Runaway

message, from her teachers, who had seemed to value and rejoice in her. Their joviality did not hide their concern. Get out into the world, they had said. As if where she had been till now was nowhere.
    Nevertheless, on the train, she was happy.
    Taiga,
she thought. She did not know whether that was the right word for what she was looking at. She might have had, at some level, the idea of herself as a young woman in a Russian novel, going out into an unfamiliar, terrifying, and exhilarating landscape where the wolves would howl at night and where she would meet her fate. She did not care that this fate—in a Russian novel—would likely turn out to be dreary, or tragic, or both.
    Personal fate was not the point, anyway. What drew her in— enchanted her, actually—was the very indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield.
    A shadow appeared in the corner of her eye. Then a trousered leg, moving in.
    “Is this seat taken?”
    Of course it wasn’t. What could she say?
    Tasselled loafers, tan slacks, tan and brown checked jacket with pencil lines of maroon, dark-blue shirt, maroon tie with flecks of blue and gold. All brand-new and all—except for the shoes—looking slightly too large, as if the body inside had shrunk somewhat since the purchase.
    He was a man perhaps in his fifties, with strands of bright golden-brown hair plastered across his scalp. (It couldn’t be dyed, could it, who would dye such a scanty crop of hair?) His eyebrows darker, reddish, peaked and bushy. The skin of his face all rather lumpy, thickened like the surface of sour milk.
    Was he ugly? Yes, of course. He was ugly, but so in her opinion were many, many men of around his age. She would not have said, afterwards, that he was remarkably ugly.
    His eyebrows went up, his light-colored, leaky eyes widened, as if to project conviviality. He settled down opposite her. He said, “Not much to see out there.”
    “No.” She lowered her eyes to her book.
    “Ah,” he said, as if things were opening up in a comfortable way. “And how far are you going?”
    “Vancouver.”
    “Me too. All the way across the country. May as well see it all while you’re at it, isn’t that right?”
    “Mm.”
    But he persisted.
    “Did you get on at Toronto too?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s my home, Toronto. I lived there all my life. Your home there too?”
    “No,” said Juliet, looking at her book again and trying hard to prolong the pause. But something—her upbringing, her embarrassment, God knows perhaps her pity, was too strong for her, and she dealt out the name of her hometown, then placed it for him by giving its distance from various larger towns, its position as regarded Lake Huron, Georgian Bay.
    “I’ve got a cousin in Collingwood. That’s nice country, up there. I went up to see her and her family, a couple of times. You travelling on your own? Like me?”
    He kept flapping his hands one over the other.
    “Yes.” No more, she thinks. No more.
    “This is the first time I went on a major trip anywhere. Quite a trip, all on your own.”
    Juliet said nothing.
    “I just saw you there reading your book all by yourself and I thought, maybe she’s all by herself and got a long way to go too, so maybe we could just sort of chum around together?”
    At those words,
chum around,
a cold turbulence rose in Juliet. She understood that he was not trying to pick her up. One of the demoralizing things that sometimes happened was that rather awkward and lonely and unattractive men would make a bald bid for her, implying that she had to be in the same boat as they were. But he wasn’t doing that. He wanted a friend, not a girlfriend. He wanted a
chum.
    Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.
    Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not
popular
)— that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls’ dormitory. Be accommodating to anybody who wants to suck you dry, even if they know nothing about who you are.
    She looked straight at this man and did not smile. He saw her resolve, there was a twitch of alarm in his face.
    “Good book you got there? What’s it about?”
    She was not going to say that