Trust Exercise(69)

“They just put you with a stewardess. I don’t even remember the flights.”

“Lucky you to be traveling with someone experienced,” Elli tells Karen.

At the airport Sarah shows she’s taken this idea of being the experienced traveler to heart. She’s insufferable, explaining things like how Karen shouldn’t lose her boarding pass and how she has to make sure she has her makeup in her carry-on bag because she won’t be able to get to her luggage before they’ve landed in London. Looking back, Karen’s willing to acknowledge it’s possible Sarah was nervous, just as nervous as Karen. It’s possible Sarah’s nervousness took the form of bossy condescension toward her friend, telling her friend the sorts of things even non–English speakers could have figured out for themselves at the airport, and then, once the plane was airborne, telling her friend things about London which she herself only knew on the basis of postcards. “Carnaby Street is where all the punks hang out. There’s a Hard Rock Café and then there’s Piccadilly Circus which is totally cool. I don’t care about Big Ben—it’s just a clock.” The plan was for Liam and Martin to meet them at Heathrow—“Heathrow” was the name of the airport but you never said “Heathrow Airport” only “Heathrow,” experienced Sarah informed inexperienced Karen—and for all of them to stay at a youth hostel, whatever this was, perhaps not even Sarah was sure, and once they were done seeing London they’d take a train down to Bournemouth, the city where Martin and Liam both actually lived. What would happen after that remained obscure.

Karen, seated next to the window, presses her face to the glass. The glass is icy cold, its touch makes her eyes water. She sees a total blackness of night she’s never even imagined, back home where the night sky is always hazed out. The plane vibrates and roars as it flies, which alarms Karen because it seems like it’s working too hard. She will not seek reassurance from Sarah. She won’t give Sarah the satisfaction. Sarah is smoking, listening to her Walkman, pretending to read. Gazing down on them from the future, on Sarah self-consciously holding her book in one hand, cigarette in the other, like a woman three times her age; on Karen chewing off the corner of her thumb while unaware of the red circular mark on her forehead from where she keeps compulsively pressing her forehead against the cold window, my heart goes out to them. Like a ghostly flight attendant floating in the aisle I gaze down at the two teenage girls, at Sarah who doesn’t love Liam, and at Karen who is not loved by Martin, and I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion. It’s sad the same way. But in the moment, staring into the darkness which she can’t keep her eyes off in spite of how frightening it is, Karen feels only resentment of Sarah. Because in the days leading up to their departure, Karen hasn’t heard from Martin at all, not even a jocular postcard. There’s no way he doesn’t realize she’s coming, she’s sent him the details more than once, and Liam knows she’s coming, and Martin knows whatever Liam knows, and Sarah treats her plans with Liam as also being Karen’s plans with Martin, and aren’t they? Karen believes it, because Sarah does. Sarah believes it, because Karen does. Karen has given Sarah no reason not to believe it, she hasn’t mentioned the silence from Martin. Karen has let Sarah have this mistaken impression, and now she hates and even blames Sarah for it, which of course isn’t fair, but Karen is afraid and embarrassed and also their friendship, at this moment of greatest shared risk, has gone wrong. It’s sick, out of whack. In fact it’s been like this for weeks but Karen wanted to think it was Elli who made things feel wrong but now Elli is gone and the wrongness remains. An hour into the flight Karen clambers over Sarah without explanation, crashes into the phone booth–size bathroom and vomits all over the ashtray-size sink. Karen stares at her greenish-gray face in the mirror. It takes her all the paper towels in the holder to clean up the vomit. She stuffs the vomit-covered towels in the toilet, presses the handle, then jumps back with fright as a sucking roar tells her she’s opened a hole in the airplane and her vomit has fallen into the sea. Retrospection streamlines the nine-hour trip and also inflates all the portents of doom. Did sixteen-year-old Karen really know, on the flight, what would happen? Did she and Sarah really sit side by side in cold silence, aware that their friendship had come to an end? Probably not. There were ideas that gave rise to feelings, and feelings that gave rise to ideas, but there was also lots of giggling, smoking, scribbling in journals, and sharing of the Walkman. We almost never know what we know until after we know it. The night rushed past the little round window and when the line of fire showed in the east Sarah pressed close to Karen, her coarsely permed hair tickling Karen’s cheek, and they watched the sun rise until the light was so bright they could no longer look. The last hour of the flight was spent solemnly doing their makeup.

At “Heathrow,” once they’d stood in all the lines and had their passports stamped—that’s a thrill nothing has ever undone, Karen can feel it again to this day, the knowing she’d just made her life forever larger than her mother’s; if she could just avoid falling behind, if she could just keep on moving, she’d always be that much ahead—an alarming crowd shouted and waved signs from behind a long railing. And there was Liam, the telegenic handsomeness he sometimes had under stage lights, or in photos, totally erased by his fish-belly paleness, his pimples, his flailing limbs like a spider’s, and his over-pointy Adam’s apple like a hard-on in his throat. And he was looking left to right frantically and waving a square of cardboard that said SARAH and when he caught sight of the person who went with that name his body froze and his mouth fell open with amazement as if he’d never believed she would come. He looked like a little child who’d just been offered candy. His joy was that unembarrassed and pure. And although the technology for reading minds has not yet been discovered, to quote a witty therapist Karen once knew, Karen was willing to bet, at that moment, that Sarah’s thoughts were so preoccupied with what an unhandsome dork Liam was despite his eyes and bone structure, and with how far he fell short of the romantic ideal she’d tried to believe that he was, and with how little she wanted to let his tongue into her mouth, that she couldn’t even see that pure joy on his face which she’d caused. Which is too bad, because a lot of us never get looked at that way.