Sellevision - Augusten Burroughs [32]
Why don’t people care? Why aren’t public payphones banned? she wondered. She could understand the need for them would outweigh the health risks in underdeveloped countries such as India or New Zealand. But in America? Everyone she knew owned a cell phone, most of them digital.
Peggy Jean closed the magazine and placed it in the seatback pocket in front of her. It caught on the lip of the airsickness bag, which reminded her. She looked to make sure that the man directly across the aisle from her was still sleeping, and then she reached over and gently removed the airsickness bag from his pouch and placed it into hers, tucking both out of sight. Airsickness bags, she had found, made handy shoe bags for travel. She wore a size five, so it was a perfect, snug fit.
Reclining, she thought back to last winter when she and her neighbor Tina were in Peggy Jean’s kitchen making nativity cookies for the church bake sale. If Tina could only read this bacteria article, she’d understand how silly her comment back then had been, how uninformed.
They’d been sitting at the kitchen table while the last batch of Baby Jesus sugar cookies baked. It was a tricky thing, because the halo sometimes broke off into pieces, or just part of the halo would break away, leaving something that resembled a horn behind. And that you didn’t want.
“Peggy Jean, I know how much you adore your boys, but it’s funny—I don’t think I’ve ever seen you, well, touch them,” Tina had said.
The comment had taken Peggy Jean by surprise. Why had Tina noticed something so personal? And then commented on it, on something that was a family matter? As if the delicate balance of good parenting could only be achieved through the combined efforts of family and stray neighborhood acquaintances.
“Tina, let me explain something to you,” Peggy Jean had said, clasping her hands together on the table in front of her, her smile of broadcast quality. “All day long I deal with media people, producers, wardrobe, and makeup personnel. People are constantly touching me.” She took a sip from her Lemon Zinger tea and continued. “Fans touch me in supermarkets. They send me little crafts and knickknacks made from Popsicle sticks. Stuffed animals they’ve made out of scraps of unwashed fabric.”
Peggy Jean paused to dab her pinky beneath her eye. “Lord knows I want to touch my boys, just all the time, but I don’t have the luxury that ordinary mothers have.”
Peggy Jean stood to check on the cookies, peering through the glass of the oven door. Then she went to the sink and gave the flowered ceramic dispenser two quick pumps with her wrist, dispensing an amber pool of Dial antibacterial soap.
“Touch is how germs are spread, Tina.”
She rinsed her hands under the scalding hot water, dried them on a fresh Bounty paper towel, and turned to her friend. “And my boys have always been very sensitive to germs. I just can’t expose them. Did you know Staphylococcus can live for hours outside the body? Hours,” Peggy Jean had informed her.
She was startled out of her memory by sudden turbulence. The plane bumped through the air like a speedboat across choppy water. The formerly sleeping man across the aisle from her awakened, gripped both armrests with his hands, and stared straight ahead. Peggy Jean, a seasoned international traveler, turned to him and leaned over. “This always happens when you pass over Greenland. It’s thermo-something, has to do with all their volcanoes, I think.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” the man said, and reached into his seatback pocket for the airsickness bag. Not feeling it, he leaned forward and peered into the empty pouch.
Peggy Jean turned away and looked out her window.
The man made a gurgling sound in his throat, his cheeks plumped out, and he leapt from his seat, dashing up the aisle toward the lavatory.
A moment later, after the turbulence had passed, the male flight attendant appeared and knelt beside her. “Well, hello again,” he said. “I just wanted to