Chapter 3
American Fantasy Cruise Terminal
Annie briefly worried that she was at the wrong cruise terminal because all the bags waiting on the curb were so big, the size that someone might need if they were flying overseas for six months, or maybe forever.
But no—the Talkers were unmistakable. The concrete sidewalk was filled with women in bedazzled Boy Talk denim jackets, in custom-printed Boy Talk T-shirts, carrying Boy Talk tote bags sewn together from vintage Boy Talk bedsheets.
Several women around her had cases of Diet Coke strapped to the top of their suitcases and held elaborate costumes—a disco ball helmet?
—tucked under their arms. Annie’s anxiety poked her in the ribs. This wasn’t for her.
The cruise organizers had done their best—it was months after the cancellation deadline.
They’d refunded Katherine’s half and given Annie a roommate.
That was the most they could do. Katherine begged Annie to go—it was the next best thing.
“Please,” she’d said on FaceTime from her hospital room.
“Please. If you can touch Keith Fiore, it will be worth it.” Keith was Katherine’s favorite, in this life and the next, ad infinitum.
She said this as if Annie didn’t know. “You are not dead,” Annie had said to her sister.
“Don’t make it sound like I’m going on some quest to avenge you.
” Katherine had cried genuine tears. Annie was not planning on touching anyone.
So here Annie was, sweating in the direct Miami sunshine alone.
Her armpits were damp, her neck was damp, everything was damp.
It had been a bad year for both sisters.
A broken leg looked more dramatic, maybe, got more sympathy nods, but divorce lasted longer.
Like a good little sister, Katherine had said all the rights things to Annie—that Chris sucked and she wasn’t going to miss having him as a brother-in-law, but that Claudia was a perfect niece and that therefore the marriage had been worth it.
The split hadn’t been dramatic—everyone said it was better for Claudia that way.
It was all bad for Annie, but at least it was over.
There was a lump of something in her stomach—dread, fear, shame?
All the recent hits. Annie closed her eyes for a few seconds and repeated the mantra she had been working on in her meditation app—Feelings are always in motion.
This too will pass. She was also getting used to the things that wouldn’t pass—being an aging woman, being a divorced woman, being a woman whose child had grown up and left the nest. When Annie was young, she’d often wanted to push the fast-forward button—there were so many things she’d wanted to get to—but now she didn’t see anything ahead.
There was nothing between here and the end, only time.
Annie pushed her small rolling suitcase across the gleaming black slaughterhouse floors of the Cruise Terminal and followed the stanchions from check-in point to check-in point.
Each cruise employee (Steve, Des Moines!
Natasha, Bulgaria! Cindy, San Diego!) smiled and wished her well.
There were wall-size photos of the American Fantasy hanging in the terminal hall, and everyone paused to have their picture taken.
There were little speech bubbles to hold, like at wedding photo booths, that said things like What’s your fantasy?
and Boy talk is my American fantasy. That one seemed to be the most popular.
Annie posed by herself, standing in front of the giant photo of the ship, and gave an awkward thumbs-up, because she didn’t actually know what her fantasy was, aside from turning invisible and pretending none of this was happening, and she couldn’t think of what else to do with her hands.
There were more halls and an escalator, every space crowded with women weighed down by luggage and pillows, like drop-off day at adult sleepaway camp, and Annie was so distracted looking at everyone else that she was surprised to find herself suddenly crossing over the small metal gangway to board the actual ship.
“Oh!” she heard herself say, as if she’d found herself there by accident.
Ships seemed inherently tragic, didn’t they?
The Titanic, the Lusitania, the ship that Tristan and Isolde were on?
Bad things happened on giant boats. Annie wasn’t phobic, but she was wary.
Cruises in particular had never appealed to her for all the usual reasons: bacterial diseases, an air of elderly American laziness, buffets in a pandemic world.
She’d sold a lot of advertising pages to cruise lines over the years, and even though the photographs were lovely, Annie had never been convinced.
Cruises were for people who wanted to travel, but mostly they wanted the comforts of home.
To Annie, it felt like a challenge to be dropped into the middle of the ocean inside an experience she wasn’t sure she wanted to have.
If everything in her life had been going just terrifically, she would have taken the loss and stayed home.
There were positives! She was a fifty-year-old woman and no longer felt self-conscious about going places on her own.
Annie wished that her sister were there more than anything she had wished for in decades, but it wasn’t a ballroom dancing competition—she would be fine without a partner.
Even if she’d been iffy—if she was iffy—about the whole idea, being alone wasn’t the problem.
She and Katherine had booked the cruise right after the divorce, an act that had felt like adolescent insolence, in a good way.
You want to be young again? I’ll show you young again.
Wasn’t that what divorces were about, wanting to rewind the clock?
That was part of Katherine’s goal, certainly, to bring Annie back to a more carefree moment in her life.
Annie wasn’t sure she believed it was possible, but she’d been willing to humor her little sister.
Their story wasn’t unique—that was the point of fandoms, wasn’t it, that there were thousands of millions of people just like you?
Annie and Katherine had talked about Boy Talk at the kitchen table, babbling over pancakes and bacon.
Their parents had teased them about the posters lining the walls in their room.
Katherine was a Keith girl. Annie was on the old side—Old!
A teenager!—for Boy Talk, and so she liked Shawn.
Brothers for sisters! Katherine went on and on about the double wedding, which she acted out with Barbie dolls.
Annie had a poster tacked to the ceiling above her bed, Shawn in acid-washed denim and a black leather jacket, scowling like it was a prison mug shot.
Oh, she had loved that scowl. There was a Boy Talk member for every kind of girl, that was the whole point.
Shawn was the oldest, the one most likely to pelvic thrust at any given moment.
Scotty was sporty, the tomboy’s choice. Terrence was aloof and mysterious, the boy band Marlon Brando.
Corey was the little one with the high voice, the top pick for the youngest Talkers.
He’d grown into a bad boy, the type with motorcycles and a rap sheet, but he’d been just a baby at the beginning.
Keith was the dreamboat who could hit the big notes.
Annie couldn’t explain calculus or physics or the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit, but this taxonomy she knew.
It didn’t matter if she hadn’t thought about any of it in decades; it was all still there, calcified into place like the fossil of a coelacanth.
Time was cruel to young love, though. When Annie went to Barnard, her roommate had spied a Boy Talk sticker on her Caboodles and laughed uproariously—“That’s a joke, right?
”—to which the only answer had been yes.
Annie had been filled with hot shame and that was it, even in her own headphones; Boy Talk suddenly felt embarrassing, a relic from childhood, like a one-eyed teddy bear.
She’d severed the relationship on the spot, as if Boy Talk had been a clingy high school boyfriend.
That was the thing about long-distance crushes, of course—they didn’t notice when you stopped doing your part.
Annie had been awful to Katherine about it when she went home to visit, scoffing at the pictures on their walls, trying to pass the shame like a hot potato, but Katherine, steadfast, refused the gift.
—
The staff at Opera Weekly all cared about music, of course.
Everyone had their favorite divas, their favorite arias, their favorite recordings.
There was a Maria Callas camp, a Renée Fleming camp, a Jessye Norman camp.
YouTube clips of favorite performances were texted around, often as punch lines to office jokes or to underline a feeling—someone has a cold?
Here’s “O soave fanciulla” from La bohème.
The understanding at the magazine was that there was a certain level of taste.
Jazz, okay. Sondheim, sure. A late-’80s boy band?
The whole office lost their minds. It was mortifying.
Annie hadn’t known much about opera when she’d started at the magazine other than thinking that it was a sign of maturity, like watching foreign films or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Part of an erudite life. That was what she’d been building all this time, after all—one didn’t choose to raise children in New York City to have them listen to Kidz Bop.