five months or so. But Gary turned into the better-looking but terribly dressed version of my mother when he began spending a lot of time talking to me about his job and why I should be doing it—or one somewhat similar to it. I never told him I’d interviewed with an airline before. Perhaps I wanted to block it from my mind. Instead I kept explaining to him that I wanted to do something more with my life than serve drinks and pick up trash. Every time I told him this I sounded snottier and more full of myself until I began to make my own self sick. I don’t know why Gary put up with me. But he did, and that’s when I started inventing reasons not to go out with him. When he didn’t take the hint, I stopped calling him back.
A year after he disappeared from my life, I became a flight attendant with the same company Gary worked for. Needless to say after I graduated from flight attendant training I began thinking about him again. More than anything I wished I had handled things with him differently. All I could do was worry about running into him again! It was inevitable. It didn’t matter if the airline I worked for was a big company with almost twenty thousand flight attendants or that flight attendants worked with different people all the time. The interesting thing about being a flight attendant is that while we may not see a person we’ve worked with for years after a trip, out of nowhere they’ll pop up on the other side of the cart, as if no time had passed, other than that person gaining a little weight or losing a little hair. Just when we begin to feel comfortable and think that maybe, just maybe, the one we’d like to avoid has quit or retired or transferred to another base, his or her name will appear on a crew list. One minute we could be working with a flight attendant on the prowl, and the next time we see her she’s the mother of three, sharing sippy-cup tips on the jump seat. Or even worse, one minute a pilot is dating a regular girl with a bad attitude on the ground, and the next time he speaks to her, she’s wearing a matching uniform—but lying about it.
I had just moved into the crash pad with Georgia and Victor, the mankini-wearing, drugged-out landlord, when out of the blue Gary called to “check in and say hello.” Too embarrassed by my past rants against the airline industry to tell him the truth—that at that moment I was laying over at a Holiday Inn not too far from the airport in Oklahoma City—I did the next best thing. I lied. I didn’t want him to know I had just finished eating breakfast for dinner at a Denny’s across the street by myself as I was the extra flight attendant on a trip and therefore on my own for the next three days, so I told him everything was great, life couldn’t be better, and yes, I was in fact still working for the watch company. I went on and on about a life I no longer had or even wanted. I was on a roll, describing in detail things I hadn’t done in over a year with people I no longer worked with, and Gary quietly listened. I don’t remember how the conversation ended, but it’s safe to assume that it did and when it did I was relieved. After that I dreaded flying the Miami run even more than I had before, which I didn’t think was possible.
If I did find myself walking through the Miami airport, the most chaotic airport in the world and home of the most amazing people-watching on Earth, I did so briskly and never stopped for anything other than what was absolutely necessary. Rice and beans at La Carreta and a
I had boarded a flight in Dallas with my crew. The plane was in the process of being catered and cleaned when I spotted a pair of aviator Ray-Bans on the galley counter. Naturally I picked them up, tried them on, and walked into the lav to check myself out in the mirror. As I stood with the door open, reapplying lipstick, I heard a familiar voice behind me say, “Excuse me. I think I left my sunglasses on board.”
Oh boy. I swallowed hard and slowly turned around.
“I guess these are yours then.” I took the shades off and handed them back to Gary. “Long time no see,” I said, cringing as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I didn’t know what else to say!
“W-what are you… when did you—”
“Last year.” I didn’t want him to know I had been lying the last time we spoke, so I did it again. I told him exactly what had happened, only I shaved off a few years. Then I did what any other flight attendant would do when a person dares to step onto the precious galley floor. I offered him a drink and prayed he’d go back to his seat, which turned out to be the left seat on a flight to Palm Springs. Gary had been upgraded to captain. I congratulated him and wished him the best.
“I can’t tell you how odd it is to see you here, on an airplane, in uniform. You really look great!” he said.
I blushed. “Thanks. You do, too.” He did. Even better than before.
When he took off his hat and scratched his head, I caught a glimpse of a young boy holding a bat and wearing a red jersey in a photograph tucked inside the clear plastic pocket on the underside of his cap, which is where single pilots keep their business cards and the others keep family photos. A way to distinguish one hat from another since they all look alike hanging on the back of the cockpit door during flight.
“So… why did we lose touch again?” he asked earnestly.
“Umm…” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I stared at the oven door for a count of three, as if seriously pondering the question, and then looked directly into his beautiful brown eyes and lied again. “I don’t remember.” What can I say? I was on a roll.
“Would you like to get together… again, sometime?” he asked. I couldn’t believe it. I’d said terrible things about flight attendants, stopped calling him, become a flight attendant, and lied about it, and he still wanted to see me again.
Of course I said yes. Because I knew Gary was a great guy! I could only assume I’d grown up over the last three years. Surely I could appreciate all he had to offer this time around now that I was in a completely different place in life. Now that I was older and wiser and well traveled, I figured Gary and I had to have a lot more in common. So I scribbled my number across a beverage napkin and told him to call me for a second time.
Midway through round two of our first date, it was clear that we had a problem. Gary was, well, not very exciting. But he was thoughtful, in that he brought flowers and always opened doors. He was the kind of pilot that would grab crew bags out of the first-class closet and line them up on the jet bridge for a quick escape. But if I wasn’t talking, we weren’t talking—talk about stressful! At least with the CEO I could share funny stories, but if Gary hadn’t already heard my funny stories, he’d heard of ones just like them. I knew he was a catch, so I tried not to let that deter me. But as he walked me to my hotel door at the end of the night I found myself dreading the kiss good night. Determined not to let a little thing like chemistry come between us, I kissed him anyway! I felt nothing. Really putting my all into it, I tried again. But we just weren’t meant to be.
Years later, during a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, my mother turned to me and announced, “There’s something I need to tell you.” When my mother starts a conversation like this, what follows next is guaranteed to be frightening.
“Dad’s dead?” I said half-jokingly.
“Worse.” My mother covered her face with her hands and I could have sworn I heard her say something crazy like “I wrote Gary a letter.”
“You did what?!”
“Right after you completed flight attendant training and moved to New York. You just seemed so sad and lonely. I was worried about you. I thought maybe if he knew you were a flight attendant he might call and offer to take you out.”
I leaned back in my seat and adjusted the air vent so I could breath. I wanted to kill her. The fact that Gary had acted surprised to see me on the airplane and never even let on about the freaking letter just proved to me that he might be even crazier than my mother! Or one of the nicest guys in the world. Either way, it meant that he lied, too, kind of, so in a way we were even, sort of.
I haven’t seen Gary since, but my mother has. Twice. The first time he was the captain on one of her flights. After years of staring at that stupid photograph, she recognized him right away. She almost died when he walked on board and stowed his bag in the first-class closet. The last thing she wanted to do was embarrass me, so she never told him who she was, but she does think he may have known based on the way he lingered around in the galley a lot during the flight. The second time she ran into him—a decade later!—he knew exactly who she was and told her so in the rear galley as she was setting up carts. After she was through telling me all about how great he was, and how he had nothing but nice things to say about me, and how he’s moving to New York and is engaged to a girl who looks, based on a photograph, kind of like me, she exclaimed, “I swear, Heather, you’ll never do better
