“Where’re you from?” an untidy boy around her age asked Girl. His hair was rumpled brown and his face was splattered with freckles.
“Rochester, New York,” she said. Her brother ignored the new child and pulled out a book.
“I’m from Minneapolis but I’m going to Atlanta! That’s in Georgia,” he bragged.
“We’re going to Anchorage,” Girl answered, wishing he would go away.
“Yeah, well, I’m going almost a thousand miles!”
“Yeah? Well, we’re going over three thousand.” The Atlanta boy spit on the carpet and walked away. Girl didn’t want to take her Barbies out to play with on the carpet now, so she dug through her carry-on for a book. The chairs were too close to the wall to allow her to lean back on two legs, so instead Girl curled forward, her book on her lap.
None of the other kids approached the children. Girl and Brother weren’t the kind of kids that made friends easily anyway. Brother wore glasses and Girl’s hair was never well-combed, and their pants were always a few inches too short for their long, skinny legs. Girl and Brother were kids who read books and played by themselves, not kids who cheered for sports teams and made friends with strangers. They didn’t particularly like other children or want them around. It was better when it was just Girl and Brother.
They had two or three flights to get from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, depending on whether Father had gotten the children a direct flight from Chicago or if they had to first go to Seattle. One and a half hours to Chicago, then a layover for an hour or two; four hours to Seattle, then another layover; three more hours up to Anchorage. It was around eleven or twelve hours altogether, but inside the aluminum tube of the jet, time seemed to dissolve into the static of the engines. Bing! Girl pushed the flight attendant call button to ask how much longer the flight would be. The attendants often stopped answering, so Girl and Brother pushed the button over and over until they got a response. Bing! Bing! Bing! Once a flight attendant gave Girl her watch to hold for the entire flight so she’d stop binging the call button. The watch was slender gold with a tiny metal buckle—nicer than Mother’s silver Timex with the expandable, accordion-like band. Soda pop was free and the children never got to drink it at home, so they’d ring the bell for pop, and more pop, and more peanuts, even though the nuts were honey-roasted and tasted gross. Back then a meal was served on the long flights, too, which was always some sort of inedible meat, but it came with a cookie or dessert of some sort. Brother would race his Matchbox cars down the aisles, and they’d fight and call the stewardess to referee.
There was a train that ran beneath the Seattle-Tacoma airport, and Brother and Girl had to ride it between terminals when they changed planes. Another Unaccompanied Minor told Girl about the passenger that fell on the tracks and was run over by the train. They used sawdust to soak up the blood. Girl thought a lot about this every time they rode the train. It was nearly impossible for passengers to gain access to the tracks. The train was hermetically sealed in its tube, with automatic sliding doors and whatnot. A passenger would have to work very hard to wind up on the tracks and get run over by a train and require someone to soak up their blood with sawdust. It could not have been accidental.
Girl didn’t know why they used sawdust to soak up blood but it seemed feasible. She often saw sawdust in the tunnels of the SEA-TAC subway. What else could it be for? The subway car smelled of oil and unwashed hands, and the carpet was always stained from too many feet.
Brother was nine or ten the year they started flying unaccompanied, and travel transformed him from the family’s problem child to the leader. Brother was not put off by blood-soaked sawdust or changing terminals all alone in strange airports or reading diagrams of the subway stops. They took the train—Girl looking suspiciously out the window, keeping an eye out for sawdust and wondering how someone could get inside the tunnel to get hit by a train anyway—and Brother in his glasses, thinking about being capable or something.
Brother wasn’t made anxious by airports or maps or directions to places they had never been. Girl followed him because she had to. She certainly couldn’t navigate strange places and large airports on her own.
At Mother’s house Brother was always in trouble for things he did or did not do: he did not do his homework, he went to the grocery store after school and someone stole his shoes, he did not do his chores, and he once asked a police officer to give him a ride home when a group of boys were chasing him. Stepmother’s conclusion: Brother was not tough enough and he did not work hard enough and therefore he was a little weenie, and did not deserve respect. It was only Stepmother who thought so, but she was the one who hit the hardest.
Brother’s competence—no, his superiority—started when they boarded that first plane in Rochester and it grew with each connecting flight. By Seattle, he was the one in charge. Girl could not change planes without him.
When they reached their gate, Girl and Brother sat alone on the floor, digging through their suitcases for toys and candy. An adult interrupted them with a grunt and handed Girl a card that read: I am deaf. I am selling these sign language cards to support myself and live independently. Girl didn’t know how to say no, so she bought a card with line drawings for the alphabet. She and Brother studied it during the long layover until they could finger-spell pretty fluently, and they used it as their secret language well into high school.
The Anchorage airport was filled with large taxidermied animals: a mountain goat, a Kodiak bear, maybe an eagle. The carpet was modern and in shades of orange and brown.
Father kept dog biscuits in his pocket for his husky and always offered them to the children as a snack when he picked them up. Girl ate them. Brother did not. The dog bones tasted like grit and shame and nothing. At Father’s house, Brother was the son, and Girl lived in his shadow.
Girl always figured that she’d grow up to be a stewardess. She didn’t want to, but she flew so much that it seemed like she was already training for it. She thought it was a boring job, and Stepmother said it was for people who weren’t smart enough to go to college, but stewardesses got to fly everywhere, and in spite of the boredom, Girl liked to fly. The smell of jet fuel at the airport would make her smile even if she wasn’t happy. Girl loved the shiny airport halls filled with rushing people going places, and the feeling that Girl was one of the people going somewhere, too. She never thought about being a pilot. Girl had taken the controls in her dad’s two-seater plane plenty of times, so she knew flying itself wasn’t hard, but all those instruments looked complicated. Girl didn’t want to have to think that much and she had no sense of direction and maps made her so frustrated she cried. There were no street signs in the sky to tell pilots where to go. Stewardess, then, was probably going to be her lot in life.
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 sh
ouldn’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 airports from childhood—Chicago, Seattle, Anchorage—have been replaced by Fort Meyers, Miami, and Atlanta. I know each one’s quirks: where to eat, where to smoke, where to shop. I never take the train in Atlanta because I am always trying to lose weight. I can cross three terminals in under fifteen minutes if I wear the proper shoes, and if other travelers heed the loudspeaker that advises us to stand right, walk left on the escalators and conveyor belts. If I have to take the train, I test my balance by standing without holding on, leaning into the acceleration, embarrassed if I do that off-balanced wobble step that shows how out of practice I am.
Airplane orange juice bears little resemblance to real orange juice. When I pull back the hermetically sealed foil, it makes a light hiss that sounds vaguely carbonated. It’s syrupy and sour, but I drink it anyway, hoping the vitamin C will ward off the germs of my fellow passengers. As a child, I ordered it over and over, hoping it would be the same sweet drink we were only allowed on special occasions, and the half-full cup of disappointment slid around on my tray until it ended in my lap.
I have learned to wear white headphones on the plane, from the moment I take my seat until the moment I exit the plane. Most of the time they aren’t connected to anything, but they stop my seat mates from treating the airplane as a flying confessional. I’ve heard about how ballroom dancing saved one man’s marriage. I’ve been told about a job interview that went poorly and the man’s fear that this wife would leave him if he didn’t find employment soon. It was after one man tried to recruit me for a blackmail scheme that I stopped talking to people on planes. This passenger wanted me to find an older, married man to buy me a drink in a hotel bar when we landed, and then invite him up to my room. My fellow passenger would snap photos, which would be “good for $5,000, usually.” He wound up next to me on the shuttle bus to the car rental pavilion. “Lillibridge,” he said, looking at my luggage tag. “I’m going to look you up later.” After that, I flipped over my luggage ID so that only the words “see reverse for info” were visible, and I stopped talking to strangers on planes.
After my divorce, I flew with my sons from Ohio to Florida to visit my parents. I pushed one toddler in a stroller, carry-on bags hanging off the handles. I wore the baby in a sling across my chest and a backpack diaper bag on my back. I told my three-year-old that TSA was looking for hamsters when we went through security—he was too young to have to worry about bombs and other implements of terror. My son stood there looking confused, trying to figure out why so many people were smuggling rodents, but he knew if he had been given the opportunity to bring his guinea pig he certainly would have. I packed toy surprises and snacks for my children, just like my mother did for me years ago. The children and I flew every year, and gradually they grew into two boys that could walk on their own holding my hands, then eventually into two boys who could carry their own luggage. They are quiet and polite and never complain about delays, and even as infants they did not scream in flight. They, too, love the transitional space of airports, the timeless feel of encapsulated air travel. But on the planes and in the airports in between, they always belong to someone—they belong to me.
loon landing
Father and #Four bought an old hunting camp on Lake Louise, a four-hour drive from Anchorage, and named it Loon Landing. There were four little log cabins, each with its own wood-burning stove, because there was no heat or electricity. Outside each cabin was a paint bucket with a toilet seat on top—there was no running water, either. One cabin was set apart on its own, and Father rented it out to fellow campers. The other three cabins sat all in a row, halfway down the hill, overlooking the lake. #Four and Father shared the Taylor cabin, which had the biggest stove and shelves of canned and dehydrated food. There was a counter that ran the length of one wall, and that was where everyone ate. Next to the Taylor cabin was the Lillibridge cabin—Father had carved signs for each cabin out of wood, named for all the family’s last names: #Four’s name was Taylor; Father, Juli, Girl, and Brother were all Lillibridges, and #Four’s children shared the surname King. Girl and Brother shared the Lillibridge cabin, sleeping on metal cots. Father hung posters over their beds—golden retriever puppies on Girl’s side, Battlestar Galactica on Brother’s. #Four covered a small table with contact paper so the children had a place to draw. The contact paper had giraffes and zoo animals all colored orange and yellow and brown. Father locked Girl and Brother in at night, but he left a bag of granola mix for the morning, and a pee bucket in the corner, which was an improvement over the jar.
The third cabin was the King cabin, where Juli and their stepsister, Anne, stayed. Of their three stepsisters, only Anne came to Alaska regularly. Jane and Sara were older, and often stayed home with their father in Toronto, with whom they lived full-time. None of #Four’s children lived with her. Juli and Anne were both the same age—fifteen. Anne listened to Pink Floyd and s
moked pot. Juli listened to Barry Manilow and did not smoke anything. No one minded that Anne smoked pot, though, because Father and #Four did too. Girl spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they smoked a pot—did they leave it on the stove until it burned? All she knew was that when pot was being smoked, Juli came outside the cabin and played with her.
At dinnertime the family would turn on the radio to listen to “Caribou Clatters,” which were messages read over the air to all the people who lived in the bush and didn’t have telephones. Sometimes Mother and Stepmother would send a message to the children over the radio—just a sentence or two saying they missed them and hoped they were having fun. Hearing her name on the radio made Girl feel important. Father and #Four had set up tent sites on their ten-acre property, and someone had to stay at the campground all summer, in case anyone wanted to rent a campsite. Father and #Four still had to work, though, so they split up the season between them. One week was #Four and Brother, one week was Juli and Girl, the third week was Father and everyone all together. Once, when Juli and Girl were at the campsite alone, Brother sent them a Caribou Clatter. “I hope you are having fun with Lucifer,” he said. Juli was livid, but that was the name of Juli’s cat, so Girl didn’t understand what she was so mad about. Girl hadn’t ever read the Bible.
Juli was sixteen and Girl was eight when Big Mama, as they called the van, pulled away and left them behind at the campground. There was no car in case of emergency, but there was a canoe Juli could row to a nearby hunting lodge. Juli let Girl stay in her cabin, so neither of them had to sleep alone. Every morning Juli read the Bible to Girl, starting from the very beginning. Girl knew Juli was dyslexic and this was a big deal to her, so she listened closely even though it was boring. At night the sisters wrote letters back home on pale lavender stationery.
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