“And now they’d better lose weight,” Bella’s mother had told Robin’s mother over the telephone.
“They’ll do that in their own good time,” replied comfortable Aunt Dee.
Bella, listening in on the extension, stared bleakly into the receiver. Appetite had plagued her since childhood. In her teens she’d developed an awning of a bosom, though her waist remained relatively slender. Her abdomen bulged. Her large legs were shapely, though, and her ankles were narrow — again, relatively.
Bella was sallow. Robin was pale but blushed easily. She had the ready smile of a child and eyes as green as a cake of scented soap. Her body sloped downward from narrow shoulders past jutting little breasts; it didn’t thicken until the tree-trunk waist; then came very wide hips.
The cousins had been close in high school and had gone to similar large universities. Robin studied child development and became a child-life specialist. Her manner with the hospitalized children she worked with was casual and reassuring. Bella majored in business. She was already the valued office manager of a busy real estate firm whose customers craved vistas, and whirlpool baths, and kitchens with granite counters.
Robin had never had a serious boyfriend and Bella had never had a boyfriend at all. Both liked to read — Robin favored whatever was popular; Bella read newspapers and a business weekly and biographies and, somewhat surreptitiously, novels written for middle-schoolers.
On the Golden Swan were two big dining rooms for evening meals. There were two small restaurants as well, one French and one Italian; but how spendthrift to patronize them when the rest of the food on the ship was free. All you could eat! There were four ports of call, one every other day in the middle of the twelve-day voyage. And swimming pools and a gym and a beauty parlor and a gift shop, and the library like a den in an old mansion. You could play shuffleboard and badminton. From a platform on the pelican deck you could drive golf balls into the sea. A party swirled every night; some had themes like Costume Ball and Talent Show. At the first party, Meet the Captain, a gray-haired Scandinavian with limited English tirelessly shook everybody’s hand and posed for small group photographs displayed for sale later in the central reception room. Robin bought one, and Bella, after some hesitation, also bought one, though she told Robin that the uniformed man must be an impersonator. Shouldn’t a captain be standing on the bridge, his eye out for whales and warships?
But to Robin and Bella the most extraordinary feature of the Golden Swan was the twenty-four-hour buffet. This occupied the entire aft section of the promenade deck. While eating you could watch the golf balls from the deck below soar into the sky and fall into a sea that was Wedgwood here and navy there and, late in the day, the purple of clematis. If you chose to face the buffet tables you saw colors more various. Pancakes were golden disks. Buckets of chowder sent up silvery steam. There were jeweled salads; hams as rosy as happy cheeks; mountains of tropical fruits. Mauve veal tongues lay on beds of lettuce. And ocher breads — there were glazed breads; grained breads; breads made with berries; breads made with olives; and the most delicious bread of all, a dense hard oblong cut into thin slices, tasting as if its flour had been ground from magic nuts and baked by gnomes in a forest hut. Two hollow-cheeked men spent all day carving roast beef. Another man continually dished out foamy scrambled eggs augmented with mushrooms, or tomatoes, or asparagus. There were cheeses of all varieties…runny, slippery, chewy, blue. Soufflés, one kiwi-colored, the other pale orange.
Their interior stateroom was just big enough for two narrow beds and two night tables. Cupboards and closets were built into the wall. The bathroom was a clever little wedge. Their beds got made and their bathroom cleaned the minute they left for breakfast, or so it seemed; at any rate, whenever they returned, the beds were taut and the bathroom polished. A small person took care of their rooms and other rooms on the corridor. At first they had only fleeting glimpses of this genderless figure — a flash of mustard-colored trouser; a dark elbow reflected in the mirror of someone’s open room.
But on the third morning Bella was gripped in the bowels as they were on their way to tap dancing. All those pancakes! She puffed back to their room, and saw that the tiny bathroom was occupied, so to speak. The yellow uniform, its back to her, knelt before the toilet. Dense hair was wound into a thick bun — a woman, then. Her feet protruded into the room.
“I’m sorry,” Bella said, but the devoted scrubber didn’t pause. “I’m sorry,” Bella repeated in a louder voice, and touched the yellow back. The woman sprang up. “I’m sorry,” Bella said for the third time. “I have to…”
The maid, standing now, bowed without smiling. She was square-faced and plain, of an indeterminate age — sixty? She slid out of the compact john, and Bella squeezed into it and relieved herself of a pungent stool. She washed her hands, and left without looking again at the small woman. A half hour later, studying her feet in the mirror as she practiced the shuffle, she suddenly recalled that she had failed to flush the toilet. Well, that could happen to anyone, couldn’t it, she said to the abdomen above the legs, the bosom…but her shame persisted, as if she had treated the servant like a robot.
This first port was the capital of a newly independent island nation. Its city hall had once been a governor’s palace, and public gardens exploded with hibiscus and jasmine. Citizens hissed in Spanish. Robin had more or less kept up her college Spanish because so many of her patients spoke it. She exchanged some sentences with the proprietor of a hammock store, who praised her mastery of the polite form. Guides and souvenir sellers were fluent in English.
But there was a third language, Bella noticed, probably some indigenous Indian dialect. The darker the person and the more menial his task, the more likely he was to use this tongue with coworkers. Some form of the same vernacular was common in other ports too — all of which, by their fourth debarkation, had merged in their minds. The ports were not only incidental, as Dr. Hartmann had warned; they were interchangeable. Oh, there were some differences — the first was reminiscent of the conquistadores; the second had one cathedral and one thousand shops; the third, reputedly narco-friendly, featured trips into the jungle to listen to monkeys; the fourth was a South American coastal city famous for its university, its school for the deaf, its pre-Columbian fort. But they were all colorful, noisy, polyglot, and — Bella said, and Robin agreed — falsely welcoming. They were places you would never want to live in and were rather glad to leave, to walk up a road leading to a brief gangplank leading to a man who checked you in. Home! The Golden Swan had become their town — a town with few laws and a loose cordiality. In the dining rooms people sat with other people at tables for ten; urged by the headwaiter, you joined a table with empty seats remaining, or began a new table which was quickly filled. Nobody dressed up. Children — there weren’t many, March not being school-vacation month — couldn’t roam free; one of the blond officers who did roam free would take an unattended child by the hand and find its parents. Passengers were not allowed in the area where the staff and crew slept. But nothing else was prohibited.
Some people began to seem like neighbors. There was a family from Maine with a retarded ten-year-old son and a clever daughter of twelve who could convert knots to miles per hour and had read up on all the ports. Melinda was staying out of school in order to make this trip, to do her share of diverting her brother. There was a short, freckled pharmacology graduate student who had brought along the research paper he was working on. He explained it at boring length to Bella’s silence and Robin’s occasional “Fascinating, Luke!” There were three women in their fifties, happy to be together, as if celebrating a reunion. They weren’t from the same city, they weren’t cousins, they weren’t classmates—“Not exactly,” the one who was a lawyer laughed. “Something like,” said the one who was a social worker. The one who seemed to be a pampered housewife merely smiled.