A Hazy Charcoal Afterglow

A Hazy Charcoal Afterglow


The train announcement had been an hour ago. Since then, roiling charcoal skies and icy rain had driven the train switches and cables crazy, so that no one could leave Pennsylvania Station, including a sentimental girl who was anxious to get home and be alone with her memories. She was almost crowded out of her space on a wooden bench by a long row of weary commuters. Whether they were old and patient, invincible yuppies, careworn or simply drunk, all of the would-be passengers were annoyed to varying degrees.
Old and patient passengers bore the wait with some longsuffering. The yuppies indignantly ranted to the ticket agents about unacceptably long waits between departures, and scant updates. But the agents’ cool rebuffs deflated the haughty, forcing some anethetize their wounded pride with fast-acting whiskey.
More than one in this whole menagerie covetously eyed her spot on the bench. But she tried to ignore much of the scene around her.
After maneuvering her back against the bench, she pulled a worn notebook from the satchel on her lap. She decided to write about love. She turned the leaves in the notebook, crinkled by ink-filled grooves where she had written before, until she found a smooth page. Unlike previous entries, she wouldn’t pluck the words from the air, relating feelings that she had only siphoned from others and channeled through her own psyche, not tasted or felt. This time, she would recall the previous night, with Nathan. How would she describe last evening? She decided on a few words, carefully concealing them from the eyes around her, in case they were too bored or agitated to read the gray text in their crumpled newspapers and decided to peek over her shoulders at phrases like “silhouette” or “cradling arms.”
“Hey. Esscuse me,” a dark-haired man said. He stood inches away from her, but his gaze was vague and scattered, as he addressed the whole bench of commuters. He asked for the time, and pointed to a watch on his wrist, while clutching a beer can in a paper bag, a smell he came very close to duplicating. She had trouble recognizing this rumpled and smelly man, until the gold wedding band gave him up. He rode the train on her morning and evening commutes, usually looking much more polished. Sometimes he spoke tenderly into a cell phone while waiting for the train to pull into the station. The sentimental girl left him to the rest of the passengers, who tried to explain to him that he was already wearing a watch. She returned to the pages of her notebook, back to Nathan.

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She remembered leaning out her window to inhale the clean, misty night and waiting for Nathan's car to drive up her street in Newark. She rested her chin on the window sill in the dark, so he wouldn’t notice her watching him park his ordinary-looking Toyota as he pulled up to her brownstone.
He was magnificent. The sight of his athletic gait, slender fingers twirling his keys and the thoughtful brow that first reeled her in several months before had now inspired waves lapping at her dock. Nathan heard much about her neighborhood, the Ironbound, thanks to her thorough descriptions of everyday life there, during their work as production assistants for a cable TV channel. He told her that he wanted to pass last evening in the place that had done so much to shape her conservative and vaguely foreign mannerisms. They walked to the warehouses and row houses a block from the river, to scout the Spanish Tavern offerings there. Then they looped back to Ferry Street, joining the parade of well dressed Portuguese and Brazilians circulating through its restaurants and pastry emporiums.

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Her hand cramped, so she stopped writing to rub her palm. She had to use the ladies room, though she loathed giving up her seat. Almost as soon as she stood up and took one step away from her chair, an older man hurried over and squeezed himself onto the empty space. Disgusted, she hurried to the bathroom, where even worse public behavior awaited. While washing her hands, she watched a young mother walk in, trying to manage a small girl that looked about three years old, a small pink backpack and an overstuffed duffel bag.
“I’ll watch your bag for you, if you want,” offered the sentimental girl.
“No, that’s OK,” the young mother mumbled. Her toddler waved at the young girl, who returned the greeting. Then the child scurried over to the empty towel dispenser. She stuck her hand inside, inspected the outside and then looked inside.
“Mommy, there’s no hand – ”
“I KNOW THAT, stupid. Ain’t never any towels,” shouted the young mother. She spun the child inside the toilet stall and slammed the door.
The sentimental girl left them behind. The child apprently continued to move around the slate and beige-brick bathroom to check things out, because every now and then the girl heard the child ask a question, or point something out. The mother either ignored her or shouted at her. When they left, the mother walked ahead carrying the bags, while the little girl trotted behind.

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That’s when the boarding call went out for her train, and soon she was waiting patiently amid the phalanx of weather-beaten commuters as it eventually broke up and streamed through the open doors. As she folded herself into a seat near the aisle and piled her belongings on her lap, the girl caught a glimpse of the inebriated time seeker from earlier. He was not alone this time. He and someone were exchanging words, muffled behind the high backrests.
Unlike previous commutes, his words were not tender. He sputtered and slurred roughly to the woman next to him. She yelled back, drunk too. Their seats bumped as they bickered and groped each other. He lunged at the woman in the seat, calling her ‘bisssh’. The girl listened, expecting his companion to protest, but none came from her.

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The girl closed her eyes. She did not want to witness their odd mating, so she tuned them out, preferring to fall into memories of Nathan’s voice, his broad shoulders and the elegant hands that possessed her that night. They shared a steak-on-the-stone dinner at one of the eateries and stopped at a produce stand during their after-dinner stroll. The girl picked up a mango, sniffed it, turned it around a few times in her hand, and showed it to Nathan.
“For dessert?”

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The inebriated couple kept on bickering, and once they were done with each other, the dark-haired man expelled his companion from the row of seats. She was disheveled, from her badly dyed hair, all orange and full of split ends, to the clothes that were a size too small and two decades too young. Her gold faux leather belt and her pants hung open carelessly. She hadn’t bothered to refasten the lower four buttons of her blouse.
The sentimental girl blushed uncontrollably. Carrot-top’s appearance was bad enough, but to make things worse, the girl recognized her. She too commuted on the same line everyday, usually catching the same train. But in all the months that passed before, the odd lovers who now exhausted and scorned each other had never spoken to or acknowledged each other, no matter how many times they shared the same train. They never sat together, and Carrot-top never wore a wedding band.
The young girl sat up straighter, trying to recover her serenity and shut out the haze of alcohol and perfume that trailed the woman as she staggered to the next car. The dark-haired man followed her closely, clutching a bottle in a paper bag, as the train lurched out of Manhattan and sped toward the tunnels for New Jersey.