friendly the stewards and stewardesses are. I love that sometimes they hand out ice cream. I love that you can step onto a plane not knowing anyone and emerge a few hours later with a new best friend.
And I love that they keep pouring wine. At least, I did, before I met Jason. I shake my head when the stewardess offers wine the first time around, as the people on either side of me have a glass of white.
Oh, for God’s sake. Why would I not have a glass of white wine on a plane? It’s tantamount to orange juice. I’m on holiday. Ridiculous that I wouldn’t celebrate a trip with one glass of white wine. It’s only one. Maybe two. Three at the most, but hardly three, in those little plastic cups. Three of those might equal one and a half glasses of wine. Hardly excessive.
“Excuse me?” I call down the aisle to the stewardess, who turns, bottle poised in hand.
“Actually, I will have a glass of white wine. Thank you.”
The guy sitting next to me smiles his approval and gives me a “cheers” when my glass is in my hand. I’m not becoming best friends with the guy next to me today, that’s for sure, but we raise our glasses before I let the cool wine slip down the back of my throat. It is more cloying than I would have chosen, but delicious nonetheless. It is the perfect addition to this flight; I have my book, my magazine, movies, and the task of stilling the fantasies in my head, which, I’m very clear, are to hide the fact that I’m actually nervous as hell. And I will take any distraction over my thoughts.
Because what if they don’t like me? What if we have nothing in common? What if they find my Englishness obnoxious? Or superior? Or alien? What if Brooks Mayhew turns out to be difficult? Or arrogant? Or drunk?
He doesn’t sound like he’s going to be any of those things, from our phone conversations. He doesn’t sound like he was ever any of those things, from what my mum has now told me about her summer with him, even though, as she kept pointing out, it was such a very long time ago.
I’m not going to think about it anymore. I’m just going to try to focus on the flight, the movie, the book, the food, the wine. I’m going to focus on getting to JFK and finding my connecting flight to the tiny airport on Nantucket. I’m going to try to focus on staying in the moment and not, absolutely not, allowing a single fear, or fantasy, to creep in.
Twelve
The flight is long, but feels short. Eventually I abandon all hope of distracting myself and give in to my thoughts. There is so much to think about, so much anticipation, it is all I can do not to get up every few minutes and tear up and down the aisle, just to get rid of some of the nervous energy.
I know a bit more about them all now, my father having written to me and told me about my long-lost family. I have learned that Ellie is twenty-seven, married to Robert, who is a banker. They live in New York, in a brownstone in Chelsea. They have two children, the light of his life—Trudy, a newborn, and Summer, who is four. Ellie is much more like her mother. She is frighteningly organized, heavily involved in the 92nd Street Y, where Summer goes to preschool. From Brooks’s description in his letters, she sounds, honestly, a little uptight, but obviously I’m not going to say that. They apparently hold lots of fund-raisers in their very lovely home, and she is an excellent mother. He says the place she really lets her hair down is Nantucket. Although plenty of her friends have summer homes on Nantucket, she chooses not to be part of the scene when there, leaving her New York airs and graces behind and reverting to the island girl she once was.
The younger daughter is Julia. At twenty-six she is, wrote Brooks, a free spirit. She wants to be a writer, but in the meantime is juggling a ton of jobs: a waitress at the Downyflake, cleaning houses, occasional bartending at the Anglers’ Club, and scalloping when she has a morning off.
For a few years she went over to Cape Cod for the summers. She grew very close to an English woman, Denise Holyoak, who lived