The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler [12]
There was the usual mellifluous murmur from the loudspeaker about seatbelts, emergency exits, oxygen masks. He wondered why stewardesses accented such unlikely words. “On our flight this evening we will be offering . . .” The woman next to him asked if he wanted a Lifesaver. “No, thank you,” Macon said, and he went on with his book. She rustled some little bit of paper, and shortly afterward the smell of spearmint drifted over to him.
He refused a cocktail and he refused a supper tray, although he did accept the milk that was offered with it. He ate an apple and a little box of raisins from his bag, drank the milk, and went off to the lavatory to floss and brush his teeth. When he returned, the plane was darker, dotted here and there with reading lamps. Some of the passengers were already asleep. His seatmate had rolled her hair into little O’s and X-ed them over with bobby pins. Macon found it amazing that people could be so unselfconscious on airplanes. He’d seen men in whole suits of pajamas; he’d seen women slathered in face cream. You would think they felt no need to be on guard.
He angled his book beneath a slender shaft of light and turned a page. The engines had a weary, dogged sound. It was the period he thought of as the long haul—the gulf between supper and breakfast when they were suspended over the ocean, waiting for that lightening of the sky that was supposed to be morning although, of course, it was nowhere near morning back home. In Macon’s opinion, morning in other time zones was like something staged—a curtain painted with a rising sun, superimposed upon the real dark.
He let his head tip back against the seat and closed his eyes. A stewardess’s voice, somewhere near the front of the plane, threaded in and out of the droning of the engines. “We just sat and sat and there wasn’t a thing to do and all we had was the Wednesday paper and you know how news just never seems to happen on a Wednesday . . .”
Macon heard a man speaking levelly in his ear. “Macon.” But he didn’t even turn his head. By now he knew these tricks of sound on planes at night. He saw behind his eyelids the soap dish on the kitchen sink at home—another trick, this concreteness of vision. It was an oval china soap dish painted with yellow roses, containing a worn-down sliver of soap and Sarah’s rings, her engagement ring and her wedding band, just as she had left them when she walked out.
“I got the tickets,” he heard Ethan say. “And they’re opening the doors in five minutes.”
“All right,” Macon told him, “let’s plan our strategy.”
“Strategy?”
“Where we’re going to sit.”
“Why would we need strategy for that?”
“It’s you who asked to see this movie, Ethan. I would think you’d take an interest in where you’re sitting. Now, here’s my plan. You go around to that line on the left. Count the little kids. I’ll count the line on the right.”
“Aw, Dad—”
“Do you want to sit next to some noisy little kid?”
“Well, no.”
“And which do you prefer: an aisle seat?”
“I don’t care.”
“Aisle, Ethan? Or middle of the row? You must have some opinion.”
“Not really.”
“Middle of the row?”
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Ethan. It makes a great deal of difference. Aisle, you can get out quicker. So if you plan to buy a snack or go to the restroom, you’ll want to sit on the aisle. On the other hand, everyone’ll be squeezing past you there. So if you don’t think you’ll be leaving your seat, then I suggest—”
“Aw, Dad, for Christ’s sake!” Ethan said.
“Well,” Macon said. “If that’s the tone you’re going to take, we’ll just sit any damn place we happen to end up.”
“Fine,” Ethan said.
“Fine,” Macon said.
Now he did