by Maria Semple
My heart started doing gymnastics and I paced around wildly, repeating, Oh-my-God-Oh-my-God-Oh-my-God, waiting for Dad to burst through the door.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” came the voice through the speakers. “That was another wonderful recap. Chef Issey has just informed me that dinner is ready. Bon appétit.”
I flew up to the lounge because maybe Dad was sitting there stunned, but the gathering had broken up. A pack of people was shuffling down the stairs. I ran to the back and took the long way to the dining room. There was Dad, sitting at a table with some guy.
“Bee!” he said. “Would you like to join us for dinner?”
“Wait, weren’t you at the recap?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear—”
“Yes! And this is Nick, who’s studying the penguin colonies. He was telling me he always needs helpers to count penguin chicks.”
“Hi…” I was so scared of Dad in that moment that I took a step back and bumped into a waiter. “Sorry… hi… bye.” I turned around and walked as fast as I could out of there.
I ran to the chart room, which is a gigantic table with a map of the Antarctic Peninsula laid across it. Each day, I’d watch crew members mark our ship’s path with a dotted line, and afterward passengers would drop by and painstakingly copy it onto their maps. I pulled open a huge flat drawer and found the map of Mom’s journey. I placed it on top and followed with my finger the dot-dot-dot. Sure enough, her ship had stopped at Port Lockroy.
The next morning, Dad was at the gym, and I went out on deck. Plunked onto the rocky shore was a black wooden building, L-shaped, like two Monopoly hotels, with white window trim and cheery red shutters. Penguins dotted the landscape. The backdrop was a field of snow, looming over which was one big, pointy mountain rising above seven smaller scrunched-together ones, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Dad had signed up to go kayaking with the first group, then to Port Lockroy with the second group. I waited until he was gone, then ripped the tags off my red parka and snow pants and suited up. I fell in with the stream of passengers clomping, astronaut-like, down the stairs to the mudroom. It was full of lockers and had two huge openings on either side where floating docks were tethered. I headed down a ramp to a sputtering Zodiac.
“Port Lockroy?” confirmed a crewman. “Did you scan out?”
He pointed me to a stand with a computer. I scanned my ID badge. My photo popped up on the screen, along with the words ENJOY YOUR TIME ASHORE, BALAKRISHNA! I felt a surge of annoyance at Manjula, who was supposed to have made sure I got called Bee, but then I remembered she was an Internet bandit.
A dozen red suits crammed into the Zodiac with Charlie at the motor. It was mostly women who had all seen enough penguins for one lifetime and felt the need to start shopping. They were bursting with questions about what there was to buy.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said with a tinge of resentment. “T-shirts.”
It was the first time I’d been out on the glassy water. Bitter wind attacked me from all sides. My whole being instantly shrank, and any time I moved, my skin hit a new cold patch in my snowsuit, so I became trapped in stillness. I turned my head the teeniest bit possible, just enough to see the shore.
The closer we got to Port Lockroy, the building strangely got smaller and smaller, which was the first time I got scared. Charlie gunned the engine and drove the Zodiac onto the rocks. I belly-rolled off the big inflated side and dropped my life jacket. I scrambled across the big rocks, avoiding the singing gentoo penguins guarding their rock nests until I reached a wooden ramp leading to the entrance. A British flag flapped in the cold gray wind. I was the first one there, and I flung open the door. Two girls, college-aged, kind of goofy and enthusiastic, greeted us.
“Welcome to Port Lockroy!” they said in British accents.
It was one of those miserable situations where it was just as cold inside as it was outside. I was in a room with turquoise-painted walls. This was the gift shop, with colorful banners hanging from the ceiling; tables full of books, stuffed animals, and postcards; and glass cubbies of sweatshirts, baseball hats, and anything you could embroider a penguin on. There were no signs of Mom, but why would there be? This was just the gift shop.
Across this room was an opening leading to the rest of Port Lockroy, but the English girls blocked it. I kept it together and acted interested in the bulletin boards while the other passengers trickled in and oohed and aahed at the swag. Even the sudoku lady had torn herself away from the library for this outing.
“Welcome to Port Lockroy,” alternated the girls. “Welcome to Port Lockroy.”
It seemed like we had been standing there for an hour already. “Where is everyone who lives here?” I finally asked. “Where do you live?”
“You’re looking at it,” said one. “Let’s wait for everyone to get in before we begin the lecture.” Then they started up again, “Welcome to Port Lockroy.”
“But where do you sleep?” I asked.
“Welcome to Port Lockroy. Is that everyone? Oh, we have some more coming.”
“Is there, like, a dining hall where everyone else is?”
But the girls looked right over my head. “Welcome to Port Lockroy. OK, it looks like we’re all here.” One of them began her spiel. “During World War Two, Port Lockroy was a secret outpost for the British military—” She stopped because the group of Japanese tourists had just entered, and with them, the usual low-grade confusion. I couldn’t take it anymore. I squeezed past the English girls.
There were two small rooms. I went left, into an old-fashioned command center with desks and rusty machines full of dials and knobs. But no people. At the far end was a door marked DO NOT OPEN. I passed a wall of decaying books and pulled at the door. Blinding light blasted me back: it led outside to a snowfield. I closed the door and backtracked to the other room.
“In 1996 the U.K. Antarctic Heritage Trust paid to turn Port Lockroy into a living museum,” one of the girls was saying.
This room was a kitchen, with rusty stoves and shelves full of weird food rations and British tins. There also was a door marked DO NOT OPEN. I raced to that and yanked it open. Again… eye-watering snow shock.
I quickly shut the door. Once my eyes readjusted, I returned to the main section and tried to figure things out. OK, there were only three doors. The front door where we came in, and these other two leading outside…
“During the war, Port Lockroy was home to Operation Tabarin—” the girls went on.
“I don’t understand,” I butted in. “How many people live here?”
“Just the two of us.”
“Where do you live live?” I said. “Where do you sleep?”
“Here.”
“What do you mean, here?”
“We roll our sleeping bags out in the gift shop.”
“Where do you go to the bathroom?”
“We go outside—”
“Where do you do your laundry?”
“Well, we—”
“Where do you shower?”
“This is how they live,” a tourist lady snapped at me. She had freckles, blue eyes, and a bunch of gray in her blond hair. “Stop being rude. These girls come down for three months and pee in a tin can for the adventure.”
“It really is just the two of you?” I said weakly.
“And the cruise ship passengers like you who come visit.”
“So nobody has, like, gotten off one of the ships to live with you…?” The sound of the words coming out of my mouth, and the whole idea that Mom would be here waiting for me, struck me as so babyish that all of a sudden I burst into the most babyish tears. Swirled into my humiliation was anger at myself for letting my hope gallop off so stupidly. Snot sheeted down my face and into my mouth and down my chin and onto my new red parka, which I had been excited about, because we got to keep it.
“Dear God,” the freckled lady said. “What’s wrong with her?”
I couldn’t stop crying. I was trapped in the fun ho
use of pemmican rations, photographs of Doris Day, crates of whiskey, a rusty can of Quaker Oats where the Quaker Oats guy is a young man, Morse code machines, long johns with butt flaps hanging from a clothesline, and baby bibs that read ANTARCTICA BEACH CLUB. Charlie, chin lowered, spoke into the radio clipped to his parka. Lots of concerned ladies asked, What’s wrong?, something I now know how to say in Japanese, which is Anata wa daijbudesu?
I burrowed through the gathering nylon mass and made it out the front door. I stumbled down the ramp and, when I got to the bottom, clambered over some big rocks as far as I could go and stopped at a little inlet. I looked back, and there were no people. I sat down and caught my breath. There was one elephant seal, swaddled in her own blubber, lolling on her side. I couldn’t imagine how she was ever going to move. Her eyes were big black buttons, oozing black tears. Her nose, too, was oozing black. My breath was dense clouds. The cold seized me. I didn’t know if I’d ever move again. Antarctica was truly a horrible place.
“Bee, darling?” It was Dad. “Thank you,” he said quietly to a Japanese lady who must have led him to me. He sat down and handed me a handkerchief.
“I thought she was here, Dad.”
“I can see why you might have thought that,” he said.
I cried a little, but then stopped. Still, the crying continued. It was Dad.
“I miss her, too, Bee.” His chest jerked violently. He was bad at crying. “I know you think you have a monopoly on missing her. But Mom was my best friend.”
“She was my best friend,” I said.
“I knew her longer.” He wasn’t even being funny.
Now that Dad was crying, I was, like, both of us can’t be sitting on rocks in Antarctica crying. “It’s going to be OK, Dad.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said, blowing his nose. “It all started with that letter I sent Dr. Kurtz. I was only trying to get Mom help. You have to believe me.”
“I do.”
“You’re great, Bee. You’ve always been great. You’re our biggest accomplishment.”
“Not really.”
“It’s true.” He put his arm around me and pulled me close. My shoulder fit perfectly under his shoulder. I could already feel the warmth from his armpit. I nestled in closer. “Here, try these.” He reached into his parka and pulled out two of those pocket-warming heat biscuits. I yowled, they felt so good.
“I know this trip has been hard on you,” Dad said. “It’s not what you wanted it to be.” He let out a big gooey sigh. “I’m sorry you had to read all those documents, Bee. They weren’t meant for you. They weren’t something a fifteen-year-old should have had to read.”
“I’m glad I read them.” I didn’t know Mom had those other babies. It made me feel like there were all these children Mom would rather have had, and loved as much as she loved me, but I was the one who lived and I was broken, because of my heart.
“Paul Jellinek was right,” Dad said. “He’s a great guy, a true friend. I’d like us to go down to L.A. and spend some time with him one day. He knew Bernadette best. He realized that she needed to create.”
“Or she’d become a menace to society,” I said.
“That’s where I really failed your mom,” he said. “She was an artist who had stopped creating. I should have done everything I could to get her back.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know how. Trying to get an artist to create… it’s gigantic. I write code. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. You know, I’d forgotten, until I read that Artforum article, that we used Mom’s MacArthur money to buy Straight Gate. It was like Bernadette’s hopes and dreams were literally crumbling around us.”
“I don’t know why everyone’s so down on our house,” I said.
“Have you ever heard that the brain is a discounting mechanism?”
“No.”
“Let’s say you get a present and open it and it’s a fabulous diamond necklace. Initially, you’re delirious with happiness, jumping up and down, you’re so excited. The next day, the necklace still makes you happy, but less so. After a year, you see the necklace, and you think, Oh, that old thing. It’s the same for negative emotions. Let’s say you get a crack in your windshield and you’re really upset. Oh no, my windshield, it’s ruined, I can hardly see out of it, this is a tragedy! But you don’t have enough money to fix it, so you drive with it. In a month, someone asks you what happened to your windshield, and you say, What do you mean? Because your brain has discounted it.”
“The first time I walked into Kennedy’s house,” I said, “it had that horrible Kennedy-house smell because her mother is always frying fish. I asked Kennedy, What’s that gross smell? And she was, like, What smell?”
“Exactly,” Dad said. “You know why your brain does that?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“It’s for survival. You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger. If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise you couldn’t smell a predator. That’s why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It’s literally a matter of survival.”
“That’s cool.”
“It’s the same with Straight Gate,” he said. “We’ve discounted the holes in the ceilings, the wet patches in the floors, the cordoned-off rooms. I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how people live.”
“It’s how we lived,” I said.
“It is how we lived.” A long time passed, which was nice. It was just us and the seal and Dad whipping out his ChapStick.
“We were like the Beatles, Dad.”
“I know you think that, sweetie.”
“Seriously. Mom is John, you’re Paul, I’m George, and Ice Cream is Ringo.”
“Ice Cream,” Dad said with a laugh.
“Ice Cream,” I said. “Resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”
“What’s that?” He asked, rubbing his lips together.
“Something Mom read in a book about Ringo Starr. They say that nowadays he’s resentful of the past and fearful of the future. You’ve never seen Mom laugh so hard. Every time we saw Ice Cream sitting there with her mouth open, we’d say, Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”
Dad smiled a big smile.
“Soo-Lin,” I started to say, but even uttering her name made it difficult to keep talking. “She’s nice. But she’s like poop in the stew.”
“Poop in the stew?” he said.
“Let’s say you make some stew,” I explained, “and it’s really yummy and you want to eat it, right?”
“OK,” Dad said.
“And then someone stirs a little bit of poop in it. Even if it’s just a teeny-tiny amount, and even if you mix it in really well, would you want to eat it?”
“No,” Dad said.
“So that’s what Soo-Lin is. Poop in the stew.”
“Well, I think that’s rather unfair,” he said. And we both had to laugh.
It’s the first time during this whole trip that I let myself really look at Dad. He had on a fleece headband over his ears and zinc oxide on his nose. The rest of his face was shiny from sunblock and moisturizer. He wore dark mountain-climbing glasses with the flaps on the side. The one lens that was taped over didn’t show because the other lens was just as dark. There was really nothing to hate him for.
“So you know,” Dad said, “you’re not the only one with wild ideas about what happened to Mom. I thought maybe she’d gotten off the ship, and when she saw me with Soo-Lin she somehow dodged us. So you know what I did?”
“What?”
“I hired a bounty hunter from Seattle to go to Ushuaia and look for her.”
“You did?” I said. “A real-life bounty hunter?”
“They specialize in finding people far from home,” he said. “Someone at work recommended this guy. He spent two weeks in Ushuaia looking for Bernadette, checking the boats coming in and
out, the hotels. He couldn’t find anything. And then we got the captain’s report.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Bee,” he said carefully. “I have something to tell you. Have you noticed I haven’t been frantic about not being able to get email?”
“Not really.” I felt bad because only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t thought about Dad at all. It was true, he’s usually all into his email.
“There’s a huge reorg they’re probably announcing as we sit on these rocks.” He checked his watch. “Is today the tenth?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“As of the tenth, Samantha 2 is canceled.”
“Canceled?” I didn’t even understand how that word could apply.
“It’s over. They’re folding us into games.”
“You mean for, like, the Xbox?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “Walter Reed pulled out because of budget cuts. At Microsoft, you’re nothing if you don’t ship. If Samantha 2 is under games, at least they can ship millions of units.”
“What about all those paraplegics you’ve been working with?”
“I’m in talks with the UW,” he said. “I’m hoping to continue our work over there. It’s complicated because Microsoft owns the patents.”
“I thought you owned the patents,” I said.
“I own the commemorative cubes. Microsoft owns the patents.”
“So, like, you’re going to leave Microsoft?”
“I left Microsoft. I turned in my badge last week.”
I’d never known Dad without his badge. A terrible sadness poured in through my head and filled me to the brim, like I was a honey bear. I thought I might burst of sadness. “That’s so weird,” is all I could say.
“Is now a good time to tell you something even weirder?” he said.
“I guess,” I said.
“Soo-Lin is pregnant.”
“What?”
“You’re too young to understand these things, but it was one night. I’d had too much to drink. It was over the moment it began. I know that probably seems really… what’s a word you would use… gross?”
“I never say gross,” I said.
“You just did,” he said. “That’s what you called the smell at Kennedy’s house.”