She moved through the corridors like an automaton, counting off the gates as she passed them. The terminal was undergoing renovation — perpetually, it seemed — and up ahead plywood walls narrowed the corridors to cattle chutes. There was raw concrete underfoot here, and everything had a film of dust on it. She looked anxiously to the bottleneck ahead — she had only ten minutes to make the flight — and she was just shifting the bag from her left shoulder to her right when she was jostled from behind. Or not simply jostled — if it hadn’t been for the woman in front of her, she would have lost her footing on the uneven surface and gone down in a heap. She glanced up to see the man who’d been sitting beside her on the aborted flight hurrying past — what should she call him? Stud Lip? Meringue Head? — even as she braced herself against the woman and murmured, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry.” The man never gave her so much as a glance, let alone a word of apology. On he went, a pair of shoulders in some sort of athletic jacket, the bulb of his head in the grip of his hair, a bag too big for the overhead compartment swinging like a weapon at his side.
She saw him again at the gate — at the front of the line, a head taller than anyone else — and what was he doing? There were at least twenty people ahead of her, and the flight was scheduled to depart in three minutes. He was just standing there, immovable, waving his ticket in the attendant’s face and gesticulating angrily at his bag. Ellen wasn’t a violent person — she was thirty-two years old, immured in the oubliette of a perpetual diet, with limp blond hair, a plain face, and two milky blue eyes that oozed sympathy and regret — but if she could have thrown a switch that would put an instant, sizzling end to Meringue Head’s existence, she wouldn’t have hesitated. “What do you mean, I have to check it?” he demanded, in a voice that was like the thumping of a mallet.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lercher,” the man behind the desk was saying, “But federal regulations require—”
“Ler share, you idiot, Ler share—didn’t you ever take French? And fuck the regulations. I’ve already been held up for two and a half hours and damn near killed when the goddamn engine caught fire, and you’re trying to tell me I can’t take my bag on the airplane, for Christ’s sake?”
The other passengers hung their heads, consulted their watches, worked their jaws frantically over thin bands of flavorless gum, the people-movers moved people, the loudspeakers crackled, and the same inane voices repeated endlessly the same inane announcements in English and in Spanish. Ellen felt faint. Or no, she felt nauseated. It was as if there were something crawling up her throat and trying to get out, and all she could think of was the tarantula creeping through the clear plastic tubes of the terrarium in the classroom she’d left behind for good.
Waldo, the kids had called it, after the Where’s Waldo? puzzles that had swept the fifth graders into a kind of frenzy for a month or two until something else — some computer game she couldn’t remember the name of — had superseded them. She’d never liked the big, lazy spider, the slow, stalwart creep of its legs and abdomen as it patrolled its realm, seeking out the crickets it fed on, the alien look of it, like a severed hand moving all on its own. It’s harmless, the assistant principal had assured her, but when Tommy Ayala sneaked a big dun trap-door spider into school and dropped it into the terrarium, Waldo had reacted with a swift and deadly ferocity. A lesson had come of that — about animal behavior and territoriality, and nearly every child had a story of cannibalistic guppies or killer hamsters to share — but it wasn’t a happy lesson. Lucy Fadel brought up road rage, and Jasmyn Dickers knew a teenager who was stabbed in the neck because he had to live in a converted garage with twelve other people, and somebody else had been bitten by a pit bull, and on and on and on. Fifth graders. Ten years of fifth graders.
“Chicago passengers only,” a flight attendant was saying, and the line melted away as Ellen found herself in yet another steel tube, her heart racing still over the image of that flaming engine and the fatal certainty that had gripped her like the death of everything. Was it an omen? Was she crazy to get on this flight? And what of the prayer she’d murmured — where had that come from? Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Prayers were for children, and for the old and hopeless, and she’d grown up to discover that they were addressed not to some wise and recumbent God on high but to the cold gaps between the stars. Pray for us, now and at the hour of our—
Up ahead, she saw the open door of the plane, rivets, the thin steel sheet of its skin, flight attendants in their blue uniforms and arrested smiles, and then she was shuffling down the awkward aisle like a mismatched bride—“The overhead bins are for secondary storage only…. A very full flight … Your cooperation, please”—and she was murmuring another sort of prayer now, a more common and profane one: Christ, don’t let me sit next to that idiot again.
She glanced down at her boarding pass—18B — and counted off the rows, so tired, suddenly, that she felt as if she had been drained of blood. (“Anemic,” the doctor had said, clucking her tongue, that was the problem, that and depression.) The line had come to a halt, Ellen’s fellow passengers slumped under the weight of their bags like penitents, and all she could see down the length of the aisle was their shoulders, their collars, and the hair that sprouted from their heads in all its multiethnic variety. The lucky ones — the ones already settled in their seats — gazed up at her with irritation, as if she were responsible for the delays, as if she had personally spun out the weather system over the Midwest, put the lies in the pilots’ mouths, and flouted the regulations for carry-ons. “All right, all right, give me a minute, will you?” a voice raged out, and through a gap in the line she saw him, six or seven rows down, blocking the aisle as he fought to stuff his bag into the overhead compartment. Force, that was all he could think to use, because he was spoiled, bullying, petulant, like an overgrown fifth grader. She hated him. Everyone on the plane hated him.
And then the flight attendant was there, assuring him that she would find a place for his bag up front, even as an amplified voice hectored them to take their seats and the engines rumbled to life. Ellen caught a glimpse of his face, blunt and oblivious, as he swung ponderously into his seat, and then the line shuffled forward and she saw that her prayer had been answered — she was three rows ahead of him. She’d been assigned a middle seat, of course, as had most of the passengers bumped from the previous flight, but at least it wasn’t a middle seat beside him. She waited as the woman in the aisle seat (mid-fifties, with a saddlebag face and a processed pouf of copper hair) unfastened her seat belt and laboriously rose to make way for her. There was no one in the window seat — not yet, at least — and even as she settled in, elbow to elbow with the saddlebag woman, Ellen was already coveting it.