The Flight Attendant by Trelaine Ito

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    It was an easy enough job. Or at least it used to be. Mary Ann had started back when they were called “stewardesses” and only people of a certain income level could afford to travel by commercial plane. These days everyone flew.
    Mary Ann primped her hair and pressed out the lingering creases in her uniform—a navy blue short-sleeve button up with a matching skirt, brightly patterned neck scarf, and black kitten heels. In a few minutes, the boarding process would begin. Mary Ann checked her lipstick in the distorted reflection of a nearby metal cabinet. It was a classic bright red that highlighted her teeth as she greeted each passenger with a bright, toothy smile and an energetic “Welcome aboard!”
    She mostly got tired nods or annoyed sideway glances in response—it was, after all, a red-eye flight to Chicago.
    She handed out sanitizing wipes and directed people to their seats almost mechanically, having run through these motions countless times over the years that her muscles acted on their own, led by the permanent smile glued to her face. And like a tree standing at a river’s edge, nameless passengers who cycled through her planes as indistinguishable from each other as drops of water in the rapids.
    She doubted that she could recognize any repeat passengers. Their features faded into the background, making them appear in her mind’s eye like phantoms and their interactions like subdued hauntings. And like ghosts glimpsed in the corner of an eye, she never saw them again.
    “Seat F will be on the lefthand side,” Mary Ann said to a tall man with a small duffle bag and a backpack, the combined weight of which looked heavier than the man could bear. She pointed him down the aisle, adding, “Please stow your larger carry on bag in the compartment and your smaller personal bag under the seat in front of you.”
    As she turned to the next passenger, a young man, no older than thirty, said “Thank you” before she could greet him. He smiled and for a split-second Mary Ann recognized his face, his shallow dimples, the leftward tilt of his head, the way his eyes squinted as he searched for his row. It felt as familiar as a reflection.
    Mary Ann continued to greet the remaining passengers but made a note of the young man’s seat: 26C.
    After takeoff, the captain dimmed the lights and the passengers closed their eyes.
Because it was a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, it was an easy enough shift, but for the late hours. Although Mary Ann had an ulterior motive for volunteering. From Chicago, she would try to find a spare seat on a regional flight bound for Dayton, Ohio. She wanted to be closer to home before she took a few days off to see her mother.
    While the passengers slept, Mary Ann paced up and down the aisle, stopping to look out into the darkness of the midnight sky, at which point she caught her reflection in the window, illuminated by the bright lights shining from the galley at the back of the plane, a distant glow that made her seem almost angelic.
    As she stared at herself, she appreciated the fullness of her hair. She had kept her updo since the 80s, perfectly coiffed but subtly tussled, as if she had encountered heavy winds on her way to work but mitigated the damage with heavy-duty hairspray. And yet her hair felt light when it was down, with elongated waves that billowed up and out, curling inward at the ends. It didn’t matter that her coworkers said her hairstyle resembled a helmet or made her look matronly. Mary Ann was proud of her hair, light brown with a few highlights to mask the ever increasing number of white strands.

     She looked down at her reflection and settled on her name tag, a silver pin with wings and the words “MARY ANN” emblazoned in all-caps.
    But that wasn’t the name her mother would use when Mary Ann was a child, not the name her mother would sing as she rocked Mary Ann to sleep.
    “Let’s go this-a-way, not that-a-way, that-a-way only leads to home.
    “Let us find a way, to a better place. Little Ayame will lead, let’s go.”
    Ayame. She was named after her maternal grandmother who, as a little girl, left Japan. Her parents immigrated to California to work on a farm outside of Sacramento, and, after much deliberation, they decided to send for their daughter. Ayame’s grandmother had an uneventful childhood. But as a young woman in the midst of World War II’s prejudices, the American government uprooted her and her family and sent them to an internment camp in Arizona. It was there that Ayame’s grandmother met her husband, who, along with his family, had been similarly removed from San Francisco.
    Finding each other was a ray of joy in an otherwise dry and bleak place. Marrying in the camp meant their wedding was tame, with so many of their belongings left behind in homes they’d never return to.
    Ayame’s mother was born near the end of the war, and when the young family was finally released, they settled in Dayton, hoping to leave behind the memory of the West.
    They bought a small farm and planted their roots deep in the Midwestern soil. Ayame’s mother watched her parents rebuild their lives from scratch, refusing to relinquish the dream of the country in which they were born. They drilled into their daughter a tough and unforgiving work ethic, raising her on a strict schedule of schoolwork and farming.
   In rebellion against her cloistered upbringing, Ayame’s mother returned to her family’s original home state, attending college at UCLA. There, she met her husband and settled in Santa Monica after graduation.
    Ayame was even born in California—a fact she both romanticizes and sometimes forgets, as if her birthland was a distant dream, an Eden in which she could have blossomed if only she had stayed. But Ayame’s grandparents struggled to manage their farm as they aged. So Ayame’s mother moved home to help her parents (although not to the farm, opting for the nearby suburbs of Dayton), bringing her young daughter with her.
    But she vowed not to hold on to her daughter too tightly. The world was so much bigger than Ohio. She’d nudge Ayame to fly away one day and never look back.
    And that was probably why Ayame became a stewardess.
    When she showed up on her first day, her supervisor said, “A-yami? That won’t do. No one can pronounce that. And we don’t want to confuse our passengers, do we?” She gave Ayame a piercing gaze, the subtle implication so clear that it sat on her shoulders and whispered “that won’t do” over and over in her ear.
    Not wanting to lose her job before she even started it, Ayame blurted out, “Use my middle name: Mary Ann.”
    Never mind that she didn’t even have a middle name. It was the first name that popped into her head, something nonthreatening but with a melodic flow, as if the first two syllables acted like a springboard, launching Ann out into the world. And that’s how she would approach her life as a stewardess, launching herself into far flung locations, exploring the world her parents couldn’t.
    “Mary Ann? Good. Follow me.” Her supervisor actually smiled, relieved not to be burdened with an unnecessary difficulty like name pronunciation.
    From then on, Ayame used Mary Ann like an alter ego, someone comfortable with both troublesome passengers and turbulent flights. Mary Ann reminded Ayame of her imagined childhood alter ego, a worldly and well-traveled woman. Every use of her new name was like putting on a mask as part of a superhero costume, one in which she was unrecognizable even to herself. She gave out Mary Ann to all her new acquaintances, wore it proudly on her uniform, and even considered changing her name legally.
    But Ayame she kept for herself.
    Mary Ann continued to patrol the aisle with a large bottle of water and a stack of cups, traversing the length of the plane every fifteen minutes or so with few pauses. She had passed passenger 26C twice now, and both times the young man, sitting under his reading light, scribbled in his journal, head down, casting a shadow over his written words.
    On the third pass, she decided to offer him water. “Excuse me, sir,” she whispered, pointing to the water bottle in one hand with the cups in the other. She felt sorry for breaking his concentration and wanted to apologize, expecting the young man to look up sternly. But his polite eyes betrayed no annoyance.
    “Thanks,” he said, matching her volume. He accepted the cup with one hand and closed his notebook with the other.
    “You must be busy with work. No one else is awake right now.” Mary Ann looked around, and indeed no other reading lights were on.
    “No, this isn’t work,” replied the young man, “I’m just scribbling down some thoughts.”
    “About what?” she asked. Catching herself, she added, “If you don’t mind me asking.”
    “Of course not. Flying always puts me in a writing mood. Something about leaving home, I guess. That’s what I’m writing about: leaving home.”
    “Are you from LA, then?” Mary Ann asked. For her, California evoked mixed feelings of both unbridled potential and unforgivable loss. Her family’s trauma wasn’t her own, but it was hard to separate the idea of a life she could’ve lived had she been raised in Los Angeles, or even Sacramento. Once she learned her family’s history—at a dinner table when she was eleven, after asking her parents why there weren’t other Japanese American kids at her school—she began to craft a story about the Ayame whose mother never left Santa Monica.
    That Ayame would live by the beach and have a permanent tan. Everyone would smile in Santa Monica. And then one day, she’d be discovered as a rising actress and singer, and part-time dancer, appearing as a guest alongside Carol Burnett or Sonny and Cher on their respective TV shows. She’d move on to movies and live in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. She’d travel the world, seeing Bora Bora on a Tuesday and Osaka on a Saturday. She’d wear all the newest fashions like flare jeans or leather miniskirts, and aviator glasses like Gloria Steinem.
    She was so tethered to this fiction that it, at times, felt like reality. She carried herself around the greater Dayton area like someone blessed by the fortunes of destiny, ready to emerge from her chrysalis any day now and fly free. Drawing strength from her alter ego—the woman she could have been or could still become—Ayame was determined to leave. So Ayame became a stewardess, a profession in which at least she could still travel the world.
    “No,” the young man said, snapping Mary Ann back into her current persona. “I’m from Hawaii originally.”
    “You must get this a lot, but I’m very jealous,” Mary Ann replied. “I try to work the Hawaii route any chance I get. It’s such a paradise.”
    “That’s funny because I try to get as far away as soon as possible any chance I get,” said the young man. Mary Ann could see a conflict flash across his face as he spoke, as if different loyalties within him were vying for control over what to say next. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful. But it’s small. I always feel trapped there, so far from the rest of the world. I sometimes wonder who I would’ve been if my parents had stayed on the Mainland after college instead of moving back home.”
    Mary Ann nodded, but she was surprised by his explanation, as if the recognition of herself in his face when he boarded had manifested itself as a parallel life story. Although they were separated by decades, they were almost kin-like in their similar desires to escape their
homes.
    As if reading her mind, the young man asked, “What about you? Where are you from?”
He looked around before adding, “And I’m sorry if I’m keeping you.”
    “No, it’s no problem at all. Everyone’s asleep.” Mary Ann paused. She wanted to reveal her fictitious self, the one from Santa Monica.       She wanted to test out a new persona, which itself was her original alter ego. But the young man might ask specific questions, ones that would pierce the façade and reveal the fraud. So instead, she said, “I’m originally from Dayton.”
    She didn’t mean to sound self-deprecating. Mary Ann had long since come to accept and love her home, even if it was much less magical a place compared to Hawaii. But that was the tone of her revelation, as if she meant “I’m just from Dayton.”
    “I would’ve never guessed that,” the young man replied, chuckling to himself. “How did your family end up there?” His laughter faded as a sobering realization struck him. “I’m sorry. That’s probably not an appropriate question.”
    “Oh no, it’s fine. Umm, well, my mother’s family moved there after the War.” The young man nodded understandingly, so Mary Ann didn’t need to elaborate.
    “I’m sure it’s lovely,” the young man said as more of an olive branch than an honest conjecture.
    “Have you ever been to Dayton?” The two of them simultaneously burst out in muted laughter, trying not to disturb the other sleeping passengers. Still chuckling, Mary Ann moved to end their brief conversation. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your writing.”
    “Wait, what’s your name?” The young man’s question was, at face value, fair. After all, they had been chatting for a few minutes now. But it still caught Mary Ann flatfooted, as if she knew he wasn’t asking for Mary Ann.
    “Mary Ann.”
    “I’m Kazuo. It’s technically my middle name, but also my great-grandfather’s name.”
    Kazuo extended his hand, but Mary Ann was still holding the water bottle and cups, so he withdrew and simply waved. “It was nice meeting you, Mary Ann.”
    “Call me Ayame. That’s my real name. After my grandmother.” It was a split-second decision, but she felt comfortable enough to share her secret with the young man.
    “Well, it was nice meeting you, Ayame.” The surprising thing was that Kazuo didn’t seem to question it. He understood the dance that they both did in a world that defined who they were by their appearance. In that dance, a given name is tool of control.
    “You as well, Kazuo,” replied Ayame, turning away from him and resuming her patrol of the aisle.
    As she walked away, Kazuo returned to his journal, adding new details to his story about a flight attendant.
She was a flight attendant with two names, he wrote. One for the passengers and one she kept for herself