My airplane was said to be bound for Denver, but it sat on the runway for a very long time. I had a window seat and could watch other planes lift their noses one after another and plow their way up an invisible road into the sky. I wasn’t impatient. Normally at this point in a flight my heart would pound and my mouth would go to cotton, but today my viscera were still. It didn’t matter especially if we burned in a fiery crash.
I thought maybe the air traffic controllers were trying to decide whether we were worth the trouble; we were only a small, twin-engine plane, incompletely filled. A few seats ahead of me a mother coached her preschooler, who was already crying because he knew his ears would hurt when we went up. This was not the first leg of their trip.
“You swallow, honey. Just remember to swallow, that makes your ears feel better. And yawn.”
“I can’t yawn.”
“Sure you can.” She demonstrated, her voice stretching wide over the yawn: “Think about being real, real sleepy.” People yawned all the way back to the smoking section, so strong was the power of motherly suggestion. I felt overcome with sadness.
The aisle seat of my row was occupied by a teenager, and the empty seat between us was filling up with her overflow paraphernalia. She threw down a hairbrush and a curling iron-whack! whack!-and pulled a substantial mirror out of a makeup case the size of my carry-on luggage. She began applying careful stripes of pastel eye shadow. When she blinked, her eyelids waved like a pair of foreign flags.
“Give it a rest, Brenda,” said the man sitting across the aisle. “You’re not going to see your boyfriend for ten whole days. Why not take this wonderful opportunity to let your face get some fresh air?”
Brenda ignored this advice, staring with deep absorption into her makeup mirror while her parents in B and C beamed her the Evil Eye. The mother was wearing a polka-dot jumpsuit with coordinated polka-dot earrings, all a little too eager-looking even for the first day of vacation. The man had on sunny golf pants that clashed with his disposition. It was hard to ignore them, but Brenda was practiced. She glanced serenely at her left wrist, which bore three separate watches with plastic bands in the same three shades as her eye shadow. Her hair looked as if each strand had been individually lacquered and tortured into position. No matter how you might feel about the aesthetic, you had to admire the effort. Most people put less into their jobs.
“Brenda, honey, please pay attention when your father is talking to you,” said the woman in the polka dots. “Could you please just try? Listening to you and your father bicker for a week and a half is not my idea of a vacation.”
“You should have left me at home,” Brenda said quietly, staring directly ahead. “‘Honey, I think we forgot something. Did I leave the iron on? No, we forgot Brenda.’” She shot me a glance, and I think I smiled a little. I couldn’t help being on Brenda’s side here. In my term as a schoolteacher I’d gained sympathy for adolescence. If I had to take a trip with those two I’d probably paint my face blue for spite.
The plane jerked a little and then began to roll creakily down the runway, gathering speed. We were taking off without a warning announcement of any kind. “Flight attendants prepare for takeoff” came out in a single scrambled burst over the intercom, and the women in pumps and dark suits ran as if from an air-raid siren. I closed my eyes and laid my head back, trying to hold on to my visceral indifference, but it fell right away. My heart had caught up with me. I heard the little boy chattering to his mother and I yawned nervously. So much of life is animal instinct: desire and yawning and fear and the will to live. We left the earth and climbed steeply into the void.
My habit was to count seconds during the lift-off, with my mind on news stories that ran along the lines of “crashed into a meadow only seconds after takeoff…” Somewhere I’d gotten the idea it took seven minutes to get past imminent peril. I counted to sixty, and started over. We’d been airborne for maybe three or four minutes when our pilot’s deep Texan voice came over the intercom. “Folks, I apologize for the delay in taking off today. We had trouble getting one of these cantankerous old engines started up.”
The announcement startled my eyes open. I looked at Brenda, who widened her eyes comically. “Great,” she said.
“It’s nice to know you’re riding the friendly skies in a bucket of bolts.”
Brenda laughed. “Like my boyfriend’s car.”
“I think we’d be safer in your boyfriend’s car.”
“Not in their opinion,” she said, inclining her head across the aisle.
I closed my eyes again. I tried to relax, but couldn’t help listening to every change of pitch in the engine noise. They sounded wrong. Suddenly I confided in Brenda, “I hate to fly. You know? It scares me to death.”
I hadn’t admitted this aloud before, and was surprised to hear it come out so naturally. The truth needs so little rehearsal. Brenda reached over and patted my hand.
“Folks, this is Captain Sampson. I’m sorry to report that we’ve lost that engine again.”
Against my will I glanced out at the wing to see if anything had actually fallen off. My heart beat hard and out of synch with itself and I felt I might die of fright. I let the fingertips of my right hand
