Once Upon a Layover in Jacksonville, Florida

I've told you some of the things they teach us in flight attendant training, but there are many things you learn sitting in an airport with a senior flight attendant who has decided you’re old enough to hear the story, she's got time today.

These two things are not the same curriculum.

I was in my second year when I flew with Courtney, whose name and description I have changed entirely, to protect her "innocence."

Side note: I'm already laughing just typing out the last few words and doing my best not to hit you with like 15 emojis and gifs, like minions giggling madly. Please get your glass of wine (yes, the big one) and settle in, because I've had a couple of espresso martinis and I feel like writing about some shenanigans.

So it's late summer of 2009, and I have been flying over a year, and I'm getting more comfortable and confident in the job. I've figured out that we do isn't rocket surgery; there are helpful checklists and binders full of information that we are expected to know, but most of the work can be boiled down to customer service, situational awareness, and memorization of steps to take in an emergency. I've flown hundreds of hours now, and worked with hundreds of flight attendants. Every flight attendant is unique in some way, and even so, Courtney stood out.

Courtney was a senior flight attendant to me, but she wasn’t old. I know I have used the phrase “senior mama” before to refer to flight attendants with higher seniority, but I feel like the phrase conjures a very specific image if you’ve never worked for an airline, and Courtney wasn’t anybody’s grandmother. She was probably somewhere in her forties, although at twenty-something I considered anyone over thirty-five to be participating in a mysterious second half of adulthood I knew nothing about and somehow expected to never truly be.

(I also forget that I, at 45, could in fact be someone's grandmother if I had had kids, so now I'm like I guess she could be someone's grandmother but I don't think she was, and now I'm digressing...)

Anywho, what I'm trying to say is that I recognized Courtney as someone I could look up to and aspire to be like. She was capable, smart, and hard working. She was charming with all of the passengers, gently flirting with everyone in that way people recognize as engaging without it coming across like she was trying to follow through with anything.

It's easy to be that kind of charming when you're pretty, and I'll be so for real with you: Courtney is gorgeous. Not gorgeous for her age, which is a phrase that should get you slapped with a glove and challenged to a duel. Just gorgeous. She had the confidence of a woman who had already figured out what she liked and knew how to get it. She also had some seniority, having been at the airline since the late 90's. This combination made her extremely dangerous.

We were on a four-day trip with one other flight attendant, working on a MD-88 for every leg, and somewhere in the middle of it we had a Jacksonville layover. Nothing glamorous. We weren't staying at a fancy tourist resort drinking frozen cocktails under palm trees. We were at one of those perfectly acceptable 3-star business hotels relatively close to the airport, one where the lobby had dark patterned carpeting and the breakfast, if there was one, definitely involved eggs poured from a bag.

The important thing about this hotel, in this story, was the van driver.

He was young. I want to say pretty young, but not concerningly young. Let me be clear about that too. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, about to start college in a couple of weeks we found out, and had just gotten back from Marine Corps boot camp. He looked like he'd just gotten back from Marine Corps boot camp, where he had apparently spent the summer doing push-ups while the rest of America's teenage boys were working at Dairy Queen.

He loaded our bags into the van, and Courtney watched him do it, and not subtly.

Did I also appreciate the way the brisk, warm wind pressed his polo shirt against visible abs? Yes. Did it seem gratuitous how he lifted each bag in a way that showed off his muscles? Also yes. Did we appreciate the show. Absolutely. Lots of murmured female noises of praise and delight. I remember wondering "Did they give him the uniform shirt with the thinnest fabric or what?"

I watched Courtney watching him load our bags, and I was also not being subtle. Courtney did not notice, because Courtney was biting her lip and checking out the guy's butt and legs. Then I looked at our other flight attendant. She looked at me, and we grinned. This was going to be fun watching Courtney flirt with him; she's good at it and men tend to get flustered.

Our young Marine climbed into the driver's seat and gave us the standard hotel-van speech. He told us his name, told us approximately how long the ride would be (about 20 minutes), and mentioned that if we needed anything during the layover, he could take us around locally.

Courtney leaned forward from the row behind him. “Anywhere?”

He looked in the mirror, I saw his eyes flick up to catch hers. “Pretty much.”

“To the moon and back?” Courtney suggested.

He smiled. “I can probably get you to Publix.”

And that was how we ended up going grocery shopping.

This probably sounds boring to you, but getting to a good grocery store was actually fantastic news because we still had two long days left on the trip, and at this point in my career I have a complicated relationship with food that can best be described as How Many Things Can I Take From the Complimentary Hotel Breakfast Without Technically Committing a Crime?

A grocery store meant yogurt. Fresh fruit. Sandwich supplies. Maybe something I could shove into my tote bag and eat standing in a galley twelve hours later while passengers snoozed before landing. Or something I could microwave at the next night's layover, maybe even with vegetables? The offer was too good, so the three of us piled back into the hotel van.

The flirting continued on the ten minute ride to the grocery store. Courtney asked him about his plans, trying to suss out his age without asking "are you of legal age to give consent?" He told her about boot camp. She asked about college. He told her he was starting in a couple of weeks. Courtney was delighted to keep asking questions.

He was exactly the kind of eighteen-year-old boy you would expect to emerge from Marine boot camp: incredibly fit, freshly aware of his own physical capabilities, and possessing approximately seven hundred percent more confidence than the average teenager. When we pulled into Publix, our other flight attendant and I got out. Courtney did not.

“You coming?” I asked.

“I don't need anything.”

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

The Marine looked straight ahead.

"Take your time," she said brightly, "we'll just be here chatting."

We went grocery shopping.

Normally, when you're buying groceries on a layover, you don't browse. Most of the time you are operating under strict logistical constraints. Everything has to fit into a hotel refrigerator approximately the size of a shoebox, survive being dragged through multiple airports, and ideally be edible without utensils, just in case you forgot to pack some.

So it takes maybe twenty minutes. Twenty-five, tops.

We came back outside carrying our bags, and the hotel van was exactly where we'd left it. Courtney was sitting almost exactly where we'd left her. The Marine was in the driver's seat. They weren't talking. They both looked completely normal.

Suspiciously normal.

Nothing to see here level of normal.

We got back into the van. I swear the energy in the van crackled, but there was thunder and lightening on the horizon, so that wasn't entirely inaccurate and may have had nothing to do with them being alone.

Nobody said anything the entire way back to the hotel. Not a word. The radio wasn't even on, so all we heard was the engine revving to get up to speed after a stop sign, and the creaking of the suspension when the van rocked to a stop.

But Courtney was smiling the entire time.

I knew that smile. I didn't know exactly what I knew, but I knew I knew something. I didn't get the story until the next day.

The next morning, when we needed the hotel van again to head back to the airport, a different driver pulled up. Courtney looked through the lobby doors and said “Oh.” Nothing else, just that little disappointed noise.

“What?”

Courtney shrugged. “Nothing.”

Our ride to the airport was uneventful, as were the first two flights of the day.

Then we had a long sit in Detroit. Long sits are where flight attendant secrets go to become public record for a select audience. There is a delicate kind of intimacy that develops when you've already worked several legs together, you're tired, you've exhausted the normal topics of conversation, and now you're sitting around an airport for four hours with absolutely nowhere else to be.

Eventually, Courtney brought up Jacksonville. Actually, I am pretty sure I brought up Jacksonville, because it was killing me to know whether or not I had read the energy in the van right.

“Okay,” I said. “What happened with the van driver?”

She looked at me. “What van driver?”

“Oh, fuck off, you know exactly what van driver."

She laughed. The other flight attendant leaned in at Courtney's gesture. And then she told us. While we were inside Publix, Courtney had stayed in the van and continued flirting with our freshly minted Marine.

The flirting had escalated, quickly.

There had been kissing.

There had been hands.

There had been twenty-some minutes of increasingly terrible decision-making in a hotel shuttle parked outside a Jacksonville, Florida grocery store.

I stared at her, my mouth dropped open, scandalized but also delighted. “You did WHAT?”

She took a sip of her fountain drink, savoring both the taste of crispy Diet Coke and the memory. “You were gone a long time.”

“We were buying YOGURT.”

She shrugged. Apparently, somewhere between produce and dairy, Courtney had decided that Publix wasn't the only place offering samples. I nearly choked.

“And then,” she said, like we had reached the boring part of the story, “I told him to call my room when he got off work.”

“What time did he get off?” I'm reeling.

“Two.”

“In the morning?”

“No, Margaret. Two in the afternoon. Yes, in the morning.”

“And he called?”

“Of course he called.”

I leaned closer. “And?”

“I told him I was tired and went back to sleep.”

I stared at her, mouth still agog. I imagined this poor kid had spent the rest of his shift driving strangers to and from Applebee's with the motivational power of an impending hotel-room rendezvous carrying him through the night, only to finally call upstairs and discover that his cougar had entered sleep mode.

“You invited him upstairs, made him wait until two in the morning, and then—”

“I changed my mind," she shrugged, twirling the straw in her drink with a fingertip, "it's allowed."

I had to shrug as well, because that's true, she's allowed to change her mind. Courtney smiled, not embarrassed, not apologetic. She didn't even seem particularly impressed with herself. That situation fascinated me. Scandalized me. Shocked me. Awed me, even.

At that time, I still thought sex had to mean something. Maybe it wasn't going to end up in marriage. Maybe not even love. But something. Attraction required emotional analysis, for me. A kiss required a committee meeting with all of my feelings. If a man touched my boob, I thought there should probably be a follow-up conversation regarding everyone's intentions. This is not true for everyone.

Courtney had apparently reached a stage of womanhood where a beautiful eighteen-year-old Marine could simply be a pleasant twenty-minute feature of a Jacksonville layover, no emotional infrastructure required. I had so many questions.

“Did you even want him to come upstairs?”

“At the time.”

“And then?”

“I got sleepy.”

I looked at our other flight attendant. She was giggling so hard she had tears in her eyes. I felt brand new on the planet, trying to catch up. I looked back at Courtney.

“So that's why you were disappointed when the other van driver showed up.”

“I wasn't disappointed.”

“You said oh like somebody canceled Christmas.”

“He wasn't as cute.”

There are moments early in your flight attendant career when you realize the women you're flying with have lived entire lives you know absolutely nothing about. They have ex-husbands and current husbands and boyfriends in three cities. They've had affairs and divorces and terrible dates in Paris. They've been proposed to in hotel rooms and dumped in airport terminals. They've kissed people they shouldn't have kissed and declined people they absolutely should have.

And occasionally, apparently, they've spent twenty-five minutes corrupting at least one member of the United States Marine Corps outside a Publix in Jacksonville.

Then they put their uniform back on the next day, check their emergency equipment, and ask if you want coffee.

Courtney looked at the clock. Our sit was almost over. We threw away our trash, collected our bags, and headed toward the gate for our next flight.

I walked beside her. “So if the cute driver had been working the next morning? Would you have gotten his number or something?”

She glanced at me. “Maybe.”

“That poor kid.”

“He'll be fine.”