haunted me for months. I felt her, always, at my back. I wrote her letters in my journal. It wasn’t because I wouldn’t have loved you more than I have ever loved anyone, I promise.

Those of us without children have not experienced, as mothers are quick to tell us, the great mystery of maternal love. But in those dark days I felt its hugeness in the baby’s absence, in my grief. I had made her disappear.

Surviving is more than simply staying alive. That’s survival of the body. Whatever core enables some women to believe this is the lesser of two evils—to sign the paper, put on the gown, allow a person in a white coat to remove part of one’s being—resides in me. There was the sharply uncomfortable knowledge that I had been capable of this. But there was, too, the discovery, however unsteady at first, that even though I no longer held my head as high as I once did, I could keep walking. Even when the giant billboard on the side of the highway declared Abortion is the ultimate child abuse and I didn’t believe that exactly, but still, I could move one foot forward, then the other, as my heart kept beating and my lungs kept pumping in their silent cave, in the dark, until months had passed and the missing part scabbed over.

 

4.

But that was twenty-four years ago.

 

5.

Recently, I visited my brother, his wife, and my nephews Reuben and Levi in North Carolina. I was packing to return home when I overheard my sister-in-law Jessica say, “That’s a special day for me, too. That’s the day I became a mother.”

This sentence, which floated so simply and sweetly from her mouth, zoomed around the kitchen corner, up the carpeted stairs, and past the family photos on the wall to the bathroom where I stood. The sentence hit me in that gut place. There’s no anatomical name for it but it’s the visceral place, which does not lie.

The enormity of her transformation struck me. One day there had been Jessica the regular person, the next day Jessica the mother. On that morning, this made me feel wistful. I call it wistful but it almost felt sad, and I started tossing toothpaste and lotion in my toiletry bag.

The alternative I always envisioned is the day I publish a book. A book is demanding but it does not require that I pass through my vagina a ten-pound body with arms and legs and giant head, risk an episiotomy and lifelong incontinence, sublimate my autonomy to the demands of another person, exchange my personal aesthetic for one of grating noise and multicolored plastic. I feel that I can succeed in life without experiencing these things. I feel that even though this means I will not be privy to the “miracle of life,” that doesn’t make me less of a person.

When Reuben was born, Jessica stored the placenta in her freezer until springtime, when she planted it under a tree. If I were a mother, I might find myself contemplating such a ritual. Now, I cannot fathom storing a body part in a Ziploc bag next to my veggie burgers and frozen peas. That’s what frightens me about motherhood: not that I would mind the sacrifices, but that I wouldn’t mind, that I might have to fight so very hard to even remember the old me. Like Jessica, I would become a new person, and my old dreams could easily float away. Between the exhausting tedium and the sweaty grip of an ever-present body clinging to my own, pulling and suckling and climbing and crawling, I fear my ambition would melt away.

For years, I have read books and articles about mothers. I eavesdrop on their conversations in coffee shops and at work. But this is out of curiosity, the same way I watch documentaries about Burning Man and a cappella competitions. Mothers’ lives fascinate me, like another planet would, with its odd moons and the beautiful glow of an otherworldly aura. From my research, I have learned that solitude and independence would be the first casualties of parenthood. So I do not feel envy on my Saturday morning run when I see a woman pushing a jogging stroller.

Still. Sometimes, something hits me. When I look at Reuben, and his emerging face looks exactly like my brother’s when he was a little boy. When Levi mails me a drawing that says Thank you for my birthday present! in huge, misshapen letters. The stab is not one of regret, and the stab does not change anything. It is something that happens, the way, I imagine, the mother pushing the stroller might stare back at me for a second too long, seeing a glimpse of her alternate reality as we pass each other on the trail, silent, out of breath, running in opposite directions.

 

6.

Sometimes, on the train, I guess how other passengers might react if we were trapped together in a life-threatening emergency. Who would become hysterical and useless? Who would prove to be dumb and domineering in equal measure? With whom could I form a level-headed alliance?

I think of myself as a survivor. I believe it is often sheer will that propels the body forward, pushes the heart and pumps the lungs, wills the muscles to move and the bones to follow. I also think of myself as kind. When I see people who are unkind—people who laugh at those who are different, pick on those who are weak—I think, I hate those people. This makes me feel less kind, and conflicted. In an emergency, these forces might compete: survival, kindness.

Yesterday, riding home on the train, I imagined the car slamming to a halt. Screams, smoke, metal screeching on metal. The emotional arc of chaos that ends with passengers banging on doors and windows yelling “Help! Get us out!” The disembodied voice of a Metro employee crackles out of the loudspeaker: “Everybody stay calm and wait for assistance!” I add pressure to the scenario in the form of a gas leak or a raging fire. The train is going to explode! I push forward, toward flickering light. But someone needs help. Would I pause to pull a person from the wreckage, promising something crazy like I’m not leaving here without you! Would I be more likely to be heroic if I could save an old person, or a child?

These imaginings make me think of Chicago. That frigid morning, the person before, the person after. A certain tint of autumn, a silver sky. I wonder if I was always a survivor, or if the abortion made me become the kind of person who could survive.

 

7.

When I met Ben, I was thirty-seven and he was thirty-nine. Independence had suited me for so long, it took years to realize I was lonely. But I had begun to feel myself drifting, a balloon at the end of a string someone had let go of, a small dot floating in a vast sky. Then Ben arrived, and being together was easy in a way I had started to suspect was a romantic myth. Ben extended his hand, grasped the string, and slowly, steadily pulled me down to earth. He has never let go. My promise is to love him well, every day, to the best of my ability.

As I get older, the lightness of freedom has only an occasional echo of emptiness. These moments do not last, but leave an uncomfortable shiver in their wake. On the cusp of middle age, I am more susceptible to the existential shudder. But that, too, is my story to write.

I remember the Oaken Bucket, my favorite childhood ride at Carowinds amusement park in Charlotte. We entered a large, wooden cylinder and pressed our bodies against the walls as hard as we could before the ride started to spin, faster and faster until the floor dropped down and nothing sustained us but centrifugal force as we shrieked and spun over empty space.

For years, I have contemplated the charge that if motherhood is the ultimate selflessness, not–motherhood must be selfish. I do not believe so. Yet there is about it an act of claiming, of self-preservation. Only recently have I started to wonder, what of me will carry on? From this I understand that children embody both the fierce urge to love that we have been led to admire and a survival instinct as desperate and human as my own. Progeny are a talisman against mortality, a cloak against the bitter cold of deep-space dark.

Lacking both religious comfort and the solace of offspring, do I ever feel a little superior, a little smug, facing this void unburdened and alone? Sometimes. But mostly, when I think of this, I think of how alive I feel when Ben and I escape the city to camp under a canopy of stars, how small I feel under the big, bright moon.

Previous
Previous

Combustion

Next
Next

M., Age Eight