12.1.2010

“Is this seat taken?”

I gesture toward the tray table, the gaudy blue-and-orange upholstery, the first unoccupied aisle-side seat-cushion-cum-flotation-device I’ve seen since I stepped on the aircraft. At least half a dozen people in front of me walked straight past this row, and I assumed that the little blonde head in the window seat must have a littler blonde sibling in the aisle. But the seat is empty. The slender woman in the middle shakes her head, and I throw my backpack in the overhead and tumble onto my butt before the crush of passengers behind me has a chance to crest into an aggravated stampede.

Did they all walk past because of the little girl? I’ve seen people avoid the rows with babies, who sometimes wail out their claustrophobia and confusion for the full two-hour journey from Portland to San Jose. But this child is eight or nine at least, white-sneakered shoes nearly touching the aircraft floor in front of her seat, far too proud and worldly to show her fears beyond the shiny copy of Cosmo Girl she holds close to her nose. I watch her turn the pages as I arrange my book, my iPod, and my water bottle in my lap, and wonder that her mother would let her read such trash.

The cabin lights go down as we taxi out to the runway. I reach up to click on my reading light, and the woman in the middle raises her arm and punches her light and then the girl’s in two quick, purposeful motions. She checks the girl’s progress with the magazine, points at something. I hear the girl say, “He’s twenty-one, but I know, he looks like he’s twelve.” I smirk behind my hand. It is the kind of comment my mom would make.

In fifteen minutes we’re airborn, the plane a winged, buoyant speck above the vanishing lights of the city. A flight attendant makes her way down the aisle taking drink orders. I request diet sprite, please bring the whole can, thank you. The woman in the middle orders a regular Sprite and a water. When the flight attendant passes, I get up behind her back and scurry to the bathroom, defying the orange glow of two hundred “fasten seatbelt” signs emanating from the ceiling. I remember when I thought that sign was law. I’m hardly the first person to get up.

Returning to my seat, I see that the blonde girl has exchanged Cosmo for a shiny hardcover picturebook Bible, a literary transition that leaves me feeling a bit disoriented. Kid has very broad taste. The book remains unopened on her tray table, though, because the flight attendant has returned with peanuts, which she distributes with an idle flick toward the girl’s lap. It takes a talent beyond what most mortals possess to read with attention while extracting peanuts from thumb-sized slit in a one-ounce bag, as I discover for myself in the process of fumbling the pages of my own book and dropping peanuts all over the cabin floor.

Since I can’t read and eat, I leave the book open in my lap and watch my neighbors with my left eye and the bag of peanuts with my right. To complete the in-flight meal, the girl has brought out a bag of sandwich cookies, white cream filling flattened between vanilla and chocolate wafers. They each take one and twist them apart, separating the vanilla and chocolate halves. The girl’s cream filling sticks to her chocolate half, and the woman’s to the vanilla. They both eat the creamy side first. When the flight attendant brings the drinks, the girl tips back her little blonde head and dispenses the Sprite in three quick sips, then stacks her empty peanut bags neatly in the glass and sets the whole collection on the woman’s tray table.

I finish my peanuts and return to my book, smiling.

An hour passes. Fictional characters celebrate and mourn, kill and forgive, sleep and eat and dream in a world of sharp urgency and deep consequence. The flight attendant makes another pass down the aisle to collect our discarded cups and wrappers. When the woman lifts her arm across my face to dump the girl’s Sprite glass into the yawning plastic bag, I see that she is also reading, a bestselling mystery novel. A notepaper bookmark, soaked in mismatched patches of bright-colored ink now faded from long use, peeks from between the final pages.

The plane dips and turns, and the lights of San Jose pour through the window and splash over my hands. Cottony weight fills my ears. When I look up again, the little girl’s face is resting against the woman’s shoulder. She presses her stomach against the arm rest between them, and the woman holds her awkwardly across this barrier, wrapping her further arm around the back of the girl’s head and with long, thin fingers gently stroking the delicate skin behind the small soft earlobe.