The Reluctant Daughter Part 6

"Can you at least give me the name of the hospital my mother's in?"

Even though I can tell he doesn't want to, Jack gives me all kinds of phone numbers, which I hastily scribble on a pad: the hospital, the hotel they're staying at, his cell phone, my father's cell phone, which of course I already have, not that it did me any good. Now I feel a little calmer; at least I can call the hospital and speak directly to my mother.

"Thanks, Jack," I say, heading toward my desk, eager to hang up the phone. But just before I say good-bye, my whole body starts to tremble, and I realize that once I hang up, I'll be losing my lifeline to her. My mother. And imperfect as she is, she's the only one I've got.

"Jack," I say, my voice small and vulnerable. "Do you thinks she's going to be okay? Or is my father just saying she's fine because he needs to believe it?"

"Lydia, what am I, a doctor?" Jack asks, but his voice has softened a bit, too.

"Isn't there anything else you can say to me?" I plead, as tears start to fall.

"Yes, there is," Jack says, sounding harsh again. "Get your a.s.s out here, Lydia." He pauses and then screams, "Now!"

I AM GOOD at many things; being a daughter is not one of them. A good daughter would have hung up the phone after speaking with her cousin Jack and immediately made plane reservations. A good daughter would already have her suitcase packed. A good daughter would not be sitting on the couch in her study with her cat's head resting on her lap, staring out the window at the falling snow and asking her mother to die.

"Mom," I say aloud. "I've never asked you for anything, but now I'm asking you to do just one tiny little thing for me. Please don't make me come out there. If you really loved me, and you're going to die anyway, you'd do us both a favor and just go now, no muss, no fuss, no cross-country plane trip. I know it's an unusual request, and not exactly a nice one, but still, I'm asking you politely. Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top?" I wait for the phone to ring again, this time with the hospital on the other end delivering the sad news, but the only sound in the room is the loud jagged purr of Mishmosh snoozing happily beside me.

I sigh and stroke the soft fur between his pointy little ears. I'm going to have to go out there. I know this. Why would my mother start making things easy for me now? And besides, don't I deserve the final deathbed scene that I've fantasized about a million times? It's so familiar to me, I don't even have to shut my eyes to conjure up an image of my mother lying in a coma, her ability to speak gone, but her razor-sharp hearing completely intact. And finally, I get a chance to deliver the speech I've rehea.r.s.ed in my head so many times.

"Mom," I say, imagining myself pulling a chair close to her hospital bed and taking her hand. "I need you to know how much you've hurt me over the years. Everything I did was wrong, and every time you criticized me-my weight, my hair, my clothes, my friends, my career choice, my 'lifestyle,' as you call it, my failure to give you a grandchild-I felt like a wooden pencil you were breaking in half with one quick snap. You never held me when I was a child. You never gave me a hug. You never told me you loved me. You never said you were proud of me. You never made an effort to get to know me or let me get to know you so we could be part of each other's lives. You never sent me a newspaper clipping or a recipe in the mail, you never called me just to say h.e.l.lo and that you were thinking of me like other people's mothers do. Nothing I have ever done has pleased you. Nothing I have ever done has been good enough for you. We've never had a heart-to-heart conversation. I have basically lived without a mother for forty-nine years, and I don't think there are words that can say how much pain that has caused me, and how deeply I have ached for you every single day of my entire life."

Whenever I come to this part of the fantasy, whether I am in my therapist's office, driving my car, or falling asleep beside Allie, I always start to cry. And today is no exception. But as I'm wiping my wet cheeks with the sleeve of my bathrobe, something unusual happens: I get mad. " Now you're going to die?" I thump the arm of the sofa and yell so loudly that Mishmosh springs off my lap as though he's being scolded. " Now, before we have a chance to work anything out, now you're going to leave me? How dare you?" I scream as Mishmosh scurries from the room. "You have some nerve," I mutter, a phrase my mother has often said to me. "Some G.o.dd.a.m.n nerve."

My outburst energizes me enough to cross the room, pick up the phone, and call the hospital number that Jack gave me. I stare out the window at the fat, lazy snowflakes drifting through the sky as I am put on hold once, twice, three times before I finally reach a nurse named Angelina who tells me that no, I can't talk to my mother; she isn't well enough to speak on the phone. And contrary to what my father so desperately wants to believe, she is not "fine" at all. Angelina's official diagnosis is that my mother is "not so good."

"Do you think she's going to die?" I ask the question I do and do not want answered.

"I can't say," Angelina replies, which I take to mean she isn't allowed to say, not that she isn't capable of making a judgment call.

"If she were your mother, would you come?" I ask, tearfully. Despite Jack's order to get my a.s.s out to the West Coast p.r.o.nto, like a good Pinkowitz, I'm not going anywhere without a second opinion.

Angelina hesitates before saying again, "She doesn't look very good," and that she can't say much more than that. If I want, I can call back later when the doctor makes his rounds, but there's no guarantee he'll have time to speak with me.

After I hang up I dial the lumberyard, but one of Allie's coworkers tells me she's too busy with a customer to come to the phone. And my therapist, believe it or not, is out on maternity leave. Vera is next in line.

"Lydia, what a nice surprise," she says, her voice more relaxed than usual. "G.o.d, it's nice to be on break, isn't it? I'm still in my bathrobe and it's almost time for lunch, how do you like that?" Vera, who is even more of a workaholic than I am, chuckles, pleased with herself. "Is this how the other half lives? You know, much as I love teaching, I could get used to being a lady of leisure. How about you?"

"Vera," I say, which is all it takes for her to know that something is terribly wrong.

"Lydia, what's the matter?" Vera asks, the lightness instantly gone from her voice.

"It's my mother," I wail, and then tell her everything.

"Oh, Lydia, you poor thing," Vera clucks with so much tenderness, I almost go over the edge completely. But that would never do, so I change the focus of our conversation and tell Vera about my mother's mink coat, which, as Jack was only too happy to mention, now belongs to Crystal instead of me.

"But Lydia, you would never wear something made of mink," Vera responds, stating the obvious just as I knew she would.

"That's not the point, Vera," I say, relieved to let my anger flow. "She still should have given it to me. And for your information, I had big plans for that coat. Remember the article I sent you years ago, about that vegetarian woman who inherited a bunch of furs from her mother and made them into teddy bears, and then started her own company? I was going to send my mother's coat to her so she could make something out of it for me. I know it's hypocritical since I'm a vegetarian and everything, but still, the animals are dead already, it's not like I'm killing them all over again, so-"

"Lydia, please. Stop already. Enough about the coat." I can tell by Vera's voice that her patience is wearing thin. "You need to deal with what's going on with your mother. What if this is the end? If you don't go out to L.A., you'll spend the next forty years sitting in your therapist's office trying to resolve your guilt. You have to get on a plane, Lydia, and the sooner, the better."

"All right, all right," I mumble into the receiver. Even though I'm not surprised at what Vera is saying, I don't have to pretend to be happy about it. But if I'd wanted someone to give me permission to not go to California, I wouldn't have called her. I would have called...whom? I can't think of one person on the planet who would tell me what I want to hear: It's okay, Lydia. You don't have to go see your dying mother. You have much more important things to do, like work on another article that no one will ever read, clean out the junk drawer in the kitchen that's been bothering you for years, sit around in your bathrobe and watch your cat's toenails grow, pick at the split ends of your already damaged hair...

"I know this will be hard for you." Vera's acknowledgment cuts into my thoughts. "But it's also an opportunity. Think about what you want to tell your mother. These might be the last words she ever hears you speak."

"I have nothing to say to her," I lie, and even though Vera doesn't believe me, she allows me to steer our conversation in another direction. I ask Vera what she's going to do during intersession and she tells me she's going off to Albany in a day or two to see Serena and help her celebrate her upcoming birthday. Vera can't believe she's old enough to have a daughter who's about to turn forty; I can't believe Vera's daughter, or anyone's daughter, would want her mother around on such a momentous occasion. I tell Vera I don't want to interrupt her visit with Serena but she insists I can call her any time. "If my cell phone is turned on, that means I'm open for business. I hardly sleep anymore anyway," Vera reminds me. "It happens to women of a certain age, Lydia. Ever since menopause I've been waking up at four o'clock, five o'clock... Six in the morning feels like the middle of the day."

"Thanks, Vera. I just may take you up on your offer."

"You're welcome, Lydia. And listen, think about what you want to say to your mother. There has to be something."

We hang up and I stay where I am for a moment, berating myself for not telling my dearest friend the truth. But how could I tell Vera what a horrible creature I am? Only a truly evil person would be pleased at the thought of guilt-tripping her own mother during the last moments of the poor woman's life. No, only Mishmosh and my therapist, who gets paid to tell me that I'm not rotten to the core, are allowed to know that there have been many times in my life when I have actually looked forward to the time I would become an "orphan." People feel sorry for motherless daughters; people judge daughters who don't speak to their mothers while they're still alive. I have always suspected that various people, including Vera, Allie, and maybe even my therapist, secretly think that my failed relations.h.i.+p with my mother is all my fault. Even though they would never say so, of course.

But sometimes other people say things. Not directly, but still, I get the message. As I make my way into the kitchen to see if Mishmosh is ready for his midmorning snack, I remember a conversation I had with my young colleague Emmeline right at the beginning of last semester when she was a newly hired faculty member in the Women's Studies department.

It was a Friday night and Emmeline asked if I wanted to go somewhere and have a drink with her. What she really wanted to do was cry on my shoulder as she told me the long, sad saga of her recent breakup, which was the main reason she was so happy to accept her new faculty position at Paradise College. It gave her the perfect excuse to abandon the city where she had just finished grad school and move three hundred miles away, leaving behind the louse who had dumped her without any warning and completely broken her heart.

"Emmeline, have one of these," I'd said, urging her to eat a cracker spread with Brie to soak up the Merlot she was guzzling like cherry soda. "I know it's hard, but you'll find someone else."

"That's easy for you to say. You've been with Allie what, ten years, twenty years?"

"Something like that." I left the exact number of years Allie and I have lived together vague on purpose. No need to rub it in.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing." Emmeline drained her gla.s.s and set it down on the table with a thunk. "The next person I go out with won't get very far unless he or she gets along well with his or her mother."

"What do you mean?" Normally I would have teased Emmeline about the grammatical awkwardness that she, being bis.e.xual, was forced to employ, but her comment hit home and brought me up short.

"I mean," she waved her empty gla.s.s toward our server, "if you can't have a healthy relations.h.i.+p with your own mother, I don't see how you can have a healthy relations.h.i.+p with anyone else."

"Is that so?" My voice was colder than the ice cubes chilling the Amaretto I was sipping. "I guess that means my relations.h.i.+p with Allie isn't as healthy as I thought."

"Really?" Emmeline asked as our server whisked away her empty gla.s.s, rea.s.suring her she'd be right back with another. "You mean to tell me that the Queen of Feminism has a few issues with her mother?"

"A few? A few hundred maybe," I said with a huff. "Entire theses could be written on the subject."

"Tell me about it." Emmeline leaned forward, eager to take the focus away from the tired old subject of her failed love life. "Is it because you're a lesbian?"

"No. Or at least not totally." Suddenly I felt like having another drink, too, so when our server returned with Emmeline's gla.s.s of wine, I asked her to bring me a second cordial. "I mean, that didn't help, of course, but my mother and I didn't get along from the day I was born. In fact, according to family lore, my very first word was 'no' and it all went downhill from there." I sighed the sigh that always escapes my lips whenever I talk about my mother. "She always takes every choice I make personally," I went on, aware that I was starting to whine. "I became a vegetarian not because I loved animals but because I hated her cooking. I became a lesbian not because I loved women but because I didn't want my life to turn out like hers. I left New York not because I loved New England but because-"

"What did she say when you came out as a lesbian?" Emmeline interrupted.

I shrugged as if it were no big deal. "Nothing."

"Nothing?" Emmeline's eyebrows rose. "What do you mean, nothing?"

"I mean," I held up my right hand and placed the tip of my index finger against the top of my thumb to form the shape of a big fat goose egg, "nothing. Literally. I sent home a letter, thinking that was the kindest way to come out to them, you know, give my parents some time to sit with the news and absorb it before we talked. And believe me, I spent weeks on that letter. I must have written fifty drafts." I picked up my freshened drink and downed it. "One week went by, then two, then three, then an entire month. I was beginning to think that maybe my letter had gotten lost in the mail. But no such luck." Emmeline waited while I lifted a cracker to my mouth and bit into it, hard. "So I called and asked my mother if she had gotten my note and she said yes. I asked her why she hadn't phoned me. And she said, 'I didn't call you because I didn't want to have this conversation with you.' So I said, 'Well, guess what, Mom. We're having it.' And she said, 'No, we're not,' and hung up the phone."

"She hung up on you? Wow." Emmeline was properly shocked. "Did you call her back?"

"No, why would I? So she could just hang up on me again?"

"What about your father?"

"We've never talked about it either." I reached for another cracker, pushed a gooey lump of Brie onto it, and shoved the whole thing into my mouth.

"Well." Emmeline sipped her drink thoughtfully. "I don't know, Lydia. Maybe you're the exception that proves the rule. Most mothers love their kids no matter what. They can't help it. It's instinct. I mean look at that awful killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. He chopped up young boys and put them in the freezer, and even his mother wept when he died."

Mishmosh wanders into the kitchen and meows loudly, startling me back into the present. "Am I really less lovable than a serial killer?" I ask my furry friend as I dump the contents of a can of Nine Lives into his bowl. "What's so terrible about me?" I wonder aloud as he frantically gulps mouthfuls of tuna as though he hasn't eaten for two days instead of two hours. "There has to be something."

There's only one way to find out, the voice of reason, which sounds an awful lot like Vera, whispers in my ear. I try to ignore it, and make myself a cup of tea. But when I lift the kettle to fill it with water, I notice that my hand is shaking. Not only that, my whole body is trembling again just as it was when Jack and I wound up our conversation a few hours ago.

"Maybe I should take a hot bath to get the chill out of me," I say to Mishmosh, but instead of heading for the bathroom, I go back to my study, sit down in front of my computer, and bring up the home pages of several different airlines. With my belly still trembling, I book an early morning flight for tomorrow, lay out the clothes I'll need to take, and then dash out to the supermarket. By the time Allie gets home from work at quarter after five, my bags are packed, my electronic ticket is printed out, and all our kitchen counters are strewn with enough cans of cat food to get Mishmosh through the rest of the winter and enough cereal, eggs, frozen dinners, and canned soup to feed Allie and her entire softball team between now and next July.

"What's all this?" Allie asks as she comes inside, stamps the snow from her boots, and shrugs off her jacket. "Are we expecting a storm?" Allie knows how I love to panic shop when bad weather is predicted.

"I'm going to California," I announce, filling Allie in on the day's events and all I've found out about my mother.

"Okay, then. We need to make a list." Allie sits down at the kitchen table and grabs a pad and pen, getting right down to business. "Let's see. We have to call someone to take care of Mishmosh, find someone to drive us to the airport, change the message on our answering machine..."

"Whoa. Slow down, Allie." I turn to face her, a roll of paper towels clutched in each arm. "I didn't say we were going to California. I said I was going to California."

Allie adds another item to her list before looking up. "What do you mean?" she asks. "Don't you want me to come with you?"

"Come with me?" I open a cabinet door and shuffle things around. It never even occurred to me to ask Allie to fly to California. "Why in the world would you want to come with me?"

"Oh, I don't know," Allie says, her voice overly casual. "I wouldn't mind taking a break from the cold, and I hear L.A. is nice this time of year."

"Allie, what's the matter?" I stow the paper towels, shut the cabinet door, and lean back against it with my arms folded, frowning. Sarcasm is so contrary to Allie's nature that whenever she attempts it, I know something is bothering her. But it usually takes me a while to figure out what.

Allie busies herself with sorting the day's mail into three piles of letters, bills, and magazines, before she answers. "Lydia, why do you think I'd want to come with you?" She opens the latest issue of Woodworker's Journal, flips through a few pages, and then slaps it shut. "I want to be there for you. I want to support you. We're a team, remember? We're in this together."

"Oh." I cross the room and perch on her lap, sidesaddle. "That is so sweet of you," I say to her and I mean it. But I also know this is one journey I have to take alone. "I won't be gone long," I tell Allie, despite evidence to the contrary: the one hundred forty-seven dollars' worth of groceries that have yet to be put away. "And we can't really afford two plane tickets to California."

"I don't care about the money," Allie says, knowing I don't either. "Lydia, don't you need me?"

"Of course I need you." I place my hands on Allie's shoulders and lean back so I can stare into her dark Spanish eyes. "I need you here to keep the home fires burning. So you'll be ready to take care of me as soon as I get back."

"Will you at least call me every day?" Allie asks, wrapping her arms around me.

"Of course," I say. "I'll call you every minute. It's three hours later there, right?"

"No, three hours earlier. Here." Allie unfastens her watch and buckles the thick black leather strap around my wrist. "Keep my watch on East Coast time and your watch on West Coast time. That way you won't get mixed up."

"Allie, I can't take your watch." I stare at the new butch/femme display at the end of my arm: Allie's treasured gold-faced timepiece that once belonged to her grandfather, and my delicate white wrist.w.a.tch with glittery rhinestones on its face instead of numbers. "What if I lose it?"

"You won't lose it," Allie a.s.sures me. "I want you to take it. So you won't forget me."

"Forget you? Don't be silly, Allie. Maybe you're afraid that you'll forget me. Here." I jump off her lap and dig into the right front pocket of my jeans for my good luck charm: a dark mahogany wooden heart the size of a newborn's fist. Allie made it for me during the wee hours of the morning that followed our first date because after she took me home she was so wound up she couldn't sleep. So instead she cut and carved and sanded until she came up with a tiny heart, smooth as a piece of sea gla.s.s, to fit in the palm of my hand. A small token of her affection, she'd said when she presented it to me on our second date, which occurred less than twenty-four hours after our first.

"I can't take your heart, Lydia," Allie tries to protest.

"Too late," I reply, placing the charm in the center of her upturned hand and closing her fingers around it with a kiss. "You already have it."

Allie pockets the trinket and then stands up and hugs me. "I'll miss you," she says, holding me close. "But I'm proud of you, Lydia. You're doing the right thing. You're a good daughter."

"No, I'm not," I mumble into her chest. "I'm a lousy daughter."

"You're not a lousy anything," Allie insists, kissing the top of my head.

"Well, I'm certainly not a good daughter. Not by a long shot," I insist, stepping out of Allie's embrace to resume putting away our groceries. "I'm nowhere near anyone's definition of a good daughter."

"You're not a bad daughter either," Allie argues, handing me a hunk of Swiss cheese and a carton of half-and-half.

"Then what kind of daughter am I?" I ask myself more than Allie as I stash our dairy products, shut the refrigerator door, and then stare at its blank white surface searching for the answer. I mull over my question like it's a crossword puzzle clue that's got me stumped. But not only don't I know how many letters I need to describe the type of daughter I am, I don't even know if such a word exists.

Allie puts the rest of our food away in silence; she knows how important words are to me, and that I won't be happy until I find just the right one.

"Ambivalent?" I say the word aloud in a voice full of, well, full of ambivalence. "Maybe that's it," I say to Allie's back as she stacks cat food cans high on a shelf. "Though I'm not really ambivalent. I am taking action. But not because I want to. Because I feel obligated to."

Allie doesn't comment and another minute of silence goes by before a new word hits me. "Dutiful," I say, trying on the word for size. "I'm a dutiful daughter."

"A beautiful daughter." Allie nods thoughtfully. "I'd say that's just about right."

"You would." I smile. But dutiful isn't it either. Dutiful sounds so meek, so obedient, so submissive, so nauseating. I close my eyes to concentrate harder, and as I do so the perfect word appears behind my eyelids as clearly as if it were written in big white letters on the blackboard in front of my cla.s.sroom. "Reluctant," I proclaim to Allie, opening my eyes. "I'm a reluctant daughter. One who wants no part of this, but nevertheless is forcing herself to go along with it. But not willingly. Re-luc-tant-ly," I say, enunciating each syllable. "Kicking and screaming every step of the way."

MY MOTHER LIKES to say, "If you want to make G.o.d laugh, tell Him your plans." And much as I hate to admit that she's right about anything, I have to give her this one. As recently as two days ago, if anyone had asked me, "What are you doing on Tuesday?" I never would have answered, "Flying to L.A." Yet here I am, all buckled up with my carry-on bag and pocketbook stored underneath the seat in front of me, waiting to take to the sky.

Somehow, despite my last-minute reservations, I manage to wind up in a row by myself. Already bone tired, I curl up in the plaid blue blanket the flight attendant begrudgingly fetches for me, shut my eyes, and try to sleep. But it's no use. I can't sleep and cry at the same time and I can't stop crying.

What is wrong with you? I berate myself as the plane starts to taxi. Honestly, what is the big deal? Yes, your mother may be dying, but so what? You've lived without her all these years and you've managed just fine. What will you be losing? A phone call every other month, if that, and a visit once every spring. Your mother knows nothing about your life, you know nothing about hers. You gave up on each other a long time ago. You're pretty much strangers. So you're not really losing her-you never really had her to begin with.

As the plane picks up speed and leaves the ground, I cry even harder. Soon I am joined by a child across the aisle from me whose steady sobbing builds into a loud wail that quickly explodes into an unrelenting, screeching crescendo. If I wasn't staring at the little girl with my very own eyes, I would swear her screams were those of someone being tortured, not someone whose parents are frantically waving cookies, juice boxes, and stuffed animals in her face, practically turning themselves inside out in their desperate attempts to soothe her. Poor kid, I think just as a woman in front of me pokes her head into the aisle, catches my mascara-streaked eye, and says in a voice full of sympathy, "Poor mother."

I look away without giving her the understanding smile and nod I'm sure she's expecting since I, like she, am clearly old enough to have had the experience of dealing with an in-flight out-of-control child. But I have never been in this mother's or any mother's shoes, and I am too worn out to politely pretend otherwise. Instead, I stare out the window at the clouds we have just broken through and out of nowhere I remember an article in the paper I recently read about a five-year-old who really was being tortured. By his mother. And in a very sick way I had envied his broken nose, cracked ribs, and split lip. At least his wounds were out there, visible for all the world to see, and it was obvious that he couldn't possibly have done anything to deserve them. When I got to the middle of the article and read that the first words out of the boy's mouth when he woke up in the hospital were I want my mommy, I couldn't read any more.

"I want my mommy," I whisper, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the corner of the scratchy blue airline blanket that is failing to keep me warm. As we race across the sky and the screaming little girl finally quiets down and falls asleep, I try to fill the bottomless hole of grief inside me with everything the flight attendant has to offer: a can of ginger ale, a granola bar, two bags of pretzels, and a bruised apple. Which doesn't help matters at all; I still feel sadder than ever, and now on top of that, I feel sick. Trying to distract myself with the latest issue of People magazine, a crossword puzzle, even the airline's overpriced shopping catalog proves futile; I am unable to focus on anything except my mother. I almost wish I had seatmates beside me to ask if I'm traveling for business or pleasure, to chat about the weather, even to show me pictures of their children and grandchildren that I could pretend to admire.

Be careful what you wish for, I remind myself after I board my connecting flight in Chicago and find myself wedged into the middle seat between two pa.s.sengers in the dreaded last row of the plane right near the bathrooms. To my left, in the coveted window seat, sits a surly teenager wearing frayed denim shorts and a tiny purple T-s.h.i.+rt that ends several inches above her waist in order to show off the silver ring glittering in her navel. When I smile at her she bares her teeth for an instant and then tilts her head so that her long dark hair falls between us like a curtain at the end of a play. A minute later she pulls a copy of Cosmo Girl out of the backpack at her feet and, angling her body away from me, makes a big show of flipping through the pages of her magazine while loudly cracking her gum.

I get the message and turn to my right. The woman in the aisle seat is clearly someone who still dresses up to travel. She is all decked out in a long floral skirt and fuzzy pink sweater, and the perfume she is drenched in smells like the lilac bush in our backyard that blooms every spring, sending Allie into a full-blown allergy attack. Her freshly styled lavender-tinted white hair floats above her head like a dollop of whipped cream, and I bet she is probably the last woman on earth, other than my mother, who still refers to the place where she gets her hair done as a beauty parlor. Her hands are dotted with brown age spots and lined with raised blue veins, and she wears quite a bit of jewelry. Several heavy gold bangle bracelets adorn both her wrists, making soft clinking sounds against each other whenever she moves, and in addition to the requisite gold band on the fourth finger of her left hand, she sports three other rings, two decorated with emeralds and one boasting several diamonds.

I am just about to say something to her when the pilot gets on the intercom to tell us that we are next in line for takeoff. As soon as the plane starts its noisy race down the runway, my neighbor opens a thick book on her lap and moves aside a s.h.i.+ny red ribbon that had been holding her place. She traces a line of print with a pearly white polished fingernail and silently mouths the words on her page. Being naturally nosy, I sneak a peek at her reading material and confirm my worst suspicions: it's a Bible. King James Version, New Testament. Oh great. I better not whip out my copy of the latest volume of d.y.k.es to Watch Out For, which I brought along to take my mind off my troubles. Life is so ironic, I think as we b.u.mp into the air and take flight. Of course the radical lesbian would get seated next to the nice conservative Christian lady. It's the way of the world. If our plane crashes, this woman might be the very last person on earth I ever speak to. Or I ever don't speak to, since we have yet to start a conversation.

Leaning forward to pluck the airline's in-flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of me, I glance to my right again, and as I do so, I see a teardrop fall on the tiny print of my neighbor's reading matter. A sinking feeling descends upon me as I scan the table of contents of my magazine. Can't I just pretend I didn't see that? The last thing I want to do is take care of somebody else right now. Right now I want somebody else to take care of me.