Liminal
Regurgitation (2019)
Artwork: Uncertain Pleasure II (1996) by Zhang Peili
Photograph by Manya Naranzogt
By Adora Svitak
The woman in the airport was very old, and beyond this there appeared to be nothing remarkable about her. I met her while trying to sleep in Gate 7B during a 3-hour layover—just the length of layover too short for sightseeing but too long to entertain myself with vapid games on my phone. It was that peculiar hour in the middle of the night when the airport was ghostly and silent save the occasional suitcase, wheeling forlornly by. I was very hungry but every fast food menu, brightly lit on flashing screens, taunted me from behind a shut metal grille.
I hadn’t thought to bring a blanket off of the plane, so I sprawled miserably across three black leather seats with a grey sweatshirt spread on top of my upper half. It had belonged to the father of the woman who I no longer lived with. My backpack I slid under my head. I came from the kind of place where people would think nothing of taking a backpack from you if you weren’t guarding it carefully, so I did this both to make myself a pillow and to keep my belongings close.
The airport was cool and whistled with air-conditioning. When I finally drifted off to fitful sleep I dreamt of ice floes and great white bears. Stirring out of sleep, I found that my teeth were no longer chattering, and there was something woolen on me. Sitting up, I saw the old woman. She was knitting the bottom half of what looked like a giant rugby scarf, which was as wide as my torso and stretched longer than my curled-up frame. She had placed the finished portion on top of me like a blanket.
“Good morning,” she said, though the moon still shone in the sky.
“Good morning,” I said, still dazed. “I’m sorry if my shoes have touched your scarf. I’m afraid they’re very dirty.”
“Are they,” she said evenly, and lifted the scarf. The pink gum-sole of my shoes looked clean. I gaped. She reached into a voluminous pocketbook on her lap and pulled from it two of the smallest tangerines I had ever seen. One, she handed to me; the other, she placed in her mouth and swallowed whole, in a single satisfied gulp. I looked at her, astonished for a moment, but found something familiar in her expression. I had seen old people in my hometown sometimes eat food in the same way: not a morsel wasted, not when the years of hunger still lived noisily in their heads.
“Thank you,” I said, turning it in my hands and digging in my thumb. The pores of the peel began to express tangy-smelling citrus oil as I methodically stripped the fruit. “I’ve been feeling very hungry.”
She nodded, as though this had been apparent, and resumed her knitting. By this time I had moved fully onto one seat and neatly folded the portion of the scarf that had been placed on me into a square, trailing into her hands. She moved the metal needles with an amazing speed.
“Are you waiting for this flight, too?” I ventured, after we had been silent for some time. The woman who I no longer lived with had often commented that I seemed cold to strangers.
The old woman shook her head. “Another one, but I like this gate the best.”
I looked around at the dour grey terminal with its identical black leather seats everywhere and generic fast food restaurants and wondered why, but said nothing.
As if understanding my doubt, the old woman added, “There’s always someone in 7B,” which I could not contest, being there myself.
I appreciated that she hardly seemed interested in getting to know me, or asking dreaded intimate questions like why I was going where I was going or where I had begun my journey. Instead she continued determinedly at her knitting. Some scarce airport workers on graveyard shifts occasionally passed by on their motorized carts. They glided smoothly over the terminal floor, which had been buffed and polished to the reflectivity of clear lake water. As they passed the old woman would pause and nod very slightly in their direction. Here she had the visage of an old general saluting troops.
“Do you fly a great deal?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“I like airports,” she said, gazing out the tall window at the empty tarmac lit by yellow lights. “Sometimes I have a drink with the pilots in the club downstairs.”
“Oh, so you work for the airline?”
She only laughed, and adjusted the bright silk scarf knotted elegantly at her throat, as some air hostesses wore them. “Have you ever considered how this is the only place where you can drink a Bloody Mary at sunrise, and no one will think less of you?”
I couldn’t tell if this was a rhetorical question. I had thought of it, quite recently—sitting at the bar in the airport I’d just come from, writing impassioned missives to the woman I no longer lived with that I would never send. “Yes,” I said.
“Would you like one?” the old woman asked, reaching into her purse. The purse looked too small to contain much of anything, but she drew out her hand and produced a highball glass. I blinked quickly.
“I had better not, thank you,” I said, feeling dazed. Where would she get all the ingredients? Perhaps she had one of those horrible mixes that came in a bag.
“Suit yourself,” she said calmly.
I glanced down at my phone, disappointed by its quietude. How many hours had I been on the airplane before this, removed from civilization, with nobody seeking to reach me? When I looked up, she was sipping on a pretty drink, her Bloody Mary, bobbing square ice cubes and salt dusting the rim as finely as fairy dust. “How in the world—” I began.
Before I could finish the question, the old woman said, “I need to run to the restroom,” removing a brown eyeglasses case and small plastic pill organizer from her bag. “Would you mind watching my belongings until such time as I return?”
The restroom, a small single-occupancy room that flipped a sign on the outside to say “OCCUPIED” when the lock was engaged, was directly across from where we sat in 7B. It would be easy to see her go in and come out, to point to a security officer if the need arose and say that the luggage belonged to the very old woman in there. All the same, as the announcements in such places made abundantly clear, one was never to watch someone else’s luggage. Unattended luggage would be removed and destroyed.
She was looking at me expectantly, and I recalled something the woman I no longer lived with had once said in a fit of pique—“Why do you always have to play by the rules?”
“Alright,” I said. The old woman nodded, shifted her purse and small suitcase closer to me, and hobbled to the restroom with her cocktail in one hand.
Some time passed, and she still had not emerged. I wondered if it was possible she could have had a fall. Hoisting my backpack onto my shoulders and taking her bags into my hands, I walked closer to the bathroom and knocked. There was no answer. I glanced down at the lock. “VACANT,” it said, white text against green. I knocked again, then opened the door. There was no one inside; it was empty and clean.
I padded back across to Gate 7B and considered my options, the heavy weight of sleep pulling my eyelids low. I was too tired to go look for someone in the vast terminal who might be able to help, and anyway this would certainly lead to the removal and destruction of the old woman’s belongings. I had some faith in her ability to return, or perhaps simply a great desire to sleep again. I arranged the suitcase under my feet, her purse under my head, and the backpack on my back as if donning an exoskeleton or a shell, and curled up painfully in this manner.
When I awoke I was in a much softer place, the small light-filled room I had shared with the woman I’d lived with, and she was stirring awake in the white cotton sheets next to me.
“Love you,” she said, and I startled.
My backpack was in the corner, half-unpacked. Gone were the old woman’s suitcase and purse, but spilling out of the top of my pack was the unmistakable stripe of the rugby scarf.
Adora Svitak is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer. Her stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, the Huffington Post, and numerous others. Her book Speak Up! Speeches by young people to empower and inspire was published by Quarto in February 2020.
