the same time I had to figure out a way to not give Georgia the wrong impression. I didn’t want to make her think that perhaps she’d made a mistake.
One day I dialed her number only to be greeted by a computerized voice informing me the number had been disconnected. At first I didn’t think much of it. I assumed she had moved and would eventually be in touch. I never heard from her again.
It took a long time to realize Georgia had “broken up” with me, but it’s true what they say about one door closing and another opening. While Georgia packed up her things, I dialed the number scribbled across the beverage napkin. A flight attendant had given it to me on my last flight, even though I had told her I didn’t know of anyone looking for a place to live. Imagine her surprise when I called her that very same day. I told her I didn’t need to see the place to know I’d be moving in—I recognized an emergency situation when I saw one, and there was no way I could deal with Victor’s antics without Georgia. So what if I couldn’t afford the extra fifty bucks for my own room? If that meant starving into a smaller dress size to afford the $200-a-month room, so be it.
Chapter 9
LIFE ON THE GROUND
I HAD ONLY BEEN in my new crash pad for two days when I became Yakov’s wife. My new roommates and I had no idea who called code enforcement about illegally rented rooms, tied-up street parking, and general neighborhood shoddiness, but someone thought we were a public nuisance and wanted us out. Yakov, the homeowner and our landlord, cheerfully informed the two enforcement officers standing on our doorstep that we were
Yakov had bought the two-story foreclosure in Forest Hills, a prestigious section of Queens, for $200,000 ten years before I moved in. At least that’s the story I heard. The home had five bedrooms, two of which were illegally constructed, and each went for $200 a month. At one time my bedroom had been the other half of the living room and Jane slept in what had once been a sunroom. Tricia, Grace, and Agnes had the three bedrooms on the second floor and two commuters, Dee Dee and Paula, split the attic, which wasn’t half bad for $75 a person.
Yakov lived in the basement. None of us had ever seen the inside of the apartment he called home, nor did we want to. We were too afraid of what we might find—a dead body, a blowup doll, a closet full of women’s clothing, or even worse, our clothing. We just didn’t know. After my experience with Victor, I knew anything was possible. Every time I took the short flight of steps outside our house down to Yakov’s door, where he’d hung a wooden box for us to drop off the rent, I worried that he might be walking out at the exact same time. I didn’t want an accidental glimpse of whatever lurked inside!
There was no explanation for our fears except that Yakov did things a little differently. He used kerosene to remove the linoleum floor. He kept a carton of eggs and a block of cheese on a concrete wall outside in the backyard under the green-and-white-striped awning that hung above his door, just a few steps away from the back door of the house. He wore the same blue sweatpants, bunched up around his gigantic calves, with thin white socks and brown leather lace-up shoes that had seen better days. While he’d hole up in the basement avoiding us at all costs, we always knew when he was home because Lucy, the dog, would disappear. We even knew when he was on his way home because Lucy, the psychic dog, would start barking nonstop twenty minutes before his yellow cab would pull into the drive.
Despite all that, life with Yakov turned out to be pretty good. Except when he had late-night poker games down in his basement apartment with a group of cabbie friends we’d never see but always hear, their thick accents getting louder and louder while smoke grew thicker and thicker. Always the first to break was Jane. She believed in nipping things in the bud. At five-feet-two, she wasn’t tall, but she wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all Yakov. With her light brown, shoulder-length hair tied in a topknot, she’d hop out of bed, stand at the opened back door, and hiss into the night, “Yakov! Stop smoking! And keep it down, down there!” Then she’d stomp through the house in her Birkenstocks and a long white terry-cloth robe to let him know she meant business. Yakov never acknowledged Jane’s weekly scolding, and things would actually quiet down for a little while until once again the cycle would repeat itself and Jane would toss aside a copy of
Jane had no problem letting all of us, including Yakov, know when we were out of line. Rules were meant to be followed.
“I don’t mind your germs,” Jane once said to me, holding a container of toilet bowl cleaner while still in uniform after having worked a trip. “But not theirs!” She glared at the ceiling. Apparently one of our roommates had walked out of
Flight attendants work with the public in confined spaces with recycled air for hours on end, so germs are a major concern. It’s why so many of us are addicted to antibacterial hand lotion. No joke, flight attendants alone probably keep Purell in business. This is also why our work shoes were not allowed to enter the house—a Jane- enforced contamination-free zone. On layovers Jane wore flip-flops in the hotel rooms and always used a washcloth placed on the bathroom counter to protect her toiletries. A shower cap became the perfect buffer for the remote control. Comforters went straight to the floor, since it was common knowledge they were rarely, if ever, cleaned. Hotel tubs were doused with a sprinkle of Bon Ami Jane kept inside a Ziploc baggie and scrubbed with a sponge tucked inside her tote bag at all times (and replaced often). Because there were rumors of flight attendants using coffeepots to wash out their hose, and because I myself had once witnessed a housekeeper using the same rag on the toilet seat and the rim of a glass, coffeepots and glasses got dunked in scalding hot soapy water for a good ten minutes before being used.
A no-nonsense woman with a little-girl voice, Jane went green way before it became popular. She’d collect newspapers and empty cans on flights even if she were landing at an airport that did not recycle. In 1995, most did not. Ten years later things weren’t much different. In 2006, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reported after a yearlong study that the U.S. airline industry discarded enough aluminum cans each year to build fifty-eight Boeing 747 airplanes and discarded nine thousand tons of plastic and enough newspapers and magazines to fill a football field to a depth of more than 230 feet. Even today what flight attendants collect on board is not recycled at many airports, particularly the smaller ones, though most airports do have recycling stations available throughout the terminals. And while you may see flight attendants collecting aluminum cans and newspapers on most of your flights, many are doing this of their own accord in hopes that somehow the neatly sorted collection will miraculously make its way to a recycling station. Jane was no different. From time to time “trash” would even make its way home where she could dispose of it properly. Nothing too crazy, just an empty water bottle here and a rinsed out paper cup from Starbucks there, random things she’d acquire over the course of a three-day trip. Jane was so passionate about protecting the environment that one houseguest decided it might be easier to pack a small bag of garbage inside her suitcase and fly home with it than sort it the way Jane had instructed.
Even though Jane was into organic food and I liked Chef Boyardee, we got along surprisingly well and quickly became good friends. Even after I caught her regifting a shirt I bought for her birthday. She made no apologies about it, either. That’s what I liked about her, along with the fact that she could be super sweet, the kind of person who’d run, literally, two miles to the grocery store in a foot of snow to buy oranges when I got sick. When I began feeling down about the way things were going—more like not going—with Brent, Jane would write words of encouragement on Post-it notes and stick them on the bathroom mirror for me to find in the morning. And she was funny, too. Only Jane could make me laugh after Brent refused to take me to the airport because his favorite wrestling show was going to be on television. He gave me two choices. Either he could take me to the airport two hours early or I could call a cab. I did what any other flight attendant wouldn’t do. I took a cab. Most of my
