Chapter 36
Annie was hungry again, sort of. Her body wasn’t reliable in the way it used to be.
Her period, her mood, her stomach, her desire.
The household had been through puberty so recently, and so Annie knew what it was when it started to happen, sooner probably than friends of hers who assumed they’d be fertile forever.
Fertile, like a cornfield, like a purebred dog, like a young wife in some religious sect.
What she really meant was young. Annie had never thought of herself as young, even when she had been, but regardless, the road to menopause felt like she was being forced to walk the plank into a school of sharks.
Final. It was helpful to think of women she knew who had gone through it, women who were not dead: Meryl Streep, Cher.
Probably lots of women much younger than them, too, but it felt impolite to guess.
It was always this way—by the time you got used to something, it was already over.
Sleepaway camp, high school, marriage. A cruise, even.
The buffet was quiet. She’d sworn it off, but Maira was right: It was so convenient.
Annie decided that she was going to get a snack, she was going to take a walk, she was going to play bingo, she was going to do cruise stuff because she was probably never going to get on a cruise ship again if she could help it.
Certain Talkers were highly visible—local celebrities—and Annie kept tabs on them.
The woman with dyed red hair who danced alone in the pool every night, shaking her ass with the vigor of a twentysomething.
Annie liked her. The couple with buzz cuts who wore matching rainbow flags around their shoulders every night.
The woman who kept sending death stares to Maira, her hair simultaneously wet and crispy-looking, and her small posse of frowning women in neon T-shirts.
Greg. He’d been hard to miss, but now he was everywhere she looked.
She’d seen him on the deck, she’d seen him at the bar by the casino, she’d seen him with an arm around another woman’s waist. That was a new feeling.
It wasn’t jealousy precisely, and it certainly wasn’t only pride but some combination of the two.
Sure, Annie was embarrassed that her roommate (a stranger) had seen a man (also a stranger) going down on her, but also, there had been a man going down on her, and that wasn’t nothing.
Annie had imagined her vagina like a gate standing guard in front of an abandoned house, overgrown vines holding the iron shut.
It was a relief to know that there weren’t any vines.
Everything still worked—she still worked.
There was a gigantic pink hunk of roast beef underneath a spotlight, glowing like it was the sixth member of Boy Talk.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had roast beef, a food from a previous century.
Why the hell not? she thought. Annie slid a small slice onto her plate, and then another.
It was cool in the air-conditioning, but Annie wanted to be warm, so she took her plate of roast beef and went through the sliding glass doors onto the sunny lido deck.
It was strange to be there in the daytime.
This was what it was made for. If she and Claudia had been on the cruise together at any point during Claudia’s life, this is where they would have been—in the pool, going down the water slide, stretched out on a deck chair reading a book—and for a minute, Annie wished that Claudia were there.
She would have looked at the whole thing with an anthropologist’s eye.
What were the social mores of this ancient civilization?
Who were these gods that the aging women worshipped so, and what did they get in return for their devotion?
Her daughter would know what Annie should do about work.
Annie could practically hear Claudia’s indignation—she’d known Geoff since she was a small child and had once wet her pants while sitting on the rug in his office.
What a gift, childhood—to be allowed to transgress and then to be forgiven.
Annie had changed, too, over the last fifteen years, but could anyone see it?
They could see the outside, of course—her softer profile, her graying hair—but they couldn’t see all the changes that had gone on inside.
She was in a maudlin mood, and Annie felt herself bumping up against everything around her, all the up-tempo music, all the bright colors.
Where was the Marlon Brando room, for when you just needed a minute to howl your pain and frustration and confusion into the darkness?
Annie’s current thought was to put on a suit and some actual high heels, the kind she only wore to weddings, and march into Geoff’s office like some kind of Business Woman.
If Maira could tell people to drop dead, maybe Annie could push back a few inches.
She would deliver her demands—a better title, more pay, respect—and then cross her arms and wait.
There would probably be applause from some of the younger women in the audience, and the young gay men, though not Kayla, who would be cowering in the corner, making a TikTok about how office life sucked.
Annie wasn’t worried about Kayla—not in this fantasy and not in reality either.
Kayla would be fine because Kayla had her entire life ahead of her.
There were so many things that Annie had agreed to as a young person that she wouldn’t agree to now—her marriage, for one, but also a million smaller things.
The ill-advised pixie cut of her early thirties.
The friends who hadn’t kept up their side.
Dinner at 9 p.m. A shot of tequila. It all sounded fun, but it hadn’t been for her.
Or it wasn’t for her now. What Geoff had offered was also not for her now.
Maybe she wouldn’t wear heels. Maybe she wouldn’t march in there at all—people were supposed to be afraid of the telephone now, but Annie wasn’t.
Annie loved the telephone. Maybe she would just pick up the phone and tell Geoff thanks, but no thanks.
Quit. That’s what Maira would do. Quit! It was a beautiful word, actually, sharp and short, like a knife.
There was an empty lounge chair near the tiki bar.
It was funny to see the bar in the daylight.
It reminded Annie of when they turned on the lights at a bar at the end of the night, how everyone scurried like cockroaches out into the dark street.
She sat down, one leg on either side of the chair, and plunged her fork into the roast beef.
It was delicious. If she was being honest, one of her favorite parts of the cruise was that she hadn’t cooked a single meal in days.
Cooking for one was a math problem Annie had yet to solve.
Recipes that required too much effort seemed like a waste of time; recipes that produced a whole sheet pan or casserole dish of something seemed like a waste of actual food.
She ate leftovers, of course, but one meal often lasted so long that it felt like punishment.
One lasagna would haunt her fridge for three weeks. She would learn. She was learning.
“Last call for bingo!” A woman in an American Cruise Lines uniform walked by waving bingo sheets.
“I’ll play!” Annie said.
The woman swiped Annie’s card and handed her three flimsy bingo sheets and a felt-tipped marker. Annie took another bite of the roast beef.
“Okay, okay, y’all. Who’s ready?” A voice came from above. “Pancake bingo in the house!”
Annie wondered if DJ Pancake was getting enough sleep. It seemed like punishing work, all of it. He started to call out numbers, and they flashed on the giant screen over his head. G23. G23. B7. B7.
Several women were playing bingo in the pool.
It had certainly been cleaned in the hours between the lido deck parties and the actual morning, but still, Annie wasn’t sure she’d get in.
Every night, so many people were in their shoes, even sneakers, standing in the pool for hours because the shallow edge of the pool was the closest they could get to the stage, and to Boy Talk, and it was worth it to sacrifice a pair of Keds.
It seemed like some sort of bacterial infection waiting to happen, the whole thing, a gym shower on steroids.
The women in the pool seemed happy enough, though.
One was wearing an enormous pink visor, and her friend was wearing an identical one in yellow.
They looked like nice women. One of them had a book sitting just outside the pool, a book Annie had read that wasn’t about dragons but real people.
Annie wished she were reading a book about real people, too.
She took another bite of her roast beef and then set the plate off to the side and stretched her legs out in front of her.
Annie heard Greg before she saw him. He was dressed like himself, not that she knew who that was, but it was nice to see him not in costume.
Blue shorts, a white T-shirt, sunglasses.
He was surrounded by women, and they were all laughing.
It was a multiethnic, good-looking bunch, like a brunch table in a psoriasis medication commercial.
He didn’t seem to notice her, but it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had, Annie realized.
They were all stuck together until the American Fantasy pulled back into Miami, and if he’d slept with half as many people as Maira said, this was not a new experience for him.
Just as before she had come, when Annie had struggled to think of how to explain what she was doing, she also wasn’t sure what to say when she got back.
It was an escape from everything but her own brain, and even that seemed to be on the fritz.
There were things she understood better: The Talkers were terrifying in the same way that moms who packed sandwiches that had been cut into cute shapes were terrifying.
They were too good at this, too devoted.
What was missing in their lives that they could do this?
Annie knew what was missing in her own life.
Companionship. Sex. A job! Anyone who needed her on a daily basis.
Estrogen. Her parents. The good parts of her marriage.
Claudia’s childhood. Her body as it had been in previous decades.
Annie wanted to come home and have things be different.
She didn’t want to be some sad piece of driftwood.
The divorce had felt like a relief once it was over. Maybe there were other things to shed.
DJ Pancake kept calling out numbers, and Annie kept marking them down. The women in the pool splashed each other amicably when one of them was close to winning. O17. O17. There was a row of red dots straight down the middle of Annie’s sheet.
“Bingo!” she shouted. “Bingo!” It felt like yelling fire in a crowded room; everyone turned to look. An American Fantasy employee in a large sun hat and zinc oxide on their nose came over to check her sheet, nodded, and then pointed up the staircase toward the DJ booth.
“Really?” Annie said. She smoothed her hair with her hands.
There was nothing special about the stairs, not during the day.
Anyone could walk up or down. But these were the stairs the guys used at night, and Annie felt like she was doing something transgressive by walking up them, like Boy Talk would be waiting when she got to the top.
She took the stairs slowly, one at a time, gripping tightly to the handrail, just in case.
At the top of the stairs, in the shade, there was a slight man wearing a bucket hat. He was not as young as Claudia, but he was very, very young. Anyone under thirty now seemed very, very young. His chest was concave, and his enormous T-shirt billowed around him like a sail.
“Hello,” Annie said. She held her bingo card out in front of her. “I was told to bring this to you.”
“Nice, nice,” said the man. “Let me see your room key?” He took both the bingo card and her key card. Annie stood and watched. When he was finished, he handed both things back, his eyes barely visible under his hat.
“So, what do I win?” Annie asked. “Mr. Pancake.”
“A thousand dollars!” he said, and blushed. “And Mr. Pancake is my father.”
“Wow, oh gosh,” Annie said. She hadn’t been paying attention. “Well, shit!”
“It’s on your account now! Go crazy!” Pancake waved his hands in the air. His DJ booth was just a folding table. It seemed so dangerous to have it all out in the open. Even though there was a roof over their heads, they were still outside.
“Thank you,” Annie said. “And you’re doing a good job. Thank you. Everyone is having a wonderful time.”
Pancake smiled, genuinely. “Appreciate that.”
“Do you mind?” Annie said. She pointed to the edge of the balcony on the far side of his DJ equipment. The space in front of the folding table was where the guys stood every night. It was right there.
“Go for it,” Pancake said, and gestured for Annie to walk around to the other side, where she would overlook the pool and everything below. Pancake then turned his attention back to the DJ table, where he pressed a button, and Pink Floyd’s “Money” began to play.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he said into the microphone.
“Round two! Who’s ready?” A small woo went up down below.
Annie stepped up to the railing and looked out over the deck.
She saw Greg and his friends, a bucket of beer at his feet.
Who could blame him for seeing an opportunity and taking it?
She didn’t want to know that he lived with his parents.
She didn’t want to know anything other than that he had wanted to kiss her.
The women in the pool bobbed up and down, their visors like lotus flowers in the blue water.
She saw the length of the ship and where she and Greg had kissed and, around all of it, the ocean.
If Annie had been in Boy Talk, she would have stayed up there as long as she could have. She might never have come down.