Some Things About Flying

by Joan Barfoot

  When she and Tom reach England, will they still dodge certain subjects? But from that great distance, certain subjects may not be interesting, or important. The two of them will be very busy with pleasure, using time, building their pictures together.

  Lila’s grandmother said she would have loved to travel, but she never could. With June, she laid out her troubles the way June set down plates for the goats, which was how Lila heard she was sometimes lonely and not always happy. Once, Lila’s grandfather gave her a box of chocolates and she was so touched she was almost in tears telling June. Or for all Lila knew, she was almost in tears for something else. “I’m so tired,” she said.

  Who else could she say that to but June, who didn’t tell her, “Buck up,” or “Really, though, you’re very lucky.” She said, “I know,” and “Yes.” They were friends. Then, to Lila, this was affection of an unfamiliar kind.

  The autumn Lila was ten or eleven, after her family was home from their holiday, June slipped in her yard, cracked her head, knocked herself out and also broke her hip. She lay outside in the rain for more than a day, until a man looking to buy cheese finally found her. She died in the hospital a few days later, of pneumonia.

  When her grandmother told Lila this on the telephone, her voice was dry and unsentimental. Lila was startled by death, someone she knew, and sad for her grandmother, truly, but she was too young to have a real notion of how much the event must have mattered. “I’m really sorry, Grandma,” she said. Those weren’t enough words for the occasion; scrambling for more, she asked, “What happened to the goats?”

  There was a pause, and when her grandmother spoke again, her voice had a choking sound that made Lila feel awful. She had said the wrong thing? Or her clumsy sympathy was of no use? “Your grandfather took care of them. They were sold off for slaughter. He’s bought up her land, too.” He’d have had no more idea than Lila why her grandmother was upset about that, and if he had known, how could he have understood? What he had done, tidying up June’s small estate, would have made kind, practical and profitable sense to him.

  It did not seem strange to Lila that it was not her grandmother and grandfather who were best friends. What was strange, what she hadn’t considered before, was that grown-ups needed best friends, leaned on them, cared for them as best they could, and grieved for them. Her grandmother and June also gave Lila her first notion of women who wear different faces and speak different words when they’re together. As Lila, Nell and Patsy do. Probably Lila’s grandmother and June had their disagreements, just as Lila, Nell and Patsy do.

  Nell’s three-so-far marriages have certainly puzzled the other two—what exactly is it she wants?—and Patsy’s divorce was a trial for them all. They were both on hand when Lila met Geoff, her last lover before Tom, and listened sympathetically when she left him. She doesn’t know quite what they think of Tom. “You know,” Patsy told her one Saturday night over drinks, “when it comes down to it, we don’t give a shit about him. He seems okay, but you’re the one we care about.”

  “So,” Nell threw in, “if he fucks you around, we’ll just have to hurt him, real bad.” They could all laugh, but in hard and unsafe circumstances, it was still a comfort.

  What they tell each other, Lila and Patsy and Nell, is that what they will have, in the end, is each other. “We sound,” Patsy said, “like kids swearing a blood oath. Should we cut ourselves and pool our blood?”

  Nell snorted. “We’re women, for god’s sake. We don’t have to cut ourselves to get blood.”

  The three of them began teaching about the same time, Patsy in psychology, Nell and Lila in English. They may have met over common difficulties, being women on an unhelpful campus, and in alliances and little plots; but it was an easy step to fondness, and then to confidences. Like love, there is a chemistry to friendship. None of them would dream of telling all their secrets, they’re not ridiculous, but they can tell what they want to.

  Which is why Nell and Patsy are the only people who know Lila’s here.

  If she can’t remember telling Tom about June, she knows she told them. About, among other things, June’s extreme response to a couple of extreme events, the choice she must have made in favour of huge consequences over ordinary limits. “And you know,” Lila said, “it looked like something that could happen so easily. Almost naturally. Do you see what I mean?”

  “But,” said Nell, “as you say, it’s about consequences, isn’t it? Risks are easy enough, as long as you can take the results.” But Nell is braver than either Patsy or Lila, who has not been inclined towards either her grandmother’s housedressy, stoic grace or June’s gum-booted eccentricity.

  Tom seems unable to grasp properly that parents in general, he specifically, can have no idea of the small random moments, obscure influences, undigested observations that create unexpected, unintended fears and desires and patterns in their children. “I know you’re important,” Lila would like to say, “but lighten up. Not everything has to do with the benign or passionate intentions of parents.”

  “I know,” he would answer. But his heart would still not be in it.

  What would Lila’s grandmother think of her now? Would she be disappointed, or disapproving, or would she still love Lila without reserve?

  Wouldn’t it be nice if love remained pure.

  “Sorry I was so long.” Tom, slipping back into his seat, startles her. “I got stuck in the aisle behind the flight attendant. She’ll be here in a minute. You want another drink?”

  Nice of him to ask. “Sure. Scotch again?” To clear her head; return her to here from there, switch her back to present from past. Tom may often feel this, flipping through the scripts of his various lives: matinées as Hamlet, evening performances as Lear. Which lines belong where? Lila can sympathize.

  Taking their glasses from Sheila, he asks, “Do you know where we are?” He must mean what they’re flying over, not actually where they are, which is inside a narrow, flying, magic silver bullet that is carrying him and Lila towards two weeks of wonders.

  Sheila checks her watch. “Just heading out over the ocean, I expect.”

  Lila wishes he hadn’t asked. It makes no sense, but water feels more menacing than land, even though they’re thirty thousand feet above anything at all. Still, there are strangely textured, unrecognizable shapes lurking in an ocean, however far below it is. On land, creatures are at least identifiable.

  “Good.” Tom nods happily; so he doesn’t feel what she does. “We’re getting there.”

  “I can’t wait.” Lila thinks everyone on this plane must be looking towards some special outcome, but she and Tom are particularly blessed in that regard, never mind anything below them, or ahead in two unthinkable weeks.

  three

  Across the aisle a little girl is getting increasingly whiny, a petulant five-year-old version of the trim woman beside her, with their mutually turned-up noses; almond eyes; shining, short, dark, curly hair. Attractive, except for the annoying little voice: “I want to do something. What’s there to do?”

  “Let’s read your book,” the woman says brightly.

  “No. I did that before.”

  “Then how about a game? How about I Spy? You go first. I spy with my little eye—come on, Susie, you spy something.”

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  Good god, all the way to England? Why do people do this to children? Or more to the point, to themselves? Or most to the point, to other passengers, taking the edge off their communal good mood? Tom makes his own contribution to Lila’s irritation. “Poor kid,” he murmurs. “It’s tough for them, sitting still for so long.”

  “Yes, I was just thinking how stupid it is, trying to do this sort of thing with them. Annoying.”

  Tom frowns. “They do have rights, you know.”

  “Perhaps they’d prefer the right not to spend hours in a little seat, in a little space, with
a lot of complete strangers who may not entirely appreciate them.” It’s not that Lila dislikes children. Really. She loves the ones she knows. It’s Tom’s automatically sentimental defence of them that gets up her nose. Either he forgets how personally she takes his reverence for families, or recollected fatherhood simply overwhelms him.

  Lila does wish she loved not just him, but everything about him; although she’s been around far too long to imagine such a thing is possible.

  “I want to see out the window,” the child is demanding.

  “Well I’m sorry, we’re not sitting by a window, we’re sitting here so we can get to the washroom without crawling all over people.” Mum’s starting to sound just a little frustrated. “Now please, sit down and be quiet, Susie.” It must get exhausting to have someone looking to you all the time not only for entertainment, or love, but also for limits and explanations and rules. How alert you must have to be every moment, keeping on top of what’s what. Briefly, Lila feels warmly towards the woman, sympathetic.

  But then, without so much as a raised, questioning eyebrow in Lila’s direction, Tom leans across the aisle, and her sympathy vanishes. “Excuse me, we have an empty window seat if Susie wants to look out for a while. Not,” he smiles at the child, “that there’s much to see away up here but,” he shifts attention back to her mother, “she’s welcome to look. I know how hard it is, keeping kids entertained on a trip.” Finally, he turns to Lila. A little late. “You don’t mind, do you?” She doesn’t bother to answer. “Come on, kids are fun. You could tell her a story.”

  Does Lila look like Dr. bloody Seuss?

  Still, it’s not the child. Once she’s scrambled past and is kneeling on the seat, looking out enthralled at the clouds passing under them, she’s rather endearing. “We’re high,” she tells Lila, turning towards her, little mouth and brown eyes opened wide with amazement.

  “We sure are,” Lila agrees.

  Tom is right in a way: a child’s face is irresistible. The appeal is partly in the way young eyes observe every unfamiliar experience: as awesome and very likely delightful. A way of seeing that could keep all the world fresh.

  A parent should be purely loving, purely attentive to this gift of seeing. In many, many respects a parent must not fail, but as far as Lila can tell, must always fail anyway.

  In any other pursuit, Lila can bear the prospect of falling short: research papers may go under critical knives, lovers come to grief, some students don’t learn. But she doesn’t think she could bear a young woman, a daughter, turning on her and crying, “What do you know? What makes you think you can tell me anything now?”

  As Lila once turned on her mother, over some disagreement she cannot even remember, although she recalls flinging her arms up, and that she was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse—she can still see the sleeves on those flinging arms, cuffed and buttoned at the wrists.

  She was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Her mother’s lips got very thin.

  The odd moment of curiosity here and there, now and then, about having a child with this man or that, or even a true, temporary desire, can’t outweigh the possibility of an unendurable moment of failure.

  This is not, of course, wholly truthful. There have been other complicated uncertainties and circumstances, and really it may be, she supposes, that decisions have simply flown by unmade. Now if she did want to change her mind, she could not. What a relief!

  No, the problem here isn’t at all the beauty of children or the adorable Susie. It’s Tom. Does he forget who he’s with? Can this be how he is in the parts of his life Lila doesn’t see? A man who will decide something, even this kind of small something, inviting Susie to join them, without a nod towards a companion’s views and desires?

  They still have their surprises, and they’re not always happy ones. That must work both ways, of course. But no wonder he got into trouble around the cabinet table, was occasionally labelled a “maverick” when he got his name in the papers. No wonder his wife finally flung up her own arms and opened her craft supply shop.

  “Sorry,” he whispers. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. Only, I was overcome with compassion for a moment. Won’t happen again.” How cutting he can so quietly, courteously be.

  It’s also annoying to know she’s being so unreasonable she can only laugh at herself.

  The window seat does seem to have made Susie happy. She stares and stares at the sky’s enormous, brilliant vacancy. “Is it really hot out there?” she asks Lila. “Are we close to the sun?”

  “No, I think it’s very cold, because it’s a different kind of air up here than when we’re on the ground. We’re a little bit closer to the sun, I guess, but it’s still very, very far away.”

  “It doesn’t look cold, it looks hot. Would you get burned if you sat on a cloud?”

  That’s a little whimsical for Lila’s taste, but still, this is a child. “It does look hot, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how cold it is. Freezing. Brrr.” Lila wraps her arms around herself, pretends to shiver.

  “Would I need a blanket?”

  “Two, at least.”

  “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Lila nods. “It’s a funny surprise when things look one way and turn out to be different, that’s for sure.”

  Susie looks puzzled and turns away, back to the window.

  When the first meal finally starts coming around, her mother, strength and patience restored, leans across the aisle and calls to her. “Come on, honey, time to eat.” She smiles at Tom and Lila. “Thank you so much. I hope she’s not been a bother. It really helps, having a break.”

  Tom is a kind man. His heart practically bleeds for people in need. He cannot, for instance, walk past a panhandler, and once when Lila was with him, he stopped and squatted beside a teenager hunched on the sidewalk, under a blanket, to pet and admire the boy’s dog and see, by the way, if he could do something to help. “Get your fucking hands off my dog,” the boy warned, which would have deterred Lila, but not Tom, who pulled a fiver from his wallet and put it down beside the boy. “I don’t know,” he sighed to Lila as they walked away. “I don’t understand how that happens, a kid living on the streets and only a dog for love.” She’d hugged his arm closer to her body. The same sort of instant, compassionate impulse to fix got him in trouble in politics: his kindness overwhelming obedience to fiscal policies.

  There’s a difference between kindness and gentleness. Lila would say she is more gentle than he, but nowhere nearly as kind. Who knows how many people he will set out to rescue, from boredom or doom, in the next couple of weeks? Lila might catch kindness from him, with a sufficiently prolonged exposure. She might go home good, even saintly.

  In that case, goodbye Tom.

  Elbows collide as they deal with their dinner, relatively recognizable as a mixed vegetable rice, a salad that does not involve iceberg lettuce, and meat that is evidently beef. There’s a tiny roll, and for dessert a dish of unsweetened fruit. This is truly a romantic meal; far more so than delicately designed dishes in a small, darkened restaurant, with champagne and candles. Because here they are, side by side in their cramped hard seats, dodging each other’s elbows, struggling with elfin cutlery, flying together—imagine!

  And in a way, it’s as private as any dark restaurant. Individuals get lost in crowds. Here are dozens and dozens of people jammed into this cabin, in which every morsel of space is designed for a purpose and nothing is wasted or useless; but push people together and they are quick to build walls, and Lila and Tom can be quite alone.

  All these strangers sitting in their obedient rows are headed in the same direction, but must have utterly varying purposes and sentiments, hopes and desires. Each is a story as well as a person. Lila and Tom, the two of them, are a story; very likely they are also two stories. He has his own, no doubt somewhat different from hers.

  Naturally she
finds their story compelling, but others’ must be interesting too.

  “Do you find yourself wondering why everyone’s here?” she asks.

  “You mean cosmically? The purpose of humanity? Or only why we’re all on this plane?” He enjoys teasing her.

  “Start small. On the plane.”

  “I guess I could wonder. Or you could just tell me what you think.” He also enjoys her telling him stories; says he likes the compactness of fictions, which he considers tidier and rounder than history’s messy, straggling facts. A misconception, in Lila’s view, but no doubt she equally fails to grasp some aspects of his sense of history.

  “Okay,” she begins. “Susie and her mother, for instance—I’m thinking you’d need a powerful incentive to load a five-year-old onto a plane for this sort of journey. So how about if the mother’s abducting Susie?”

  “Why the hell would she do that?”

  “Because, let’s see, when she’s very young, she meets a rich older guy with a lot of power and connections and glamour, and she’s dazzled. He’s charming and protective, and she thinks he’ll look after her. But once they’re married, it turns out he’s a power freak, won’t let her go anywhere or do anything, starts handing out black eyes and bruises. Then they have Susie, but instead of making him better, he gets worse, punching her, once even breaking her arm. He’s rough with Susie, too, and she starts worrying about him harming her, and that’s too much, that’s the end. She can’t let him hurt her child.

  “But where can she go? On her own she doesn’t have anything, or any skills. Still, one day she packs up a few things and sneaks out with Susie, rents a room, finds a lawyer.”

  “Where does she get the money for that?”

  “Oh, from an old high school friend she’s managed to stay in touch with, and her brother and sister give her some. Enough. Then she gets a part-time job waitressing, while her sister looks after Susie. She’s almost starting to think she can get on her feet.

  “Finally her husband says okay, she can have a divorce, but not Susie. He wants Susie. Her lawyer says her husband might well win custody, since he’s guaranteeing a good education and all kinds of luxuries, and she can’t. So what can she do? She’s desperate. She gets all her courage together and tells her husband she’ll accuse him of abusing Susie if it comes down to it.