An Unexpected Travel Companion
Mid-August, sweltering. I was flying back from New York after being there for eleven days, ten nights. I’d been working as a live-in nanny on the Upper East Side for a family I was employed with when I lived in Brooklyn. The baby girl is the sweetest thing in the world, but extremely unique and sometimes difficult. She suffers from a rare syndrome that affects many things about her development, including the fact that she doesn’t sleep. She wakes up every few hours, expecting milk and snuggles. While that’s adorable, as someone who is accustomed to eight uninterrupted hours of sleep each night, it made for long nights and an equally lovely, but long trip.
I had just boarded my second flight of the day, a small jet plane to Key West from Miami. The flight earlier that morning had been packed full, as most connecting flights from NYC are, with families, businessmen, independent travelers and screaming babies alike. It was the kind of flight in which lines for the bathroom queue down the aisle, children are crying and multiple languages are muttered amongst passengers. I was exhausted.
Travel is something I await, I adore, I relish, I cherish. But the going is always more exciting than the returning, and knowing I was bound for a hot meal at a tiki bar in Key West upon deplaning made the trip that much more agonizing. I could almost feel the condensation in my palm from a cold glass and taste the citrusy beer on my tongue.
After walking outside to get to the little plane bound for Key West, climbing the steps to the side door and giving a knowing smile to the steward, I collapsed into the aisle seat directed by my boarding pass. Moments after texting a friend that the flight is mostly empty and I was glad to have my own row, a boisterous figure in a bright blue maxi dress came traipsing down the aisle and stopped directly in front of me.
“23D? You’re in my seat, Hon. You don’t like the window?” The mass of blue said to me, before I was able to refocus my eyes, and find a kind face.
“Oh, I thought D was the aisle seat.” It was. “No, I’m fine with the window!” I hurriedly replied. I don’t know what it is about the little pictures stamped on the carry-on stowaway areas that are so confusing for us to decipher, but this was the second time today someone had been in my seat. Too tired to argue with her, and sensing her energy was high and wired, I exasperatedly but quickly bent down to yank my backpack out from under the seat in front and jammed it into the corner, sliding into the window seat.
The mass of blue closed me in as I looked over the seat heads around us and realized all but ten seats were empty on the flight.
I felt a cold hand clasp my wrist, “Just so you know, I’m afraid of flying,” she said to me, leaning in close with widened blue eyes to match her dress. Scents of floral perfume and alcohol wafted between us as she squished around to settle in. “I’m usually fine after take-off, but if I grab you, just go with it. Something about human contact really helps.”
I looked around in disbelief and made eye contact with a young guy in the row behind us, who smirked and quickly looked away out the window. This had never happened to me before. As I sat in awe at my luck, my new companion rummaged through the colossal purse on her lap, looking for something to ease the anxiety, I imagined.
Ordinarily I love flying, sitting in airports watching the people go by, casually speaking with strangers and building loose but somehow comforting bonds with other travelers. But this, this was too much to take on a day like this. I couldn’t help but laugh, so I looked out the window, feigning interest in the take-off procedures to do it.
“Wow, you’re really fast,” she said to me, looking at my thumbs typing ferociously this latest encounter to my friend before the flight took off. I smiled and gave a nod of assurance to her, going back to my phone. Oblivious, she proceeded to tell me about how slowly she types to her son, who she’s coming to visit, and how she’s thankful for the time off work, though she loves her job, and so on. Defeated, I switched my phone to airplane mode, slipped it into the bag at my feet, and settled into my inevitable role. We exchanged names at this time, in an order that felt backwards, as I already had personal knowledge about her life extending far beyond a first name, not to mention her hand clasping mine.
Tammi began to squirm and fidget like a cat unwillingly being taken to the vet. She looked around the cabin and let out a long exhale through pursed lips. “I need a scotch and a cigarette,” she said to me with a nervous laugh, and it was then with a knowing smile I began to understand the combination of smells cloaked around us. Floral perfume, alcohol, faint smoke. The trademark of a particular brand of Southern women.
“Oh— I need a coffee,” I said, “I tried to get one before this flight but my layover was too quick, and there was nowhere to stop on the walk.”
“Coffee, oh nuh-uh not me.” Her hands were rubbing up and down the fronts of her thighs as if she could wipe the nerves off.
I began to understand the assignment as she anxiously awaited takeoff: to distract this woman and keep her company while she faced her fear. So, I did what any good Samaritan would do by this time, I made small talk. I cooed at pictures of her dogs on the phone she passed me, and I listened to stories about her son, her friends, and her ex mother-in-law who loves her more than her own son, the ex-husband. I calmly allowed her to hold my wrist during take-off and turbulence, and I kept the conversation going through any potential lulls, especially when she began to fidget again.
“Why fly if you hate it so much?” Halfway through, curiosity won me over.
“Oh, I’d do anything for my son. He was miserable in Jacksonville during the pandemic, and when he told me he wanted to go live in the Keys with his Dad for his senior year, my heart just sank, but I want him to be happy. I can’t not see my son, you know? I took a few days off work and here I am, I’d just do anything for him. He’s the greatest thing I ever did in my life, having him.” Her candid tendency to overshare didn’t make me squirm so much as melt. She had the kind of motherly love everyone talks about, the lift-a-car-over-your-head-during-an-emergency, scream-at-a-bear-on-a-hike, face-your-fear-of-flying love the rest of us can hardly fathom until we have our own kids.
I thought about my own mother, how she would do the same thing if I lived far away. When I live far away. How she’ll get on a plane, sit next to a stranger, strike up conversation and talk about me. How proud she is, how worried she is, how sure she is that I’ll find my way, even if it takes a bit longer.
The wheels emerged from the bottom of the plane with a low rumble and a tiny jolt. Tammi instinctively grabbed my hand again, eyes darting around the cabin. “It’s just the wheels coming down, we’re preparing to land,” I assured her.
“Oh thank God.”
I told her this is the part I actually disliked the most. Whenever a plane lands, it feels like it might nosedive on the runway, all of that momentum cascading forward, screeching to a halt makes my hair stand on end. She reached out and held my hand again, resolutely, this time unafraid for herself.
When the plane docked, my travel companion quickly stood up with her black-hole of a purse, carrying the scent of cigarette smoke with her. She stopped to smile at me, thanking me for keeping an old scaredy-cat like herself company. I nodded at her, “Happy to do it, lovely to meet you. Have a good trip with your son.” The large blue shape waved a hand, swished down the steps to the runway and morphed back into a colorful mass of people at the gate.
That’s the thing about traveling, you never know who you’ll meet or what story will collide with yours, to suddenly slip back out again.
As an introverted explorer, I tend towards isolation and crave the low-pressure recesses of my own mind, but whenever something unexpected pulls me out into the world around me, into conversation, I’m thankful for the push. All this time I thought I’d been called to help her, but weeks later, I’m seeing she was a lesson bestowed upon me.
I smile when I think of Tammi, and the next unsuspecting innocents who will be seated beside her for the return flight.
