Unaccompanied Minors There were two types of unaccompanied minors on flights out of Denver: divorced kids and skier kids. You could spot the skier kids because they always wore something to prove they’d been to Colorado -- they had lift tickets fanning out from the zippers of their jackets, or baseball caps that said Vail. But since today was December 26th, we suspected that even the boy with the raccoon-face tan -- the kind you get from ski goggles -- was like us -- a divorced kid too. My sister Betsy and I were traveling from Boulder, Colorado, where we moved with our mother after our parents got divorced -- to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where we grew up, and where our father still lived. It was 1988 and I was fifteen and Betsy was ten. As soon as our flight left Denver, my thoughts turned to our layover in Chicago. Betsy and I loved the O’Hare airport. With its shiny food court and chain bookstores and big glass atrium ceiling, it seemed like a beautiful new mall. When we landed in Chicago it was snowing, snowing hard enough to shut the airport down. It was only the middle of the afternoon and travelers were already reserving sleeping spaces by throwing their parkas over blocks of chairs. Even floor space was scarce, and some people were stuck alongside the moving walkway. The mall had become a refugee camp. The departure board showed that our flight to Grand Rapids was canceled, so we went to a service desk, where an agent took our tickets and typed things into her terminal. Then she turned on her microphone and sent a cryptic message out over the PA. “I have two UMs at the service desk. Two UMs at the service desk. “Okay,” the woman told us. “Someone’s coming by for you.” A second woman appeared, and we followed her to a gray, unmarked door. She fumbled with her keys. I squeezed Betsy’s hand. The door opened onto a room packed with kids sitting on their winter jackets. There were dozens and dozens of kids, all kinds of kids, some in small groups, the young ones conversing with stuffed animals, others looking uncomfortable in dresses or overheated in moon boots that had been too big to pack. Most of them were facing a podium at the front of the room, as if they'd been dropped off at the public library and were waiting for a reading by Shel Silverstein. At the podium, a steward put our names on a list. The woman standing next to him was wearing the uniform of another airline. It was strange to see people from different airlines mixing, almost like something that shouldn't be allowed. There were a handful of folding chairs in the room and we found a free one near the center. I took the seat and Betsy settled on the floor beside me. She got her baby blanket out of her bag and began to sniff it. It seemed we'd never been around so many divorced kids at once. Back home, most kids had both parents. You'd forget you were different and then you'd be at someone's house after school and the dad would come home and from the landing on the staircase you'd see him sorting through the mail, talking to the mother in the kitchen. It was hard to explain why this was sad. As a result, all that most of our friends knew about our divorce was that my favorite video to rent was Kramer vs. Kramer and Betsy's was The Parent Trap. So now it was strange to hear kids talking about the things we kept to ourselves. A group nearby was engaged in a kind of divorced kid oneupmanship. A girl wearing a sweatshirt with a Christmas tree patch said she saw her father only a couple times a year; a boy lying on his stomach claimed that he saw his dad even less. They exchanged a series of anecdotes about stepmothers and took a poll of who'd been the object of a custody battle. It seemed improper to talk so freely about these things. I didn't want to join in but I also didn't want to be left out. I had no way of expressing this at the time, but it felt like we were part of something on a grand scale. All these kids, here in Chicago, at the transfer point between mom and dad. Several hours passed and more and more kids came into the room. Some of them had the suitcases you take on sleepovers -- the ones printed with cartoon characters, like Snoopy. One girl was carrying nothing but a single wrapped present. I had one in my bag too. I guessed it was probably for her dad. Meanwhile, gate agents darted in and out, consulting papers and making shushing noises and yelling out names from the podium. Being babysat by the airlines was a lot like what you'd expect. There were no perks -- no coloring books or story hours -- no vouchers for cookies and milk. There was no one who roamed around, kneeling, wiping noses and tear-stained cheeks. For the most part, the staffers who looked after us stayed behind the podium. They seemed flustered, annoyed. Normally their babysitting duties were small-scale. They were good at shepherding kids along moving walkways, and doling out little pins shaped like wings. In the UM room, they reverted to the same crowd control techniques that they used in-flight: secure the doors, withhold information, and discourage people from getting up to use the bathroom. So we did what any group of fed-up, delayed passengers does -- we started to generate our own information. In the late evening, a rumor filtered through the crowd that the reason some kids were being escorted away was that their parents were making a bigger fuss than the other parents. Where were those kids going? The question arose from those of us in the land-locked middle, and traveled through the crowd. The answer was transmitted back to us by our intelligence forces stationed at the podium. Those kids got hotels. The rest of us would have sleep here, in the UM room. A divorced kid reacts to his parents' separation in one of two ways. As the rumor about the sleeping arrangements spread, it became clear who was the divorced kid who acted out and who was the divorced kid who avoided conflict. Fart noises increased. Crushed drink boxes began to litter the floor. I realized that, when thrown with sufficient force, a Nerf ball could cause injury. Soon word came around that the system had changed, that our babysitters were mad and they didn't care who your parents were or how many times they called -- now they were taking the good kids first. Immediately, Betsy lay down on her blanket; I took out the book in my bag, Catcher in the Rye. Within an hour, we were out of there. By now it was one in the morning. Betsy and I and a group of others followed a stewardess through the dim halls. The metal gates were down over the entrance to the food court, and travelers were sleeping in chairs. I thought we were headed straight for bed, but we emerged at the entrance to a hotel restaurant. Betsy and I sat next to each other on a cushiony bench and ordered hamburgers. After the meal the group was divided up. We would share a room with two other people. The first was a girl close to my age who was wearing glasses with pink plastic frames. I convinced myself that she was the same girl who'd been in my lane at swim camp, years earlier, when my parents were still married. I didn’t ask her because I didn’t want to ruin it if it wasn’t true. The second person was a stewardess who looked about thirty. She wore a lot of make up, and she was big-boned -- packed into her uniform. She wasn't mean to us, but she was pretty standoffish. When the stewardess went into the bathroom, the swim camp girl pulled me over to the window. The curtains were closed but red light shone in from the parking lot. “Will you sleep in the bed with me, so I won’t have to sleep with the stewardess,” she said. I looked over at Betsy. She was sitting on one of the two double beds in the room, sniffing her blanket. I told the girl yes. It just came out. Almost immediately, I felt awful. When we lay down, I inched as far to the edge as I could, so that I’d feel nearer to my sister, on the edge of the bed across the aisle. The stewardess came out of the bathroom wearing control top stockings and a lacy slip and got under the covers like that. I’d never seen a grown woman sleep in anything other than a flannel nightgown. I wondered if she always slept like that or if it was just because she had to get up early. Maybe this was what all stewardesses wore, under their uniform. But maybe she just felt awkward. Or maybe there rules about what you wore, that you had to keep covered. Or maybe she just didn't want her bare legs near Betsy. I saw Betsy shift under the covers and curl into a ball. I now felt certain that this was the worst thing I’d ever done to my sister, more horrible than the time I’d fed her a mixing bowl full of raw cookie dough, just to see. I wanted the strangers removed and my family restored. I hated the swim camp girl sleeping next to me. She wasn’t from Michigan. She didn’t have anything to do with me. On these trips to visit our father, more than any other time, all Betsy and I had was each other. I thought of the kids in the UM room at the airport, the ones saying crass things about the saddest thing that had ever happened in life, and how reassuring it had been when I looked at Betsy, sniffing her blanket, the way she always had, the way I thought she would forever. —Susan Burton |