Alligator - Lisa Moore [35]
Twenty-one?
Chairs, four to a cabin, unfolded into cots and the train rocked them. They slept in their jean jackets and made love with their clothes half on and hoped no one would interrupt.
Sometimes they shared the cabin, once with a girl from Switzerland with fat red cheeks and thick blond braids whom Martin mistakenly called Heidi, though her name, she said, was Giselle.
Madeleine socked her bum into his hips, his cock pressing against his fly and the seam in the bum of her jeans and that was as close as they could get under the circumstances. Good night, Heidi, Martin said over his shoulder.
They were both twenty-one and couldn’t make love enough. There was never enough sex. They hung on to each other in their sleep, his arm under her shirt between her breasts, her chin resting on his fist. He always slept in longer than she did.
In the early mornings she made her way down the rattling train for coffee and she would see the fields, luminous green with blue shadows under the clouds, and the Alps, smoky and cold.
Cows that watched the train with profound interest and started a quick walk with their heads hanging low between their shoulders having decided to keep the train company and in midstep forgot what they were trotting after and stood as still as stone.
She saw villages, forests, and windmills sweep past and returned to the cabin and he was still sleeping.
She read The Magic Mountain and went for another coffee, but he did not wake until the very last minute when the train jolted and screeched and emptied out. They had to take their knapsacks down. She pulled on the collar of his jacket and his eyes flew open as if he had been administered electric shock. He stretched his face and had a little shake and sat blinking, his fists dug into the cot, staring at the floor. He had no idea where he was.
Come on, she said. She was taking down the knapsacks by herself, grunting under their weight, Come on, come on. By then she had lived a full life, felt vast gushes of euphoria and boiling impatience. The day was half over by the time he opened his eyes.
They brushed their teeth in filthy bathrooms with warped mirrors and naked light bulbs in mountain villages. The porcelain sinks had flares of rust and the drains went down into the earth and bubbled up close by. She thought about the phrase, My husband. She said it to herself, This is my husband, Martin. Or, This is my husband, Martin. She hated the word wife. It was not a word she could bring herself to say.
Husband, too, was questionable. It sounded stout, bifocaled, and involving of a cardigan.
There were things she would not do: she would not iron his shirts, she would not mow lawns or ever, ever, ever fake an orgasm or put her children in tennis or sailing or allow Martin to buy a motorcycle because she was afraid his head would get smashed in, though he wanted a motorcycle more than anything in the world, nor would she ever get fat or sleep on the couch or let the sun set on a fight or have an abortion or make meatloaf, although a recipe with orange rind and brown sugar had caught her eye.
She would not outright deny the motorcycle — how could she — but she would connive against it.
She would never freeze seven meals because she was going on a trip and didn’t want him to have to cook.
It frightened her, what she had got into. In her mother’s deep freeze there was a crown of rosebuds that she had worn and a wedge of wedding cake wrapped in tinfoil. Her dress had been cream-coloured, full of understated flounce, and belonged to her godmother. She’d stood on a stool at a dressmaker’s with her arms out from her sides and had the zipper moved so the dress would fit in such a way that she could draw breath.
She had fully expected, at the dinner in which they announced their wedding plans to his parents, to be told they were too young, that they had their lives ahead of them, that they’d known each other for only six months and if they were not pregnant