In Plane View

Photo by Gina Easley

By Wendy Fontaine

There are airplane seats in my living room. A row of five, straight-backed, with navy-blue and charcoal upholstery, canvas seatbelts with silver buckles that still shine. They must have come from a big plane, a 747 perhaps, something that flew over international waters. Bulky and awkward, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a Pottery Barn catalog or a Living Spaces commercial, the seats are not my taste. I’d prefer they weren’t in our apartment at all, but they belong to my husband, James, and predate the beginning of our relationship. Over the years, I have tried to ask as few questions as possible about the seats, as if my disinterest could somehow make them fade into the background.

When guests come, the airplane seats are the first thing they see. “Are those from a real plane?” they ask. I roll my eyes. James smirks and nods. The guests search for appropriate responses, which vary from shock to envy, depending upon their gender.

No one ever sits in the seats, but if they did, they’d feel the scratch of polyester against the backs of their thighs. They’d notice a hard metal frame pressing into their shoulder blades. If they closed their eyes, they might hear the deep hum of the engine or the sharp rattle of a beverage cart. They might even feel the bounce of turbulence no longer there.

•••

Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a production assistant on television shows around Los Angeles, James found the airplane seats in a heap of gear outside a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After a show wraps, crewmembers tear down the set, separating scrap materials from furniture and other items that can be reused. The seats were either on their way back to a prop warehouse or bound for the trash. But James and his roommates, who were also working as PAs and stuntmen at the time, snagged the seats and brought them back to their shared, three-bedroom apartment in the city.

The guys, most of whom came to LA from the rugged streets of Boston, were just getting started in the business. They worked long, entry-level shifts and pooled their earnings to cover rent, booze, and cable TV. Back then, much of their furniture came from the curb. A large couch, swayback and gray like an old mule. Kitchen chairs. End tables. Even a futon that would later become my daughter’s bed.

James and his friends put the seats on a wooden riser in their living room to create movie-theater seating, an optimal arrangement for watching Super Bowls and Stanley Cups. A projector transformed the opposite wall into a giant screen. I didn’t know them then, but I imagine them also watching the shows they had been working on at the time, scanning the credits for their own names.

•••

One day, while vacuuming the space around the airplane seats, I see what appears to be a serial number stamped on the back of the chairs, along with a date: Sept. 25, 1992. An internet search of the serial number proves fruitless, but the date makes me smile. That’s the year James and I graduated from high school. We went to the same school in western Maine, though we were hardly friends at the time. He was the captain of the football team who dated the head cheerleader. I was captain of the basketball and field hockey teams. The titles were mostly honorary; I was a hard worker but a lousy athlete. With only sixty kids in our graduating class, we knew each other’s names but never had a single conversation—not that either of us can recall, anyway.

After graduation, he studied advertising at Florida State University, then moved to Los Angeles to find work in show business. Along the way, he was the life of every party, a distinction he earned with excessive drinking and risky decisions.

I wouldn’t know about it until much later, but when he was in his twenties, a drunken car wreck nearly severed James’ right arm just below the shoulder. Doctors said he’d never regain full use of it, but after surgery and physical therapy, he proved them wrong. He even played football again, as a fullback with a semi-pro team that practiced three nights a week and competed on the weekends. More than once, he was the team’s most valuable player.

•••

After high school, I went to the University of Maine and got a degree in journalism. James never married, but I got hitched right away, mostly to escape the paper mill town where we grew up. My first husband was in the military which meant we moved every four years. In each new town, I got a job as a reporter at the local newspaper, covering everything from tedious school board meetings to gruesome homicides. Through work, I found a way to belong.

After ten years of marriage, our daughter Angie was born, and I quit my job to take care of her. While her dad was away on short deployments, she and I went to mommy and me yoga classes, story time at the local library, and swimming lessons for infants at the YMCA. I nursed her and made her baby food from scratch. Our days were smooth and peaceful, easy and predictable. But then the clouds rolled in.

When Angie was two, her father and I split. He had an affair with a woman he had known back in high school, who now had kids of her own. After that, Angie and I left our family home and moved back to the paper mill town, where I got a job bottling pills in the supermarket pharmacy, rented an apartment and filed for divorce. Money was tight, so we furnished our new place with things from yard sales and thrift stores. Mismatched dishes. A faded pink rocking chair. A kitchen table that wobbled, no matter how I attempted to fix it.

After a year of court hearings, the judge granted me full custody of Angie, meaning all the decisions about caring for her were up to me. There were doctors’ appointments and tantrums, nightmares and fevers, potty training and time-outs. I was her mother and her father, never feeling as though I was doing either job well enough. The hardest part, though, was focusing on Angie when my own heart was broken, when I was afraid of what each new day would bring, when I couldn’t imagine a time when things would feel normal again.

Instead of being home with my daughter, making her meals from scratch and teaching her the alphabet, I dropped her off at daycare in the morning and went to the pharmacy to hand out Vicodin and Viagra for eight dollars an hour, then warmed up macaroni and cheese for dinner in the afternoon. Each evening, I bathed her, read her bedtime books, and cuddled her under the covers, wondering if this was it—if this was the life we were meant to live, in this small town, where everything was bumpy and rough. I missed our old life, our sense of stability. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and, just for a moment, forget where we were.

•••

For two years, Angie and I juggled work, daycare, and life in our little rental apartment. We celebrated birthdays and Christmases and made a few friends. But the paper mill town never felt like home. When she was four, we had a yard sale of our own. We sold the dishes and the furniture, then drove south to Boston and boarded a plane bound for Los Angeles.

During my divorce, James and I had begun an email correspondence that turned into friendship. I wrote to him, at first, because I was lonely and talking to adults kept me from going stir crazy. He wrote back, maybe, because his roommates had all moved out and he needed someone to vent to about work. In our emails, we told each other what we had been doing since high school. I shared the details of my breakup and the struggles of parenting. He wrote about the parties, the accident, and the day he decided to quit drinking. I admired his resolve, his self-control, and discipline; he appreciated my tenacity. Our friendship turned into intrigue, and intrigue turned into romance. He started sending Angie and me little gifts, playful things to keep us smiling: a red-and-white cowgirl lunchbox for her, a coffee mug shaped like Buddha for me. Then he sent plane tickets.

The trip marked Angie’s first time on an airplane, and she spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window at a blanket of clouds, mesmerized by how soft the world looked from high up. I passed the time imagining what things would be like in California and wondering if James could handle being around a demanding preschooler. The visit was a test that I suspected we would fail. It was easy to romanticize a relationship from three thousand miles away. Being together every day might be a different story.

That week, James took us to all the usual tourist spots. The Hollywood sign. Venice Beach. In-N-Out Burger. Angie liked him instantly. She sat next to him at dinner, asked to hold his hand when we crossed streets, and pretended to be his pet dog—her favorite game of make-believe. But it was the quiet evenings at his place that hooked me, when he and Angie curled up on that old swayback couch to watch superhero movies, her forehead resting on the jagged scar along his bicep.

After Angie and I returned to Maine, the paper mill town felt even less like home than it had before. I knew that no matter how hard I worked or how long we stayed, the town would never be where we belonged. James invited us to live with him, and I spent several months waffling about whether moving was the right thing to do—for Angie and for myself. I was afraid of making a huge mistake, of giving up our safe haven. But I also knew that if we didn’t go, if we didn’t at least try, I would always wonder what life might’ve been like for the three of us. So Angie and I had our yard sale and went back to California. For good.

•••

In the years before our arrival, most of James’ curbside treasures had disappeared—taken or disposed of by various roommates as they moved up in the world and moved on, into their own places or in with girlfriends and wives. James had moved up, too; no longer a production assistant on television shows, he had become a computer engineer on blockbuster movie productions, the kind that involve the most famous actors in Hollywood.

The airplane seats remained, though, along with a Scarface poster, the beer-stained carpets and a shelf of half-filled liquor bottles. His party days were behind him. No more drinking, no more reckless behavior. But the bottles and other trappings stayed—reminders that good times can be good, but they can also go bad.

Of course, I had my own attachments. After two years of single parenting, I drew imaginary lines around my daughter and myself. When I went grocery shopping, I bought only the things Angie and I liked. When I cooked, I made enough for two. I kept our laundry and our money separate. At night, I crawled into bed with my daughter instead of the man who would eventually become my husband. Some of it was habit, but most of it was fear. How could I trust someone again, not only with my heart but also with my daughter’s? Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the past, even when you know that letting go is the last step before flying free.

James never questioned my hesitancy or complained about feeling left out. He simply waited to see how things would evolve. Then one day, while he and Angie lounged on the couch, it suddenly became clear: if I kept my guard up, if I continued to hold him at arm’s length, then so would Angie. Love doesn’t live inside imaginary lines. It is big and risky. It is the whole sky or nothing at all.

•••

Now Angie’s ten years old, and James and I are married. In time, he took down the Scarface poster, tossed the liquor-bottle mementos, and replaced the carpets. I learned how to shop and cook for a family of three and started sleeping in my husband’s bed. We bought a new sofa, brown suede with cream stitching, and put that old swayback couch on the curb for someone else.

The airplane seats, however, are still here.

I would love for them to disappear one day, perhaps go to a storage facility or maybe into the trash. But the chances of that happening are slim. James wants to hold onto them, even though they no longer go with the décor.

I understand the seats are part of his past, a part he isn’t ready to relinquish just yet. They hold memories of the fun he had with a particular group of guys and how hard they all worked to make names for themselves. Maybe they also remind him of his retreat from alcohol addiction, when he sharply and decisively changed the trajectory of his life.

If that’s the case, then the seats remind me of something too: that it’s all right to put my flaws in the middle of the room. I can struggle with the past and feel insecure about the future, and James will love me anyway. I can be hesitant and fearful, territorial and overprotective—it won’t matter. Love is also staying in the room with another person’s imperfections. It’s sitting with their undesirable elements without making demands or asking too many questions.

Even though I hate the airplane seats, this apartment feels like home. Angie and I have finally landed where we belong. So I’ll keep the silly seats forever if I have to, if James wants them. I’ll keep dusting them, keep vacuuming around them and dressing them up with throw pillows. I’ll even sit in them for a movie or two, scanning the credits for his name.

•••

WENDY FONTAINE’s work has appeared in Compose Literary Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, Passages North, Readers Digest, River Teeth, the anthology Turning Points: Stories about Choice and Change, and elsewhere. In 2015, she won the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Wendy lives and teaches in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Leaves in the Fall. www.wendyfontaine.com