Really, no kidding, that was her name. We never did actually introduce ourselves in the hours we spent together, but I caught a glimpse of her itinerary as we landed: Peacock, Harriet, Ms. It's a name that should belong to a dear friend of Miss Jane Marple, or a character in a board game.
I wasn't in the mood to meet or talk or listen to or be around anyone. I was sulking about being given a seat over the wing--I mean, if they're going to bother asking whether you want a window or an aisle seat, mightn't they figure you want to look at something other than the wing? I didn't want to be on this plane at all; I'd rather have covered the two thousand miles from Seattle to Wisconsin on the road, as was my tradition, but time didn't permit.
I've always liked driving across the continent. It is a form of meditation for me, an emptying of the mind I need to help ease me from one context to the next, from where I start to where I end up. The process, in fact, is much of why I travel. I like to know each inch of distance traveled. I like knowing that nobody in the world knows where I am, that at any exit I could pull off and start a new life. This revelation, which generally occurs at about 3am on any given road trip, reminds me that at any juncture, I am living the life I've chosen. On the road, suspended out of any context, the reality of choice leaps up in high relief against the terrain. Sometimes this jolts me into making major changes; sometimes it reaffirms my pleasure in my life. Always this line of contemplation is instructive, if not consistently comfortable. I relish every moment of desolation and exhilaration in a 36-hour drive.
There's something very unreal about going into a big crowded flying room in one city and shortly thereafter getting out into a distant city without having really covered any ground. The addition of an airport at either end lends air travel a surreal quality I don't like. But I compromise when necessary. When I fly, I take a window seat and a couple Bloody Marys, disengage myself as much as possible from the plane's interior, train my eyes on the terrain below, and simply space out. While it's impossible to telescope a three-day rapture into a three-hour flight, at least I can watch the topography and get a quiet time between social lives.
But this time even this much would be impossible. The plane turned out to be a jumbo jet, fully booked and chock full of small children and a contingent of Marine recruits. Worse, I was stuck with a view of the wing. I had been settled in my seat for half an hour, the air was stifling, and passengers were still boarding, wandering the aisles in confusion, tickets in hand, trying to sort sections, rows, and seats. I resented them for not rushing to their seats more efficiently. I resented them for being there at all. I was praying to the goddess of boarding passes that no one would come and occupy the seat next to mine, one of the last remaining. I was resenting the fact that there wasn't a chance in hell that would happen.
That's when Harriet Peacock appeared before me: a pale woman in her early forties, wearing a polyester double-knit leisure suit in horizontal stripes of white, mint green and menopause pink. A beam of sunlight forced its way through the window, illuminating her and glinting off the monofilament fibers. This, I thought, is a bad omen.
``Youseetay.''
``Huh?'' I couldn't make out what she'd said, but it was definitely aimed at me. It hadn't the inflection of a question, but she was waiting for a response. Had I seen Tay? Who the hell was Tay?
``Are-you-sit-ting-in-seat-A?'' She enunciated it like some people address the blind--like I must be either deaf or stupid.
``Oh. Oh. Yah. I guess so.''
She sat down next to me. My bad mood was now fully entrenched.
I inspected her as she settled in. Coke-bottle glasses made her eyes look tiny and sunken. Facial features neither unattractive nor compelling, unremarkable dark hair in a grown-out seventies shag. I decided she must be from the hinterlands, an agricultural culture where back-to-the-land nostalgia had never taken root, where polyester is still the easy-care miracle fabric of choice. She was, in fact, from somewhere outside Spokane.
She seemed harmless enough. Yet something about her alarmed me; all my sirens and yellow lights were engaged: Warning. Caution. Danger. Stayaway, Stayaway, Stayaway. Something in my head kept repeating: Something's wrong. I thought it was just my resentment at the intrusion and told myself to shut up, but the alarms were insistent: Something's wrong, stay away.
``You don't need to worry,'' she said, still arranging her things under her seat, on her lap, in her purse. She was moving slowly, listlessly. ``Once I get settled in, I'm really very well behaved.''
Now where the hell did that come from? I looked down at myself, trying to figure out from whence she'd gotten the notion that I wasn't comfortable, that she wasn't welcome. It wasn't too difficult to ascertain: my body had rolled itself up and away from her in a slow recoil; I was sitting up on one hip, pressed toward the wall. My forehead had been pressed to the window and it must have looked as though I was trying to use the window as an exit. I suppose I was. I sat up straight. There'd be no convincing her that the plane's wing and the tarmac beyond held such urgent fascination for me that I just had to climb out through the window to investigate right now. I was utterly embarrassed and ashamed.
As I worked to regain my composure she was saying something, but again her words were difficult to decipher. Her voice had a heavy, plodding sound lacking inflection or animation, without grace or finesse. It sounded for all the world like an onomatopoeic English translation of fresh manure hitting the ground: Plop. Plop thud. It lent her a distinct air of dull-wittedness.
But dull-wittedness wasn't cause for me to cringe away from her; nor would it set off my alarms like an encounter in a dark alley. Sitting next to her was like perching at the opening of a great, black void, a vacuum. For all the polyester and mousy hair, the woman had something going on that belonged to the Twilight Zone. Whatever it was, I was certain it didn't belong next to me. Swell, I thought. My own personal travel-size black hole.
All the passengers were seated but the plane still stood at the gate. My alarms droned on, Danger, Stay Away. One of the stewardesses was moving a service cart down the aisle. As the cart passed Harriet, a half-dozen packets of peanuts fell to the floor; she leaned over to pick them up and tried to hand them to the stewardess. The stewardess, however, was having a bad day. Somehow she misunderstood Harriet's intent and, rather than accepting the peanuts, grabbed another handful from the cart and threw them unceremoniously onto Harriet's lap. She shot Harriet a look so venomous I couldn't believe it was inspired by the distribution of peanuts. I wondered if Harriet had this sort of effect on everyone.
Harriet, crestfallen and misunderstood, gazed helplessly down at her lapful of peanuts. ``But I was only trying to help,'' she said. It sounded like the last and final words of someone who, following one calamity too many, has given up on the world and will now simply wander away from it into oblivion. The poor dear was really forlorn. This was enough to start changing my attitude toward her. I mean, Harriet might be a black hole, but for the moment she was my black hole and I'll thank you not to mess with her. I sent the offending stewardess a glare that should have iced over her wings, but it only glanced off her as she aimed her parting shot at me, one of those evil eyes usually reserved for mothers whose children are wreaking havoc in a restaurant: Can't you keep that thing under control?!
As Harriet stowed the troublesome peanuts, I looked at her more closely. She was alarmingly pale; the black of the hairs on her forearms and the fringeling of a mustache above her lip accentuated her bloodless pallor. She appeared never to have met the elements, a creature of the indoors. Her skin had the translucence of a baby's or an ancient person's; it appeared the embodiment of fragility and vulnerability. She reminded me of the sickly kid in everybody's fourth grade class--the one who suffered asthma and all manner of allergies, who needed such thick glasses at such an early age, not what one would describe as `robust'. She looked insubstantial, as though she were dissolving into the ether, right before my eyes.
The plane took off and I craned my neck to watch the receding planet, but the only sliver of a view beyond the wing was warped by the waves of heat coming off the engine. Harriet had started talking again and reluctantly I sat up straight, scowling at the prospect of commercial flight chit-chat.
``Are you on a business trip, or just pleasure? Or both?''
``I'm visiting my sister.'' I was determined not to encourage any further talk with detailed response or anything that could be construed as interest in her, her travel, or her life. I felt positively prickly.
``Are you just going to Minneapolis, or do you get a connecting flight?'' I thought this was an odd way to ask where I was going.
``I'm going on to Madison, Wisconsin.''
She paused, searching for a segue into what she had to tell me. And, I later understood, she really did need to tell me. ``I don't want to alarm you,'' she offered, ``but you might be on the same flight as my husband.''
Clearly she was going to be difficult to ignore; her statement was designed to beget further inquiry. It worked. I was annoyed with her cryptic approach, but I went ahead anyway. Why, pray tell, ought I to be alarmed at the thought of sharing a 747 with her husband? Was he a pilot, but a very bad one? Why, if they were both traveling in the same direction at the same time, weren't they traveling together? Was she embarrassed to be seen with him? Was he an ax-murderer? Should I be alarmed? Was I sitting next to a real loon?
``Oh?'' I replied with due caution, ``Is this something I should be alarmed at?``
``Well, I guess not, not really. I mean, you'd probably never even know he was on the plane anyhow. But if you did, it might be...sort-of...creepy.''
``How so?''
``Well...he's dead. He's flying in the baggage compartment. I'm taking him home to Rockford.''
Thud.
Her announcement landed like a brick and it lay there, demanding to be picked up. I was staring a hole into the upright seatback tray in front of me, trying to summon the appropriate response for such an occasion: something sincere, yet neither familiar nor cloying. I thought of ``Gee, that's too bad,'' but I wasn't sure it was too bad. Maybe he'd spent the past decade in a coma, or with a wasting disease. On the other hand, ``what a blessing'' was most likely not the appropriate response. I settled on a noncommittal ``Oh. I'm sorry,'' and gingerly, tentatively volunteered the invitation to the next step in the dance:
``Was it sudden?''
The plane had reached altitude and the NO SMOKING sign ding-ed off; we gratefully grabbed our cigarettes and each lit one.
``He had lung cancer.''
Her husband had been treated for a couple months at the Vets' hospital in Seattle, but he was terminal; she took him home to Spokane because he was happier there. For months, maybe a year, she'd kept her job as a nurse in a Spokane hospital and came home to care for him. Having left the Vets' hospital, they'd incurred a $20,000 debt for private care. It seemed to me an abomination that she should be left with such a debt when the patient, after all, had died. But she said she didn't mind; it gave her something in the future to work toward.
When it finally happened, his death had been sudden; neither he nor Harriet were expecting it to come just yet. His lungs just filled up with fluid, and he died. It happened yesterday. Having explained this, she became fearful that perhaps she had contributed to his sudden death--she was a nurse, after all, and she had been with him only a couple hours before--couldn't she have anticipated that his lungs were about to drown him? She was fearful of what I might think of her, failing to save her husband.
``I doubt there was much to be done even if he were in the hospital.'' I was trying to reassure her; she really did know it wasn't her fault, but needed to hear it from someone else just then. ``I've heard of that happening, people's lungs suddenly filling with fluid. I guess it happens pretty often to people in your husband's condition.''
This seemed to relieve her; she sighed and relaxed back into her seat. She seemed to want to hear more, and so I continued, trying not to sound trite: ``Sometimes it can be a blessing for it to happen suddenly. I mean, it might have saved him a lot of suffering.'' This is what she'd needed to hear. At that moment, a pact formed between us: we were simpatico. She rambled on through the three-hour flight, asking only brief affirmations from me. And I listened, often too close to tears to respond, trying to offer those responses which would help her continue to release the tension she poured out by way of stories. Public mourning was out of the question. She needed to talk and keep talking.
``He was watching the Iran-Contra hearings. He watched all of it, right up until he died. It was keeping him happy--he really got a kick out of them going after North like that. He especially likes Inouye and Mitchell, the guy from Maine. But the day he died--yesterday--he was really excited because Proxmire was coming up that day. He got himself all set up in the easy chair in front of the TV--he's just like a kid.''
She liked thinking of the pleasure he had taken in the Contra hearings; it seemed to suit a sense of humor they'd shared. Listening to her talk about it, I got a sense of them as partners and companions. She was just now learning to refer to him in past tense, after fifteen years in present and future tense. Throughout the flight she struggled with the shift, from ``is'' to ``was'', from ``are'' to ``am'', from ``loves'' to ``loved''. Sometimes she caught herself speaking as though he were still alive, and she'd correct herself; each time, she confronted it anew. It was a heartbreaking process to witness. Their lives together disintegrated into their constituent elements and she was forced to distinguish her life from his. Her mate was dead.
``I don't know if he ever got to see Proxmire; I was at work when it happened. I'll bet he's really disappointed he didn't get to stick around for the end; he wanted to see how it all came out. But then, he'll probably know what really happened long before the rest of us; after all, now he can go ask ol' Bill Casey himself.'' She laughed at this, as much as she was able, and looked my way to gauge my reaction. My hands covered my mouth to stifle more of a laugh than would have been polite, but she must have interpreted this as shock on my part.
``Oh god. You must think I'm really sick to make jokes about my husband's death. I've been told I have a morbid sense of humor. I'm sorry if I offended you. It's hard to know what to do. I've never done this before. God--I've been a widow for twenty-four hours. I mean, what can you do on an airplane? It's not exactly a good place to mourn. I don't know how to do this. Am I doing something wrong?''
``No. You're not doing anything wrong. I don't really think there's any wrong way to do it. You won't offend me; you can just go ahead and say whatever you want.'' I was determined to provide her a safe place to do whatever she needed to on this flight. By now I was glad she was next to me and not sitting with that cross-looking business man in front of us. She was looking forward and I peeked behind those obscuring glasses of hers. Her eyes were all puffy from a long bout of crying, and somehow this reassured me; I felt it was an accomplishment on her part, a sign of good mental health. She didn't need any help mourning with her husband's death--she just needed to get through this flight. She needed to talk, and to find ways to express what was happening without making a public display.
And Harriet did find ways to tell me what she was thinking about. It seemed every story was packed and layered with meaning, all told with a kind of back-fence humor and grace I rarely hear anymore.
``He was a bone-thrower,'' she said, and delighted in the befuddled look on my face. ``See, a lot of the time he worked in a slaughterhouse, and what he did, his job, was he was a bone-thrower. After all the flesh was stripped off a carcass and all that was left was the bones, the cutters would throw the bones in this trough behind them, and my husband would come along and pick them up and throw them in this bin and cart them away. So he was called a bone thrower. I just love telling people that--`Oh, my husband's a bone-thrower.' I especially liked saying that to people in the hospital.''
She would be going back to work in two weeks. She looked forward to it because she dreaded living in their home alone and having too much time to brood. ``I tell you, if you ever want some time off, just go into your personnel office and tell them `my husband just died,' and they'll be falling all over themselves to give you some time off. It's real effective.''
She told me about her brother, who'd be picking her up at the airport and was already making arrangements for the events to come. They'd had a somewhat odd relationship in their teens--always picking on each other and always close.
``He was a real lady-killer, and he always had a lot of girlfriends. He had this big old Buick and, you know, it was the sixties and sexual liberation and all that. Well, he sure liberated a lot of girls in that car. And then during the day he'd let me use the car, and I'd keep finding all these girls' panties in the back seat, so I'd just go and return the panties to whoever was his date the night before. But then one time I returned them to the wrong girl. Boy, was she mad. And then when he found out, and this girl told him off, he was mad at me. So I stopped returning his girlfriends' panties. I started throwing them in the trunk.''
She started thinking about dating, and about sex. ``Hell, I'd never thought I'd be a widow when I was young. I'd never thought I'd be in the dating scene again. I haven't done that since the sixties, and it was different then; I don't know how it's done now. I mean, back then we had diseases, but those diseases were just embarrassing. Nowdays you've got diseases that'll kill you.''
It was early evening now and the plane was on its approach to Minneapolis, a much bigger airport than I'd anticipated. The stewardess suggested that everybody check the airport maps and their boarding passes to find their terminal; that's when I saw Harriet's name on her ticket. We were both flying out of the same terminal, on the other side of the airport, so I suggested we walk there together. She visibly relaxed a bit; she'd been dreading the airport crowd. So had I. As we left the plane and entered the stream of foot traffic, I found myself feeling fiercely protective of Harriet, ready to block oncoming bodies like a football player run amok. I wanted to clear a path for her. I wanted to shelter her from any critical eyes, any unkind act. I didn't want her to have to deal with any of it. I wanted to keep her safe.
We both had a short layover, so we stopped at a bar, out of the glaring lights and the obstacle course. She continued with her stories; by now she was anticipating the days ahead with her family and her husband's. They had left Illinois to get away from them. Now she worried about how she was going to pull off services and reception combining the two families: hers were hard-drinking Catholics, his were tee-totaling Protestants. She wanted so much for everyone to get along, for everything to go well. She dreaded running interference between the two clans, and she felt responsible for the outcome. She expected herself to act as hostess more than grieving widow.
``Maybe you don't need to take care of them all,'' I said. ``Maybe they can take care of themselves. You deserve a little caretaking yourself; don't run yourself ragged to please someone else.''
Over Bloody Marys she recalled growing up on the farm, her father's alcoholism, and her allergy to corn, her father's staple crop. When the corn was tassled, she'd stay inside and sneeze and struggle to breathe. It was that season now.
``I just know,'' she said in parting, ``when my brother picks me up, just as soon as I walk out of that airport, my eyes will start watering, and tears will just be streaming down my face.''
I looked at her. ``I'm sure they will.''
Laurie Lindsay is a Seattle writer working on her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Washington who considers flying to be a private and sacred act not performed with the assistance of others. She is the former editor of a northwest trade magazine and accomplished cook.
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