Chapter 10 #2
Annie watched as Mr. Beer Pong kissed each of the playing cards on the cheek and handed them bottles of beer from a bucket at his feet.
He looked approximately her age; it was hard to tell in the dark.
The man put his hand on one of the playing card’s lower backs, and together they swayed back and forth in time to Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.” He didn’t look like someone’s husband, and he didn’t look gay.
What a concept, to be a straight man alone on a cruise like this!
Annie felt a small laugh tumble out. She hadn’t had sex with anyone after Chris—honestly, she hadn’t even wanted to.
Annie hadn’t had sex with Chris in two years!
It wasn’t that she wanted to sleep with Mr. Beer Pong—she didn’t—but for the first time all year, Annie thought, Maybe.
She was a woman sitting at a bar, looking across at a man.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t her type and that he was dressed as a binge-drinking game played by college students.
It was a possibility. Annie felt like a small door somewhere inside her was creaking open on rusted hinges.
It was all there suddenly—her first kiss with George Bellingham in the middle school bus parking lot.
The first time Jamie Johnson felt her up in his parents’ basement and how quickly he yanked his hand out of her shirt when his mother opened the door.
When a boy had licked her neck at a party during the first week of college, a stranger!
Her first orgasm, Jake Hutchison. Oh, she had loved him.
Not him him—she’d hardly known him, really—but Jake had been so handsome, just the most handsome person she’d ever seen naked, and he’d done that for her.
It was almost too much to bear, even then, like some sort of Make-A-Wish program, despite the fact that he’d quickly ditched her for a girl with pierced nipples.
Annie thought about her first real boyfriend, Clarence Brown, who had been so kind to her, he’d made her a crossword puzzle from scratch, he’d written her songs on his ukulele.
She tried to remember the reasons she’d broken up with Clarence—he was a hacky-sacking hippie and lived in a co-op on campus, he loved the Grateful Dead and smoked pot out of a tiny glass one-hitter every night before he went to sleep.
He had seemed too messy for her then, but maybe she could have used the messiness, incorporated it into her system.
She could have married Clarence, and maybe she should have.
She’d waited to get married, and look what good that had done.
Annie didn’t want to think about her husband, and so she didn’t.
He wasn’t anywhere near these memories. These were first—these were just for her.
Boy Talk had been there too, though. Lurking in those early feelings, putting words to what she wanted to feel.
Words she wanted someone to sing to her.
DJ Pancake was already deep in his set, and even before the Kenny Rogers, Annie had heard other songs that had game in the title: Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).” Talkers could be counted on to sing along to songs by other boy bands, it seemed, and for a second, Annie wondered whether these women were the type to go on other boy band cruises too, if they split their affection.
Claudia had had a passing interest in One Direction when she was in middle school, and Annie had been delighted to relive the joy of having a favorite, of learning tiny facts about people you would never meet.
Annie wondered if her predilection for Boy Talk had been living dormant in her body, the way chicken pox stayed quiet for decades and then bloomed into shingles.
Annie didn’t feel like she was blooming, exactly, but she did feel the way she’d felt when she and Chris and Claudia were on vacation in France, several decades after her most recent French class, finding certain vocabulary words swimming back to her from some deep folds in her brain.
Maira tapped Annie on the arm and pointed. Above them, on the balcony, a thick-bodied middle-aged Black man in a baseball hat gave someone a fist bump and then walked down the stairs.
“That’s their manager, Bobby,” Maira said.
“I could introduce you later. I have his email address too. BabyBobby@, ha! Can you believe it?” She set her drink down and cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Bobby! Bobby!” He looked over to where they were sitting and gave a point and a nod.
Maira flushed with satisfaction. “Last year, I saw him at the airport afterward. He was so tired, he said.”
“I bet,” Annie said. She was already tired, and so grateful for her stool. Most women were standing, and Annie’s calves and feet hurt just looking at them.
The music cut off, and Shawn’s voice came through the speakers. “All right, all right. It’s game time!”
The Talkers roared.
Boy Talk appeared one at a time in the same spot on the balcony, each guy in turn blown up on the screen above his own head.
Terrence was dressed in a giant yellow onesie—a Pokémon.
Pikachu! Annie rescued its name from the depths.
Annie remembered one staging of Puccini’s Turandot where the emperor had been lowered from the ceiling.
This was like that, but furrier. Scotty came out next in a similar suit but bluish-green.
“Snorlax!” a younger Talker shouted from over Annie’s shoulder.
Keith and Corey came out together, dressed in matching white pants and T-shirts with giant red R’s on their chests, Keith in a purple wig and Corey in a pink one.
“Who are they?” Annie asked.
“They’re the bad guys!” Maira shouted. She knew everything and was willing to share her knowledge.
Maira’s purple and blue streaks twinkled in the lights from the tiki bar, and Annie was glad that women her age had started dyeing their hair funky colors again instead of just coloring the grays, and she was about to say so when Annie realized that she was already drunk, and so she probably shouldn’t say everything that crossed her mind.
Keith moved into the center of the balcony, posing and laughing.
Whose job was it to come up with their costumes?
Shawn jumped in behind Keith and Corey dressed as a shirtless Ash Ketchum, a child.
Shawn flexed, and at the foot of the stairs, two women dressed like sexy Ash Ketchums, their costumes even skimpier than Shawn’s, jumped up and down, and then Shawn rushed down the stairs to greet them and pulled them onto the small stage with him.
DJ Pancake played Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” and all three Ashes jumped up and down, mouthing the words.
Shawn’s showmanship was unmatched. The boys at her high school who had had big personalities had always seemed too scary, too popular for her to have a crush on, but Shawn was far enough away that she could pretend.
Keith seemed to be enjoying his purple wig, which was long and fluffy like a guitar player in a different kind of ’80s band.
Keith twirled the edges in his fingers and flipped the long part back and forth over his shoulder.
He was laughing with Scotty and with Shawn.
It was funny to think about them as adult men who had actual relationships with each other, relationships that existed in private and not printed on the side of a lunch box.
Most of the guys had cups in their hand—the idea, according to Katherine, was that the guys were all somewhere on the tipsy-to-wasted continuum at these parties, but Annie didn’t buy it, not looking at them.
They were working, and on these nights, their job was to look like they were having the best time they’d ever had so the women would think that they were having the best time they’d ever had.
After all, it was what Shawn had promised them.
Keith turned toward Annie—toward her section—and waved.
Without even meaning to, Annie waved back.
She was surrounded by other people who were waving back, of course, everyone was waving and screaming, their hands in the air, but still, she was embarrassed.
It felt like too much, like stalkerish behavior, even though they were literally all waving back, the entire audience, they could not leave unless they jumped off the ship and started to swim back toward Florida.
Keith, of course, wasn’t actually paying attention to her.
He was dancing goofily to Madonna, pointing his fingers in the air like a real middle-aged dad.
He had never been a good dancer—that was ammunition for sisterly arguments for years, that Shawn was a better dancer than Keith, and it was obviously still true.
He was rocking his hips side to side, almost like bouncing a baby to sleep.
Keith pointed kindly at a woman’s homemade sign and smiled.
He seemed like a nice man. Annie took out her phone and snapped a few pictures for Katherine.
So often, the word nostalgia felt coated in bile—a nostalgia act.
Annie understood and she didn’t. Nostalgia was for the Smurfs, for erasers that smelled like strawberries.
Maybe that was what the costumes were about, the goofy T-shirts, but inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed, as much as she’d chosen to ignore it.
Maybe that was nostalgia after all, that the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life.
What had the research shown? A shortcut to happiness.
Music made plants grow faster; it made cows give more milk.
They meant Mozart and Puccini, sure, but why couldn’t it also mean this?
There were so many people crammed into such a tight space.
Shawn twirled around, hooking his arm around his brother’s waist, and then they spun in circles, laughing, a square dance for two.
All around Annie, women were dancing and singing, and for a second, she closed her eyes and thought, No one else will ever understand this, except of course everyone standing beside her, who all understood it perfectly.
This was why people turned to religion or watched the Super Bowl at a sports bar instead of alone in their living room.
It felt good to be a part of something where your passion was celebrated instead of mocked.
They were all in this together, the men and the women, a symbiotic organism.
Annie was tired, but she knew that there was no going to bed, not yet.