David
“DOES THIS DRESS make my nose look big?”
Emily Glass stood at the mirror brushing her hair. Her pink sundress was tight around the torso and flared out at the hips.
“How could a dress make your nose look big?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “With my nose, you have to be careful. I read on PopSugar that I shouldn’t wear black, for example. It’s harsh against my skin and it’ll accentuate my nose.”
Emily’s nose wasn’t small, but it wasn’t enormous either—long, prominent, but nothing anyone would point out unless she pointed it out first. She had brought her nose up on one of their first dates, when she self-effacingly said that she was tired of her parents’ friends telling her that she looked like a young Barbra Streisand. David hadn’t thought to give the correct response: an incredulous look and a shocked “Why would anyone ever say that? You’re far more beautiful!” Instead, he only nodded. She had never let him forget it.
As she turned around, her hair whipped over her shoulder and revealed the candy-pink straps of her sundress. David wasn’t sure what this type of dress was called. He had recently heard the term bodycon but still didn’t completely understand what it meant or if it applied to this dress. He playfully reached out to pinch her butt but wound up groping a handful of poufy fabric. She spun around and laughed.
“I love you so much, sweetie.” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.
“You know you don’t need to wear a dress to the airport. This is going to be just like Las Vegas all over again. And this time, we’re not shopping for leggings halfway through the trip because you only brought miniskirts.”
“You’re not still mad about that, are you?”
“I wasn’t even mad then. I just want you to be comfortable and I don’t want you to complain during the flight.”
“I want to be comfortable too. But every outfit this week needs to count.” She opened her eyes widely for emphasis.
“Don’t go too sexy on the night of the bachelorette, okay? Trust me, I know guys, and guys don’t care if you’re on your bachelorette party, they’ll just go for it.”
“I wouldn’t wear anything sexy anyway, with Lauren there. If I want to avoid her usual criticisms, I’m going to need a giant androgyny cloak.” Emily’s arms released from David’s neck as she pantomimed a cloak over her head.
David laughed. “I don’t understand why you think she’s such a bitch. Lauren’s always nice to me.”
“Because you aren’t her sister. And you should hear the stuff she says about you behind your back.”
“What does she say?”
She paused. “She thinks you’re boring and that you attempt to make up for it by projecting hegemonic masculinity. I disagree, obviously. But when she found out you played basketball in high school, she kept sending me all these articles about sexual assault and high school sports.”
“What the hell does ‘hegemonic masculinity’ mean?”
“I forgot you didn’t major in something useless at college like I did. Let’s put it this way. She’s been engaged to an unemployed lumberjack with a neck tattoo for ten years—if she doesn’t like you, it’s probably a good thing.”
“But I want your family to like me.”
“The rest of them do!”
“Yeah, okay.” He reached over to close his suitcase where the zipper was gaping, and then realized Emily might see this as literally turning his back on her.
“Are you upset now? I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew something bad would happen this week. Why do I always do this? Now we’re going to be mad at each other all week.”
“Look, I’m not even... I’m just going to feel so weird seeing her now.”
“You should always feel weird seeing her. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel weird seeing her. She’s a huge jerk.”
“Well, huge anyway.”
“Mean!” She laughed. “Get that out of your system now. If Lauren didn’t like you before, any comments about her weight will put you into the same category as the guy who accidentally called her ‘sir’ at Panera four years ago.”
“Who did that?”
“None of us knows. But she’s written six blog posts about him.”
Emily
By the time they got to the airport, she was already starting to regret wearing her sundress. So many women managed to look chic at airports, and she didn’t understand why she couldn’t be one of them. She saw a six-foot-tall Latina woman in leather leggings and a simple black blazer, her highlighted hair barrel-curled and cascading down her back. She was standing at the ticket kiosk with a sleek black rolling suitcase, unburdened by a heavy laptop bag, huge overpriced bottle of water or any of the other unwieldy items Emily always lugged around at airports. A few feet away, she spotted a college-aged girl in a casual, loose crop top, a pair of high-waisted jeans shorts and clunky white sneakers, taking selfies near the end of the security line. She also looked flawless. Why was it so hard for Emily? She could spend four hours getting ready and still somehow feel inferior to every other woman in the room. Already she was shivering, her knobby legs were covered in goose bumps and she realized that she should have worn a bra when she looked down and saw her nipples poking through the thin cotton bodice of her dress.
“They won’t let you take the NaturBuzz bottle through security,” David said.
“Right. I guess we should just drink it now. Is it bad to drink it if you haven’t actually worked out?”
“I don’t think so. Better to drink it than throw it out anyway.”
“Sir.” A TSA agent approached. She was short and heavyset with blond hair in a tight, oiled bun as if she were on duty in Iraq and not just working the security line at the San Francisco International Airport. “You need to remove that bottle from the vicinity immediately.”
“Can’t I just drink it? We’re not even in the line yet.”
“If I can see you, you’re in the line.”
“Um...okay.” He handed the bottle to Emily. She looked at the label: white pomegranate and kaffir lime. She would have preferred to savor it a little rather than guzzle it near the TSA line. There went nine dollars’ worth of NaturBuzz, none of it contributing to muscle growth, just winding up as urine in an airplane toilet.
“I don’t have all day, ma’am,” the agent said.
“Oh gosh, please don’t call me that,” Emily said, half jokingly. “It makes me feel middle-aged. I’ll just drink this now, okay?” She thought she might get a little “I hear ya, sister!” from the TSA lady, but all she got was a steely stare and a defiant arm cross. Emily untwisted the lid and chugged half the bottle. She handed it to David, who finished it off.
“Okay, thank you, finally,” the TSA agent said.
As she went through security, Emily couldn’t help feeling anxious again. She looked at the other people in the line. She felt a familiar whirring in her chest and flipping in her stomach. A redheaded man in a suit took off his wing tip shoes for security. She turned to David.
“He could kill all of us right now and it would be too late for anyone to stop him. Ugh, this is why I hate airports. Everyone is a suspect.” Maybe that was why the gorgeous women were there—to divert attention from all the terrorists in the security line. Genius.
“Everyone is a suspect in your world,” he said. “This is the woman who called the cops on the building’s handyman for ‘sitting around outside.’”
“First of all, I’m still not convinced Chan wasn’t up to something. And second of all, that guy in the line could kill us and nobody would be able to stop him before the first few casualties. And that’s assuming he’s carrying a gun and not a bomb. I can’t do this.”
“This guy isn’t carrying anything.”
“Oh, really? You’ve inspected his clothing and you know he doesn’t have a gun? You can’t just blindly trust everyone at an airport.”
“Emily, he isn’t even...”
“If you were going to say that he isn’t even Middle Eastern, that’s the point. They’re dropping in people we least suspect. And you know I call the cops on white people all the time, I make sure to do that. Remember the guy at the St. Patrick’s Day parade? I suspect everyone equally. This guy looks exactly like someone who doesn’t want people to think he’s a terrorist. Look, he isn’t even bringing a carry-on, just a backpack. Ready for jihad.”
“He’s probably going to New York for business.”
“Do you just think that nobody ever has a gun? That there aren’t at least a few terrorists on dry runs in this line? Did you think 9/11 was Photoshopped too? Please tell me you haven’t become one of those people in the YouTube comments section.”
“Actually, you’re one of those people. You honestly believe there are terrorists in this specific security line?”
She could tell he found this somewhat amusing. Her therapist called this “flaunting her pathology.” Sometimes her anxious rants were intentionally comedic, if only to break the tension. If she acted believably insane, it was a problem, but if she hammed it up so much that she could later claim to just be joking, that gave her an out. She knew David found her anxieties annoying, but in the moment she was too worried to care. She would deal with the embarrassing aftermath of being wrong after they landed. Better to be wrong about a terrorist attack and feel like an idiot, than to be right about it and dead. Life had to win every single day. Death only had to win once.
“All I’m saying is that there could be terrorists in this line,” she said. “It would be so easy to pull off. Just look at that guy.” She pointed to a young white hipster with a scruffy brown beard and a bowler hat, carrying a black violin case.
“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ll play this game with you. If you were going to do it, how would you do it?”
“I don’t know, I’d have to call some terrorists to learn some options. But it’s easy. For one, last time I packed a full-size conditioner and they didn’t stop me.”
He squeezed her shoulders as they moved toward the body scan. “You really are nervous about this week, aren’t you?” he whispered in her ear. His one-day scruff tickled her neck and she smiled. The shoulder massage felt good. She wished she could stay in this moment forever, his face against hers, his hands on her shoulders. She would always feel safe then. Except in the event of an aneurism.
“Well, yeah, my mom is going to be a nightmare, but that’s not why I’m worried about the plane blowing up. Two different things, babe.”
“She’ll be fine. And don’t say ‘plane blowing up’ at an airport. Watch, you’ll be freaking out about terrorists and then you’ll be the one they arrest. It would be more typical of you to be detained for terror threats before your wedding day than to be killed by a terrorist before your wedding day.”
“Judging by how lax they are about checking that guy over there, they’re not going to pull me aside for saying that. They should, though. How do they know I’m not a terrorist? How would they notice a real terrorist if they don’t even notice a run-of-the-mill crazy person like me?” She forced herself to smile. Sometimes smiling made her feel better. Her fourth-grade teacher had told her that if she pretended to be happy, there was some chemical reaction in the brain that would trick her into being happy. She had believed it, and smiled like a lunatic whenever she was even mildly worried. Her teacher had probably said it to help her do better socially, but as a result she just looked like a grinning freak. She toned down the smiles in middle school when someone put a note in her locker with a picture of the Joker, but she still kept the habit into adulthood—just a watered-down version. David seemed to appreciate her periodic attempts to seem normal, and she often wanted to remind him that he should count himself lucky that his bride’s wedding anxieties weren’t about second thoughts and cold feet, but about bombs and Ebola. Fuck—Ebola bombs. Surely someone was planning that.
“You’ll be less crazy on the honeymoon, right?” he asked, wavering slightly as he said crazy since he meant it in an endearing way but was aware it sounded mean.
“I mean, I’ve always been crazy. I’ve known that since I was four. Thank you, Mom.”
“Your mom definitely didn’t call you crazy.”
“Well, of course not. She says I’m mentally ill and reminds everyone whenever she gets a chance because it makes her look like such a saint for putting up with me. And I can’t even argue with her, because then I look even crazier. This would all be so much easier if I could do my crafting. It always calms me down.”
She was one of the first Pinterest users and an avid crafter in her spare time. Her crafts ranged from no-sew pillowcases to embroidered handkerchiefs to the ominous and pointless “glitter balls” that she insisted she would use if she ever threw a snow-themed holiday party. She spent hours studying the Pinterest pages of her favorite crafting bloggers. The women always looked so pristine and perfect with their strawberry lipstick and winged eyeliner, their pure white kitchens bathed in natural summer light, their unused copper pots hanging from the ceilings. When they baked, they never got flour on the counter. When they crafted, they never got glue on their manicured hands. Who were these women? Emily’s crafts always got messy, and even when they were successful they were useless, like the glitter balls. David was nice enough not to bring it up, but she could sense his amusement every time he ran his fingers across the abandoned glitter balls still sitting on the kitchen counter.
Sometimes she worried that she was unbearable—disorganized, distracted and high-strung, leaving a trail of glitter behind her that nobody could clean up. But she knew so many women who were worse. Kathleen, her former friend from college, had cheated on her fiancé during her bachelorette party with a spray-tanned club promoter named TJ and hadn’t even felt bad about it because she said it was part of “finding herself.” One of her cousins repeatedly referred to her husband as “the Idiot” in her irritating Long Island accent, acting as if the nickname was witty and sassy instead of abusive. Emily could have been lazy, materialistic, demanding, emasculating, frumpy, unavailable or cold. She was none of those things. For all her shortcomings, she was outgoing, loving and never once turned David down for sex—even that one time she had a stomach bug—a badge of honor she wished were appropriate to share with other people.
She would never dream of ridiculing him over bottomless mimosas with “the girls,” calling him “the Idiot” or joking about how she pretended to be asleep to get out of sex. Unlike the way some women she knew regarded their men, she loved David because of his flaws, not in spite of them. Her favorite thing about his face was his slightly large ears. If he suddenly became rich (which seemed more and more likely every month he continued working at Zoogli), her favorite things about him would still be the little things, the goofy things. Other women would try to seduce him if he had money, that was for sure, but they would never love him for his weird ears, or feel a wave of warmth in their hearts whenever they heard his off-key rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the shower. She hoped he knew this. Men always claimed to want women who loved them for them, not for their money, but rich men always seemed to wind up with women who only wanted their money. She wanted to believe she could trust David, but why was he any more trustworthy than the thousands of other future Silicon Valley billionaires who would leave their loyal wives for Russian models?
Even if David never became rich, there was still something else for her to worry about: aging. She was twenty-eight, zooming toward her thirties, a decade she had long believed marked the beginning of a woman’s journey into her new identity as a sexless, living Roomba. Meanwhile, David at twenty-eight was more handsome than ever. Just shy of six feet, with a full head of chestnut hair, and a face like a grown-up all-American lacrosse frat boy but without the arrogance. He was the man she dreamed about marrying when she was a little girl—except back then she had pictured him sporting a shaggy ’90s haircut parted in the middle and a puka-shell necklace. She thought David was better-looking than everyone else did, which was obvious from the incredulous looks her friends gave her every time she referred to him as “out of her league.” Regardless of what her friends said to reassure her that she and David were equally attractive, she didn’t buy it. David was tall and fit—that could carry a man his whole life. It could only carry a woman for a few years before the estrogen dipped and she became another crazy-armed Madonna look-alike, veins popping out and skin sagging over preserved mummy muscles, boobs like two half-empty water balloons bagged in wrinkled beige napkins. She could gain weight and avoid the gaunt face of middle age—perhaps wind up looking like a jolly, pie-baking Mrs. Claus—then use push-up bras and shapewear. That wouldn’t be very sexy, but at least then she wouldn’t have the desperate, roast-chicken look of all the Real Housewives. Her therapist told her these concerns stemmed from her body dysmorphic disorder, but she knew he was just saying that to be nice.
She knew that one day—perhaps not today, perhaps not even in ten years—David would look at her, look at himself and realize just how much better he could do. He was far too sweet and devoted to realize it now, but it was bound to happen by the time he hit middle age. As a result, she had to be vigilant. Plastic surgery was out of the question because of her fear of ineffective but paralyzing anesthesia—it had happened to some woman in Kentucky and the story had trended on social media—but there were other things she could do. Her fitness routine was intense. In college, she only did the occasional dance workout video, but she had come a long way since then. Darius, her fitness instructor at LifeSpin, assessed her as a Level Four during her StrengthFlex test. Her new LifeSpin routine involved light weights, yoga, Pilates and NaturBuzz hydration. She did squats in the shower while the conditioner was in her hair in the hopes of attaining a Photoshop butt.
Aboard the plane, she rolled on two tight black knee compression socks. They looked stupid with her dress, but this was one of the few health-over-beauty sacrifices she made. If there was anything she worried about more than her declining looks, it was her health. She had recently read a Dr. Oz article about deep vein thrombosis, the silent killer. There seemed to be way too many silent killers out there for one thing to be given the title, but as far as silent killers went, deep vein thrombosis—and its aggressive cousin, the pulmonary embolism—played the part quite well. They could strike any person, at any time, and one of the symptoms was “no symptoms.” She shuddered just thinking about it.
“You should listen to some music,” David said, handing her a pair of white earphones, the speaker area lightly dusted with his orangey earwax. They would be so gross if they came from anyone but him. Maybe that was something she could incorporate into her wedding vows.
“I actually popped a Benadryl right before we got on the plane. I’m going to sleep.”
“I wish I could sleep on planes. My neck always hurts and then I wake up as soon as there’s any turbulence. I don’t know how you can be so anxious and still have such an easy time sleeping in public places.”
She laughed. “That was a compliment, right? You should try to sleep too. We won’t get much sleep when we arrive. Everyone is going to ask us how work is going and a gazillion other questions we don’t want to answer.”
“Ugh, I hate talking about work.”
“Me too. I want to talk about fun things.”
“Like parasites?”
She gave him an indignant look. “Like fun things.”
“You’re cute.”
“Want to have sex in the bathroom?” she asked perkily. Sometimes she liked to throw out offers like that. David was too vanilla to ever take her up on them, but they made her appear kinky, so she could fulfill the roles of both seductive “other woman” and loyal, nurturing wife. If she were giving him so much sex, he wouldn’t have any energy left for all the other women she imagined were sneaking around him, waiting to strike as soon as she turned thirty. Sometimes she swore she could hear the popping of their bubblegum and the sizzling of their hair underneath curling irons when she walked down the street.
“Sex in the bathroom sounds illegal, but you can give me a hand job underneath my blanket.” She assumed he was kidding, but he really did have one of those fleece blankets given out by the flight attendant, so maybe he was serious.
“Just you? Like, I don’t get any...you know...under my blanket?” Having sex with a guy in the airplane bathroom was sexy, Pan Am, Mad Men stuff. Giving a hand job under a fleece blanket while everyone on the plane watched reruns of How I Met Your Mother was just sad. But if David really wanted it, she’d look so cold and withholding if she said no.
“Finger banging is harder to maneuver,” he said. “You don’t have to give me the hand job, though. I just thought...” He gave her a flirty smile.
“I’m just joking. I’ll give you the hand job.”
“Wait, seriously? I was joking too.”
“I don’t know why you would joke about that. People do this stuff all the time.”
“Have you?”
“No. Just people do.” He never wanted to hear about, or even think about, her previous sexual experiences, even though on their first date she was twenty-five and had obviously had relationships before him. No one-night stands, though—she was too afraid of antibiotic-resistant chlamydia. He had never even divulged his own number, which led her to believe it was either embarrassingly high or low.
“Okay, you can give me a handie, but only after the safety demonstration.”
“I can give you a hand job? I’m not begging to do it, I was just offering.”
“I mean, can you give me a hand job after the safety demonstration?”
A peppy blonde flight attendant popped her head into the row and reached her arm around David’s lap to make sure his seat belt was fastened. She pursed her mauve lips.
“Sir, in the future please do not have a blanket on your lap when we are checking seat belts,” she said, in a way that managed to be both unnecessarily friendly and unnecessarily rude.
“Uh, sorry.”
“And, ma’am?” the flight attendant asked. Emily realized her blanket was covering her seat belt, as well, and lifted the blanket to reveal that it was, in fact, fastened. Not that it would mean anything, if there were a terrorist on the plane. Why did anyone even check this? They should have been going around making eye contact with all the passengers to check for secret signs of nervousness, the way she once heard people did in Israel. Why didn’t she live in Israel? Her cousin Rebecca did Birthright in 2007 and kept going on about how the police presence “ruined the experience.” Of course, Rebecca was being stupid, because police were the only thing making the experience possible in the first place. Maybe if Emily lived in Israel, she’d feel safer. Except there would be a lot more threats in general—she wasn’t sure if the police presence outweighed the increase in threats.
“Thank you,” the flight attendant said.
“Oh, I have a question,” Emily said.
“Sure, ma’am.”
“Did you call me ma’am because you thought I was old, or because you say that to all women over the age of eighteen?”
She cocked her head. “I’m confused. Would you prefer something else?”
“I mean, I don’t prefer anything because it’s not like I’m going to be hanging out with you loads of times, but I just want to know what calculation went through your mind when you looked at me and thought, She’s a ma’am.” Emily could see David wincing out of the corner of her eye.
“Well, you’re an adult woman, so we say ma’am to be polite.”
“It’s not that polite, though. I mean, you obviously weren’t trying to be rude, but when I hear ma’am I don’t think the person is being respectful. I think my crow’s feet are showing and that I look forty.”
“Well, how old are you?”
“How old did you think I was?”
“I don’t know, thirty-two?”
“I assume you were rounding down not to offend me. You probably meant thirty-five or older. I’m twenty-eight. Thanks.”
The flight attendant looked like she was about to say something but thought better of it and walked off.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” David asked. “She thinks you’re a weirdo now. Why do you always do that? For the last time, you don’t look older than your age. Stop freaking out.”
“Everyone thinks I look older than my age. You only say that to flatter me, which, trust me, I appreciate. But this isn’t just my anxiety. You can attribute a lot of stuff to my anxiety but not this. Everyone agrees with me except for you.” Emily longed for the days when “I thought you were so much older” was a compliment. It was great when she was nine and trying to look grown-up, useful when she was eighteen and trying to buy alcohol, mildly annoying by the time she hit twenty-three and devastating now that she was twenty-eight. Worst of all, nobody else seemed to relate. Even people she thought looked terrible for their age loved to regale her with their arsenals of stories of how they were mistaken for fetuses when trying to see R-rated movies.
David shook his head. “It’s really not you. People are just terrible at guessing ages. The other day at LifeSpin, one of the new trainers asked me if I was there with a parent because you need to be eighteen to have a membership.”
“See? This is exactly what I mean. Everyone else gets guessed as younger. That never happens to me. I was actually offered a free Jazzercise class.”
“If you’re referring to JazzSweat, that’s not for older people. It’s actually super intense. They give you free cashew powder if you get through all six classes without passing out.”
“Sure. Fine. But that flight attendant definitely thought I looked old.”
“No, she didn’t. Even if she thought you were thirty-two, that’s, like, no different from twenty-eight. You’re freaking out over something so tiny. Even for you.”
“Okay. Full disclosure, I asked her that because I actually was offended by her use of the word ma’am but the good news is, she thinks I’m crazy, so now we don’t need to worry about her bugging us while I give you a hand job.”
“You’re actually going to do that?”
“After the safety demonstration.”