Greta watched her own children crawl into her stepmother’s lap and call her Grandma. She helped the old woman fold her laundry. She drove her to the grocery store on Sundays.
And, all the time, Greta knew what she knew about the skill she had and would not use until finally one day there was a tube in her stepmother’s throat. One eye was dead, and one was fixed on Greta—the parched lips opening and closing, the spotted skin, the limbs all turned into themselves like the branches of a terrible tree, and Greta kissed her stepmother’s forehead then, took a step back, taking her in, before she said it four times under her breath, and then listened. Some radiant wind swirling around the dead woman. Some sound of grateful bliss.
“If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane”
Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane. When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed. She was wearing a black turtleneck and slim black pants. Black boots. Pearl studs in her ears. She was swinging the loose leg, the one that was tossed over the knee of the other—swinging it slowly and rhythmically, like a pendulum, as she tried to drink her latte in burning sips.
By the time the stranger approached her and asked her to carry the foreign object with her onto the plane, the woman had already owned that latte for at least twenty minutes, but it hadn’t cooled a single degree. It was as if there were a thermonuclear process at work inside her cup—the steamed milk and espresso somehow generating together their own heat—and the tip of her tongue had been stung numb from trying to drink it, and the plastic nipple of the cup’s white lid was smeared with her lipstick.
Her name was Kathy Bliss. She was anxious. At home, her two-year-old was sick, but she’d had to go to Maine anyway because she’d been asked to speak on behalf of the nonprofit for which she worked, and possibly thousands upon thousands of dollars would be gifted to it by her hosts if she were able to conjure the right combination of passion and desperation with which she was sometimes able to speak on behalf of her nonprofit. She didn’t much believe in what they were doing, which was, to her mind, mostly justifying the spending of their donations on computers and letterheads and lunches with donors, but she had her eye on another nonprofit, one devoted to curing a disease (or at least publicizing a disease) which no one knew about until it was contracted, at which time the body attacked itself, turning the skin into a suit of armor, petrifying the internal organs one by one. The vice president of this nonprofit had his eye on the regional directorship of the American Cancer Society, she knew, and with some luck his position would be open, and she would be ready to move into it.
Still, she’d always understood that you have to put your energy into the place you are if you want to move on to another place; and, on occasion, she could be convincing—something about the podium, a bottle of water, a few notes, and all eyes on her—and there was clearly no one else at her nonprofit who could even remotely have been considered for this engagement. (Jen, with her multiple piercings? Rob with his speech impediment?) She had to go.
The baby was sick, but the baby would be fine. Kathy Bliss had a husband, after all, who would take care of their baby. He was the baby’s father, for God’s sake. This wasn’t 1952. The man had a Ph.D. in compassion. Who was she to think the baby would be any better off with her there just because she was of a certain gender? And if she hadn’t had to go to Maine, Garrett would have gone to work himself, which would have left only one parent at home anyway, doing the same thing either way—cuddling, cleaning up puke, taking the temp, filling the sippy cup with cold water.
Still, Kathy Bliss felt a pain, which she knew, intellectually, was imaginary, but nonetheless was excruciating, hovering around a few inches above her breasts, as if only moments ago something adhesive—a bandage, duct tape, a baby—had been ripped away from her bare flesh and taken a top layer of cellular material with it.
The latte had scalded her tongue (just the tip) to the point that she could feel, when she moved it across the ridge behind teeth, the rough little bumps of it gone completely dead—just a prickling dullness. Without the taste buds to interfere, Kathy Bliss could really feel the ridge behind the back of her teeth, the place where the bone smoothed into flesh, the difference between what was there for now and what, when she was dead, would be left. She took another sip. Better. Maybe it had cooled down a bit, or maybe her tongue couldn’t register the heat of it anymore. That was probably dangerous, she thought. The way people got scalded. Their nerve endings dulled, and they stepped into the tub without knowing it would cook them.
“Sorry,” the stranger said after his pant leg brushed her knee, but she didn’t really look at him, not yet. His tan belt was at eye level, nothing remarkable about it, and then he was gone.
As was always the case in airports, there was a small crowd of confused people (the elderly, the poor, some foreigners) standing patiently in a line they didn’t need to stand in, and a woman behind a counter who was waving them away one by one as they approached her with their fully sufficient pieces of paper.
“We’ll be boarding in forty minutes,” the woman said over and over, refusing to smile, make eye contact, or answer questions. The woman had a spectacular hairpiece on top of her head. A kind of beehive with fronds. When she waved, the fronds shivered, caught the light, looking fountainlike, or like incandescent antennas. Although the woman had dark skin (tanning booth?), her real hair was a pale pink-blond beneath the hairpiece, which was the synthetic blond of a Barbie doll. What had the woman been thinking, Kathy Bliss wondered, that morning at the mirror, placing it atop her head. What had she believed she would look like with that thing on her head? Had she wanted to look the way she did—shocking, alien, a creature out of an illustrated Hans Christian Andersen?
Many years before, when Kathy Bliss was a college student, in an incident that had, she believed, changed and defined her forever, she’d come across a dead body in the Arboretum. A woman. Stabbed. Mostly bones and some scraps of clothing—and she (Kathy Bliss, not the dead woman) had run screaming.
It had been a very quick glimpse, so of course she hadn’t known at the time that the body was that of a woman, or that the woman had been stabbed, knew nothing of the details until she was given them later by the police. Still, she knew that she must have stood there open-mouthed for at least a second or two (she had been running on a trail but gone off of it to pee) because she clearly saw, or remembered seeing, that there were bees in that dead woman’s hair.
When a few people left the line, a few more entered it. All over the airport, there were such sad, small crowds. They hesitated together at every counter, not ready to believe that all was well, not able to so easily accept the assurance that they already had what they needed, that they had found their proper places so quickly and had only now to wait. Kathy Bliss herself had forced one such crowd to part for her when she entered the terminal, pulling her suitcase on wheels behind her as she made her way to security. She could feel their eyes on her back as she passed, knew they were probably loathing and admiring in equal measure her swift professional purposefulness. She knew where she was going. She’d done this a million times.
But, to her ears anyway, the wheels of her luggage made the sound of a spit turning quickly (but with some effort) over a burning pit, as she dragged it behind her. She had no idea why. They weren’t rusty. It was a fairly new bag. It had never been left out in the rain or pulled through the mud. But there it was, the sound of a spit, turning. A pig on that spit. An apple in its mouth. That final humiliation. We shall eat you, Pig.
She couldn’t believe it when, at the SAVe a LIFe! picnic that summer, that they’d actually done that, actually roasted a pig on a spit with an apple crammed into its mouth.
At first, she hadn’t noticed it because she’d been busy meeting and greeting. (“Yes, yes, o
f course I remember. Nice to see you again. Thank you for coming.”)
But after she’d filled her glass with punch and had just tipped the glass to her lips, she’d seen it out of the corner of her eye, taken one step toward it, seen it fully then, and reeled—literally reeled—and splashed pink punch onto her chest, where it trickled down in a sweet zigzagging rivulet between her breasts.
Luckily, she’d been wearing a low-cut dress, also pink.
“Whoa,” the college president she’d been standing next to said when she reeled. “Friend of yours or something? Are you a vegetarian?”
“Jesus,” she’d said, “I am now,” turning her back to the spit, trying to smile. But there was a cool film of sweat all over her body, as if each pore had opened in a moment, coating her with dew. “What a spectacle.”
“Isn’t that the point?” the college president had said.
“Because of heightened security measures,” the ceiling droned, “we ask that you report any unattended luggage. If a stranger should approach you and ask you to carry a foreign object with you onto a plane, please contact a member of security personnel immediately. …”
“Excuse me?” the stranger said, taking a seat beside her.
Kathy Bliss turned, swinging her leg off her knee, placing both black boots beside one another on the floor.
“Yes?”
The stranger was young and handsome. He had dark hair and tan skin and large brown eyes. Slender fingers. What appeared to be an actual gold Rolex on his wrist. He was wearing a white shirt with a red tie and a black leather jacket. An Arab, she thought right away, and then felt bad for thinking it. He had no accent. She could tell that already from the two words he’d spoken. He was an American, not an “Arab.” He was probably more American than she was, her mother’s parents having stumbled into this country from Liverpool, broke, in the twenties, her paternal grandparents having dashed across the Canadian border in the thirties in search of higher-paying employment with the U.S. Postal Service.
Still, it must be awful, she thought, to look like an Arab in an airport these days. It must have felt, she supposed, like wearing a scarlet A. Everyone staring, either wondering suspiciously about you and feeling guilty about wondering, or feeling suspicious and self-righteous about staring and wondering. “I’m sorry to bother you,” the stranger said. “Are you, by any chance, going to Portland?”
“Yes,” Kathy Bliss said.
“Well—” he smiled, and then his breast pocket began to play the theme from the Lone Ranger loudly and digitally, and he reached into it and fumbled around for a moment until it stopped and he said, “Sorry,” shaking his head. For a crazy second Kathy Bliss thought of asking him to check the caller ID, to make sure her husband wasn’t trying to reach her with some news about the baby (she’d turned her own cell off to conserve the battery, and would check it just before she got on the plane)—but, of course, this stranger had nothing to do with her baby.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
The man had a tiny gold cross in his left earlobe. It was really very beautiful—and strange, too, how masculine that little earring made him look with the dark shadow of beard on his chiseled jawline, and how masculine he made that earring by wearing it in his ear, with its foiled brilliance. A small, bold statement. It might have been a religious statement or a fashion statement, what difference did it make?
“Yes, but please,” he said, “if this sounds strange to you, just send me away.”
“Okay?” she said. A question.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m supposed to be going to Portland for my mother’s seventieth birthday, but I just got a call from my girlfriend telling me—” he smiled ruefully, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, “—I’m sorry, I should make something up here, but I’ll just tell you the truth. She’s pregnant. And she’s flipping out. And I feel like,” he tossed some emptiness into the air with his palms, making a gesture she’d seen men make many times in response to women’s emotional states, “honestly—I think I ought to go buy her an engagement ring today, and get my butt over to her apartment. I mean, this isn’t a disaster. Or it doesn’t have to be. We were getting married anyway, and we knew we might get pregnant. We weren’t even using any—” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, really sorry, to be filling you in on all these details. I’d made it through security, I was planning to just go and come back maybe even tonight, and then I realized—I just realized I shouldn’t go at all. That I should go straight back to my girlfriend right now.” He inhaled, looked at Kathy Bliss as if trying to gauge her reaction. “I’m sorry,” he said, “to fill you, a complete stranger, in on these sordid details.”
Kathy Bliss tried to laugh sympathetically. She shook her head a little. Shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “Been there, done that!”
The stranger laughed pretty hard at this. His teeth were very straight and white, although one of the front ones had what looked to be a hairline crack in it. A very thin gray crack. Her two-year-old, Connor, had just recently gotten so many new teeth that it surprised her every time he opened his mouth. The teeth were like little dabs of meringue. Clean and white and peaked. She liked to smell his breath. It was as if there were a pure little spring in there. His mouth smelled like mineral water.
“Well, there you have it,” the stranger said. “I guess, if nothing else, we’re all here because somebody’d been there and done that.”
“That, too,” Kathy Bliss said. “But, I mean, I have a child. It’s a great thing.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m starting to forget, in all this hysteria, the great fact that I’m going to be a dad—”
“Well, congratulations from me,” Kathy Bliss said. She felt the warm implication of tears starting somewhere around her sinuses, and swallowed. She changed her latte cup from her right hand to her left, reached over the metal armrest, and offered it to him. He shook it, smiling. Then he shook his own hand as if it had been burned. “Jeez,” he said, “that’s one burning handshake.”
“My latte,” she said. “It’s like molten lava.”
“I guess so,” he said.
The stranger was wearing khaki pants with very precisely ironed creases. For a quick second Kathy Bliss wondered if his girlfriend was also an Arab, and then she remembered that she had no way of knowing that he was an Arab, and far more evidence, anyway, that he wasn’t—and reminded herself that it didn’t matter anyway. So, maybe his parents had been born in Egypt, or Iraq. The color of his skin was beautiful. A warm milky brown. She felt a pang of jealousy about the girlfriend, lying on their bed at home, not knowing that this beautiful stranger was making desperate plans to buy her a diamond that day. What a thing, this life. Love. God, when it worked, it really worked! She had, herself, fallen in love with her husband upon first sight. She’d been given his name as the best shrink in town for the kind of problem she was having—which was spending every minute of her day trying not to think about the dead body in the Arboretum for two solid years after she’d seen it—and she had no sooner settled herself in the chair across from his, and he’d crossed his legs, looking more anxious and frightened than she, herself, the patient, felt, that she knew she wanted to marry him. And he’d cured her, too. Without drugs. A few behavior modifications. A rubber band around her wrist, a mantra, a series of self-punishments and rewards.
“Well, to make a long story short,” the stranger said, “my girlfriend’s freaking out back at our apartment, and my mother’s turning seventy in Portland, and I’m her only son, who’s such a scoundrel and an ingrate, not to mention morally reprehensible for impregnating someone he’s not married to, yet, that he’s not even showing up for her party, so—” and here he shook his head and looked directly into Kathy Bliss’s eyes, “I wonder if I, a stranger, could ask you, a passenger, to carry a foreign object with you onto the plane?”
“Oh my God,” Kathy Bliss said. “All these years I was wondering if anyone was ever going to ask me that.”
“I think,
” the stranger said, “now is the point at which you ought to contact security personnel—like, right away.”
“Yes,” she said, “I think I may have heard an announcement pertaining to that. And I’ve always wondered to myself what kind of idiot would actually do such a thing, like carry a foreign object onto a plane.”
“Well,” the stranger said, “here’s the object you’ve been waiting your whole life to carry with you onto the plane.”
Out of a pocket in the inner lining of his coat, the stranger produced a narrow rectangular box wrapped in gold paper. He sighed. “It’s a gold necklace, and if you’d be so foolhardy as to carry it with you onto the plane, I’d call my brother and have him meet you at baggage claim and get it to the party this evening. But,” he waved his slender fingers around over the box, “I totally understand if you think that’s nuts.”
“I have no problem with it,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t contact security personnel.”
“Let me open it for you, at least,” he said, “so you know you’re not carrying a bomb—”
“If you managed to get a bomb in that little package,” she said, “you deserve to have it carried by a passenger onto the plane.”
She regretted the joke even as she said it, saw the towers dissolving into dust on her television again. It had been on the floor because the entertainment center had not yet arrived (it was being custom-built somewhere in Illinois) and there was no table or counter big enough to put the television on. The baby was crying (eight weeks old), so she’d had to stand and pace with his hot little face leaking tears onto her shoulders as those towers collapsed at her feet. The front door had been open, and it had smelled to her as if the stone-blue perfect sky out there were dissolving in talcumish particles of dried flowers—such a beautiful day it horrified her. An illusion dipped in blue. She could have walked with her baby straight out the front door or right into the big-screen TV of it, and they might have turned, themselves, into nothing but subatomic particles, blue light, perfume.