Postcard From the City
Postcard From the City
There she sits, in the seat across from me on the train to Toronto. She’s of an indeterminate age: anywhere between 35 and 50, I would think – maybe even a little older. She got on the train the station after mine, carrying only a large shoulder bag, and without looking around sat down in the seat opposite me. She looked out the window for a few minutes as the train pulled out of the station, then reached into her purse, pulled out a Styrofoam bowl of some sort of pasta salad for which she, according to the label, had paid $2.50 as some local farmers’ market, and proceeded to eat a little of it with a plastic fork. After a while she replaced the bowl in her purse, zipped closed the bag, arranged herself in the seat, carefully avoiding crowding those around her, put her head back and fell almost instantly into a deep sleep.
She is not a large woman, but she looks strong, compact and solid. Her clothes – a pair of khaki Capri pants, running shoes and a dark green polo shirt – are clean, but worn. Both the pants and shirt show the early signs of fraying a little at the edges. Her arms are crossed over her chest, showing the muscled forearms and hands. The skin on the arms is still firm, but starting to show some wrinkles close to the elbows; there are a few white marks here and there that look like small scars or scratches.
Her hands are clean, but clearly use to hard work: the finger nails are very short and unpainted. She wears no rings. Her knuckles are large, but not red as one might expect from hands that spend a lot of time in water, cleaning or doing dishes. These are more the hands of someone who might work with tools of some kind.
The sleeping body radiates exhaustion. Her head rests on the back of the seat in a position that looks awkward and uncomfortable, yet she sleeps soundly through the various stops, the rolling and jerking of the train, the coming and going of passengers. There are lines on her face, but they are not pronounced yet. Her skin is sallow as of someone who spends a lot of time indoors and who is not getting much sleep. She wears no makeup, yet her hair, brittle and dry though it is, has been dyed a dark auburn, but it is surely only a cover for what is almost certainly grey or greying hair.
In the depth of her sleep, her mouth has fallen open a little, and she breathes regularly and slowly without any fitful moves or sounds. She remains in almost exactly the same position for the nearly two hours she’s on the train.
As we roll into our final destination, she awakens without any of the startled and somewhat self-conscious behaviour so common to people who have fallen asleep in public. She merely sits up, runs her hand over her face, collects her hand bag, and with a look out the window as if double-checking that we have, in fact, arrived, she stands up, joins the line to get off the train, and disappears into the crown on the platform, and into the rest of her life.
There she sits, in the seat across from me on the train to Toronto. She’s of an indeterminate age: anywhere between 35 and 50, I would think – maybe even a little older. She got on the train the station after mine, carrying only a large shoulder bag, and without looking around sat down in the seat opposite me. She looked out the window for a few minutes as the train pulled out of the station, then reached into her purse, pulled out a Styrofoam bowl of some sort of pasta salad for which she, according to the label, had paid $2.50 as some local farmers’ market, and proceeded to eat a little of it with a plastic fork. After a while she replaced the bowl in her purse, zipped closed the bag, arranged herself in the seat, carefully avoiding crowding those around her, put her head back and fell almost instantly into a deep sleep.
She is not a large woman, but she looks strong, compact and solid. Her clothes – a pair of khaki Capri pants, running shoes and a dark green polo shirt – are clean, but worn. Both the pants and shirt show the early signs of fraying a little at the edges. Her arms are crossed over her chest, showing the muscled forearms and hands. The skin on the arms is still firm, but starting to show some wrinkles close to the elbows; there are a few white marks here and there that look like small scars or scratches.
Her hands are clean, but clearly use to hard work: the finger nails are very short and unpainted. She wears no rings. Her knuckles are large, but not red as one might expect from hands that spend a lot of time in water, cleaning or doing dishes. These are more the hands of someone who might work with tools of some kind.
The sleeping body radiates exhaustion. Her head rests on the back of the seat in a position that looks awkward and uncomfortable, yet she sleeps soundly through the various stops, the rolling and jerking of the train, the coming and going of passengers. There are lines on her face, but they are not pronounced yet. Her skin is sallow as of someone who spends a lot of time indoors and who is not getting much sleep. She wears no makeup, yet her hair, brittle and dry though it is, has been dyed a dark auburn, but it is surely only a cover for what is almost certainly grey or greying hair.
In the depth of her sleep, her mouth has fallen open a little, and she breathes regularly and slowly without any fitful moves or sounds. She remains in almost exactly the same position for the nearly two hours she’s on the train.
As we roll into our final destination, she awakens without any of the startled and somewhat self-conscious behaviour so common to people who have fallen asleep in public. She merely sits up, runs her hand over her face, collects her hand bag, and with a look out the window as if double-checking that we have, in fact, arrived, she stands up, joins the line to get off the train, and disappears into the crown on the platform, and into the rest of her life.
posted by Millie Beagle at 5:25 pm
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