Lilly and I met at Logan International Airport in Boston on April Fools’ Day, 1997. Lilly had been a flight attendant for several years and had worked for a couple of different airlines. When I met her, she had recently joined a U.S. carrier and was based in Boston. Lilly was on her way home after having completed a four-day work schedule from a two-legged flight that ended in Boston. We were stranded at the airport because of the weather.
Much like Lilly, I had not been prepared for the surprising change in weather on that day. Winter appeared to have ended since the temperature had reached nearly 80 degrees in previous days and was in the seventies on that particular day of April. Somehow, Old Man Winter had returned with a vengeance. Unpredictably, it began to snow furiously as if the snow were in a hurry to come down from the sky. It wasn’t long after the snow began to fall and the temperature began to dip that the flights cancellations were announced.
Stranded, I fond comfort in the other passengers with whom I had so much in common. It did not look like anyone was going anywhere any time soon, so passengers began to complain to one another and make trivial conversations. I was seating next to a woman named Lilly. It was clear that Lilly was a flight-crew member as she was in uniform. Lilly and I kept each other company at the airport. Her flight home to San Francisco had been canceled and she was unable to return to the Boston apartment that she shares with other flight-crew members as her home away from home when she flies out of Boston’s Logan International Airport.
Lilly had only been with her current employer for a year but had flown with other airlines for more than ten years. She worked several flights that served Hajj pilgrimage for a former airline employer. Flying was Lilly’s life. She had a goal to see every corner of the world before age forty. When I met her, she was well on her way to accomplishing that milestone.
That night at the airport turned into the next day. Snowed in, I and everyone else spent the night leaning on whatever extra chairs available to pass the time and try to get some sleep. By daylight, the city of Boston had cleared up the roads and ended the horrible wait at the airport for many passengers who had been surprised by the weather. I had spent a horrible night but I had made a new friend.
The next time I saw Lilly, she had invited me to a get together in the apartment in Boston’s Cambridge area that she shared with three other flight attendants, all of whom actually lived outside of Boston. But, because they originated their flights out of Boston’s Logan airport and were based there, they needed to have a place to spend the night before or after their working flights. Lilly actually lived in San Francisco. Of the other three, one was from Mississippi, another lived in Michigan, and the other lived in New York.
The party ended early. The predominantly flight-crew members left because they had early flights to catch in the morning and needed to rest. At the end, there were six of us, all of whom women. We played gin rummy, drank wine, and talked about men, relationships, and sex.
It turned out that during the conversation, one of Lilly’s friends shared that she had been sexually assaulted in high school. Lilly was quick to mentioned the statistic that one out of six women has been victim of rape or sexual assault as per the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women survey, 1998.) Surprisingly that evening, four of the six of us acknowledged to having been sexually assaulted or raped. We talked about many issues and spent hours talking until Lilly began to tell us of an incident she witnessed while in Saudi Arabia following a Hajj-pilgrimage flight she worked as a flight-crew member.
