At the airport their friends split off to go to their different airlines, and Willa and Derek were finally on their own. She was glad he was there to take care of things. She wouldn’t have known what to do at the metal detector or how to check her luggage. When everything had been seen to, he shepherded her to the waiting area and settled her in a plastic chair, and then he went off to buy soft drinks. She had the feeling while he was gone that she was all alone on the planet. The passengers sitting around her seemed not quite real, and she was conscious of herself from outside, from a distance—her back very straight, her patent-leather pumps set primly together, her eyes wide and wary. The sight of Derek heading toward her finally, with a paper cup in each hand, filled her with relief.
“What do you think I should call your folks?” he asked as he plopped down next to her and passed her a cup. “Mr. and Mrs. Drake? Or use their first names?”
“Oh, Mr. and Mrs., at the start,” she said. She didn’t even have to consider. Her parents would be horrified if a young person acted so free and easy with them. Or her mother would, at least. “After they get to know you, though,” she said, “they might suggest you use their first names.”
“What are their first names?”
For some reason, she hesitated. Maybe she worried he would ignore her advice and start right off using them. But then she said, “Melvin and Alice.”
“Hi there, Melvin and Alice!” he said. He put on a resonant, deliberately smarmy-sounding voice that made her laugh. “May I please have your daughter’s hand in marriage?”
Willa stopped laughing. She couldn’t tell if he was serious.
“Too soon?” he asked her. He set an arm around her shoulders and looked into her face. “Too sudden? Did I surprise you?”
“Well…”
“It must have crossed your mind, Willa. I’m in love with you. I’ve wanted to marry you from the day I first laid eyes on you.”
His face was so close to hers that she could see the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose, as fine as grains of sand. His freckles rescued him from handsomeness, she always felt. They made her trust him. Without a second thought she had turned her back on those overconfident football players pressing sweet mixed drinks on her; she had covered sheets of notebook paper with “Willa MacIntyre” and “Mrs. Derek MacIntyre,” and dreamed of being surprised one night with a diamond engagement ring. They could be engaged throughout her senior year, she figured, and marry the summer after she graduated.
But “I can’t imagine just going off and leaving you behind when I start my job,” he was saying. “I need to have you with me.”
Willa said, “What…?” Then she said, “You’re starting your job this June, though.”
“Right.”
“You want to get married in two months?”
“Or it could be three, if you need more time to plan the wedding,” he said.
“You mean before I finish school?”
“You can finish in California.”
“But at Kinney I have a full scholarship!”
“So? You could get a scholarship in California, too. With those grades of yours? Any place would be dying to have you.”
She didn’t bother telling him that scholarships were not that easy to arrange. Instead she said, “And Dr. Brogan.”
“What about him?”
“He’s got a whole plan for me, Derek. Next fall I’m taking his honors course in linguistic anthropology.”
“You think they don’t teach foreign languages in San Diego?” he asked.
“No, I just—”
“Willa,” he said, “do you not want to marry me?”
“Oh, I do, but—”
He took his arm away and slumped back in his chair. “I messed up, didn’t I,” he said. “I should have made you a formal proposal.”
“It isn’t that! I really do want to marry you, Derek; honest. But couldn’t we just, maybe, get engaged for now?”
“Sure,” he said.
This wasn’t very satisfying. She studied his face, which gave nothing away. “Are you mad at me?” she asked him.
“No.”
“I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“I’m not mad in the least,” he said, “because I’m counting on changing your mind by and by.”
“Derek—”
“So! I call your parents Mr. and Mrs. I do not use their first names until they tell me to. And how about your sister? Is she ‘Miss Drake’?”
“No, silly,” Willa said, forcing a laugh. “She’s Elaine.”
“Or maybe Miss Elaine,” he said consideringly. “Miss Elaine and Miss Willa, the two spinster sisters of Lark City, Pennsylvania.”
Willa gave him a playful slap on the knee. But she couldn’t help feeling that something unsettled still hung in the air between them.
* * *
—
In the magazine ads for airlines, stewardesses wore trim skirts with matching tailored jackets and military-looking hats. But the young woman who greeted Willa and Derek when they stepped onto the plane wore a boxy pantsuit—pantsuit!—and no hat at all. And the seats were arranged not in twos but in threes, which made them seem less luxurious. Willa and Derek had a window seat and a middle seat. Derek stood back to let her in next to the window, but she said, “Oh, I’ll take the middle,” because she needed less room. She settled in after he did and fastened her seat belt and then tentatively pressed the button to tilt herself farther back, till Derek told her she shouldn’t do that until they were in the air.
Even if it wasn’t as glamorous as she had imagined, she was still excited. The interior of the plane had an unfamiliar plastic smell, and the sounds seemed different, too. Some sort of sealed-off, plugged-up silence lay just beneath the voices of the other passengers.
The man who dropped into the seat on her right was gaunt and whiskery, and he wore a black-and-red lumber jacket over threadbare jeans. She decided against saying hello. She merely smiled at him with her mouth closed, but he was figuring out his seat belt and might not have noticed.
When they took off she was reading the safety instructions, and she folded them immediately and returned them to her seat-back pocket. It was lucky she did, because their trip down the runway seemed very long and bumpy. (Willa tended to get carsick if she read in a moving vehicle.) After a while she started wondering: Were they not ever going to leave the ground? Was the pilot trying to lift off but failing? She shifted her eyes from the airport buildings outside the window to Derek, who was reading the Sports Illustrated he had brought along. He seemed relaxed, so she decided not to worry. And just then she felt a shift of some kind and the plane tipped upward. She saw the scenery dropping away below them, but they couldn’t be actually flying, could they? It didn’t feel like flying. She still felt earthbound; she was still weighing down her seat cushion. Somehow she had expected more of a floating sensation. And once they had leveled off it was even more disappointing, because any sense of motion gradually ceased. They could be just sitting on the ground with the engines roaring, except that the scenery had vanished.