Cabin Pressure

Starved to whip-cord thinness, hair dyed gleaming chestnut, and wearing her most youthful jeans and flattering cashmere sweater, fifty-eight-year-old Lizette boards her flight from New Orleans to Hawaii. She’s always afraid to fly, and this flight will be more stressful than most; after six months of online dating, she’s meeting Pakalo in person for the first time at the airport.

Will she get away with it? Lizette worries, buckling into her requested bulkhead window seat, Economy Class. Will she pass for a vibrant forty-five? Before her recent, extensive plastic surgery, she was beginning to look like some sad, ancient MeeMaw. A MeeMaw! Lizette, whose only daughter has just had her first baby, still can’t believe it. Will Pakalo buy her implied age?

“Please God, he better,” Lizette mutters. It wasn’t a real lie. She only let Pakalo believe what he wanted to believe, and besides, nobody’s strictly truthful on dating sites, right? She’s hunting in her purse for a mirror, seeking reassurance her new jawline’s sharp as an axe-blade, when a flight attendant, the short blonde one, pushes an obese old lady’s wheelchair up to the bulkhead. “Here we are!” She helps her charge transfer to the empty aisle seat beside Lizette.

It’s a big effort. The panting blonde says, “All right, Miz Vilma, don’t worry—we’ll be in Hawaii before you know it. Your little dog stays in his carrier throughout the flight, okay?”

Lizette glares at the vented, daisy-printed quilt bag the attendant stows under Miz Vilma’s seat, then pointedly looks out the window. She dislikes dogs, small dogs most of all. They stink, they yap nonstop, they bite, but every MeeMaw—and by virtue of owning one, Miz Vilma is surely a MeeMaw—seems to possess at least one of the little horrors.

Wrinkled lips trembling, the old lady pats her shelf-like, oddly lumpy bosom, and confides to Lizette, “I’m scared to death a flyin, dawlin, I gots the angina, you know.” Lizette, reluctant to engage, merely lifts a bored, waxed eyebrow. Miz Vilma, however, does not take the hint. “I said to Brenda, she’s my daughter, ‘Flyin? That’s gonna kill me!’ but she don’t listen, never did. Crouton and me only gots to be on this plane cause Brenda won’t let us live in her house no more. He’s part Spitz, sheds his hairs all over her sofa-couch. She tole me I hadda give him back to the pound! I tole her, ‘I’ll die without my lil dog!’ She says to me, “Then you and that mutt a yours gotta go live in Hawaii with Jeanie.’ Hawaii! I don’t wanta live by some volcano or whatever—I’m from Chalmette! This’ll give me a hawt attack, I feel one comin on. Who’ll look after Crouton if I die? Oh Gawd, I wish me and him hadn’t a gotten on this plane!”

Lizette heartily wishes Miz Vilma, who smells powerfully of White Shoulders perfume and the pungent, insistent odor of small dog, hadn’t a gotten on this plane either. Like Miz Vilma, though, she dreads the stressful hours ahead of her; she can’t help but sympathize with the old lady’s trepidation. As the plane leaves the gate and taxis onto the runway, Lizette’s breath shallowing, heart rate climbing, “Oh, we’ll be fine,” she says. Lizette hopes to hell she’s right.

Responding, it seems, is a mistake. Miz Vilma cries, “Aw, dawlin, I’m so scared, my hawt’s going flibbity-flop!” The dog under her seat sounds alarmed, too. A sharp, muffled yapping commences, and does not stop. “Hole on, Crouton!” Miz Vilma clutches her vast chest, weeping, as with a vast groan the 757 goes airborne. “Oh Gawd, save us!” The plane labors upward, engines whining, wings shaking. Seizing Lizette’s wrist, her grip awfully strong for an old woman with a heart condition, “Holy Mary,” Miz Vilma screams, “we all gonna die.”

At this point, between the weeping and yapping, it’s all Lizette can do not to scream herself. Instead, though, she remains grimly silent, even after the plane achieves altitude and Miz Vilma doesn’t release her wrist. Discreetly, Lizette tries to free herself, with no success. Ten barely-tolerable minutes later, her sobs dwindling, the older woman lets go of Lizette’s now thoroughly numb wrist, and hugs her heaving chest instead. The muffled yapping stops, too. Miz Vilma swipes her eyes with one hand, the other still protectively clutching her bosom.

“Sorry, dawlin,” she sniffles. “M’hawt’s been a busted Timex going on twenty years now. Hope Crouton don’t get sick. When I’m scared, he gets scared, too. Then he vomicks.” A tentative pat to Lizette’s shoulder, an attempt to smile—“You a good person, honey,” she says, “helpin a sick old lady keep from dying a fright. You the only one on this plane act like you give a care ‘bout me and Crouton.” In what seems shy hope, Miz Vilma whispers loudly, “If I don’t make it to Hawaii, could you look after Crouton for me? Jeannie ain’t gonna want him, she already said, but I could die peaceful, knowin you won’t let nothin bad happen to my baby.”

Lizette, relieved to have her wrist back, and wishing to keep whatever peace is available, offers easy reassurance. “Sure, no problem, but come on, cheer up. You’re not going to die.”

*********

The hours pass, Lizette’s anxiety growing by the air-mile. Mild turbulence sets her heart racing. Her thoughts are racing, too. What if Pakalo realizes she sort-of lied? Will he be angry? Might he abandon her at the airport? Lizette fears abandonment more than flying. Her ex-husband, may he rot in hell, left her for his masseuse, Ting, a vapid child of thirty. Subsequent forays into finding a new man ended in hasty abandonments, too; Lizette sees them at restaurants she frequents—men she’s dated once and never heard from again, willowy twenty-somethings hanging on their arms. Online dating had seemed more promising, safer, until Pakalo’s ultimatum they meet. Afraid of growing old and being alone, if this last attempt fails, Lizette fears she’ll never recover.

The elderly woman slumped in the seat beside her doesn’t seem to be doing so hot either; gray-faced, eyes shut, hands folded as if in prayer on her irregularly heaving chest—Lizette doesn’t want to be concerned, but is. “You okay?” she finally asks. Miz Vilma is unresponsive. Lizette, growing alarmed, taps her shoulder. “Hey!” Miz Vilma’s doughy arms drop from her chest, and flop like de-boned fish over the armrests. Her cold left hand lands in Lizette’s lap.

As Lizette, horrified, stares at it, Miz Vilma's slack mouth expels a long, weirdly resonant burp. Her torso collapses over her knees in a White Shoulders-scented, old lady-avalanche restrained only by the lap-belt from crashing to the floor. Lizette croaks, “Help? Somebody?”

Yap! A tiny dog pokes a raisin nose through the gap between Miz Vilma’s voluminous print top and her neck-wattles. Undoubtedly Crouton, he wriggles free of the confines of his owner’s undoubtedly dead bosom. Bulgy eyes imploringly meet Lizette’s dumbfounded gaze. Yap? Slackjawed, she can only gape. Crouton seems disappointed. Giving himself a shake, he leaps to the floor, and bolts under the curtain to the First-Class cabin.

Yap Yap Yap!

“Catch him!” somebody shouts. Crouton zips back into Economy, another flight attendant—the pudgy brunette—in pursuit, and what Lizette privately calls “Cattle Class” erupts pandemonium. The dog sprints up the aisle to the rear of the plane, evading passengers’ reaching hands. Almost, the brunette attendant catches him, but trips, falls, and disappears behind the last row. Yappetty-yap! Crouton pelts back to the bulkhead. Ignoring his dead owner, he jumps up on Lizette’s knees, and unhesitatingly burrows underneath her sweater. “No, no!” That’s what one tells unwelcome dogs, isn’t it? Lizette doesn’t know. “Down, boy!” she commands uncertainly.

“Ma’am!” The pudgy attendant limps to the bulkhead. “How could you let your dog run loose on my plane?” she scolds Lizette. “Flight rules explicitly state he stays in his carrier!”

“Wait!” Lizette desperately wants to deny any connection whatsoever to the odorous mess of dingy fur inside her most expensive cashmere sweater, but Crouton is looking for a comfortable spot on her newly lipo-ed stomach, tiny paws tickling. Lizette, very ticklish, giggles helplessly as Crouton climbs her chest. Itty toenails finding purchase in her WonderBra, his head emerges from her sweater’s neck. As Crouton licks her jaw, Lizette struggles to hold the wriggling dog away from her face, but finds she can’t manage it without removing her sweater. “Please, you’ve got to believe me,” she begs. “This, this, MeeMaw dog—it isn’t mine!” Wild-eyed, she jerks her head at Miz Vilma’s folded body, motionless beside her. “It’s hers, I swear.”

“Really?” For the first time, the attendant seems to notice Miz Vilma’s odd posture. She gives her shoulder a gentle shake. “Ma’am?” Miz Vilma’s head lolls a critical forty-five degrees to the right, and most of Miz Vilma falls over the armrest into the aisle, blocking the progress of the blonde attendant just now pushing the drink cart into Economy.

“Shit!” The pudgy brunette squeezes around the cart, running for the cockpit. “Code Six, we got a Code Six back here!” The blonde drags the cart behind the curtain, leaving Lizette in sole custody of Crouton, an active lump now busily attending to butt-hygiene under her sweater.

Across the aisle, a not-unattractive bald guy in a Saints jersey catches Lizette’s stunned gaze. “My MeeMaw, she got four of ‘em just like that one.” He smiles. “Buy you a drink, lady?”

“Yes, thanks.” It’s been forever since a man has offered to buy Lizette a drink. This one is a good listener, too. In the ensuing hours before the 757 arrives at Inouye International Airport, nobody thinks to relieve Lizette of Crouton, Miz Vilma’s unfortunate, unwanted legacy.

*********

The flight from New Orleans is deplaning. Waiting beyond the gate is a huge, brown-skinned man—four hundred pounds, easy—draped in a vast Guns-N-Roses tee-shirt and a grass skirt big enough to roof a tiki hut. As he scans arriving passengers, his eyes, tiny in rolls of fat, brighten.

“Aloha, Lizzie, you hot wahine!” he calls, sounding appreciative. “Hurry on over here, I want a hug.” Pendulous arms spread wide, he purses his lips. “Gimme a big kiss, doll-face.”

Lizette comes to an uncertain halt. “Pakalo?” she chokes. FaceTime in no way prepared her for this. Lizette’s misleading him about her age now seems a minor sin of omission.

“Feeling shy?” Pakalo asks. “No problem, we got a week to fix that. What’s this?” He’s looking at the dog in Lizette’s arms. Tennis-ball head cocked, ears pricked, Crouton eyes Pakalo, too. He lifts his tiny hackles, barks what can only be a warning. Yap! Pakalo laughs uneasily. “Ha Ha, Lizzie, your profile say you don’t like dogs. You lie to me ‘bout that, huh?”

Character, they say, is destiny. Lizette is no practiced liar; she never could lie for shit. It occurs to Lizette if she’d been a better liar, she might still have a marriage—a marriage, now that she thinks about it, that wasn’t a particularly good one in the first place.

So Lizette surrenders to destiny (which, by definition, is unavoidable, anyway). “No, it wasn’t a lie, but this isn’t a dog-dog, not really. It’s uh, a special breed. Just for Meemaws.”

“MeeMaws?” Pakalo says blankly. “I never heard of no MeeMaw. What’s a MeeMaw?”

Resolutely, Lizette wades into the Rubicon. “Me, I’m a MeeMaw.” Pakalo is still clearly confused. Sighing, she explains, “A New Orleans grandmother. I’m a grandmother, so I’m a…MeeMaw.” She’s surprised how light she feels—stronger, freer than since her divorce.

Pakalo folds his arms, and rests them on the Continental Shelf of his belly, frowning “I wasn’t looking for no granny.” Black eyes narrowing, he appraises Lizette, shrugs. “I could change my mind, though,” he says magnanimously. “You still hot—for an old lady, that is. Ha ha.”

“No thanks, keep your mind right where it's at.” Lizette turns away, striding down the concourse to baggage claim. Over her shoulder, Crouton grins at bewildered Pakalo, and barks a triumphant yap! Bag retrieved, Lizette sprints up the escalator to the terminal, where Lizette, self-confessed MeeMaw, and Crouton, Meemaw-dog, are just in time to board the next flight home to New Orleans.

They are not afraid.