“It’s my mom’s,” I said, pointing to her on the other side of security.
“I’m just going to run it through again.”
I nodded, strangely unconcerned. I’d already spent all my energy taking off her jewelry. I slipped my watch back on and retrieved my bag. Near me, Rand was shrugging on his suit jacket and smoothing out invisible wrinkles.
Mom finally made it through security and walked up to me, barefoot and shockingly small without her usual platform heels.
“That agent is rescanning your bag,” I said, gesturing to the front of the x-ray machine. “And that gentleman,” I pointed to the salt-and-pepper-haired agent from before, “would like me to inform you that you, quote, ‘have got it going on.’”
She giggled.
Mom’s bag came through again, and the younger agent explained that he would need to look through it first.
“I just need to check something,” he said apologetically. “But it can’t be what I thought it was.”
Looking back, I consider it a shocking display of filial love that I didn’t instantly disavow any knowledge of my mother right then and there. (“I’ve never met this woman before,” I’d say, and walk swiftly to my flight. End of story.) What I’d learned over the years, but what this poor hapless fool did not yet know, was that with my mother, it absolutely could be what he thought it was. There were no limits to what her purse could be hiding.
It’s kind of like Mary Poppins’s bag, if Mary was a compulsive hoarder who hung out with hobos. My mother’s purses defy the laws of logic and space-time. When I was a kid, this was delightful, because I could always find some fun treat inside like a fortune cookie or a book of matches or a kitten.
But as an adult I’ve learned to fear the contents of her bag, a reaction that, I realize, can be traced back to precisely this moment.
The security agent rummaged through my mom’s carry-on. It was strangely shaped—deep, but rather narrow, so he couldn’t actually open it enough to see what he was doing. He was just reaching in blindly and pulling things out by touch, as if it were some sort of terrifying grab bag.
I remember the look on his face when he first felt the chain. His brow furrowed, and his face registered that familiar “I am not paid enough for this” expression worn by so many who worked for Homeland Security.
Slowly, he began to pull the offending object out. Like a magician unfurling a rope of handkerchiefs from his sleeve, or The Lord of The Rings trilogy, I expected it to end long before it did. It was a metal chain, roughly three feet long and an inch thick, looped in an enormous ring. My mother’s keys came out last, dangling from the end.
“Those are my keys,” Mom said, helpfully.
I decided my only recourse was to pretend this behavior was entirely normal and not a deleted scene from Mad Max.
“Oh,” I said, with a frantic chuckle. “It’s just her keys.”
The agent shook his head.
“No,” he said, “That wasn’t what I saw on the scan.” My stomach dropped.
He continued rifling through mom’s bag. Over her head, Rand caught my eye. He’d been ready to go for some time now—a delay like this was new to him, and I suspect he was starting to understand why I’d insisted we arrive at the airport three hours early and also why we should have left my mother at home.
See? I’m not irrational. I’ve been worried for A PERFECTLY GOOD REASON.
And that perfectly good reason was what the agent finally pulled out next from my mother’s bag.
In my memory, the entire security checkpoint fell silent at that moment. A teacup shattered on the floor. Someone screamed and fainted.
The TSA agent held in his hand a ten-inch-long stainless steel pickax, found in the bowels of my mother’s purse.
I was about to say something, but I lost my train of thought as soon as the agent began pulling out retractable blades from the handle. A screwdriver. A corkscrew. A pair of six-inch long blades, one serrated, one not, in the event that you need to stab someone and also slice a baguette.
By now, my mother’s packing habits had garnered a small crowd. A cluster of agents had come over to see what was happening. One of them realized the implications of the situation, and what it meant for national security.
“We need to strip search them,” he said to the blond agent, eyeing the three of us.
“All of them.”
Rand blanched. In the distance, Christmas music played. I closed my eyes and wondered what death is like.
But, as has so often been the case, my mother’s eccentricities and legally questionable behaviors were ignored on account of how she looked in skintight jeans. Her admirer, the gray-haired agent from earlier, came over, confidently.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re fine.”
And then, alarmingly: “I know them.”
I have told this story many times, and friends have often argued its accuracy. “Why,” they inquire, “would someone who found her attractive not want her to be strip searched?”
And the answer is, clearly, that this gentleman was playing the long game. He knew that if he saved us from a strip search, his odds of incurring my mother’s favor were much higher.
I suppose, in the interest of homeland security, I should have pointed out that we didn’t know him. But I didn’t want to start our Christmas vacation with a cavity search, so I remained quiet while the agents at the other end of the table discussed our fate. Today, had the same thing happened, we’d be carted off to some island where the only rule is “No one escapes alive.” But this was 2002. Not all the protocols were in place. The TSA was not the widespread bastion of mediocrity we’ve come to know and hate.
The final judgment was merciful: we could get on our flight, dignity/modesty more or less intact. We just had to leave behind mom’s pickax. Astonishingly, they let her keep the three-foot length of chain.
I was effusively, absurdly grateful. I was also ready to leave my mother behind, too, if need be.
“But I need that,” Mom said, when she realized she might be separated from her pickax.
“Mom, we’re leaving it here.”
“I need it,” she said again, more quietly and somewhat pitifully.
“You can’t take it past security,” I snapped.
“You could always mail it to yourself,” one of the agents suggested.
“Yes. Let’s do that,” Mom said.
“You’ll have to go back to the other side of security,” the agent explained. “There’s a shipping office—”
“Mom, we are NOT taking it—”
“I NEED IT.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’ll do it,” Rand said.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll do it.”
In the coming years, Rand and I would discuss this repeatedly. How it was ridiculous of him. Indulgent, unnecessary. How if the only punishment my mother received for bringing a miniature pickax on a domestic flight in a post 9/11 world was to lose said pickax, she’d have gotten off easily.
Rand has said, time and again, if these events had happened later in our relationship, later in his relationship with my mom, he’d have calmly deposited the pickax in the trash, promised to buy her another one, and boarded the flight while resolutely ignoring her protests. But we’d been dating for barely a year, and we were still doing things that we’ve since abandoned. I was shaving my legs. He was humoring my mother.
I pleaded with him not to go, panicked that he’d miss our flight. One of the agents said that they’d let him skip the line. Rand told us he’d meet us on board, gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and disappeared, the flaps of his jacket taking flight as he ran into the sea of holiday travelers.
Watching him go, I remember thinking that this act—selfless, idiotic, illogical—was what love was.
In the years since, it hasn’t seemed to have waned at all, though he now has fewer qualms about gently telling my mother that she’s being fucking insane.
By th
e time we reached the gate, the plane was well into the boarding process. Mom didn’t understand why I wasn’t responding to any of her attempts at conversation or how I’d managed to sweat through both my shirts.
“You almost got us strip searched,” I finally said, barely above a whisper.
“I got us out of trouble,” she countered.
“YOU WERE THE ONE WHO GOT US INTO TROUBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE.”
Mom rolled her eyes at me. “Well, whatever,” she said.
We boarded. Rand had booked himself and me the aisle and middle seat in one row and given Mom the aisle opposite.
“I’m not sitting with you?”
“You like the aisle,” I said.
She looked hurt.
“You like the aisle,” I repeated. “I figured this way we could both have the aisle and still be close to one another.”
In what I have to consider a rather marked accomplishment, Mom succeeded in taking offense to this, seeing it as a punishment for what had happened before. As though I could have anticipated the present fiasco and planned our seating arrangements accordingly. Which is ridiculous, because if I had known she was going to get us nearly strip searched, I wouldn’t have put her in a different row. I would have put her on a different flight. To a different final destination.
“You like the aisle,” I hissed once more. I don’t know if she heard me; she was already engrossed with the in-flight magazine and eating almonds, to which she is allergic.
I sat, nervously waiting for Rand. He was the last person to board our plane. He rushed in, his face pink, his forehead damp with sweat.
He passed my mother without acknowledging her and moved into the middle seat next to me.
“Did you want the aisle?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
He waited a beat before answering.
“They almost didn’t let me back through,” he said, his voice soft and devoid of emotion. He’d found the shipping office easily but had gotten caught up in security gridlock when he’d tried to make it back through. The agent who had told him that he could skip the line had disappeared. He eventually made it through when someone else recognized him from earlier.
He didn’t look at me as he explained what had happened. He only stared ahead at the seat in front of him. His first flight with my mother, and she’d already succeeded in breaking him. We hadn’t even begun taxiing.
“I get it,” he said, finally turning to me, his eyes wide and glassy. “I get it now.”
He didn’t elaborate further. There was no need. He understood my anxiety, my fears, the specific sort of madness that overtakes your life when you invite my mother into it. That I was who I was—organized and cautious and overly apologetic—because my mother wasn’t.
In the decade and a half since that day, he has come to understand the important role she plays in our lives. That my mother is a prerequisite catastrophe, needed so that we can have order. Not long ago, she and I had a monumental, earth-shaking fight. When I told Rand about it, he shook his head.
“You have to call her. We need your mom.”
There are a finite number of things we can control and an infinite number of things that we cannot. I’ve spent my life trying to prepare for every variable, but nothing ever goes as planned, anyway. I suspect that’s what my mother realized a long time ago: that there is no point to seeking order. That even when you think everything is in place, the unpredictable is there. It sneaks into your suitcase, in the form of a forgotten nail file or water bottle or the occasional stainless steel pickax with retractable blades. It walks onto a midnight bus and blindsides you with the sort of romance you didn’t think actually existed. It hovers on the edge of your passport photo, and you think it doesn’t belong there because you’ve failed to realize that it is holding you up.
Sometimes, you have to stop fighting the chaos and just embrace it.
I looked over at my mother, tiny in her aisle seat, flipping through a magazine, brushing a long strand of wavy hair over her ear. The flight was packed, but the universe had seen fit to reward my mother’s behavior. The two seats next to her were vacant. Whoever had booked them had missed their flight.
We flew to Florida, and my mother happily curled up and fell asleep across all three seats.
4
IN WHICH I AM SURPRISED TO LEARN THAT GETTING LOST DOESN’T BRING ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE
IT WAS RAND WHO SUGGESTED I start a blog—just one more way in which he’d decided to ruin all my plans. It was early 2009; it had been a year since my layoff, and during that time I found I was particularly ill-suited to most professions. I’d sent out a bevy of résumés and cover letters, including one that began with the sentence “I believe my diverse skills would make me an excellent water sewer analyst.” I had received no replies. I took a few freelance gigs when they appeared, but the bulk of my day was spent in a funk, trying to decide whether I’d let my brain atrophy naturally or expedite the process through recreational drugs.
Rand was concerned that the vast amounts of free time were making me unhinged. It was after a long day that I’d spent perusing Craigslist’s “free stuff” section and penning an alarmingly long complaint letter to the manager of the Little Caesar’s in Marysville, Washington, about the decline in the quality of their Pizza-Pizza, that he suggested I write for the unnamed masses of the Internet.
“What about?” I asked.
“What do you want to write about?”
“You and cake.” I should have pretended to think about my answer more, because Rand let out a defeated sigh and shook his head. He tried a slightly different approach.
“What can you write about every day?”
This time I stopped, considered the question carefully, and answered more slowly.
“You,” I said, as though the idea had just come to me. I paused for a long minute, squinting as I stared into nothing.
“… and cake.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, which is what he sometimes does when he’s overcome by his love for me.
“No one will want to read that,” he said. And then he offered up the idea of travel. For the last few years, his work had required him to be on the road. And because he was constantly working, he was constantly zipping off somewhere. A travel blog meant that I could write and spend time with him. Which sounds like a great idea, but just you wait.
By now, I really should have stopped listening to Rand. Because here’s the thing that he won’t tell you and he will probably get mad at me for revealing, but I feel you should nevertheless know: Rand has terrible ideas.
If you met him, you wouldn’t realize this. He comes across as exceedingly smart and logical, which is precisely what makes him dangerous. He gets these bat-shit crazy ideas, and he looks so nice and normal that they seem totally reasonable. I’ve seen him order a cappuccino for an eight-year-old. He refuses to get insurance on rental cars because he’s “done the math” and it’s more financially viable to pay for an accident every few years. One time he put hand soap in the dishwasher, which is fine if you want to do a bunch of ecstasy and turn your kitchen into a 1990s-era bubble bath–themed rave, but not if you want to actually wash dishes. Also, he thinks Oswald acted alone.
He makes the unreasonable sound sane with such regularity that when he suggested I become a travel writer, it seemed like a good idea.
There were, of course, several problems with Rand’s idea. The first, and perhaps most salient, was this: I have zero sense of direction.
I know that a lot of people think that about themselves, but I assure you: I am worse. This, and not the big eyes or the pouty lips or the metabolism of a fucking hummingbird, is what I inherited from my mother. I never know where the hell I am, and of course Rand always does. He’s able to pick out cardinal directions when we’re standing in a city we’ve never been to. On the rare occasion that he happens to get disoriented, though, he will ask me which direction I think we should head. And
then he’ll proceed to go the exact opposite way.
Without fail, that will be correct.
Logic would dictate that since I am so consistently wrong, I simply need to always go the opposite of what I think is the right way. Then I’ll surely end up in the correct place, right?
But no. That’s never the case. My brain is so traitorous that even when I do the opposite of what I think is right, I still end up in the wrong place. It’s some epic, inevitable-as-a-Greek-prophecy type bullshit where I’m always wrong. Before the blog, my solution to this problem was simple: I never went anywhere alone. As a child, I went so far as to try to convince people to accompany me to the bathroom, even in the comfort of my own home. Success in this endeavor was mixed.
There was other evidence that perhaps I was not cut out for a life on the road, or a life that required any degree of movement at all. I constantly suffer from motion sickness. I feel nauseated after bending over to tie my shoes. I’m pretty sure this is the universe’s way of saying, “Stay still,” and also, “Maybe you shouldn’t have survived infancy.”
Would that these were the only things that make me a terrible traveler, but the list goes on. I can barely point out Asia on a map. It takes me three hours to pack for anything. I have dietary restrictions. I can’t sleep on planes. Nor can I watch movies, because staring too intently at a screen makes me feel nauseated. I can’t really do anything on a plane without barfing, and that includes barfing. Once I get started, it’s basically an infinite loop of puking.
Also, I’m terrified of pigeons.
The point is: I should not be traveling at all (and perhaps shouldn’t be let outside my house), much less writing a blog about it. But somehow when Rand suggested it, it sounded perfectly reasonable.
So in the spring of 2009, I started a travel blog. Sometimes you can’t let a complete dearth of natural talent or ability stop you from doing something. Imagine where we would be as a society without open-mic night or amateur pornography or those painful preliminary rounds of American Idol. I, too, shudder at the thought.
In the early days of my blog, I pretended that I knew what I was doing. I tried to write articles that sounded professional and came up with all sorts of lists that I thought people would find helpful. I had advice about which lip balms to use during long, dry flights and proper footwear suggestions, and I’d even compiled a list of tips on how not to get your luggage stolen (I was particularly ill-suited for this task, as I’d just recently gotten my luggage stolen). It was all incredibly useful and so dull it would have bored someone who was already unconscious.
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