Departure
Just as there is no explaining why some people can’t board by their assigned row, there is no explaining how Grendel fit into the measuring bin at the gate. I had hurried there after my standoff with the child at the water fountain and now the flight attendant, who a moment before had been certain Grendel was too large, snapped the stretchy string of the claim ticket in her hands.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
I was surprised, too, but I pulled Grendel up and out and smiled apologetically, which seemed to annoy her more. She crushed the tag in her fist and turned her attention with a fresh smile to the next person in line. I spun Grendel around to roll in front of me, the position he seemed to like best, and headed down the ramp.
I see a lot of nice airplane-window shots on Instagram, but to me the idea of being pinned against the curved metal wall of an airplane by a stranger or two is intolerable. I am devoted to the aisle seat. I keep a scarf with me for holding over my nose against other people’s aromatic food, and I hold a book in my hand as I board the plane. I do not take any chances, and a chance would be leaving a window of opportunity open in the time it takes to get a book out of my bag.
Something about travel makes people confessional. Why isn’t it enough to be going with friends to celebrate your fiftieth birthday in Las Vegas with matching T-shirts? Why does your seatmate need to know all about it, how long you’ve planned, how crazy your boss thinks you are? Maybe everyone just feels raw and vulnerable in their flip-flops, another mystery. To me, bare feet and travel go together as well as spiders and cuisine.
I turn the reading light on before fastening my seat belt.
In the end the plane was overbooked. No one volunteered to be bumped, so they held a lottery and I lost. I had to close my book, wrestle Grendel from the overhead bin, and deplane. The attendant who had measured Grendel seemed to be suppressing a smile.
I would arrive on the Thursday and leave on the Monday. That’s how Lindy and I had described the visit, setting it up by phone, the definite articles giving the days a certain dignity. Now I’d be arriving on the Friday. I called Lindy, who seemed unfazed by the change.
“I’m just sorry for you,” she said. “Travel delays are the worst.”
But as I went to treat myself to a Bloody Mary, I didn’t feel irritated. I felt relieved. Lindy and I shared a lot of history. The thought of some quiet hours in a hotel room before the burden of arrival sounded good to me.
The televisions behind the bar were showing sports and violence, and people talking about sports and violence. The night before, while I had finished packing and gone to bed, another black man had been shot by a white person in uniform. I had not seen this news yet. Coverage of a football game was on two screens, this story was on the other two.
The television anchors were reporting that a group of young men had been running around Central Station. It was either a game or, possibly, parkour, reports hadn’t been confirmed, but two of the group claimed to be parkour instructors who sometimes performed in public spaces. When they were finished one of the men approached a window to buy a train ticket. He slipped his backpack off his shoulder and dropped it to the ground, then leaned over to get out his wallet. He was out of sight of the ticket window for five or six seconds. When he stood back up, the clerk shot him in the chest with a gun she kept in her purse. He was thirty. The woman, fifty-six, said she was scared he was getting out a gun. She’d noticed him running around the station that evening.
I signaled to the bartender to cancel the mixer in my drink and watched the screens closely, trying to follow along through the misspellings and broken rhythms of the closed-captioning.
Suddenly a man a few stools down said loudly, “Oh, man. Don’t do that.” He was black and shaking his head. “You don’t need to buy me a drink.”
The white man next to him pushed back his stool and stood up. “I just wanted to do something nice for someone today and you were sitting right here.” Both men wore blazers and jeans.
The bartender waited as if in stop-motion, holding aloft a credit card and turning to the first man who had spoken.
“I’ll get the tip,” the black man said, and the bartender swiveled back into motion.
The white man nodded, signed his receipt, and left.
Gradually the restaurant din came back up, most tables likely debating whether the gesture was a weak attempt at token solidarity or a genuine desire to make a connection. Just recently I’d read about a fever of kindness running through a small Southern town in which the residents started paying the bill of the car behind them at a McDonald’s drive-through. For several days, cars paid for each other in an unbroken line.
My visiting plan included three white, one brown (Neera is half Iranian), and no black women. I regretted this imbalance and wished it were otherwise. I’d had a chance. A girl named Danielle Belieu arrived in mid-September the year I was in fifth grade, and perhaps because her apartment building and my house were close, Danielle wanted to play often. I remember a snowstorm when we both came out of our homes and played in the middle of the street. I can see her standing under a streetlamp with the snow coming down fast. We already knew school would be canceled the next day and we were happy. Danielle had a big smile, with upper teeth that were going to need to be straightened. My braces were already on. When she wanted to play, I often said I had to do homework, which was sometimes true and sometimes not. She was the only person I knew who lived in an apartment building. She was also the only black girl in the fifth grade.
The next year we chose instruments in school. I wanted to play the cello, but Danielle chose it so I didn’t. Instead I chose the viola, a miserable instrument on which I achieved nothing. Danielle eventually won a music scholarship to college.
The first year I was on Facebook I found her and sent her a message. She responded, I wrote back, and I never heard from her again. Sometimes the door to friendship doesn’t open as far as you think it might, and you’re vulnerable standing there on the threshold, not yet in or out. It was uncomfortable online, and Danielle had endured the feeling in real life. I wish I could say the school where Danielle and I met is more diverse now, but it’s not.
I looked back at the TV screens. Now there was a report about people wearing backpacks across their chests as a symbol of solidarity with the slain man, the way they had once put up their hoodies. The closed-captioning was badly delayed, but one commentator seemed to be suggesting a backpack worn in front was better for your posture anyway. Two birds, one stone, or something like that.
THE AIRPORT HOTEL’S specialty was freshly baked cookies any time of the day or night. NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH ON YOUR PLATE FOR A COOKIE! was the lengthy slogan, printed on a sign near a huge plate in the lobby. A white employee of the hotel was eating them, and when the clerk helping me noticed him, he winked at her and made an appreciative growl. The clerk, a black woman, shook her head. “I see you stealing my cookies,” she said. She repeated this sentence several times, the emphasis moving around: “I see you stealing my cookies; I see you stealing my cookies.” The man ate at least five more.
I lingered over some brochures, and when the man finally left, the clerk rolled her eyes and replaced the cookies.