Hey friends.
Welcome to a new episode in the Tall tales series here on you’re listening to radio revel. Today’s story, which I think dates back to the late ’80s, is called Deny. Enjoy.
Caroline got on the northbound E-train at about three in the afternoon. The ride would be long, she knew, she was going to the outskirts of the city, getting off at the last stop, in a neighborhood that she had never been. Her reasons for being on a train ride that would carry her outside of the boundaries of her usual movement in the city must have been special: although she was wearing white sneakers, she carried her best red, low-heeled shoes in a plastic bag, shoes she planned on slipping on right before the train pulled into the last station, stop number 18, funny, most of the stops had better names, like “Finkerton Avenue” or “157th Street”, this one was simply “number 18”.
Although she had not made plans to meet anyone at the station nor anywhere else at the end of the line, she was dressed well, her best blue frock, new, coffee-colored stockings, she had even dabbed a bit of perfume on her pulse zones, her neck, her wrists, the space between her breasts. Anyone taking notice of her would have thought that she was on her way to a romantic dinner, except that it was just after three in the afternoon, hardly a romantic hour in this city.
No one was taking notice of her though, the train was alternately full of people and then nearly vacant. In one station her car would fill until everyone rubbed elbows and shoulders with everyone else, at all times pretending not to be doing so. In the next station nearly everyone got off the train and it would not fill again until the next station. Thanks to this alternating tide of passengers, Caroline was able to get a seat near the door after only one stop. She was also able to better control the stops by following the map pasted to the window at her side. She wanted to be sure to change her shoes once the train left the next to the last stop. She wasn’t worried about missing her stop, it was the end of the line, number 18.
After one stop at which almost everyone had gotten off, and before the car could fill again at the next, Caroline took out her little green date book, opened it with the maroon ribbon that marked the current date. She was dismayed to find nothing printed on that page, not the date, not the hours of the working day, not even the little square space at the bottom where one was supposed to write “notes”. Nothing. She took a fountain pen from her bag and was going to put the date at the top of the blank page when she noticed the date on the page before read the 17th, while the page after read the 18th. Why had this page been left blank, then? While trying to decide what she would do with this blank page she looked up, noticed the man sitting in the seat across from her on the other side of the car.
He was an elderly man, perhaps in his seventies, well dressed, a gray mustache hanging over his upper lip, small, light brown crumbs clinging to the points of the hairs framing the corners of his mouth. She noticed scales of dandruff clinging to the shoulders of his dark overcoat. He seemed to be looking directly at her, and though this made Caroline uncomfortable, she forced a smile onto her lips and gave him a slight nod, they were nearly the only two passengers in this car, it seemed only polite, this was not an elevator, she had not been raised to pretend that other people did not exist. The elderly man, however, did not return her smile, did not give the slightest indication that he had seen her friendly gesture, even though he did seem to be staring her down. Caroline began to feel even more uncomfortable and suddenly busied herself with tucking the date book and the fountain pen into her handbag, pulling a pair of delicate black knit gloves out, tucking them gently into the toe of the left red heel, this way she would remember to slip them on after having changed her shoes.
In the next station the train filled again with people. Though they seemed to be hundreds, they made little noise as they got on, sat quickly in the available seats or reached about for a handhold. Caroline could no longer see the elderly man, instead had a clear view of a red sweater covered with little friction balls stretched out over a swollen midriff. As the train moved forward towards the next station where she was sure everyone would get off the train, this belly jiggled in front of her nose. She thought about strawberry-flavored gelatin, with little pieces of banana suspended as if frozen in time as they were falling. Her grandmother always prepared a cake-pan of such every year at Thanksgiving, repeating at Christmas, until this last year when she forgot to put sugar in the boiling water mixed with the old-fashioned, unsweetened gelatin: though everyone laughed and sprinkled sugar on the little rectangular red blobs on their plates, Caroline’s parents and aunts and uncles exchanged meaningful looks, telepathically conspiring to later discuss putting their mother in an old-folks’ home.
Caroline wondered what the old man was staring at right now, he could not see her any more than she could see him. She wondered if he had escaped from the old-folks’ home that his children had confined him to, and the train wheels began their squealing sound, the inertia wrenched her forward, then back, the train braked as it pulled into the next station. She watched to see if the elderly man would get off the train at this stop, he must have, he was no longer sitting over there when the doors closed on the now empty car, yet she had not seen him get off.
Now she was completely alone, realized that she had allowed herself to become distracted by memories: that last stop had been the next to the last, the train had climbed out of the underground, was shooting rapidly among warehouses, factories, small vegetable gardens fit in between ugly brick buildings and the train tracks she rode on. She was relieved, on consulting the map, that Station Number 18 was yet bit of a journey, she would have more than enough time to change her shoes, but feeling little nervous, she got down to the business at once.
As she was pulling on her gloves, glancing out the window, she noticed Station Number 18 pulling closer from the distance. It was a large station, white bricks, an iron and milky glass awning jutting out over the street where taxis and buses would pick people up or leave them off. Above the awning were tall aluminum numbers, a tall 1 and a tall 8. Anyone could see immediately that this building must be Station Number 18. Caroline got to her feet and stood before the door as the train pulled up next to the platform.
She figured that, this being the end of the line, the train should sit in the station for several minutes with the doors open while the engineer got out of his little cabin in the front car and walked the length of the platform to get into the little cabin in the end car. She had observed this many times before, funny how with his little stroll along the platform this man was able to change the end car to the front car and the other way around, actually turn the train around without having lifted a finger. If Caroline herself took this little stroll, nothing would change, the end car would continue as the end car and the front car would not change suddenly to the end car. She looked for such a power in her own experience, wondered if changing her shoes was a feat of equal importance. She had changed herself from a simple woman riding a train to the last station into an elegant lady with red shoes, a blue dress and the smell of an expensive perfume hanging about her like a cloud. No, that was not the same as changing the front and end cars of a train, but it would have to do, since the doors were opening now and she had to step down.
She was wrong about how long the train would be in this station, there must have been another engineer in the end car, she had barely begun to pass through the doors when they closed on her, catching the plastic bag and trapping one of her sneakers on the inside of the car. Caroline instinctively pulled on the bag and it tore in the middle, one white sneaker falling to the platform before her and the other hanging in its half of the bag on the inside of the car which now began moving in the opposite direction, back towards the city and the underground. She was naturally dismayed at the loss of the sneaker, it was not quite new, but it was not worn out either. Of course, she had not only lost one sneaker: though she had the other, she only had to lean over and pick it up, what good is one sneaker? Caroline had two feet, two feet which would surely be sore feet when she got home that evening after wearing those elegant red shoes all afternoon. She used the red-shod left foot to kick the sneaker over the edge of the platform and then leaned over that same edge to check where the shoe had landed. She thought about track fires, but decided that she did not care, that train should not have pulled out so quickly, at least she had been ready to get off, if not, the door might have closed on her arm and her arm was something she certainly would have missed had it been ripped off and carried away.
Anyway, since no one was waiting to meet her, nor had she expected to be met, she walked across the platform to an iron bench propped against the outer wall of the station and sat down to take a moment to organize her thoughts before setting out. She did not pull out the date book, that had proven to be of no use to her. She instead decided to give her situation a good think, knowing that being mentally prepared would be to her benefit when the need arose. As she was putting different thoughts into different categories, three men came along the platform and moved closer to her. She did not notice them until they were all hanging above her, blocking her way so that she could not have stood even if she had wanted to. These three men were not in her plans, her brief moment of thinking ahead had not prepared her to react appropriately.
All three of the men wore burly overcoats and thick hats. She did not have time to register details about the two men bracketing the man in the middle who immediately caught her attention and held it carefully. He had a dark face, the lines deeply carved around his mouth and in his forehead, though his eyes were not at all marked, not even the slightest crow’s foot. He sported a thick black mustache that hung over his mouth hiding his lips totally; yet when he smiled at her, it parted like a theatre curtain, revealing a double row of large, brownish-yellow teeth, he probably smoked, but the teeth seemed to be all present and there was no horrible smell of bad gums or cheap wine. In any case, as he leaned closer to Caroline and began speaking, she felt herself leaning further back, until she could no further, her shoulders pressed firmly against the white brick wall behind the iron bench.
Caroline was not at all interested in what this man had to say, later could only remember that he had asked her what she was doing in this neighborhood, dressed as she was, alone, no one waiting for her at the station. She had politely said “no” when he asked if she would like him and his friends to accompany her somewhere, she was sure that he was instead insinuating that she accompany them somewhere. She knew that she did not want to go anywhere that these three men would want to take her. As the man continued speaking, as moments passed with these three men hovering over her like a domed cathedral ceiling, decorated with demons, the perspective adjusted to make them realistic from the marble floor below, but distorted from close up, Caroline became more and more convinced that she was in a fix. How she would get out of this fix depended only on her. She was not the type of lady who would make a scandal by screaming or asking for help from passersby. She decided that the best she could do was to gather up her handbag, get up and enter the station as if she had a purpose, as if she had a place to go right then, she had to make it seem as if someone were waiting for her, even if this were not the case.
She was only slightly surprised at the success of this tactic. The man in the middle with the mustache nodded to his companions, and they moved back a step in unison to give her room to stand, turned their backs on her, also in that strange choreographed unison, began walking purposefully towards another bench further down the wall where another woman was sitting alone, smoking a cigarette. As she entered the main station area Caroline wondered if that was what they were looking for, they were asking her for a smoke, but she didn’t smoke.
Inside the station, Caroline looked around, thinking that maybe what she needed was to sit for a moment, have a cup of coffee, take out her date book and plan her next move. Around the perimeter of the grand hall she could identify a newsstand, the ticket windows, a shoeshine shop with five high chairs and that funny little foot-shaped, cast-iron rest in front of each and a little padded stool on which the shoeshine boy would sit. There was a shop that sold candies, another that sold souvenirs. Across the hall was the passage that led to the men’s and ladies’ rooms, another passage that led to an underground parking garage, but there did not seem to be any place to have a cup of coffee.
The grand hall was nearly empty, she saw a man buying a paper, three women in line before the ticket windows, an old black man reading a paperback book at the shoeshine stand, there were no elegant businessmen sitting smoking cigars while their little black executive slippers were caressed with black wax and a chamois cloth. A woman with a little girl was buying red jellybeans in the candy shop, no one was looking at the postcards on the spinning racks in the shop to the left.
It was also very, very cold in the station: with each breath, Caroline exhaled a little vapor cloud, a drop of moisture hung from the end of her nose. She pulled a tissue from her bag and blotted at the tip of her nose, decided to use the ladies’ room; she did not want to have an emergency situation once she found herself in the unfamiliar neighborhood outside of the station. As she headed to the ladies’ room, the loudspeakers echoed something about a train that maybe she should have taken, she was still uncomfortable about leaving the station or even remaining in the station, she did not want to buy a paper or have her shoes shined or buy candies or a little plastic camera with a pencil sharpener hidden in the bottom, with the little white button that, when pushed, rotated a little set of pictures of the city behind a little magnifying lens one pressed one’s eye to.
At least half of the people who should have been in the grand hall of the station at this hour of the afternoon were in the ladies’ room. At least half, since Caroline assumed that the other half would have been in the men’s room if it were as warm as the ladies’. She entered a comfortable anteroom furnished with sofas and ashtrays and even a large picture of the station itself hanging on the wall. Over in the far corner sat a coffee machine, there were little tables perched in front of the sofas lining two walls, and though her intention had been to use the toilet, Caroline remembered having wanted a cup of coffee, decided that she would take action on that first. She placed several coins in the slot and pushed a button that promised extra sugar. A blue plastic cup dropped into the niche at the bottom of the machine, a shot of hot water spurted into the cup, accompanied by a shot of a dark syrup. A white paper envelope with sugar and a wooden stick to stir the coffee dropped beside the cup. She took the cup out of the niche and moved over to a sofa, where a fat lady had just risen to enter the toilet area.
There was plenty of room for her to sit and even leave her handbag on the sofa next to her. She smiled around at the other women who were chatting in low voices; some of them returned her smile, though the majority did not even notice that that fat woman had left, that this slight woman had taken her place. Caroline thought of when she was a girl, when one of her brothers would get up from the sofa to go get a soft-drink from the fridge and she would hop up into the warm cushions left free, and her brother would come back saying “I hope you jump into my grave as quickly!” She emptied the little envelope of sugar into the cup and stirred the hot coffee, made a conscious attempt to focus her thoughts.
She decided that what she would do then, once she had finished her coffee, used the toilet, maybe retouched her makeup and such, would be to march right up to a ticket window and buy a ticket on the next train out of Station Number 18. She felt lazy about acting on her decision though, she had only to compare the comfortable warmth of the ladies’ antechamber to the cold in the grand hall to feel her eyes become heavy and droopy. The coffee was not having any effect on her: though she had slept well the night before, she was suddenly drowsy, sure that there was no harm in having a little cat-nap here on this sofa among these groups of women chatting in low, murmuring voices.
In a vain attempt to stay awake, she tried to listen in on one or the other conversation but could only discern stray words here and there. Once, she felt she had caught the stream of the sentence but could not hear the end, as the loudspeaker echoed the arrival and departure of another train. So that was how things were in Station Number 18; trains did not arrive and later depart, they arrived and departed instantly, almost in the same moment, as if there were some need for hurry here. Caroline resolved to be waiting with her toes on the edge of the platform when her train came in, she could jump in through the open doors before they closed on her handbag or even on some part of her body.
She awoke slowly, very hot, with a painful urge in her bladder. She looked at her watch and noticed that it was only a little after three in the afternoon, decided that she had not slept that long, just a little cat-nap to clear her head of cobwebs. She panicked for just a moment, she did not immediately find her handbag on the seat to the right, found it on a second try to the left, that was only natural, Caroline was right-handed, always carried her bag in the crook of her left elbow, why had she looked to her right? Sleepy disorientation, she decided, as she rose to use the toilet.
This area was not as welcoming as the anteroom. Along the left wall were a dozen white doors, each with a stenciled black number. Along the opposite wall was a long mirror with basins hanging from the wall below. A throng of women crowded in front of the mirror, some adjusting a strand of hair, others repairing runny mascara. Caroline walked down the left side of the room, pushing lightly on each of the doors, finding each locked, she supposed that the stalls were occupied, finally coming to one door that opened easily. Her dismay was sudden as she noticed upon closing the door behind her that the locking mechanism was broken. Only her sharp urgency led her to overlook this inconvenience. The door at least remained closed as she sat on the stool, but was just out of her reach to effectively hold it closed in the event that someone tried to enter. The more she imagined the scene, the more anxious she felt: all the preceding doors had been locked, any woman looking for a vacant stall would naturally push on her door as well, it would open, there would be an embarrassing moment.
In the end, though, nothing of the sort happened. Caroline, doubly relieved, left the stall and looked about for a space among the congregated women leaning into the mirror over the sinks. There was no opening, so she went to the end of the room and leaned slightly against the tiled wall and took out her own compact, checked her face in its tiny, oval-shaped mirror. Yes, her nose was shiny, she had wiped away the powder when she had patted her nose earlier in the cold of the grand hall. She retouched the point of her nose with the little pink puff, snapped the compact shut, hid it away in the little pocket in the lining of her bag, pulling the fine zipper shut. She turned and left the toilet area, passed through the warm anteroom, tried to absorb as much of the pleasant heat as she could, stepped into the vestibule that would lead her to the grand hall.
Someone must have complained to the station chief, the heat had been cranked up, and the grand hall was not only warm, it was hot. The few people meandering about had opened their jackets, loosened their neck scarves, some were even fanning themselves with little pieces of cardboard or newspaper. There was no one in front of the ticket windows, so Caroline stepped up to the first and smiled at the man working behind the barred opening. He did not look up but rather leaned a carton sign against the bars that read: “Closed, please use the next window.” Fortunately, there was no one waiting at the next window either, so Caroline simply slid to her right and smiled at the woman working behind that one, this woman did look at her, not with a smile but with a frown of disapproval, asked her to please wait behind the yellow line painted on the floor. Caroline of course did not see any reason to wait behind the yellow line, there was no one else waiting to buy a ticket, but she did as she was told, turning her attention to the third window and hoping that the man working there would be a little more pleasant.
After a couple of minutes, that man gestured to her and she approached the window. On the verge of asking for a ticket to anywhere within an hour of Station Number 18, Caroline was cut short when that man asked her curtly if she had taken a number. She had not, and he leaned forward, pushing his hand between the bars and pointing towards the number machine at the end of the row of windows, a little red box from which little paper tickets slid out of a little slot. Caroline walked over to the number machine, brooding over the absurdity of taking a number when she was yet the only customer, but determined to follow the rules to avoid ugly confrontations. Had she known where she was going or what she was doing there, she might have stood up to these bad-humored ticket sellers, but she did not feel confident enough to be sure of winning an argument. She pulled a number and read it, it was number 17, she looked up at the red neon sign that indicated the number of the current customer, which flashed 3. So she would have to wait, she thought, until 13 people had bought tickets before they would attend her petition. That also seemed a waste of time since there did not seem to be thirteen people in the station who would want to buy tickets ahead of her. In any case, convinced that no one would serve her before her turn, she decided to go out, take a walk around the neighborhood, maybe just a turn around the block, then come back to see if her number had come up.
The temperature outside was bitter in comparison to the hot, close ambiance inside the station. Caroline had left through the main door and stood under the iron and milk-glass awning. The neighborhood did not invite one to take a stroll, but this had been her decision, she was determined to continue forward. She turned to the right and followed the sidewalk, thinking that if she kept turning right at each corner, she would simply circle the block and thus come back to the main entrance in a few minutes, in this way using up part of that time she had to spend waiting for the numbers to turn at the ticket window. That seemed like a good idea until she came to the first turn of the sidewalk: the turn was to the left, she had no choice, the turn to the right did not exist, it was closed off with a white brick wall. It never occurred to her that a train station would rarely be found on a block one could walk around.
She considered, for just a moment, of retracing her steps and retreating to the warmth of the station, she felt her nose drip again and her fingers, though covered with the black knit gloves, were becoming numb, insensitive to the cold. Caroline was not a person to retrace her steps though, she was not a person who would, for example, go back on her word, she always kept her promises, especially those she had made to herself, so she turned to the left and let the sidewalk take her where it would, she was sure she could find the station again, it was the biggest building on the horizon, and the huge 18 over the awning could surely be seen from any vantage point on her walk.
The sidewalk jigged and jagged, soon she could not keep track of the turns. She looked back over her shoulder to see if she still had the station in her visual camp, but she found herself in a narrow street lined with industrial brick buildings that hid the entire horizon from her view. Now what will I do, she questioned herself. Just as that question ran through her thoughts, a door opened to her right, a young man leaned his head out and greeted her as if he had been waiting for her arrival.
She asked, and he told her that his name was Markus. He was a very attractive young man, longish curly dark hair, dark eyes with long lashes. His smile was welcoming, and Caroline was certain that inside it would be much warmer than in this street shaded from any warmth the afternoon sun might shed by the overhanging buildings. Markus stepped back and made an inviting gesture with his arm and open palm. She passed through the iron door, which he closed behind her.
The street had been dark, but this reception area was darker. Caroline could make out, through the smoke-filled air, that there were several men sitting on benches along the walls, in small groups, speaking amiably in low voices. Markus gently took her left elbow in his hand and led her towards the right, where a glass-paned door stood half-open in the corner of the room. The glass in the frame was like a screen, lit from behind by a source that moved and made unusual animated shadows float on the matted glass.
As they gradually neared the door (they did seem to be walking rather slowly, she thought) Caroline could hear voices from the other side, as well as a low stream of light music. She could also smell some type of incense that made her think about church. “This smells like church,” she said to Markus, and he merely smiled that enchanting, welcoming smile and accompanied her gently through the door. This door he also closed behind them as she looked about a room with a dozen or so people sitting on cushions scattered about on the floor. At the far end of this room was a fireplace that held a merry flame. Candles were strategically placed about on tall candlesticks and two particularly ornate candelabras stood on either side of the only chair in the room.
It looked like a comfortable chair, well-padded, upholstered with a deep blue fabric that at first glance looked like raw silk. Caroline gave Markus a questioning glance and he assented, inviting her to sit with an extended, open hand. The young people sitting about on the cushions continued chatting as she moved through them, but now the tone of their conversations seemed more exalted and each person greeted her with a particular nod and smile as if they knew who she was. The chair was too narrow to hold both Caroline and her bag, so she set it on a little dark table to the right and lowered herself into the chair’s embrace. At this moment all conversation stopped in the room, all faces looked into her face, only the light music could be heard. Caroline turned her head to the right corner of the room and saw there three musicians playing small stringed instruments with small bows.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for her to make some pronunciation: she smiled and told them that the chair was very comfortable and that she was grateful to them for letting her warm herself beside their fire. The group applauded after her short speech and one of the young men rose to his feet and said a few words of his own. There followed a short debate and finally a vote. The results must have been favorable, as Markus came towards Caroline with a dark wooden box and offered her its contents.
Inside she saw a strangely carved statue, the material looked like soap, but when she took it in her hands, the coolness of the stone made her realize that it was a creamy pink marble. The figure represented a stylized woman’s figure, with the arms extended over the head, both hands clasped in tight fists with the index fingers pointing towards the heavens. Caroline decided that she probably was expected to give another short speech on having received this award, smiled humbly and thanked them again. There was another applause as two young girls entered with huge, round trays, passed through the now crowded room offering little glasses of steaming tea to each of the participants; the groups returned to their conversations, seemed to ignore Caroline’s presence.
Which was all right with her. She found herself sleepy again, it was hard for her to nod in the right places as Markus explained her next move to her. He was saying something about either moving on or staying put, that she could chose. If she wanted to move on, then there was a car waiting for her in the back street (Caroline nodded). If, on the other hand, she wanted to be with her admirers, she was welcome to sit in the comfortable chair as long as she liked (Caroline nodded). If she felt hungry, she would be brought something delightful to eat (Caroline nodded). If she were tired, they would show her to another room where she could lie down and recover her energies (Caroline nodded off).
When she awoke, she found that she had been moved to the other room and laid on a dirty and smelly foam mattress thrown carelessly on the floor. It was not cold, this must have been a boiler room, that huge metal tank to her right was hot to the touch. Her throat was dry, her sinuses were totally blocked, her tongue felt like a whetstone. Caroline called out as best she could, noticed in the distance a small flame that moved from side to side. She realized that the room she was in was quite large and very dark. She called out towards the fire, asking if they could not bring her something to drink. The flame did not get any closer but instead simply moved from side to side again, as if shaking a negative head, we can not offer you anything to drink. She fell back onto the foam rubber and suddenly realized that she wished that she were dead. A voice inside her head that wasn’t hers said, don’t fret my dear, you already are.
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