There is a kind of mania in this story. The narrator’s voice appears on one level calm and reasonable, but as the story unfolds it seems a control mechanism for appearance’s sake, and a smokescreen for her loss of agency. The narrator lightly details her husband’s infidelities in a way that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader, but for our masochistic central character life appears to be a series of preordained patterns, and everything seems as important as everything else. Never more so than in her strange obsession about how the trains terminate at Garscadden, the stop before hers, despite how few people ever get off there. She comes to blame the trains for the failure of her marriage, and for almost killing her husband, a kind of chaos theory of relationships.
“I went down, as usual, to stand on the westbound platform, this time in a hard, grey wind, the black twigs and branches over the line, oily and dismal with the damp.”
And she finally drags that oily and dismal world back to her cheating spouse.
First published in Beloit Fiction Journal Vol 5, No. 1, and collected in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon, 1990
A Personal Anthology 