Once Girl sat next to an Asian man, almost old enough to be her father. It was on the way home from Alaska the winter that Girl was ten. Girl and Brother often went to Alaska separately in the winter to have “alone time” with their father. The stranger spent hours coloring with Girl in her coloring books. Girl knew Mother wouldn’t think it was appropriate for a grown-up to want to play with her so much, but Girl didn’t know what to do—they were assigned seats next to each other, and Girl was bored.
“What’s your name?” Girl asked, but the man wouldn’t answer. He just kept coloring.
“Here,” he said, “take this to the bathroom.” He had written something that looked like a foreign language in her coloring book, maybe Chinese. “Hold it up to the mirror, then you will see my name.”
Girl took the book to the tiny plane bathroom. She never locked the door, because more than anything Girl was really afraid of getting locked in small places. If she didn’t lock the door, though, the light wouldn’t turn on, so in order to see the book Girl held the door open just a tiny bit with her foot. Girl saw his name in the reflection clear as a bell: NICHOLAS. Girl went back to her seat, impressed that he could write backward, but a little scared. Grown-ups shouldn’t be so tricky about their names.
Girl slept the rest of the flight, and Nicholas woke her up only when they landed. Girl looked around for her blue knit hat that said Go Kiss a Moose, a present from her father that Girl used to carry her Smurf figurine collection. There was nothing Girl loved more than the Smurfs. She had gotten a few new ones on her trip, so now Girl had eight of the two-inch-tall, blue, plastic creatures. Girl had put her hat full of Smurfs under the seat in front of her next to her carry-on—she was sure she had—but it was gone. There was nowhere else for it to be, and the stranger helped her look for a minute but he wasn’t happy or friendly anymore. “It’s time to leave the plane,” he said sternly. Girl knew he had taken them. She didn’t think he wanted to play with them—Girl figured he wanted to use them to make friends with another child. Girl hated him and she wanted her Smurfs and her new hat but everyone was filing off the plane, and who would believe a grown-up would want a hat full of Smurfs anyway?
notes from the fourth wall: fragments on flying
on the planes and in the airports in between, matt and i belonged to no one
I feel the shift in my thighs first, long before the pilot announces that we have begun our descent. Right above my knee the pressure changes as the angle tilts slightly forward. Now my weight is balanced between my thighs and the top of my back, and gravity pulls at the balls of my feet, but not the heels. I fly like other people take the bus. And this fall I have been flying every week. Sundays I leave Cleveland for Florida. Wednesdays I leave Key West to return to Ohio. October, November, half of December, and here it is January and I’m on a plane. The pressurized cabin is the same air I breathed in childhood.
When I smell jet fuel, there is a commotion inside my rib cage, soaring up, up, up. If happiness were visible, it would gush from the top of my head like those mega-sprinklers they advertised on TV in the 1980s. As a child, airports and airplanes were a liminal space between parents. As an adult, the encapsulated time in flight is a respite from emails, text messages, housework, and long lists of things I should be doing but don’t want to do. It’s a release from guilt and the privilege of being alone with my thoughts and books. The freeze-time is as prized as the destination.
Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska was 4,486 miles: 1,047 miles to Chicago, 1,976 miles to Seattle, 1,463 miles to Anchorage. Of course, we always had layovers at the airports in between.
When I was a child, we didn’t have to take off our coats and boots to go through security—we just emptied our pockets, and made sure the straps of our carry-ons didn’t snag as they went through the X-ray. We scorned grown-ups who made the machine beep and did that cartoonish “D’oh!” face as they slapped their back pockets and removed their wallets and coins. We never made the machine beep. Now security requires tiny containers of liquids kept in a Ziploc baggie, no shoes, no belt, no coat, take your laptop out of your bag, stand with your hands above your head like you’re freeze-frame in a safety dance while the scanner moves around you. I still have no patience for people who make the machine beep.
As an adult, I mostly fly south. My nostalgic
