by Rich Horton
I sat near outlets when I could, and charged my phone and texted friends, called home each time I was bumped to a new flight, and debated renting a car. If Dido was home, sometimes she would speak to me. She could not understand why I would not come home. My wife said that in my absence Dido was having nightmares again. Nightmares about what? “Toilets,” my wife said. “An overflowing toilet. Yeah, it sounds comical but she wakes up screaming. And she wet her pants today because she didn’t want to use the toilet at school.”
I said, “I could rent a car. If I drove, I would be home in about twelve hours.”
“No,” my wife said. “That’s ridiculous. You hate driving. You’re a terrible driver.”
Which was true. And every time a flight was canceled, there was a new gate where I could go and wait, suspended in the cloudy green day. I read the new Kate Atkinson. I drank iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts. Passengers swapped gossip and stories. There was a family, I was told two or three times, who had flown over from London to take their three young daughters to Disney World. Now they had been stuck in Detroit for three days. They had not gotten to Orlando, and now they could not get home, either. Eventually, I, too, began telling this story, though I was not sure that I believed it.
Every now and then, a ragged cheer would go up at a gate. By this, we would know that a flight crew had arrived, and these passengers were escaping Detroit Metropolitan Airport. By the third day, I no longer waited only for flights that might take me to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut. I allowed myself to be booked for flights that might go to Logan or LaGuardia or even Philadelphia. But these, too, were delayed and then canceled. Each night I left the terminal between 10:00 pm and midnight and rode the shuttle back to the Sheraton. In my room, I washed a pair of underwear and socks with shampoo, rolled them in a dry towel, and put on my bathing suit. I swam until I felt as if I had washed time off of my skin again, and then left wet footprints across the courtyard that would be gone by the time I was asleep. In the morning, I woke up and traveled back to the airport. My wife was growing tired of her role as a single parent, but in the end we agreed there was no need yet for me to rent a car. My wife felt sure that I would be home soon. I told her the story of the English family. Still, she felt I would be home soon. I would be home soon and the appointment on my calendar could be safely marked off once again. Life would go serenely on.
In the middle of the night I woke from a terrible dream. Dreams, too, are markers of my condition, or so I have come to believe. It is possible that Dido has inherited my condition just as I inherited my mother’s face, although it is possible her bad dreams are just bad dreams.
In my dream there was a pool in a courtyard, only it was full of moonlight instead of water, so bright I could not bear to look directly at it. But oh, there was a smell that was so delicious and enticing that I went into the pool, my eyes open so I could see what smelled so very good. The moonlight buoyed me up just as water would do, and I immersed myself in that wonderful smell, and my eyes watered and my mouth was so full of saliva that I had to swallow over and over again. I rubbed my eyes and then I saw that standing all around the pool were all of the people I have ever hurt or injured without meaning to. Some of them I didn’t even know or maybe I didn’t remember them, but I knew the reason they were standing there. There, too, were all the people that I would inevitably go on hurting even though I do not wish to—there was my mother, and my wife. There was Dido. Their eyes were so full of pain—I realized that they felt pain for me, because I was in the pool and I could not get out. I was in the pool because of my condition, and because they cared for me, they could not leave me here alone. I was hurting them in this way too, and when I realized this I was so full of anger that I burst into a thousand pieces and bits of my skin flew everywhere and that was how I woke up, soaked in sweat as if I had been running.
I got out of my bed and put on my wet bathing suit and went to the courtyard pool. I wanted to make sure that everything was the way that it should be. I needed to see that my dream was only a dream and not something true. And, too, I could still smell that delicious smell. I needed to know if it was something real.
It was the middle of the night, but in the courtyard where nothing ever changed, it was only twilight. The delicious smell dissipated. I swam lap after lap and no one came to tell me that I should get out even though the hours were clearly marked on a sign tacked to the side of the cabana. No one came and so I swam until my head was clear again and my dream was gone.
• • •
All of my life, I have been a person in whom strangers have confided. There is something in my face that says, “I am interested in you” to some, and “I will keep your secret” to others. I have my mother’s face, and it is true that my mother was sincerely interested in everyone she met, and that she was a faithful keeper of other people’s secrets. I am not my mother. Sometimes, I think, I am not even myself. But whether a trick of physiognomy, or a habit of expression learned as her child in the way that all children mimic the behaviors and mannerisms of their parents, just as Dido sits at my wife’s desk and makes a face at my wife’s laptop and polishes the glasses that she does not wear, my face has said, all of my life, “I will listen to your story.”
Pity the introvert with the face of a therapist or a classroom aide in a kindergarten room. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy in human spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin. The airport itself was bad enough, but even worse was the shuttle I rode back and forth between the airport and the Sheraton. The driver was a woman in her seventies, an ex-servicewoman, the mother of three grown children. One was an addict, and one had had a breast cancer scare. The other was estranged from her mother, though she lived only twenty miles away. The shuttle driver prayed every night to be reconciled with this daughter—who, it was determined, was my age almost to the month. With each ride, her presumption of our acquaintance grew deeper and by the third morning, she embraced me when we arrived at the airport in case she did not see me again. But although her daughter would not return to her, I did. I had no choice.
Pity the werewolf. Wash off a stranger’s sadness in a green pool. What should a stranger’s story mean? Wash it away. Fall asleep in the clean reek of chlorine and inhabit the fragmentary and uneasy dreams of departed guests whose strands of hair, dander, lardy fingerprints, odd bits of trash, and inconclusive stains inhabit these transitory and poorly lit spaces. If you listen, a hotel room speaks too. It says: I will keep your secret.
• • •
I tallied my receipts on the fourth day. I checked in with my research assistant, who keeps the lab running on days when I’m looking after Dido, or when I have a flare-up and am confined to my home office. My university had covered my flight, the conference, and my hotel in Iowa City, but now there was the cost of airport food: coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, breakfast sandwiches, packets of unshelled pistachios and Snickers bars, bananas and burgers and power bars. There was my trip to Target; the room at the Sheraton at $119.00 plus taxes every night, checked out of so hopefully each morning; the five dollars I left on the bureau as tip; and the two dollars I gave each time to the shuttle driver. There was the cost of the babysitter my wife was paying to look after Dido while she was at work. My work schedule is flexible, coordinated with my wife’s so that one of us can be at home most days with Dido when her school lets out, but still there was a great deal of business, now, to take care of at the lab once I was home and could go in. That would be more money for the babysitter.
My wife and I had decided that if there were no flights to Hartford or Boston or New York today, then tomorrow I would have to rent a car. This would give me two days to get home before my appointment. Even I could manage six hours in a car one day, and six hours again the next. I could even, my wife suggested, look around at my fellow would-be passengers. Maybe one of them might be willing to share the cost of a car. “Maybe,” I said. “You think the English family has made it home yet?” she said. �
�Maybe,” I said. “Next month we’ll go camping,” she said. “I ran into Molly at the co-op and she was telling me about this place in New Hampshire. Right on a lake. A little playground for kids, and lots of trails. She’s going to send me a link to the campsite. That sounds amazing, right?” “Maybe,” I said. It was a little hard to think past the next few days, getting home, and my appointment, and then catching up with work. I had my phone plugged into an outlet, and right then I was scheduled to leave on a 2:15 flight, and we talked until my flight was canceled and I had to hang up and unplug my phone and again go to book a new flight. Dido was asking about a dog again, because she’d snuck down the basement stairs to hunt for treasure. We have the usual sort of New England basement, which is to say that it is damp and cold, with a floor of tamped-down dirt. I have never liked spending time down there, but Dido is fascinated by it. The previous owner died in her nineties, and her children didn’t bother clearing out the basement before they sold the house to us. There are old chests of drawers, some of them hiding photo albums or Depression-glass saucers, celluloid hairbrushes decaying around the horsehair bristles, the tangles of human hair coiled around the animal hair. There is the rocking chair, the hat rack and the hatboxes full of mouse droppings and shreds of silk, the washing board and the bundles of faded letters and the dog crate that is big enough Dido can stretch out inside it on her back and look at the gouges on the interior ceiling. Dido wants a dog so badly that my wife said she could almost taste it. Could almost hear clicks on the wood floor upstairs while she was downstairs, as if Dido were conjuring a pet into existence by force of her extraordinary will. And Dido was still having nightmares. She was making my wife go with her into the bathroom each time to hold her hand while she peed. My wife had tried to get Dido to explain what was so terrifying about a clogged toilet, but Dido could not articulate this to her. She could only dream it over and over again.
In the same way, my last day in Detroit followed the established pattern. I moved from gate to gate until there was only one flight left to wait for. This last possible flight into Hartford was scheduled for 10:30 PM, and then its departure was postponed and postponed again until eventually it was almost midnight and the agent at the gate got on the speaker to tell us that it was looking likely to be canceled. The airport was shutting down for the night.
On my phone was a series of texts from Dido. Dido loves texting, because she knows that it is something that adults do. Earlier in the evening she had somehow gotten the phone from my wife and used it to text me her name, over and over. Dido. Dido dido dido dido dido. And so on. There was a long string of emojis too, mostly made up of toilets, ominously, and then strings of words made up from predictive text. Then more toilets. By the time Dido is a proficient speller, perhaps it will no longer be necessary to spell at all.
I began to text my wife as people around me disconsolately collected their belongings. But the agent at our gate came over the speaker again to tell us new information had been supplied to her. It now seemed possible that a flight crew from Cleveland would be arriving in twenty minutes and might yet be assigned to our flight. So we were to wait.
We waited without much hope. We had all heard similar announcements over the past few days. But in the end, there was the crew, and here was the plane, and we all got on and the plane took off. It was a full flight, of course, and I had a middle seat. There was a woman a decade or two younger than me in the window seat, whose clothing was more youthful still. Dickies jeans, plum-colored hair, shitkicker boots, and a cropped T-shirt with DTF in a Gothic font. In the aisle seat was a woman just a little older, heavyset and tired looking, wearing the kind of clothing and minimal makeup that signals camouflage worn by lesbians in administrative offices. And when they looked at me, I knew what the two women saw. I was wearing the same slouchy black cardigan over the same black jersey dress I had worn for the past four days. It was my wife’s cardigan, and days ago it had smelled like her, but it no longer did. I had on a wedding ring and a smoky eye, thanks to the MAC boutique in the Detroit airport, where a bored aesthetician told me about the Roller Derby match that her girlfriend had dragged her to the previous weekend and how she’d realized, watching the very first jam, that her girlfriend was cheating on her with the worst skater in the league. The smoky eye did not suit me. I’d been wondering, though, if it would stay on in a swimming pool. I’d been thinking all day about the swimming pool. Even here, on the plane and on my way home, I held that swimming pool, that cool and empty space, inside my skull as if by holding it there I might contain everything else that must be contained. I do not do well in small spaces. I do not feel safe when I am far from home. I am not safe when I am far from home.
I texted my wife again. On a plane! Getting in around 3, so don’t wait up. I’ll take a Lyft. Love you. Then I turned off my phone. You could feel every passenger on the plane holding their breath as we waited to see if we would, in fact, take off. And then the exhalation when we did. I clasped my hands tightly in my lap as the plane taxied and then rose up, the ground visible only as stacks and necklaces of lights that shrank to sequins, then bright pinpricks, shrank until everything was a velvety black.
There was no reason for it, but I thought of the shuttle driver’s daughter. Though the daughter was my age, a middle-aged woman estranged from a woman who was near my mother’s own age, her face was the face of my Dido.
“Well,” the woman in the window seat said. “I guess we’re going to get home after all.”
On my iPad I had the first three episodes of a television show that my wife did not care to watch. But the woman in the window seat waited as I took out my headphones and just when I was putting them on she said, “I don’t know you, do I?”
I lifted my headphones. I said, “I don’t think so. No.”
“No, I do,” she said. “Don’t I? Martine?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m Abby.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Did you ever live up in Vermont? Burlington?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been there a couple of times, though. It’s pretty.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It is. I lived there for a while. Oh, God. A while ago now. I moved up there because my girlfriend was opening a gallery, and I’d just gotten my degree. But then she dumped me a month later, and I should have just left but I didn’t. It just seemed so embarrassing, packing up after just a month. So I slept on her couch for a couple of weeks until I found another place to live. And then I stayed there for eight years! Until another breakup, like one of those burn everything down to the ground breakups. But fuck, it’s pretty up there. Just, you know, the dating scene is a little incestuous.”
“Small towns,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” the woman in the window seat said. “I was trying to explain it to a friend in New York once. I ended up drawing her a diagram with everybody’s name on it, and then these different colored lines. You know, who’s dating, who used to date but now they’re just friends, who broke up with who and now they won’t talk to each other, who’s in a poly relationship, who hooked up but thinks that no one knows, and then all the asterisks.”
I said, “Being married makes everything a lot less complicated. Sometimes.”
The woman in the aisle seat, on the other side of me, shifted. Her thigh rubbed against mine. She was pretending to read the in-flight magazine but I could tell she was listening.
“For Christmas, my friend took the diagram I’d drawn her and embroidered it all. Got it framed. I was like, what am I supposed to do with it? Hang it on a wall? But it was pretty. She used different stitches for the different kinds of relationship lines. What do they call that? A sampler, right? Anyway Martine was part of that whole scene. You look so much like her. I wish I had a picture. She and Leila. They were married when I met them, but then it turned out that Leila had this whole other life. She’d had a girlfriend in Quebec the whole time she and Martine were together, which you would think would not be easy to pull
off, but Leila was a sales rep for a company in Quebec, this printing company, and so she was up there for a couple of days out of every month. Sometimes a lot more. But then Martine found out and threw Leila out and Leila moved up to Quebec, although she kept coming back to Burlington and telling Martine that she really thought they could work it out if Martine could just figure out how to get past it. She wanted to try therapy, and when Martine wouldn’t go for it, Leila used her keys to let herself in while Martine was at work. She texted Martine and said not to worry, she was just there to pick up a pair of jeans she’d left behind, but when Martine got home, it turned out that Leila had actually been there to pick up her favorite strap on. Like, seriously? They don’t have sex shops in Quebec? After that, Martine went through this whole phase. She was wild. She fucked any girl who looked at her twice. She would have fucked a cat if the cat had seemed into it. And she tried everything else too. People do that sometimes, you know? When they’re going through something? Like my best friend growing up. She used to say she was putting the ‘ho’ in Hoboken. But you know, it turned out she was having all these other problems at home. It was how she felt in control.”
“Did you?” I said. “Sleep with her? Martine?”
“No,” the woman in the window seat said. “I mean, I hooked up once with Martine at a party. But we were both pretty out of it. There was some good shit at that party. This one girl, Viddy, she got this idea that she could juggle anything. She took a bunch of knives out of a kitchen drawer and threw them up in the air. Cut her hands all to pieces, and then everybody was just dealing with that. It was bad. I was an ambulance driver for a while, so I was doing first aid, and I had Viddy’s blood all over me, and I really wanted to get cleaned up and this girl, Martine, it was like she didn’t even notice the blood. But it kind of ruined the mood for me, and Martine went home with somebody else. There was something she was looking for, and I guess she just had to keep looking for it until she found it. I don’t know what happened to her, but I hope she found it.”