Photographs of Trains -- roughly

Photographs of Trains

I see the tangerine tinge of the streetlight divided and then rendered into a thousand tiny drops of condensation forming on my window. From my bed, I hear people walking and coughing on the street and the sound of cars passing with lesser frequency on the interstate as late night melts to early morning. It must be two or three in the morning and I’ve fallen into a cliché of sleepless nights. Kenny, who I’ve been dating since last autumn, feels me turning over and sleepily drops his arm across my stomach and curls around me as I lay rigid on my back. Though we’ve been together for a year, we live apart, and for the first time I feel claustrophobic having someone sleep in my bed, breathing next to me. Faintly I hear it: the only sound that I can hear from the outside loudly enough to wake me at night and instantly be comforting- the whistle of a train rolling by.

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The previous summer, at an estate sale, I bought an old pair of cowboy boots and a typewriter, which I adored because it typed in cursive. I typed everything on it – even shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of words that I just liked. I preferred to see the crisp mechanical font over my own hand writing style, characterized by inconsistent patches of cursive and print.
I was always wearing those cowboy boots. Once when I was wearing them during a visit to my father’s sister, my aunt Lisa, she remarked how funny it was that I dressed like my mother when she was my age. “You know, when I first met your mother I thought she was so great – really interesting, talking about her job at NPR in San Francisco, and really just fun to be around. Phenomenal writer.” I relished any history Lisa would impart to me about my mom or father. My dad was usually open to telling stories about when he and my mom met, or when they were married; my mother however made it clear through her irritation and terseness in her usually placid tone that it was not something to be discussed. Lisa’s perspective of my parent’s relationship was my favorite to hear because it was so glamorized. Lisa is a fantastic storyteller, with a soothing voice that was textured like mahogany. Her when she laughed, her head tilted back slightly, the lashes about her eyes knit together, and her laugh itself sounded like an endearing cackle. Initially, Lisa’s stories about my mother, particularly, sounded so full of adventure and charm: my mother the aspiring writer, actor in Shakespeare productions meets my father, the starving artist in San Francisco, and they both discover they avid fly-fishermen. The more I heard these stories from Lisa, though, they began to feel artificially innocent. Whenever I talked about a past breakup with Lisa, she would ask what I learned from the relationship, and say that we don’t need to have regrets. That philosophy may have worked in Lisa’s personal history, but she was just an observer of my parent’s relationship. Maybe it made her feel better to re-tell me stories like this – polished with the haze of foregone sentiment and romance. Maybe she thought it would make me feel better.
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After commenting about my mother’s and my similar attire, Lisa sent me an old photo of my mother, when she first met my father. It’s a photograph just of her profile, a California sun glowing softly around her face and on the straight honey hair which framed her face. In this photo, her eyes are closed, her lips are parted, her bulky knit sweater hanging comfortably on her frame, and on her head is an old dusty white cowboy hat, a cluster of wild roses tucked into the band. I never saw my mother like this – when she had just finished college and her senior thesis on Hawthorne; when she was being romanced by my father, also freshly graduated, pioneering his way into graphic design. She looks different now, her hair is dark and permed, mascara and eyeshadow on her eyes, Mary Kay’s Frosted Pink lipstick detailing her lips. Holding this photo, I couldn’t help but see what everyone always said and I denied growing up – that my mother and I look alike, especially in this photo when she was about my age – early twenties. I thought that I most resembled my father, who lived in a different state, and since there was no other comparison or contrast, I believed, for my friends to think that I looked like my mother was not a fair analysis, but simply a lack of options.

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I pull air into my lungs and fill them as full as I can as the first train whistle blows. I hold it in until I hear the next train’s long moan, and ration my exhale, releasing the air burning in my lungs as long as the train’s sigh. I never quite make it. I turn onto my stomach after gently picking Kenny’s hand up by his pinky finger and placing it on the bed beside me. I keep listening to the trains, rattling along on tracks, bound for their next scheduled destination. I poke Kenny’s arm, then stomach, and he stirs softly. I barely hear him say It’s fine. It’s okay. Sleep, over the crescendo of the train’s wistful exhales as I lay on my back and stare up and out the window that is covered in tiny spectacular gems of water.


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Along with the photo of my mother in the cowboy hat, Lisa also sent my mom and dad’s wedding announcement. It is on simple brown paper, with a sepia toned candid shot of my mom and dad in an embrace, wind ruffling their hair and denim jackets. In this photo, the resemblance between my mother and I was undeniable. Below the photo, old Grateful Dead lyrics read:

It’s nothing they explain
Like a diesel train
Better not be there when it rolls over
…They love each other

Better not be there when it rolls over? I read and reread the lyrics. I know there are other interpretations of this song, but I immediately felt tingling in my cheeks and thought What the hell kind of warning is that to put on your wedding announcement. Later I realized that my parents had already known my mother was pregnant with me by the time those announcements were sent, those invitations that made love seem like a diesel train. I wondered if those lyrics had been some clever foreshadowing; I couldn’t keep the images of my parents- together and happy, something I cannot picture except for in photographs- out of my mind, and began to search for significance in photos and stories of my parents. I wanted to know why piecing a history of my parents together was so important to me. It became obsessively essential for me to know if they had really loved each other or not. Initially, I wanted to know because I thought it would cement my alluring position as a lovechild, a reminder of a hippie legacy of yesteryear that existed in Lisa’s rendition of my parent’s story.
But I soon realized I anxiously wanted to know if history really repeats itself. And if, by typing my story so distinctly in cursive, my story was not an original, but a revision of my mother’s, and I just couldn’t see it because of the difference in lettering.
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I fall asleep finally, on my stomach, one palm pressed against the head of the bed, shifting over so far in the large bed that my other arm falls over the side and my legs are half in, half out in the tangle of sheets and quilts. When morning sun burns through my gauzy blue curtains, I’ve relaxed so Kenny and I are twisted together again, my toes nestling in the arch of his foot. Kenny mumbles, his mouth full of both concern and sleep “What’s wrong? What are you thinking about?” I’ve learned that my face is my greatest traitor of my emotion. I don’t answer but turn the question to him.
“I was actually thinking about a Dmajor 7 dominant chord in Coltrane’s Kind of Blue and his phenomenally new use of the Lydian Scale,” he says, effortlessly, like an afterthought. He looks different to me as he lays in bed this morning, as though I am peering through a sharper lens. I see how my favorite curl in his hair catches the light through the dewy pale glow of the curtains. The shutter of my mind’s camera adjusts, the curtain drops, and the moment is captured. And, like all other photos it is suspended in time, thus making it instantaneously a thing of the past. Within a moment, he is up and dressed, and wants to go eat breakfast.

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Once my parent’s divorced when I was four, I never saw my mother and father in the same room again. I have constructed memories of the two of them together solely through photographs Lisa has shown me, and stories that are infrequently told. They married on a hill overlooking Marin and John Muir Woods, called Mt. Tamalpais. My mother wore a sheer, layered white dress, and had flowers braided into her hair. The intricate crocheted webs of her grandmother’s ivory gloves are spun around her fingers, adorning her slender hands. My father wore a simple brown suit, the late afternoon sun radiating the ginger flecks in his beard, a white rose tucked into his lapel. A friend had made their wedding cake – a thick cake full of carrots from the friend’s garden, nuts and dates.
During the reception when my mother and my father cut the cake and exchanged bites, embarrassment draining color from his face, as he told that when he took his bite from my mother’s fingers, he thought that there was a nut in the cake, so he kept biting harder and harder. The nut wouldn’t break, and he opened his eyes to see my mother had tears running down her cheek. “I thought she was just so overcome with emotion!” He said to me, laughing nervously, his brown eyes getting bigger as he told the story. “My mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood, and I realized that I was biting her finger.” As we sat eating lunch he finished his story and looked directly across the table at me, and laughed as he said said “You know, I really thought it was going to work out. Live and learn, kid. Your mom seems like she’s happy now with Larry, and I’m happy with how things are for me.” I wondered if it really was as simple as that. If toil and emotional pain and confusion over years and years could suddenly be satisfied by applying a “live and learn” mentality.
I asked my mother about the cake story a few years ago and her cheeks instantly flourished a ruddy color. She bit her lower lip, leaned her head back and away from me, the stiffness in her jaw causing veins in her stiff neck to swell. Her voice sputtered sharply with terse beginning of words or phrases, like a frustrated engine giving away to false starts, completely uncharacteristic of her usually fluid tone. She crossed her arms and I could see her knuckles pale as she pressed her fingers into the flesh of her arms. Her hands appeared as bony and fragile as a swallow’s claws. I remembered seeing her hands, like claws, clutching something so tightly like this before: once when I was seven or eight and begged her to show me the house where she and my father first lived in North Portland. She protested on the grounds that the neighbhorhood was unsafe, didn’t I remember when that driveby shooting happened on our street? Eventually she gave in, as long as I promised to be good while we did the rest of the errands.
As we drove past a colorful sign on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. welcoming us into “Portland’s Urban Community” she barked at me to lock the doors of our boxy old blue Volvo. Our conversation ended abruptly after that, as she straightened in her seat and pressed her head and her stiff neck into the headrest, and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the muscles in her upper arms were defined; so tightly that her hands once again nearly trembled like a small bird’s, dearly holding onto its safe perch. I saw no apparent harm in this neighborhood, but as my mother slowly curled her thin, delicate lip into her mouth and clenched her upper teeth onto it I realized with a chill that she was uncomfortable. It seems so clear to me now that she wanted to fiercely protect me, lock me in the car, and drive straightforward.
Now I was pushing her to tell her side of a bittersweet memory.
“Oh God – excuse me for taking the Lord’s name in vain- but that was so stupid! I knew right then it was a mistake and I shouldn’t have married him.” Then why did you? “Well I had found out a month earlier that I was pregnant with you, and I settled. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time. I just thought that I loved him, but I guess I wasn’t sure. But hey, I got you out of the deal,” she nudged me as we sat side by side on the loveseat, which she called a settee, in her living room, which she called a parlor. I thought that there must have been more that a bit finger to be a harbinger of failed marriage, but we never really spoke of the subject again. She patted my hand, but her fingers were cold, her fingernails long, and the rings she wore on her fingers clicked together, punctuating the quiet.
“I got you out of the deal.” I didn’t even know how to begin digesting that. It became clearer to me: my mother may not subscribe to the “live and learn” “there are no regrets” philosophies of Lisa and my father. My mother wrote in an email after I moved out a few years earlier when I was seventeen, that “You have chosen a tough path. People ask me about you and I tell them you are fine, but I don’t really know. I feel like you’re going down my path, honey, and I’ll tell you something: I regret it. I learned, but I still regret it and can’t get back all that time I wasted, pursuing journalism and marrying your father, concerts and drugs, all of it. It amounted to nothing. You can’t ever retrieve time.”
It wasn’t anger that constricted her throat and jaw and made her grasp with a talon-like strength. It must have been the terror of a mother who feels she must protect her child. Now, I believe she has the right as the position of a mother to fiercely protect me in any way she believes she can; however I did not always recognize or like her methods and I know that I do not always appreciate them, though I should accept them because they come from the loving intentions of a mother. I've come to realize this is my downfall, not hers.
When we had been driving in the car she wanted me to protect me, and I couldn’t see it because I couldn’t see the danger that she believed existed. If this was the case now, we both had a common fear: and that was one of me reliving her past.

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My aunt, Lisa, and I are not only family, but have become close friends as I have grown up. She’s all about “meditation retreats”—at one such event we even stole bread from the resident monk’s quarters together and hid behind a tree to eat it unnoticed by our fellow Qui Guong meditators. I forget she is my dad’s older sister.
She is the keeper of family history: has all the pictures and knows all the stories about our great aunt who immigrated here from Italy, stories of her father as a boy, and stories of my parents together. She always told me that my parents really were in love, for a time, despite whatever my mother says. I’m really not sure whose word to take on that one.
My mother says she never was, and still is not a fan of her ex-sister-in law, Lisa.
The briefest history of my relationships with my Aunt Lisa and my mother could be summed up something like the following:
Age Four- Matters of Eternal Significance:
Mom: I’ve asked Jesus into my heart to save me from my sins and save me from Hell. I think you should too.
Lisa: I don’t believe in Hell

Age Seven- Dress Code:
Mom: We’ve decided we’re not going to wear pants anymore because it’s displeasing to the Lord and its cross-dressing
Lisa: Let’s go shopping! Look at these pink stretchy pants! They’re darling. When you get back home you could wear them under your dresses.

Age Eleven- Body Modifications:
Mom: If God wanted you to have holes in your ear lobes, he would have put them there already.
Lisa: Well then why didn’t God just give you a zipper if he wanted you to have babies? Let’s get your ears pierced. Twice!

Age Thirteen – First Real Bra:
Mom: Why do you want to buy colorful bras? Who’s going to see them? Nobody better be seeing them! (I remember how she laughed nervously as she said this; now her laugher in that memory echoes in my ears as tender, addled with terror, bittersweet)
Lisa: Pretty bras make you feel good! Let’s go to Victoria’s Secret

Age Fifteen – Boy Talk:
Mom: You are far too young to understand what it means to kiss a boy. It is the beginning of an intimacy that you should save for marriage. You are defrauding your future husband by being promiscuous.
Lisa: Do you have a boyfriend? Is he cute?!

Age Seventeen – Bridesmaid at Lisa’s Second Wedding:
Mom: Your Aunt Lisa really isn’t doing her kids any favors by getting remarried. She’s choosing her own life over her kids.
Lisa: (In her slim wedding gown, with her smooth hair upswept and pinned) You know, when I married Jack (her first husband) I said to my bridesmaid, right before the ceremony started like this, that one day I was going to divorce him. I knew it had an expiration date from the beginning, but I wanted to have kids, and it seemed like it was going to work out, so I compromised.
Until that moment I had relied on Lisa to be opposite to everything my mother believed about religion, fashion, and family. This statement of Lisa’s resonated loudly with my mother’s account of her resorted marriage to my father. Though their motives and outcomes were different, though they Lisa, and my mother blissfully remarried, they had first compromised.

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My relationship with Kenny was comfortable, and by comparison, he was a better boyfriend than the previous boy, who hid fifths of whiskey in the campus library to unfailingly spike his coffee when he studied, who had no remorse over getting a rather large Homer Simpson tattoo, and who had a very visible tattoo of a beer stein- which he explained in one of those all-too-true-jokes that he loved cartoons and beer more than anything. I knew that it shouldn’t have been about comparisons.
When Kenny appeared with a mutual friend to my house on my birthday that early fall evening that we met, he was carrying a guitar, had a feather in his cap, and was undeniably sweet. Everyone else fell asleep, but he and I sat in the tall grass of my backyard and told stories about being kids, old-time music, and where to get the best burritos. We were both born in California, only a few miles apart. He told me about his childhood, being a fledgling skate punk, raised in Singapore and Mexico. I told him about being raised in Oregon by Baptists. He somehow thought that was equally exotic. We couldn’t understand with so many common friends why we hadn’t met before.
Over the next year, though, I began to feel my relationship with him like was running after a train or a bus that I needed to catch; I could see it, but it clearly wasn’t stopping. Running after public transportation is impossibly disappointing. Our relationship was so fluid initially: conversation was easy, any time we saw each other was delightful – full of adventures and hikes through the forest, bike rides, and picnics in the back of his truck. Slowly, though, over months our conversations relied on gossip about mutual friends or monotonies about school: Do you have a lot of homework this week? Yeah. Did you know Sarah is getting married? Yeah. Weird. I felt like I was back at college orientation, mindlessly answering What’s your name what’s your major?
As the summer turned to gray autumn, we always ate at the same Thai restaurant. We sat there once, and Kenny asked if I would order the pumpkin curry, like I always did. And I asked if he would order the lemongrass chicken, like he always did. After that we sat in an uncomfortable quiet, and I racked my mind for something to talk about. Finally I just said that I felt like all we did when we spent time together was sleep, eat, or I would read while he practiced guitar. I argued that wasn’t quality time, that it was just coexisting. His eyebrows moved together as he pushed a curl behind his ear and said with his eyes looking away from me, “That’s all I ever do…practice, eat, sleep. It’s all I really want to do. It’s nice when we can just do those things together. I think that’s what companionship is.” I panicked at the thought that we were not growing closer, but growing accustomed to each other—that what I thought was empty coexistence was meaningful companionship to Kenny. I assumed I should attribute any disenchantment to us being comfortable, “after the honeymoon phase” as “they” (whoever they may be) so obnoxiously say. I desperately wanted to run back to sublime summer nights in fields of tall grass and the diminishing thrill holding hands; but it seemed as though that was the past, better contained in photographs. So I rationalized that this was what comfortable relationships were about: companionship over excitement, and lowering my expectations as a compromise to avoid constantly sleeping alone and cold solitary weekends and holidays.
But Mom had settled. Lisa had compromised. I didn’t know if I was doing the same or just convincing myself I was.
I continued wanting to see pictures and hear stories of my parents over and over. And know if there was some objective way to know whether or not I was becoming my mother in more ways than just physical similarities. I thought I could find a clue, some transcendent enlightenment from knowing my parent’s history to illuminate my situation.
This kept me up at night.

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I had the opportunity…or experience, rather, to attend both of my parents’ second weddings. My mother remarried when I was four, and limited by the capacity that I had for understanding at the time, I mostly remember diligently performing my duties as flower girl, my satin was dress sticky and moist – it was 108 degrees that August in Portland when my Mom married Larry. It seemed to me that their wedding was just attended by masses of suits and dresses and shoulder pads, shiny black oxfords, and pastel flats and sandals. It took place in a Baptist church where they sung in the choir. I remember most vividly Larry’s sister insisting on bringing her ambrosia salad, full of canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows. Mom and Larry insisted it was unnecessary, but she still carted in a huge bowl of the gelatinous mass to their wedding reception, in the non- air-conditioned church basement- turned- inferno by the intemperate weather.
Looking through photos the only thought that strikes me about that day is hair product – my mother’s artificially wavy hair sprayed and meticulous, Larry’s hair with this perfect side combed arch, detailed with hair gel. My mother had six bridesmaids, all wearing black matching dresses that looked like something a flight attendant wore. Mom wore a white shiny dress with big bulbous sleeves and carried burgundy roses, which coordinated with the other decorations; and seamlessly matched the cake: three tiers- white, starchy, with a few burgundy rosebuds and a crucifix on top, filled with raspberry. In wedding photos I can be seen gazing excitedly as Mom and Larry both hold the knife, cut the cake, laugh as they exchange bites, their eyes locked and gleaming. Larry and Laura, they almost even had the same name.
Now when I email my mother, I have to use their joint email, larlaura, which always makes me feel weird to address messages to a name-conglomeration. Though I address messages to my mom, I usually get a response from her husband. The funny thing about my mom’s transition from barefoot hippie bride to my father, to the bride of a Christ-centered church wedding, is that I can’t remember a transition. Maybe since it all happened when I was young, I was unaware of the change, but as I remember it, the transition was seamless and almost immediate. One month we lived with my father. Another month we lived with Larry. On Sundays we slept late and ate pancakes, until one Sunday we began attending church, and every Sunday thereafter.

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My father remarried much later, when I was nineteen, the summer before I met Kenny, the summer I wore cowboy boots all the time. The wedding was in an old country church outside of Davis, California and I sat with my cousins and Lisa, leaning my head on her shoulder, during the simple ceremony, in which Dad and Charlene exchanged vows and he slid my great grandmother’s wedding ring on her finger. Afterwards, Lisa and I drove past rows of grain and pear trees, now outlines and cut-outs in the diminishing late afternoon light, to the Italian restaurant where the outdoor reception was.
There were white lights strung in the trees, adding to the affectionate glow of that early May evening. My dad’s old fishing buddies told tall tales of their fishing adventures and drank beer while I met Charlene’s roommates from college. When the wedding cake was served– tiramisu, already sliced and put on plates, no circumstance surrounding it, friends and family gave toasts to my Dad and Charlene, his new bride, who I had immediately admired for being a writer. I took photos with Charlene’s old Minolta. When I developed the film, the photos were hazy, the kind taken in low light, so that motion is blurred, faces are grainy, light is tender and whatever is captured is ambiguously beautiful.
Later in the evening when my favorite Bob Dylan song played, my dad caught my eye across the tables where the revelers of the occasion sat, bellies full of food and wine, relishing the afterglow of the sunset and the mild twinkle of lights dazzling the glasses. Dad raised his glass and mouthed Thanks for being here, buddy. I raised my glass and we smiled.
I had always maintained that I looked more like my dad.

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Thack thack thack- Sitting in my room, a few days after that sleepless night full of trains sighing, I am pounding on my typewriter. I have been reheating the same cup of tea all evening, but the drink just gets stale and bitter, only lukewarm.
I watch my typewriter spit out my tangled thoughts on paper, typed so neatly in cursive reminiscent of vintage textbooks, its almost cruel. The notes are obscure and incoherent when I read over them – ramblings about white roses, my mom’s cowboy hat, my cowboy boots, debating with myself about whether or not I look like my mother, wedding photos, train tracks and fancy cakes, and the scar my mother’s trim finger has from my father’s teeth-- all ending with, Jesus Christ, Kenny and my name are so similar…are we going to have a joint email account too? Shit.
I cough on the tea, cooled once again and realize I have been typing all these thoughts so I didn’t have to see my handwriting, indistinguishable from my mother’s, right down to how we pen the stems of our lowercase a’s.
I stand and look out my window to only see it is dark, so the watery glass on the heavy old double-paned windows multiplies my distorted reflection. Pushing my arms into the sleeves of my scratchy wool coat and wrapping my scarf around me, I stumble over my own feet, rubbing my temples and untangling my hair with my fingers on my way out, pausing only to hear the doorknob latch behind me. I am still unsure of exactly what to say to Kenny. I do not know if I am compromising, justifying in this relationship, overreacting from the possibility, or any combination of those, but in the flurry, the nuance of those implications don’t even matter anymore.
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I still don’t know. I think sometimes such matters are increasingly ambiguous; the clarity I have now has a dash of apathy. Time has passed, my relationship with Kenny feels smaller and far away.
Regardless, I do know that trains are only set in their tracks. And I was determined. I may not have had, or ever will have all the sides of the stories, or have the complete history of my parents. But I had what was in front of me: photographs and paper full of cursive.
My boots crushed leaves as I marched to his apartment, and resolvedly knocked on his door.
Better not be there when it rolls over.