Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(31)

That’s the amount of forethought, anxiety, and emotional energy that goes into every single flight. Fat people are not having fun on planes. There is no need to make it worse.

Just a month or two after the first time I didn’t fit, on a crack-of-dawn flight from New York City to Seattle, I had my first ever, um, disagreement with a seatmate. Despite my online irascibility, I’m pathologically polite in person, so face-to-face hostility is foreign to me. I’d almost missed the plane—I was that person staggering on board just before the doors closed—and I’m sure this dude thought he was going to have the three-seat row all to himself. He was about my age, maybe midthirties, an average kind of Jon Gosselin–looking guy. Probably works in an office; hangs out at, like, an Irish pub because he’s too old for clubs but still wants to hit on chicks; has always wanted to learn to surf but will never get around to it. I don’t know, just a guy. I flashed him an apologetic smile and pointed to the middle seat. “Hey, sorry, I’m over there.” He didn’t respond or make eye contact, just glared blankly at my hips. Then, as I went to put my bag in the overhead bin, I heard him mutter something sour.

“[Something something], say excuse me.”

I froze. Was someone being a dick to me? In person? At seven a.m.? In an enclosed space? For no reason? When I have a hangover? And we’re about to be stuck next to each other for the next five hours? I’m used to men treating me like garbage virtually, or from fast-moving cars, but this close-quarters face-to-face shit-talking was a jarring novelty.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he muttered, still refusing to look at me.

“No,” I said. If I’m going to make a living telling women to stick up for themselves, I need to do it too. “You said something. What did you say?”

“Nothing,” he repeated.

“No,” I repeated. “What did you say? Tell me.”

“I said,” he snapped, “that if you want someone to move, it helps to say ‘excuse me’ and then get out of the way. You told me to move and then you just—” He gestured with a large circular motion at my body.

“I’m putting my bag in the overhead bin,” I said, anxiety thundering in my ears. “You know, because that’s how planes work?”

“Yeah,” he said, dripping with disdain. “Okay.”

He stood up so I could slide into the middle seat, keeping his gaze fixed on the far bank of windows, avoiding my eye contact. I sat, trying not to touch him. My head felt like a hot-air balloon. I hadn’t said “excuse me” yet because I was still in the process of putting my bag in the overhead bin. The “excuse me” part of the transaction comes when you ask the other person to get up. I hadn’t leaned over him or touched him or dropped anything on him. No éclairs had tumbled out of my cleavage and into his hair. Was a preemptive “sorry” really not enough? Had I violated some custom I was unaware of? Had I fallen through a tesseract and into a dimension where “sorry” means “No offense, but you have a Jon Gosselinesque face and a Kate Gosselinesque personality”? If not, I could not fathom where I’d gone wrong.

The last few passengers boarded and they closed the doors. No one came to claim our window seat, so I slid over, saying, “Looks like there’s no one in the middle seat, so you won’t actually have to sit next to me. Since I apparently bother you so much.”

“Sounds great to me,” he droned, eyes front.

As soon as he fell asleep (with his mouth open like a nerd), I passive-aggressively jarred his foot with my backpack and then said, “Oh, excuse me,” because I am an adult (and he loves to hear “excuse me”!). We ignored each other for the rest of the flight.

It felt alien to be confronted so vocally and so publicly (and for such an arbitrary reason), but it also felt familiar. People say the same kind of thing to me with their eyes on nearly every flight—this guy just chose to say it with his mouth.

This is the subtext of my life: “You’re bigger than I’d like you to be.” “I dread being near you.” “Your body itself is a breach of etiquette.” “You are clearly a fucking fool who thinks that cheesecake is a vegetable.” “I know that you will fart on me.”

Nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane. Don’t think we don’t know.

That’s why—to return to my first-class flight—my foray into “luxury” was so disheartening. It wasn’t a taste of the high life so much as an infuriating illumination of how dismal it is to fly any other way. I realized: Oh. Flying first class wasn’t intrinsically special, but it was the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like a human being on a plane.

We put up with economy class because most of us have no choice—we need to get from here to there and we want cheaper and cheaper tickets. I can’t blame airlines for trying to stay in business by compressing as many travelers as possible into coach like a Pringles can lined with meat glue. It seems like a straightforward business decision, which is why it’s confusing, as a fat person, to hear so much about how I, personally, have ruined air travel. There are entire blogs devoted to hating fat people on planes—describing their supposed transgressions and physical particulars in grotesque, gleeful detail, posting clandestine photos, and crowing about the verbal abuse that posters claim to have heaped on their bigger neighbors. As though there were a time when 1) there were no fat people, and 2) everyone passionately loved flying.