In the skies above America, strangers talk to Cora.
Their stories at first seem harmless – until she notices uncanny echoes of her own life in their words. How is it they seem to know more about her than they should?
Worn thin by work demands, a troubled daughter, and family crises she can’t afford to fix, Cora escapes to her family’s ramshackle beach house in New Zealand. There, amid shifting tides and rising emotions, she reconnects with her family’s past, reveals her deepest shame, and learns the real reason for all those friendly strangers.
Nice People on Planes is a novel about finding connections that are more than skin deep in a busy and disconnected world.
In the skies above America, strangers talk to Cora.
Their stories at first seem harmless – until she notices uncanny echoes of her own life in their words. How is it they seem to know more about her than they should?
Worn thin by work demands, a troubled daughter, and family crises she can’t afford to fix, Cora escapes to her family’s ramshackle beach house in New Zealand. There, amid shifting tides and rising emotions, she reconnects with her family’s past, reveals her deepest shame, and learns the real reason for all those friendly strangers.
Nice People on Planes is a novel about finding connections that are more than skin deep in a busy and disconnected world.
When did this begin?
Which passing comments of a stranger became something more than a whiling away of empty hours?
When did the words that tumbled out in that rare intimacy first take on a darker meaning?
Last year, I met an elegant Jordanian woman on a flight from Miami. A perfumer, travelling the world to design new fragrances for the superrich. Did we meet before or after this thing started?
Should my trickle of suspicion have come – in my messed-up head with too many hours alone in a cramped and hurried world – sooner? Or am I imagining ribbons of meaning in those conversations, weaving them together in ways which, at the time, did not yet exist?
If only the clouds could tell. They were there the whole time, plane after passing plane.
Chapter 1 LOS ANGELES – DENVER DEPARTS 2:46 PM FEB 21, 2022
Purposeful. Perky. He was lanky and poised. Another ‘P’ word to describe him? I looked out the window and considered this as he side-stepped into the middle seat, ignoring, as we do, the awkwardness of bodies rearranging, of unforgiving spaces.
Had he been one of them too?
That day, Black Sabbath is what I needed. To lose myself in their blasts of sinister poetry after that hectic week. But now a warm numbness pressed down, paralyzing my upper frame with its important attachments: arms, fingers. A baby behind me chortled. The plane jerked forward, its engines rising in pitch and volume. I let myself sink into those seconds of nature-defying power as the machine ran then sprinted then threw us into that first moment of lift.
Exhilarating, even after all these flights.
My hands found a rhythm, moving methodically as the plane levelled off. I reached for my purse.
The man next to me leaned over and looked out the window. “You can’t beat LA from above,” he said in what sounded like a radio voice, his morning program rousing us into the day.
“Much prettier than the real thing,” I said, pulling my purse to my lap and letting my hand move inside. Soft felt. And the sharper edges of a lipstick case.
We sat for a moment taking in the zagging coastline against the linked-up suburbs, like two old people sitting on a park bench watching the children pass.
The plane veered east; the sea disappeared.
“Heading home?” he asked.
“Yep, been in LA for work. Heading to Chicago.”
“Ahh … my kind of town,” he smiled. My mom used to say if she got a penny every time we kids fought … same goes for strangers who act like Sinatra every time that place is mentioned.
“You? Going home?” I asked.
“Nope. Family. My dad’s going into an old folks’ home in Denver. Getting old.” Then he added, as if he’d just thought of it, “Sad.”
I turned slightly so I could get a look at him. Freshly shaven skin covering a thick jawline. Almost attractive in an electronics-store salesman sort of way.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, adding “but some of the aged care facilities these days are fabulous, aren’t they?”
It’s a funny thing that happens when two people sit together on a plane. Sometimes we ignore each other, even though we touch limbs, share air and the muted sounds of bodily functions. Our physical closeness is unusual – maybe that’s why it can carry a greater force, one that can’t be replicated at sea level. Except maybe on stuck elevators, say. We are, after all, soaring thousands of feet above the ground, in a vulnerable, adventurous thrust through space. Through time. Held together by the fact that we must do this almost unimaginable thing – move high above the earth at 500 miles per hour in a sealed container – alongside 300 other strangers.
Maybe it’s this unspoken, shared understanding, masked by safety procedures and overly brewed coffees and the hypnotic hum of the engines, that makes people feel closer when they spend a couple of hours together, up there.
My new acquaintance moved further into this intimacy, tilting his head to reveal a substantial mole below his hairline.
“Not this one. Dad’s broke,” he said. “Can you believe it’ll cost 700 bucks a week for a crappy nursing home? It’s crazy. I had no idea before this all happened.” The strong jaw bulged even further.
“Dad was a great saver,” he continued, “always planned for his retirement like a squirrel. He and Mom split up when I was a kid, but there always seemed to be other women around after that.”
I glimpsed out the window to see what the clouds were doing: cumulus, spotty convection clouds as the air heats on land, then rises. Nice.
I asked “Where did all his savings go? Did it get gobbled up after he retired?”
“Sort of,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But mostly gobbled up by all his relationships. It was like, I don’t know, like he could never just live on his own. First it was a lady with three kids, then an Indonesian nurse, then some lady from Oregon with a gambling problem. He seemed to lurch from marriage to marriage without thinking of the longer-term consequences. Every divorce meant less money in the bank, even after all that saving as a younger man.”
I counted my own ex-husbands, envisioning a hyperbola graph to demonstrate their inverse proportionality; the number of marriages on one axis and my declining wealth on the other.
He talked about his father’s Alzheimer’s and the unnecessary treatments for things unrelated to the real problem. How it chewed through any cash reserves that his past wives hadn’t.
“By the time he was finally diagnosed properly, he had $362 in the bank. He got Medicare-funded home help for a couple of months, but now…” he looked out my window, “now, he needs full-time care.”
Paternal. That was another P-word. Can you feel paternal towards your own dad?
My neck was growing warmer despite the gloom of his story. Softer too. What had Sandra said? Imagine a warm gel sliding down your neck and shoulders, taking all that tension to the floor. I glanced at the carpet beneath my feet and wondered what that stress-imbued gel would look like, then told the man I was sorry to hear that.
“For me, though,” and now he turned to face me, lining up that mole as if it were ready to take aim at my eye, “it’s made me think long and hard about my retirement. Dad may’ve been a saver, but he never invested well. He never turned his assets into investments.”
In that moment, I wondered if he could see into the spreadsheet of my own life with its unproductive marriages and crappy cars and kids that always seemed to keep my potential nest egg in check. I imagined the lines deepening on his forehead, financial advisor-like, as he poured over my 401k retirement fund, its inconsistent past aplomb on the page, and that jawline sharpening when my response to whether or not I have life insurance yields an alarming “no.”
“If Dad had sold his assets instead of sitting on them, he’d be able to afford the decent care he deserves.”
My fingers coiled themselves into a knot, like a clew of wriggling worms. All I could think of to say was, “What a shame.”
“Anyway,” he continued, relaxing a little, “that’s why I’m heading to Denver. To put the old man away, I guess.” He leaned his head back against the headrest, staring up at the air vent philosophically as the engines sang in a near-monotone.
I closed my eyes and yearned for Black Sabbath again, or something edgier. Instead, my own father appeared, tanned and cheerful. His knob-like bones sticking out on the tops of his shoulders and my using them as slippery handles when climbing on his back at Maroa beach. I could see the freckles beneath his tan, like fading constellations in the morning’s first light. I felt his hands under my arms as he lifted me up high and threw me into the shallow sea, my squeals bouncing off the beach.
If he’d survived into old age, maybe he too would be staring out the window of some Oak Ridge old folks’ home in a windswept town. I imagine him waiting for his lunch to be delivered to his room, and, since it hasn’t come, he stands up, confused, letting his eyes wander to the button on the wall near the bed. He walks over and pushes it hard. He sits obediently, straight-backed, thinking about roast chicken with soft, bright vegetables. He focuses on his shoes to pass the time. There’s a noise in the hall – it could be Brona – but then he realizes it’s Mr. Dombosky trying to hit the nurses again. His stomach spins and he thinks of the beef stroganoff Brona used to make, succulent, rich sauce, like her thick hair and thick foreign accent.
Old Bert. The adage “you die as you lived” had never been truer. A short, sharp cardiac arrest while fishing. Quick and easy. At 68.
If Dad could see me now, what would he think of me in my corporate dress and unsensible shoes and streaks of blonde in my bobbed hair?
“I guess,” the man’s voice pulled me back to seat 16A, “it’s a fairly typical situation these days.”
“Do you visit him often?”
“Once or twice a year. But you know how it is – kids, jobs. Family holidays. You just start living your own life, I guess.”
Philosophical? Partially.
“Yeah, and I’m sure that’s what he would want,” I said.
The view had transformed into a layer of thick, white fluff – everyday cumulus, nothing that interesting. The plane shifted slightly. Engines dropped their pitch.
The short layover in Denver would give me enough time to fire off a few emails to Steve about my work at Drumme Manufacturing this week. He’ll want to know the same two questions – how many billable hours and are there longer-term business opportunities – rather than the important stuff.
Like the foremen with their arms folded across their chests, shaking their heads at the Mexican staff. The lunchroom with its segregated tables of nationalities – Brazilians, Poles, Filipinos – like countries on a map divided by the lines of language. The boardroom, my pen running out of ink, crystal-ball-like, the moment I wrote “cultural differences” on the whiteboard, as if the pen itself knew it was unwise to even start. Drumme would keep me busy for a while: one-to-one leadership coaching, a management workshop, plus a staff session on cultural values for each division. It had been a hard, productive start this week, but I’d need to spend a lot more time in Los Angeles to carry the contract through.
Out my window, the foothills bulged with late-winter snow that spilled down to the plains. The expansiveness of Colorado suddenly made me feel hollowed, de-shelled. Without a center.
Or maybe it was the expectation of having to move through the crowded, solitary halls of yet another airport.
The plane lowered, growing the hills in size and power over me. I breathed through it. Two. Three.
“What a landing,” the man said. He leaned over again to peer out the window. Covert mole revealed once more. “Almost didn’t feel the wheels touch the ground.”
“Mmmhmm!” I agreed in a voice that reminded me we’d once again become two strangers sharing an uncomfortably tiny bit of space. We waited quietly while a man of ambiguous ethnicity jostled in the overhead locker, resting his enormous forearm on the top of his seat as he waited to disembark.
“Well,” I said, “it was nice talking to you. And I really do hope things turn out okay for your dad.”
His focus was now fixed on the front of the plane. The line of passengers near the front started to ease; the cabin door must have been opened. He turned his head briefly and pressed his lips into a quick smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
Pleased.
I pulled my body and my purse along the seats. A small plastic container had been left on the floor across the aisle. Two earplugs inside, one orange, one green. Why different colors?
I popped them in my bag. For later.
I've read through my "One Line Review" above and realised that it doesn't really sell this book as a taster of what it can offer but it's actually really, really good.
It is structured, as I have stated, around plane trips that Cora, our narrator, takes on planes, mainly for work trips although she does also travel to New Zealand as well. These trips are all dated and listed at the start of each chapter and the people that she meets all engage in conversations from which she launches into thought about her life mainly and about the people around her, especially her daughter Dottie, her son Dylan and her brother, Christopher. She is also stimulated by these conversations into looking back at her marriages and this causes her to reflect on what went wrong and prompts speculation into what she might want for the future.
Cora is an engaging narrator and she lives a fast-paced life. She is successful in what she does, which seems to be a facilitator sent to companies to encourage better relationships in the workplace with a view to improving productivity and results, no doubt. She gets a lot of satisfaction from this although she is starting to feel the strain as a result of the amount of travelling she has to do as well as the time it takes her away from her family and how this impacts on relationships that are important to her.
Running alongside these plane journeys and Cora's internal examinings of self is the story of her family's bolthole in New Zealand which is coming under threat from developers who want to demolish it to build a resort. The ramifications of her accepting an offer in order for this to happen lead to confliction: it was built by her grandfather and is ramshackle by her own admission but she is invested in it, more so than her siblings as it holds more than just memories for her. However, selling it would lead to financial freedom and opportunity for her and her family and locals - what should she do?
There was much to like here. I especially enjoyed the "Interstices" that Hart chose to include: a little surreal and whimsical but as a lot of the action takes place in the clouds, it seems only fair to have them. Only on reading the book will you know what I mean!