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The Garbage Train
by
Laura Podolnick
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The garbage train scares everybody. It moves too slowly and quietly.
"It's like a ghost train," my ex-boyfriend told me, when I confessed to
him that I was afraid of it, that it gave me chills and made my nipples
hard when it passed me at night as I waited alone on the platform. "It's
like a view from the past. They're all just these old trains. So weird
and old, and now they pick up garbage." At this point, we are not even waiting for a train. We're in his tiny, dimly lit room, under the comforter, naked. We have just had sex. We've been broken up for four months, which is almost as long as we were together. The garbage train is scary perhaps because it does call to mind the past, and because it moves. It's a train coming from the past. It's a train coming straight from the past to remove our present garbage. Seeing it is like visiting a nursing home and looking into the sad and impotent eyes of the people whose world we've inherited and who we now keep as we keep flowers, in sterile, not-aesthetically-unpleasing utilitarian pots. Serviceable, like the garbage train is serviceable. But what of lost love? I ask him, changing the subject. Did we ever really have it? He honestly doesn't remember, and neither do I. We notice that it's late - very late, four - and we begin to dress. He puts on his shoes and his coat, because it is our custom for him to walk me to the train and wait with me for it to arrive. I always appreciated that. Before, I'd rail against the condescension of that thing called chivalry, meaningless empty gestures meant to keep me prim and tiny and helpless as a fainting petticoat priss in the 19th century. But, I find this little effort touching from him. He's younger than me, and I find that touching too. When I was eight months old, he was a helpless newborn. I like to imagine us then - though of course, we did not know each other. My mother tells me I was talking already at eight months, but I did not have teeth. I could have protected him with words, then. Fought off the taunters, even if they only exist in my mind. So does all of this. Back then, I bet I was bigger than him, even. Though probably not by much. As we wait, the garbage train creeps on by and I am shaken and so is he. I hate how it is painted a garish yellow, sloppily. As though it were bad long ago and now it is being punished, like Cain, to forever wander the subterranean tracks and be reviled. Everyone else who is waiting for the train seems ill at ease, too. To see a crowd stare at a garbage train is not dissimilar to seeing a crowd stare at a public rape. Perhaps not that violent - more similar to seeing a crowd watch a homeless man have a seizure on the train platform. Cautious interest. Fear. Pity. Waiting. Every system has to have a garbage train. I tell him this as we watch the tail end of it, which is not a car but some sort of gigantic, terrifying tool that resembles a wrecking ball. A garbage train: meaning something to crawl around and pick up the refuse and remain as invisible as possible. Bottom-feeders know they strike fear, don't they? "The garbage train of our relationship," I say, pulling a piece of my hair off his coat, "surfaces in the form of your passive-aggressive comments about me fucking all your friends." He rolls his eyes in a way that I know means I am right, but that the analogy is reaching too far and that he finds me ridiculous. "No, really," I insist. It is garbage, my bad behavior. I don't say this, but I mean it. Let it slip between the train and the platform as I have let your bad behavior slip. All your silly breakups, all your stoic "I don't love you's." This is something better than forgiveness. This is letting go. This is freedom. He rolls his eyes again and crosses his arms. He finds me and my over-thinking lame. Truthfully, so do I. I am lame. I am afraid that I will get picked up by the garbage train. "That," I tell him, "is the core of my fear." It never stops, but what if one day, it does? What if it stops and the doors open? What then? It's a train with open doors, and I'd be waiting for a train, so of course, I'd walk right in. As if in a trance. I'd feel mean if otherwise, rude and rejecting of something deigning to serve me. Where would the garbage train take me? Where does the garbage get off? "There was a time," I continue, "that I would have said you were afraid of the garbage train because it was different and you can't handle novelty. You can't improv. You told me so. Your every move is painstakingly memorized." I used to look down on that, but in retrospect, I am curiously impressed. "I underestimated you," I say, and you respond immediately, "I know." (Did you already live out this situation in your mind? Is that how you knew what to say so quickly?) You tell me, "I was in gifted classes, you know." I reply, "You
were?" noncommittal, interested. "Well, except for math." I accept this.
I know he's smart. I am forever touched and saddened that he's always
trying to prove it to me. I say, "I couldn't do half of what you do. I
lie in bed all day and cry because nothing is the way I need it to be
and I can't fix it. You don't have to prove yourself better than this.
It's like beating a dead horse." I immediately feel stupid for saying
this cliché aloud to him, and I cringe and cover my face. He smiles and
reaches out to hug me. He always did accept nearly anything from me, no
matter how idiotic. Some people claim to only be able to love those who
"call them on their shit." I am too weak to be called on anything. "You
know that," I say, "despite all my posturing to the contrary. For that,
I thank you. I thank you for allowing my shit to remain covert." For
allowing my personal garbage train to run silently and at such rare
early dawn hours that even nocturnal misfits like me would never, ever
witness it in motion.
Laura Podolnick lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She is 26. She
writes words, paints pictures, records music, and rides buses and trains
for pleasure as well as utility. |