it. “Watch this,” she said to me. “This is how you get a little exercise before getting on a plane.” And she ran quickly up the moving steps, using it like a treadmill, and waving goofily to me from the middle, as if she were Lucille Ball. “Ma’am, that’s the wrong escalator,” said someone on the other side, going up, and then because it was taking Sarah so long to get to the top, someone else came riding up and said, “Do you know you’re going up the down side?” No one understood what she was doing, and so no one smiled.
“Exercise!” exclaimed Sarah. This burst of eccentricity in her I could see was familiar to herself, and unresisted. Such self-permission I don’t believe I’d ever witnessed before in almost anyone of any age. I myself went up the up escalator and watched as, still holding her carry-on bag, her shearling coat lifting behind her, she took the flying gazellelike leap necessary to get off the descending stairs, and which if her timing had been even a moment different could easily have left her maimed. That all this failed to draw the notice of anyone in security was a relief.
“Not too bad for an old gal, eh?” said Sarah, breathlessly grinning and pink in the cheeks. I made a smile of some kind—I have no idea what kind—and we then moved quickly to the elaborately cordoned security line, where a beefy, bloat-faced man took our nail clippers and Sarah’s tweezers. “A girl just can’t groom anymore!” she said to me. I chuckled to please her. She had an anxious energy swimming around her, which laughter—hers, anyone’s—seemed to dispel.
As for me, tension gripped my neck. I couldn’t distinguish my own fears of flying from my general disorientation regarding this sudden trip. The plane was small, only a fifty-seater, hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose. The handles on the emergency exit doors were grizzled, crooked, and beat. Was this good luck? The January day was blue, sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine. Watching from the plane window, I saw dozens of planes negotiating the small grid of runways: a bee dance of near collision and narrow escape. Oh, where, oh, where was the nectar? There was just the busy dance and commerce of a hive. Robert’s word—and true.
Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble. It seemed to me like a ride you’d spend extra tickets on at the state fair. I felt the lift in my gut and the plane tipping side to side, finding itself. For a split second I darkly imagined all the workers at Boeing or wherever this puddle-jumper had been made (Brazil! I would later find out) as carnies, toothless and tattooed. Beneath us the ground shot away—if the world vanished like the wake behind a boat rowing away at dawn, would that really be such a bad thing? The twenty-five minutes of farmland between Troy and Green Bay became a snow-splotched checkerboard of drained olive, khaki, gold-gray, and nut brown—not unlike the roasted bean display, green to french roast, that Starbucks had set up near the register, and which I sometimes found myself staring at as if the displays were glass vats of pistachios or M&M’s or gumballs one might get from a machine if one only had the right change.
The right change . I thought of this phrase now and its meaning for Sarah. Her desire for a baby. Her undertipping of the cabbie. I had yet to see her get ahold of the right change.
Contents may shift during the flight , we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and
“Exercise!” exclaimed Sarah. This burst of eccentricity in her I could see was familiar to herself, and unresisted. Such self-permission I don’t believe I’d ever witnessed before in almost anyone of any age. I myself went up the up escalator and watched as, still holding her carry-on bag, her shearling coat lifting behind her, she took the flying gazellelike leap necessary to get off the descending stairs, and which if her timing had been even a moment different could easily have left her maimed. That all this failed to draw the notice of anyone in security was a relief.
“Not too bad for an old gal, eh?” said Sarah, breathlessly grinning and pink in the cheeks. I made a smile of some kind—I have no idea what kind—and we then moved quickly to the elaborately cordoned security line, where a beefy, bloat-faced man took our nail clippers and Sarah’s tweezers. “A girl just can’t groom anymore!” she said to me. I chuckled to please her. She had an anxious energy swimming around her, which laughter—hers, anyone’s—seemed to dispel.
As for me, tension gripped my neck. I couldn’t distinguish my own fears of flying from my general disorientation regarding this sudden trip. The plane was small, only a fifty-seater, hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose. The handles on the emergency exit doors were grizzled, crooked, and beat. Was this good luck? The January day was blue, sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine. Watching from the plane window, I saw dozens of planes negotiating the small grid of runways: a bee dance of near collision and narrow escape. Oh, where, oh, where was the nectar? There was just the busy dance and commerce of a hive. Robert’s word—and true.
Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble. It seemed to me like a ride you’d spend extra tickets on at the state fair. I felt the lift in my gut and the plane tipping side to side, finding itself. For a split second I darkly imagined all the workers at Boeing or wherever this puddle-jumper had been made (Brazil! I would later find out) as carnies, toothless and tattooed. Beneath us the ground shot away—if the world vanished like the wake behind a boat rowing away at dawn, would that really be such a bad thing? The twenty-five minutes of farmland between Troy and Green Bay became a snow-splotched checkerboard of drained olive, khaki, gold-gray, and nut brown—not unlike the roasted bean display, green to french roast, that Starbucks had set up near the register, and which I sometimes found myself staring at as if the displays were glass vats of pistachios or M&M’s or gumballs one might get from a machine if one only had the right change.
The right change . I thought of this phrase now and its meaning for Sarah. Her desire for a baby. Her undertipping of the cabbie. I had yet to see her get ahold of the right change.
Contents may shift during the flight , we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and
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