Southern Lady Code: Essays(17)

I didn’t say, “There is too a ghost!”

I didn’t say, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I didn’t choke on a cupcake for breakfast. I didn’t bleed out from a Cling Wrap serrated edge. I didn’t reach into a bag of chips and get bit. I didn’t make a deal with the Dirt Devil and get my soul sucked out by a vacuum cleaner.





STRAIGHTEN UP AND


            FLY RIGHT





Congratulations, you are sitting next to the most considerate person on the plane. Seat 17B, that’s me. I’ll fly for up to four hours in this middle seat with my arms pinched to my sides and this mass-market paperback book in my hands. Yes, the print is tiny, but that’s why I wore my glasses. I’ve sacrificed my vanity to make you, Seat 17C, and this guy by the window in 17A more comfortable.

By the way, before you got here, 17A and I took a vote and closed the shade. The reason I have no fear of flying is that I imagine myself a parrot in a cage under a blanket. Polly wants sensory deprivation! What’s there to see once we’re up in the air anyway? Clouds. Crop circles. Been there, done that.

17A is already asleep. Isn’t he darling? His head lolls on his neck pillow like a ball-in-cup game. As soon as he sat down and we finished exchanging the same pleasantries that I’m exchanging with you, he drugged himself “with something expired he found in his dead father’s medicine cabinet.” He’s not going to disturb us (or anyone else) until after we land and someone shakes him like a can of paint.

Pardon me for saying so, but you might have thought to check your carry-on bag.

Honestly, nobody wants to help you put your bag in the overhead bin. Nobody wants to watch you hoist your bag like a sack of bricks and Barbies onto your seat back, then onto your clavicle, and then into the overhead bin. No, your bag won’t fit that way. It goes wheels out. Now you’ve got a stewardess involved. I mean flight attendant. I mean woman who wants you to—as a Delta employee once begged on my flight out of Atlanta—“Put your tush in the cush so we can push.”

What’s so bad about waiting ten minutes for your bag to come through on the carousel? I’d rather wait by the carousel than wait in a hot metal tube that smells like Chick-fil-A. What are you so afraid to lose? You can fit your tube top in your purse.

Neatly. You roll a tube top.

9F’s handbag looks like a laundry sack. It wouldn’t fit under the seat in front of her, so now a flight attendant is carrying the sack like it fainted and trolling the overhead bins for a hole. 9F is Facebook live-streaming the flight attendant, who is just doing her job. 9F is going to get herself kicked off this flight and delay our departure.

My handbag sits stiff and obedient under the seat in front of me like a magician’s top hat. It has many secret compartments that hold many secret things. If this plane goes down on a deserted island, I’ll be the last one to sunburn (SPF 50), get sick (Airborne), or eat the pilot (peanut M&M’s). Worried about terrorism and can’t get through security with 3.4 ounces of pepper spray? A knee sock and a roll of quarters goes unnoticed through an X-ray machine; swing it like a chain mace, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a weapon (Charles Bronson in Death Wish).

See, I told you I was considerate. We should form an alliance before takeoff. In case of emergency, 17A will never know what hit him and everyone else on this flight is too self-absorbed.

Hear that? 16A has called someone to tell him she’s boarded the plane. If these are the last words she chooses to tell her significant other before possibly tumbling out of the sky to her fiery death, then 16A is a horrible lover. It’s like going to bed with a man and talking dirty about your dust ruffle.

I kiss my husband good-bye before I go to the airport, and then I call him when I get to my hotel. In between, I read my book. But he doesn’t know that. A secret to our happy marriage is: I keep an air of mystery. Where am I now? Who am I talking to? Did I poison 17A? Just kidding! It’s like I’m an international spy. Or an air marshal.

And I am.

Do you know how many times I’ve seen something and said something?

Three times. And it’s about to be four.

They’ve made the announcement to turn off our phones, but 15D hasn’t complied, so we’re all going to die. I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen and we are all going to perish pointing and yelling at him.

But you’re the one on the aisle, so go ahead and gesture to a flight attendant about how 15D is endangering us. Go on. You’ve seen something, now gesture something.

No? Okay, I’ll do it.

Boy, that flight attendant is really laying into him; but 15D deserves it, and I’ll admit I get off on watching him pay for his crime. For the rest of this flight, I’ll revel in 15D’s chastisement like other women might delight in a lap dance from Channing Tatum. Are you getting a contact high from sitting next to me, an everyday hero?

I’m a national treasure. I’m like a wheat penny. I may look small and out of circulation, but if we find ourselves iced into a mountain, altitude sick, and bartering for oxygen masks, I’ll work. You can count on me.

The pilot says we’re not taking off for another twenty-five minutes. This doesn’t bother me, don’t let it bother you. You didn’t bring a book (or a fistful of pills like 17A), but today’s planes are like day cares or hospitals: there are TVs eight inches from all of our throats. Look, they’ve got HBO. Find something to watch in which women have hair as long and as wavy as washboards and erections outnumber dragons and zombies.