Sydney Fair

          Sydney boarded the plane at 11:00 a.m., confident, yet insecure.  It’s funny how two diverse emotions can be so innocently juxtaposed on the same playing field.  She felt happy, happy that her four-year college degree could be put to use yet apprehensive due to her temporary absence in the states.  Wanting to take her friends and family with her , her heart was plagued with talons ripping any semblance of buoyancy out of her step.  Yet here she was going forward, moving forward, leaving her boyfriend Jonathon of two years crying at the gate. 

            Looking back perhaps she knew the fatalistic web she would succumb to.  But at the time she made no pretense of their separation.  She sobbed and held him closely promising to become his wife a year later.  And after the long goodbyes that stretched beyond their departure Sydney was on that plane headed for her destination.  

           Her first stop was at O’Hare in Chicago, Illinois.  Though the plane ride was a relatively short one, it was Sydney’s first plane ride ever.  Although she was 22, she has not been afforded the luxuries of travel growing up.  Her father and mother did what they could to make ends meet, but to be a daughter of two parents without college degrees, life was tough.  Her mother worked arduously at the local grocery store in town, and her father, a radio announcer, loved what he did but was paid a pittance for his long hours.  They lived in a trailer on South Michigan Street in a small town in western Wisconsin.  There were some terrible years growing up.  Sydney remembered the plastic bubble wrap that used to cover the windows, or at least try to cover the windows.  When winters became cold, as they inevitably do in Wisconsin), she would lie in bed shivering in her white nightgown, trying to get warm.  At an early age, she discovered that one of the only ways to find warmth, and pleasure no doubt, was to slip her hand beneath her panties and stroke herself over and over again.  After a while, her face would become flushed, and she would cuddle her stuffed animal and fall asleep for the night. In the morning, with the light streaming through the plastic-covered windows, she would rise and begin a new day. 

            The small plane she had boarded offered no comfort. As it was her first time, perhaps she felt the turbulence more than was present, but she quickly discovered the little white bags tucked into the pockets in front of her, and she made no excuse to acquaint herself with them.  Arriving in Chicago, the skies rained in what meteorologists described as a torrential downpour.  To Sydney’s liking however the plane had landed.  She was pale, but she found her land legs and summoned a sense of wanderlust from somewhere deep inside making her way to a nearby shuttle bus, proceeding to Gate H.  At the airport Sydney said goodbye to a German exchange student she happened to know, got her boarding pass, and proceeded to a waiting area.  It would be another two hours before her next flight.  After an hour her stomach had settled and its gnawing found its way to pepperoni pizza strata at four dollars a slice.  A man who sat next to her carried on some polite conversation and offered to buy her a beer. 

            Even at that young age Sydney was attractive.  While she wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, she had a wholesome, innocent demeanor about her that was friendly and warm, resonating with a small-town girl sort of appeal.  However, beneath her button-down denim blouse she had the potential to be wild like an untamed stallion.  When she was little, she turned on the gas stove in her kitchen.  Her mother had passed out from her grocery-store shift long before Sydney had any dinner.  She must have been about six at the time.  She got a stool, pulled it up to the stove, lit the gas, opened a can of corn-beef hash, and proceeded to cook it on the stove.  Well, Sydney’s long hair mingled with the flames.  Her mother did not awake to her screams.  Had it not been for a neighbor hearing the little girl’s cries, the whole trailer would have burned down.  Sydney’s burns are still their today as are the many scars she carries with her.  And when the stranger initiated conversation with her she was in a daze, remembering that day. 

“Miss, may I buy you a beer?” 

Within the reverie of her memories, she didn’t answer. 

He asked again.  “Miss, may I buy you a beer?”

“I’m sorry.  No thank you,” she queasily replied.  Thank you for your kindness. 

That wild stallion in her showed up many times in Sydney’s life, from drinking blackberry brandy out of the back of a pickup truck in the middle of a cornfield, to losing her virginity up against a freezer with her boss when she was twenty-one, and this journey across the Pacific Ocean.  Life sure was a wild ride.  At 2:45 Sydney left her cacophony of thoughts under the still pounding rain in Chicago and boarded a DC-10 on its way to Los Angeles.            

Once she settled in, Sydney tried to a quaint myself with her surroundings.   She was still queasy from my morning flight,  supposing that her Midwest bundle of nerves wasn't helping either.