Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

I stared at her, disoriented. Then, much to my horror, I realized she was no random passenger but the driver herself, in cap and uniform.

“Do you hear what I said?” she repeated, with an aggressive side-to-side head tic. She was as wide as a prizefighter; the nametag, atop her impressive bosom, read Denese. “You can’t have that dog on this bus. ” Then—impatiently—she made a flapping hand gesture as if to say: get him the hell back in that bag!

I covered his head up—he didn’t seem to mind—and sat with rapidly shrinking insides. We were stopped at a town called Effingham, Illinois: Edward Hopper houses, stage-set courthouse, a hand-lettered banner that said Crossroads of Opportunity!

The driver swept her finger around. “Do any of you people back here have objections to this animal?”

The other passengers in back—(unkempt handlebar-moustache guy; grown woman with braces; anxious black mom with elementary-school girl; W. C. Fields–looking oldster with nose tubes and oxygen canister—all seemed too surprised to talk, though the little girl, eyes round, shook her head almost imperceptibly : no.

The driver waited. She looked around. Then she turned back to me. “Okay. That’s good news for you and the pooch, honey. But if any —” she wagged her finger at me—“if any these other passengers back here complains about you having an animal on board, at any point, I’m going to have to make you get off. Understand?”

She wasn’t throwing me off? I blinked at her, afraid to move or speak a word.

“You understand?” she repeated, more ominously.

“Thank you—”

A bit belligerently, she shook her head. “ Oh, no. Don’t thank me, honey. Because I am putting you off this bus if there is one single complaint. One.”

I sat in a tremble as she strode down the aisle and started the bus. As we swung out of the parking lot I was afraid to even glance at the other passengers, though I could feel them all looking at me.

By my knee, Popper let out a tiny huff and resettled. As much as I liked Popper, and felt sorry for him, I’d never thought that as dogs went he was particularly interesting or intelligent. Instead I’d spent a lot of time wishing he was a cooler dog, a border collie or a Lab or a rescue maybe, some smart and haunted pit mix from the shelter, a scrappy little mutt that chased balls and bit people—in fact almost anything but what he actually was: a girl’s dog, a toy, completely gay, a dog I felt embarrassed to walk on the street. Not that Popper wasn’t cute; in fact, he was exactly the kind of tiny, prancing fluffball that a lot of people liked—maybe not me but surely some little girl like the one across the aisle would find him by the road and take him home and tie ribbons in his hair?

Rigidly I sat there, re-living the bolt of fear again and again: the driver’s face, my shock. What really scared me was that I now knew if she made me put Popper off the bus that I would have to get off with him, too (and do what?) even in the middle of Illinois nowhere. Rain, cornfields: standing by the side of the road. How had I become attached to such a ridiculous animal? A lapdog that Xandra had chosen?

Throughout Illinois and Indiana, I sat swaying and vigilant: too afraid to go to sleep. The trees were bare, rotted-out Halloween pumpkins on the porches. Across the aisle, the mother had her arm around the little girl and was singing, very quietly: You are my sunshine. I had nothing to eat but leftover crumbs of the potato chips the cab driver had given me; and—ugly salt taste in my mouth, industrial plains, little nowhere towns rolling past—I felt chilled and forlorn, looking out at the bleak farmland and thinking of songs my mother had sung to me, way back when. Toot toot tootsie goodbye, toot toot tootsie, don’t cry. At last—in Ohio, when it was dark, and the lights in the sad little far-apart houses were coming on—I felt safe enough to drowse off, nodding back and forth in my sleep, until Cleveland, cold white-lit city where I changed buses at two in the morning. I was afraid to give Popper the long walk I knew he needed, for fear that someone might see us (because what would we do, if we were found out? Stay in Cleveland forever?). But he seemed frightened too; and we stood shivering on a street corner for ten minutes before I gave him some water, put him in the bag, and walked back to the station to board.

It was the middle of the night and everyone seemed half asleep, which made the transfer easier; and we transferred again at noon the next day, in Buffalo, where the bus crunched out through piled-up sleet in the station. The wind was biting, with a sharp wet edge; after two years in the desert I’d forgotten what real winter—aching and raw—was like. Boris had not returned any of my texts, which was perhaps understandable since I was sending them to Kotku’s phone, but I sent another one anyway: BFALO NY NYC 2NIT. HPE UR OK HAV U HERD FRM X?

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anything else—I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.

I think I must have been getting quietly sick ever since the stop in Cleveland, but by the time I finally got off the bus, in Port Authority, it was evening and I was burning up with fever. I was chilled, wobbly on my legs and the city—which I’d longed for so fiercely—seemed foreign and noisy and cold, exhaust fumes and garbage and strangers rushing past in every direction.

The terminal was packed with cops. Everywhere I looked there were signs for runaway shelters, runaway hotlines, and one lady cop in particular gave me the fish-eye as I was hurrying outside—after sixty-plus hours on the bus, I was dirty and tired and knew I didn’t really pass muster—but nobody stopped me and I didn’t look behind me until I was out the door, and well away. Several men of varying age and nationality called out to me on the street, soft voices coming from several directions ( hey, little brother! where you headed? need a ride? ) but though one red-haired guy in particular seemed nice and normal and not much older than me, almost like someone I might be friends with, I was enough of a New Yorker to ignore his cheerful hello and keep walking like I knew where I was going.

I’d thought Popper would be overjoyed to get out and walk, but when I put him down on the sidewalk Eighth Avenue was too much for him and he was too scared to go more than a block or so; he’d never been on a city street before, everything terrified him (cars, car horns, people’s legs, empty plastic bags blowing down the sidewalk) and he kept jerking forward, darting toward the crosswalk, jumping this way and that, dashing behind me in terror and winding the leash around my legs so I tripped and nearly fell in front of a van rushing to beat the light.

After I picked him up, paddling, and stuck him back in his bag (where he scrabbled and huffed in exasperation before he got quiet), I stood in the middle of the rush-hour crowd trying to get my bearings. Everything seemed so much dirtier and unfriendlier than I’d remembered—colder too, streets gray like old newspaper. Que faire? as my mother had liked to say. I could almost hear her saying it, in her light, careless voice.

I’d often wondered, when my father prowled around banging the kitchen cabinets and complaining that he wanted a drink, what “wanting a drink” felt like—what it felt like to want alcohol and nothing but, not water or Pepsi or anything else. Now, I thought bleakly, I know. I was dying for a beer but I knew better than to go in a deli and try to buy one without ID. Longingly I thought of Mr. Pavlikovsky’s vodka, the daily blast of warmth I’d come to take for granted.