The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Eight Is Enough

I'm one of those people who is more likely to raise a fuss if you suggest I board a plane rather than get into a car. I know all the statistics. I'm aware that the road is far more dangerous than the sky. The thing is, I don't understand how planes remain airborne, despite M.'s most sincere efforts to educate me. Until last year, he owned a plane. I sat in it once, when it was in the hangar, dust-covered and cold; safe. Try as he might, and he tries frequently, I've yet to board an aircraft with him, and it is slowly making him crazy. This is a man who thinks he should have wings rather than arms. Spitfire mother, Messerschmitt father. I don't get it.

Knock wood, I've never experienced a serious car accident. Knock, knock. There was one incident when I was seventeen when my best friend's car, a Hyundai Pony, slid off a glass-topped country road into a ditch and landed on an angle. I had been in the back seat with my then-boyfriend, and I distinctly remember him whispering in my ear that we were going to end up in the ditch. He was a country boy, he knew how gravel roads with ice worked against inexperienced high school girls. Almost as soon as he'd said it, we very calmly veered to the right and the sound was like running into a bank of wet sugar. We ended up walking to a lonely house in the middle of a deep blue night and I was mortified to find that we'd stumbled upon a biker clubhouse. Mercifully, though the two men we encountered had obviously been sleeping, they were kind enough to help us out by calling on those closeby who owned tractors. Two actually showed up at the site of the slide, and they linked a chain to the car and pulled it up and out, as though it weighed nothing. The result of this incident was that I missed my midnight curfew and that I had my very first hickey on my neck which mortified me. I remember thinking that something more violent and passionate should have been the cause of that horrible, splotched purpleness, not the guileless fumblings of a boy who wore a fake leather jacket. Thankfully, Kyla, my best friend, spotted it before anyone else did and she wrapped a scarf around my neck so my mother wouldn't see it. My mother was, and sort of still is, like Mrs.White in Carrie when it comes to sexual happenings. To go home late and marked with the bruise of a whore would have meant many months of solitary confinement. As it was, there was some serious drama about the fact that the accident had happened at all (You will never ride in a car with teenagers again!), and it forced a meeting between Kyla's parents and my own, her mother desperate to assure my semi-sane mother figure that it really was just a one-off, that Kyla knew how to drive. Eventually, though, that car was totalled in a very random accident about a year later, and strangely, it was Kyla's sister driving while my sister sat in the passenger seat. Though Ky's sister was hurt slightly, my own sister was fine, though shaken. A case of a guy in a muscle car thinking he should ignore a red light, t-boning the Pony and sending it spinning across the intersection onto the lawn of a gas station. Neither incident was the fault of the Pony driver. I remember this whenever I drive my own car, that there is always someone out there who doesn't pay attention, always someone who thinks the law doesn't apply to them.

My cousin Rosemary was killed when she was only nineteen years old. Three weeks before Christmas, 1983, somewhere outside of Chicago. She had been huddled in her car, waiting at a red light and the car approaching from behind slid into the back of her. There had been no damage to the car at all, and the driver got out and came to her window to let her know that there wasn't so much as a scatch on the bumper. She looked at him strangely, said that her chest hurt, and then she slumped over, dead. No one could believe that it had happened, and though it's been over twenty-five years now, my aunt and uncle have never recovered from the loss. They say it was the way she'd been sitting, trying to get warm, which caused the spine to disconnect from the brain, or something to that effect. She'd been on her way to school, was wearing an engagement ring she'd been given the weekend before, and was probably one of the happiest people I'd ever known. There was no one to blame in that situation, no one to put the hate into. It simply happened.

I've been known to run red lights or miss stop signs. I'm human, and I've been lucky, so far (knock, knock). I should probably get back into a plane at some point, though. I know it goes against logic, this persistent, post 9-11 fear. How nice it would be to wake in the morning and be somewhere exotic by the afternoon. I don't know that a Hyundai could manage that.

The title has no relevance whatsoever to my entry.