The Postcard

The back of an airplane is a scary place. Right by the lavatory, you can feel the engine roar under your seat.  Well, to be honest, I’m not really savvy in the anatomy of planes, so perhaps the engine isn’t right beneath us in the back, and the roar is just amplified by our fear. The woman next to me is filing her thumbnail with her other thumbnail. I guess that’s how she expresses her nerves. She keeps looking up and then out of the window and then to her nails and then up again—an incessant loop.
The flight attendant comes by with the refreshment cart. I’m slightly startled to see that unlike the archetypical flight attendant (a woman in her mid-late 20s with a toothy smile and abundance of eye makeup) this is just a young man with a strange haircut—a haircut that reminds me of a medieval times monk, a big flop of hair on top and shaved on the bottom.
When the cart squeals close to us in the back, I’m on the edge of my seat in order to seem attentive and ready to go because I hate failing in social settings and becoming an inconvenience to others. I order a Coke and when the monk-like flight attendant reaches down to set a napkin on my tray, his fingers fumble on the coarse paper. This gives me a chance to stare at his young twenty-something face, which still withholds an impression of aging exuded by his deep laugh lines and kind, wise eyes. Finally, he manages to get a single napkin between his fingers and places it under my drink. I say thank you under my breath because I can never really adjust my voice to the appropriate volume in social settings.
I am in this plane because my mom and dad began to hate each other a couple years ago, so they split and my dad decided to move east to New York City with the towering buildings and smaller people, and my mom decided to stay west in Indianapolis with the squat buildings and bigger people. I lived with her now, but for fall break my dad requested that I come visit him. I haven’t seen him in a year, unless you want to count Facetime calls, and he has a new girlfriend who is approximately ten years his junior. It isn’t that I don’t want to go but it also isn’t that I want to go either, so I’m just in the middle as usual, caught in a hollow limbo of apathy.
All of the sudden, the lavatory doors swing open by me and the woman next to me lets out a feeble shriek, finally freeing her thumbnails from their perpetual interlocking. When she realizes that it was nothing, she lets out a sigh of relief doused in embarrassment, and looks at me in the corner of her eye to see if I had noticed her momentarily lift her thin veil of social decorum. I just take a long swig of my Coke.
I’m beginning to grow even more intrigued with the monk-like flight attendant. I wouldn’t say it’s a matter of being attracted to him, but I would rather say it’s an odd sense of awe I have towards him. His feeble gestures, his nimble limbs moving up and down the narrow aisle with ease, his hands always being folded open like a chalice. And of course his hair. He smiles at everyone, even the despicable kind of people who push their seat really far back so that the people behind them can’t even move their knees.
We land in a matter of an hour and the monk-like flight attendant helps me get my bag down because I seem like I’m struggling, which I am. This time I shout a thank you, and then feel hot because it was far too loud. He just smiles and tells me to take care.
Before I can take my leave and try to nudge my way through the line out of the metal vessel, he startles me once again and momentarily stops me at the front of the plane where the other two flight attendants are standing, all bidding their goodbyes and “thank you for flying with us” to the passengers. He hands me a slip of paper with a glossy feel. I gently pull it out of his hands and realize that it’s a postcard displaying a scenic image of Time Square, with the words ONLY IN NEW YORK taking up the upper left corner. I look at the monk-like flight attendant who still has his hands folded open like a chalice, and smile at him with a face feigned with gratitude—although I really am grateful, I can just never transfer my emotions on my face properly.
All he says is, “Have a great trip!”
I say a thank you in the proper volume this time, and with the gleaming slip of paper within my fingertips, I deem this encounter a great victory.
_ _ _
My father is a tall and slender man, and exudes the distinct smell of tobacco even though he swears that he quit three months ago. His girlfriend is also tall and slender, with big lips and bright green eyes—an intense color of green that gives me an impression that they can’t be real.
He picks me up in a cab, gets the driver to grab my bag, and wraps his arms around me so tightly that I feel like Mowgli getting strangled by the boa constrictor in The Jungle Book. “How ya doin’, kiddo?” he says.
“Fine.”
“This is Janine,” he points to the girlfriend with the fake eyes.
She kneels down to hug me although I’m only three inches shorter than her at the very least, squealing, “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”
I notice that the cabbie has been back in the taxi for a while now, and seems to be taking a brief nap, or maybe is just resting is eyes. I look back at my dad; his face seems to be expanded out by his excitement, his eyes and mouth wide in elation, “Oh man, am I glad to see you! We’re gonna have so much fun, kiddo.” We get in the cab and I am bemused once again because he’s never called me kiddo before.
The girlfriend daintily sits on the furthest left, her legs crossed bearing an infinity tattoo on her left ankle. My dad groans heavily when he settles in his seat in the middle. Siting on the far right, I turn my attention to the window right away.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” my father musingly sighs, turning in my direction. I only see hordes of strangers and gray.
Still clutched in my right fist, I look down at the postcard that the monk-like flight attendant gave me and examine it with more scrutiny. The colors of commercialism are all neon and shocking, the various corporation logos are hovering above the masses divinely, and the fast-moving cars underneath are so velocious that they have now been reduced down to swirling streams of yellow light. It all seems to blur together like a cacophony of colors.
I look back at my dad and his girlfriend, and they seem to be linked by their skin, my dad’s face burrowed in her neck. The girlfriend seems to be pregnant. Her belly is swollen, and whenever there’s a bump in the road she grabs onto it as if it were an overflowing glass of water. My father hasn’t uttered a word about it. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to know.
_ _ _
We dine at a restaurant with a name that doesn’t make sense.
“You’re gonna love this place,” my dad says as he takes a picture of me standing in front of the façade of the building, under the neon sign. Mirrors. The restaurant is called Mirrors but of course when we go in, there are none, only more hordes of stoic yet bustling people, nudging their way to wherever.
We’re seated in a matter of twenty minutes, which is wonderful timing in Manhattan, as my dad tells me. The food is flat, but he seems to love it because he takes about four to five pictures of it before even touching the plate of kale and pork. The girlfriend strokes his neck while doing the same to her own plate of kale and asparagus salad. “Smile kiddo,” he says to me, taking another picture, and I comply, jutting out my chin so that his Instagram followers won’t notice my double chin.
After ten minutes into the bland meal, he asks while wiping off his mouth with the coarse bleached table napkin, “So what do you like to do?”
I always hated this question because my answer always seems like a lie coming out of my own mouth. “I don’t know, hang out with my friends, draw a little, whatever.”
“Oh, what do you like to draw?”
“Anything, really.”
“You know, I actually have this friend that went to drawing school and now he’s got a degree in it. Maybe he can help you out sometime.”
I consider his offer for a moment, but then wonder what exactly this nameless friend could help me out with.
“So what exactly do you want to do in the future, kiddo?”
“I don’t really know yet, maybe be an architect.”
“Oh really! That’s awesome, wow, I did not know that about you.”
The girlfriend smiles with an aura of knowing, “Yeah, that definitely fits you.”
My dad looks at her admiringly because she said something remotely kind to me, and then pecks at her cheek again. She giggles but I don’t see what’s funny.
“You know what we should do then?” my dad picks up his drink and takes a short swig, “We should go the Empire State Building tomorrow morning! It’s one architecture’s greatest achievements,” he says as if I don’t already know, “it only makes sense.”
“That’ll be nice,” I look down at my own kale infused meal, untouched and undisturbed, like a perfect pool of paint. The feeling of hollow apathy has lifted a little as I imagine my tall and slender dad holding my hand as we look beyond the hordes of strangers and gray, and behold the top of the world beneath us, on top of the tower that defined a city.
_ _ _
The next morning, I sit at my dad’s kitchen table ready by 9 a.m. After fifteen minutes, I fear that he has overslept so I knock on his bedroom door. No answer. I continue this pattern until two hours later, when he finally stumbles out of his room with a bleached bathrobe wrapped haphazardly around his thin body. “S***,” he winces when he sees me, the girlfriend trailing behind him, wearing an oversized gray shirt.
“Sorry kiddo,” he says, rubbing his eyes as if he’s trying to remove me from his vision, “Totally forgot.”
_ _ _
When we reach the tower, the line outside of it seems to extend without an end. My dad winces again, “Maybe we’ll just take a quick picture outside.”
We eat lunch at a restaurant with an irrelevant name once again. Dialysis. Then my dad buys tickets to go on a double decker tour bus. Crowded with people from every continent all giving off the distinct tourist smell of grease and discomfort, the tour guide introduces himself as Randy and cracks New Jersey jokes throughout the ride. My dad and his girlfriend are either linked by the skin or eyes linked to their phones.
Night falls quicker than anticipated, and by the time the bus reaches the pinnacle of the tour—Time Square. The passengers being filtering out into the street to take pictures, and I feel so restless that I too leave the bus before my dad’s face leaves his girlfriend’s neck. When I reach the zenith of the street, where I can face the plot of buildings until they almost emulate the view from the postcard, I feel disillusioned. The lights are dull. There are no fast-moving cars because the area has been cut off for tourists, who all have their backs to the main attraction, smiling at small pieces of metal flashing and reflecting off of their alabaster teeth. No one is really looking.
I begin to stroll off, not knowing exactly to where. I walk for what seems to be a matter of minutes, but when I look at the street signs, I see that I’ve been walking for about ten to fifteen blocks. My feet throb and the hair on my arms stick up like antennas. I still somehow doubt that my dad has noticed.
To the right of me is a line of people; the woman wearing close-fitting dresses suffocating their figures, all above their red knees, and the men in almost identical dress shirts, which tighten around their shoulders so when they try to wave at someone, their arms can only go up midway. One of the men is the monk-like flight attendant.
But his eyes are not so kind, and instead clouded with lust, and his hands are not open like a chalice, but instead around the waist of a woman sporting a suffocating black dress. And his hair is gelled up into a quiff.
A few of the people move into the building that they’re standing outside of, and for a moment I can hear blaring music exude from the momentarily opened door. And then it stops.
He moves too, but not nimbly or gently, more authoritatively, still clutching onto the woman’s waist as if it’s his. For a moment his neck cranes and he spots me, his eyes boring into mine. “Hey,” he yells, “I know you from somewhere!”
My eyes widen now as I clutch onto my beaded purse.
“Yeah, you were one of the passengers on my last flight yesterday!” he continues, “I remember, I gave you a postcard of Time Square that I found on the ground the other day.”
I nod, hoping that this will suffice.
He laughs, something meant to be jovial sounding somehow malicious. “You wouldn’t happen to still have it, would you?”
I slowly nod once again, my hand stuffing itself into my purse, feeling for the glossy slip of paper. But to no avail. I look at the contents of my purse more intently, moving every unimportant knickknack to the side, but still can’t seem to place it between my fingers.
But when I look up again, he has gone. And in the corner of my eye, I can see a sliver of paper floating off into the lights, sailing on the wind into nowhere.