Flight 800

All you need to do is marry some decent boy and settle down, is what my father told me every time I asked about college. There are no decent boys in this town, is what I’d answer. Then he’d call me ungrateful. Then I’d slam the door to my room, the tiniest space in the house—more an oversized closet than a real bedroom, but it was the only space not filled with the junk of my three brothers’ lives—matchbox cars and baseball gloves and Aurora monster kits and sweaty socks tossed behind beds and found weeks later, stiff and reeking. For me to wash. Because there was no one else to do it. Our mother was dead. Sometimes, I thought she was lucky. She’d never have to do another load of laundry.

I’d stay up late nights doing laundry in our cold basement, wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, stacks of homework books piled on a metal folding chair next to me. I owned two bras, two sweaters, three blouses, two skirts, one pair of fraying jeans. After school, I babysat, but I got no money for it because they were my brothers. Fridays and Saturdays, I waited tables. I saved my tip money, but not for clothes. I put it in a glass jar with a Monopoly GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card and hoped the freedom would rub off.

I made valedictorian, won a scholarship, but my father said college was a waste of time for a girl. I calculated how far my thousand-dollar scholarship would take me. Would it be one semester? Part of a semester? Would the tip jar add enough for books? Could I get a job on campus?

It was 2 a.m. I was falling asleep by the dryer, but a strange scratching noise woke me up. I saw a mouse slinking out from the bottom of the dryer, where the linoleum was pushed up, and I screamed and threw my history book.

I missed. But I was more relieved than not. It wasn’t the mouse I was mad at.

I looked out the small, high window, looked at stars I knew were millions of miles away and probably dead by the time their light reached me. Going away to school seemed as impossible as getting to one of those stars. I watched two blinking lights streaking through the sky. Shooting star, I thought, but then I realized it was an airplane, on its way to somewhere far from here. New York. Los Angeles. Paris. Tokyo. Singapore. Places I’d never been, had no hope of ever going to. People in their seats, reading, nodding off, not even thinking how lucky they were. Stewardesses in neat uniforms, handing them drinks.

You didn’t need a college degree to be an airline stewardess. Only good balance and a smile. The ability to squat in a narrow aisle while holding a dinner tray.

I could do that, I thought.

*

And now, as we’re buckling ourselves into the jump seats, folding ourselves down, red lights flashing and passengers screaming and praying all around us, I don’t think of my oldest brother in jail, my father dying of black lung in the VA hospital. I think of that mouse, how it froze for a moment, watching me, its bright quick eyes holding no expectation of mercy.

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