“Don’t forget the Song of the Sea,” she said.
“The Song of the Sea,” said Kimmi. “That’s what I came to look up! I need the words.”
“It’s long and I don’t know it all, but I can tell you Miriam’s Song, which she sings after the Israelites cross to safety,” said Miriam. “It’s much shorter, and it goes in English, ‘Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.’ Not really talent-show material, though.”
“Probably not,” said Kimmi doubtfully. “But let me write down the words anyway.”
chapter six
Christine came downstairs after her epic nap on the deck chair to find Valerie still sitting at the little table, squinting at her laptop screen through her glasses, typing away. Christine stripped in the tiny bathroom and stood in the weak stream of water in the shower stall, which appeared to have been built for a medium-sized child.
“You have such a nice body,” Valerie said as Christine came out of the shower and started dressing. “I’d kill for your boobs.”
Valerie’s breasts were flat little bumps, but her body was lanky and narrow-hipped, the kind most women envied and yearned for. Anyway, she’d never had any difficulty finding boyfriends; she just had trouble staying interested in them for longer than two months.
“You’re sexy and glamorous,” she told Valerie. “And I’m ordinary and always have been.”
Valerie was still fixated, a frank and frankly sexless appraisal that made Christine feel like a cow at a state fair. “You have amazing arm muscles. Farming kicks the ass of going to the gym.”
“Thank you,” said Christine with effort.
A few minutes later, wearing her dusky rose shantung sheath, bare-legged and bare-armed, and a short string of seed pearls she’d found in a small Williamsburg thrift shop back in the 1990s, plus the strappy gold stilettos she’d worn at her own wedding, Christine climbed the grand staircase and wandered along the ship’s main promenade. Her hair was pinned up with another thrift-store find from her city days, a rhinestone comb sparkling on the back of her head. Her hands, which she’d had manicured in Portland the morning before her flight, looked totally unfamiliar with their well-shaped nails, pinkish gold. Her toenails were a darker shade of the same color, and her feet were weirdly free of calluses.
She checked out her own reflection in a long beveled mirror hanging in the stairwell. She felt confident, not awkward anymore, thanks in part to Valerie’s compliments, which felt much less intrusive in retrospect. She felt like a woman. Gone were the mud boots, the dog-hair-bedecked jeans, fleece jacket and knit cap, the drab wool scarf that she joked with Ed had molecularly fused with the skin on her neck. Gone were the sloppy, country-girlish ponytail, the ever-present farmer’s smell of sweat, fingernails full of dirt. She had no evening chores, no canvas totes full of wood to bring in from the woodpile, no chickens or ducks or dogs to feed, no dinner to cook, no checklists or orders to look over, no runs next door to Steve and Molly’s farm for a quart of sheep’s milk and a quick hello. Too bad Ed wasn’t here to appreciate this. He loved to tell her in his understated way that she “cleaned up good.”
Restless at the memory of the farm, she picked up a glass of sparkling something from a passing tray and took a sip: it was excellent, very dry. The long, burnished wood floor of the promenade glowed as the sconces and lights came softly on, and she stopped by one of the enormous windows to look out at the darkening ocean. Live old-style jazz tootled and honked on the warm breeze from somewhere not too far away; it was the kind of jazz she liked, swinging and danceable. She felt her shoulders moving in time, felt her whole body revved up with the heat of sensuality. The booze warmed her chest. She smelled cigarette smoke from somewhere nearby. Champagne fizzed in her nostrils while she moved loosely to the jazz and let the sea air slip around her skin.
An hour later, Valerie was already waiting for her at the entrance to the fine-dining restaurant. “There you are!” she said. Christine peeked in and saw a long room with a high ceiling, chandeliers, ceiling fans with fat wooden paddles, potted palms, half-moon banquettes. She heard silverware on china, a hum of voices, music from a string quartet across the room, three elderly gentlemen and a lady. “Are you drunk? I hope you’re drunk. You’re fun when you’re drunk.”
Once again, the irritation of being both scrutinized and appropriated by her friend returned. Christine tried to slough it off. “They’re having a luau in the buffet room, with ukuleles and steel guitar and three girls in leis singing old Hawaiian torch songs. And suckling pigs.”
“You want to eat there instead? This place just has a geriatric string quartet and the decor is kind of snoozy. The menu looks great, though. They’re serving frigging squab. Pigeon. No joke.”
“This place looks great,” said Christine as a tall, gray-haired, stiff-backed gentleman in a crisp tuxedo approached to lead them to their table.
“My name is Sidney, and I will be your maître d’ for this cruise,” he said with a species of British accent. He seated them with thin-lipped formality, pulling their chairs out. “The wine steward will be over immediately.” As he unfolded their napkins for them with ceremonious precision, Christine took hers and draped it over her lap, afraid she was doing it wrong, almost expecting him to correct her. “Enjoy your dinner, ladies.” He bowed slightly from the waist and glided away. Christine was almost certain that she caught a glimmer of self-mocking amusement in his eye as he turned.
“The staff seem like actors in a play,” she said. “Like Upstairs, Downstairs, that old BBC show my parents watched. Downstairs is like backstage, where they get to be themselves.”
“A play,” Valerie repeated. “Christine, this isn’t romantic for them.”
“I know,” said Christine, wondering when Valerie had become so much smarter than she was. They’d been equals once, back when they were younger. Then Christine had gone home to Maine. “I was just babbling. I’m drunk, remember?”
But in fact, Christine wasn’t at all drunk, and she had no idea why she’d said that. To keep the peace, maybe. To prevent herself from snapping defensively at the friend who’d invited her on this cruise in the first place, to whom she felt uneasily beholden.
The menus were handwritten in black ink on rectangles of cream-colored stock. In addition to the squab, there were tartare de boeuf, Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half shell with shallot mignonette, a vegetable Napoleon, and a few other classic dishes. It really was like going back in time. She could have been in a fine-dining restaurant decades ago in Boston, rubbing shoulders with bluebloods and Harvard professors. Her parents had taken her and her sister down a few times to expose them to “polite society,” as they called it, and Christine had loved it.
The wine steward arrived with an Aussie accent and a thick book full of names of different wines.
“I’ll have the house white,” said Christine. “As long as it’s not Chardonnay.”
“House red for me,” said Valerie. “As long as it’s not Merlot. One glass with dinner every night, two if I’m feeling racy. I seriously do not want to lose my shit on this cruise. You know how I love to lose my shit. It just leads to trouble of the sexual kind, and I have no time for that.”