The Purser

by Liz Kerr

As soon as the plane landed, Tess knew she couldn’t go straight home. If she did, her husband would know, he could read her like that, and he’d want to know the guy’s name and address from the flight manifest and it would turn into this whole big thing.

She’d made the mistake once, early on in her career, of telling him about a passenger who, while she was doing beverage service, had forced his hand up her uniform skirt with such force he’d ripped her pantyhose and torn her panties. Her husband’s reaction was visceral - a coiled, quiet, seething kind of anger she’d never seen from him. When she woke in the middle of the night, her body’s internal clock still somewhere over Europe, he was sitting up in bed, in the dark.

“You need to quit that job, Tess, or I’m going to kill someone,” he said and she believed him and felt bad, guilty even, that the creep was in his head.

Tess remembered the first time the creep got into her head. It was mid-August, the summer she turned five, and her mother had taken her to the discount store down the avenue to pick out a dress. She was miserable with poison ivy, her arms and legs chalky pink from dried-up calamine lotion. As her mother pulled her along the sidewalk shaded by the elevated train, a man, a stranger, came up behind them. He made kissing sounds at her mother and kept repeating “hey baby.” Tess didn’t understand why her mother didn’t react to being called, in her opinion, the worst thing you could be called - a baby. She also didn’t understand why her mother had said, “we won’t tell Daddy about that man,” not until years later.

So she lied to her husband and said, “If it ever happens again, I’ll quit.”

Tess knew she’d never be able to explain to him her obsession with flying, that it was a result of divine intervention. All the times in Catholic school they’d prayed a novena for more young men to receive a vocation to the priesthood, she was actually praying to fly off somewhere like Wendy Darling. Through the intercession of Mary, her prayers were answered.

Tess never again told her husband about passengers who felt the price of a ticket entitled them to molest the flight attendants. She learned to fight back with a combination of ice water and turbulence and looked after her co-workers so well she was promoted to purser and voted in as their union rep. She tamped down the urge to punch some passengers in the face by doing post-flight yoga, wine or a combination of the two and for the past 15 years she’d been successful.

Until the Access Hollywood tape came out.

She first heard it while deadheading on a flight out of Philly International. She should have been resting but couldn’t stop watching it on her phone. She was the mother of a twelve year old girl and this man, this creep, was the Republican party nominee for President of the United States of America.

His voice, his sneering, privileged, punk-ass, “grab ‘em by the pussy” laughter, was every passenger who’d ever pinched her, squeezed her, poked her, grabbed her, said “my bad” or “while you’re down there” or “so, about that mile high club.”

Tess worked the flight back from Chicago to Philadelphia and, after all the passengers had been buh-bye’d, she went to the airport crew lounge, changed out of her uniform and formulated a plan to vent her anger.

The Barnes & Noble was across from the Willow Grove Mall, built on what had been, in Tess’s childhood, the Willow Grove amusement park. It wasn’t until Tess smelled the coffee from the in-store Starbucks that she realized she had been awake for over 20 hours. She ordered one for herself, a double espresso, and one to use as a weapon. She scoped out the cafe and chose a table in the corner, where her back would be against the wall and facing front like anyone who grew up during the South Philly mob wars knew to do. She tossed her jacket across the table to hold her spot then headed over to the books.

She wasn’t sure what section to look in and didn’t want to ask the clerk, because he might be suspicious as to why she wanted to bring every copy the store had of The Art of the Deal to her table in the cafe. The thought of what section his books should be in made her laugh out loud. Fantasy? Horror? Science Fiction? She made her way to the Business section and pulled her first batch of the book’s hardcover and paperback versions.

She stacked them on the seat and lifted each book, one at a time, for her liquid inscription. She used her straw like a pipette to draw up the dark liquid and, with her finger covering the top of the coffee-filled straw, let it drip all over the page, enough to make it un-sellable. She tilted the book cover to act as a wall but needn’t have bothered, really, because in between customers the barista kid just looked at his phone.

When she’d finished, Tess carried the books back to the shelf and lined them up neatly. She was careful not to touch the Ayn Rand book on Capitalism in the same row, in case she became infected with a disregard for the poor.

Ten months later she was working a night flight out of Washington National Airport when a group of young men boarded from a connecting flight out of Charlottesville. They had the look of frat boys, which could be dangerous for her flight attendants, and they seemed overly excited, like maybe their team had won something that day. During beverage service she could see them passing an iPad with the volume up. Afraid it might be porn and other passengers would be offended, she watched over the back of a seat but saw nothing more than some sort of night parade with torches. When she returned to the galley for clean-up, an elderly male passenger poked his head in.

“Miss,” he started to say but couldn’t continue. He looked pale, his voice was tremulous and Tess was thinking about how many steps away the defibrillator was.

“Are you having any chest pain, sir,” she asked, ready to start CPR if he dropped.

“They’re Nazis,” he said.

“Nutsies?” “Are you hungry?” Tess asked.

Another passenger, a woman, rushed down the aisle.

“Can you make those guys shut the fuck up? They keep chanting something about Jews and high-fiving. It’s disgusting.”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said “let’s get this gentleman back to his seat first.” She handed the elderly man off to another flight attendant and walked toward the young men

“Is there a problem here?” Tess asked and they all shook their heads. “I’ve had several complaints about noise so you all need to keep it down.” As Tess turned to go back to the galley, the young man on the aisle seat made a motion with his arm that almost looked like a Nazi salute. Maybe he was just stretching, she told herself, he must have been stretching.

When she got home, her husband was watching the news. The way he was sitting, literally on the edge of his seat, told her it was bad.

“Hear about this?” He pointed to the screen, to the parade of torches and Tess recognized the chant. “A girl got killed.”

“Some of them were on my flight,” she said, “I need to take a shower. Did Veronica get the bus on time or did you drive her?”

Her husband, who worked a Monday thru Friday schedule, re-oriented her. “It’s Sunday, Tess, she’s still sleeping.”

Tess knocked softly on her daughter’s bedroom door, opened it slowly, and tiptoed over a minefield of shoes, clothes, and school books. She watched her breathing and decided not to wake her. If she did, she’d have to answer her questions, truthfully, about how her flight was and had she met any interesting passengers. Tess didn’t want her daughter to be a naive kid, but she wanted to shield her, at least for another day, from the version of the world she witnessed 35,000 feet above.

She grabbed a pair of tweezers from the bathroom shelf, dropped them in her purse and went downstairs. “I’m going to get in a quick yoga class, ok?” Tess was out the door before he had a chance to talk her out of it.

The shoe store called itself a shoe warehouse and it truly was - aisle after aisle of boxes stacked by brand name. Tess made her way to the Ivanka Trump brand boxes. She reached into her jacket pocket and wrapped the sharp, pointy tweezers around her middle finger, pointy side down, like a reverse brass knuckles. She bent over the shoes, as if she were trying them on, dug the pointy tips deep into the fake leather and pulled, leaving a long slit.

Maybe because she was so exhausted, the chant from the Nazis on her flight kept playing in her head. She forced herself to dedicate her practice, as her yoga instructor always told the class to do, so she thought about the tour she took on her first Amsterdam layover of a tiny attic where a young girl hid from Nazis. She dedicated her practice to Anne Frank and destroyed the rest of the Ivanka Trump brand shoes.

In her position as union rep for the Association of Flight Attendants, Tess was cc’ed on incident reports filed by members of her local. In June, eighteen months since he took office, she started to see reports coming in from flight attendants all reporting similar episodes involving children, really young children, pre-schoolers, toddlers. The narrative section of the reports described traumatized in all its synonyms - terrified, in shock, sobbing, hysterical and detailed their concerns of child neglect by the ICE agents. Some described toddlers with no clean diapers, children with high fevers, children suffering nausea and vomiting. One reported it as kidnapping while another called it human trafficking. The flight attendants were refusing to take part in the forceful separation of minors from parents. There was chatter in the union about an organized “sick out” to protest the treatment of the children.

Tess booked on to a flight number that came up in several of the reports - Phoenix to Miami. She was on board the next day as twelve small children and an ICE agent boarded. They were dressed alike, gray sweatpants, white t-shirts, and cheap slip-on sneakers that Philly kids used to call bo bo’s. The agent attempted to stop her from assisting a small boy of about five with his seatbelt and Tess explained, as purser, every passenger was under her charge.

Nothing she said, in her limited Spanish, could soothe the little boy. He sobbed so hard and called out so insistently for his mother that most of the flight attendants and many of the passengers were in tears. Tess imagined the child’s cries of “Mama!” penetrating the cockpit’s steel door, picked up by air traffic control and reverberating via radar across the country, cloud to cloud, state by state, carried on a reverse jet stream wind back to a young woman in a detention center cell somewhere in Arizona.

“Basta!” the ICE agent yelled at the boy. Tess stepped in between them.

“Did you just call this child a bastard?” Tess asked the agent.

“No, I didn’t. I said basta - it means enough.”

“Don’t yell at him again,” Tess said.

Upon landing, the agent made it clear to Tess that the children were in his custody and they were to de-plane first. She asked him where the children were being taken.

“That’s confidential,” he said, but Tess already knew, the stories were coming out, that the children were going to be locked up somewhere, lost to their parents. She filled out an incident report that cited child abuse and sent it to her superiors.

Tess deadheaded back to Philadelphia Airport and changed in the airport’s flight crew lounge bathroom. She stripped off the uniform she was beginning to despise and changed into jeans. She checked her purse, made sure the Swiss army knife she had confiscated from a passenger she’d caught bragging about getting it through TSA was securely zipped in with her make-up, and texted her husband that she needed to make one quick stop before coming home.

Tess pulled out of the airport employee’s parking lot and headed north on I-95, toward the Macy’s in the Willow Grove Mall.

As she rode the escalator down to the Women’s Dress department, she suspected security might be on to her, that at any second she’d be approached by a guard or a police officer or, but no one stopped her. She scoped out the section but there were no sales clerks in sight. There were just a few shoppers, all women, mostly shopping in pairs.

Prominently displayed in the front of the Dress section were the classic fashion labels - Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. Tess moved past them to the Ivanka Trump rack, back in the corner, sort of hidden almost, like the porn section in the video store where she’d worked after high school.

She reached for the first dress, grabbing it more forcefully than she realized and it screeched along the metal bar.

Two women, a mother and daughter perhaps by their similarities, looked over at her and looked at the display sign. The older one pointed at the sign and said “Ivanka Trump,” and the younger one said, “ew”. Tess wanted to tell them what she was there to do, that she was their sister in the struggle, but she couldn’t blow her covert mission, so she formed her features into the vacuous expression she’d seen on female passengers en route to Disney World for their weddings.

She draped dress after dress over her arm until the weight pulled on her neck and shoulder, as many as she could carry, like someone you’d see on the news fleeing a wildfire or some other national disaster, and carried them to the dressing room.

Tess chose the last room in the row, hung the dresses on hooks and slid the door latch shut. She was comfortable in the confines of the tight space, used to working around the smell of feet and dirty carpet. She set her purse on the small shelf seat and pulled out her tools - the confiscated Swiss army knife, a black Sharpie, dark red lipstick, thick foundation, and a package of make-up remover wipes.

She applied the foundation with a heavy hand and ran the dark, almost crimson lipstick shade she’d bought especially for the occasion over her lips three times. She glanced in the mirror and was reminded of the Fun House mirrors that used to be here when it was an amusement park. At different angles she could see images of her mother, her grandmother, her sisters and her daughter, as if they had all crowded into the dressing room with her. She removed the first dress from its hanger, turned it inside out and pressed her face against it, rubbing her foundation into the cheap rayon. She pursed her lips and forced the crimson red into the fabric. She held the dress at arm’s length to admire her work and couldn’t decide if it was more Shroud of Turin or Pablo Picasso.

It took four wipes to clear the makeup from her face after which she moved on to the next dress. She reached for the confiscated knife and opened the blade. The dress had a label Made in Vietnam and she thought about the children working in sweatshops, stitching their youth away, with no hope of union protection. She slid the blade under the stitching of the hem and tore all the way around. It was a quick and easy process so she did the same to the next four dresses. One dress had buttons down the back and she used the blade to slice them off, one at a time, like a wood carver whittling thorns off a branch.

She picked up the last dress and spread it carefully on the floor. She took the lid off the black sharpie and wrote in very large letters I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?

She gathered all the dresses and hung them on the rack at the dressing room entrance, the one that held everything that the customers didn’t want.

When Tess left Macy’s, she knew she needed caffeine to drive home safely. She went to Barnes & Noble, purchased her usual double espresso, and wandered over to the Children’s section. She thought about a podcast she’d listened to on her way back from Miami, a discussion with the head of a non-profit that sent books to children in detention centers. Tess had written the non-profit’s address on an airline napkin and tucked it into her wallet.

She walked through the aisles of cleverly displayed books, thinking about the children on her flight. She stopped wandering at a book titled ‘That’s Not My Monster’. She carried the book over to the Customer Service kiosk in the middle of the store.

“Do you have this book in Spanish?” she asked the clerk.

“Let me see,” the woman answered and typed the title into her computer. “Yes, we do. It’s called ‘Este No Es Mi Monstruo’.”

Tess repeated the title slowly, “‘Este No Es Mi Monstruo’. Perfect.”

“Would you like it shipped to your home address?”

Tess reached into her purse and handed the woman the airline napkin and her credit card. “No. You can ship them to this address.”

“How many books,” the clerk asked, “One?”

“No,” Tess said, “45.”

About the Author

Liz Kerr has had poetry, short stories and non-fiction published in Philadelphia City Paper, Philly Fiction, The Galway Review, Sixteen Magazine (Dublin), Jewish Currents Magazine, Rust Belt Rising, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Irish Central. She is a registered nurse in heart transplant and oncology at a Philadelphia hospital. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and dual Irish and American citizenship.