“YOU TURNED MY EIGHT-HUNDRED-DOLLAR HAIR INTO A KINDERGARTEN CRAFT PROJECT!”
Thirty-five thousand feet up, a young woman stood in the aisle of a crowded airplane with one hand stuck to her own head and murder on her mind.
She was pointing at me with the other one.
Every head in the cabin turned my way. The businessman in 22C took off his headphones. A baby three rows up stopped crying just to get a better look. The flight attendant froze halfway down the aisle with a pot of coffee in her hand.
And there I sat. Martha Delaney. Seventy-three years old. Retired school librarian. Grandmother of four. Lifelong member of the First Methodist choir.
With pink glitter on my fingers and absolutely no regrets.
Well. Almost none.
But two hours earlier, nothing in the world could have told you this was coming.
Two hours earlier, I was standing in a duty-free line with a present for my granddaughter.
I need to explain about the present, because it matters.
My granddaughter Emily was turning ten that Saturday. She lives in Phoenix with my daughter, Joanne, and her husband, and her three older brothers, who are all very loud and very large and eat like a pack of wolves. Emily is the only girl. She’s the baby. She’s also the smartest person in that house, and everybody knows it, including the wolves.
Three weeks before her birthday, I called and asked what she wanted.
“Grandma,” she said, very seriously, “there’s only one thing in the whole world I want from you.”
“And what’s that, sweetheart?”
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.”
I wrote it down on the notepad by my phone. Then I looked at it.
“Slime?”
“It’s purple and pink and it has glitter and little stars in it and it smells like cotton candy and it stretches like four feet. A girl on YouTube stretched it across her whole kitchen.”
“Why on earth would anybody want to do that?”
There was a long pause.
“Grandma,” Emily said patiently, “it’s slime.”
As if that explained everything.
The problem was, Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime was sold out. Everywhere. Joanne had tried. Two of my friends from church had tried. I’d tried, on the computer, which took me forty-five minutes and two calls to my son, Robert, to figure out.
Sold out. Sold out. Back-ordered until March.
Then, the week before my trip, Emily’s oldest brother texted me a picture.
Grandma they have it at the airport. The toy store by gate B. My friend saw it.
Under it he’d added: Don’t tell Em I told you. She’ll freak.
So that’s how I ended up at the airport two hours before my flight, standing in a line at a little duty-free shop that sold perfume and chocolate and fancy liquor and, on one shelf in the back corner, next to stuffed airplanes and coloring books, exactly four enormous tubs of Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.
I took one. Then, after some thought, I took a second, in case something happened to the first.
Then I put the second one back. I’m on a fixed income.
The tub was the size of a coffee can. It was sparkly. When you shook it, it made a soft, wet, sucking sound, like a boot coming out of mud.
I held it in both hands like a trophy.
The line was crawling.
And the reason it was crawling was standing right in front of me.
She was maybe twenty-eight. She had blonde hair that went all the way down to the backs of her knees. I’d never seen hair like that on a real person. It was thick and shiny and perfectly smooth, like something out of a shampoo commercial. It swung when she moved, a half-second behind her, like it had its own opinions about where to go.
She was holding her phone out at arm’s length, talking to it.
The phone case said BRITTANY in rhinestones. In case she forgot.
“Okay, guys,” she told the phone, “help me choose. This one or this one?”
She held two little perfume bottles up to the screen. Both pink. Both shaped like a woman’s body. Both very expensive, if the little velvet stand they’d come from was any clue.
The cashier, a tired young man with a nametag that said DEVON, waited.
“Ma’am, should I ring those up?”
“One sec,” Brittany said, without looking at him. “My chat is deciding.”
Honey, at my age, one second had better come with a chair.
I shifted the slime to my other arm. My hip was starting to complain. I’d been up since four-thirty. The cab driver had taken the long way. Security had pulled me aside because of my knee replacement, and a very nice young woman had wanded me in a little glass booth while I stood with my arms out like a scarecrow.
“I know!” Brittany said to the phone. “They’re both gorgeous. Ugh. Okay. Maybe I’ll just take both.”
She put both bottles on the counter.
Devon read out the total.
She blinked at it for half a second. Just half a second. I saw it, because I was standing right behind her, and I’ve raised three children and taught school for thirty-one years, and I know what that half-second blink means. It means I can’t afford this.
Then she smiled at the phone.
“Beauty is an investment, right?”
She tapped her card. It went through. She looked relieved, very briefly.
Then she grabbed a tester bottle off the counter and sprayed her neck. Then her wrists. Then, for good measure, her hair. A great big cloud of it.
The cloud reached me a second later.
It was heavy and sweet and smelled like a peach that had been dipped in honey and then set on fire. My eyes watered. I coughed.
“Excuse me, dear,” I said. “That’s quite a strong perfume.”
She glanced back at me over her shoulder.
“It’s French.”
“I don’t think the French intended us to taste it.”
Devon made a noise like a teakettle. He put his hand over his mouth and turned around to straighten the cigarettes.
Brittany turned back to her phone.
“Guys,” she said, “apparently my perfume is offending people now.”
And she flipped her hair over her shoulder.
All of it. A great golden sheet. It swung back like a curtain and hit me square across the face.
It was heavier than I expected. It was like being slapped with a wet bath towel that smelled like burning peaches.
“Careful, sweetheart,” I said. “Your hair just hit me.”
“Then don’t stand so close.”
“I’m standing in line.”
“Personal space is still a thing.”
I took a step back. I bumped into a man behind me carrying a bottle of Scotch, who said “Whoa,” and caught my elbow.
Brittany whipped her head around again to look at something on the shelf.
This time the hair caught my hand. My hand that was holding the slime. I nearly dropped it.
“Does it always need that much room?” I asked.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
She sighed, loudly. “It’s called volume.”
“I see. I thought Cousin Itt had finally found a conditioner.”
Devon lost it completely. He bent over the counter with his shoulders shaking. The man with the Scotch laughed so hard he snorted.
Brittany grabbed her little bag with her two perfumes and spun around to glare at me.
“Whatever. Some people just can’t appreciate good hair.”
She stalked to the door. Then she stopped and turned around, like she’d thought of something clever.
“Maybe you’re just jealous.”
“Of the perfume?” I said. “Not particularly.”
She left.
The smell stayed behind. It hung in that little shop like a guest who hadn’t noticed the party was over.
Devon was still wiping his eyes when I put the slime on the counter.
“Cousin Itt,” he said. “Oh my God. My grandma used to watch that show.”
“Your grandma has good taste.”
He scanned the tub. He looked at it, then at me.
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime. Lucky granddaughter.”
“She’d better think so. I’m told it’s the only thing in the whole world she wants from me.”
He bagged it in a little plastic bag. I took it out of the bag and zipped it into my big brown purse, next to my reading glasses and my pill organizer and my book of crossword puzzles and three butterscotch candies.
“Have a good flight, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Devon.”
I went to find my gate.
I was certain of two things.
One. I’d never see that girl again.
Two. That slime was going to reach Emily in Phoenix in one piece.
I was wrong about both.
I should tell you something about me and airplanes.
I don’t like them.
I never have. I don’t trust anything that heavy to stay in the sky. My late husband, Eddie, used to say flying was the safest way to travel. He used to quote statistics at me. He used to say you were more likely to get struck by lightning on the way to the airport.
“Then why are they always telling us where the life vests are?” I’d say.
“That’s just a formality, Marth.”
“Formalities don’t come with whistles.”
Eddie died four years ago this November. He had a stroke in the garden. He was seventy-one. We’d been married forty-six years.
In all those forty-six years, every time we flew anywhere, he held my hand during takeoff. Every single time. He’d hold it on the armrest between us, and squeeze it when the wheels left the ground, and he wouldn’t let go until the seatbelt sign went off.
This was my third flight since he died.
The first two, Joanne flew with me. This was the first time I was doing it all by myself.
I’d been thinking about that all morning. On the cab ride. In the security line. In that little glass booth with my arms out.
I hadn’t told anybody. Not Joanne. Not Robert. Not my youngest, Paul, who lives in Seattle and calls me every Sunday.
I’d decided I could do it. I’m a grown woman. I’ve done harder things.
But I’ll be honest. My hands were shaking a little when I sat down at my gate.
Gate B14 was crowded. Every seat was full. I found a spot by the window, next to a mother with a teenage boy who was playing a game on his phone so hard he was practically sweating.
And across the way, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the charging station, was Brittany.
She had her phone propped up on her little perfume bag. She was talking to it. Every so often she flipped her hair, and the two people sitting near her leaned back to get out of the way.
“Okay, guys, so I’m at the gate,” she was saying. “Flying to Phoenix for my friend Kayleigh’s bachelorette. Yes, I’m wearing the extensions. Yes, they’re the eight-hundred-dollar ones. Yes, I know, I’m obsessed.”
The teenage boy next to me looked up from his game. He looked at her. He looked at me.
“Is she famous?” he whispered.
“I don’t believe so,” I said.
“Then who’s she talking to?”
“Her chat,” I said. “I’m told they’re deciding things.”
He frowned at her for a long time. Then he went back to his game.
“Weird,” he said.
His mother elbowed him. But she was smiling.
When they called our group for boarding, I gathered up my purse and my little rolling suitcase and got in line.
The perfume found me before I found the airplane.
Heavy. Sweet. French.
I didn’t even have to look. I just knew. She was somewhere behind me in the jetway, and her perfume had gone ahead to save us a seat.
“Okay, guys, finally boarding! Let me show you my seat!”
My row was near the back. Row 24. Seat F, by the window. I’d asked for the window because Eddie always said if you could see the ground, you’d feel better.
I never did feel better. But I kept asking for the window anyway. It felt like listening to him.
When I got to my row, an older gentleman was already standing in the aisle, trying to heave a heavy bag up into the overhead bin. He was tall and thin, with a neat white mustache and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He looked like a retired professor, which, it turned out, he was.
He had the bag about halfway up when Brittany came down the aisle behind him.
She stopped one row in front of us and spun around to show her followers the inside of the airplane.
Her hair spun with her. Half a second late.
It caught him square across the face.
His glasses flew one way. His bag went the other.
I caught the bag. I don’t know how. I’m seventy-three and I have a replacement knee and I caught a twenty-pound carry-on bag in midair like a linebacker. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing.
The man felt around on the floor and found his glasses under a seat. He put them back on. They were crooked.
“Thank you,” he said to me. He looked down the aisle at the back of Brittany’s head. “I believe I’ve just been assaulted by a shampoo commercial.”
“I believe you have.”
“Should I file a report?”
“It would be a long form,” I said. “There’s a lot of surface area.”
He laughed. It was a nice laugh. Surprised.
He took his bag from me, carefully, and put it in the bin. Then he held out his hand.
“Harold.”
“Martha.”
“Martha,” he said, settling into the aisle seat, 24D, and nodding at the empty middle seat between us, “I do hope she isn’t sitting near us.”
Brittany sat down in 23F.
Directly in front of me.
Of course she did.
She turned around in her seat to put something in the seat pocket and saw me.
Her face fell.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Not you again.”
“What a small world,” I said.
“Are you following me?”
“No, dear. Your perfume arrived first.”
Harold coughed into his fist. It might have been a laugh.
Brittany turned back around and slumped down into her seat. I heard her mutter to her phone, “Guys, it’s the perfume lady. I’m literally cursed.”
Takeoff was the hardest part.
It always is.
The plane rolled out to the runway. The engines got louder. The flight attendant, whose name tag said KELLY, did the little safety demonstration with the seatbelt and the oxygen mask and the life vest with its whistle. I watched every second of it. I always do.
Then the plane turned onto the runway and stopped.
The engines roared.
I gripped the armrest on the window side with my left hand. My right hand was resting on the empty middle seat, where Eddie should have been.
The plane started moving. Faster. Faster. Everything rattled.
And I thought, I can’t do this. I’m going to get off. I’ll take a bus. I’ll take a train. I’ll drive to Phoenix if I have to.
The wheels left the ground.
I closed my eyes.
And then I felt something on my right hand. Something light. A hand.
I opened my eyes.
Harold had reached across the empty middle seat. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight ahead, at the seat back in front of him. But his hand was resting on top of mine. Very lightly. Just barely there.
He didn’t say anything.
When the plane leveled off and the seatbelt sign went off with a little ding, he took his hand back and opened his newspaper.
“My wife hated takeoffs too,” he said, without looking up. “Thirty-nine years. She’d have broken every bone in my hand if I’d let her.”
I swallowed.
“My husband used to hold mine,” I said.
Harold nodded. He turned a page.
“Well,” he said. “Someone ought to.”
We didn’t talk about it again.
The seatbelt sign had barely gone off when Brittany stood up in the aisle with her phone held out behind her, pointed at the back of her own head.
“Okay, guys, you asked for the back view.”
She turned slowly. Like a rotisserie chicken.
“Eight hundred dollars, guys. Look at that length. Worth every penny.”
The man across the aisle in 23C tried to get past her to the bathroom. She didn’t move. He waited. She kept rotating. He finally squeezed past sideways, holding his breath.
Then she sat back down.
And she flung the whole thing back over her seat.
All of it. Like hanging laundry on a line.
It landed on my tray table. It slid down over my armrest. And then, one golden strand at a time, it settled across my forehead.
I sat there for a moment.
I wanted to be sure. I wanted to give her a chance. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she didn’t know.
I gently lifted a handful of hair off my tray table and laid it back over the top of her seat.
A minute later, she shifted, and it all came sliding back.
“Excuse me,” I said, leaning forward. “Would you mind moving your hair?”
“Not now,” Brittany said. “I’m live.”
“I’m sure your viewers are very impressed. I’d be more impressed if it stayed on your side.”
“Oh my God.” She didn’t even turn around. “It’s hair.”
Harold leaned over and lowered his voice.
“Eight hundred dollars,” he said. “I paid less for my first car.”
“Did it come with a steering wheel?”
“Eventually.”
I laughed out loud. Brittany turned around and glared at both of us. Then she flipped her hair again and it swept across my face like a feather duster.
But Harold helped. He really did. For a while.
He told me he’d taught American history at a small college in Ohio for forty years. He’d retired three years ago. His wife, Margaret, had passed two years ago. Cancer. He was flying to Phoenix to visit his son and meet his brand-new granddaughter for the first time.
“Her name is Lucy,” he said, and he pulled a photograph out of his wallet. An actual paper photograph. A tiny red-faced baby in a pink hat. “Three weeks old. My son printed it out for me because he knows I won’t look at the computer.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She looks like Winston Churchill,” Harold said fondly. “All babies do. But don’t tell my son.”
I told him about Emily. About the wolves. About the slime.
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime,” Harold repeated slowly, like he was trying out a foreign language.
“It stretches four feet, I’m told.”
“Why would anyone want it to?”
“Harold,” I said seriously, “it’s slime.”
He laughed so hard his newspaper fell off his lap.
But an hour into the flight, I was ready to launch myself out the emergency exit from sheer rage.
The hair would not stop.
Every few minutes, Brittany would sit up and flip it back. Then she’d sit forward to film something out the window and it would slide down onto my tray. Then she’d lean back and it would pile up on my lap. Then she’d turn her head, and it would sweep across my crossword puzzle and smear the pencil.
I moved my crossword. I moved my water. I moved my reading glasses. I tucked my arms in.
It found me anyway. Like water finding a crack.
Twice more, I asked her politely to move it.
Twice more, she ignored me.
The third time, she finally turned around in her seat, her eyes all narrowed, and said, “Seriously. Why are you so obsessed with my hair?”
“I’m not obsessed,” I said. “I’m simply sitting behind it.”
“You’re jealous.” She looked at my head. “When was the last time you had hair like this? Fifty years ago?”
My hair is short and silver now. I keep it cropped close, like a pixie. I’ve worn it that way since Eddie got sick. I didn’t have time to fuss with it anymore, so I cut it all off one morning in the bathroom with the kitchen scissors, and Joanne took me to a real salon the next day to fix it.
I don’t miss the old kind.
I raised three children. I taught nine hundred kids to love reading. I nursed my husband through two years of illness and held his hand when he died. I buried my mother, my father, and both of my brothers.
I’m not apologizing for a single year.
“Actually,” I said, “I had rather lovely hair during the Reagan administration.”
Brittany laughed. “See? Ancient history.”
She turned back around. And flipped her hair. Right into my face.
Then the lunch cart came.
Kelly the flight attendant pushed it slowly down the aisle. Chicken or pasta. I took the chicken. It came with a scoop of rice, some green beans that had given up on life, a dinner roll, and a little salad in a plastic box with a tiny bottle of olive oil dressing.
I unwrapped my plastic fork. I was actually hungry. I hadn’t eaten since my toast at four-thirty.
I took one bite of chicken.
Then Brittany flung her hair back to take a selfie with her lunch tray.
The ends went straight into my rice.
Not near my rice. Into my rice. Like a big golden broom sweeping across the plate.
I stared at it.
“Excuse me!” I said. “Your hair is in my lunch.”
She didn’t even turn around. “Then don’t eat it.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Problem solved.”
“Not quite,” I said. “I would like to eat the rest of it.”
“Lady, you are making a huge deal out of nothing.”
I looked down. My fork was gone. I’d set it on the edge of my tray for one second, and now it wasn’t there.
“You wouldn’t happen to have my fork up there, would you?” I asked. “It seems to have disappeared.”
Across the aisle, the teenage boy from the gate snorted. I hadn’t realized he was on our flight. He was sitting in 24A with his mother. His mother reached over and pinched his arm.
But her own mouth was twitching.
I pressed the call button.
Kelly came. She was young, maybe thirty, with tired eyes and a very patient face. She looked at my tray. She looked at the hair in my rice. She looked at Brittany.
“Ma’am, I’ll get you a fresh meal,” she said to me. Then she leaned over toward Brittany. “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to keep your hair on your side of the seat, please.”
“Fine!” Brittany threw up her hands. “Whatever!”
Kelly took away my tray. She gave me a look as she left. A tiny one. The kind that says I’m sorry, and also, I see it too.
Brittany turned back to her phone.
“Guys,” she said in a whiny voice, “apparently I’m not allowed to have hair on this plane.”
Then she flung it straight back over the seat.
“Oops,” she said.
My new lunch came.
I ate in peace for exactly two minutes.
I don’t like flying. I believe I’ve mentioned that.
So, for my nerves, I’d ordered a small glass of white wine. Just a little one. Eddie always ordered me one. He called it my “wing juice.”
And when the plane hit a patch of turbulence and started bouncing, I held that little plastic cup of wine with both hands, like a chalice in church.
That’s when the hair went in.
Not near it. Not on the edge of it.
In it.
The ends swirled around in my wine like a paintbrush in a jar of water.
I sat there, holding the cup, watching three inches of golden hair slowly soaking up my Chardonnay.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
Brittany spun around. “What now?”
“Your hair,” I said, very slowly, “is in my wine.”
She looked at the cup. She looked at me.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at your age anyway.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Instead of answering, she lifted her phone up over the top of her seat and pointed the camera right at my face.
“Guys, she’s giving me the angry grandma look!”
“Would you please take that thing out of my face?”
“Relax. I have eleven hundred people watching. You’re, like, a sidebar.”
Harold put down his newspaper.
“Shall I call Kelly again?” he asked quietly.
I looked at the wine I no longer wanted to touch.
I looked at the hair, still dangling in it, dripping onto my tray.
I thought about the duty-free shop. About the hair in my face. About the man with the Scotch catching my elbow. About Harold’s glasses flying across the aisle. About my rice. About Fifty years ago? and Ancient history and Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at your age.
I thought about how she’d looked at me. Like I was nothing. Like I was a piece of furniture in her video. A sidebar.
I’ve been a lot of things in my life.
I’ve never been a sidebar.
“No, Harold,” I said. “I think I’ve had enough.”
I reached under the seat in front of me for my purse.
Brittany kept streaming. She’d turned back around. She was talking about the clouds.
“They’re like… cotton candy, you guys. Like, literally. I’m so inspired.”
I unzipped my purse. I took out my wallet. I opened it and took out a crisp hundred-dollar bill. My emergency money. Eddie always made me carry it. In case, Marth. Just in case.
I leaned forward and let it flutter down between the seats, right beside Brittany’s sandals.
“Sweetheart?” I said sweetly. “I think you dropped something.”
“What?”
She looked down.
She saw the bill. Her eyes went wide.
She folded forward, all the way, like a lawn chair, snatched it up off the floor, and stuffed it into her purse in one quick move.
Then she said, still bent over, “Guess you’re not completely blind after all. Thanks.”
Of course she took it.
In her world, everything that fell near her was hers.
But here’s the thing about hair that long.
It’s long enough to be in two places at once.
Brittany went down to the floor. Her hair didn’t.
Her hair stayed exactly where it was. Draped up over the top of her seat. Hanging down the back. The ends heaped up on my tray table in a big golden pile, like a cat that had decided to take a nap there.
Harold looked at it. Then he looked at me.
I reached back into my purse.
And I took out the present.
I unscrewed the lid of the Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.
It made a sound. A long, slow, sucking schlorp.
Harold’s eyebrows went all the way up.
The smell of cotton candy came out. Strong. Stronger than the French perfume, actually, which I’ll admit gave me some satisfaction.
Inside, the slime was purple and pink, swirled together, with glitter all through it and little silver stars. It was cold. It jiggled.
