by Sara Majka
Inrush (center detail) Mia Pearlman
Museum of Arts & Design, NY
Maybe five or six years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city. We were moving often during this time, as if it were the best solution to a shattered life. He was teaching in the Hudson Valley, and I had moved back to Maine, but would go sometimes to see him, and we would take long walks saying little because much had already been said. We would walk through the estates along the river, and drive up to Hudson, where there was a café that we liked, with an outside patio made of concrete. The croissants were carefully made there, though they served everything on paper plates.
He would order while I waited at the table, and when he returned we often didn’t talk, or we would complain about the waste of paper. After a time I would get in my car and find my way back to Maine. More than once I had to pull over in that car—with the leather seats ripping and the filling coming through, and the smell of the heater, and the sense still of him… all of this was a comfort that would disappear after several days—I would have to pull over and call him. The small wood signs had numbers of roads that I didn’t know, and he didn’t know, but we would piece it together, and tell each other small jokes.
In the middle of one of these trips I took the train into the city, perhaps leaving from Poughkeepsie, though I don’t remember for sure. Only that I wasn’t well in the way that I would be later, and that the wave of the power lines in the midday sun seemed alive to me. I watched them for the better part of two hours. They seemed to be telling me something—the way the lines threaded up and down, and passed through sun and shadows. It felt as if there was only me on the train and that spectacle keeping pace with me.
The train was dirty with few people on it. We passed empty lots and warehouses. When we pulled into Grand Central, I entered the station and stood against the wall, so I could look at the ceiling without being noticed, as tourists who wandered with their heads up would be noticed. Then I found my way to the subway and to the museum. It was maybe 2008, in the new MoMA, which seemed that day like a church built to disorient. A large white space, with escalators that brought you from floor to floor, and every floor looked like the one before it. I was there to see an exhibit by an Argentinean artist named Armando Reverón. The Times had run an article with photographs of his life-sized dolls and of his self-portraits with the dolls, and I had torn the clipping and brought it with my on the train. The exhibit took up one gallery, with the paintings in front and the dolls in back. For a time I sat on a bench, then I left the gallery.
I don’t remember the train ride back. How I remember the train ride there I don’t know. It must have been the brightness of the journey, and the strangeness of those power lines. I don’t remember much from this time, and I thought I wouldn’t see my ex-husband again, or go back to the Hudson Valley, and for some time it all seemed to vanish.
The excerpt here is the beginning of a longer work in progress.
