Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days

Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of an argument. They’ve been riding the argument all night since they got on the train originally and carelessly bound for … what? dinner? a movie … they almost can’t remember, they have been riding 2001 and changing trains so many hours now. Each knows something more is at risk in this particular argument on this particular evening than just its resolution, than one woman conceding to the other if only to placate the moment. This particular argument has always been just a little too profound to call merely a lovers’ quarrel.

woman on the other side, and it was only there in Tokyo staring out over the

To others riding the train with them, the two might appear to be mother and daughter. One of them is close to fifty, with a recently cropped mane of increasingly silvery hair and serenity woven in the air around her like a web; the other is barely a woman at all, nineteen years old. The older woman, who doesn’t like to think or speak of the age difference, has to acknowledge to herself that indeed it makes their argument more complicated. They’ve had some version of this argument many times now in the last several months, and this time each senses that they won’t, as in the past, just move on when it’s over. Or rather: they’ll move on, but without each other. Although the older woman seems the less agitated of the two, the less heated in her words, that’s more a function of maturity; in fact she feels more is at stake for her — but, you know, try telling the younger woman that. Thinking about it in the many silences that fall between each of the argument’s flare-ups, the older woman realizes that to the younger woman, with her entire future still ahead of her, the decision has consequences that much more resounding. So maybe, Sara admits to herself, it’s not so fair to say she has more at stake. I have too little time, the girl has too much. She admits this to herself but not out loud; admitting it out loud, she would lose everything.

They’ve just gotten on the subway line heading south. It’s become a ritual of this argument, in the way all arguments have rituals, that every time a cessation of hostilities coincides with a subway station, the women get off the train and change to another. At this point they’re not paying attention to which train or which station. Somehow as long as they keep moving — as opposed to going to a café somewhere and thrashing things out for good — perhaps some rubicon can avoid being crossed. Lately the younger woman has begun to feel things are out of control, a feeling she hates. She doesn’t want to bring up the age thing with Sara. It’s always been

water that I finally realized it had been my mother on the other side of that

a psychological obstacle for the couple to surmount, particularly for the older woman who’s that much more keenly aware, the younger realizes, of everything such a divide in years represents. By now the girl accepts there’s something maternal in her attraction to the older woman, and doesn’t understand why this is any less a basis for love or a romantic bond than anything else. Women are drawn to father figures all the time so why can’t I be drawn to a mother figure.

That this probably says something about her relationship with her real mother, the girl understands. Ironically it was this that brought her to Sara as a patient in the first place. Somehow, though, they never got into it in any of their sessions, and she’s trying to remember if she was always the one avoiding the topic or if, now that she thinks about it, it was Sara who avoided it, once the attraction became apparent. Rather quickly it seems, now that the girl thinks about it, they wound up talking more about Sara than her. “You’ll spend your whole life,” Sara said that first session, “making peace with your own true nature,” and every now and then Sara repeats it as though to imply she understands the girl’s nature better than the girl does. The girl still isn’t sure what it actually means, the business about one’s true nature, or whether it’s just something Sara says to sound superior. But at this moment it seems to her perhaps it says a lot more about Sara than about her.

True to the cliche about therapists, Sara’s past seems its own sort of mess when it’s not a blank altogether, and the girl realizes the divide in years is more remarkable for all the experience Sara never had. Whereas the girl’s first sexual encounter — with another girl — took place at eleven, Sara’s had been in her mid-twenties with an emotionally fetal man she wound up dating

river staring back at me, her shoulders sagging in defeat when she couldn’t

thirteen years, never marrying, never living together. After this relationship didn’t so much collapse as trail off into nothingness, with the man simply moving on to another job in another city, Sara’s next was with a woman, also a client like the girl, lasting eight months and then followed by a chasm of nearly ten years in which, as far as the girl can tell, Sara had no intimate human relations of any sort. So talk about spending your life making peace with your own nature. When you get right down to it, then, who’s really the senior partner here, the girl asks herself on the train now.

So as to establish some control in the relationship, the girl always made it a rule never to make the first move in these things. She broke the rule in Sara’s case, figuring it was the only way anything would ever happen. Now she wonders if this was a mistake. In any other situation she can’t help thinking a nineteen-year-old would never come on to a woman nearly thirty years older but perhaps that’s naïve; after all, nineteen-year-old girls come on to older men all the time. Within six months of their first doctor/patient session, the two moved in together. It’s been a year since, and was a lovely time up till the whole baby obsession that, the girl can pinpoint exactly, began one night four or five months ago. They went across town for dinner at the brownstone of another lesbian couple, who disclosed that without much luck they had been investigating ways of having a child. All the talk that evening of eggs going back and forth from one person to another boggled the girl’s mind so much it gave her a headache.

On the train now the girl feels trapped by how often and fervently she’s insisted to Sara the difference in age means nothing to her. Now, subway track rattling beneath them, that argument restrains her from giving voice to the fact that, in her view,

find the courage to face her small abandoned daughter who not so long

the daughter/mother nature of their relationship renders what Sara wants a bit bizarre. But is this really what troubles her most? the girl wonders. Leaving aside everything else — leaving aside even how it would be her body, after all, serving as laboratory, incubator, assembly line in the processing of some anonymous male sperm just so Sara’s long latent, now suddenly urgent maternal drive might be satisfied — what strange new dynamic would be loosed not only between them but within the girl herself? If, consciously or not, defined as such or not, on some level the girl plays the role of daughter in her relationship with Sara, then would a baby in some way be a grand-daughter? A sister to her own mother?

Like all those eggs being bandied about over dinner, this makes her head hurt. Perhaps she should get off the train. And naturally, she realizes, we keep talking about this baby as though it goes without saying it would be a girl: what if it’s a boy? Do we know how to raise a boy? Do I know how to raise a boy, if it should ever fall to me to do it alone given — muttered under the breath of her mind — how much older Sara is? Somehow the notion it could be a boy, it just makes the whole idea, monumental to begin with, that much more overwhelming, although the younger woman has to confess there’s something irresistible about someday reminding the young teenage barbarian, fumbling with girls in car seats to heavy metal on the radio, that he’s literally the son of a jerkoff; it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying with a daughter.