How They Met, and Other Stories

isn’t in the mood. I leap onto the third or fourth stair and

start running.

The rest of the mall dissolves—I feel my legs pushing me up

against the flow. I’m making it—step, and step, and step. I

reach the final leap—the most dangerous part. Especially if your

shoelaces are untied, as mine are. I take a breath and jump onto

the second level’s marble floor. I raise my arms to complete the

arc, like a champion Olympic gymnast, conqueror of the mall.

I look down and see Mandy at the base of the escalator, making

mock clapping gestures. “Come on,” I yell, motioning for her

to follow. She touches her hair in hesitation. I can feel the reason

killing the impulse. “You can do it,” I say, but she shrugs.

I don’t understand. Anyone can do it. We’re at some sort of

standstill, like when a conversation abruptly stops

and you can’t think of anything more to say. I don’t think

she’s going to do it. I really hope she does.

I’m about to yell “Don’t bother” with a particular edge

in my voice. But then Mandy pulls her coat firmly around her

shoulders and throws herself onto the downward escalator.

How can I explain what I suddenly feel? I see her jump,

her hair lifting in the air, and I can’t help but think something

along the lines of Wow. I once asked Randy how he knew

that he had fallen in love with his girlfriend, Amy, and he just

looked at me like it was the hardest question in the world.

I expected some floral, florid explanation, about the air

lightening and flute music filling his ears. This relationship

that had him so transfixed—I expected a masterpiece of

sentiment, one that would make me so happy for him and

so empty inside. Instead he just turned to me and said,

“The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when

there was no question about it. One night I was lying

in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just

was there, undeniable.”

There is no question about it. I look in amazement

as Mandy pushes herself up the stairs, not looking up

at me, concentrating on her footwork. I want so much

for her to reach the top. I want her to reach me

at this very moment. I picture myself embracing her

when she makes it, looking into her eyes for the

confirmation of my feelings. What do I feel? If it isn’t

love, then it’s certainly the potential for love, the realization

that there’s more to us than liking and dating and being

each other’s Pictionary partners. I’m so happy. I’m so

afraid. Does she feel the same way? All I know

is that I know. When she reaches the top, maybe I’ll

dance with her to the piped-in non-music drifting

from the ceiling. I’ll do anything—I want to do something

totally strange and new and special. I want to hold her.

I want to sleep with her—fall asleep with her in my arms.

I want to wake up that way. I’ve never seen her asleep.

All of these strange impulses—I want to tuck her in.

I want to be there, and be there, and be there.

And then she falls.

It’s over before I can register what’s happening. Her foot

hits one of the steps and, well, she trips. It isn’t dramatic—

she doesn’t fall down the escalator or anything.

It isn’t even good comedy. She just stumbles face-first onto the

steps. Then she pushes herself up and rides the rest of the way

down. I run to her—it’s as if I’m moving doubly, being

carried as I go down. I get to her. I can’t tell if she’s crying

or laughing. “I can’t do anything!” she says, brushing back

her hair, and I see her exasperation isn’t serious. I say

something along the lines of “Don’t be silly, it could’ve

happened to anyone,” and gather the things that fell

from her bag. She’s still sitting when I’m done, so I offer her

my hand. She doesn’t get up—she just keeps looking at me,

not at my hand but at my face. I put the bag down and sit

beside her, right there on the floor of the mall. “Are you

okay?” I ask. She says, “I fell,” and I say, “I think I’ve fallen, too.”

It’s never like the movies, is it? A great romantic moment, and

clunky, corny things just tumble out. “Oh,” she says, and I wonder

if she’s saying it just to see what I’ll offer next.

“Yeah,” I reply, saying it to see what she’ll say next.

Which is, “You have to be careful.” Now what does that mean?

Indirect discretion. No one wants to fully commit—

everyone’s afraid that they’re misinterpreting because no one

is talking straight. Playing the old What Are You Thinking? game.

You have to be careful. Mandy has skinned her hands

and her lip has a little cut in one of its corners.

“Sometimes…” I say.

“Well…” she answers.

And I can’t take it anymore. She just looks at me, no help at all.

But, then again, all I’m doing is looking at her. A silent standstill.

A time for something. On her lip, there’s a little drop of blood.

I kiss her anyway. At this particular moment,

there’s just no question about it.

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO MEET ON AIRPLANES

This was ten years ago. I was a junior in boarding school, heading back to campus the Monday after Thanksgiving. After three rounds of leftovers, I was ready to return to the dorm, to our well-honed methodology of procrastination, to that last gasp of late-night madness before exams settled in and Christmas came.

I had planned my flight down to the last minute: I’d finish the book I was reading, proof a paper I had due, and sneak in a forty-five-minute nap before touching down in Boston. I had my headphones to protect me from screeching children and talkative adults. I had five sharpened pencils in the front pocket of my bag. I was ready to go.

I usually liked to sit in row seventeen, because seventeen was my lucky number. This time, however, I was seated in row fourteen. I decided not to take this as a bad omen. I was not a person who normally believed in omens. Only luck.

I am always early to airports, and thus I always board when my row is first called. The overhead compartment gaped for my hand luggage. I fed all the seat pocket detritus into its maw—the shallow magazines, the safety instructions, the plastic-wrapped blanket, and the paper-clad pillow. I would keep only what was essential: my headphones, A Room with a View, my research paper, and three of the sharpened pencils.

As the plane filled up, I began to get hopeful; the seat next to mine was still empty, leaving me with plenty of legroom. I took up my book and started to read. I lost track of where I was, and was brought back by a tap on my shoulder. She might have said excuse me—I didn’t hear. I looked up into the aisle. And there she was.

She was my type of pretty. Short black messabout hair, falling wherever it wanted. She was wearing a red sweater that somehow brought out that green of her eyes. She had a nice smile. I recognized this in the second before I tried to stand, even though my seat belt was already on. I continued to notice this as I unbuckled the seat belt, as she slid past me. Once she sat down and started going through the bag on her lap, I said hello.

I had never talked to a stranger on a plane before, nothing above the cursory regards. This was because I am in general an antisocial person, and because I’d never been seated next to anyone even remotely desirable. Instead I had an unerring ability to be partnered with the overweight business traveler who brought no reading material, or the father whose poor wife was across the aisle, forced to manage the demands of their children. Never anyone my own age, traveling alone. Never anyone who was my type of pretty.

She said hello back to me and scavenged deeper into her bag. I could feel my courage wavering. I tried to think of something profoundly interesting and not at all stalkeresque to say, but nothing came. I am a very strong believer in personal space, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was storming hers. I was about to retreat to my headphones when she finally found what she was looking for—a copy of A Room with a View. The same edition as my own.

I’d always had (and still do) two rules for myself: If I were ever to pass a busker on the street who was playing the same song that was on my headphones, I would give away all the money in my wallet. And if I were ever to be riding the T and spy someone reading the same book as me, I would strike up a conversation. Again, not seeing it as an omen, but as luck.

I figured the rules of the T applied to air travel as well. Of course, I’d never actually planned what I was going to say to the person who was reading the same book as me—my thoughts had never gotten that far. So I was entirely unprepared when I looked over to her and said, “It looks like we’re reading the same book.”

I took mine off my lap. She looked at it, then looked at hers. She could have easily dismissed it as a little coincidence, a minor disturbance. But instead she looked back up at me and said, “Wow. Neat.” Not at all sarcastic. No—she got the subtle wonder of the situation.

I knew right then that we were going to get along.

Her name was Rory. I introduced myself as Roger. She had been visiting her father for Thanksgiving, and was now going back to her mother’s house in Newton, where she went to high school. We were both aiming to be English majors when we went to college, and neither one of us was reading Forster for school.

I think one of the highest compliments you can give a person is that when you are talking to her, you are not thinking about the fact that you are talking to her. That is, your thoughts and words all exist on a single, engaged level. You are being yourself because you aren’t bothering to think about who you should be. It is like when you talk in a dream.

She spied my AP English research paper in the seat pocket. I ended up proofing her Virginia Woolf while she marked up my Wilfred Owen with one of her own (yes) sharpened pencils. We talked about our Thanksgivings, which really meant talking about our families in all their fragments and fissions. We began to see signs everywhere—in the fact that we’d both ordered the vegetarian meal even though neither of us was strictly vegetarian, in the fact that we were both wearing contact lenses, in the fact that we both had cousins named Jessie who were our favorites.

We talked through the in-flight movie. We talked in such a way that the flight attendants assumed we knew each other. We talked so much that we started to feel like we did know each other, as if every shared story could create an actual shared past.

Then the turbulence hit. I am an easy flier; I cannot tell you why, no more than I can tell you why I am afraid to climb down ladders. (Not up, just down.) From the moment the seat-belt light came back on, it was clear that Rory was not an easy flier. She clutched at her armrest, changed her breathing. She apologized to me and made fun of her paranoia. But I could tell that it was fear—a pure and genuine fear, the kind that rebukes rationality no matter how pleasantly or clinically the rationality is offered.

“My doctor gave me drugs, but I think I’m even more afraid of them,” she told me. “He said to throw a blanket over my head and pretend I wasn’t really on a plane. That was very helpful.”

I took out her copy of my book. She was about twenty pages ahead of me, but that didn’t matter. I freed her blanket from its plastic protection and threw it over both of our heads. Then, by the trail of light along my arm, I read to her. We walked around Florence as the characters courted disapproval. After a particularly sudden dip, Rory grabbed my hand without asking, and I let her without mentioning it. I kept reading, turning the pages with my one free hand as all our air turned to breath and the light of the world came in through a scrim of blue cotton. When the plane steadied off, I put the book down for a moment. Rory leaned into my shoulder with her eyes closed and a half smile on her lips. Gently, she found the right angle, the comfortable inclination. I let the book drop. I let us sleep. Two strangers under a blanket, in between two versions of home.