Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Fran found herself in line at a deli, heard herself ordering a sandwich. She saw her hand give the cashier a handful of bills. She felt herself chewing the sandwich. She floated above herself like one of Chagall’s friendly women, lifted with sentiment and hope, except hers was more a detached feeling. She thought of Paulina from the magazine. Fran wouldn’t allow herself to touch her hair, even to worry about her hair. Some people didn’t even have hair! Some people were just heads! She wandered toward the ticket window. She would sleep and wake up in New York and everything would be different. She would let Paulina fix her hair. She would surrender. Anxiety fluttered in her stomach. She sneezed and strangers blessed her. She handed over her credit card and the Amtrak people restored her power.

On the train, Fran sat next to a guy her age who spent the trip talking across the aisle to his friend. The guy, who Fran gathered was named Brock, wore ripped jeans and had paint-spattered sneakers. His hair was in disarray, but his face was decent. Would he be the street punk who rescued Fran from predictable living? He paid her little attention.

Fran slept for hours, until she was woken by classical music booming from a cell phone. She looked at the Post-it for a long while. “He’s like my guru,” Brock told his friend, praising an eccentric, contradictory UCLA professor. Brock seemed familiar to Fran — not him exactly, but those like him. “Recipes ruin everything,” he said. “Cooking is like painting. .” Her ears twitched. Must be an art grad somewhere, she thought. Yale?

Everything he said made her dislike him more. “I’ve always wanted a pet monkey. You think we could keep it in studio?” His companion laughed at his every word. For a long stretch Brock was silent, underlining photocopies of theory with a grubby pencil, but then he started up again. “The first-years might go after us in crit. Remember how we were back then?”

The world he spoke of tempted Fran. She wished that Brock and his friend would accept her as one of their own, but they never even asked her name. She tried to summon the old painting fantasies — her grand debut at such-and-such gallery — but it no longer felt possible or important.

When their talking got too animated, she rose to change seats. The train jerked while Fran walked through the aisle. Her hand clumsily touched the shoulders of strangers. She passed women with children. People of all races. Who was she looking for? There were no open rows. She would have to choose someone to sit with. Pennsylvania passed by in blank fields and outdated little towns. Every few minutes her aimlessness would turn, like a coin catching light, and fill Fran with exhilaration. She would never go back to Ohio!

Her mind raced with possible outcomes. She braced herself for the worst — Paulina shunning her in front of her fancy friends. Paulina pushing her down an elevator shaft. Paulina surprised she’s even there — the message was for someone else. No one at Paulina’s because she’s with Julian.

Fran walked the length of the train. Vast wastelands passed by the windows. The graffiti made her lonesome. Passengers unwrapped food from the dining car. Then, as happened every few years, like spotting an inexplicably big moon, Fran saw a beautiful boy.

He was dark haired. His features came from the same impossible place as Marvin’s. He was with a friend. They seemed too young to see through her. Fran fell into the seat across from them and didn’t wait for them to ask. “I’m Fran,” she told them. The beautiful one rolled his eyes at her, like he was showing her how they worked. The beautiful never needed to speak, though sometimes they did Fran the favor.

“I’m Flip,” the friend said, and pointed to the beauty. “This is Stephen.” Stephen had it even worse than Marvin. He would never be able to blend in with a crowd.

They lived in Brooklyn. Flip told Fran all about the band they were in and gave her a business card. Every word they exchanged cemented their acquaintance. If Paulina didn’t show, if the address was a fake, if the feeling was wrong, maybe she could bother these two. She hadn’t told Gretchen she was coming. She hadn’t told anyone. If Paulina killed her, no one would be able to say where she’d gone. Fran looked at the card in her hands. Braying Donkey, it said, and underneath it brayingdonkey.blogspot.com.

“What’s that smell?” Stephen asked, finally revealing his voice.

“What smell?” asked Fran.

“It’s like some chemical. Are you a scientist?” he asked her.

“She’s a test question writer,” Flip said, smiling at her.

“Actually, I’m a painter,” Fran said, and Stephen lifted his beautiful face from Flip’s shoulder. She smelled her hair; it smelled like iodine. “I think it’s my hair. I just got it straightened.”

“Why?” Stephen asked, rubbing his face. He looked into her eyes and she felt dissected.

“Long story,” she said, hoping it made her seem mysterious, but Stephen just dozed against the window. For the rest of the ride she forged a bond with Flip. Flip was from San Francisco and had two brothers and two sisters. Fran could tell he was smarter than she was, but she didn’t know if he was smart enough to know this. He was still so young.

When Stephen woke up, Flip said, “Guess what? Fran knows Apollo Space-Ears. She saw him naked!”

“Lots of times,” Fran said.

“Cool,” Stephen said, obviously impressed. “He filmed his new video in our friends’ loft last year.”

The train pulled into the dark labyrinth leading to Penn Station. The cabin went dark. Lights ran down Flip and Stephen’s faces. Fran was terrified. They left the train together. Like always, Fran thought to herself, as if Flip and Stephen were her best friends and lovers and they all lived together in Brooklyn. She could go to all the Braying Donkey shows. She could even suggest a better name. They would record a whole album called Fran. A double album.

What was Paulina doing right now? Signing autographs? Slaughtering pigs? It was impossible to tell. Suddenly it crossed Fran’s mind that Paulina could be throwing a party. Maybe the note was just an invitation and Paulina would be there with her girlfriend.

They took the long escalator up to the ground level. Everyone pulled rolling suitcases with one hand and held their cell phones in the other. Fran quickly sized them up as she had walking the train. She believed she could guess their life story from the style of their backpack — drama queen embarking on a singing career, college boy trying to find meaning in nature.

Inside Penn Station, some people kissed openly under the fluorescent lights; others ate muffins, displaced from the people they loved. It seemed impossible that any of the strangers could know Fran or would ever want to, though she continued to follow Stephen and Flip past the bathrooms and the pretzel stand, the small flower shop that distracted her back to the Lancaster fantasy.

Up the final set of escalators, Fran felt the evening air on her face like a lukewarm bath, and with it, a sense of accomplishment for having made it to the city. The city was important to so many people, though maybe, as she’d realized on the train, not to her. Fran stared at the majestic post office on Thirty-Fourth Street. A sweet smell from the mixed-nut cart was overpowered by the smell of urine as Fran followed Flip and Stephen past a pair of flattened jeans on the curb.

The sun had set and people leaving work late walked briskly past people on their way out to bars. Women walked jacketless into the cool night. Fran followed Flip and Stephen without looking at the street signs. She removed a long, straight hair stuck to her shirt. She pictured Paulina’s girlfriend as Deena. “You wanna get a slice with us?” Flip asked. Fran nodded.