by Anne Tyler
“What kind of teensy little problem?” he asked.
“Well, any time you turn it on a red dot shows up on the dashboard.”
He raised his eyebrows. He said, “You’ve been driving all around with the idiot light lit?”
“The idiot…?” she said, and Willa tensed, worrying that she had taken it the wrong way. But then she said, “Oh. Well, yes, I suppose I have been.”
“And you didn’t think to get it looked at?”
“I know! I’m awful,” she said gaily. “I’m so hopeless with mechanical things.” And she made a silly-me face at Willa and Elaine.
“Can you believe her?” their father asked them. But he seemed amused, more than anything. From his expression, he might have been asking, “Don’t you think she’s wonderful?”
Elaine was too busy spreading jam on her toast to notice. Willa just looked at him and said nothing.
Their mother peered into the cream pitcher and shook it a little, and then she got up and carried it out to the kitchen. Elaine, meanwhile, started talking again about Dommie Marconi’s rabbit, except now she was calling it a bunny. “Bunnies are real quiet and Dommie says they don’t need walking,” she said. “Can we get a bunny, Pop? Please?”
But he was studying Willa. He said, “Willa, honey? Are you still mad at me?”
She shrugged.
“I didn’t quite understand about last night,” he said. “What was that? Can we talk about it?”
His voice was meek but pushy, Willa thought, and she didn’t feel like answering him, but she knew he would keep on pressing her until she did. So she shrugged again and said, “I was just overtired, I guess.”
“Oh,” he said.
That seemed to satisfy him. At least, he didn’t ask anything more.
In the silence that followed, Willa’s eyes met her sister’s, and the two of them exchanged a long, stunned, stricken gaze.
1977
WILLA’S COLLEGE had a jitney that made several runs to the airport before any major holiday. She herself had never taken it—plane travel was expensive, and she went home by Greyhound bus if she went at all—but in the spring of her junior year her boyfriend suggested that he come meet her family over Easter weekend, and it was his idea they should fly. What else, he asked: ride sitting up on a bus all night only to do the same thing going back again two days later? Well, yes, that was what she would have done. But she didn’t argue.
Derek paid for her ticket out of his monthly allowance, but Willa told her parents he had happened upon it for nothing in a buy-one-get-one-free deal. Heaven only knew if there were such deals, but her parents weren’t used to flying themselves and they took her word for it.
In the jitney he and she were surrounded by friends, mostly his, and they couldn’t carry on much of a conversation. Derek was president of the senior class and captain of the tennis team; he had a warm, friendly way about him that everybody liked. So there was a lot of backslapping and wisecracking and calling from seat to seat, while Willa held her purse in both hands and looked on, smiling. She had dressed up for the plane, which she would not have done for the bus. She wore a powder-blue wool suit and her hair was smoothed into a bun. (Derek said she was the prettiest girl in the school when she did her hair that way.) He, on the other hand, was in jeans and his usual tan corduroy blazer, because he came from California and flying was not such a big deal to him. But he was so square-jawed and clean-cut, a full head taller than anyone else—and two heads taller than Willa—and with his short blond hair he could not have looked sloppy if he’d tried, Willa believed.
Kinney College was in northern Illinois, surrounded by farmlands as flat as pool tables, and on this April afternoon the few trees they passed were still stark and bare. At home it would be spring already. The Lenten roses had come and gone, her mother had written; they always finished up before Easter. Derek was going to like seeing some green for once. He couldn’t get over the long midwestern winters.
At the airport their friends split off to go to their different airlines, and Willa and Derek were finally on their own. She was glad he was there to take care of things. She wouldn’t have known what to do at the metal detector or how to check her luggage. When everything had been seen to, he shepherded her to the waiting area and settled her in a plastic chair, and then he went off to buy soft drinks. She had the feeling while he was gone that she was all alone on the planet. The passengers sitting around her seemed not quite real, and she was conscious of herself from outside, from a distance—her back very straight, her patent-leather pumps set primly together, her eyes wide and wary. The sight of Derek heading toward her finally, with a paper cup in each hand, filled her with relief.
“What do you think I should call your folks?” he asked as he plopped down next to her and passed her a cup. “Mr. and Mrs. Drake? Or use their first names?”
“Oh, Mr. and Mrs., at the start,” she said. She didn’t even have to consider. Her parents would be horrified if a young person acted so free and easy with them. Or her mother would, at least. “After they get to know you, though,” she said, “they might suggest you use their first names.”
“What are their first names?”
For some reason, she hesitated. Maybe she worried he would ignore her advice and start right off using them. But then she said, “Melvin and Alice.”
“Hi there, Melvin and Alice!” he said. He put on a resonant, deliberately smarmy-sounding voice that made her laugh. “May I please have your daughter’s hand in marriage?”
Willa stopped laughing. She couldn’t tell if he was serious.
“Too soon?” he asked her. He set an arm around her shoulders and looked into her face. “Too sudden? Did I surprise you?”
“Well…”
“It must have crossed your mind, Willa. I’m in love with you. I’ve wanted to marry you from the day I first laid eyes on you.”
His face was so close to hers that she could see the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose, as fine as grains of sand. His freckles rescued him from handsomeness, she always felt. They made her trust him. Without a second thought she had turned her back on those overconfident football players pressing sweet mixed drinks on her; she had covered sheets of notebook paper with “Willa MacIntyre” and “Mrs. Derek MacIntyre,” and dreamed of being surprised one night with a diamond engagement ring. They could be engaged throughout her senior year, she figured, and marry the summer after she graduated.
But “I can’t imagine just going off and leaving you behind when I start my job,” he was saying. “I need to have you with me.”
Willa said, “What…?” Then she said, “You’re starting your job this June, though.”
“Right.”
“You want to get married in two months?”
“Or it could be three, if you need more time to plan the wedding,” he said.
“You mean before I finish school?”
“You can finish in California.”
“But at Kinney I have a full scholarship!”
“So? You could get a scholarship in California, too. With those grades of yours? Any place would be dying to have you.”
She didn’t bother telling him that scholarships were not that easy to arrange. Instead she said, “And Dr. Brogan.”
“What about him?”
“He’s got a whole plan for me, Derek. Next fall I’m taking his honors course in linguistic anthropology.”
“You think they don’t teach foreign languages in San Diego?” he asked.
“No, I just—”
“Willa,” he said, “do you not want to marry me?”
“Oh, I do, but—”
He took his arm away and slumped back in his chair. “I messed up, didn’t I,” he said. “I should have made you a formal proposal.”
“It isn’t that! I rea
lly do want to marry you, Derek; honest. But couldn’t we just, maybe, get engaged for now?”
“Sure,” he said.
This wasn’t very satisfying. She studied his face, which gave nothing away. “Are you mad at me?” she asked him.
“No.”
“I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad in the least,” he said, “because I’m counting on changing your mind by and by.”
“Derek—”
“So! I call your parents Mr. and Mrs. I do not use their first names until they tell me to. And how about your sister? Is she ‘Miss Drake’?”
“No, silly,” Willa said, forcing a laugh. “She’s Elaine.”
“Or maybe Miss Elaine,” he said consideringly. “Miss Elaine and Miss Willa, the two spinster sisters of Lark City, Pennsylvania.”
Willa gave him a playful slap on the knee. But she couldn’t help feeling that something unsettled still hung in the air between them.
* * *
—
In the magazine ads for airlines, stewardesses wore trim skirts with matching tailored jackets and military-looking hats. But the young woman who greeted Willa and Derek when they stepped onto the plane wore a boxy pantsuit—pantsuit!—and no hat at all. And the seats were arranged not in twos but in threes, which made them seem less luxurious. Willa and Derek had a window seat and a middle seat. Derek stood back to let her in next to the window, but she said, “Oh, I’ll take the middle,” because she needed less room. She settled in after he did and fastened her seat belt and then tentatively pressed the button to tilt herself farther back, till Derek told her she shouldn’t do that until they were in the air.
Even if it wasn’t as glamorous as she had imagined, she was still excited. The interior of the plane had an unfamiliar plastic smell, and the sounds seemed different, too. Some sort of sealed-off, plugged-up silence lay just beneath the voices of the other passengers.
The man who dropped into the seat on her right was gaunt and whiskery, and he wore a black-and-red lumber jacket over threadbare jeans. She decided against saying hello. She merely smiled at him with her mouth closed, but he was figuring out his seat belt and might not have noticed.
When they took off she was reading the safety instructions, and she folded them immediately and returned them to her seat-back pocket. It was lucky she did, because their trip down the runway seemed very long and bumpy. (Willa tended to get carsick if she read in a moving vehicle.) After a while she started wondering: Were they not ever going to leave the ground? Was the pilot trying to lift off but failing? She shifted her eyes from the airport buildings outside the window to Derek, who was reading the Sports Illustrated he had brought along. He seemed relaxed, so she decided not to worry. And just then she felt a shift of some kind and the plane tipped upward. She saw the scenery dropping away below them, but they couldn’t be actually flying, could they? It didn’t feel like flying. She still felt earthbound; she was still weighing down her seat cushion. Somehow she had expected more of a floating sensation. And once they had leveled off it was even more disappointing, because any sense of motion gradually ceased. They could be just sitting on the ground with the engines roaring, except that the scenery had vanished.
The stewardess came to stand near them in the aisle and demonstrate the safety equipment, including an inflatable life vest. Life vest! For what? Nobody watched except Willa and the whiskery man beside her. Willa made sure to keep a rapt expression on her face so the stewardess wouldn’t feel ignored.
Then a different stewardess wheeled a cart down the aisle and offered people free drinks. Derek ordered a Coke but Willa said, “Nothing, thanks,” because she would feel shy about asking her seatmate to let her out if she needed to use the bathroom. He didn’t take anything, either, just shook his head and went on staring glumly straight in front of him.
She told Derek, “I wish we were on a flight where they gave us a meal.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “Believe me.”
“I wanted one of those teeny saltshakers like my roommate got on her trip to New York.”
He gave her an indulgent smile and went back to his magazine.
Willa had brought a paperback, but she didn’t think she could concentrate so she let it stay in her purse. She resumed looking out the window. Thin shreds of clouds passed like wisps of cigarette smoke. She tried to convince herself that these were the pillowy puffs she used to imagine bouncing on when she was a little girl, but they didn’t seem related. Judy Collins came into her head, singing “Both Sides Now.” All at once the lyrics seemed more meaningful.
Willa glanced at Derek again. He was still absorbed in his reading. His face in repose was so serene that it seemed childlike, with his lashes casting a shadow on his velvety cheek. So this was the person she was going to end up marrying! After all her years of wondering. She had to keep trying the notion out, the way she would try out her image in the mirror after she got a new hairdo. Each time she returned to it, she felt a thrill all over again. And yet…Nobody had told her that you could want to marry a person but still have conflicting thoughts about him. (She was sometimes a little put off by his single-minded interest in sports, for instance. Also he had a bit of a temper and twice to her knowledge had got into a shoving match with guys at football games.) Well, but of course you could have such thoughts. This wasn’t a Hollywood movie.
Something nudged hard into her right side, and she drew away, but the nudging object followed her. She looked over at the stranger. “Keep your eyes straight ahead,” he muttered. He was staring straight ahead himself, and his lips were barely moving. Whatever was pressing into her side went on pressing, no matter how she shrank from it.
She blinked and focused on the seat back in front of her.
“This is a gun,” he said quietly, “and it’s loaded. Move and I shoot. You’re not allowed out of your seat, and neither is he.”
In a thin, whimpery voice that didn’t sound like her own, Willa asked, “How am I going to explain to him that he can’t get out of his seat?”
Derek said “Huh?” and looked over at her.
The gun jabbed her harder. She said, “I didn’t say anything,” and Derek returned to his magazine.
A few minutes later the stewardess came down the aisle again. This time she was carrying a plastic bag. “Trash? Any trash?” she asked at each row, and she gave the bag a shake. Willa looked up into the stewardess’s face when she reached them and sent her a silent message: Please. Please. “Trash?” the woman said, shaking her bag. Without taking his eyes from his magazine, Derek held his empty cup out, and Willa raised a hand to pass it along but the gun jabbed her again. She gasped aloud, but Derek just extended his cup slightly farther and the stewardess took it from him and continued on down the aisle.
Willa could see that the stranger’s right arm was folded across his stomach, but his gun was concealed by Willa’s armrest. Her mind was racing. She had heard that phrase often, “mind was racing,” without realizing what it would actually feel like—the skittery, frantic speed of her thoughts. Should she scream? Poke him with her elbow? Jump out of her seat? But then he might shoot Derek.
Derek said, without looking up from his magazine, “My ears are popping; are yours?”
“What?”
“You know to swallow, right?”
“What?”
The jab of the gun was vicious this time, painful and insistent, and she said, “Oh!”
Derek glanced over at her. Then he closed his magazine, leaving a finger inside as a marker, and undid his seat belt and stood up. “Trade places with me,” he said.
Willa gazed up at him imploringly.
“Come on. Move.”
She fumbled for her seat belt. She undid the buckle, holding her breath, and then she clutched her purse and sat forward, wincing as she braced for the slam o
f the bullet. Nothing happened. Derek took her arm to help her to a standing position and guide her past him to the window, after which he settled in the middle seat and opened his magazine again.
At first she was so tense that her spine didn’t touch her seat back. She was wondering when Derek would feel the gun nosing his ribs. All he did, though, was turn a page, and when she dared to slide her eyes past him she saw that the stranger’s hands were resting loosely on his knees now, and there was nothing in them.
She sat back. She was shaking. She turned her face toward the window, but she was conscious only of Derek’s thigh near her own thigh, and his corduroy sleeve rasping her own sleeve each time he turned another page. She felt deeply grateful for his certainty—his matter-of-fact conviction that he could handle any of the many, many dangers in the universe.
* * *
—
She had been anxious about their landing, back in what seemed that long-ago time before she’d really had something to be anxious about, but in fact she noticed only the mildest bump, followed by a long, hard pulling-back sensation. Then a voice came over the loudspeaker welcoming them and thanking them and hoping to see them again. Outside her window, Willa could see pale lavender mountains far in the distance.
The whiskery man was the first to stand up and the first to step into the aisle, and while Willa and Derek were waiting their turn to step into the aisle themselves he was already pushing past the people ahead of him and making his way to the front of the plane. As soon as he was safely out of hearing, Willa touched Derek’s elbow and asked, “Did you know what he was up to?”
“What who was up to?” Derek asked, turning slightly to look at her.
“That man sitting next to us,” she said, and she tipped her head in the man’s direction. He was sidling past a fat woman now. All they could see of him was his scrawny black-and-red back, and then not even that. “He was pointing a gun at me.”