Baboon

SHE DOESN'T CRY

That's Anika standing on the dusty platform with her doll in a light blue fabric bassinet lined with a thin blue-dotted plastic. With one hand she holds on tightly to her father's gray flannel pants. With the other, she swings the bassinet back and forth. All the while she stares at a little girl on her mother's hip on the opposite platform. The girl has laid her arms around her mother's neck and is pushing her cheek into her face. Anika and her father have been standing there for a while; the father is reading the newspaper and gives her a distracted answer every time she asks him something. "Is that our train?" He nods. "Is it?" "No. . " "Why are you reading the newspaper?" "Hmm. . "

They took a taxi to the train station, and Anika sat completely still looking at the back of the driver's fat gray neck. The car smelled bad. Her father spoke in another manner, and laughed strangely when the driver said anything that was apparently funny. She had cried a lot when they were about to leave. The baby spit up down the mother's back. Anika screamed when her father carried her out the door. They are going to see Grandma and Grandpa. Her mother is too tired to come. Anika doesn't think she looks tired. It's her baby sister who sleeps all the time. The father folds up the newspaper and smiles at her. "Do you know what we're going to do when we get to the ferry? We're going to get some ice cream."

A tall, strange man comes smiling toward Anika and her father, and it's obviously someone the father knows, for they greet each other warmly with loud exclamations of surprise, and they both set their suitcases between their legs to shake each other's hand. "This is my daughter," says the father, touching her head, "This is Anika." "Wow," says the man, "the last time I saw her she was in a baby carriage." "Three years old," says the father, "she's three and a half now, and a month ago we had another little girl." The strange man lifts his gaze from Anika, to the father, and then pats him enthusiastically on the shoulder. "Congratulations, old boy, I'm so happy for you! And mother and child are well?" At this point in the conversation, Anika places her bassinet between her legs and puts her hands on her hips. Now she's standing exactly like the two men. She looks up at the strange man's face, and doesn't long any more to return to her mother in the apartment with the yellow curtains and the cat that's almost always lying in the sun on the kitchen floor with half-closed eyes. She has imitated the two men's postures down to the smallest detail, and she looks over at the girl again who is still clinging to her suntanned mother. Stupid little girl. Anika can feel the bassinet against her legs. She makes a large spit bubble that bursts so that her mouth gets wet. She sticks her tongue out at the girl. She feels tall and wide. It feels a little like the time she was at the swimming pool with her mother, the water was cold, she shrieked, but it was nice, and she now shifts to her left foot, exactly as her father has just done, and a wonderful sensation floods through her, something velvety soft and dark, but at the same time, extremely bright. She: a person. She can almost not stand still any more, she wants to hop up and down, she wants to run all the way to the trash can at the other end of the platform, but when she looks at her father and the man, they're saying something with deep murmuring voices, and she notices that they are both standing completely still, as if trapped in their old bearish bodies, so Anika stands like them, rubbing her chin with her thumb and finger, as her father was just doing. That's when the strange man suddenly looks at her. He stops talking mid-sentence, and a smile spreads across his face. He sputters and covers his mouth. Surprised, the father follows his friend's gaze, and then he too burst out in uncontrollable laughter when his eyes scan Anika, stopping first at her legs straddling the bassinet, and then her serious face. Anika hides behind her father. Something burns in her head and stomach. He bends down and picks her up. He tries to get his voice under control. "Don't be sad." He looks at his friend. More laughter. "It's just because it's so funny that you're standing like us, right?" Now his voice begins to shake. "It's funny, don't you think?" The two men let go and laugh loudly. They can't stop. The father with his enormous hand presses her cheek to his face. Anika cries woefully while looking at the girl who at that moment is being lowered down onto the platform by her mother and darts off to climb up onto a bench. Anika cries harder. The laughing ceases. "Sweetie, it's nothing to cry over," says her father. Then the big brown train pulls in between the children, making sizzling, hissing sounds. The father quickly says good-bye to his friend and climbs up into the train, Anika still in his arms. He puts her down on the seat in the compartment. Smiling, he shakes his head. She gets on his lap sniffling, and presses her forehead against the window. She looks at the light blue bassinet left behind on the platform. She doesn't say a word. She can smell her father's pipe tobacco. The window tastes sour. A little black seed that looks like the pupil in her father's eye, the one that squints a bit when he doesn't know what to say, is now planted in her. She feels it rumbling in her stomach, but she doesn't cry. The train pulls out. Fields and woods fly by, far away and green. She doesn't cry.