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 not renters; we were family. That’s how I became the wife of Yakov, an overweight and frequently sweaty Russian cab driver. Lucky me. Yakov then pointed to my roommate Jane and said, “My sister.” Jane’s eyes bugged out of her head, but she forced a smile and nodded. Our five other roommates were working, but unbeknownst to them we were now cousins. The men in suits didn’t blink an eye. Still, they wanted to see the place, so Yakov gave them a quick tour and like that they were gone. I could only wonder what I’d gotten myself into.
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 Runner’s World, slide her tiny feet into her man shoes and exclaim, “What’s wrong with him, it’s one o’clock in the morning!” as she passed through the living room where the rest of us sat watching late-night TV if we didn’t have an early trip the following morning.
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 our bathroom, not hers, and announced she’d been up all night scratching. Bed bugs, I assumed. “It’s safe to use now,” Jane said.
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 colleagues will walk three miles uphill in a foot of snow to save a buck. That’s how much I liked Brent. Plus, I didn’t want to spend a second longer than absolutely necessary at an airport when I could be on the couch with him. And Hulk Hogan.
Jane had a killer figure that disappeared under the polyester tent she wore to work. Like me, Jane was still on probation, so her dress had yet to be altered. Since she was just two weeks behind me in seniority, we made a pact to do it together and then go out and celebrate our short hemlines, which, believe it or not, we looked forward to more than using our passes for the first time. That’s how dowdy we looked compared to our more senior coworkers. Imagine our excitement when that day finally came, followed by shock when Jane showed the seamstress exactly where she wanted her hem to fall and the seamstress barked in broken English, “No—uniform!”
Unfazed, Jane said, matter-of-fact as can be, “Do it.”
The woman shook her head violently. “Uniform—too short!”
After a good ten minutes of this we finally got our way, but we never did hear the end of it. Whenever we’d walk by the dry cleaning shop where the seamstress worked behind a sewing machine in the front window, she’d stop working on what she had in her hands and slowly shake her head at us. And every time, Jane would yell out, “Not too short!”
Turns out, we didn’t go short enough, because one day while jogging the famous Venice boardwalk on a layover in California, Jane spotted the captain from her flight, a real ladies’ man with Robert Redford hair and a reputation for dating flight attendants. He was headed her way on rollerblades.
“Hey!” Jane called out to him as he passed her by.
He came to a stop immediately, smiling at the brown-haired beauty wearing short shorts and a jog bra. “Well, hello, little lady. I’m Brad.” He held out a hand.
She just looked at him. “I know who you are. I’m on your trip!”
Later on, she complained, “It’s like they have no idea we have butts and boobs under those dresses!”
Even so, pilots loved Jane. This is because Jane believed in treating everyone fairly, which meant she always offered the cockpit food even if they weren’t scheduled to eat on a leg. This is not the norm. It’s an unwritten rule that flight attendants get first dibs on any leftovers from their cabin before offering anything to other members of the crew. Then, after every flight attendant has had an opportunity to eat, we might call the pilots to see if they’re hungry. If they are, we’ll offer an entrée. That’s it. No extras. But Jane treated pilots like first-class passengers, offering up hot towels, appetizers, two different kinds of bread, and both dessert choices if she had them, which is why it came as no surprise when she broke up with a mountain climber from Denver and started dating a pilot she met on a flight from San Diego. Whenever she’d get an earful from another flight attendant for giving pilots “our” food, Jane would just say, “It’s not their fault our union’s negotiating skills suck.” She had a point. On domestic routes crew meals were not in our contract.
At my airline before 9/11, flight attendants working domestic routes were catered “snack packs” instead of crew meals. These snack packs consisted of a cat-sized portion of canned tuna, a couple of crackers, a packet of mayo, a brownie, and the smallest apple ever grown on U.S. soil, all thrown inside a plastic drawstring bag. After 9/11, the not-so-filling snack packs were replaced with zilch, while pilots continued receiving the same crew meals they always had. Imagine working a twelve-hour day sustained only by white dinner rolls and soda while having to serve the cockpit a steak with veggies and a baked potato with all the accoutrements, and a slice of cheesecake on the side. Who wouldn’t be resentful? Now, flight attendants have no choice but to bring food from home, which isn’t always easy to do on a multiple-day trip, and which is why Jane’s attitude toward pilots’ food was so rare.
Jane was definitely unique, kind of like the house we lived in. It was in desperate need of a paint job and stood out from the other immaculate homes on the quiet tree-lined street in more ways than one. A cracked walkway led up to three lopsided steps and an aggressively overgrown bush blocked what otherwise would have been a lovely view into Jane’s bedroom window, which would have been the sunroom if the house had not been illegally converted to add more rooms. All the homes in the neighborhood possessed the same floor plan, which might be why our elderly neighbor across the street spent the better part of his days staring at that very bush, which was all that stood between him and knowing what was really going on inside a house full of attractive women, an odd Russian cab driver, and a frequently barking border collie. Some days our dear neighbor would walk outside and pretend to collect the newspaper (his neighbor’s), or take out the garbage (on noncollection days), or water the grass (that had already been watered), all in an effort to get a better look at us. We’d smile and wave. He’d turn around and walk inside. All the navy blue polyester and rolling bags in the world didn’t seem to tip him off, and eventually he reported “the whorehouse” to police. When a couple of cops stopped by the house to check out the situation, it didn’t escape my attention when a buff bald police officer placed a business card on our kitchen table and said, making direct eye contact with Tricia, a petite blonde with double Ds from Mississippi, “Feel free to call if the neighbor continues to harass you. Or if you need anything else.”
The neighbor wasn’t the only one who was confused. The cable guy’s eyes about popped out of his head when I answered the front door wearing a short black silk robe with pink fuzzy slippers, my hair a tangled mess, and asked him to please, please, please try and be quiet because my roommates were still sleeping.
“We were working all night last night,” I added. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. That’s when Tricia came stumbling down the stairs wearing a silk eye mask on top of her head and a short, somewhat see-through nightie. I noticed a look of confusion followed by outright fear sweep across the repairman’s face.
“No, no, no, we’re flight attendants!” I exclaimed. The cable guy and I laughed.
Tricia, completely oblivious to the strange man standing in the middle of our living room with a bundle of cable wrapped over a shoulder, called out on her way to the kitchen, “After I grab a cup of coffee remind me to tell ya about the guy who tried to hide a gigantic package between his legs last night.”
I swallowed hard, looked at the repairman and smiled innocently. “She’s talking about luggage.”
At least I hoped so, because out of all my roommates in the house, if anyone was going to talk about sex it was Tricia. Tricia went through men like most flight attendants go through first-class bottled water. Some she met at bars in Manhattan, others she either met on the airplane or through fellow coworkers whose boyfriends took one look and immediately wanted to set her up with their friends. Tricia was the kind of flight attendant that guys specifically looking to hook up with a flight attendant dreamed about. The kind of girl who wouldn’t think twice about changing out of uniform in the lav after a flight to put on sexy lingerie and nothing else under a buttoned-up company-issued trench coat. She’d walk through the airport terminal greeting everyone who passed with a friendly hello, before exiting baggage claim and hopping into an expensive sports car with an attractive man behind the wheel. Not shy about discussing the details of these short-lived but hot and heavy romances, she’d frequently declare, “Y’all are not gonna believe what I did this weekend!” The only thing we truly wouldn’t believe would be something that sounded believable. That’s how crazy her life was. But it wasn’t all good.
Whenever Tricia would utter the words “Oh my God, y’all,” Jane would take a deep breath, roll her eyes, and quickly disappear. The tales were always elaborate and interesting, and in the beginning I loved listening to them. Take for instance the time she got into a car wreck and woke up in the street, her shoes stolen right off her feet. “Those were expensive shoes, too!” she cried, tears streaming. Never mind what had happened to whoever had been traveling in the car with her. Another time she left three large Nordstrom shopping bags on board a flight she’d worked from San Francisco. While waiting with a group of others for the employee bus she realized what she’d done and quickly ran back to the gate as fast as she could only to find the bags were missing. A handful of cabin cleaners denied ever having seen them. Two days later the bags were anonymously returned, but Tricia refused to ride the bus to the employee parking lot because she thought that ground personnel were talking about her. She may have been right because she began receiving death threats. It started happening around the same time she had to take out a restraining order on an old boyfriend who kept driving by our house.
“He’s stalking me!” she screamed, running into the house late one night and waking up everyone. This sort of thing happened so often it got to the point where Tricia’s very presence became overwhelming. The mere sight of her car parked in the drive was equivalent to a dark cloud looming over the house. It didn’t matter if I’d had a layover in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Bakersfield, California, as soon as I’d see that used silver Mercedes behind Yakov’s yellow cab, I’d instantly want to fly back to wherever I’d just come from to avoid the stress.
Luckily each new man took Tricia away for a good two to three months at a time. They’d spend some time together at his apartment in the city or house in the Hamptons and life at the house would become peaceful once again. But like clockwork a big blowup would occur and Tricia would come storming back, dragging the ab machine none of us had ever seen her use behind her. To Jane’s horror, she’d ditch the eyesore in the middle of the living room and leave it there collecting dust until the next guy swept her off her feet. And she’d start cooking up a storm. While the brownies and lemon bars cooled and a gigantic pot of vegetable stew simmered on the stove, she’d replay the breakup details over the phone in the living room with a glass of wine in one hand and an opened address book on her lap. Starting with the As, she’d torture us until the last and final Z. Tricia had a lot of friends.
“You’re Tricia’s roommate!” coworkers would say whenever I’d happen to mention her name in flight. “Oh my God, I love her! She’s hilarious.”
I’d just smile and nod. No one had a clue what it was like living with her.
Part of the problem was that Tricia had the most crash pad seniority. She was the queen bee. She got the largest bedroom in the house and the entire place was decorated with photographs of her draped all over friends from every corner of the world. Pots and pans, furniture and rugs, microwaves and air-conditioning units, everything belonged to her, either by purchase or by inheritance. Even the bed I slept on had once been hers. I bought it for twenty bucks—the same amount she had paid another flight attendant five years prior, back before it had a big green paint stain. Perhaps she had dated an artist. Because car magazines filled our mailbox when she dated the NASCAR guy; when the golf pro came on the scene, a full set of clubs took over the hall closet leaving absolutely no room for coats and jackets; and much to Jane’s delight, gourmet cookbooks began to stack up on the kitchen counter after Tricia hooked up with a head chef at a five-star restaurant in the city.
It’s not that I didn’t like her, but I could only take her in small doses, which is why I almost died the day I got called out to work a trip with her. When I realized we weren’t just going to be on the same airplane, but in the same cabin—business class—I wanted to slit my wrists and set myself on fire. Business class is the most junior position on the airplane for a reason. It’s a lot of work. In coach there’s not much to offer passengers, while in first class the passengers usually sleep through the service. But in business class passengers want to sample it all and then some. To prove this point a colleague once offered business-class passengers a silver-lined tray piled high with silver spoons.
“Would you care for a spoon?” he asked, and without saying a word passengers would reach for one. Two minutes later he walked back through the cabin and collected all the spoons. Next he put a box of Kleenex on a silver-lined tray and one by one passengers reached for a tissue. So while it was bad enough working with the most demanding passengers on the airplane without crew drama, I couldn’t imagine dealing with such a high maintenance group of people with a coworker like Tricia.
To my surprise Tricia turned out to be a real joy to work with. The service went off smoothly and Tricia proved herself to be one of the most professional, hardworking, and friendly flight attendants I’d ever encountered. And that’s the moment I began to respect her. Passengers loved her, and I did, too! Honestly, Tricia and I had such a nice trip together that I would have “buddy bid” with her if she’d asked. She never did. But who would’ve thought? Not me, that’s for sure. It just goes to show you never truly know someone until you’ve actually lived and worked with them first.
Strangely, I had the opposite experience with Dee Dee. Dee Dee was, in a word, cool. She wasn’t a classic beauty, but she worked with what she had and always looked great. With a dark year-round tan and a trim build, she kept her black hair in the latest style and coordinated brightly colored sundresses with matching strappy sandals. Even though she was older than me, she had a youthfulness about her I’d never before seen in a woman her age. Dee Dee had been flying for seven years, so she had the most airline seniority in the house and always held the best international trips. I was in complete awe of her. If Dee Dee wasn’t taking in a show in London or shopping for spices in Jamaica or buying clothes in Paris or eating Wiener schnitzel in Austria or relaxing on the beach in Brazil, she was rollerblading the boardwalks of Long Island or taking the train into Manhattan before her trips, which always departed late at night. The woman had more energy than all of us in the house combined. On top of that she commuted from Arizona, where she lived with her husband and a cat named Doug. The day before each trip Dee Dee drove an hour to the airport to hop on a flight to Chicago, where she’d connect to another flight to New York, landing after midnight. I never heard Dee Dee going up the stairs late at night to get to the attic, but Jane did, all the time. It was always a topic of conversation the following morning.
I’d never flown with Dee Dee before and I was excited about getting assigned a reserve trip with her to London. We always had a good time hanging out in the crash pad together, so I assumed the trip would be just as much fun. On the flight over she kind of gave me what I thought was the cold shoulder. I was a little surprised, but I figured she was just catching up with her friends after a few days off—after all, these were flight attendants she’d flown with every month for years. And she did make sure to include me in their plans for our thirty-six-hour layover in London.
A few hours after landing, Dee Dee and I met up with some other crew members in the hotel bar, which offered 20 percent off to airline personnel and which therefore was packed with airline personnel. We’d just ordered beers and were snacking on vinegar chips when a handsome pilot I’d never seen before turned his attention on me. He had only one thing on his mind, I’m sure, but I didn’t care. This was a first for me. Flattered, I decided to enjoy it, especially since the last time I’d spoken to Brent he’d made it clear that while he liked me “more than a lot,” he still wanted to date other women. That hurt. This didn’t. Anyway, my mother always wanted me to marry a pilot, not a personal trainer–lead guitarist for a cover band. Not that I had any crazy ideas about walking down the aisle with the adorable first officer who was now whispering something in my ear about taking a stroll outside where it might be a little quieter, but I did visualize us making the most of our flight benefits, heading off on exotic vacations on our days off.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” Dee Dee asked out of nowhere.
All eyes were now on me. The pilot took a step back. Nervously, I laughed, “You mean the boyfriend who didn’t call on my birthday because he was on a date with someone else?” I could have sworn I’d told her this already. Perhaps the booze had gone to her head or maybe the jet lag had made her forgetful, either way her block completely caught me by surprise.
I didn’t go for a stroll with the pilot, but I did continue flirting with him. Dee Dee stood nearby, eavesdropping on our conversation, interjecting things that I’m sure would have been better left unsaid, since the rest of the crew was now cracking up. At one point we were discussing books and I mentioned something about feeling passionately about women’s rights. That’s when Dee Dee laughed and then said loudly enough for everyone in the bar to hear, “Didn’t you used to work at Hooters?” All eyes were back on me. After that I decided to go to bed.
On the flight home I got an earful in the form of silence. Whenever I’d enter a galley, everyone would immediately stop talking and just smile. At first I thought Dee Dee and her friends just disliked pilots, and maybe new hires who were interested in pilots. I must have embarrassed her since I should have known better than to accept the advances of someone who worked on the wrong side of the cockpit door. But then a few weeks later a good-looking captain offered Dee Dee a ride home and she accepted. Excitedly, she rehashed the details of the twenty-minute drive, emphasizing the part where he tried to kiss her and she pushed him away. I realized then and there that she didn’t dislike pilots, maybe only new hires who attracted pilots—in other words, me. Or maybe that’s just me and my insecurities.
Besides the fact that they were both married, commuted to work, and lived in the attic together, Dee Dee and Paula had very little in common. We’d know when Paula was in town because a basket with knitting needles would appear next to the sofa, whether or not she was on a trip. Around the house Paula hung out in acid-washed jeans paired with ribbed turtlenecks in the winter or oversized T-shirts in the summer. Her auburn hair was always worn loose and wavy as she sat on the couch crocheting yet another scarf for another relative’s birthday. Rarely did she wear makeup, which is why it was always a bit of a shock to see her dressed for work in uniform with her dark brown eyes lined in kohl and her lips painted a dark red, emphasized by hair that had been pulled back and held in place with a barrette. Even though Paula and Dee Dee were close in age, Paula seemed a lot older and wiser. But she was fun. Well, that is, when she was around, which tended to be hardly ever. In order to spend as much time at home with her two young sons, she’d fly to New York the morning her flight departed and work a high-time trip to get as many hours as possible in the shortest amount of time. As soon as the trip was over, she’d jump on the first flight home. It seemed exhausting. When I asked about juggling the whole wife, mother, flight attendant thing, she told me that if I could work a line of red-eye flights and act somewhat normal between trips, I could do anything, even run the PTA.
“What about your husband and kids, don’t they mind that you’re gone?” asked Jane who all of a sudden seemed overly worried about how this worked. Things were getting serious with the pilot, I presumed.
Paula laughed. “Of course they mind! But that’s too bad. I need a little me time. Even our worst trip is a vacation from my regular life.”
Like most flight attendants with children, Paula was a “slam clicker” on trips. As soon as she’d get to the hotel room she’d let the door slam-click shut behind her, never to reappear until pick-up the following morning. The next twenty-four hours were filled with bubble baths and room service, soap operas and books in bed, peace and quiet and waking up to the morning light instead of a husband who needed help finding his socks or the kids crying for breakfast early in the morning. Because of her job her husband couldn’t take her for granted and the kids got to know their father in a way most never do.
“Trust me, Jane, they’ll be grateful I have this job when they’re older and we’re flying around the world for free,” added Paula.
When Jane wondered out loud if her boyfriend could be as patient as Paula’s husband, Paula, the nerdiest of us all, had this to say: “It’s pretty amazing what men will put up with for a blow job.” All of us laughed, even though Jane and I would later admit that neither one of us could imagine Paula doing something like that.
“It’s the quiet ones you have to worry about,” I told Jane when Paula was out of earshot. Before, I never really believed the saying, but now I knew it to be true.
The following day Jane looked at me mischievously. “She must do it a lot.”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about or what “it” meant. We’d both been traumatized by the revelation.
Like Paula, Grace was another roommate who was rarely around, not because she commuted or had kids, but because her boyfriend was in the military and stationed in Japan. Holed up in her room, she spent hours talking to him over the phone using discounted calling cards that seemed way too good to be true, even though she purchased packs of them at Costco. Grace began Skyping before I’d even heard of the word. She was on top of the latest means of communications and always trying to educate the rest of us in the house about things that seemed a little shady at the time, like using the computer as a phone. Grace had been dating her boyfriend for years. Sadly, they rarely saw each other. That was okay because she was strong, and whenever she began to feel weak, she read the Bible or distracted herself by taking the train to Koreatown to pick up treats she grew up on as a child that she would later force upon us.
“Don’t knock it before you try it!” Grace once said, holding up a jar of something pink swimming in red liquid. None of us were up to trying it.
As much as Jane would have loved to have thrown away whatever it was Grace always brought home from her excursions into the city, she never did, not even when Tricia complained about needing extra room to house twenty Tupperware containers of vegetable soup. Paula, always the peacemaker, offered to reorganize the fridge to make it all fit after Dee Dee decided to get rid of the tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos she’d brought from Arizona by whipping up fresh pico de gallo for all of us to share. Whatever was left over she’d take to the crew working her trip later that night.
The most interesting thing about Grace was not that her childhood reminded me of the Broadway show Miss Saigon, but that that she worked for a different airline, one of our main competitors. After hours of comparing the two airlines, it soon became clear that, besides the fact that her airline served better snacks (cookies instead of pretzels, which she was kind enough to bring home by the case), everything was pretty much the same. Her passengers were always threatening to fly our airline, while our passengers wondered why they weren’t flying hers. After one of my flights diverted to another airport because of bad weather in New York, one such passenger yelled out that next time he was going to fly my roommate’s airline. A coworker walked over to his seat, opened his window shade, pointed to one of several airplanes parked on the tarmac beside us, and said, “Go ahead. There they are. Looks like they diverted, too.” The man didn’t say another word. That’s when I realized it didn’t matter who we worked for, we all had the same passengers. As well as the same cheaply made uniforms. Although I did find Grace’s coat dress to be a little more flattering than ours. At one point I even considered offering to buy it from her, and then taking it to our favorite seamstress, who could switch out the buttons with ones that had my airline’s logo on them. Besides the seamstress—“Uniform, wrong buttons!”—who would notice?
While I loved hanging out with Grace, Jane got on better with Agnes, which I couldn’t understand because Agnes and I didn’t exactly click. Then again, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to make things click. When she spoke I could barely hear her. And when I did hear her I didn’t always understand what she was saying. Jane found her to be deep. I found her to be a little… well, different, considering she couldn’t remember how to work the microwave and coffeepot no matter how many times I showed her. I don’t think she knew how to work the oven or the fridge, either, because Agnes couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds. The girl rarely ate. At five-feet-nine, she looked like a model, that’s how willowy and pretty she was. Like Grace, Agnes had a strong connection to God, but unlike Grace she was quiet and pretty much only spoke when spoken to. With long strawberry-blond hair, light blue eyes, and fair skin, Agnes looked as angelic as she acted. On her days off she, too, would hole up in her bedroom, only she preferred the company of a good book to a phone or a computer. Rarely did she hang out with us, and when she did it never lasted long, because if we weren’t bickering and gossiping, we were sharing things unfit for virginal ears.
Grace was the first one who noticed Agnes might be up to something. We were all sitting on the couch when Agnes tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen, grabbed a loaf of bread, a container of mayo, and a couple of wrapped-up packages of deli meat, and without saying a word started for the stairs. Jane had seen her do this once before and wondered if there might be a connection between the sneaky sandwiches and the late-night hang-up calls we’d been getting for the last month. I thought the calls probably had more to do with Tricia’s stalker, but Dee Dee wasn’t so sure since the stalker and Tricia had recently made up and were trying to rekindle what they once had. Jane rolled her eyes. Paula brought up the empty baby stroller she’d noticed outside our front door the previous week. Dee Dee had seen it too, but figured it belonged to the neighbors who had young kids. Jane didn’t think so—both boys were too old for a stroller. Anyway, she’d seen it behind the house next to the recycling bin and figured someone must have left it inside Yakov’s cab. She was just happy to see he’d placed it near the right bin. Then she wondered why Yakov didn’t use it to repair the broken washer since he had a tendency to do weird things like that. That’s when Tricia ran through the front door and yelled out she had to get ready for a date, she was late. Paula worried about Tricia dating the stalker again, but Grace reminded Paula that Tricia had asked us to stop calling him the stalker, since his name was Steven. Jane made a face and Dee Dee started laughing. Paula offered to open another bottle of wine. When Agnes reappeared to put the secret sandwich ingredients back in the kitchen where it all belonged, Grace asked her what was up.
“Oh, uh… I was just hungry,” she said, and disappeared back up the stairs.
It was an unwritten rule that in our crash pad no men were allowed to spend the night—well, no local guys. This rule was established by Jane after Grace ran into one Tricia’s boyfriends in the kitchen early one morning. Grace didn’t find it amusing to see him standing there in his tighty-whities. Jane was appalled to learn he had eaten her banana. Paula couldn’t believe we were making a big fuss. Dee Dee was too tired from the red-eye from Buenos Aires to care. If anyone was involved in a long-distance relationship, it was perfectly fine to have the person over, even for a few nights. In that type of situation, it was safe to assume we probably knew him well (or at least, a lot about him) and there was little chance of his being a frequent visitor. Otherwise, no boys allowed. Not only because it wasn’t safe to have strange men spending the night in a house full of women, but because the last thing we wanted to do was hear or see Tricia—I mean a roommate—having sex. So imagine our surprise when it turned out to be Agnes and not Tricia breaking the rules.
None of us knew how long it’d been going on, and we didn’t want to know, either, because Agnes’s stowaway boyfriend was creepy. And old. Twice her age, at least. Jane was the first one who saw him in person. She came home early from a trip that had been canceled and found him sitting on the sofa with his shoes on the table, watching a horse race and drinking Dee Dee’s Diet Coke as if he owned the place. The worst part: he was there alone and unsupervised. Well, we thought that was the worst part until we found out more about him. When we confronted Agnes, we learned he was a single father with a gambling addiction who unofficially moved in with us after he lost his house. Agnes took care of his little girl, a precious child who called her Mommy, while he blew money she’d lent him at the racetrack. The dirty stroller, we realized, belonged to him. We were horrified to know how long he’d been around and not one of us had a clue. Agnes had wanted to have children for so long. When pressed as to why she would allow someone like him run her life, she admitted it had everything to do with the child. A few days after we banned him from the house, I spotted the stroller in a park two blocks away. I scanned the playground but never found him, and went straight home to warn my roommates to be on the lookout. Soon he started popping up on every trip Agnes worked. This went on for months, even though we’re only allotted so many buddy passes for family and friends, until finally Agnes got suspended for abusing her flight privileges.
Agnes is the only person I’d ever met who could treat past abuse like an addiction and get away with it. A few therapy sessions later Agnes was back on the line and soon the boyfriend was trying to get back in her life, using his child to do so. When she realized the only way to make a change was to make a change, a big one, she transferred all the way to San Francisco (and, to my surprise, once she moved out we became good friends). We were all proud of her for finding herself and standing strong. We encouraged her not to regret what went down. To this day she will admit she’s still trying to learn from that experience so that it wasn’t a waste in her life.
We didn’t have to look far to find another roommate to replace Agnes in the house. My mother moved in.