Riot

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I cannot believe I am sitting next to him, yet again, on a plane. How many times we have done this, how many flights, transfers, holidays, my passport and ticket always with him, even my boarding card: he was the man, the head of the family, he held the travel documents. And when it was all over, that was among the many rights I had regained, the right to be myself on an airline. Not an appendage, not a wife, not Mrs. Rudyard Hart, no longer resigned to his determination to have the aisle seat, no longer waiting for him to pass me the newspaper when he’d finished it, no longer having to see the look of irritated long-suffering on his face when I disturbed him to go to the washroom, or asked him to catch the stewardess’s attention to get something for the kids.

The kids. It’s been years since we’ve all traveled together, as a family. He enjoyed travel, he often told me, but on his own. He was self-sufficient, he didn’t need things all the time like we, the rest of us, did — juice, or entertainment, or frequent trips to the bathroom. He made it obvious that being accompanied by us was not his preferred mode of travel. But we did it often enough, till the kids began to rate airlines and hotels and transit lounges the way other kids compared baseball teams. And because of Rudyard’s postings, the kids had an unusually exotic basis for comparison. “Emirates is cool,” Kim would say, because that airline had video monitors on the backs of the seats and a wide range of channels to choose from. “But they make you fly through Dubai,” Lance would retort, pronouncing it Do-buy, “where it’s just shops, shops, shops everywhere.

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