The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  “I told you I may just stay on the boat,” the gentleman said to his wife.

  “And you?” he said, turning to the middle-aged woman, who was in the midst of yanking the chopstick out of the teenage boy’s mouth. “Stop it,” he heard the kid snap.

  “Oh, I’m just going to walk around a little on my own. Get a feel for the place,” she said, tucking her hair behind an ear nervously.

  Julian turned next to the man at her side, who was topping off his wineglass with the bottle chilling in the ice bucket. It was the cheap swill, the boat’s “signature” chardonnay, but still known to get the job done.

  “How about you, sir?”

  “I’m going swimming with the dolphins with my daughter,” he said, breaking into a broad smile as he looked at the teenage girl across from him.

  “Actually, Dad, I decided to sign up for stand-up paddleboard lessons. Forgot to tell you,” she said, popping a piece of sushi into her mouth. “I want the cardio.” The father looked crushed. Julian wished Roger were here to witness all this domestic bliss.

  “And you?” Julian addressed the platinum blonde who was busy taking pouty selfies.

  “I’m going to do the sunrise yoga on the beach.” She reapplied lip gloss and clicked another selfie.

  “You are? I thought we were spending the day together.” A different middle-aged man, scruffy and dressed in a T-shirt and unbuttoned flannel, looked at her with disappointment. “I guess I’m deep-sea fishing by myself, then.”

  “Wow. Looks like everyone is headed in different directions. Lots of exciting plans,” Julian said. “You will all have a lot of catching up to do at tomorrow night’s black-tie dinner.” He waved to the family and set off for the neighboring table. One hundred and thirty-two more tables to greet, Julian thought, signaling to Lindsay to cross off the Feldman family from his diagram.

  “You must be the Taylor family from Minneapolis,” Julian said, approaching the next group and putting a friendly hand on the shoulder of the man seated at the end of the table. “Tell me, what’s everyone planning to do tomorrow?”

  A little girl about six years old piped in with her plans to go banana boat riding and Julian regaled her with a tale of him losing his bathing suit when he fell off a banana boat. The table loved it. “More stories,” the little girl begged. “Tell us more stories.”

  This was so much easier than thinking about pesky Roger.

  TWENTY

  Darius’s plans changed by the time they reached Sint Maarten.

  Some time ago, Marcy had posted a picture of herself parasailing in Jamaica. Okay, fine, he knew exactly when she’d done it—last April, with her two sisters, and Marcy had been wearing a neon green bikini. When he saw it on the list of excursions, Darius had immediately decided that was what he would do. Then when he got back home and was back with the group, he’d casually bring up parasailing, pretending that he didn’t remember Marcy had ever done it, and surely she’d chime in with her own experience. And just like that, they’d have a “thing.”

  But he was late in signing up, as he was in everything in his life, and the parasailing was sold out. Downcast, he walked into the teen lounge after the around-the-world dinner with his mind made up to just stay on the boat the next day. He didn’t dare ask Rachel to join her in the stand-up paddle class. For one thing, if he was anything on a paddleboard like the way he was on a skateboard, Rachel would mercilessly tease him. Secondly, if she’d wanted him there, she would have asked him to join. He’d given her lots of openings, following her around like a shadow, whenever he could even find her on the boat. She’d been a slippery eel and Darius couldn’t understand why. The boat seemed entirely lacking in the stuck-up overachievers she normally rolled with. Those kids were probably all saving orphans or building huts, like Rachel had done over spring break. He’d hoped once she got into Stanford the pole might come out of her ass, but so far it seemed firmly wedged in.

  “Whaddya doing tomorrow?” came a familiar voice when Darius was sitting on a white leather couch in the arcade, nursing a flat Coke. He looked up and saw Angelica, this time wearing a Highland chess team T-shirt tucked into a pair of bell-bottoms. Under an illustration of a knight, the shirt read:

  Five, Six, Seven, Eight

  First You Check and Then You Mate!

  “Um, not sure,” Darius said. He dropped the straw he’d been grinding with his teeth. Supposedly his habit of chewing on things was a nervous tic that he would outgrow, at least according to their pediatrician. And Darius was pretty sure the doctor’s instructions were for his mother to ignore it, not yank out objects from his mouth. “I wanted to parasail, but it’s sold out.”

  “Come with me, then. I’m going to take the snorkel class. The rest of my family is going to the aquarium, which is so dumb. We live in Maryland, near one of the best aquariums in the world. I guess they really like fish.”

  Darius hadn’t considered where she was from. Highland sounded like a town that could be anywhere, from Michigan to New Hampshire or Nebraska. And Angelica, with her chess and debate team shirts, was the sort of teenager that existed in every high school. Darius couldn’t begin to imagine why she took even the slightest interest in him. She must be very lonely. Maybe she thought he didn’t realize she was a dork back home. The nerdy kids in overnight camp were like that, always trying to reinvent themselves for four weeks and praying nobody from back home outed them as losers.

  “No more practice SATs for you, then?”

  “Nope. I got a 1550 on the last one so my parents decided to let me out of my cage.” Without asking, Angelica sat down next to Darius on the couch and grabbed the Coke from his hand. “Flat!” she said, wincing after taking a sip.

  “Your cage?” he asked, bewildered by her sharing his beverage.

  “I shouldn’t complain really,” Angelica said. “My parents aren’t terrible. I guess they just don’t want me working behind the counter at a dry cleaner’s for the rest of my life.”

  Darius laughed. “Ugh, can you imagine?” He literally couldn’t. When he was a kid he used to love to go along with his dad to pick up the dry cleaning. He found the rotating rack and the metal pole with the hook used to get the clothes down endlessly fascinating. But now? He’d be miserable working in one of those places, hot and smelly and customers complaining about their clothing getting damaged. That was about ten rungs below working in the lifeguard chair, where at least he got sunshine and could ogle girls in bikinis.

  “I can, actually. My parents own a dry cleaning store. They are really proud of their business, but like—they want me to be a rocket scientist or something. I work there every day after school. I get my homework done while I’m there and then I’m free to just chill out when I get home.”

  Darius couldn’t look at her. He was such an ass having assumed she’d been joking. But how could she be on a trip like this? he wondered. He knew it was costing his grandparents a pretty penny. His mother had made him thank them each, like, a dozen times already.

  As if reading his mind, Angelica said, “My uncle is paying for this trip. He’s my mom’s sister’s husband. They love to show off. He’s got a huge electronics exporting business in Beijing. My family never takes vacations. My parents can’t close the dry cleaner’s and the only people who work there are my mom and dad and me and my brother.”

  “Who’s working there now?” Darius asked.

  “My cousin on my dad’s side of the family. But my parents are freaking out about it. I had to train him on the register for, like, five days before he figured it out.”

  Darius nodded.

  “So, you wanted to know about my ‘cage’?” Angelica asked, putting “cage” in air quotes. “When my parents first moved to this country—I was six and my mom was pregnant with my brother—their first landlord suggested that they play Scrabble to help them learn the language. I learned right alongside them and
I guess I was pretty good at it, you know, for an immigrant kid. I’ll never forget, the landlord said to my parents, pointing at me: This one is smart. She could end up at Harvard.”

  Darius recalled a memory. When he was in middle school, he had a Harvard T-shirt that Grandpa David had bought him after he’d delivered a lecture at their medical school. It was super soft and came down to his knees and he loved to wear it around the house on weekends. Rachel, who’d been given a Harvard notebook and was walking around the house with it everywhere, scribbling mysterious notes that she’d cover up if anyone walked by, had been quick to point out to their parents that the shirt was the closest Darius would ever come to Harvard. “Maybe Grandpa will give a lecture at Hartford and get you a more appropriate shirt,” she had said. Darius didn’t even know what that was supposed to mean, but he was certain it was an insult. And his parents hadn’t done anything more than say, “Rachel,” in their cautionary voices.

  Later that night, Darius had stolen the notebook out of Rachel’s room while she was sleeping and looked inside. All he found were lists of her homework assignments and he wondered why she went to such effort to shade them from view. At the time Rachel had been in tenth grade and he was in eighth. She was as opaque as a paper lunch bag and he felt like cellophane. Or so it had seemed to him until he cracked open her notebook. Then he realized she was just desperate to appear like she had secrets worth guarding.

  “So then what happened?” Darius asked Angelica.

  “My mom said, what is Harvard? And the landlord—this old white guy named Terry McDougall who I don’t think even went to college—proceeds to explain to my parents that if you go to Harvard, you will be rich and your life will be perfect. You should have seen my dad’s eyes. They looked like golf balls. I have no idea what they did after that—whether they asked friends for advice or went to our pastor or maybe even looked up Harvard in the library—but after that they were on me nonstop. Piano practice, chess team, debate, gymnastics, learning more languages. I became this kid they programmed like a microwave. She-will-go-to-Harvard-no-matter-what,” Angelica said in a robotic voice.

  “What about your brother?” Darius asked.

  Angelica’s eyes glazed over and she blinked twice quickly.

  “Theo’s severely learning disabled. He goes to a special school. So it’s all on me, Angelica Harvard Lee, to get the family out of Chinatown.” She reached over and took another pull of Coke from his straw. He must have looked at her wild-eyed because she said, “Oh, the germs? You have no idea the things I’ve come into contact with at the cleaner’s. Let’s just say people come in needing some very personal stains removed. I guess I’ve just become numb to it.”

  “So you think you’ll get into Harvard?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m an immigrant with near-perfect SATs, I work a part-time job every day, and I’m captain of the debate, chess, and field hockey teams at my school. So, I’d say I have a fifty-fifty shot.” She gave a wry smile.

  “What do you mean? You’re perfect. I mean, you sound perfect for a place like Harvard.”

  “Who knows? There are a million other kids just like me, except maybe they do everything I do but they’re blind or their parents are in jail. That’s a real thing, trust me. I read this article about how colleges love to admit kids whose parents are incarcerated.”

  “Or maybe they’re blind and their parents are incarcerated. Oh, and they started a school for Tanzanian refugees,” Darius said.

  “I don’t think Tanzania has refugees. But yes, the perfect applicant would be a kid who started a school for Tanzanian refugees who are blind and their parents are incarcerated,” Angelica said, throwing her head back with a maniacal laugh that shook her bun loose. “That’s pretty much who my guidance counselor tells me I’m up against.”

  “Sounds like mine. Does she also hide behind the cafeteria making out with the assistant principal?”

  “No, mine sneaks cigarettes in the faculty lounge with the gym teacher, Mr. Nostril. That’s really his name.”

  “Ours is Mr. Strong—that’s just what he makes us call him,” Darius said, but suddenly he felt a weight returning to his shoulders. Marcy flirted openly with Mr. Strong, asking him to time her sprints or for tips on how to stretch her calves. She joked about how the gym teacher totally wanted her and Darius would think, Well, you do lead him on. Nobody dared say it out loud, though he couldn’t imagine Jesse wasn’t thinking the same thing. Marcy was one of those girls that nobody called out on stuff.

  “You okay?” Angelica asked and Darius fretted about how totally incapable he was of maintaining a poker face.

  “Yep, fine. I think I’ll do the snorkeling with you. Will you come with me to sign up? I’m not sure where to go,” he lied, looking down at his untied shoelaces, yellow and loosely looped through his checkered Vans.

  “Sure,” she said, pulling him up to stand. He was surprised by Angelica’s forwardness, drinking from his straw, touching him. “But you need to tell me at least something about yourself after I just gave you my autobiography.”

  Darius jammed his thumbs into his back pockets. Where to start? His bitchy sister giving him the slip? His shopaholic mother? Or maybe his wayward uncle? Then there was finding his grandmother inexplicably weepy at the sail-away party.

  “My mom has, like, a crazy shopping problem. I saw, like, hundreds of bags in our attic and she doesn’t know that I found them.”

  “That’s about your mom. Tell me about you,” Angelica said, superciliously. Of all the SAT vocab words, that was his favorite for no particular reason.

  Darius groaned. This girl was worse than the common application.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Natasha had been upside down for three minutes already, but still she felt all her energy pulling her down. She was supposed to invert her feelings by performing Sirsasana, but even with the blood rushing to her head and her lips swollen stiff, she was still pissed at Freddy.

  She rolled gracefully out of her pose and took a big gulp of kombucha. She was doing yoga amidst about a hundred other women and a group of delightfully cute gay men, all from the boat. She recognized some of them from the fitness room on board and gave them pleasant nods. Natasha was a yoga fanatic and held a teaching certificate that she never used, preferring the act of massage and finding the pay better too. But still, she knew she stood out in the class as one of the best. She saw others take notice of her perfect Bakasana and the way she effortlessly transitioned in Vinyasa without even breaking the rhythm of her breathing. She could stay in this class forever, where nobody looked at her like they thought she was a clueless little girl. People came up to her during the break to ask her for pointers. If only her boyfriend would follow suit.

  She had told him at least a dozen times not to grant the interview to High Times without hiring a publicist first. How did she know? First of all, basic common sense. Second of all, her friend from the St. Regis, Lucy, who worked as a concierge, was a former daytime television actress. At one time she had a pretty good gig on All My Children playing somebody-or-other’s mistress and there were no immediate plans to kill her off by a poisoned martini. Lucy gave an interview (her first ever) to Soap Opera Digest, where she accidentally spilled the beans on how the show’s season would end and also made a few badly timed jokes that made her seem, incorrectly, like she was a gun enthusiast. Her contract was shredded faster than the cheddar at Taco Bell, which was why Natasha was certain that Freddy shouldn’t go into the interview without some coaching and a third party present to help steer the conversation. But did he listen to her? Nope. He’d all but patted her on the head when she suggested it.

  And then, after the fallout, did he come apologizing to her after the article was published, outing his financial status (with surprising accuracy) and blazing with all those terrible quotes about his family? No, he did not. Instead, he came bounding into the gym and actually pressed pause
on the treadmill while she was running at seven miles per hour, nearly causing her to fall flat on her face. He ranted about the reporter and the editor and blamed everyone but himself. And instead of saying he regretted the things he’d said about his family, he just kept repeating over and over that he hoped they’d never see the article. Maybe it went without saying he was remorseful. Natasha sure hoped so.

  Her frustration with Freddy aside, she still wanted all of the Feldmans to take her more seriously. David had hardly spoken to her, other than to randomly ask if she’d be interested in participating in a study related to early detection of ovarian cancer that supposedly his former colleague was conducting. She was pretty sure it was his fairly inelegant way of determining her age, since he made a point of saying that the study subjects had to be between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine. Annette had barely looked in her direction for more than two seconds, instead either focusing on her compact mirror or staring off forlornly into space as if waiting for someone to ask her what was wrong.

  And what about Elise, with her haughty protectiveness of Freddy when she came upon her chatting with the boat captain? Freddy’s sister clearly thought she’d stumbled upon some illicit scene and had a visceral reaction of outrage on her brother’s behalf, as if it was her place to suddenly look out for her brother when she never had before. Natasha could have cleared up the whole matter easily—suite guests were entitled to a meet and greet with the captain at the time of their choosing and Natasha had scheduled this appointment in advance of boarding with the concierge (officially called their “wish granter”) who was assigned to manage their stay. Freddy, at the last minute, had bailed and she’d gone off to meet Captain John by herself. He was a charming guy and very handsome. He was also happily married and delighted in showing Natasha about four dozen photographs of his children. Of course the endless iPhone slideshow had occurred before Elise had stumbled onto the scene, acting like she’d found them in flagrante delicto. And Natasha had felt like it would make everything worse if she clarified why she was hanging with the captain. She certainly hadn’t missed Elise’s face when Freddy announced he had upgraded rooms.