About Crows

Sister at the Airport

7 Si s t er at t h e A i r p o rt On my sister’s nights off, she drives alone to the airport and haunts the security gates. While man, woman, and child wait in line for random screenings, she stands to the side, with the other families, waiting for loved ones to arrive, weary, and smiling, from the other side of the exit doors. My sister tells me that Western Mass. is all microbrew beer and goodbyes; she prefers to be in a place where people arrive. She tells me, with no sense of shame, that the degree of pleasure she feels is contingent on sex, age, race, and perceived social status. While my sister feels little for the middleclass mother fingering her key ring and car alarm remote in expectation of her son—coming home from some private university in the South—she’s moved to tears at the sight of a child holding a cardboard sign that reads WELCOME HOME DADDY. My sister has conversations with those standing in wait. No feeling, she says, is so strong or pure as the anticipation of reunion. She listens to their stories and fills with their excitement, or else excuses herself to go buy coffee. Sometimes my sister tells them she is waiting for her boyfriend: coming home “on leave.” Other times, if she doesn’t feel like talking, she is there to pick up her housemate, heading back from a business trip. And sometimes she is there to greet me, her brother, returning from Siem Reap, or some other far off place. When we were younger, she was responsible for retrieving me from the airport. It was always a red-eye from Oakland, and everybody else had become bored with homecomings. I am afraid that’s when this all started. The whole way home, she could only speak of the people she waited with; as we drove past the penitentiary, and the fox standing alone in the field of snow beside it, she would go on and on. ...