I plow into the crowd. Clear security and proceed to the exit at Gate B-24.
A young mom dragging two kids bumps into me. For a second I think she’s going to apologize, but she takes one look at me and her expression changes—embarrassment-surprise-fear-pride-disgust—all in millisecond flashes. It’s almost fun, like watching a slide show. A PowerPoint called How People React to Other People Who Don’t Conform to Their Expectations of Niceness and Civility. I draw my coat around me and step past her. Slap my passport and boarding pass down in front of the TSA guy. I allow myself to wonder what the other kids will be like. What they’ll think of me.
The TSA guy starts leafing through my passport. Does a suspicious double take when he sees that nearly every page is full. Aruba, last summer. Dubai, for a paper on migrant workers. Tokyo, volunteering after the earthquake. He eyeballs my boarding pass. Motions for me to step to the side.
Oh great. I swear I’m not a drug dealer. I move out of the line, eyeballing the boarding pass and trying to see how it incriminated me.
A TSA woman approaches, red lipstick so bright it’s like she just made out with a freshly painted fire truck. “Follow me, miss,” she says in the most bored voice ever, and starts leading me around the endless security queue. I brace myself for deportation, gulag, whatever they do to drug dealers these days. The TSA woman positions me right at the front of the line. And leaves. The security people wave me forward.
Oh. Well, that’s cool.
Phone out, coat off, hands up for the body scan. And now I’m in the gate area, squeezing past some punk guy who thinks it’s a good idea to travel with studded belts and twelve dozen piercings. He looks at me accusingly, like I’m personally responsible for his poor life choices. I head into the gauntlet of fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, screaming kids, and snack walls.
I think of the last time I was here. I was on my way to a master class on Renaissance literature in Perugia, Italy. Everything was infinitely worse. Dad couldn’t take me to the airport—he stays at the loft downtown during the week—and I said I’d order a car, but Mom had to drive Penny to her ballet class so she offered to take me.
I should have guessed this wouldn’t end well. Mom doesn’t do things for no reason.
They sat up front. Mom was chewing that nasty medicinal herbal gum she likes. She kept leaning across the middle console and tucking Penny’s hair behind her tiny, half-gone ear. I wanted to tell her to watch the road.
Later, in Departures, Penny was power texting, her hair brushed forward to hide the scarring on her cheeks. Mom was telling her something about Madame Pripatsky’s carpel tunnel syndrome. I was being pathetic, thinking, Mom? Penny’s not even good at ballet. I’m the one going to Italy. Talk to me.
And I was saying, “Penny, don’t forget to feed Pete.”
I adore Penny. I have no right to. I shouldn’t even be allowed near her, but I do. She’s the only person in the world I’d bother rescuing, if, say, the whole world were about to be hit by a comet and I had a spaceship. She’s the one who gave me the nickname Ooky, back when she was two and the name ‘Anouk”‘ involved way too much drooling. When she was four, she told me she wanted to be a fish when she grew up, a blue one, also a veterinarian. I remember saying she could totally do that because blue fishes skilled in veterinarian work were really rare. She’s eleven now. She wants to become principal dancer at the New York City Ballet someday. She can barely walk upright.
I remember Penny nodding to me. Her thumb, tapping away at her screen. Me and Mom, staring past each other. Mom’s forty-three. She’s got huge hair, like Mufasa. She’s charismatic. She can make shareholders, VPs, the hot dog–seller on the curb outside her building follow her into the void. She’s never spared a drop of that charisma on me. Not in a long, long time.
We stood like that for maybe ten seconds, but it felt like a million years, and inside I was screaming for her to just turn her eyes a quarter of an inch and look at me.
She didn’t. She fixed her gaze on a point over my shoulder and said: “Keep those Italian boys in line.” And then she smiled this tiny, grim smile that said: Serves you right.
It does serve me right. She’s absolutely correct.