Chapter 7 #2
Annie turned to the women standing around her.
Comparison was deadly, every woman who’d survived middle school knew that—but Annie couldn’t help it.
It was a sea of bodies, and she was in the middle of it, a single drop of water.
Some of the women were thin and some were heavy, but they were all three-dimensional, complete with cellulite dimples and waggly upper arms and soft bellies, bellies that had done the work of carrying children, of living full, complicated lives.
Just like Boy Talk had left their mysterious adult selves behind on the mainland, so had these women—husbands, children, jobs, problems—and now they were transformed into whatever had come before.
Their original forms. Annie’s body was healthy.
She went to the YMCA and rode a stationary bike; she walked around Central Park.
Not one person on this ship would make her feel like her body should look any different than it did, and that made her feel weightless and beautiful.
They were all weightless and beautiful. The company should have printed that on the brochures.
Maybe the cruise lines would hire her, and she’d suggest it.
Know your demographic, that was the most important rule of marketing.
Annie squinted at the five men. Terrence looked strange, now slightly grizzled and sinewy, but the other four had somehow retained the core of their charm, even as they’d gone from soft-cheeked teenage boys to whatever this was.
She suddenly had so many questions for her sister, information that Katherine would be spilling over with—what the hell had these guys been doing since she stopped paying attention?
When had Shawn started to look like this, and were those really his teeth?
Were they all married? Did they have families?
Annie had been expecting them all to look the same as the last time she saw them, whenever that was.
It was actually such a feminine way to go through the world—people commenting on your looks, strangers pawing at you, people projecting their sexual fantasies on you while you were just trying to do your job.
A Boy Talk song started to play and the men jogged down a staircase and then reappeared on the stage at the center of the deck, only ten feet from Annie’s stool.
The men split off, each of them pointing their eyes and hands toward a different section of the crowd.
Keith was closest to the tiki bar, and he waved at them—at her, sure, she supposed, but at all of them, as a group, as a synecdoche, as the representatives of every girl who had ever loved Boy Talk in the history of the world.
Keith Fiore smiled more widely than she’d ever seen him smile in his life, and Annie couldn’t help it, she smiled back as if he was looking straight at her, like she was smiling at a child staring out the window of a departing school bus.
It was an involuntary reaction, exactly the way she’d felt when she took Claudia to Disney World when she was seven—when Mickey Mouse waved, it hadn’t felt like some twentysomething Floridian actor in a furry suit was waving at them, it had been goddamn Mickey Mouse, and she and Claudia had both squealed with delight.
Katherine would have been jumping up and down, hysterical.
Annie was surrounded by Katherines. Annie felt like a chaperone, mostly, except for the tears, which had stopped.
Keith jogged over to the other side of the stage, and suddenly it was Shawn and Scotty, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, and everyone screamed more—it wasn’t just seeing Boy Talk or hearing their voices, this crowd wanted to touch them, and Annie saw the poster over her childhood bed, and this man standing in front of her, and it felt impossible that they were the same, a mathematical improbability, but a good one.
The ship’s horn blared, and clouds of black smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe behind the screen.
The American Fantasy was moving away from the dock.
The men weren’t singing, though each of them now held a microphone—a song played over the speakers, and they were singing along without holding the mics to their mouths, off and on, clapping their hands, pointing to the crowd.
It reminded Annie of dancers at a bar mitzvah—it was their job to pump up the crowd and to be the objects of lusty screams. Scotty came close to the edge of the stage and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a totally hairless torso that looked like an aging Ken doll, all smooth tan bumps.
Annie covered her eyes with her hands—it was too much to take in.
Maira was singing along, but Annie didn’t know the words, or she didn’t at first, but after about a minute, she had most of them.
Maira was swiveling her hips to the beat, and Annie let her chin nod along.
The song was about dancing, or about dancing as a metaphor for sex, and the guys were dancing, and the women on the deck were dancing, everyone in their safe, separate areas, all of them propelling the ship away from Miami and into the ocean, where they could finally be alone together.