“You’re just awful!” she said, laughing.
“I don’t know. Have you ever considered dyeing your hair blonde? Like Melissa, you know? Maybe Mom would like you a little more.”
“When dessert comes, you’re going to be wearing it,” she laughed.
“Maybe my mother was right, after all,” I sighed.
That got her to splutter at me, but neither of us wasted our dessert, which was cheesecake. I commented to her, “I am definitely going to have to do some running tomorrow, or they’re going to have to wheel me off this barge!”
“Even on vacation?”
“Run with me.”
She gave me an interesting smile. “I can think of lots more interesting things to do in the morning.”
“That’s also a possibility. I have to say, that’s also a definite possibility. Did you have anything specific in mind? I mean, really, really specific?”
“You’re just a dirty old man,” Marilyn laughed.
“I’m a dirty young man. Totally different. My father, now he’s a dirty old man. He and Mom…” I just waggled my eyebrows at her.
“Gross! I don’t even want to think about that!”
After dinner, I stopped at the maitre de’s desk near the front of the restaurant and asked if it was possible to change tables. He looked at me curiously, and I explained that there was a little difference in personalities with our tablemates. He, in turn, said he already had a request from them for the same thing. I just smiled and said I would leave it in his hands, and I would remember it at the end of the week. You don’t tip on the boat at each meal, but at the end of the week, you give tips in envelopes, to the restaurant staff and the room staff.
Then we went down to the theater for the evening show. That first night, the show was more in the way of an orientation. The cruise director did a little show and tell about the Sun Viking, and gave us answers to all the usual questions, like when is the midnight buffet. (At midnight, that’s why they call it the midnight buffet!)
The Seventies is when cruising as a vacation really took off in America. The Love Boat had just started a year or two before, and it depicted a cruise ship off the Mexican and California coasts, where people fell in love, and the crew had all sorts of romantic and hilarious moments. It was incredibly popular at the time, and ran well into the Eighties. Real cruises have very little in common with The Love Boat, but that’s not to say they weren’t just as enjoyable. Still, the cruise director had to work to fix some misperceptions.
Some of them simply weren’t discussed. On the television show, the whole crew was white Americans, with a few blacks or foreigners thrown in for balance. Real cruise ships are totally different. Royal Caribbean was pretty typical. All the officers and bridge staff and engineering staff were Western European (the shipping line was Norwegian and they only hired ex-Norwegian Navy captains to run their ships). All the waiters and busboys and cleaning people were Asian, and if they only made peanuts, it still beat what they would make in a slum in Manila or Jakarta. Finally, all the entertainment and cruise staff were Americans, usually a bunch of Hollywood and Broadway wannabes. The cruise director was actually a standup comic.
After the show, we walked around some more, had a few drinks in one of the lounges, and waited until midnight to see the midnight buffet. You will never go hungry on one of these boats. You have breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, midnight buffet, and any number of other things to snack on in between. They also had about a dozen bars and lounges on board, and while that wasn’t covered under the all-in-one price, there were some guys who bellied up to the bar on Sunday and never left until we docked on Saturday!
Tonight was what they considered informal. Monday night, we were out to sea, and was formal, very formal, bring your tuxedo formal. Tuesday we would dock in Bermuda and until we left Thursday, everything was informal. Friday we were out to sea again, and we were formal (although not quite as formal as Monday) that last night. Saturday we would dock back in New York and go home.
No, I didn’t molest Marilyn on the deck that night, since we were both tired from a long day. I did let her try to keep me in bed the next morning, and boy, did she try hard! Afterwards, though, I got up and ran around the boat for a few miles, and then went back to the cabin and jumped back in bed with her. That seemed like a reasonable compromise. Afterwards, we cleaned up and went down to breakfast.
We were seated at a table with several other people. Breakfast and lunch seating they tried to minimize the number of tables used, to lighten the load on the staff. There is only a single seating, and you can come in whenever you like, and you don’t sit at your assigned table. Marilyn had picked up a copy of the daily schedule for the ship, along with the ship’s newspaper, printed somewhere down below. We were greeted by the people sitting next to us, a retired couple from Boca Raton. Marilyn loves this sort of thing, since she’s one of the world’s biggest gossips. She can sit and talk to anybody, for hours.
We decided on table service, rather than the breakfast buffet. The house specialty was suggested, Eggs Benedict, which Marilyn asked for, but I declined. I ordered two eggs over easy. “What are Eggs Benedict anyway?” she asked after the waiter left.
“You don’t know?! You ordered them!” I replied, incredulous.
“Well, I’ve heard of them.”
I just stared for a second. “Unbelievable. I’ve heard of the North Pole, too, but I don’t think I want to visit there.”
“Behave!”
“Eggs Benedict is a poached egg on an English muffin, with Hollandaise sauce on it, or something like that,” I explained.
“That sounds like something you’d enjoy,” she argued.
“Yeah, except for the fact that I can’t stand poached eggs!”
The waiter brought our juice, orange for Marilyn and tomato for me, and then I sent him back for some Tabasco sauce. When he returned I sprinkled some in my tomato juice, along with some salt and pepper. “You and your Tabasco sauce!” remarked my wife.
I sipped it and it was pleasantly spicy. “That’ll get your heart started in the morning. Put some hair on your chest.” Tabasco is probably the most popular condiment for soldiers; somebody always has a bottle, even out in the field on exercises.
“You need some more, then,” she commented, causing our tablemates to laugh.
“That is cold, lady! That is cold!” I said. “You weren’t complaining about my chest this morning,” I replied, winking at the others.
Marilyn squealed with indignation and swatted me, and then went back to gossiping with the neighbors. She’s world class. All of our children over the years would tell me something, like they were getting married or being deployed overseas, and would always warn me not to tell their mother, since it was a secret. (Well, don’t tell me then, either, but I can keep my mouth shut!) The typical phrasing used was, “Mom can keep a secret just as long as it takes her to find a telephone!” Eventually that was modified to “… as long as it takes her to log on to her email!” Invariably, after the kids would tell her, weeks or months later, she would squawk about being kept in the dark, especially after they would laugh and tell her I had been told weeks or months before!
Monday was a total goof-off day, just sailing around the middle of the Atlantic, with no land in sight and nothing to be seen but the occasional ship in the distance. It was clear and sunny and cloudless. I gave Marilyn a wedding present of sorts, a new string bikini, which she protested about when she saw how small it was, but then she put it on, along with a cover-up. I changed into my swim trunks (basic Army issue green) and a tee shirt, and we headed up to the pool deck. The Sun Viking had two pools on the same deck, as opposed to some of the later ships which had more than one pool deck. We found a spot, set out our stuff, and hopped in the pool briefly, then slathered on some lotion to get a tan. Thankfully, Marilyn had been to the tanning booth before the wedding, so she didn’t look white as a ghost. I also had some color, but it was mostly the redneck tan of a guy who’s out in the sun working. Chest and legs pale, face and neck and arms dark. Well, we don’t play with those howitzers indoors!