The assignment was to generate seven texts about public transportation. Then we were to choose one to make into a performance. I arranged the class as though they were on a train and then had them change trains and shared three stories using film to create an atmosphere of travel and movement between imaginary trains to emphasize the passing of time between decades.
Summer 2009
The Overnight Train from Amsterdam to Prague
Luggage stowed, I was settled for a fifteen-hour trip from Amsterdam to a writing seminar in Prague, Czech Republic. A fit young man with curly blond hair and green eyes, bearing an uncanny resemblance to my first boyfriend, interrupted my solitude by ordering me out of my seat, saying that it was his seat. I refused to budge. I dug out my train ticket, in an effort to end any argument that this was his seat, not my seat, couchette number 75. Then he made me look at the numbers on my ticket. I was assigned couchette number 75, but on the train car 172, not 171. I am sometimes wrong, I often joke to anyone who will listen, but usually only in thinking I’ve made a mistake.
In an effort to be conciliatory, Marco offered to help carry my luggage to the new train car. I said I didn’t think he should touch a stranger’s baggage. He said those rules were for planes and we were on the train. Bumbling about, I heaved my big suitcase out of the overhead rack. Even though I was leaving my life behind to travel, I was bringing a suitcase big enough for my tennis racket. Fumbling under the weight of the red bag, he awkwardly followed me through the narrow aisle and swinging connection where the two train cars got linked together.
We soon found a shared vocabulary that crossed every international boundary: pictures on our phones. Marco showed me photos of the rooms where he and Edwin had stayed on other trips pointing out the two single beds. Then he looked from the single beds to me with a teasing smile. Were they gay, I wondered.
As it turned out, Marco and Edwin were travelling companions, not lovers. Marco, a social worker, kept insisting he was bewildered to be almost forty years old and not married. But, being single gave us time to assemble photos on our phones. Marco and I showed each other pictures of our exes, whiling away the hours as the train raced through Eastern Europe. When other riders crowded into my compartment to take their seats, Marco gave me a kiss on each cheek and one on the mouth to say good-bye. I noticed that nothing was very customary about Marco, including his take on the European way of parting from each other.
During my three-week stay in Prague, I sent Marco pictures of my young female friends. He responded to my shots enthusiastically, inviting us all to get together. “The more the marry,” he wrote. He spoke and wrote in Dutch better than English. When Marco signed his email, “X x,” I responded in kind. When he emailed “Love, Marco,” I returned my email with “Love, Anne.”
Three weeks later, I sat down on the wet marble steps of 21 Prins Hendrikke across from the central train station in Amsterdam. I decided that if he didn’t show, I would walk to the museum of Anne Frank’s home. Shortly after one, Marco, looking angelic with his halo of blond curls, approached me, walking easily along the sidewalk. He carried an umbrella and wore a white shirt with a collar and jeans. He kissed me directly on the lips, not even pausing to brush each of my cheeks with a kiss, European style.
“What were you hoping?” asked Marco.
“I was hoping you would show,” I told him.
“Do you want to see my town?” Marco asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Just before I boarded the train to Utrecht with him, I told him that my roommate from Prague thought he was lying about his age. She thought he wanted to seem old enough to go out with me, Marco might be thirty-five, not almost forty as he claimed. She writes fiction, but she did have a point.
“I am not lying”, Marco said. With a delightfully funny pretend show of irritation, he determinedly got out his passport and thrust it in front of my face. He forced me to look at the typed letters indicating the date of his birth, December 4, 1969.
“See,” he exclaimed in mock outrage. “I am thirty-nine.”
“All right, all right, put it away,” I said.
“But how do you know that I am not an axe murderer?” he asked.
“I’ve decided to trust you,” I said.
I saw Utrecht from the back of Marco’s bike. Once Marco started to pedal, I ran alongside and then jumped up to sit side-saddle, behind him, poised on a sturdy black metal frame suspended over his back tire. We cruised on cobblestones past canals, art galleries, bookstores and bridges, past ancient churches that had not been bombed in World War II and even past a statue of a rabbit, done in the style of Rodin’s thinker, made as a joke about sexuality and called “The thinking Rabbit.”
When I exclaimed that I loved lavender, Marco promptly bought two lavender plants and balanced them on the front of his bike handlebars. Each time after we stopped and then needed to start again, I got a little better at hopping onto the metal frame jutting out from behind Marco’s seat.
I need to explain here that I have never been a crier. Whenever my mother yelled angrily at me in the car on the way to school, I scorned my sister who cried openly. I always held back my tears, not wanting to cry in front of anyone.
Then when I got to school, I would head straight for the girl’s room across the hall from my classroom. Then I locked myself in a stall and cried by myself, glad that no one could see me.
At Marco’s flat, nestled into a street along a canal, I watched him finish ironing his work pants and shirts. We drank some coffees, ate oranges and chocolate. He introduced me to some female artists singing English lyrics that I’d never heard before. I wrote down their names. He showed me his English books.
“Do you know this one?” he asked, hefting a large book of fables about creatures written in English. I didn’t. So Marco read aloud his favorite, a story about an ant and a squirrel. The squirrel thought the two of them should separate to find out how much they would miss each other. Ant didn’t see the point of being apart. Even the idea of separating was more than they could bear. So they decided never to be apart.
At first my eyes just welled up. Then tears spilled over the lids and started following each other down my cheeks. Marco finished the story and came around to my side of his sturdy kitchen table and put his arm around me.
I cried in front of him without needing to hide my tears. “It’s not that hard to love someone. If you love someone, nothing is lost,” he said.
B) Shooting 
C) Theft
