Girl on a Train

My dad was a professor, and when I was sixteen, we spent a year in Sevilla, Spain, while he was on sabbatical. I initially resented my parents for forcing me to leave during my final year of high school and grad. I was furious. Certain I’d be missing one of the most important years of my life.

I was wrong, of course.

Looking back, I’m so grateful for that time abroad. Away from the claustrophobia of my suburban high school. Away from the sameness and pettiness. I got to know all my Spanish relatives that year. Our very small, very sweet abuelita, our tios and primos, who would take us to Sevilla’s many bars for cañas and tapas late into the night. I was the baby of our family, but my older Spanish cousins accepted me as one of them. I’d tag along, laughing at things I only half understood, wondering what my life would’ve looked like if I’d grown up here, imagining the kind of person I would be. After a couple of months, I finally learned enough Spanish to understand my cousins’ jokes and to converse with them more deeply. I even had my very first boyfriend, Javier, a mod who loved Ska music, his scooter, and practicing English with me.

My sister Terri was four years older, and for most of our lives, I had been her bratty younger sister. But that year, away from home, away from our regular roles and routine, something shifted between us. That spring, we took a short trip to the Algarve with one of our cousins. It was my first real taste of independent travel. We were a little reckless, hitchhiking to save money. Nothing happened, but it became a shared secret, one that still makes us laugh whenever it comes up, all these years later. I think that trip changed how Terri saw me. Because when she started planning her big backpacking trip at the end of the sabbatical, she invited me along for a portion of it.

We travelled together for a month, through Spain and Portugal, without cell phones or internet, just a call to our mom every week or two from a pay phone. We followed a loose itinerary, travelling by train, staying in hostels, small inns, or homes that opened up to backpackers. It was an incredible experience that cracked open a true love of travel. I have so many fond memories of us in Lisbon, Porto, and the many beautiful villages in between, wandering the cobblestone streets, meeting locals and fellow travellers, devouring Portuguese almond cookies with a meia de leite. Slowly making our way to Salamanca, Toledo, and finally Madrid. My sister packed her notes from an art history class, and she would tell me about Goya, Velázquez, Miró, and Picasso. I can remember us staring at the Guernica for hours, while she shared the story behind it. I was seventeen and for the first time, I felt entirely grown up. I was someone who knew how to move through the world.

Picasso’s Guernica

This was long before high-speed travel, before the sleek efficiency of trains that whisk you between destinations so fast you barely notice. These trains were slow, hot, and cramped. Part of the experience was enduring the endless drip of sweat down your spine, gathering at the backs of your knees, the particular smell of a stranger’s meal trapped in the thick air. We’d prop the window open and briefly stick our heads out, hoping to catch a breeze that barely came. We had no choice but to be exactly where we were, in the dense heat and crowded compartment. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit there and let the slow hours pass.

I remember one particular train ride, I think we were travelling from Porto to Madrid, with a short stopover on the way. It was crowded and hot, which was to be expected. My sister and I grabbed two of the last seats available, across from each other, next to the window. It was a four-seat cabin, and a Portuguese man travelling with his elderly mother took the two aisle seats beside us. As soon as the train lurched forward, they unpacked an absurdly large lunch. Fried fish wrapped in aluminum foil, sliced corn bread, wedges of cheese in a tea towel, a tin of anchovies, even a bottle of port. The elderly mother unwrapped everything like she’d spent her lifetime feeding others. The man smiled at us and offered us some bread with cheese. We smiled back, said “Obrigada.” It was one of those lovely travel moments. A sharing between strangers who don’t speak the same language.

An hour or so later, as we were all trying to nap, the smell of fried fish still lingering in the air, I suddenly felt a hand moving up my sweaty thigh. It didn’t take long to realize this was not an accidental brush; it was deliberate. The man, who was sitting next to me, who had just shared some of his lunch with us, was inconspicuously trying to move his hand up my thigh, into my shorts and underwear. Forty years later, I still vividly remember him trying to feel me up on this insanely hot and sticky, slooow-moving train, his elderly mother sitting directly across from him. I was seventeen at this point, my sister was twenty-one, and he was likely our father’s age. I was in absolute shock. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, especially with his mother right there.

I shifted, closed my legs, and squeezed my sweaty thighs as tightly together as I could. I contorted myself, pressing into the corner of the cabin, hoping I could disappear into the side of the train. I crossed my legs. I turned my body sideways. I did everything except the one thing that would’ve actually helped: standing up and saying, loudly and clearly, “Stop!” But I was seventeen, he was a grown man, and his mother was right there. So I questioned myself. I’d been raised to manage my discomfort and not to inconvenience or embarrass others.

But he grew bolder. Interpreting my silence as some sort of permission. With each shift I made, he made a shift of his own, closing the distance I’d just created, his hand inevitably finding my thigh again. He pretended to fall asleep, his body leaning into mine, giving him cover and access.

I looked at my sister, widening my eyes, tilting my head toward him, hoping she’d understand. She looked back at me with her tired smile, then leaned against the window to sleep again. I don’t know why I couldn’t say anything. Even across eighteen inches of a train compartment, even to my own sister, with whom I’d hitchhiked through the Algarve, and shared a secret and a love of almond cookies. I couldn’t find the words or make the sounds or do the thing that would have made it stop.

I don’t even think I told her afterwards.

What I think it comes down to is that I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to embarrass him, this man who was assaulting me, or his mother, this woman who had packed his lunch and unwrapped it with such care. Somewhere along the way, I had learned a hierarchy of needs, and my own comfort, my own safety, my own body did not sit at the top of it. His and his mother’s dignity did. An undisruptive train ride did.

How insane it is to be put in this position. Not only to have a stranger violate you, but to spend the entire time worrying about their feelings. To be so well-trained in your smallness that even in a moment of clear violation, you cannot find your voice. How dare I speak up. How dare I create a scene.

Despite knowing better now, that girl on the train, the one crossing and recrossing her legs, pressing herself into the corner hoping to disappear, prioritizing someone else’s comfort over her own safety, still lives inside me. The saddest part is, I know I’m not alone. She lives inside too many of us.