Travel Space

I thought I might have lice. The young woman who sat next to me on my last flight before COVID had scratched her head constantly, combing her fingers through her long blond streaked hair and then cleaning her fingernails.

I went to the lavatory, hoping that she would relieve her itch before I returned, but it continued. The longest she went without engaging in this ritual was 21 seconds.

At first, I played bridge on my phone with one hand while the other shielded her from my view, but I couldn’t concentrate. I twisted my body away from her and watched a movie, but she was still in my peripheral vision.

I was so repulsed that I resorted to pretending to sleep on the tray table on the back of the seat in front of me. Where was my sleep mask when I needed it?

She looked like a good candidate for the unenviable middle seat when she walked down the aisle assessing the seating possibilities in the front of the plane and asked, “Is that seat taken?” Does anybody ever say, “Yes, my invisible bodyguard is there”? Or something more feasible, like “My husband is in the bathroom.”

With ease, she dispatched her carry-on in the overhead compartment. When she was seated, she a removed a science textbook from her satchel and a plastic clamshell with a green salad topped with strawberries. I thought I had lucked out.

My husband and I choose Southwest Airlines flights whenever possible, because they fly out of Islip. When you purchase a ticket from Southwest, you are not reserving a particular seat. Exactly 24 hours before your trip, you must go online to be assigned a place in the queue.

After you board the plane, you select your own seat. Most people prefer one on the aisle or by the window, which leaves the unpopular middle seat vacant.

For years, I sat there to be next to my husband, who likes the aisle seat so he can stretch his long legs. Until it finally dawned on me that sitting across the aisle from him and holding hands at takeoff was a better alternative.

If you don’t check-in in a timely manner, your seat choices are limited. You could end up in the dreaded C section, the last group to board. In that case, I prefer a middle spot in the front of the plane rather than the slim chance of aisles seats across from one another in the back.

But I have specific requirements. Never sit near a family with young children. I have no patience to play peekaboo with a toddler for more than two minutes, or to pass oozing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to her siblings.

Avoid any section with babies. There are no headphones, except maybe the ones the pilot wears, that can tune out a screaming infant. My first instinct is to look sympathetically at the mother, but the passenger in me wants to yell, “Give the baby a damn bottle!”

After one flight, I found a pacifier in my pocketbook. I assumed it came from the rambunctious toddler who sat in front of me. l hoped the exhausted mother had spares.

The list goes on: If aisle and window people are large, with possessive positions on the arms of the seat and bodies that can’t be contained in their less than 2-foot-square space, I continue my search. If someone is opening a particularly pungent sandwich, I move on.

The same decision applies if a passenger’s lunch looks amazing. I would be drooling while I waited for a minuscule bag of pretzels and a nonalcoholic drink.

Maybe I could relax more with a chilled glass of wine, but since mid-March 2021, that’s a thing of the past on Southwest flights.

If I notice a gaggle of girls wearing tiaras or a group of guys with matching sweatshirts at the airport bar pounding beers or downing shots, I pray that we are not on the same flight. It’s no fun sitting near a party of revelers yelling back and forth to each other when you’re trying to make up for lost sleep.

Flying home from Rome several years ago, I had an aisle seat. The older Italian woman next to me, who drank one glass of red wine after another, started her life story in heavily accented Italian. “… And then my sister Josephina, she’s no good. Oh my God, oh my God. You won’t believe it. What’s in her top drawer? A diploma. Does she have a job. No. No. …”

After a half an hour, I grabbed a stewardess, ordered vodka on the rocks, put my headphones on and tuned into a movie.

So being confined in tight quarters with strangers can be challenging. But my complaints are trivial in the tensions of air travel today, when passengers have shouting matches, physically assault one another and are abusive to flight attendants.

At the end of the month, I will be boarding a plane, flying to a warm destination to visit a sister I haven’t seen in two years. If it means being tested, wearing a mask that makes my nose itch and run, and sitting between two oversized people with families in front and behind me, I will be armed with a sleep mask, earphones and Xanax — happy to feel “normal” again.