A Day with a Perfect Stranger Page 2

  “Not really.” I buried my head a little deeper in the magazine. I don’t want to blow up at this guy.

  “So you don’t think God exists at all?”

  “Who knows? Look—”

  “Let’s assume that he does. Then we’re talking about reality, not religion, aren’t we?”

  I looked up at him. “As I started to say, anything that has to do with God is religion. And I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  He locked his fingers in front of him and stared at them for a moment before looking back at me. “Okay. Let me ask this. If you were to die tonight, do you know where you would go?”

  “No!”

  Two people in the row in front of me turned my way.

  “No,” I repeated. “I don’t think I’ll go anywhere. I don’t know if I’ll go anywhere. I’m not worried about life after death. I’m just trying to make it through this life.” I held my magazine up to my face and shifted my body toward the aisle.

  “I know,” he persisted. “I just hate to see you throw your marriage away. I think if you—”

  I slammed the magazine on my lap and turned toward him.

  “Look, you don’t know anything about me, my marriage, or my life. But here you are, trying to cram your beliefs down my throat. The last thing I need is more God talk. I was hoping to escape that on this trip.”

  “Why do you want to escape from part of your husband’s life?” he asked.

  “Because it’s not part of who I am,” I snapped back. “It’s not part of who I want to be or what I want my family to be. If that’s who Nick wants to be, fine, but he can do it without me.”

  I rose out of my seat. “Excuse me.”

  The man by the aisle got out of his seat and let me by. The people behind us were staring at me. I walked to the back of the plane. Both bathrooms were occupied, and a woman appeared to be waiting for the next opening. I stood with my arms crossed, steaming.

  I can’t believe I was talking to that guy. I might as well have invited Nick along. I can’t believe he would talk to me that way. I told him how I feel about religion. And then for him to say anything at all about my marriage!

  A boy came out of one bathroom, and the woman entered.

  Now what am I going to do? I can’t stand back here the rest of the flight. But I certainly don’t want to sit next to him again. I glanced at my watch. More than an hour and a half to Dallas.

  I thought through my options. It was certainly too late to ask anyone to switch seats. I looked around for the flight attendants. Both were at the front of the plane starting to serve snacks and drinks. I really need to get something into my stomach to settle it down. A man came out of the other bathroom; I went in. I guess I’ll just go back and read. I can ignore him. Surely he won’t say anything else.

  I returned to my seat as inconspicuously as possible. “Hey,” the window-seat guy said as I sat down. “I’m sorry if I made you mad. I only—”

  “Sure,” I said matter-of-factly. “Let’s just drop it.”

  “Okay. I hope the rest of your flight goes well.”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  I closed my eyes, and, mercifully, he shut up.

  MY EYES HADN’T BEEN CLOSED two minutes when I heard a child’s laughter. I opened them. A little boy, about four, kept ducking his head between the seats in the row in front of me and looking back toward the man on my left, in the aisle seat. His head would appear, and the boy would make a funny face, giggle, and hide behind his seat. The third time I glanced at the aisle-seat guy. He was making funny faces back.

  The game went on for a few minutes until the boy popped his head over the back of his seat. He had a plastic fire truck in his hand. “You wanna play with my truck?” he said to the man.

  “Sure. That’s quite a fire truck you have there. How many fires have you put out with it?”

  “I don’t know. About a hundred.”

  The boy ran the truck over the top of his seat and down its backside as far as his arm would reach, all the while making truck noises. Suddenly he disappeared again, only to pop back up with another toy. “Do you want to play with my police car?”

  “Absolutely,” the man replied. The boy reached out with the car, and the man took it from him. They both ran the vehicles along the top and back of the boy’s seat, emitting vroom sounds and pretending to almost run the car and truck into each other, then avoiding collisions at the last second.

  “The doors and trunk open up,” the boy stated.

  “They do? Let me see.” The man opened each one. “What do you put in the trunk?”

  “Bad guys.”

  “Oh. Kind of stuffy in there, don’t you think?”

  “No. I let them out when we get to the police station.”

  They played a few more minutes until the flight attendants reached us with beverages and pretzels. Of course, pretzels. I requested cranapple juice. The man on my left asked for some orange juice. The window-seat guy missed his chance by dozing off, which was fine with me. The attendant put ice in a cup for me, handed me the cup, and held out the cranapple can. The aisle guy took it and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He opened his juice. I did the same with my can and poured it over the ice in my cup. I noticed that he wasn’t using the armrest between us. That’s a first for a guy. I staked claim to it by sliding my elbow over.

  “Where are you heading?” he asked.

  “Tucson.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Hopefully both. I’m going down to a new resort hotel to get a feel for the place…take a few pictures. I’ve heard they have a nice spa too.”

  “Are you a photographer?”

  I laughed. “No, hardly. I’m a graphic artist. Well, part-time. The rest of the time I’m a mother.”

  “Sounds like you have a job and a half. At least.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  We both sipped our drinks.

  “You’re pretty good with kids,” I remarked.

  “I love them.”

  “Do you have any?” The man was about my age, early thirties; maybe he had one or two small ones himself.

  “No physical descendants, no.”

  I thought that was an odd way to describe kids.

  “How many do you have?” he asked.

  “Just one. A daughter. She’s two.”

  “What a great age.”

  I smiled. “It is. She’s already putting full sentences together. I have a feeling she’s going to be a real chatterbox. Yesterday we were driving along, talking about birthdays, and she asked me, ‘Mommy, could I have a dinosaur cake for my birthday?’”

  He chuckled. “I love how kids are so drawn to dinosaurs. It’s like they were made specifically for kids’ imaginations.”

  “Sara’s dad can’t wait to take her to the natural history museum in Chicago. I figure that’s more a boy thing, but it looks like Sara might enjoy it. In a few years.”

  I opened my pretzels and ate one. Why do I ever eat these things?

  The aisle guy spoke again. “Sorry for your encounter with our friend next to you.” He nodded toward the window seat.

  “Oh, well. I’ll survive. I guess I’m a little testy right now.”

  “I can understand why.”

  He sipped his juice and opened his own bag of pretzels. I assumed he was referring to my marriage. Everyone within five rows now knew I had a bad marriage.

  “Have you ever been married?” I asked him.

  “No, not precisely,” he answered.

  “Engaged?”

  “I’m sort of engaged now, you might say.”

  “No date set?”

  “Not one that we’ve announced.”

  Sort of en
gaged? With no date? What kind of engagement is that?

  “Have you been together long?”

  “It depends on your time frame, but, yes, quite a while.”

  I stuffed the rest of my pretzels into the seat pocket in front of me and took another drink. “You never know what’ll happen in marriage, I suppose.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking to the man or to myself.

  “How so?”

  “Well, you know. People never expect to have marriage problems. I mean, everyone realizes they’ll have some problems, but no one expects to…”

  My voice trailed off. Here I’d been shouting at the guy on the right for getting too personal, and now I was on the verge of spilling my story to this man on my left. Granted, he seemed a lot less judgmental. Still, I didn’t know if I wanted to get into the whole thing. After all, I didn’t know him from…the guy by the window. But sometimes we feel more comfortable talking with strangers. That’s why people pour out their hearts to bartenders, isn’t it? They’re safe. They’ll listen to your story, avoid passing judgment, and comment if you want them to. At least, that’s the theory.

  I decided to continue with my train of thought. Or, rather, line of questioning. “Why do guys change after they get married?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…you’ve never been married, but you’re a guy.”

  “You might say that.”

  “And you must have been in relationships before.” He’s engaged and decent looking.

  “I’ve been in relationships forever.”

  Okay, not that good looking.

  “So what is it with men? It’s like they get you to marry them, and once they’ve caught the prize, their real self comes out.”

  “And women aren’t that way?”

  “Yeah, we are, but it’s different. It’s just…different. We don’t totally change.”

  “Is that how it seemed with your husband?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. I just wish Nick could be more like he was when I met him.”

  “What was he like?” Somehow he asked that as if he really cared about my answer.

  “He had time for me. I mean, he was in graduate school then, so he was pretty busy, but he took lots of time out of his schedule for me. And when he was with me, he was really with me. Like, emotionally. Unlike now.”

  “How is he now?”

  “After we got married, that all changed. We’d moved to Cincinnati, and he started working longer hours at his new job, and he didn’t have time for me anymore. Or to do anything around the house, like at least pick up every once in a while or clean the bathroom every other weekend, which he used to do. I mean, we were together for three years before we got married. Lived together for two. You’d think you’d know someone by then.”

  I took a drink and sneaked a glance at the window guy. I was feeling a bit self-conscious. We were close enough to the engines that the people in the other rows couldn’t hear me, but I certainly didn’t want him eavesdropping on more of my personal life. He was still sleeping, though.

  “I don’t know,” I continued. “I suppose marriage is a gamble that way. You can’t be sure what course your partner’s life will take. I guess the man you marry isn’t really the man you marry. We carry a certain image of the person we choose, and we expect them to be like that after the wedding. But they aren’t. At least, Nick wasn’t.”

  “So what’s brought things to a head?” he asked. “Something usually does.”

  I paused. This was going to sound pretty stupid. No, beyond stupid. “Well, a couple of weeks ago Nick came home late one night claiming that he’d had dinner with—I’m not kidding—Jesus Christ. Completely out of the blue. I mean, he seems to have been in his right mind one day, and then the next, he’s making up bizarre stories and turning into a religious nut.”

  “So he’s giving you the same story now…”

  “Exactly the same. All he can talk about now is Jesus. He’s never been religious before, not in the least. I’ve tried to ride this out, but it’s driving me crazy.”

  “How have things been apart from that?”

  “Actually, he’s been around a little more. Spent more time with me and Sara. I think he finished a project at work. But I’d almost rather go back to the way we were. This is not the man I married. I didn’t plan on religion making a sudden appearance. It’s messing everything up.”

  “Religion always messes everything up,” he replied. “I hate religion.”

  AT THIS POINT in the flight I experienced my second-worst nightmare of air travel (next to being trapped by an evangelist): the guy in front of me tilted his seat all the way back. Jerk. Where do people get off thinking they have a right to put their seats back without asking? I’m five eleven! “Excuse me for making you miserable back there, lady, but I’m much more comfortable.” Oh, no problem. Now I have the choice of either doing the same to the person in back of me or being transported to Dallas in a space half the size of my car trunk. I resisted the urge to do what I always want to do, which is to nonchalantly dig my knees into the person’s seat until they straighten back up.

  I finally decided to put the issue out of my mind—my stewing wasn’t affecting the guy in front of me in the least—and get back to the man in the aisle seat. I wondered about his last comment, about religion. I had mixed feelings about delving further into it. I was already struggling enough with my feelings toward Nick’s new diversion; I didn’t know if I needed to egg them on. But I was curious as to his opinion.

  “Why do you dislike religion?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well…” Asked to provide an actual answer, I realized that wasn’t so simple. I always said that people could believe whatever they wanted to and it didn’t make any difference to me. Right now, though, I wanted to get as far away from religion as I could. “Maybe so. I’m not saying people don’t have a right to believe what they want to. It’s just not for me.”

  I poured the rest of my juice before resuming. “But what about you? You were the one who said you didn’t like it.”

  “It keeps a lot of people from living life to the fullest,” he answered. “It makes some people feel guilty over things they shouldn’t feel guilty about and others worry about things they shouldn’t worry about.”

  “I know! Religious people are so uptight.”

  He continued. “People spend their time doing things to placate some supposed deity. Unfortunately, it’s wasted effort.”

  “You would think they would focus on feeding the poor or something.”

  “They often do. And that’s a good thing. But so much of religion…People think that wearing special clothing or dipping themselves in a certain river or repeating specific religious phrases or abstaining from certain foods or traveling to specific sites earns them points. They do these kinds of things all over the world. American Christians have had their favorite rules: don’t play cards, don’t dance, don’t go to movies—”

  “Don’t touch alcohol,” I added. “We invited a few neighbors over one night for dessert, and one of the couples wouldn’t touch the rum cake. Honestly, I was offended.”

  He laughed. “What’s on the inside is what matters, not the external rituals.”

  “Totally,” I agreed.

  “Like the burka that some Muslim women are forced to wear.”

  “Is that the full covering that has slits for the eyes?”

  “Right, the full covering. Most Muslim women want to dress modestly, and that’s admirable. But many Muslim women are threatened or beaten for not having everything completely covered. That’s evil. The men are afraid the women will make them lust. But you could put a woman in concrete blocks, and men would still lust.”

  I smiled. I like this guy. He sees it like it is and tells it like it is too.

  “The problem,” he continued, “is what’
s inside men’s hearts, not what’s on women’s bodies. Controlling women is just an excuse for men to exercise their dominance.”

  “I despise that,” I said. “And it seems like some people want to do the same things here! There’s a church on our side of town that I heard doesn’t even let women speak. I’ve felt like going there one Sunday morning and standing up in the middle of the service and giving them a piece of my mind.”

  He returned to the broader theme. “It angers me that religion has been used to justify such immense evil—slavery, racism, wars, oppression, discrimination. I hate that religion is the cause of so much ignorance and superstition in the world. I can’t stand that religion is something people feel they have to escape from to lead normal lives.”

  “Yeah,” I answered meekly as Nick popped back into my mind.

  “Back where I grew up,” he said, “religion and hypocrisy went hand in hand. I abhor people claiming to be one thing but in their hearts and actions being the exact opposite. I saw that all the time. The leaders just focused on the rules, which made them self-righteous. Then they would lay the rules on other people, who felt guilty when they couldn’t keep them well enough. It was a big power play, a way for the leaders to keep themselves in positions of control.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “In the East, in a small town.”

  “I’ve heard that small towns can be bad that way.”

  A flight attendant came by with a plastic bag for trash. I handed her my can but kept my cup, which had a little ice left. “Could I get some water?” I asked her.

  “Of course,” she said, her accent apparent. “I’ll be right back with it.”

  In a moment she returned with a bottle of water and handed it to me. As she did, the aisle guy said something to her in a foreign language—maybe from Eastern Europe. Her face lit up, and she responded to him in kind. They conversed for a couple of minutes before she departed for the rear of the plane.

  “You spoke that well,” I commented. “What language was it?”

  “Croatian.”

  “That’s pretty obscure.”

  “I’ve spent some time there.” He took the final sip of his juice. “One of the things I dislike the most is when people who really do mean well get distorted by religion.”