While I was still a stewardess I dated a cute guy, Jim, who was in dental school and sang in a barbershop quartet. If this style of singing sounds old-fashioned, his group was anything but, their harmonies electrifying. But the truth was I was more attracted to his blond older brother, Randy, who had the apartment next door to mine—and who only had eyes for my roommate, Marina. I remember feeling irked when Randy told her at the apartment pool that she had a beautiful voice, and she thanked him smugly, knowing I was the one he’d heard singing. I also remember the four of us going to the beach one evening and seeing my first blue tide, the waves shimmering with phosphorescence.

Marina, however, decided she wasn’t interested in Randy, and on a later outing, Ella completed the foursome. In the evening we drove up a mountain to a campground, arriving after dark. When Jim had matter-of-factly said on the way that he didn’t believe my family situation was as bad as I claimed, I was stung. Here was someone else—besides my mother, I mean—who was denying the reality of my experience. As the other three got stoned around the fire, I sat apart—I didn’t do drugs—and felt myself spinning in a whirlpool of pain. Years later I would know these feelings were archaic and stemmed from my childhood. But at the time all I knew was that I was going to have to break up with another boyfriend.

As I sat there in the dark, looking up at the starry sky, I was seized by an impulse to scream—but couldn’t. The imperative never to make public my true feelings was too strong. Throughout my adolescence I’d had to hide my pain because that was what my mother required of me. An irony I haven’t mentioned is that while she was judgmental and critical of me much of the time, she occasionally liked to say that I was more mature than my girlfriends, seeming to bask in this idea, which I sensed was really about her need to see herself as a better parent than theirs.

To air my real feelings would be to cast doubt not only on my mother’s superiority as a parent but on her legitimacy as a family therapist, which was our bread and butter. Her very reputation could be at stake. So I’d always understood, on some level, that I must never let my suffering show. To scream would be to broadcast to the world how damaged I was—how broken, defective, crazy.

I don’t remember how long my internal battle went on—just that it was fierce. I kept saying to myself that in the grand scheme of things, what did it matter if I screamed? The stars couldn’t hear me. Still it felt absolutely impossible…right up to the moment I did—a shattering shriek. (At the time I wasn’t aware of the concept of a “primal scream.”)

Afterwards I heard laughter, other campers imagining it was a prank, I suppose. To my surprise, there was no consequence whatever to my scream—no external one, at least. Not even Ella or Jim came over to see if I was OK. But there was an internal one—for a moment later, all my pain was gone. Though it might be difficult for some to understand, this was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Jim and I drove back to his fraternity house the next morning, and, while he was in the shower, with no forewarning—well, except for the scream—I left him.

Pan Am had two types of “stand-by” for stewardesses—24-hour, which meant you had to be ready to fly at a moment’s notice, and TACA, which meant you had to be available by phone to accept a flight for the next day.

The month I was TACA, I got out a felt pen and started to draw dress designs. I’d always loved clothes and, as a teenager, had made many of my own. Now, seized by the notion that maybe I could design clothes as a sideline, I worked ferociously, and by the end of the month, I’d developed a distinctive illustrating style and created a line of two dozen outfits. The times I was called to fly, I found it emotionally wrenching to have to leave my project; I felt I was being painfully ripped away from the kind of work I was meant to do.

At a union meeting, the junior stewardesses were told not to let Operations bully us—that is, coerce us into flying the same day when we were TACA. So, at the end of the month, when Operations phoned and said they needed me for a flight that same afternoon, I said no. Five minutes later I got a call from my irate supervisor, telling me I was suspended.

By the time I went in for my scheduled appointment with him a few days later, my mind was made up. In the interim, he’d read my brief record—apparently I’d gotten a commendation from one of my pursers—so when I announced I was quitting, he did some fast and furious back-pedaling, trying to convince me to stay.

I refused—and left with the hope that my resignation might make the higher-ups think twice in the future about trying to strong-arm their flight attendants.

I soon realized that, despite the excitement of waking up in a fancy hotel halfway around the world every week, I wasn’t cut out to be a stewardess.

Each month you had to bid on a schedule of flights for the following month by listing the available ones in your order of preference. The senior girls got all the best schedules and the junior girls the most grueling ones, including a long, arduous flight over the pole to England, an overnight during which you couldn’t sleep because of jet lag, and a return flight the next day. The junior girls were also the first to be rerouted. I was—on a flight to Hong Kong—and had to fly a shuttle back and forth between Tokyo and Vietnam for days. True to form, I kept getting sick—colds and flus. And Operations wouldn’t let you fly with a cold because nasal congestion can cause your eardrums to burst at high altitudes. So they continually grounded me and docked my pay.

                                                                             …

“I’m so fed up I could cry—all the little things that could possibly go wrong are doing just that. I’ve been trying so hard to be organized, to counteract my tendency to be absent-minded—care, thoroughness, planning. But what good? My wig gets singed in an oven blast—how could I have known artificial hair was so sensitive to heat? My pocket notebook with myriad important dates and addresses, as well as a favorite drawing, disappears; apparently it fell out of my purse sometime yesterday during the bustle of my arrival in LA. My pantsuit is likely to be permanently stained, the lady at the dry cleaners tells me. And on and on. It all seems so senseless, like everything I touch goes awry.

“I keep feeling rushed, vaguely panic-stricken, as though there isn’t going to be time enough for me to complete each thing that I undertake, whether it’s an afternoon of shopping for sandals or an hour of guitar practice. I wasn’t cut out to be a stewardess, it seems—because I’m only allowed a day here or there in which to carry on a normal life. I keep thinking, I have three days…I have three days, as though my next flight to San Francisco were going to be the end of my life.”

“My training flight was from New York to Frankfurt. We left six hours late—the first 747’s were full of glitches—so, of course, when we arrived at 3:00 in the morning, there was no crew bus to take us to our hotel. One of the stews had rescued a diminutive cake that no one had claimed from the first-class galley. It looked like an old-fashioned powder puff box and had a glaze you could rap with your knuckles and only hurt your hand. Somehow or other we broke into that cake and devoured it in hunks with our fingers as we sat, stupefied, on our upended luggage, waiting…

“I flew only one charter flight, battling a regiment of soused dentists who ultimately conquered the plane. First they took the aisle, where they played craps, gambling for the duration of the trip, and later the galley, where they raided the liquor and mixed their own drinks. Led by our purser—diminutive, frantic, and as high-strung as a bird—we mounted a gallant defense but were no match for their numbers. One dentist finally pried open our commander’s mouth—which was full of gold—emitted a boozy gasp, then gravely handed her his card.”

MATERIALISTIC

“My purser to Vietnam was a disciple of some Eastern guru who espoused ‘the way of roughage.’ While the rest of us skirmished over the leftover prime rib in the first-class galley, she nibbled beatifically on wilted lettuce from the brown paper bags she carried with her everywhere.

“When I found out the other stews were laying bets about whether my short auburn curls were natural or not, I tipped my wig to the winners.

“Over Vietnam, the landscape from the window of the plane looked as green and calm as a dense-weeded sea floor. The crew was led off the tiny airfield at Ben Hua to a couple of rooms which memory won’t furnish. In one, however, there was a shin-high white ceramic elephant for sale. My purser, reading what must have been an acquisitive glint in my eye, asked what sign I was, then nodded pityingly. ‘Yes, Taurus is materialistic.’ Which is why I didn’t buy that elephant—and still have it trumpeting through my dreams.”

I spoke too soon. I did do another drawing from life after Thayer—which I came across when I was looking through my old artwork the other day. My freshman year of high school, I babysat three sisters over a period of several months. The eldest was Linny, in the portrait above. One night their parents came home early and found I hadn’t put the girls to bed yet. Not that I hadn’t tried—but the kids were having too much fun and wouldn’t mind me. Having been disciplined by my parents with intimidation and shaming, methods I wasn’t about to use on my charges, I didn’t know how to exert my authority. And so, despite their children’s attachment to me, the parents fired me.