“Lots of things,” Lisa answered, pulling a blouse over her head. She no longer wore a bra, partly because the only one she’d brought with her had worn out.
“But what are some of them, sweetheart?” Jeanne persisted. “I’m interested in your life, remember?”
“Oh, Mother,” Lisa said with a sigh. “It’s hard to tell you. About lots of things. The way you adults messed up the world. About how to scrounge for food. About what we want to do with our lives.”
“How do most of your friends manage to get food?” Jeanne asked, handing Lisa the brush she knew she was glancing around for.
“Some of them fish,” Lisa answered, beginning to brush her hair. “Garbage cans outside rich white people’s houses. A few go house to house begging.”
“Your friends beg?” Jeanne asked.
“Certainly, Mother,” Lisa snapped back. “There are no jobs and no food. What do you expect?”
“Don’t their parents manage to provide food?”
“Sometimes,” said Lisa. “But most of us want to be independent of our parents.”
“By begging?”
“It’s better than blowing the world apart.”
“I don’t see how the parents here are responsible for the war,” Jeanne responded, feeling annoyed by Lisa’s self-righteousness.
“Some of them are white, mother,” Lisa said, as if that explained it. “And Robby says all whites started it with their superrationality.”
“Ah,” said Jeanne, knowing she was too annoyed to enter reasonably into an abstract discussion. “I see.”
“That’s why music is so important,” said Lisa.
“Yes…” said Jeanne, standing uncertainly in front of Lisa, who was ready to leave. “Tell me, sweetheart, is Jim your lover now?”
Lisa, who was about to escape, stood still, her eyes on the floor. She turned back to face Jeanne and she slowly raised her eyes. “Yes, Mother,” she answered quietly, without defiance or apology.
Jeanne, who’d been holding her breath, let out a sigh. “I see.”
“You and Neil—” Lisa began.
“It’s all right, honey,” Jeanne said, biting her lip and averting her face to look out the window. “I… Jim… Jim is… a fine man.”
“I love him, Mother,” Lisa said in a low, uncertain voice.
“I know, honey,” Jeanne said and went over and hugged Lisa to her. “I know.” They held each other for a half-minute until Jim’s voice called to Lisa from the dinghy alongside Vagabond.
“But, Lisa,” Jeanne said, releasing her daughter but blocking her path. “I don’t want you abandoning the boat. Stay here. Make love here if you must.”
“It’s not that,” she said, and, inexplicably, she seemed irritable again. “You don’t understand. There’s no life for us on the boat. Nothing but more of the violence that Neil and Frank seem to believe in. Some of the people in Amalie are different, and Jim and I are interested in finding a better world.”
Jeanne felt herself stiffen again at Lisa’s naive oversimplifications. It made her feel both sad and frightened that her daughter seemed to need to escape from the boat and the adults on it. Their world was falling apart. “But, honey—” she began.
“I’m going,” Lisa announced and brushed past Jeanne and left the cabin. Jeanne followed, and as Lisa climbed down into the dinghy, she wanted to call her back or give her a warning of some sort, but she couldn’t articulate her fears even to herself. “Lisa,” she called down to her. “I… I want you to find a better world, but… just be certain it is a better world.”
For a moment Lisa pretended to busy herself with helping Jim fit an oar in the oarlock, but then she looked up at her mother defiantly.
“It can’t be any worse than the one that’s sent us here to starve to death,” she said.
Jeanne, feeling she had nothing better to offer Lisa, could only look down in shocked silence. Jim, smiling up at her awkwardly, shoved off and slowly rowed Lisa away.
For Neil, after a week on St. Thomas, land was again enemy territory. After their first few days anchored in the harbor he let any or all of the others go ashore to try to find food or a house or whatever it was they thought they wanted. He believed that each of them would soon realize the hopelessness of finding a welcome here. Whenever he left Vagabond, he was ill at ease, constantly looking back at the water toward the white, triple-hulled form of his ship, his home. Except when he was with Jeanne—then, together they carried home with them.
The idea of settling on St. Thomas went against his instincts. He worried that Vagabond might be hijacked, worried about the plague, worried about submitting to a governmental authority that was little better than a gang of pirates itself. His reaction to the appalling conditions on St. Thomas was ambivalent. While he sympathized with the native islanders and resented the rich whites flying or sailing off to other havens, he knew full well that he was one of the lucky ones who had the means to get away and knew he’d be happy to do it— indeed, was constantly scheming to be able to do it.
Yet that alternative, all the alternatives, were, as always, heartbreaking. Somehow, some way they had to take on enough food for a voyage even longer than the one they had just completed. Somehow, some way they had to get hold of the weapons to protect themselves against pirates and, eventually, Neil speculated, against foreign navies and air forces. Somehow, some way they had to find a place on the planet where they could feed themselves and be free of the great, leaning, gray weight of the nuclear holocaust. Somehow, some way. It was life.
He talked with as many sailors as he could, and although many said they wanted to escape, all were as stuck as he. The only difference was that many of them had lost confidence in themselves or in their boats and were waiting, stuck in their own stuckness… .
Philip and Sheila Wellington were exceptions. They were determined to get away, and since their thirty-foot catamaran’s mast was cracked, they were trying to work out a deal with a man named Oscar White who owned an old fifty-five-foot sloop but had little skill or experience at sailing. Philip had become increasingly edgy over the week Neil had known him; he was convinced that St. Thomas was about to explode and that they had to get away.
On their eighth day on St. Thomas, Neil met with Philip again, this time on Oscar’s sloop, Scorpio. The ship was an old racing boat, once queenly, now old and unmaintained, still solid, it seemed to Neil, but much of its gear was in need of repair and all its varnish and brightwork needed attention.
The three sat in the huge, airy open cockpit in front of the beautiful mahogany wheel, which alone was polished and gleaming. Oscar was an intense smallish man in his thirties, with long, wild blond hair, a big handlebar mustache, and narrow blue eyes. A former real estate broker, he had left his job, wife, and family for a fling in the Caribbean on a cheap yacht he’d planned to fix up and sail off into the sunset. The war had interrupted his idyll after less than two months.
His crew consisted of two young men who’d latched onto him in Fort Lauderdale. Gregg and Arnie were both wiry young men, much more laid-back than Oscar, and apparently happy to go along with whatever he decided. They were also friends of Jim, Lisa, and Katya. There were usually two or three young women aboard Scorpio, but none of them showed up for the conference, nor did Gregg and Arnie, content to remain fishing off Scorpio’s stern.
Philip and Oscar sat on one side of the cockpit and Neil on the other, each of them holding a tall glass of water as they once would have held gin and tonics.