I lugged my enormous suitcase into the train and dragged it along the corridor looking for an empty compartment. Finally I found one which smelled of old farts and decomposing banana peels. The stink of humanity. And I was doing my part to help that stink. What I wouldn’t have given for a bath!
I heaved my suitcase upward and just missed getting it high enough to slip into the rack. My arm sockets were aching. Just then a young train attendant in a blue uniform appeared and took the suitcase out of my hands. With one swing he slid it into the overhead rack.
“Thank you,” I said, reaching for my purse. But he walked past me without acknowledging this.
“You will be alone?” he asked ambiguously. It wasn’t clear whether he meant “do you want to be alone?” or “will you be alone?” Then he began pulling down all the shades. How kind of him, I thought. He wants to show me how to keep other people from disturbing me, how to have the compartment to myself. Just when you were about to give up on people, someone appeared and did you a favor out of the blue. He was pushing the armrests up to make a bed for me. Then he ran his hand along the seats to indicate that this was a place to lie down.
“I really don’t know if this is fair to the other people,” I said, feeling suddenly guilty to be hogging a whole compartment. But he hadn’t understood me and I couldn’t explain myself in French.
“You are seule?” he asked again, flattening his palm on my belly and pushing me down toward the seat. Suddenly his hand was between my legs and he was trying to hold me down forcibly.
“What are you doing?” I screamed, springing up and pushing him away. I knew very well what he was doing, but it had taken a few seconds to register.
“You pig!” I spat out. He smiled crookedly and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say “no harm in trying.”
“Cochon!” I yelled, translating for his benefit. He laughed weakly. He wasn’t exactly about to rape me, but neither did he understand my outrage. After all, I was alone, wasn’t I?
With a burst of energy I leaped up on the seat and grabbed my suitcase, nearly bringing it down on my own head. I stormed out of the compartment while he just stood there smiling his crooked smile and shrugging.
I was furious with myself for my credulity. How could I have thanked him for his consideration when any idiot would have known that he planned to grab me by the snatch as soon as the shades were drawn? I was really a fool-despite all my pretensions to worldliness. I was about as worldly as a goddamned eight year old. Isadora in Wonderland. The eternal naif.
“Boy, are you stupid,” I said to myself as I stepped down the corridor in search of another compartment. I wanted a crowded one this time. One with nuns, or a family of twelve, or both. I was wishing I’d had the nerve to belt him one. If only I were one of those wise women who carry aerosol cans of Mace or study karate. Or maybe I needed a guard dog. A huge dog trained for every sort of service. It was likely to come in handier than a man.
It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group-mother, daddy, baby-that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me!
Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains. Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all?
The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks.
It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!”
“Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?”
I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken?
“I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face.
Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment.
“Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly.
They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle… The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up… shut up… shut up…
The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America-didn’t I agree?
“Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself.
“Really?” This gave me new status. I might be a curious lone female, but at least I was not a bottle-washer like his wife.
“Don’t you agree that our American educational system has misconstrued the meaning of democracy?” he asked, all pomposity and bile.
“No,” I said, “I don’t agree.”
Oh Isadora, you are getting crusty. When was the last time you said “I don’t agree…” and said it so calmly? I’m beginning to like me quite a lot, I thought.
“We haven’t really figured out how to make democracy work in the schools,” I said, “but that isn’t reason enough to go back to an elitist system like they have here…” (and I gestured briefly to the dark countryside beyond the window) “… after all, America is the first society in history to confront these problems with a heterogeneous population. It isn’t like France or Sweden or Japan…”
“But do you really think increased permissiveness is the answer?’
Ah, permissiveness-the puritan’s key word.
“I think we have too little genuine permissiveness,” I said, “and too much bureaucratic disorganization masquerading as permissiveness. Real permissiveness, constructive permissiveness is another story altogether.” Thank you, D. H. Lawrence Wing.
He looked puzzled. What did I mean? (The wife was rocking the baby and keeping silent. There seemed to be this unspoken agreement between them that she should shut up and let him appear to be the intellectual. It’s easy to be an intellectual with a mute wife.)
What did I mean? I meant myself, of course. I meant that genuine permissiveness promotes independence. I meant that I was determined to take my fate in my own hands. I meant that I was going to stop being a schoolgirl. But I didn’t say that. Instead I nattered on about Education and Democracy and all sorts of generalized garbage.
This crashingly boring conversation got us half the way to Calais. Then we shut out the light and went to sleep.
The conductor awakened us at some ungodly hour to catch a steamer. When we got off the train it was so misty and I was so sleepy that if someone had marched me into the Channel I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to resist. After that I remember dragging my suitcase down endless corridors, trying to sleep in a folding chair on a pitching deck, and waiting on line in the early morning damp while the immigration officials inspected our papers. I stared at the white cliffs of Dover for two bleary-eyed hours while we lined up waiting to have our passports stamped. Then there was a cement passageway about a mile long which I dragged my suitcase down to get to the train. When the British Railways came to the rescue at last, the train crawled and stopped and stopped and crawled for four hours to Waterloo. The countryside was bleak and filmed with grime. I thought of Blake and Dark Satanic Mills. I knew I was in England by the smell.