“That’s really interesting,” said Christine. “Seriously.”
“Hey, can I play you an interview I just did?” Valerie took out her iPhone. “I managed to get one of the cooks to talk to me, she works under the guy who snubbed me. I want to know what you think. Here.” She thrust her phone at Christine.
“Now?” said Christine, looking down at Valerie’s phone. After only one day without using one, it was jarring to look at the small lit-up screen.
“It’s short,” said Valerie. She clicked on an icon marked ISABELLA INTERVIEWS and handed Christine a pair of earbuds, which Christine obediently put on.
Valerie hit play, and a woman’s accented voice spoke into Christine’s ear. She sounded Spanish and tense. “I can give you a couple minutes but then I have to be back at my station.”
“What is your name and nationality?” Valerie’s voice said.
“Consuelo Fonseca. I’m Mexican. From Acapulco.”
“How long have you worked for Cabaret?”
“Six years.”
“Can you tell me a bit about your job?”
Christine heard an angry, scornful sound, a snort. “Sure. I’ll tell you a couple of things. We work sixteen-hour days for pathetic wages. Most of us, our contracts are being canceled at the end of this cruise.”
“They’re firing you?” came Valerie.
“Yeah. And you know why? So they can hire refugees to do the work we do, but for less money and longer hours. I’m talking desperate people, from Syria, Sudan. The owners of this company are shit. One of them is on board. I read an interview with him online where he said that the reason Third World workers like us are good at our jobs it that we’re culturally suited to them.” Her voice deepened as she imitated him. “ ‘The Filipinos always smile at the customers even when they’re tired from working so hard because they’re so happy and it’s such an honor to work for Cabaret. Workers from India are great like that too, always smiling, happy to work aboard these ships. Mexicans are the same. Always cheerful.’ ” She snorted again. “Look at me, so fucking cheerful. It’s bullshit.”
“So why did you stay with Cabaret all these years if the conditions are so bad?”
“Because there’s nothing for me in Mexico, no jobs, the economy is shit, and I’m sending money home and spending nothing. I don’t have time to spend money. I’m young and I can take it. My parents are depending on me. I need this stupid job. Like everyone else on board this ship. We all need these jobs.”
“But you don’t think they should hire these other workers? They need the jobs more than you do, even.”
“No. I don’t think that.” Consuelo’s voice was acid. “What I think is that they should stop treating us like slaves and not get rid of us to hire cheaper labor.”
“I get it,” said Valerie.
“So they’re dumping us and hiring desperate people, even more desperate than we are. Syrians running away from hell. Africans who will do anything to have a safe place to sleep, a tiny bit of money for their families. They’ll be treated like labor animals. It’s completely fucking wrong.”
“Wow.” Christine heard real surprise in Valerie’s voice. “I didn’t know that.”
“Okay,” said Consuelo. “I have to go now.”
There was a click. Christine took off the earbuds.
“That’s horrifying.”
“I know, right?” said Valerie. She finished her martini. “Want to go in the pool and lie on one of those big rafts?”
“In our clothes?”
“Why not? I’ll leave my phone here. No one will steal it.”
They arranged themselves head-to-toe on an empty raft, cradling their drinks. Christine kicked gently against the pool’s edge and sent the raft bobbing and floating into the middle. The surface of the water rocked and shimmered. Light from tiki lamps shot upward and dissipated in the still air. There were a few other people, dog-paddling with foam noodles, lounging on fat inner tubes, but no one paid attention to them. It was as if they were in a self-contained little bubble, a sanctuary of sorts. Christine looked down at her bare feet glowing like pale flat fish above the blue water, bobbing around with the bright neon purple and pink floating things. It reminded her of the aquarium, which gave her a fresh jolt of that same panicky, desolate feeling she’d had looking in at all those creatures in their tanks, reading all the plaques about the dying oceans. But there was something else too, something more immediate and personal. She felt a resurgence of the long-quashed yearning that had been awakened by her conversation with Miriam that morning.
She lifted her head. Being around Valerie’s fast-talking nervous energy made Christine aware of how slow and stolid she had become. She could feel Valerie’s brain working now, even when she was silent, the energy of her thoughts running ceaselessly. Christine remembered being that way, back in her old life. Now, there were whole swaths of time when her thoughts seemed to stop, when action took over completely and she became a functioning machine, carrying out her tasks. She thought with an odd, unaccustomed longing of her old walk-up apartment in New York, on Orchard Street, the sour, fecund smell of the old tenement stairwell; she remembered climbing up the four flights to her apartment’s battered front door in stylish leather boots, heavy plastic bags of groceries wrapped around both wrists. It was odd how real it felt to her, more real than the farm, as if her entire life since going back to Maine had been some sort of hallucination, as if she’d never left that life of late nights in bars and reading books on long subway rides and jostling through crowds of varied, interesting people.
She hadn’t been looking to escape from that life, not consciously. But one fall weekend, she had gone up to Maine to visit her parents in Standish, and incidentally to interview a farmer friend of theirs named Ed Thorne for a piece she was thinking of writing on the rising popularity of small organic farms in New England. She had driven her mother’s old Subaru over to Fryeburg on a clear, crisp day to find Ed heaping a pile of pumpkins into the back of his truck to take to the farmers market the next morning. As Ed liked to put it, it was love at first question; she sat on his porch all afternoon with him, drinking mead he’d made with honey from his own bees, and then sat all evening at his table, eating the dinner he cooked, food he’d raised and grown himself, and then she spent the night with him, and the next night, too. It was a relief to admit it to herself: she was tired of being broke, in debt, stressed-out about money and bills, the hustle of freelancing. Six months later, she left New York and moved back up to Maine to live with Ed. The piece never got written. That had been almost eight years ago.
“Val,” she said now, “I have to make a decision. Ed wants kids, and I don’t.”