Tom and Buddy persisted, and Sam was desperate to go, and Tom pulled some strings to arrange for nearly free passage on an Italian cruise ship. He and I would give lectures on faith to a group of sober people, in exchange for a week traveling among Caribbean ports with Buddy, Sam, and Sam’s friend Alex.
Sam and Alex and I got up one day at dawn and flew to Fort Lauderdale. I had developed a tic by the time we met up with Tom and Buddy at the dock. I’m the world’s worst traveler, afraid of all the usual things—of wars, of snakes, of sharks, of undertows. But I was also worried about group hugs, VX gas attacks, and huge platters of cream puffs. I was afraid I would never be able to stop eating the cream puffs once I got started: I saw myself as Al Pacino in Scarface, facedown on the plate of cocaine, only I’d be buried in puff pastry, custard in my hair.
I love to swim in warm seas but hate getting there. I cling to the motto of my favorite travel agents, Karl and Carl, who advise, “Trust no one, see nothing.”
A thousand people were waiting to board when we arrived at the dock. The predominant adornment—stitched, beaded, embossed, tattooed—was the U.S. flag. There were lots of women with big hair, but as Ann Richards once said, “The bigger the hair, the closer to heaven.” My sense, which was confirmed in conversations later in the week, was that these were not people with a lot of money: these were largely people who saved to go on cruises every few years.
Tom was wearing a T-shirt with the Arabic alphabet on it. Buddy had a bag of M&M’s, and the five of us ate them by the fistful. Tom and Buddy, in their upscale hobo clothes and with the beginnings of beards, stuck out in the bright, cheery crowd. People gave Buddy second looks, because he’s the last person you’d expect to find on a cruise ship, besides me. He’s in his mid-fifties, and to the untrained eye looks sort of seedy: overweight, with flyaway hair and at least two front teeth missing, as if he’d just gotten out of bed and forgotten his partial dentures.
Tom travels worldwide to lead spiritual retreats and teach English, and very little worries him when it comes to travel. Buddy, in contrast, had not been on a boat since the Vietnam War, and everything waterish scares him. As soon as we were safely onboard, he became convinced that the ship would tip over. Then, after we were shown to our rooms by smiling, handsome young men, he became convinced that a revolution was brewing among the cabin help. And that John Ashcroft was spying on us three adults, because of Tom’s shirt, and also because, while standing in line in port, we had accidentally expressed our opinions on George Bush’s sobriety and deft diplomatic touch in the Middle East.
Sam and Alex went off on their own, and we went to sit outside and look out at the ocean, which was kindergarten blue. People streamed past us in bright-colored leisure wear and with flags—flag pins, T-shirts, purses, sarongs, swimsuits, baseball caps, fingernails. A woman with a huge blond beehive wrapped in a flag scarf walked by, and Buddy turned to Tom with a look of horror. “Live and let live,” said Tom. “The rain and the sun fall on the just and unjust, and while this is offensive, it is true.”
I loved my room. It was small and clean and had a porthole—and there was no one else in it. I could have stayed there forever, if I hadn’t been in there with myself. I started to channel Buddy: worried about the ship’s tipping over, water pouring through my porthole, shark attacks. I put on some shorts and announced to the aunties that we were going for a brisk walk on the ship’s promenade. They are so in love with me, as if I were a gentleman caller. Half the time I am hard on them, viewing them with contempt, covering them in blue jeans when it is hot, threatening to do something drastic one of these days—I’ll make them start jogging, that’s what I’ll do! Or I’ll get them some lymphatic seaweed wraps, bandage them like mummies in Saran Wrap, and then parboil them for an hour. Sometimes I catch myself being mean to them, and my heart softens, and I apologize, hang my head, and put lotion on them, as if laying on hands. And after periods when I have acted most ashamed of them, I adorn them with children’s tattoo bandages, with butterflies and wolves.
Sam and Alex became co-conspirators with Buddy on our way to dinner the first night, after he announced to them, sotto voce, that he had discovered plans for an uprising among the cabin crew, brewing, even as we walked, in the boiler room. After that, the boys would follow him anywhere.
On the way to the dining room, Buddy took us on a tour of the ship’s more glaring infirmities: gouges in the wall, various cracks that needed caulking. He showed us to the fancy glass elevators in the center of the ship, from which people were streaming on their way to the dining rooms, past well-appointed shops and bars, ornate columns and marble staircases. When everyone had gotten out of one elevator, Buddy stared inside and clutched his head. He looked at Sam and Alex to see if they had noticed: the handrail had pulled free, and screws stuck out of the walls. “What if the hull is like this?” he said. Alex and Sam gripped their foreheads.
I walked to dinner with my arm on Buddy’s, like royalty, past the shops, where vendors stood in the doorways and called for us to come in, like the sirens in the Odyssey. Buddy, with his missing front teeth and mussed-up hair, pulled me close, protectively. “This woman is incorruptible!” he cried to them.
There was way too much food on the cruise, every time you turned around. Half of me wanted to eat it all, and half wanted to go on a diet. I heard my therapist reminding me again and again that diets make you fat and crazy, ninety-five percent of the time. So I asked the aunties, who get out so rarely, what they wanted to eat. They covered their mouths; it was too ridiculous to say. Eventually they chose slices of mango, cocktail prawns, and whole-wheat buns still hot from the oven, and two servings of crème brûlée.
Sam and Alex wore white shirts and khakis to dinner, and the five of us sat with four adults we’d just met. I watched the other adults relate to the boys, who talked away like normal people, making shifty eye contact as they spoke; when others spoke, the boys listened. Every so often Sam looked at me with a vague scorn, as though he thought I was talking too much, but I tried to let him be. I am not here to be his friend. I’m here to be me, which is taking a great deal longer than I had hoped, and I am here to raise him to be a person of integrity and joy. Besides, the kid you know at home is only a facet of the child who lives in the world. His voice, bearing, and vibe change to suit the company, as in those flip books where you can change the hat, head, torso, and legs of the figure, so that an admiral with a spyglass can turn into a pirate, then into a sea monster, then into a sailor or a porpoise. I liked to watch Sam discover parts of himself through other people at the table, the way I have liked to watch him over the years discover Caesar salad, and the Rolling Stones, and even, to some extent, me.
“Why are you eating such weird food?” Sam demanded of Buddy, who had chosen only an appetizer and dessert, pumpkin soup and crème brûlée.
“I’m preparing for the nursing home,” Buddy said, opening his eyes wide. It took a moment for Sam to realize Buddy was teasing. “I am! I practice sleeping with a pillow between my knees, so I don’t get bedsores.”
“Oh, Buddy,” said Sam, so affectionately it was as if the flip book had just gone past the spy, past the pirate, past the hoodlum, to a young sweet boy.
I met up with Tom and Buddy for breakfast the next morning. They already had been to the Internet café and were filled with the latest evidence that the United States really was about to attack Iraq within days. “The whole world hates us now, and I’m so afraid,” Buddy said. “I don’t feel there’s any hope at all—I feel like one of those goats you see in Indonesia, that tour guides bring along with them, tied to the top of their buses, when they take people to see Komodo dragons. They toss the goats over the cliffs to the Komodo dragons below.”
“Live goats?” I asked.
“The goats have to be alive, because the dragons want to play, and it’s more fun for the tourists.”
“Maybe the goats don’t know what awaits them.”
“Of course the goats know,”
Buddy replied. “The smell of Komodo dragon shit and dead goats gets stronger the closer they get.”
“What are we going to do? I mean, seriously.”
“I can’t speak for you, miss,” Tom said. “But I’m going back to my room pretty soon, and I’m going to stretch out and read all morning. And if there is crème brûlée again for lunch, I think I’ll be able to get through the day.”
That sounded like a plan. I got into bed with a stack of magazines. Tom had given me The Nation and Harper’s, while the receptionist at the spa had lent me Harper’s Bazaar, and the combination was perversely right.
After a while, though, I went to visit Tom, whose room was next door to mine. He was lying on his back, reading a book about Muslim culture.
“I get so afraid,” I said.
“And God delights in you, even when you’re scared and at your craziest. Just like God delights in the men in their flag bikinis, with their little units showing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m incredulous, too.”
I stretched out beside him on the bed, laughing. “Some of these people seem to be drinking dozens of nice social drinks all day,” I said.
“As soon as we’re tied up near a beach, we’ll have them all thrown overboard. After lunch, before boating. Until then, we’ll just be kind and say, ‘Hi! How are you doing? Can I get you another crème brûlée?’ ”
It was beautiful and dreamy up on deck. I lounged on a chair in the shade, in my shorts, studying the people who were lying in direct sun. I heard my father’s dermatologist explaining to him, thirty years ago, “A tan skin is a damaged skin,” when he was treating him for melanoma. I practiced identifying with a few people nearby, but not the thin, lithe, young, tanned, toned beauties. What was the point? It was like a caribou’s comparing herself with a cat, a different species altogether. That’s me in twenty pounds, I thought pleasantly, looking at one woman. That’s me in twenty years, I thought, watching an old man with Coke-bottle glasses. I closed my eyes and listened to the engines, and to distant voices. I felt as though I were inside a great breathing being, buoyed up by the water in the pool, the pool buoyed up by the ocean, floating on the earth. I remembered learning to swim in the deep end of the rec center pool, when my dad would hold me up until I felt safe enough to rest down into the water and float. In those days, we all spent too much time in the sun—who knew?
I slathered on more sunscreen, pulled my floppy lavender hat down lower, and covered my legs with a towel, even though I was in shade.
I slept and woke a few times over the next hour. Once when I came to, a bevy of young women was swimming in the pool, so sunlit and Pepsodent and similar that for a groggy moment I thought they were doing synchronized swimming. They stirred my memory of the older girls at the rec center, the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, practicing in the deep end while we younger girls paddled nearby, agog, flannel fish sewn to our suits so the lifeguards would know we could swim. We worshipped the peppy, vigorous older girls in their white tank suits and bathing caps with petals and chin straps, swimming on their backs in perfect circles like a dream, like a wedding cake, suddenly dipping beneath the turquoise water, the pointed stalks of their legs reappearing first, and then the rest of them, as they floated on their backs like skydivers in a daisy chain.
When I was young, I thought that this must be what heaven was like, to be one of those teens. When you’re synchronized, you are all beautiful—Breck girls opening and closing like anemones in time-lapse photography, kaleidoscopically.
I fell asleep again, and when I woke, Buddy was standing over me, calling my name. Sam was peering at me with disapproval, as if he’d found me sunbathing in biohazard gear. Buddy bent down beside me.
“Things are clearly growing uglier down in the boiler room,” Buddy whispered. “We need to be on the lookout for possible security breaches.”
“Who’s the leader of the uprising?” I asked.
“The revolution is being led by unseen forces. In the boiler room.”
Alex held his finger to his lips. I nodded grimly.
Tom and I were out on deck that afternoon, waiting for Buddy. Everything was more fun when he was around. Sam and Alex had fallen in with a roving gaggle of teenagers, had gone off to God knows where.
“Why are you always chewing on ice?” I asked.
“Rage,” said Tom.
“I’m worried about what Sam and Alex do after we go to sleep,” I said. “I’m afraid they sneak into the bars. It’s such a mean, scary world. And Sam can be so mean to me, too.”
“He’s very different with us from how he is with you. He’s wonderful with us. All kids’ behavior makes their parents a little crazy sometimes. And vice versa. My ninety-four-year-old mother said something annoying to me over the phone on Christmas Eve, and I whined at her, ‘I hate it when you say that.’ So she says it again, right? I said, ‘Please don’t say that. It makes me feel like an eleven-year-old.’ And when she said it again, I slammed down the phone. She’s ninety-four! I’m a middle-aged priest—and it’s Christmas Eve! I wanted to throttle her over the phone. But I finally figured out that it was my craziness, so I went to see her at the old folks’ home, and I brought everyone communion, and it was lovely.”
We stood at the railing, our backs to the sea. Even from fifteen feet up, I could see the corrugated skin, the lumps and veins and chicken-skin knees of other passengers. I saw huge guts, bad moles. There were many fat, hairy middle-aged men in teeny bikinis, many matronly middle-aged women with big fallen breasts and poor posture—that which used to be the offering was now the burden. But it’s our hearts that weigh us down. Who could even imagine what cargo these people carried? One old woman seemed to be wearing oversize pink-tinted panty hose. They looked like the pink tights we wore for ballet lessons, a room of small girls in black leotards, leaping about the rec center’s deeply scratched polished floors. Because I was so thin, my tights were always baggy, but I felt pretty—until I would hear a grown-up ask my mother, “Don’t you ever feed her?” and my mother would laugh, as if this was so witty, even though we heard it all the time. But she’d be mad when she told my father later. He always used the word “slender” to describe me. The pink stockings on the cruise ship turned out to be the old woman’s own skin. She had grown too thin for her tights, and they were bagging on her.
Saint Bette said that heaven is where people finally stop talking about their weight and what they look like. I feel grateful just to think of Bette Midler’s being alive during my years on the planet—just as I do about Michael Jordan and Nelson Mandela. Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to joy and equanimity. I prayed for the willingness to have very mild spiritual well-being. I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees. And in a sudden moment of clarity, I realized that I also needed to create my own cruise ship again.
I said good-bye to Tom, and stopped at the snack bar for a glass of cranberry juice and soda with lime. I went by the café and asked the aunties what they might like for a snack—bread pudding or fruit salad. They wanted half a sandwich, a lot of bread pudding, and one small whole-wheat bun. I think they would have ordered a bread beverage if they could—beer, with hops and barley, or in the interest of sobriety, a raisin-bread frappé. Bread is as spiritual as human life gets. Rumi wrote, “Be a well-baked loaf.” Loaves are made to be eaten, to be buttered, and shared. Rumi is saying to be of service, to be delicious and give life.
The aunties know things.
I went to my room, changed into my swimsuit, slathered on sunscreen, and stopped at the spa for a couple of magazines. I went on deck, where people lay sunbathing. I found a lounge chair in the shade and lay down. At first I used my towel as a blanket, but even in the shade it was hot, and the aunties felt smothered. They love the sun. So I took off the towel, and then my shorts, and ate my bread pudding. I opened a magazine. Every so often, I looked up
and smiled at people walking by.
Once again: If Jesus was right, these are all my brothers and sisters.
And they are so letting themselves go.
This is not how Jesus would have seen things, but at first I couldn’t help it—once again I saw an expanse of walruses, big wet bodies flopped down on towels, letting it all hang out. Some people were sleeping in the sun. I worried about their sunburns and melanomas, as some of them had moles I thought should be looked at when we reached the next port. People were putting cool lotion on their bodies, and on one another. They got up and returned with drinks. They handed one another caps and visors, and covered one another with towels.
I drank my cranberry and soda, and put more lotion on the aunties. They loved it out here on deck—the sun, our favorite drink, watching the company onboard. I felt safe with the people around me now. This sense of safety suddenly made it clear to me that, looking at us, God saw not walruses but babies: radiant and befuddled, all these hearts at temporary rest. When you rest, you catch your breath, and it fills your lungs and holds you up, like water wings, like my father in the deep end of the rec center pool.
twenty-three
let us commence
I am honored and surprised when people ask me to speak at their graduations, and this is what I say:
This must be a magical day for you. I wouldn’t know. I accidentally forgot to graduate from college. I meant to, thirty-some years ago, but things got away from me. I did graduate from high school—do I get a partial credit for that?—although, unfortunately, my father had forgotten to pay the book bill, so at the graduation ceremony, when I opened the case to look at my diploma, it was empty. Except for a ransom note that said, See Mrs. Foley, the bookkeeper, if you ever want to see your diploma alive again.