They sleep on their backs. The ship leaves the Bahamas in the night.
The third day is a day at sea.
At dinner, the dad and the mom sit facing Mattie and Paul.
The mom looks over at Christine’s table. A different woman is there. Older, with chandelier earrings, a lot of make-up. Her glass of water is empty and on the edge of her table.
Mattie reads the menu in her head, “… a bed of carrots, broccoli, and four other green,” then out loud, “red, healthy, steamed vegetables.” She looks up.
“You’re the sarcastic one,” says the dad. He’s looking at Mattie. He brings his hand up from under the table. He points at Paul. “You. What are you? You’re sarcastic too, aren’t you?”
“I’m the outwardly depressed, inwardly content one,” says Paul.
“He’s the sarcastic-sarcastic one,” says Mattie. “Two sarcastics.” She flips her menu over, looks at the back of it.
“I’m the outwardly depressed, inwardly content one,” says Paul.
The soup is green and good. The salad is crunchy, with water droplets all over and in it. Mattie has ordered the steamed vegetables. She eats most of it. She crushes a carrot by pressing down hard with her spoon, which then squeals against the plate. I’m the stupid one, she thinks. She grins a little. She reaches for the sugar, changes her mind, moves her hand to her water, changes her mind, brings her hand to her head, scratches behind her ear.
“I saw that,” says the dad. “I saw starting with the childlike behavior with the carrot.” He looks at Mattie, at Paul. I made you two, he thinks. He stands and reaches across the table and pats Mattie on the head. He pats Paul, too, on the head. He sits back down. He pats the mom on the head. The mom pats the dad on the head. She smiles. She turns and looks quickly over at Christine’s table again.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I keep looking.”
That night, after the farewell show in the Moonbeam lounge — a dancing, singing, juggling thing — there is the midnight buffet. It has three ice sculptures. A swan, a bear, a dolphin. The foods are also sculpted. There are owly apples, starfishy cheeses, cookies shaped esoterically like ocean sunfish. People take photos of their plates. They eat cautiously at first, then, having realized something, violently, biting off heads and fins and limbs, grinning. The mom runs down to their room and comes back with the camcorder.
After the buffet, they go up to the top deck. The air is cool, and the ocean, all around, is black and smooth. The stars are rich and streaky, as if behind water. They go down one deck, into a glass-enclosed area. It is late and there are just a few other people here.
There is a ping-pong table. The dad challenges Mattie and Paul. The mom starts up her camcorder, which is digital. “If I lose,” says the dad, “I’ll buy you both cars.” The mom zooms wildly in on the dad’s face. She pans back and steps in closer. Paul’s body is languid and cascaded, chin to chest to stomach, but his arms are speedy and graceful. The dad stands rigidly, up close to the table. He does not bend his back or twist his hips. He tosses his paddle from hand to hand. “Ambidextrous,” he says. He is winning. From his time in prison, he has become an expert at ping-pong. He flips over his paddle and serves with the handle end — a slow, high lob to Paul. Mattie chops the ball down massively, tennis-style, and, while doing that, knocks Paul to the floor. The ball bounces hard and loud and high. The dad leaps and tosses his paddle into the air. The paddle does not connect with the ball. The dad catches his paddle. “Mattie,” he says. “Mattie!” The mom’s hand is shaking a little. She tries to keep the camcorder steady with both hands. She hears Mattie laughing and Paul saying, “What the hell was that? What was that!” She tries to zoom in on Mattie laughing. She pans back and sees Paul on the floor still. His face is startled and young. He has taken off a shoe. He throws it at Mattie. Mattie whacks the shoe at the dad, who pivots and whacks the shoe behind him, where it goes spinning over the railing into the dark. The mom pushes the camcorder at Mattie’s chest. Mattie is laughing and she looks and takes the camcorder. The mom runs off, into the fore of the ship — a dark, open area with lounge chairs, railing, the sky, the ocean. Mattie sets the camcorder down on the ping-pong table. She runs and follows her mom. There is a cool breeze and it is very calm and quiet. The floor is wood. The mom is at the railing. Her form is small and vague.
Mattie goes closer, hears that her mom is weeping, and hesitates. She stops smiling and feels that her cheeks are tired. She glances away, turning her ear flat to the sandpapery roar of the wind, then looks back, quiet again. The mom has turned a little. Mattie has a sudden bad thought and is about to say, “Mom, wait,” but the mom now turns fully around. She is crying loud and wet. She steps slowly toward Mattie. She cries with her arms at her sides. “Mattie,” she says. She flings a fist up to her shoulder, pushes it back down to her side. There’s a contrary draft of wind and the mom’s hair sweeps, diagonal, across her face. The ocean behind her is pooling and dark and quietly moving. The sky is black and close. “Oh, Mattie,” she says. Her voice is loud and clear. “I’m so happy.”
Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues
That kind of gnawing offness that Greg always felt, that constant knowledge that he was doomed in small but myriad ways, intensified in the presence of people, became immediate and insufferable, like a rat in the stomach. So after his parents sold the house and retired to California, Greg moved alone into an apartment behind a rundown 24-hour supermarket. There he drank coffee, and watched The History Channel. His meals became larger and less often, like a crocodile’s. He’d eat an entire package of bacon or a box of frosty muffins, sleep for 20 hours, and then masturbate, languishingly, to all his crushes from middle and high school. He became nocturnal and strange, taking on all the impatience and bipolarity of a young child, without any of the charm or smooth complexion. Sometimes he’d catch himself speaking, in his head, to objects — a thing of food, a box of Kleenex, a door — hesitate, but then continue, keep on going with what he needed to say, finish it off, out loud, because what did it matter, either way?
But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did — he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve.
As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way — like the moon. Whereas before, reclused in his apartment, Greg felt as if on the moon, negotiating all its post-apocalyptic, spaceman barrenness and sometimes eyeing the Earth out there — that gaudy ornament in space — at first with envy, but then with a latent, inaccurate sort of hatred.
It was probably best not to think about your life, though — ever — Greg knew, but to just assume that it was there, and happening, to trust that it was out there, doing whatever it was that a life would do. It was probably best, instead, to spend your time wiping the bathroom floor with wet toilet paper; filling the refrigerator with food, noting the day-to-day depletion of it; looking at stuff and going “Hmm” without thinking anything. Things like that. Things that were neutral and lucid and made profound sense as long as you kept them to yourself, in a secret box concealed from the rest of your brain — a box you then crawled into, like a hiding spot. An end-place.