by Susan Choi
“They just put you with a stewardess. I don’t even remember the flights.”
“Lucky you to be traveling with someone experienced,” Elli tells Karen.
At the airport Sarah shows she’s taken this idea of being the experienced traveler to heart. She’s insufferable, explaining things like how Karen shouldn’t lose her boarding pass and how she has to make sure she has her makeup in her carry-on bag because she won’t be able to get to her luggage before they’ve landed in London. Looking back, Karen’s willing to acknowledge it’s possible Sarah was nervous, just as nervous as Karen. It’s possible Sarah’s nervousness took the form of bossy condescension toward her friend, telling her friend the sorts of things even non–English speakers could have figured out for themselves at the airport, and then, once the plane was airborne, telling her friend things about London which she herself only knew on the basis of postcards. “Carnaby Street is where all the punks hang out. There’s a Hard Rock Café and then there’s Piccadilly Circus which is totally cool. I don’t care about Big Ben—it’s just a clock.” The plan was for Liam and Martin to meet them at Heathrow—“Heathrow” was the name of the airport but you never said “Heathrow Airport” only “Heathrow,” experienced Sarah informed inexperienced Karen—and for all of them to stay at a youth hostel, whatever this was, perhaps not even Sarah was sure, and once they were done seeing London they’d take a train down to Bournemouth, the city where Martin and Liam both actually lived. What would happen after that remained obscure.
Karen, seated next to the window, presses her face to the glass. The glass is icy cold, its touch makes her eyes water. She sees a total blackness of night she’s never even imagined, back home where the night sky is always hazed out. The plane vibrates and roars as it flies, which alarms Karen because it seems like it’s working too hard. She will not seek reassurance from Sarah. She won’t give Sarah the satisfaction. Sarah is smoking, listening to her Walkman, pretending to read. Gazing down on them from the future, on Sarah self-consciously holding her book in one hand, cigarette in the other, like a woman three times her age; on Karen chewing off the corner of her thumb while unaware of the red circular mark on her forehead from where she keeps compulsively pressing her forehead against the cold window, my heart goes out to them. Like a ghostly flight attendant floating in the aisle I gaze down at the two teenage girls, at Sarah who doesn’t love Liam, and at Karen who is not loved by Martin, and I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion. It’s sad the same way. But in the moment, staring into the darkness which she can’t keep her eyes off in spite of how frightening it is, Karen feels only resentment of Sarah. Because in the days leading up to their departure, Karen hasn’t heard from Martin at all, not even a jocular postcard. There’s no way he doesn’t realize she’s coming, she’s sent him the details more than once, and Liam knows she’s coming, and Martin knows whatever Liam knows, and Sarah treats her plans with Liam as also being Karen’s plans with Martin, and aren’t they? Karen believes it, because Sarah does. Sarah believes it, because Karen does. Karen has given Sarah no reason not to believe it, she hasn’t mentioned the silence from Martin. Karen has let Sarah have this mistaken impression, and now she hates and even blames Sarah for it, which of course isn’t fair, but Karen is afraid and embarrassed and also their friendship, at this moment of greatest shared risk, has gone wrong. It’s sick, out of whack. In fact it’s been like this for weeks but Karen wanted to think it was Elli who made things feel wrong but now Elli is gone and the wrongness remains. An hour into the flight Karen clambers over Sarah without explanation, crashes into the phone booth–size bathroom and vomits all over the ashtray-size sink. Karen stares at her greenish-gray face in the mirror. It takes her all the paper towels in the holder to clean up the vomit. She stuffs the vomit-covered towels in the toilet, presses the handle, then jumps back with fright as a sucking roar tells her she’s opened a hole in the airplane and her vomit has fallen into the sea. Retrospection streamlines the nine-hour trip and also inflates all the portents of doom. Did sixteen-year-old Karen really know, on the flight, what would happen? Did she and Sarah really sit side by side in cold silence, aware that their friendship had come to an end? Probably not. There were ideas that gave rise to feelings, and feelings that gave rise to ideas, but there was also lots of giggling, smoking, scribbling in journals, and sharing of the Walkman. We almost never know what we know until after we know it. The night rushed past the little round window and when the line of fire showed in the east Sarah pressed close to Karen, her coarsely permed hair tickling Karen’s cheek, and they watched the sun rise until the light was so bright they could no longer look. The last hour of the flight was spent solemnly doing their makeup.
At “Heathrow,” once they’d stood in all the lines and had their passports stamped—that’s a thrill nothing has ever undone, Karen can feel it again to this day, the knowing she’d just made her life forever larger than her mother’s; if she could just avoid falling behind, if she could just keep on moving, she’d always be that much ahead—an alarming crowd shouted and waved signs from behind a long railing. And there was Liam, the telegenic handsomeness he sometimes had under stage lights, or in photos, totally erased by his fish-belly paleness, his pimples, his flailing limbs like a spider’s, and his over-pointy Adam’s apple like a hard-on in his throat. And he was looking left to right frantically and waving a square of cardboard that said SARAH and when he caught sight of the person who went with that name his body froze and his mouth fell open with amazement as if he’d never believed she would come. He looked like a little child who’d just been offered candy. His joy was that unembarrassed and pure. And although the technology for reading minds has not yet been discovered, to quote a witty therapist Karen once knew, Karen was willing to bet, at that moment, that Sarah’s thoughts were so preoccupied with what an unhandsome dork Liam was despite his eyes and bone structure, and with how far he fell short of the romantic ideal she’d tried to believe that he was, and with how little she wanted to let his tongue into her mouth, that she couldn’t even see that pure joy on his face which she’d caused. Which is too bad, because a lot of us never get looked at that way.
In the first confusing moments, going out through the gate in the railing and struggling to get to Liam through the crowd, it wasn’t obvious that Martin wasn’t there. It still seemed possible that he was parking the car, or getting a coffee, or returning from a trip to the men’s room. Liam grabbed Sarah around the waist while jumping up and down so that they banged clumsily into each other, and then Liam got his tongue in Sarah’s mouth until Sarah pushed him off to arm’s length. “Wait, wait! Let me look at you!” she said, as if she wanted to gaze in his face and not get his tongue out of her mouth. That was when Liam caught sight of Karen, it seemed for the first time.
“Oh wow, Karen! You came!” Liam said. “I thought Martin wrote you, about his big part? He got a summer stock part—”
“You mean he’s not here?” Sarah said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“He told me,” Karen said before planning to say it. “I mean, he said he was up for a part. Probably his letter saying he got the part is still on its way to my house.” Karen felt Liam looking at her in confusion. Clearly Martin had gotten the part, if there really was a part, a while ago. But Liam was too stupid to know she was lying. He was even more stupid than Karen.
“It’s so cool you came anyway!” Liam said earnestly. “We’ll all have a great time—”
“But where’s Martin,” Sarah demanded. “Can’t Karen go where he is?”
“He’s touring, Sarah. I can’t just go along on his tour!”
“He really told you he might be on tour? How come you never told me? You came all the way here and he’s not even here?”
“I’m sure my mum won’t mind if Karen stays too,” Liam tried interrupting.
“Your mum?” Sarah said.
It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that momen
t was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring. “I still want to see England,” she said to Sarah angrily. “Stop making such a big deal about it. I have to go to the bathroom.”
In the bathroom Karen threw up again, but since she’d felt too sick to eat on the plane, all she threw up was smelly clear slime. She hadn’t made it into a stall and she could feel the eyes and hear the feet of Heathrow travelers as they steered clear of her while she heaved and gagged over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Did Martin somehow know? She’s always wondered. Despite his obvious defects of character he’s persisted in her psyche as a weird joker-god, malicious and omniscient. Karen finally left the bathroom. Her eyes felt scrubbed with salt. An endless punch was landing in her gut.
Karen, Sarah, and Liam went to the youth hostel where in a room like a prison cell Karen lay in a bottom bunk facing the wall with her suitcase on her feet so she could feel if someone tried to steal it and slept a feverlike sleep while Sarah and Liam did whatever they did, had whatever adventure they had, made whatever postcard pictures in Sarah’s mind part of her life. Later Sarah would be someone who referred to Trafalgar Square and U2 in Cardiff and bangers and mash. Later Sarah would go home with Liam to Bournemouth and meet his mum who watched the BBC and spread Marmite on toast and waited hand and foot on Liam as if he were a king and on Sarah as if she were his new wife the Queen and who seemed to have no idea that Sarah was still in high school, and later Sarah would learn that Liam had been “on the dole” for his entire adult life and was perfectly happy about it, and later Sarah would break up with Liam and go back to London alone and live in the hostel again and somehow get a job at a nightclub as a cocktail waitress, and later Sarah would meet a guy at the nightclub who took her with him on a train to see U2 in Cardiff and whom she lost in a stampede for floor seating in the arena, and later Sarah would stop sending Karen these updates, each one so flashily stamped with different-color silhouettes of the Queen, because Karen never wrote back. Karen never even read the letters until many years later and still isn’t sure why she read them at all. In London Karen lay in the bunk in the prison-cell room in the hostel, and knelt behind the door down the hall labeled “Water Closet” gagging over the toilet, and sat in the grimy vinyl chair in the hostel office while a robotic guy from Germany figured out how to place an international collect call for her. Bunk bed, toilet, telephone. That was London.
Karen and Elli had succeeded in keeping the escapade a secret from her father yet when he answered the phone he wasn’t as surprised or confused as you might think to learn his daughter was in London and that she was sick, broke, and alone. The sound of his voice, unemotional but not exactly cold, drawling a little in a way she’d somehow never noticed before, coming out of the phone into her ear as she sat in the chair in the hostel in London, marks the beginning of Karen’s true adult life, if these things can be marked. Karen hopes they can. She finds that sort of historical clarity helpful. At the time Karen couldn’t have explained her decision to call her father and not her mother but it was part of that beginning of true adult life, paradoxically since it was a decision to make no more decisions, to seek out superior judgment, to acknowledge there was such a thing. Karen’s true adult life began when she recognized she was a child, and remembered that, unlike her mother, her father viewed her as a child as well. Calling her father meant doing things his way, but at least he had a way. At least he had a way, and the will to stick to it. Karen put herself into his hands. All the way back to America, Karen remembered nothing, she kept nothing in mind and called nothing to mind. Now she was an expert traveler: she did it all with a mind that was totally empty. Her father was waiting in the airport for her with his belly buttoned into his work shirt and his big hairy hands gripping each other in front of his crotch. Elli sometimes called Karen’s father “a fucking hick” with great scorn but Karen’s father had command of the resources. That first night he said nothing to her, just let her sleep in the small, sad room that was always reserved for her and Kevin’s rare visits and that wasn’t decorated with anything but their school portraits, every single year but one (Kevin first grade/Karen third grade—Elli had forgotten to order the packets), framed and lined up on the wall. Paneling on the walls and shag on the floor Karen’s father had nailed up and tacked down himself. Military-style bedsheets Karen almost couldn’t wedge herself into, they were tucked on the mattress so tight. Then their strong detergent smell gave her a headache and kept her awake. This kind of thing had never bothered her before. The next day, the trip to the doctor. Back home again Karen’s father tanned her bare butt with his belt the way he’d done when she and Kevin were very little, before the divorce. All of this had been expected and hoped for. Karen’s father let her get back in bed afterward, brought a folding chair in and sat on it, watching his knuckles until Karen stopped crying. Eventually he said, “Who’s the guy.”
“Just some guy who was visiting from England.”
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“And you couldn’t find him when you went over there?”
“No.”
“Any other ideas where to look?”
“No.”
All this was just a formality. Karen’s father didn’t want to deal with the guy any more than Karen did. “The place is an hour drive from here. They have classes to keep you at grade level. And church, obviously. It’s a God-centered organization. They’ll handle everything. And the adoption.”
“Okay,” Karen said.
“It isn’t fancy but it’s safe and it’s clean. You don’t need a hotel.”
“I know,” Karen said.
“It’s not cheap but it shouldn’t be cheap. For the sake of the babies. It’s not a vacation.”
“I understand. I’m sorry,” Karen said, which she was.
In a strange way it was the perfect place to say goodbye to God. At some point, without noticing, Karen had stopped believing in God. So there was something sweet and sentimental for her about living someplace where no one could shut up about him. “Thank you so much, Karen, for the unconditional love you’ve shown in seeking God’s will for the future of your child” was the kind of thing everyone from the math tutor to the caseworker to the janitor said every chance they got. And though she understood this was people euphemistically kissing her ass for not getting an abortion, it was still pleasant to be thanked and praised all the time, as if you were really “God’s gift,” another popular phrase. As her father said it wasn’t “fancy” but in fact it was a lot more like a hotel than anywhere else that Karen ever lived. There were vases of real flowers, and soothing Jesus music, and more vegetables and fruits than Karen had known existed. She had her first kiwi fruit here, for example. Years later—in fact, recently—Karen came to understand that she’d been pampered so much at the home because the home was a farm for growing White Christian Babies Without Health Defects of the type that’s so rare and in such high demand on the adoption market now. Even if she’d realized this then, she wouldn’t have enjoyed the time less.
Exactly a month after Christmas, as everybody from the OB to her caseworker noted, as if Karen had been extra clever this way, Karen had her baby. The baby was female. The feeling-state of labor can’t be kept in mind or called back to mind, although the final slippery escape, like a fish coming out, does turn out to be memorable. When her baby was clean, warm, and dry and all wrapped in a blanket Karen held it and smelled it and thought to herself, I will never remember this smell, and she was right, she has never remembered it. It’s always just out of reach, like a dream. Later on there was a prayerful ceremony in which Karen was praised some more, for her selfless Christianity in having chosen life. Then her baby was taken away to be united with her Forever Family, wh
oever they were.
Two weeks later Karen transferred back to CAPA. She drove her old car to school, arriving early so she could park in the front lot, where there weren’t many spaces. She wanted to avoid everyone that she knew and they parked in the back. It was cold and damp and the dampness made a sort of light haze that in her memory softened the light so that she felt hidden and somehow alone, as if she was actually going to succeed, and get through her first day back at school without having to see anyone. But it was a small school with all the same people every year and there was no way she’d even get through an hour without seeing them all. But even a few minutes without seeing them would have made a difference. There were teachers’ cars in the front lot but it wasn’t half full. Karen’s plan was to sit in the smokers’ courtyard, which opened off the cafeteria through a set of glass doors, so it wasn’t a good place to hide but at least you could see people coming. She knew there was nowhere to hide and the best she could do was to see people coming, but then she pulled open the heavy front door of the school and there was Sarah. Karen and Sarah looked at each other for just long enough. Neither stopped walking, Karen in, and Sarah out, the same door.