Most grown women probably would have cared about how it looked to bring a stuffed animal on a plane. For so many others to witness such a blatantly embarrassing need for a “security blanket.” Except in this case, it was a security stuffed animal. More specifically, a not-so-gently-used brown dog with floppy ears and eyes that looked as though they had been scratched at repeatedly. More cynical minds might have characterized the dog as “abused.” In that way all children end up abusing the things they hold dear with “too much” affection. Not yet knowing you’re supposed to play it “close to the vest” if you want to get something (or someone) to love you back in return as much as you love it (or them).

Margot had never grasped that, not even after she grew into an adult. Ergo, her continued reliance on a stuffed animal as a result of “driving away” most other live creatures that couldn’t handle her Elmyra-style effusiveness. But a stuffed animal could give her what she needed: the ability to showcase all of her unbridled emotions without fear of being deemed “clingy.” A stuffed animal could never call her such a thing. Sure, that was because it wasn’t sentient, but no matter to Margot. Both “parties” were getting what they wanted out of the arrangement—she a “receptacle” for her love and anxiety, and “he” (her mom had named him Harpo, after Marx, not Oprah’s production company) a devoted “master” that would always treat him kindly. And, unlike other kids, she would never throw him away in one fashion or another.

Well, maybe the phrase “treat him kindly” was misleading. Being that Margot’s behavior toward Harpo tended to morph into something less than kindly whenever she was on a plane. That was when she tended to turn into a real ball of nerves. A trait she was better able to keep under control while on terra firma. But up in the air, far from any such solid ground, Margot panicked. It was a setting that she found it entirely unnatural for human beings to be in. Accordingly, she couldn’t control the chaos wrought by her disquietude over what she viewed as a freakish anomaly. Even though everyone on the plane likely saw her as the only freakish anomaly about the flight.

All because Harpo was there. To soothe her. To prevent her from becoming far more legitimately “unhinged” than they apparently already thought her to be, observing her clutching to him and rubbing her head against his “fur” as they all walked by (because, to make it even more of a spectacle, she was only a few seats back from the front of the plane, situated for all to see as they came onboard). But Harpo was a crutch, a pacifier, a nonjudgmental “friend” to help her through the journey. And while a grown woman traveling with a stuffed animal was enough to attract attention in and of itself, it didn’t help that Margot also had a tendency to rub her face and wipe her nose on the ears of Harpo, scarcely aware that she was even doing it in her state of “blackout stress mode.” She would remain in said mode until being forced to leave “the fugue” once she disembarked from whatever plane she was on. It was only then that she could immediately notice how gross the creature could get as a result of her own carelessly administered bodily fluids.

Still, washing Harpo (therefore subjecting him to further wear and tear) seemed, to Margot, a small price to pay for running him ragged on any plane trip. Even if he did die just a little more on the outside every time (though who could say what was happening to him on the inside?). Even so, considering Harpo’s age (roughly the same as Margot’s, whose mother gave him to her about five months after she was born), he looked “passable.” Margot was forty-one, and she felt that she, too, looked “passable.” Though one might be disinclined to believe so based on her nonexistent sex life. In any case, “back then,” when her generation was only just being born, toys and toy-adjacent items were actually made—nay, crafted—to last. Not, as it became increasingly the case in the twenty-first century, designed solely for obsolescence. Built to break, as it were.

Instead, Harpo was constructed with the utmost care (or so Margot to believe). His stitching taut and meticulous. The stuffing extra plush. The eyes made of solid, sturdy handmade glass (that could nonetheless still be scratched into oblivion). Harpo was created, in short, during an era when childhood itself was still valued, and, thus, so were the “accoutrements” related to it. Maybe that’s why the children of Margot’s generation never quite transcended into adults—seemed to be perennial sufferers of Peter Pan Syndrome. Their childhood had been rendered too precious to ever fully let go of, and so many of them simply held onto the well-made ephemera that represented that time in their lives. Harpo was just such a “thing.” Though, to Margot, he was as flesh and blood as “real” friend or family member—if not more so.

Margot supposed that was why many of her friends and family members had started to pull away from her. For she didn’t seem to care about them nearly as much as she did select inanimate objects—Harpo above all. So attached had she become to him that, of course, she would never concede to boarding a plane without him. Which is why, when one of the attendants on the flight from Chicago to her hometown of Billings had the audacity to tell Margot that she had to store Harpo in the overhead compartment during takeoff, Margot absolutely flipped, refusing to do so. Who the hell was this uppity bitch to tell her how to live? To essentially reveal that she was passing judgment on Margot for needing such a childlike support tool in order to function. That was the real reason she was telling Margot to put Harpo out of sight. She was secretly jealous of Margot’s ability to give so few fucks about public opinion as to freely bring her girlhood stuffed animal with her for the journey. And we all know what happens to people who disobey a flight attendant on a power trip.

Hence, as she and Harpo were being escorted off the plane before it even took off, Margot shouted, “Fucking petty power monger!”

Never, in all her days of traveling with Harpo, had she ever encountered such harsh treatment. Such prejudice and total disregard for her emotional support needs. It made her vow to never fly again. Granted, she had been looking for any “legitimate” excuse not to for years. And if it meant that the friends and family she had already distanced (or rather, who had distanced her) back in Billings would have to see less of her, so be it (because no, Margot wasn’t about to make the roughly twenty-hour drive in lieu of the three-hour flight).

She was already doing them a favor by even gracing them with her presence at all roughly three to five times a year for holidays and major milestones in the birthday and anniversary arena. They would just have to go about their lives without her—because Margot repudiated the very idea of taking any flight that made her go without Harpo.