At Last at Sea
BY Sarah Steinberg
Photography by Ronnie Comeau
"My dear, you will love it,” my mother had told me over the phone from Toronto, lingering on the L, attending to the V. “You’ll just love it,” she said again, as I wrapped the phone cord around my wrist like a bracelet, staring out at the palm tree in my backyard. “It’s just glorious. I'll fly in and stay with you, and we’ll board the ship from San Diego. You’ll see.”
But I don’t like being in a place where the doors don’t lead to land and each day begins and ends like the one before it. No newspapers, no cooking, no cash, and the only thing to see out the window is ocean. Grey, blue, white and water, water, water. It doesn’t even seem that we’re moving.
When the elevator reaches the lido deck, the door opens on a gaggle of little kids in bathing suits. One of them, a small girl about five, is wearing orange flotation devices on her arms. I’ve seen her in the water every day, splashing around and giggling.
“Hi, Fishy,” I say, and wave. We had a conversation in the pool yesterday. She explained to me, her eyes big and round and earnest, that she was a dolphinin- a-whale-fishy-boat. My mother is already making her way toward the buffet. Fishy waves back.
Lounge chairs line the rim of the pool on the lido deck, employed mostly by ladies in old-fashioned bathing suits with oily, rubbery skin, many of whom have positioned sheets of aluminum under their faces to catch the sun. The majority of the ship’s passengers appear to be these old ladies, travelling in twos and threes, though there is the occasional husband, plate heaped with food, lingering behind a more ambulatory wife. And there are some younger couples too, celebrating, I can only imagine, first and second anniversaries. I wish my mother had a group of friends to cruise with, to play mah jong with, to talk to.
Across the deck at the buffet my mother is gesturing to me. She picks up a piece of something from a plate and pops it into her mouth. As she begins to chew, she stabs her finger three times towards the plate, and then at me, and then again at it. I recognize this pantomime. I shake my head no, and then she repeats the same series of gestures. The man beside her is staring. When she points at the food again, thrusting her finger toward it more forcefully, and for the third time, he goes around her.
She is wearing only a purple bathing suit and a straw hat, a pair of enormous sunglasses overwhelming her already small face. I feel embarrassed, but in fact I’m embarrassed to be embarrassed. This is my mother, with the good intentions, the incessant worry (“For your welfare, dear”) and the endless, inane stories of minor domestic disturbances (a raccoon-in-the-garbage-can might last up to half an hour, complete with a detailed denouement outlining the steps taken to protect the garbage against another attack). And she is also, at times, poetic, as when she wrote to me in an email about the mother of a bride: “That bitch Anne will be cool and elegant in some invisible little number, and I envision myself sweating, red-faced and thirsty.”
My mother is talking to a woman who is also wearing a straw hat, her hair pulled back into a neat bun. This woman is lean and well-dressed, in linen pants and a blousy top. She is perfectly attired for a luxury cruise, though that is not quite what this is. I bob around in the water for a while, my ears just below the surface.
Later, in our tiny room, my mother is sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette. She tells me she’s made a friend.
“Another woman whose daughter hates her,” she says. “It’s interesting, we were talking about it, and this woman is a sociologist, but she says she doesn’t know why her daughter hates her. She said it just happens that way sometimes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Maybe your friend the sociologist needs a therapist,” I say.
“Maybe you do.”
“I’m going back to the pool,” I say, and walk out of our room, directly toward the casino.
Our first night on the ship we were placed at a dining table with six others: an elderly couple, neither of whom could hear very well, two sisters, both former schoolteachers, and two women named Cathy—friends in their mid-forties, both from San Diego, both blond, both former bombshells.
The dining room was set elegantly, with white cloth draped over the tables, linen stuffed into the wine glasses, and chandeliers, at least 70 of them, above every table, dripping with glass that was not crystal but looked it.
“Well,” my mother said, to no one in particular, and inhaled deeply, as if preparing to answer a question that hadn’t yet been asked. Both Cathys looked at her.
“Isn’t this nice?” she said, exhaling and unfolding a cloth napkin. The Cathys nodded.
“Is this your first time on a cruise?” one of the Cathys, the one with slightly shorter, blonder hair, asked.
“Oh no!” my mother said. “Oh no, no! I sailed to Peru last year. This is, in fact, my fourth cruise. And not to be my last!” She paused. “Unless I pop off suddenly!”
She looked at me and laughed a deep, miserable laugh. I noticed one of the schoolteachers, whose name I had already forgotten, eye her sharply. Oh, fuck off, I thought at the schoolteacher. Just you fuck off.
Our first course was served, a spinach salad with little chunks of canned, white asparagus, tomatoes and bacon, and I began to pick at it, moving the bacon out of the way with my fork.
The same Cathy spoke up. “I’ve never been to Mexico before. Except T.J. I mean real Mexico. But I’m so excited. I hope I can bring back some nice things. It’s so cheap.”
My mother seemed to have misunderstood Cathy to mean she was concerned about crossing the border with her new Mexican treasures and proceeded to launch into an almost frantic explanation of the U.S. customs system, which, she said, was hardly any different from the Canadian one, and assured Cathy that border patrol was only looking for people who were attempting to transport serious drugs, firearms or cash.
I watched the teacher as she wielded her knife and fork to cut the spinach into more manageable pieces and then halved the already small tomatoes and speared them onto her fork. She made little “Uh-huh” sounds and nodded, without looking, in my mother’s direction.
By dessert, my mother was still talking—to no one in particular, it seemed—about The Antiques Road Show, her mouth full of chocolate cake, and a small piece of asparagus clinging to the side of her chin. I had been staring at her for a long time, ready to point at that spot on my own face, but she never looked at me. The elderly couple had, by then, excused themselves, and the schoolteachers were talking quietly, almost whispering, to each other.
“So what are you going to do now?” I asked, as we were drinking our coffee.
“What the hell do you care?” she said. “You’re certainly not going to spend any time with me.” “You know,” I said, “if you perhaps tried to ask people some fucking questions and then waited long enough to listen to their responses, you might actually make some fucking friends.”
“My daughter with her beautiful language and her advice. Thank you, my darling. I will certainly keep that in mind the next time I’m at dinner with a bunch of sullen witches.”
Our dinner companions pretended not to hear. Whatever symphony had been piped into the dining room had been turned off.
When I reach the casino I see the Cathys sitting at the bar. They smile at me as I near.
“Hi, ladies,” I say. I’m not sure how to address them.
“Hi,” the blonder Cathy says. “We haven’t seen you guys at dinner lately.”
“Oh,” I lie. “We’ve been eating in our room.”
“Your mom’s really funny,” she says. The other Cathy smiles into her cocktail.
“Yep,” I say. And then, because I can think of nothing else, no questions, I shrug and walk away.
I have 20 bucks in my pocket, and I cash it into chips and sit down at the blackjack table. I bet it all on my first hand, which is a blackjack, and my subsequent hands are nearly all winners. Within a half hour I’m $180 up. The croupier, Dave, is friendly, and what’s more, he seems pleased that I’m winning. I feel better than drunk.
“Well,” I say, savouring the sound the chips make as I stack and restack them with my thumb and forefinger, and thinking suddenly of an accordion. “I guess you gotta know when to fold ’em.”
“OK, good,” Dave says. “Good on ya.”
“I know, huh?” I say, surprised by my own restraint.
When I return to our cabin, my mother is still sitting on the little blue sofa. The TV is tuned in to the ship’s channel, a closed-circuit surveillance camera on the top deck; you can see the tip of the boat’s bow, but mostly just what’s in front of us. There’s no land in sight. But I think we’ll be in Acapulco soon, maybe one more day.
Her face is hard set, her jaw clenched, her mouth a frown. She sweeps her eyes over me, from my face to my feet and back up again—a gesture I see teenage girls do a lot—and then she looks away, at the ashtray, her drink. Her eyes are red.
“You are,” she says slowly, nodding her head a bit, “a very bad daughter.”
She says this as if it were the conclusion to a conversation that had been going on for a long time. And I suppose that, in many ways, it is.
“Uh-huh,” I say, but what I really think is that we have a very small room and I wonder if Dave the croupier would like to fuck me and I wonder how late the ship’s bars are open. “You have some spinach on your chin,” I say, which isn’t true.
I close the door behind me and walk down the tiny passageway, toward the elevator, thinking I’ll go to one of the bars. A few doors down I see Fishy, still wearing her bathing suit, her orange flotation devices still attached to her arms.
“Hi, Fishy!” I say.
“No!” she says, shaking her blond head, her damp hair flapping around her face. “No no no, I told you. I’m a whale-in-a-dolphin-in-a-fishy-boat!”
“Oh,” I say, as if it was all clear to me now. “I understand. That’s very interesting, though, because you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m a dolphin.”
“No!” she says, unconvinced, her mouth open, shaking her head. “Nuh-uh.”
“Yep,” I say. “It’s true. I am a dolphin. I’m a dolphin in a girl suit. That’s why you can’t tell right away.”
Fishy looks me over carefully. At first I think she is about to laugh, but then her features twist and she wrinkles her nose and shuts her eyes, and when she opens them again they are brimming with salty little tears.
“No, Fishy,” I say, alarmed.
But she lets out a loud, terrified wail, all her teeth in view.
“It’s OK, it’s OK, dolphins are nice.”
But she is scared and I don’t dare touch her. As she cries, she reaches up toward the handle of her cabin door, but she’s too little and she fumbles with it, twisting it in the wrong direction. I hear footsteps and then the door opens, and Fishy is scooped up by her mother and then gone, the door locked quickly behind them.
“Mommy!” I hear the girl cry, and I stand there, still as salt air, but I can’t make out any words, just more crying, then her mother, who murmurs, and a few light sobs, and then, later, nothing.
