How to Get Along with Women (13 page)

Jeannie sipped from a lowball glass of ginger and lime bar mix, pushed her shot glass at Anna when no one was looking.

Listen, Anna said. You won't get fired if you tell. She leaned over and poured the shot into Pavel's beer. They give you this little maternity uniform. And you don't have to wear heels! Shelagh Manus had a baby flying six-leggers. She flew till eight months.

Jeannie reached over and squeezed her fingernails into Anna's wrist. It won't be the same, she hissed. You know it won't.

Anna slumped against Jeannie for a moment, like sisters.

Where's your ring?

Jeannie caressed her own hand.

Sometimes I dance with them a little, she said.

The guys?

I don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Would you do it if he was here? Anna sat up and pointed to an empty spot on the bench. Pretend he was here, in the room.

Pretend is pretend, Jeannie said.

Anna knew when she'd got in the cab with the rest of them that she'd be stuck and then drunk and the next day on the aircraft would hurt. It was a thing she did on purpose. Spring and summer being high times for rough air; all those hot pockets rising. What Pavel's crew had going for them was an eight a.m. wheels-up. This, if nothing else, promotes moderation. Aubrey and Anna the last to leave the bar.

Lights on?

Another cab ride home?

They woke up in the cloverleaf tub and there was the sun and they said goodnight. She couldn't remember if she'd kissed him the night before or what.

Did I kiss you? At the bar?

You showed me your brother.

Anna remembered then: her hand in her coat pocket, thumbing the little booklet.

All the pictures?

The top one. You said he got scars later.

Her blue trench and the little black shoes lying poolside. O-ho.

Before anything, before crawling onto his bed, before sleep, she double checks all her pockets, both hands at once, down and through and up and out, and then turns them inside out, and throws the purse upside down, but the photos are gone. Empty. Swept into a corner at the bar or face down in a puddle or caught in the pool filter or wedged into the seat of the taxi, but not here, not in her pocket, not on the floor.

You'd find the booklet and think, Some mother's collection. You'd look around for the wallet it came out of, lost money or lottery tickets or a credit card maybe not even cancelled yet. All this before flipping the little pages. Zoran through the years. One enzyme, absent. In the top picture Zoran is still clean and intact.

Then a disease that builds up over time. Too much uric acid in the blood, gets into all your organs. Kidney problems: hips and elbows and knuckles swollen with gout. Moderate retardation, low muscle tone. No motor control. Frustrating. So frustrating that by late childhood you might bang your head off the wall, you might gnaw at your own tongue and lips, then later your fingers, starting from the nail and working in to the first knuckle, then the second. All the fine parts that won't work.

This is how Anna explains it, lying on Aubrey's bed and staring straight up.

He chewed his lips off? Aubrey tucks her in, pins her by the shoulders: You have to sleep now. We're out in four hours.

He picks up her hand and sucks on two of her fingers a moment, pretend-chewing them, then pulls them out and holds them in the air.

I think we got no problems with these ones, he says.

Anna laughing. Who's gonna find those pictures? Then: Put your hand over my mouth, cover my mouth. Aubrey, cover my mouth.

He does. He lets her scream. His hand gets wet: the breath steams out of her. She screams until the voice coming out is cracked and thin and when Aubrey takes his hands off her face she still wants him on her. She holds his wrists. They're sober but remember being drunk.

When he's done she wants to trade places, and she leans up over him and holds him down with her hands under his collarbone. She's still wearing a t-shirt. She puts one hand over his mouth.

He chewed his own lips off, she says, rocking him back and forth. And his fingers. He had no finger-tops, no nails, he went down to the knuckle.

He could have done anything, she says. Any crime, they couldn't catch him.

Aubrey catches his breath.

You get it? she says. He had no fingerprints.

At the airport, the power's out and it's hailing and an old man smiles while Anna counts change for the vending machine.

Other stewardesses go to Rome, Paris, London, he says. You get to overnight in Sault Ste Marie.

New York yesterday, she says. And Chicago tonight. So I guess I'm okay.

The man's smile sags a little. He's tired of her already.

She doesn't want this old man here. She wants Aubrey standing next to her, close enough that if she fell his body might stop the falling. She wants the right change for a bottle of juice. She looks around. Aubrey is up at the ticket counter, leafing through the pack of flight plans. She can see his lips moving as he reads. Alternate: Sudbury. Flight level Two-Three-Oh. Expected passengers: Fifty-three.

Someone takes a step toward her and Anna jumps back.

Listen you blonde bitch, the old man whispers. His eyes are a watery grey.

No. He doesn't say a thing. His body hasn't moved. He's timid and disappointed. The girls always seem so nice when they're up in the air. Why is this one so mean?

Hope you got some hot coffee on that airplane for me, he says.

She presses a hand on the juice button.

You like the way we take care of you, yeah? she tells the old guy. Bring you tea and cookies when your seatbelt is on. Maybe you wanna sit in my lap?

The plastic bottle of juice smacks down into the bottom of the machine.

Aubrey catches this from where he's standing in his hat and long coat. She looks up and realizes he's been watching for some time. He takes a warning step toward them. Shakes his head, then points to the ladies' room. He's her only witness: Jeannie and the First Officer in the back room with egg sandwiches, eating off napkins with the draft blowing through the gap in the door to the ramp.

Anna cracks the seal of her grapefruit juice and drinks it on the toilet in the dark airport, slipping a couple Advil down alongside. When it's time to go, Aubrey walks into the Ladies' and rattles the cubicle door. She comes out and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Can't go flying without you, Aubrey says.

He tows her little suitcase. At security bypass he watches as she pulls off her glove, presses her fingertip into the scanner long and deep and slow.

She was seven when Zoran was born. Small and purple in her mother's bed, little fists curling around the edge of the eiderdown and for eight weeks he screamed.

Anna carried him up and down. Once she carried him by his feet and gave him a shake, to stop the screaming, but her mother took him away. Her mother waiting for him to do the normal things: sit up at six months, crawl, get on his feet and rock against the living room coffee table. He didn't babble. He vomited. They had to abandon a red couch when they moved apartments because there was so much baby vomit plastered down behind the cushions and who wants to sit on that?

A bit slow, the doctor thought, Maybe the mother a bit old for new babies.

He peed orange.

He learned to talk but it sounded wrong. He spat. When he walked his legs kicked out funny. He fell down. He had trouble eating. He couldn't get his hand to the right place, into his mouth. His hand with food in it. The mother put on music and he danced with his whole body, arms and legs spastic with joy.

When he was three and she was ten Anna fell asleep every night to the sound of his head, banging off the wall between their rooms. Rigorous.

Your colleague doesn't like me.

This is Anna's old man again, the man from the airport. They're standing back in the galley of the plane, Anna sorting dirty napkins from empty beer cans for recycling, Jeannie dropping used glasses into a tray.

Jeannie looks up: The lavatory is at the front of the cabin, sir.

The man looks confused, turns, and heads up to the front of the plane where a handful of people are standing, hunched, waiting in turn for the bathroom door to open.

How many times a day do I say that? Jeannie says. She slides the glass tray back into its compartment, latches the door, pulls out an empty metal canister and sits down on it.

You should have told him I'm your managing flight attendant. Anna hasn't moved. She's poised over the garbage bag, arms raised, two empty cans of Molson Canadian in each hand. I'm the Purser on this flight, she says. We provide consistent service to all passengers.

Jeannie looks up. He wanted the lav. Right? He was asking for the lav?

There's a pause. Anna's not sure now. What was the man talking about?

Where did you fly before?

I used to bartend, Anna says. And I was a nanny for these two little girls.

That's the same job as this, Jeannie says. She's filling out bar paperwork on her lap: how many bottles did you start with, how many did you use.

I flew with Sky for seven years, and then charters with Soleil for a year and a half, Jeannie says. Our passengers are so chill compared to that. You fly vacation charters, people are throwing food at you. But you get the layovers, so.

Anna pulls out a cart and steps on the brake, locking the wheels while she sets up her bar top. She reaches up and pulls down a coffee pot, looks it over. Unscrews the lid and goes to throw the switch on a hot jug to fill the pot with coffee.

Jeannie stands up.

No one's drinking coffee at this time, she says. Don't bother. Here. She takes the pot out of Anna's hands and latches it back in its compartment. Just put lots of water, beer, two whites and a red.

Jeannie unlocks the brake, pushes the cart at Anna.

I'll go first, you can follow me. If someone wants coffee, I'll get you to run for it. Okay? She pulls out her own cart and cuts the brake with her shoe. A bell rings: woman at row 6.

Don't worry that you didn't fly before, Jeannie says. This whole place is just daycare with drinks.

She backs into the aisle, towing her bar cart behind her.

Get people on a plane, she says, suddenly everyone's in Pampers.

There's no one in the last row, so after they're done service Anna slides into a passenger seat and pushes up on the white plastic shade. The blue outside hurts her head and she almost pulls it down again, but natural light is good for you, helps you sleep at night. Out the window it's bright and sinister. The plane drops and starts. Jeannie already has a seatbelt tight around her belly. A rough patch of air; une zone de turbulence.

She gets her phone out, hops up out of her seat and refastens next to Anna.

Okay look, she says. I'm fourteen weeks, so that's right here.

I don't know what this is, Anna says.

It's Baby Bump Pro, Jeannie says. It's an app. It tells you where the baby's at every week.

Anna cups a hand around the screen. There's still some glare off the window but she can make out a drawing of a fetus, its skin transparent, weird legs curled up. All the ribs showing, skinny. Half the thing is just a head, eyes closed and lids blue with blood vessels. By now your baby is about 3 inches long, she reads, and weighs nearly an ounce. Her tiny, unique fingerprints are now in place.

Do you know what you're having? Anna says.

I only had sisters, Jeannie says. So I don't know what you say to a boy. She flips ahead to eighteen weeks, then twenty, then twenty-eight. The legs get longer; the skin is still see-through.

Jeannie swipes a finger across the screen and the image changes and she tosses the phone back in her purse.

God, she says. Boys. What would you even say?

There's a giant man on top of the optician's, holding a sign that says Eye Can See You Now. They're in the shuttle, down from the airport to the hotel. Everything is enormous in Chicago. A giant bull on top of the steakhouse, a white plaster horse outside Tony's Western Wear, and then the fast stream of carbon copy taco shops. Taquería, Quesadillas, Gorditas.

Jeannie: A Gordita is like a Taco Bell thing, right?

Gordita, it means like, little fat one. It means, something that fattens you up, Anna says. A fattener. In a good way.

Jeannie shifts straighter and sucks in her gut. Day three of four days out, seventeen hours now on the ground at Midway. Light loads for weekend flying.

How fat do you think you'll get, Anna whispers. Thirty pounds? Fifty pounds?

Jeannie picks her nose, lightly, in the window. The guys are sitting up front and don't see. Anna sees. She smoothes the lapel on her trench coat, adjusts the flight report envelope where it's sticking a little too far out of her purse.

Where's your hat? she says.

Jeannie turns: In my lunch bag.

In the room, Anna unzips her case and lets it spill open on the floor. Aubrey hangs his coat in her closet, next to the ironing board. She pries off her high heels and throws them at his feet.

I'll just stay, he says. He's got a key she handed him at the desk, for a room down the hall, and he slips it into the coat pocket and starts peeling off his uniform, hanging up each piece: jacket, then tie, then shirt.

She takes the running shoes out of her bag, and a pair of shorts and some socks and gets up and goes into the bathroom to change. There's a click from the little doorknob lock, and she unlocks it and then clicks it again, just to be sure.

Kicker Blvd. Or Knicker. Kiefer. Turn left here.

No: Kedzie.

She's the only runner in this part of Chicago, every sidewalk a construction project, every corner broken down and pyloned-off and a quick jump down into the road. If you run in the Sault, you go along the shoulder with the airfield on one side of you and forest on the other. They warn you about coyotes. A few years ago a girl got eaten. Not right there, but in the province, and now they're seeing coyotes near the airport all the time so it stands to reason.