PART 1
For her eightieth birthday I surprised her with a first-class ticket to California.
My name is Lisette. I am thirty-one. My grandmother is called Isolda and she turned eighty in the March.
She had not stepped onto an aeroplane in nearly thirty years.
I had worked out the exact number once, at a kitchen table, with a calculator, out of idle curiosity — and then I did not ask why. That is going to be a theme.
So I wanted everything about that trip to feel comfortable and special.
No cramped seat. No fighting for overhead space. No unnecessary stress.
I had a list. An actual list, on a phone, with four items on it.
I was extremely pleased with myself about all four, and I read it out to my mother on the telephone in the January, and she said it was lovely.
But a few minutes before boarding, she quietly walked over to the gate agent.
I thought she was asking about the boarding time.
She was at that desk about four minutes. I watched her from a seat eleven feet away and I remember thinking she looked like somebody at a counter in a bank.
When she came back she handed me a new boarding pass.
I stared at it. I said: Grandma, what did you do?
She said: I changed my seat.
I looked down. She had moved herself from first class all the way back to economy. Row thirty-four, by the window.
I said: that ticket was expensive.
I know, sweetheart.
Then why would you give up the seat?
She smiled softly and squeezed my fingers, and she said: I’d rather sit at the back.
Not I don’t mind the back. Not it’s too much fuss up there.
Those are what women of eighty say, and I would have accepted either of them in about two seconds and never thought about it again.
She did not use either. She has never in her life used either.
I’d rather. A preference. Stated once, with no reason attached, by a woman who always gives reasons.
That was all she would say. No explanation. No reason. Nothing.
And I let it go.
Because she is eighty. Because it was her birthday. Because I did not want to be the granddaughter who makes a scene in a departure lounge about a gift nobody asked for.
All three of those are true.
