The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  “I’m allergic to sesame,” Rachel said to the waitress. “Do you have anything you’re positive has no sesame in it?”

  The waitress, a hearty woman with a white blond chignon, seemed excited by the question. Annette squinted to read her name tag: Ekaterina, Ukraine.

  “I’m very glad you asked, miss. Our specialty is the baked Alaska. No sesame—I prepare fresh for you. It is a delight for the eyes. Perhaps you have seen our baked Alaska presentation on the YouTube?”

  Annette saw Darius smirk.

  “We have not,” Annette said. “Please tell us.”

  Ekaterina looked as though she didn’t fancy herself up to the task. Whether it was a question of her English language skills or the sheer weight of describing the rapture that was supposed to be the baked Alaska, Annette wasn’t sure.

  “Oh, it is spectacular. We do a parade. Our biggest baked Alaska—it goes on the float, I think you say—is three meters tall,” she said.

  Meters, not feet. It was just one of the many differences between the staff and the guests. There was kind of an Upstairs Downstairs thing happening on the boat. Annette had gone for a stroll the other night after David had fallen asleep again before nine. The medicine made him so tired, as though it was preparing her in stages for what life would be like without him. She’d made her way below deck to where the staff cabins were located and all she saw was merriment—waiters playing cards, dancers twirling with the croupiers, engineers building houses of cards with tented Deep Blue Digests. Annette had stood out of sight for as long as she could, tucked behind the open door of a supply closet filled with barf bags, wondering if things really were better below deck.

  A common theme among the crew—almost a universal truth—was that they were far away from their families. There were the occasional husband-wife pairings (porter/cleaner or bartender/waitress), but most of the workers were oceans away from their families, sending money home, breaking their backs to provide their children and spouses with schooling and clothing. But still when Annette came upon them, they were smiling and laughing. She wondered if it was easier for them to be distant, shielded from the daily insults of family by miles of ocean.

  “For you, though, I have a small sample. But don’t worry, it is enough for you to share. On the Ocean Queen, we do everything big.” Ekaterina smiled and reached under the trolley, where a tablecloth was obscuring a mini refrigerator. For the next few minutes, the Feldmans watched in silence as the ceremony of the baked Alaska unfolded. A thin layer of pound cake was pressed into a pan and topped with four generous scoops of vanilla ice cream. A meringue with remarkable adhesion (Annette could never get the egg whites to peak when she beat them) was then draped on top like a cloak. Finally, Ekaterina poured a generous amount of rum around the perimeter of the plate.

  “And now, the magic moment,” she said, reaching for matches. She struck a match against the book in one graceful swoop. Annette struggled sometimes with the flimsy matches from restaurants, but these looked long and sturdy, oversized like everything else on board. Ekaterina touched the flame to the alcohol pooling around the dessert and, voila, a blue ring of fire was formed. The flames worked their way up the meringue, toasting its edges to golden brown. The smell was evocative and Darius said, “Rach, this is like toasting marshmallows at Camp Lackawanna.”

  Lackawanna was the overnight camp on the East Coast that the Connelly kids went to for five years straight, where they learned to sculpt jugs on potter’s wheels, windsurf, pitch a tent, and all manner of skills practical and impractical. In a gesture of generosity, Annette and David had offered to pay for their grandchildren to attend. Freddy and Elise had been to a similar camp, Camp Topanga, which had since been disbanded over ugly rumors about the camp director fraternizing with the female counselors. Annette didn’t want her grandchildren to miss out on the camping experience, which had been so formative for Elise and Freddy. It was on the clay courts of Topanga that Elise had mastered her tennis serve and in the nature center where Freddy had developed his fondness for the outdoors. (He’d lasted four whole summers at the camp until he was kicked out after being caught with a clove cigarette.) Not only did she wish her grandchildren to experience camp life, she didn’t want to sit out when all of her friends discussed what to send in the care packages and mock complained about the schlep to the boonies for visiting day. Now she thought about all that camp tuition money that would have accrued interest, carving a sizable dent into David’s medical expenses. She shook off the thought. There was no sense living life planning for doomsday. And besides, apparently her grandchildren were skilled in marshmallow toasting. Could she really put a price on that?

  She looked back at the flaming dessert. The white of the meringue was starting to blacken, but the fire was still going strong.

  “Excuse me, are we supposed to blow out the fire or wait until it burns out?” Annette asked Ekaterina, but she was already out of earshot, rolling the trolley out of the ballroom toward the galley.

  “You’re supposed to blow it out,” Elise said firmly. “I’ve made baked Alaska before.”

  Really? thought Annette. Anytime she’d been in the Connelly house, the closest Elise came to baking was slicing from a premade cookie dough roll. Even her meals left something to be desired. She’d have thought her daughter might have invested in a cooking class after all these years of phoning it in.

  “No, you haven’t,” Rachel said, confirming Annette’s suspicions. But now her annoyance shifted to Rachel. Her granddaughter still hadn’t passed into that stage of adulthood where she realized that her parents sometimes did things when the kids weren’t around and that didn’t revolve around them. It reminded Annette of how both of her kids thought their teachers slept in school until Elise’s fourth-grade teacher brought her daughter to work one day and blew everyone’s minds. She would love to discuss this with Elise, but her daughter could be so prickly about how she raised her children, as though she and Annette were on different teams.

  “I don’t think so,” David said. “You’re supposed to let the alcohol burn out and the flame will extinguish on its own.”

  Annette looked at her husband. He was a man of science, but then again, Elise claimed to have made this dessert before.

  “Blow it out,” Elise said again, this time more urgently. “The whole thing is burning.”

  “No, your father’s right,” Annette said. “If we had to blow it out, Ekaterina would have told us to. And she just left.”

  “Who?” Darius asked.

  “Ekaterina. The waitress who brought the dessert,” Annette said. She eyed the dessert with growing concern. The flames weren’t growing taller, but they showed no signs of subsiding either. And the meringue had gone from golden brown to crispy black. Still, David usually knew what he was talking about. Why trust Elise? She wasn’t in her right mind.

  “You’re going to burn the ship down,” Elise said, standing up from her chair and leaning over the baked Alaska, lips puckered and ready to blow.

  “Do it, Mom,” Rachel said. “I want to try it before nothing’s left.”

  “Why? You don’t even eat anymore. Is it because of Austin?” Darius said.

  “Who’s Austin?” Mitch asked, his eyes moving between his children.

  “Rachel’s married boyfriend,” Darius said.

  “You are the worst, Darius,” Rachel said. “Just so you know, Mom spent all your college money. So you’re probably going to have to come work for me one day. Bet you wish you’d known that before you ratted me out.”

  “Guys. The dessert is really smoking now,” Natasha said. “Like, more than I think it’s supposed to.” Her doe eyes were washed with concern. She was so Bambi-like it was ridiculous.

  “The alcohol needs to burn off,” David repeated, like he was telling a nurse to back the hell off with her IV bag. “If you blow it out, it will taste like straight Bacardi.”

&
nbsp; “This is ridiculous,” Elise said. Like she was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, she moved her head in a dramatic circle and blew hard to beat back the flames. But then, before anyone could push it aside, a lock of hair escaped from her bun.

  “Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!” Elise let out a virulent shriek. “Help me! Help me! Help!”

  For a few seconds, nobody moved while they tried to grasp what was happening. Then the smell, noxious and forceful, made it obvious. Elise’s hair was on fire, her reddish locks singeing and crisping. Freddy jumped up first, dumping his water glass on Elise’s head. It helped, and a reassuring fizz sounded. But then Elise shrieked again and it was obvious her hair was still smoldering.

  Freddy grabbed Rachel’s glass and flung it at Elise.

  “No!” Rachel screamed, but it was too late. Elise’s hair sizzled and the smell grew even more lethal. “That’s vodka! I’m so sorry.” Rachel began to cry.

  Natasha appeared with a large pitcher of water (when had she even run off to get it? Annette wondered) and poured the whole thing on Elise’s head in one quick motion. The stench of burning hair finally began to subside.

  Annette watched as Elise slowly lifted her hand and brought it to her head. In patent disbelief, she grasped at the clumps of her hair, assessing the damage while biting down hard on her bottom lip.

  “Elise—” she started to say, wanting to comfort her daughter. She knew her hairdresser Antonio could work magic on anybody, and there was no doubt if Elise was willing to make the trip, Antonio could fashion a flattering bob out of the remains. Truthfully, Annette had always thought Elise should cut her hair shorter. So maybe this was a blessing. “If you want, I can ask Anto—”

  “I. Am. Going. To. My. Cabin,” Elise said and nobody dared to convince her otherwise. She turned her back on the group and headed toward the exit, her fist still grasping a clump of her sopping wet hair. Mitch, dutiful, followed quickly behind.

  When they were gone, Freddy, Natasha, David, Rachel, and Darius all looked to Annette for instruction. They only treated her like the matriarch when convenient. She rubbed both her eyes, even though she knew it would drag the coal of her eyeliner toward her temples. It was rare she was this tired.

  “What are you all waiting for?” Annette finally said. “Time for bed.” She honestly didn’t want to hear another word out of any of them. The following day she was turning seventy. Surely nobody had thought to bring her a gift. So she would give herself a present: a deep and dreamless night’s sleep, compliments of another one of David’s Valium.

  TWENTY-SIX

  2300 hours. 120 miles from St. Lucia.

  Julian had a monster migraine. Soon after he turned forty, the debilitating headaches began. He had assumed the worst, a brain tumor. For a few weeks he avoided seeing a doctor because he couldn’t face having his worst fears confirmed. But Roger made him go after he found him sitting in a corner of their bathroom in a pool of his own vomit. They went to the neurologist together, holding hands in the waiting room even though both of their palms were clammy, and Roger left his side only when the radiation tech forced him outside.

  “Migraines,” the doctor said, after an excruciating wait for the results. “Your MRI and CT were clean. It all makes sense. The vomiting. The waves in your vision.”

  Julian and Roger exhaled, a collective breath that ruffled the papers on the doctor’s desk.

  “It’s not a tumor,” Roger said in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice from Kindergarten Cop and they all started laughing, though it couldn’t be the first time the neurologist had heard the joke.

  “But I’ve never had them before,” Julian said. “How could they just start out of nowhere?”

  The doctor, a white-haired fellow whose bookcases were lined with pictures of grandchildren, smiled kindly.

  “You’ve just had a big birthday, haven’t you?”

  Julian didn’t answer. It was rhetorical anyway. The doctor had his chart right in front of him.

  “Forty is not unheard of for the onset of migraines. In fact, some new literature is showing that more and more men are having their first episode in middle age,” he explained. “Happy birthday.”

  In that moment, even though Julian had been grateful to Roger for forcing him to make the appointment with the best neurologist in Miami-Dade County and taking off work to accompany him, now he wished his boyfriend was not sitting there listening to the doctor talk about Julian getting old.

  Roger was nine years Julian’s senior. He had thinning hair and a back that creaked. By contrast, Julian’s head of hair was shampoo-commercial-worthy and he bounded up and down the steps on the cruise ships without so much as a touch of charley horse, no matter how many times a day he did it. Julian loved being the younger partner. He had exclusively dated older men. And while turning forty in no way narrowed the age gap between them, somehow it bookended them both in middle age. He didn’t want Roger to see him that way, as a man on a collision course with fifty, someone who developed a medical condition simply because of the number of rings in his trunk.

  Julian had left the doctor’s office immensely relieved that he was tumor free but still with a nagging feeling. What would come next? Perhaps a soft penis that no amount of coaxing or dirty movies could bring to a salute? Cellulite that was defenseless against the Total Body machine at which he prayed every morning?

  “Cheer up,” Roger said when they reached their Volvo in the parking lot. “You could be dying. Instead you’re just old like me.”

  The migraines always started with the same symptom, a stiffness at the base of his skull. The thin gold chain Julian wore around his neck would take on the feeling of an albatross. He knew one was coming before the black-tie gala when he struggled to put on his bow tie. He took his medication immediately and hoped to be spared the worst of the symptoms, since this was the biggest night on the cruise. But the moment he walked into the cocktail hour and the jazz trio sounded like toddlers with tambourines, he knew it was going to be a difficult night. Maybe Roger was right and he should find a job that he could leave behind in the evenings. A job where he wasn’t literally trapped.

  And then the fiasco with the Feldman family happened. He wasn’t surprised it was one of the most vanilla-looking families on board causing all the commotion. It always happened like that. The motorcycle gangs would embark in their leather and chains, inked with dragons and flames on their massive biceps, and he wouldn’t hear a peep out of them the whole time. Not a noise complaint or a scuffle in the casino. Sometimes those guys were the surprise hit of the amateur comedy night. The bachelorette squads would cross the gangway giggling loudly, already drunk on Red Bull and vodka and life, and then the next day he’d see them all fast asleep at the pool, because they were young, overworked professionals who above everything else were just tired. But the families, the multigenerational clusters of slow-moving grandparents and fast-talking teenagers, of middle-aged parents getting crushed on both ends, they were always the source of drama. They were the ones for whom the Caribbean cruise was a trip, not a vacation.

  He made his way down the hallway toward his room, stepping over a chorus girl from the late-night adults-only show making out with a busboy she’d ignore the next day. Normally he’d tell them to take it inside somewhere. Same with the line cooks who were smoking Turkish cigarettes while playing cards, ashing right into the carpet. But tonight Julian couldn’t be bothered. He needed to get to his room, lie in the dark, and wait for the migraine to subside. Above everything, he needed silence. His room was at the end of the hallway. He had one of the better cabins, with a small sitting area and a queen-size bed he loved to lie in on the diagonal. Roger was a cover-stealer and tosser-turner, so Julian relished his evenings in bed alone.

  When he opened the door, Julian saw a small pool of light in the corner shedding from the desk lamp. In the desk chair sat Roger.

  “Ahh!” Julian yelped
in fright. “What are you doing here?”

  “Surprise,” Roger said. He rose from his chair and looked like he was coming to give Julian a hug, but stopped himself short.

  “You’re not well,” Roger said. “You have a migraine.”

  “Yes,” Julian said, moving into the room and sinking onto the bed. “How can you tell?”

  “C’mon, Julian. I know when you need to pee.” He joined Julian on the bed and took his hand. Roger wore a Dolphins string bracelet that Julian teased him about. Just because I love football doesn’t mean I can’t love you, Roger would say back every time. Don’t be so stereotypical.

  “What are you doing here, Roger? How did you plan this? And why did you wait so long to tell me you were here?” Julian’s head felt like an aquarium, questions swimming in circles like bettas. “And who is watching Takai?”

  “My sister has him. I’ve been having the best time watching you work without you knowing. It’s like Undercover Boss, except it’s ‘Undercover Boyfriend.’ Also, I’m technically not Roger. I booked the trip under the name Carlos Rodriguez and listed my occupation as traveling urinal salesman. Figured I’d have some fun with it. I thought you might have said something when you were reviewing the manifest, but it didn’t get your attention.”

  Julian attempted a smile.

  “That is hardly the strangest occupation I’ve come across. But nice effort,” he said. “I still want to know why you’re here.” Roger’s coming on the boat felt like an invasion of Julian’s territory, even if his boyfriend intended it as a loving gesture. It was a sign that Roger didn’t take his work seriously, if he thought he could show up like this. Julian would never just appear at the Dolphins offices and expect Roger to drop everything, even though he had promised to bring him into the locker room before a game at least just once.