Payback

didn’t know what you’d do in such circumstances until you were actually in them. “Like combat,” Rick told her. “In Iraq we all used to try to figure out what we’d do if this or that happened, but all your preconceived notions — well, things change, Angie.”

Angela had remained shaken by the argument, but friends told her that the fact she and Rick had postponed further “discussion” until they’d had time to reflect on each other’s viewpoint was a good sign. Marriage was compromise — life was tough enough with what you had to deal with, potential hijackers and terrorists included. Leave the what if’s in your life out on the street and get busy, get the best home in a nice suburb — tree-lined — good medical coverage, and go on doing what you had to do.

Right now, Angela was having second thoughts about having any kids. The noise from the excited horde of two hundred young “jet-setters,” as the head teacher referred to his delighted charges, was ear-throbbing. Several of the first-class passengers were not amused.

“I pay for first class and this is what I get?” asked an elderly, short, balding passenger in 10A. “I should go deaf for buying a ticket?”

“Motrin time,” joshed his wife, whose bulk dwarfed him.

“They’ll settle down,” a petite, curvaceous blond — and transparently unconvinced — flight attendant assured him.

“No,” the man replied, looking up at her. “Kids never give up. They keep going and going and going till you’re dead.”

“He’s right,” enjoined his wife, her earlier jocularity giving way to spousal support. “It’s true, young lady,” she told the blond flight attendant. “You worry about them when they’re born, when they go to school, when they finish school, when they get married. You never stop worrying.”

“I’m not worried!” said the husband, turning to her. “I’m mad. I save all my life for London, to see my brother — to go first class to see my brother — and I’m assaulted by this noise. I live in New York — I haven’t had enough noise already? I should get more?”

“I’ll have a word with the teachers, sir,” the attendant told him. “I’m sure they’ll calm down.”

“Teachers?” He turned back to his wife. “What do they teach them? They should teach them manners, that’s what they should teach them.” He looked across the aisle at Agent Angela Medved. “Am I right?”

Angela smiled, a strictly by-the-book sky marshal, her smile apolitical, friendly but strictly “no comment.” The old complainant in first class had a point, but his tone was embarrassing several of the other passengers, including the Secretary of Education, Norma Peale, the first African-American woman to hold the post. These people seated in the new condensed foam seat/bed recliners were habitual first-class flyers and for some, if not the Secretary herself, such a plebeian outburst was as unsavory as observing someone trying to sneak into their more plush and sedate domain from coach class. First class was occupying itself with magazines and newspapers, this privileged group feigning unawareness of the FASTEN SEAT BELTS signs and the chief steward’s announcement to make sure all seats were in the upright position, hand luggage properly stowed, et cetera. It was a purposely nonchalant contrast to the hyperactivity and noise from coach and that of the loud, complaining man from Brooklyn and his large wife.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” announced the tour leader, a young principal of a grade school in Dayton, Ohio, who was standing in front of the coach section’s screen and holding the intercom mike while patting the air for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he repeated to the students, “we can’t take off until you’re quiet!”

A chorus of “Shhs” hissed through coach’s 220 maroon-upholstered seats. The image of the cheery-faced, thirty-year-old principal in a short-sleeved blue polo shirt and casual tan trousers, his matching blue Gap jacket draped loosely over the back of his seat, was in marked contrast to the more formally attired airline personnel. “That’s better,” said the principal. “Now, whether you’ve flown before or not, you need to watch the screen in the back of the seat in front of you in a moment.”

“Where else would they look?” a colleague nearby joked with his fellow teacher.

“You’d be surprised,” the teacher laughed, adopting the same holiday spirit.

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Now,” continued the principal, cabin lights intensifying as the sun disappeared below the skyscrapers of New York, “for those of you who’ve not flown before, the first thing we want you all to know is that your arms might get tired from flapping them!”

“Sheesh,” said one of the other teachers, but the kids loved it. What normally would have been greeted by them with hoots of “Ha-ha!” derision was now accorded a sprinkle of laughter and giggles, even by the would-be sophisticated youngsters excited by their anticipation of the seven-hour flight to London, of seeing the changing of the guard, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament, where, one teacher had told them, Britain had made the decision to be the first to stand up and fight side by side with the Americans against Saddam Insane.

“Thank you, thank you,” said the principal, bowing to the smattering of applause for his weak attempt at humor. “Second thing for those who haven’t flown before is not to be freaked out by the noise of the plane as we taxi down the runway, and the thump of the undercarriage, that is, the wheels, as they’re brought up.” He leaned forward, reading the name of a ten-year-old fifth-grade student, the beautiful contrast between her white teeth and ebony skin set off by a cherry-red blouse, and asked, “Emily, what’s another word for bringing up the wheels, pulling them in?”

“Re—,” she began softly, tentatively, “—tracting.”

“Retracting! Excellent, Emily. Everyone hear that? Retracting.”

The principal heard the word “penis,” followed by raucous laughter from a gaggle of seventh-grade boys, huddling several rows back, in front of Michael O’Shea, his assigned flight buddy, Tony Rivella from Astoria, Oregon, and the chaperone of the seventh graders, Susan Li.

“Okay, guys,” the principal told the seventh graders, “behave yourselves or you get to carry all the girls’ luggage.” There was more laughter, from the girls, the lights dimmed against the wavy painted turquoise interior, and the Boeing Dreamliner began its full-power run.

“You know, miss,” Michael O’Shea informed Susan excitedly, “they call this new plane ‘the Porpoise.’ You know why?”

“Yeah,” cut in Tony. “ ’Cause it’s supposed to look like one of them smiling fish.”

“Yes,” said Susan Li, deciding that this wasn’t the time to correct Tony Rivella’s grammar. “And the way they’ve painted the inside of the fuselage, that’s the body of the plane we’re in, looks so graceful, like a porpoise.”

“They say,” said Michael O’Shea, his eyes sparkling with anticipation, “that this Dreamliner can reach point eight five Mach.”

“That’s not fast,” said Tony. “Not even the speed of sound. This crate’s no faster’n a jumbo.”

Michael was stymied for a second, and Susan Li felt sorry for him. The gap of a missing tooth in his upper row from a recent Rollerblade argument with a brick wall, together with his crestfallen look, evoked the mother in her — she had a boy of her own — and she wanted to embrace him, hold him. But these days, no way. You didn’t dare touch a child. “I didn’t know that, Michael,” she said instead. “Point eight five Mach. It sounds pretty fast to me.”

Michael, rallied by her response, felt emboldened enough to parry Tony’s disdain further by adding, “Yeah, and the Dreamliner only needs two engines. Old jumbos used to need four.”

“So,” retorted Tony, “what if one catches fire?”

“Tony!” Susan Li cut in. “Don’t say such things.”

Michael O’Shea wouldn’t be outdone. “My dad says the airlines have ordered, like, a hundred and fifty Dreamliners and that a Dreamliner can fly on one engine and—”

“You’d crash and burn, man!”

“You two!” Susan scolded them, “stop arguing and watch your monitors.”

Tony’s aggressive retort to Michael, who was an inherently shy boy, upset Susan Li more than she cared to show. She hated any kind of petty one-upmanship because it reminded her of the mean-minded verbal bullying she had been forced to endure as a Taiwanese immigrant to the U.S. — the daily gauntlet of “slant eyes” and other racial epithets she had run into every day. The worst of such abuse, she knew, was that you never knew when it would be unleashed against you. You’d just start to feel safe, accepted by your peers, when out of the blue “Chink!”