Vendela Vida - The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

When you find your seat you glance at the businessman sitting next to you and decide he’s almost handsome. This is the second leg of your trip from Miami to Casablanca, and the distance traveled already has muted the horror of the last two months. What’s to stop you from having a conversation with this man, possibly even ordering two vodka tonics with the little lemon wedges that the flight attendant will place into your plastic cups with silver tongs? He’s around your age, thirty-three, and, like you, appears to be traveling alone. He has two newspapers on his lap, one in Arabic, and the other in English. If you get along well enough, you could enjoy a meal together once you get to Casablanca. You’ll go to dinner and you’ll sit on plush, embroidered pillows and eat couscous with your hands. Afterwards, you’ll pass by the strange geometry of an unknown skyline as you make your way back to one of your hotels. Isn’t this what people do when they’re alone and abroad?

But as you get settled into your seat next to this businessman he tells you he plans to sleep the entire flight to Casablanca. Then, with a considerable and embarrassing amount of effort he inflates a neck pillow with his thin lips, places a small pill on his outstretched tongue, and turns away from you and toward the oval window, the shade of which has already been shut.

As the flight takes off, the inevitable cries of babies start up and you absentmindedly flip through your guidebook to Morocco. You read: “The first thing to do upon arriving in Casablanca is get out of Casablanca.” Damn. You’ve already booked a hotel room there for three nights. You should be annoyed with yourself for not reading the guidebook before reserving and paying for your room, but instead you direct your annoyance at the guidebook itself for telling you your first three days in Morocco will be wasted. You stuff the book deep into your backpack and remove your camera. It’s a few months old, and though you’ve used it, you’ve kept it in its box with the instructions, which you have not yet read. You decide now is a good time to read them and figure out how to download the photos of your newborn niece onto your laptop. You turn the camera on — it’s a Pentax, a professional camera that’s nicer than you need — and study a photo of your niece on the day she was born. You feel your eyes start to well up and you turn the camera off.

The plane has still not reached a comfortable cruising altitude and the seat-belt sign has not yet been turned off, but this doesn’t prevent a Western-looking woman across the aisle and two rows ahead from standing up. Wearing a dress patterned with autumnal leaves even though it’s spring, she removes her carry-on suitcase from the overhead compartment. Then she sits down, places it on her lap, opens it, shifts a few items of meticulously packed clothing around to a different position within the case, closes it, and lifts the suitcase back up to the overhead compartment. A flight attendant briskly approaches and reminds her the seat-belt sign is still illuminated. The woman in the autumnal dress sits for five minutes before she is unable to control herself and stands once more to retrieve her suitcase, place it in her lap, open it, and rearrange the clothing before restoring the suitcase to the cabinet above her seat.

Your fellow passengers — half of whom look like tourists, and half like they might be Moroccans returning home — make eye contact with you and with each other and pupils are rolled. It’s collectively understood that this woman is suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. When the woman in the autumnal dress stands for a third time, the passenger seated in front of her, holding a book and wearing glasses, abruptly turns around to stare. She is part of a group of women who have been traveling with you since Miami. Judging by their Florida State University sweatshirts and their approximate age, you assume they attended FSU together almost forty years ago, and are on a reunion trip.

There’s something familiar about this bespectacled woman who’s now turned and looking back, and as you lock eyes for a moment, you sense she’s maybe wondering if she recognizes you from somewhere. You spot one of this woman’s sneakers, turned outward in the aisle — a clean, puffy white Reebok — and you immediately know where you last saw her. Your heart races the way it does when you’ve had too much caffeine. You avert your eyes from hers and concentrate on the seat back in front of you. You pull down the tray table and place your head on it. You do not want this woman to recognize you, to ask you questions.

You are careful not to peer out into the aisle again, no matter how many times the woman in the autumnal dress stands up and sits down, no matter how many times the flight attendants come down the aisle to confront her and remind her that she must remain seated. You order a glass of wine from one of these flight attendants and you take a Unisom. You know you are not supposed to mix alcohol with this tablet but you’re suddenly afraid of passing the duration of the flight awake and anxious, of arriving in Casablanca feeling ragged and wrecked. You close your eyes and think of sex, which is what you think about when you have trouble sleeping. You see flashes of body parts and scenarios — some that you’ve seen in films, and a few you’ve experienced. You think of the sunscreen-smelling boy you kissed in a hammock on the beach when you were eighteen, the man from Dubrovnik who accompanied you to an Irish bar when you were twenty-five, a scene from an Italian film with Jack Nicholson and a foreign actress whose name you don’t remember. You think of the girl with the green eyes at the loft party whose hand brushed over your breasts. She looked back but you didn’t follow.

None of this helps: you cannot sleep. The children on the plane are screaming, especially the little girl across the aisle from you who is sitting in her mother’s lap. Her hair is braided into multiple plaits, secured with bows. Usually girls in braids make you tender — they remind you of your own childhood, of how your mother came into your room every morning at six and wove your hair into two tight braids. At the ends she tied bows out of short pieces of thick fraying yarn, usually red or yellow in color to match your school uniform. She did all this while you slept because she needed to be at work before 7 A.M. Even if the strokes of her brush or the rapid motion of her fingers roused you, you were careful not to reveal you were awake. You knew she would be upset with herself that she had deprived you of sleep, so you kept your eyes shut and mimicked the slow breath of slumber.

You attended an expensive all-girls school on scholarship and not many of the other mothers worked, so she wanted to say to any mother who was watching (and they were always watching): Yes, we are middle class, yes, I work, but my daughter isn’t the worse for it — look at her neat, tight braids. For reasons that were never clear to you at the time, your twin sister was not given a scholarship to the school and attended the public school near your apartment building. Not that you will ever pity her: she was always prettier (you are fraternal twins, not identical) and more outgoing. The result of this combination meant she was more frequently in trouble. She wore her hair cut short even when it wasn’t stylish, but usually it was. You, on the other hand, had braids until you were in the seventh grade.