and I wonder again when it happened. When Aubrey went off the rails. A lightning-quick chain of associations takes me from there directly to a memory so strong and so familiar that it even brings back all the smells of the pivotal moment twenty-two years ago when my own life was decided.
The cumin scent of body odor; the hot metal-and-grease smell of the iron wheels against the rails; a citrus aroma from the Berber grandmother sitting across from me feeding sections of blood orange to the three grandchildren crammed onto the seat next to her; the fragrance of mint tea and falafel from the vendors working their way through the car; and a whiff of cedar and rosemary from the arid plains and hillsides carried on the hot, dry air that blows against my face.
Voices speaking a throaty language with volleys of glottal jerks fired back and forth rise above the clattering hubbub of an ancient train lumbering across Morocco. Back home, everyone would be plugged into their brand-new Walkmans. But here, the boom box is still king, so while one at the front of the car blares traditional, snake-charmer-sounding Moroccan music, another at the back rips loose with Whitney Houston pleading, “I wanna dance with somebody.”
It is 1988. I am sitting on a wooden bench seat beside a glassless window. The aisles are crowded with men in turbans and striped djellabas. On the bench beside me is the battered backpack that I will be living out of for the next three months of hitchhiking and Eurailing around Europe, visiting as many of the places where my grandmother served during World War II as I can on this trip she financed. A reward for finishing nursing school.
I glance at the Atlas Mountains rising in the hazy distance, and translate the tan, sage, and blue of the landscape into my grandmother’s black-and-white photos. Each picture is populated with the grinning faces of Bobbi Mac’s friends. All the game gals with nicknames like Pee Wee, Speedy, Slats, who called my grandmother Crazy Mac and turned World War II into the most fun sleepover ever. I’d heard their stories so often that they were like characters from a fairy tale.
I wish that I were traveling with them, with a gang. I knew about all the amputations Mac had assisted at, all the handsome young men who died, but none of that was as real as the stories of cocktails made from rubbing alcohol, dances in airplane hangars, dating generals who took you to eat lobster at castles, wearing a long black slip that passed as an evening gown to a formal dance, singing silly Hawaiian songs for the troops in a grass skirt and a coconut-shell bra, arms and legs darkened with a mixture of Pond’s cold cream and Hershey’s cocoa powder.
On the bench across from mine, the Berber grandmother and her grandchildren stare at me as the red fruit churns in their open mouths. The grandmother wears a djellaba of a rough weave the color of mulch and a cotton head scarf dyed indigo blue. The youngest child, a scrawny girl with bright, dark eyes and a wide smile in a grimy pink caftan with a beige turtleneck underneath it, picks her nose as she chews and gapes at me. The two grandsons beside her both wear ragged T-shirts that must have made their way to North Africa via Goodwill. One features the Ghostbusters logo. The other depicts a silver hand gripping a giant silver gun beneath silver letters that spell out ROBOCOP.
I smile weakly, trying to prove that though I am an American I am a friendly person of goodwill and not a poltergeist hunter or android assassin.
The tea vendor passes and in the shiny, round surface of his silver pot, I see my twenty-one-year-old face and find it just as round and gleaming and heart-stoppingly perfect as the pot itself. In the next instant my young self traveling on that train twenty-three years ago notices that her spiral perm has grown out, leaving the top of her hair and her bangs flat as a poodle that needs to go to the groomer. That her face is greasy and she needs to put on some lip gloss. And that a really cute guy is heading toward her.
The first time I set eyes on him, Martin was swaying down the aisle of that packed train rocking across North Africa. He is thin in a haunted, poetic, punk-rock star/drug addict way that hints