The women on the cleaning crew were almost all Black. The passengers whose crumbs they picked up were almost all white. In the first years, Ruth used to say, there were still airports in the South where she would not have been allowed to buy a cup of coffee at the counter in the same terminal where she cleaned the planes at night. She told this without bitterness, or without much. She told it the way she told everything, as a fact about the world that a person had to know in order to walk through it.
Naomi's father had been ten when his mother started that job. He used to go with her sometimes on Saturday nights, when there was nobody to watch him at home, and sit in the last row of an empty airplane with a comic book while the women worked. He told Naomi later that he had learned everything he needed to know about airplanes on those nights. He learned what the inside of an airplane smelled like when the engines had been off for an hour and the cabin had gone cold. He learned which seats had the most legroom and which had the broken recline. He learned to read the placards on the bulkheads and the overhead bins. And once, he said, when he was twelve, he had sat down in the first row of a big jet, in the wide leather seat at the very front, and closed his eyes, and pretended he was flying to Paris.
His mother had come up the aisle with her bucket and seen him there. She had not told him to move. She had stood next to the seat for a moment, looking at him, and then she had said something he remembered for the rest of his life.
"Planes don't care who sits in them, baby. Only people do."
Then she had told him to lift his feet so she could vacuum.
Naomi had told that story at the launch of the Signature cabin, standing in the aisle in front of seat 2A. She had told the journalists and the guests that her grandmother had cleaned the first-class cabins of other people's airplanes for nineteen years, and that her grandmother had never once sat in one, and that she had built this cabin so that anyone who bought a ticket for it would sit in it exactly the way her father had sat in that empty leather seat when he was twelve: as if it were his. As if nobody could tell him otherwise.
It had been a good speech. The press had quoted it. The marketing team had put a line from it in the inflight magazine.
And then, for eleven months, a cardiologist from Philadelphia had been asked to show her boarding pass three times.
Naomi rinsed the coffee cup and put it in the rack to dry. She put the folder in her bag. She looked once more around the apartment, at the bookshelves and the framed photograph on the wall by the door, a black-and-white picture of a small woman in a work smock standing at the foot of a set of airplane stairs, squinting into the sun. Then she turned off the lights and went down to the car.
* * *
Eddie was waiting at the curb with the engine running and the heat on. He had been her father's driver for six years before he was hers, and he drove the way her father had flown, smoothly and without any wasted motion.
"JFK, Terminal Four," she said, sliding into the back.
"I know where you're going." He met her eyes in the rearview mirror. "Lena called me last night. Said you were flying commercial like a regular person and I wasn't supposed to make a fuss about it."
"I'm always flying commercial, Eddie. It's an airline."
"You know what I mean." He pulled out onto the avenue. The streets were still mostly empty, the traffic lights changing for nobody. "She also said to tell you she thinks this is a bad idea."
"She told me that herself."
"She said to tell you again."
Naomi smiled and looked out the window. The buildings slid by, dark at the top and lit at the bottom where the lobbies and the delis were already open. A man was hosing down the sidewalk in front of a restaurant. A woman in scrubs was waiting at a bus stop with a cup of coffee and her eyes closed.
"What do you think?" she asked.
Eddie was quiet for a block. "I think your father used to do this," he said finally. "Get on his own planes without telling anybody. Sit in the back sometimes. Talk to the crew in the galley. Find out stuff nobody would put in a report."
"I didn't know that."