Losing It

Photo by Dmytro Nushtaiev on Unsplash

When June lost her sister on the train, when she slid open the door of the compartment, the private bank of seats where she’d left Edie and their bags, to find a fresh-faced Swiss family, the boy and girl in matching corduroy outfits, perfectly coiffed, eating cheese sandwiches, the four of them playing Uno, the parents as involved in the game as the kids, she didn’t panic. That was the problem.

She did not even ask the family, had they seen a girl, about twelve, long legs, black hair, blue eyes you couldn’t not notice. She did not ask the ticket collector or the one-armed man cleaning the toilet. She did not ask any of the other passengers—even the ones who had talked to Edie for hours: the sunburnt hippie couple, the kid who had stolen June’s Walkman (well, Edie had really handed it over to him; all he did was walk away and back to his friends, who were all hanging out in the luggage area, smoking, a mix of tough-looking teenage boys and girls, and when June followed him to get it back—her favorite tape was in there—she asked in a small voice, in the most polite French she could muster, Would it be okay if I had my Walkman back? The thief just sat there, chewing gum, listening to her tape, and the whole group stared into her arrogant American soul, so she turned around and made her way back to her seat).

But the point is, when she realized Edie was gone, she did not get off the train at the next stop and talk to the gendarmes or find a pay phone to call Mom or Cousin Agnes, who was supposed to be waiting for them up in Vouglans. She’d never met Cousin Agnes, but that’s who they were on their way to visit for five weeks. Who was Cousin Agnes? What did she look like? Well, I think she’s got red hair, Mom had said on the way to the train station. It’s probably not red anymore. The town’s really small. Speak French! And be polite. She has a son, I think. Jesus, he’s probably a grown man by now. Do the dishes. Offer at least. Brush your hair every morning.

I’ll make her, Edie had said.

Don’t fight.

I never fight. June’s the maniac.

So it was partly Cousin Agnes’s fault, whoever she was, for telling their mother it was okay to send them there, and partly their mother’s fault for wanting to send them there in the first place.
It was also the train—these French trains! There was always a strike, and you never knew where the train was going to stop for six hours or twelve hours or not stop at all. Also, it was one of those trains that splits up at a certain point, and the back half goes east while the front half goes north, and they were never totally clear about which town was the split stop, or June wasn’t paying attention when they made the announcement.

So you could blame it on June, or the trains, or the workers on strike, or the Walkman, but the reason they even had one Walkman between them was the song “Paradise City,” which June couldn’t stop playing over and over again that year. It was the only song she really liked on the mix that her boyfriend had made for her. Ex-boyfriend. Well, they never called each other anything. He’d moved to Normandy without telling her. They’d met at school her first day in France. They spent months dry humping and playing Ping-Pong, and then one day he was gone. The worst part was she didn’t even like him. Sloppy kisser, way too much spit. Kissing him was like drowning, and not in a good way. He was from a town in Wales called Chirk. Some jerk from Chirk. Plus, she could never have sex with him. He thought he was smart. Those were always the dumbest people. He was the kind of boy if you said you’d like a glass of orange juice, he’d tell you how oranges were grown, who exported them, et cetera, which he pronounced exetera. The dumbest. He was also in love with Edie. June could tell by the way he looked at Edie and not at her. The problem was Edie had no idea she was beautiful, or she didn’t care that she was or what anyone thought about her or about anything, and this made everyone want her more. She was all guile that way, on this planet for the sole purpose of sucking people in and leading them astray. Because nobody got anything from Edie and she wanted nothing from them except to make them believe they had a chance. And the problem was, after the Walkman was stolen, Edie, who had really heard the song only once, decided to sing just one tiny part over and over again until the whole song was in smithereens, obliterated, a very good song turned into a nightmarish dirge or death knell. Edie sat there drawing portraits of people on the train in her sketchbook, singing one verse very slowly over and over and over and over again, like she was in a trance, refusing to shut the fuck up no matter how many times June asked her to please shut the fuck up. Eventually, June looked out the window at the countryside, like if she focused on the scenery—the cows and the river below the trestle and the mountains in the distance—she could eliminate her sister, but Edie was still all, Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. So this might have been why she didn’t go into a panic when Edie was gone. It was also the reason she left her there in that moment, to go find a quiet place somewhere away from Edie, so that she could read her book.

And it was kind of the book’s fault too. Because it wasn’t just any book. It was a book she had to read in secret. In the toilet or in one of the luggage areas. Beauty’s Punishment might have been the start of the problem. She had found it in the bathroom at the airport. It was based on the fairy tale, but it was not a book for kids, which was fine, but it was also not a book for anyone. It was full of disgusting things like cruel lesbian queens and grown men pretending they were horses and begging to be whipped and princesses having sex with snakes and torture chambers and scenes that only someone not right in the head could imagine. The worst part was she could not stop reading it. It was the only book she could ever in her whole life not stop reading. She was not much of a reader. She had a hard time in both English and French and in school in general—she could not sit still. Maybe she was dumb, a bimbo in the body of a teenaged ogre—couldn’t she at least have been dumb and beautiful?—or maybe it was because her mom had insisted on schools where children learn how to build birdhouses and boats instead of sentences, though Edie went to those schools too, and she was two years younger and already reading Tolstoy. But this book for the depraved, this book she had to read in secret. It made her know things she couldn’t un-know, and maybe it had scarred her, had turned her into a sex maniac, obsessed and troubled, unfit for this world, not just irresponsible, but capable of the unimaginable, like leaving her sister to be kidnapped or raped. But the book was not in her backpack, and this was also a problem.

June ran back to the compartment to find Edie reading the book aloud, and in splits, actually, cracking up so hard, she couldn’t even sit upright. I can’t believe you’ve been actually reading this! But June, what the hell is wrong with you? They were both horrified: Edie both amused and horrified with her sister and June just horrified with herself. It really wasn’t a book that Edie should be reading. It had really messed with June’s head. June had felt shame before, but she actually turned into shame itself in that moment; it was her biggest secret brought to light, and there was no escape. Her sister continued to read aloud the passages that June had underlined.

But the problem really started way before the trip. Maybe during wind season. Season of the mistral from hell. Season of slamming doors and rattling windows, the bay a bordel, a total mess. There was black gunk washing up on the beaches from here to Corsica—you couldn’t go swimming or you’d drown—forest fires in the hills, burning closer and closer. The problem was the wind drove Mom nuts—like, Van Gogh–style—from the ash in the air clogging her lungs to all the banging in random intervals. She kept shouting at the wind and coughing all night. She couldn’t paint, which was why they’d moved to France in the first place. All Mom could do was smoke cigarettes and totter around the little old stone house muttering about what a fat failure she was, a fraud whose days were numbered, who would soon be unmasked, and June and Edie spent whole nights in their attic bedroom, awake and agitated and fighting over who was turning pages or breathing too loudly, who was singing in her sleep (Edie), whose reading light was too bright, who had clogged the small toilet, whose farts were more toxic, whose turn it was to fasten the shutters or stack bricks from the cellar to keep the doors from slamming shut.

On those nights, June would sneak out, find her way down the dark road to the beach, sit on the rocks with her Walkman, blast “Paradise City,” and read Beauty’s Punishment with her flashlight, make herself come under her jean shorts, and think about swimming out as far as she could, even if it meant drowning. What a corny way to die. People would think she was spoiled. Plus, she was only fourteen. She was determined to make it to seventeen, make it to Amsterdam, and make it to at least third base, at least before her little sister got there.

So you could blame it on June for not ending it all when the impulse struck, for deciding to live long enough to make this mistake.

It could have started with the wind, which brought in the madness. But they said the wind would all be over by summer, and it was. It was all over.

Except then there was a heat wave and it didn’t rain for weeks.

There was the fact that they were living in France in the first place. A country of wind season and heat waves and rail strikes. This was not the life Mom had imagined. She probably imagined painting and eating pastries on the shore, bottles of rosé, ruddy neighbors with peppery beards, quiet Provençal types wanting to lend tools or a hand or whatever. Cork and olive trees, the sapphire sea. There was all that. But nowhere was what you thought it would be: Italy had not been Italy, Cairo had not been Cairo, New York City had certainly not been New York City. The only place that had turned out to be what it was had been Bethel, Ohio, which was even more what it was than expected: grayer, duller, lonelier, more Bethel, Ohioan than the Bethel, Ohio, in your head. That’s why when the gallerist in Arles called, Mom jumped at the chance to move again. She had spent a year or five in her twenties at art school in France, and that’s where she’d fallen in love with their father, a handsome grave error named Paul who now lived in Bangkok, the last anyone heard—or was it Bali?—somewhere inconvenient, conveniently. No, Mom did not miss him, she’d explained—How can you know someone who doesn’t know himself?—but she did miss that time, that window of freedom before she was anyone, and now that she was someone, now that the world had stopped ignoring the fact that she was a painter, she wanted to go back to when she was unknown, when no one had any expectations whatsoever, when she didn’t expect a goddamn thing from herself (that was real freedom). And she wanted the girls to speak French—they were half-French, after all, as she never ceased to remind them, especially when they made fun of the French, what stuck-up chodes the French were—You are half-French, you know. And by that logic, June always thought, we’re also half-Ohioan, and also half-magician with only two tricks: being someone we’re not and making ourselves disappear.

So maybe it was all the magician’s fault, or their mother’s for getting tricked by the magician, but the problem with the past was the past was endless (her parents’ parents’ parents’ parents), or the wind, but if June was really honest, it was actually probably the heat, when everything was supposed to be calm, on one of those unbearable days in Les Issambres, already hot at seven in the morning. Edie and June were outside at the clothesline, fighting over whose turn it was to hang the sheets, how they should be hung, whether or not the jeans were dry or almost dry, whose underwear was stained, whether the stain was period or poo . . . Soon, the clothes were strewn all over the dead grass, the girls were on top of each other, and June was holding Edie in a headlock. Keep kicking, June whispered in her sister’s ear. I’ll bite that earring off, you little bitch. And she almost did. She held the tiny gold flower between her teeth for a second. Edie pretended to cry—she only ever faked it, but she was putting up a fight, or digging into it, enjoying it, bucking her hips, screaming, grinding her heels into the dead grass.
June was too old for this, they were both too old, but it had been a while since she had caused her little sister pain, and it felt so good, like some kind of release, to cradle a sweaty neck in the crease of her elbow, to hold a wad of hair in her fist, and she remembered why they used to fight like this when they were little. It would never be normal to fight like this again, not with Edie, not with anyone else. She was hocking up a loogie to spit in Edie’s face when their mother came down, looking like always: tired and pissed. June let go, rolled to her feet, flipped her hair, and Edie stopped her fake crying. They both gathered clothes like nothing happened.

That’s enough, Mom said. That was always enough for Mom. What the hell is wrong with you? Have your brains melted? People come here to relax, you know. She was still in her nightgown that she had worn all day the day before, and the day before that. Anything she wore those days looked like a nightgown.

We were just playing, June said.

Get in the house and pack your bags. I’m sending you to Vouglans to see Cousin Agnes.

Where’s that?

Who’s that? June said.

The mountains. Your cousin.

But there’s nothing to DO in the mountains, Edie said.

It’ll be cooler up there. She has a lake, some horses. There are cherry trees. I wish I could go.

We have a cousin?

That’s enough, Mom said. You have no idea how lucky you are. That’s your problem.

But really it had nothing to do with that fight or the heat, or Mom wanting to be alone to make art. It was really Mom wanting to be alone with the neighbor, Monsieur Thibault. Even though he had white hair and a face like an overripe tomato. He got their mother drunk on port every night. He brought her pickled garlic and melons from his garden. He listened to her complain and told her she was a genius. That’s actually all Mom wanted from life. He wore pink shorts and Oakleys and a striped sweater around his shoulders. He was so French. He was a creep around Edie. He was just like everyone else. He was nobody. But he was the reason Mom wanted the girls out.

So it was also Monsieur Thibault’s fault.

And the reason she’d lost the money was really the fault of the money belt. She hated wearing the money belt, which was the reason she had stuffed the money in her backpack.

It had been her mother’s belt, a dirty piece of cloth threaded with a string you tied around your waist with J.M. embroidered in red on the front.

Let me wear it, Edie said. June loses everything.

Give that to me, June said. She stuffed the money belt in her backpack. I’ll put it on later.

Do NOT lose that cash. Do you hear me? Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye?

Edie leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek.

Not really, June said. She put on her headphones. The hinge on the door was broken. You couldn’t close it without letting it slam.

She would have had some money if she had put the money in the money belt, or if that money belt of her mother’s was something she wanted so close to her body, which it was not.

Maybe it was the hippie couple’s fault. If they hadn’t walked in, the whole trip might have been different. June and Edie were alone in a non-reservation car for the first hour of the trip. There were eight orange seats, four facing each other, a table in between. They sat by the windows. They played Spit. They played War. They played Gin Rummy. They played 7-Up. They played Guzzle, Guzzle, Guzzle the 8s, a game Edie had invented—the rules changed a lot. They played Pig. June always lost. She hated cards. She leaned her head against the window as the train sped up the coast, then through unbloomed lavender fields full of baby donkeys, hills of burnt trees in the distance, vineyards—dried from the drought. They passed a cemetery, a church, a medieval town built into the side of a cliff. June would have been fine for seven hours watching the passage of France through the window of a train if she could have just sat there with her Walkman on, daydreaming about making it to third base with Montgomery Clift or Beauty being tortured by the queen.

The first actual stop was a town that looked like it had hit the skids: graffiti everywhere—MERDE MITTERAND NOUS AVOUS TOUS LE SIDA—garbage blowing on the platform.
Just as the train was pulling away, a man and a woman came into their car, wearing rucksacks. They looked like they’d been living in train stations their whole lives. They were both white with badly sunburned faces. He had dreadlocks that came down to his butt, and she wore a long flowery skirt over jeans. They smelled like sweat and patchouli and spoiled milk. The woman was wearing Chuck Taylors with no socks. That’s where the rotting smell was coming from. She was also wearing about thirty bracelets on each wrist, and she jingled every time she moved.
Dives, the man said. This town is called DIVES. Can you believe it? Dives. It’s a dive, all right. They were Americans. They don’t speak English, he said to the woman. PARLEZ-VOUS ENGLISH?

June smiled dumbly and shook her head.

Told you. OKAY IF WE SIT HERE? But it wasn’t a question. He threw their bags on the empty seats. June wanted to gag. Then Edie began to speak her nonsense language.

Hava gobabalsisi?

Tamago, June replied.

Seekamo chugalal.

They’re either Finnish or Hungarian, the man said.

As long as they’re quiet I don’t give a fuck who they are. I’ve never been so ready to go home. You didn’t tell me we were going to be starving and eating so much bread.

I didn’t tell you anything, did I, baby? You know where you’d be right now if I hadn’t rescued you?

Probably back in Edina.

Driving around in your Perkins apron waiting for next semester to start. THIS, he said, gesturing out the window to a parking lot, is a real education. Life. The world. You cannot learn what we’ve learned in the past three months from reading. You know what your problem is? I don’t mean to insult you, baby, but deep down, you’re bourgeois.

Tyler, your parents just bought a third home in the Hamptons . . .

Bourgeois is a state of mind, he said. Besides, I’m done with them. Smash the family, smash the state.

June couldn’t take the smell or the conversation, so she went to the toilet, where she almost vomited. When she came back, Edie had blown their cover and was letting Tyler lecture her about commodity fetishism. The bracelet lady was snoring. She had her nasty feet on June’s seat.

But why didn’t you DO anything? Why didn’t you ask someone? Tell someone? Say something? Do you know what could happen to a young girl on a train? Do you have any idea what the world is? How sick people are? How there are rapes and dismemberments and bodies found? And June might have heard these voices, somewhere in the back of her head, but they were either very quiet or she decided to ignore them and go have a Coke at the café car, where she saw the man who looked exactly like Montgomery Clift. He had been holding his passport, so she could tell he was Dutch. So it was also kind of the Dutchman’s fault. And also Montgomery Clift’s, whose face she could not get out of her mind. She had seen From Here to Eternity about seventeen times that year, and she couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was a real man. There were no real men left in the world. They had gone the way of the dodo bird. She’d read that in a French teen magazine. So when she saw the Dutchman at the bar, she thought maybe she was dreaming, and the real world, time and space, had become suspended. She wouldn’t have stared at the Dutchman if it weren’t for Montgomery Clift. She wouldn’t have noticed the angles of his cheekbones, the broody concern of his forehead, his feminine lips, and she wouldn’t have smiled, and he wouldn’t have smiled back. He wouldn’t have asked, Where are you heading, and she wouldn’t have said, Amsterdam, hoping that he was going there. That’s where I’m going too, eventually. Have you been?

No.

What are you drinking?

Orangina?

How old are you?

Eighteen.

You’re a student?

Yes, she said.

I am too, he said. Marine biology. I’m on my way from a conference. He was looking at her, trying to figure out who she was.

She ordered a beer that she didn’t drink and didn’t pay for, because the money was gone. And there wouldn’t have been this conversation, which actually June was not present for, because even though she heard what he was saying—he was some kind of scientist coming home from a conference—she was somewhere else: she was already making love to him, she had married him in her head, she was off traveling the world with him, and she was saying some things about who she was, a student, on her way to Amsterdam to become an artist. He was a stranger and so was she, so she could be whoever she wanted. And when he invited her to come out with him that night, how could she resist?

She walked up and down the aisles once or twice, but she couldn’t bring herself to call her sister’s name. Maybe it was because she didn’t think Edie was really lost. June thought she was the lost one, and that if anyone should be looking for anyone, Edie should be looking for June. She was the one most likely to get lost, being a loser and everything. Edie was a know-it-all and a reader of great books and guidebooks and maps. Geography was never a problem. She knew the names of towns and rivers. She knew the capitals of all the countries on earth. She always knew where she was and how to get home. When Edie went somewhere, she went there, unlike June, who lived in the torture chamber of her head. If there was a strike and the train was stalled out for an hour, and Edie decided to run and get a raspberry cream pastry at the station, and the train left without her, she would just eat the pastry and pay an old man to drive her to the next town over, and she would find a faster train to Vouglans, where she would meet up with Cousin Agnes and her son and wait for June’s slow train to arrive. Nothing was ever a problem for Edie, because whatever happened, she couldn’t care less, and maybe that’s also part of why June didn’t panic. June was the one who had no idea where she was, couldn’t remember the name of the town where they were supposed to switch trains. For a moment—it was longer than a moment, a few hours, actually—she imagined that she didn’t have a sister, or any family at all, that she wasn’t on her way to see Cousin Agnes, she wasn’t a child, she was just a person on a train, a nobody, and though her bag was wherever Edie was, she had her passport in her pocket, and no money. But nobody was around to annoy her or embarrass her or ruin her songs or ask her what the hell was wrong with her or tell her what to do. She could be whoever she wanted. How many times in life would she get to feel this way? You couldn’t learn what she was about to learn from a book.

She almost said yes. But the conductor announced the next stop: Grenoble. And June remembered that’s where they were supposed to change trains, and without even thinking, she said she had to go, so she went. When she got off the train and walked across the station, there was Edie, sitting on their bags, stuffing her face with a raspberry cream tart, reading Beauty’s Punishment.
June had almost gone with the Dutchman. Who knew who he really was or where he was really going, where he had planned to take her? She was only fourteen. She would wonder about that, about all the things she almost learned but didn’t.

She could have gone. He wanted her to.

She had her chance. She lost it.