Seat Mate

By TAD BARTIMUS

Flight attendants were closing the door as she burst through it, scarves fluttering, beads jangling, tie-dyed pants blinding us with their electric purple. Bumping her overloaded way down the aisle, she headed straight for me.

I was piling magazines and snacks into the empty space and celebrating the prospect of four hours of solitude and elbow room when my new seat mate stepped on my best dress-up shoes and announced, "I made it!" Her intrusion made me as churlish as a four-year-old forced to return a candy bar.

We know the person sitting next to us may be the last face we ever see, the last voice we ever hear. We know it, but we don't think about it.

I can be a judgmental snob; looking her up and down, I saw running shoes with dangly rhinestone earrings. Clearly we had nothing in common. I backed out into the aisle in my patent leather pumps with little grosgrain bows and didn't even say hello as Ms. Gypsy made her nest in the window seat.

"Sorry," she said, sounding like she really meant it when she missed the overhead bin and showered me with a blizzard of paper. I determinedly turned sideways and opened my magazine, hoping my body language warned, "Don't Tread On Me."

"Where are you from?" "What do you do?" "Been traveling on business?" "Married?" "Got any kids?" Through gritted teeth I responded in single syllables. She cheerfully continued her interrogation until I caved in; maybe a brief conversation would shut her up before the movie.

We felt the first bump as we ate our salads. By dessert everybody was strapped in, riding a bucking bronco straining to move forward through a black sky.

Frequent flyers carry with them subliminal images: desperate survivors in the frozen Potomac River; flaming metal cartwheeling through an Iowa cornfield; hundreds of empty shoes scattered over Lockerbie's green pastures. We know our in-flight priorities can shift in seconds from complaining about not getting a pillow to praying we'll get to sleep on our own again. We know the person sitting next to us may be the last face we ever see, the last voice we ever hear. We know it, but we don't think about it. Until .

By the time the pilot warned us for the third time to tighten our seatbelts I was breathing in fits and spurts and devising mental scenarios to save the infant across the aisle. My seat mate, silent for the past hour, asked: "You fly this route all the time. Is this normal?"

"No," I croaked. I kept my eyes fixed on a piece of carpet lint, silently talking down my panic and trying to shake the image of a giant hand pushing us toward the cold sea. No such luck.

"Talk to me," I said, abruptly turning toward her. "Please talk to me."

She looked pale in the dim light. "Let me tell you about the time I put an elephant in my friend's dorm room"

On and on the engines heaved and pulled, as the woman in the purple pants spun out stories about how the elephant smelled bad but didn't mess up the carpet, why her neighbors illegally grow roses on city land, what happened when her mother ventured into TV production.

It wasn't that her stories were so interesting, it was that she distracted me, made me laugh and, on one particularly bad jolt, put out her hand to gently touch my white knuckle and say, "It will be alright." I believed her because I wanted to.

The turbulence stopped. We fell asleep. Then we were there. More of her papers flew around the cabin as she repacked her carry-on bag and I tried to collect my wits as well as my belongings. Veering off towards the ladies room, she yelled, "I'll catch up with you at baggage." She didn't. Now I'll never get to thank her because I never knew her name. Wherever you are, Rhinestone and Purple Pants Woman, you're the best.

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