Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot Read Free Book Online

washroom without crawling all over people.” Mum’s starting to sound just a little frustrated. “Now please, sit down and be quiet, Susie.” It must get exhausting to have someone looking to you all the time not only for entertainment, or love, but also for limits and explanations and rules. How alert you must have to be every moment, keeping on top of what’s what. Briefly, Lila feels warmly towards the woman, sympathetic.
    But then, without so much as a raised, questioning eyebrow in Lila’s direction, Tom leans across the aisle, and her sympathy vanishes. “Excuse me, we have an empty window seat if Susie wants to look out for a while. Not,” he smiles at the child, “that there’s much to see away up here but,” he shifts attention back to her mother, “she’s welcome to look. I know how hard it is, keeping kids entertained on a trip.” Finally, he turns to Lila. A little late. “You don’t mind, do you?” She doesn’t bother to answer. “Come on, kids are fun. You could tell her a story.”
    Does Lila look like Dr. bloody Seuss?
    Still, it’s not the child. Once she’s scrambled past and is kneeling on the seat, looking out enthralled at the clouds passing under them, she’s rather endearing. “We’re high ,” she tells Lila, turning towards her, little mouth and brown eyes opened wide with amazement.
    â€œWe sure are,” Lila agrees.
    Tom is right in a way: a child’s face is irresistible. The appeal is partly in the way young eyes observe every unfamiliar experience: as awesome and very likely delightful. A way of seeing that could keep all the world fresh.
    A parent should be purely loving, purely attentive to this gift of seeing. In many, many respects a parent must not fail, but as far as Lila can tell, must always fail anyway.
    In any other pursuit, Lila can bear the prospect of falling short: research papers may go under critical knives, lovers come to grief, some students don’t learn. But she doesn’t think she could bear a young woman, a daughter, turning on her and crying, “What do you know? What makes you think you can tell me anything now?”
    As Lila once turned on her mother, over some disagreement she cannot even remember, although she recalls flinging her arms up, and that she was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse—she can still see the sleeves on those flinging arms, cuffed and buttoned at the wrists.
    She was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Her mother’s lips got very thin.
    The odd moment of curiosity here and there, now and then, about having a child with this man or that, or even a true, temporary desire, can’t outweigh the possibility of an unendurable moment of failure.
    This is not, of course, wholly truthful. There have been other complicated uncertainties and circumstances, and really it may be, she supposes, that decisions have simply flown by unmade. Now if she did want to change her mind, she could not. What a relief!
    No, the problem here isn’t at all the beauty of children or the adorable Susie. It’s Tom. Does he forget who he’s with? Can this be how he is in the parts of his life Lila doesn’t see? A man who will decide something, even this kind of small something, inviting Susie to join them, without a nod towards a companion’s views and desires?
    They still have their surprises, and they’re not always happy ones. That must work both ways, of course. But no wonder he got into trouble around the cabinet table, was occasionally labelled a “maverick” when he got his name in the papers. No wonder his wife finally flung up her own arms and opened her craft supply shop.
    â€œSorry,” he whispers. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. Only, I was overcome with compassion for a moment. Won’t happen again.” How cutting he can so quietly, courteously be.
    It’s also annoying to