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said, “Let’s go.”
    Then he wrapped his arm around me and gave me a big kiss. The sales clerk watched in horror as she slowly realized that we weren’t mother and son. Or maybe she just thought I was evil. I don’t know. The whole thing was so humiliating, I try not to think about it.
    A year later, I was seven months pregnant and in the mall in Bellevue, Washington. There was a woman sitting next to me who apparently had never seen a pregnant grandmother-type. Sitting next to an Eagle Scout. Who had his arm around her.
    She kept staring at me. But in that endorphin state that God gives those who are pregnant, I didn’t see myself as she did. I saw myself as a fresh, first-time mom (who maybe had let her roots slip, but what did it matter?). I had gained fifty pounds in the first seven months and had gone from model thin to fat and happy. I didn’t care how I looked! The onlything that mattered was my belly, and I wanted that belly to stick out and shine.
    The woman finally spoke. “Are you pregnant?” She asked the question as if she was shocked. Really shocked.
    “Yes.” I said, smiling. Then I thought I’d let her off the hook in case she was wondering. “I’m an older first-time mom.”
    “I’ll
say!
How old are you?”
    I squinted my eyes at her, and rage filled me for a minute. “Well, my husband is thirty-six!” I said. “So I can’t be that old!”
    These are the types of humiliations I experience every day.
    I just thought you should know there are some downsides to being a flight attendant. There’s the beef-jerky face and the all-night flights with no rest in-between. And if these problems aren’t bad enough, they will seem worse if you marry a man who looks like he needs a note from his principal to go out with you and then you have a baby just before joining AARP.

C HAPTER 18
     

     

The Dream of Becoming a Spud
     
    W hen I was hired for my first airline job, I didn’t understand the importance of seniority. In the business of in-flight service, seniority is everything. Seniority (your date of hire relative to other flight attendants) determines your bidding preferences for trips, vacations, and number of days off. I had such low seniority in the beginning years at all three of the airlines I worked for that I was on Ready Reserve. Ready Reserve means that you are on call twenty-four hours a day forseveral days a month. When I started out I was on call twenty-four hours a day for twelve days a month.
    In those days we didn’t have cell phones, so I lived with a beeper. Later, as I got more seniority, I moved to Call-in Reserve, which meant I could make a call in the morning and another one in the afternoon to see if Scheduling had a trip planned for me. Finally, I got to the place where I could Hold-a-Line. Holding-a-Line meant that I knew a full two weeks before any given month which days I would be flying and what trips I would be flying. But every year for the first twenty years of my flight career, I dreamed of becoming a Spud.
    The term
Spud
was first brought to my attention by a flight attendant who walked up and warned me to stay out of the flight attendant lounge between the hours of three and four each afternoon.
    “Why?”
    “Spud sign-in,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Spud sign-in. It will make you sick when you see the schedules they fly.” She referred to the flight attendants with forty or more years of seniority.
    “Look at them,” she said. “They all wear the shapeless gray uniforms with brown spots, and their middles stick out farther than any other part of them. And as they turn on their thinlegs, the thing that comes to mind is spuds. They all look like spuds on a stick.”
    Then she pulled out a schedule of one of the Spuds. “Look,” she said. “They work eight days a month, get six weeks vacation a year, and make sixty-thousand dollars a year. That’s just two days a week, working for six months of the year, and the other six months they are using a