The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  Sensing a sympathetic ear, James piped up as he continued making up one of the separated beds. “Not only do we share a bed, but we sleep in shifts. We share with three other people, taking turns.”

  “What happens if the person before you is a lazy bed sharer and hasn’t changed the sheets before it’s your sleepy shift?” I asked. “And please tell me you don’t have to share a pillow!”

  Ardhi and James simply burst out laughing. Although we hadn’t set sail, I was very unsure whether it was sea sickness or revulsion that had just socked me in the gut.

  “Do you share a bed with the captain?” I prodded, eager to gross myself out further. “Or Devon? I’d bet he never changes the sheets and he produces a wide variety of nighttime noises.”

  Both Ardhi and James giggled again but said nothing.

  “Where do you eat?” I pressed further. “Do you eat at the buffet?”

  “No, no, no.” James smiled as he shook his head and tucked the last edge of the sheet under the mattress. “We have a cafeteria on our deck. We aren’t allowed up to the passenger buffet. We would lose our jobs if we did that.”

  “Do you have the same food there as we have?” I asked hopefully.

  “No,” Ardhi replied slowly, and then added a chuckle as he flung out a comforter on one of the beds. “It’s not the same food. It’s not very good down there. Hot dogs and things you microwave.”

  James nodded his head in agreement.

  “You know what I think,” I replied, despite the fact that I knew by the silence that was sitting on the bathroom sink that I had said enough already. “I think you should get a drool-free pillow! You deserve a clean pillow. Everyone does!”

  “Your beds are ready!” Ardhi said as he straightened out the last wrinkle on a comforter. “Embarkation is always very busy for us. Have a great dinner!”

  And with a little wave, Ardhi and James shuffled out of the room in short, little steps and closed the door behind them. Immediately Jamie poked her head out of the bathroom doorway.

  “All of the asshole colonialists in the room raise their hands,” I announced as my arm sliced into the air.

  “God job, César Chávez!” Jamie said as she hopped off the sink. “Who do you think you are, every disenfranchised college-aged male trying to establish his identity by hanging a Che Guevara poster in his dorm room and keeping a beat-up copy of On the Road in his backpack? Do you want to see those boys left on the pier with sad Ardhi and James faces as we leave the next port?”

  “No, but I feel so bad for them,” I replied. “They are both so nice.”

  “We can do other things for them besides urging them to unionize! We can leave them a big tip at the end, and proclaim their excellent customer service on comment cards. But this ship is not an American ship, and they play by different rules. And the last time I heard, there were no unions in Jamaica or Indonesia, and sharing a pillow was probably not a big deal until you brought it up and mentioned slobber. I’m ready for the buffet, but I will only eat dinner with you if there’s a promise of not mentioning boycotting grapes to anyone working near or around the salad menagerie and fruit carousel. No hissy fits, provoked or otherwise. Agreed?”

  Stymied, I nodded my head, but the moment after we entered the buffet dining room, I knew all bets were off. What I witnessed there was unbelievable. I have honestly only seen that kind of chaos on news footage when the United Nations drops sacks of rice and grain into the middle of a country experiencing prolonged famine or when the Marines pull out of a war zone and there’s one helicopter for the 10,000 civilians attempting to escape with them. Typically, Americans are only most likely to behave in a manner that frantic if they are exposed to something free and sample-sized, but clearly, in the gauntlet that formerly was a buffet line, the passengers lost sight of the fact that they had already paid for the food they were swarming on, which under normal circumstances usually takes the thrill right out of the hunt. Willful ignorance prevailed as the buffet that we had visited earlier in the day became not even remotely recognizable; people elbowed each other in an attempt to outnudge everyone else to the vat of macaroni salad; dirty looks were exchanged when a desired piece of fried chicken was plucked from the poultry mountain by a fellow marauder; and faces were concealed behind towers of brisket and barbecued ribs piled onto dishes as passengers uneasily wavered in a balancing act to an empty spot at a table.

  I have to be honest and say that all of the food that was wonderfully desirable only hours earlier lost all its appeal once it was apparent I would have to fight for my meal. I felt like a Christian in the Colosseum, on display and ready to die for my belief in a ciabatta roll. A mere three seconds after we got in line, I was separated from my friend by the hungry hordes swathed in Wal-Mart resort wear, and my pledge to her was challenged by a man who, at the salad menagerie, dug his virus- and bacteria-laden hand into the raisin bowl to scoop up a dozen or so wrinkly nuggets, only to delicately place them on the community spoon provided for his protection and then transfer them to his plate. When he turned around to leave and search out additional food to fondle, my eyes were still wide with horror and my jaw gaping, and when he looked at me for a brief split second, I had no control over my innate reaction to throw him an expression of disgust and cry “YUCK!” over the din of serving spoons clinking on china.

  When I finally found Jamie at the fruit carousel twenty minutes later, my plate was empty and so was my reserve of fear concerning blatant confrontation. I had been pushed, cut in front of, and stared down by fellow passengers, including a streetwise sixth grader who should have been in school to begin with but apparently had the identical attraction for the same mini quiche Lorraine that I did. I was ready to bite someone. I was able to calm down a bit after I spied triangles of juicy, blood-red watermelon lined up like fallen dominoes on a silver tray. They looked so refreshing and delicious and serene, just waiting for me to reach forward and pluck one. I was going in with a pair of tongs when the woman in front emitted a throaty gargle and open-mouthed coughed, sending a direct hit in on the pineapple, the grapes, and my watermelon, all of which now fully deserved boycotting.

  “Jamie,” I yelled in a booming voice to my friend and everyone between us, “avoid the Tropical Delights Tray! This one in front of me just coughed all over it like she was a terrorist. I can see little noroviruses—which cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea for an average of one to two days and will require you to stay in your cabin with your roommate for a twenty-four-hour self-imposed quarantine—dancing all over every formerly delectable slice from here.”

  It was at that moment that Jamie and I wisely decided that we were not buffet people after all but dining room people, and this was confirmed with our first step into Château de Versailles, the ship’s grand and mirrored cuisine hall, decorated exactly as if the specter of Marie Antoinette was expected to appear any minute in a cloud of ectoplasm and proclaim all of us “provincial” in a ghostly howl. I gawked in amazement as I walked down the steps into the hostess area that provided a full view of all the tables. Look at that, I thought to myself, no one’s coughing or spraying saliva on a whole flock of baked chickens, no one’s juggling three plates, each representing the cuisine from a different continent, and no one is already shoveling forkfuls of lasagna into their pie holes while waiting to scoop themselves up the fixin’s of an entire meat-loaf supper and some chicken fingers.

  Ah, the dining room, I comforted myself as I looked at Jamie with a smile in my eyes and nodded. This was where we belonged!

  True, the selection of entrées wasn’t as vast, but that hardly mattered when I realized that the lady at the next table had never had an opportunity to dribble her saliva all over my dinner before I did. We had our very own waiter who was only too eager to suggest which bottle of wine would best accompany our dinners and urged us to go on ahead and order a spectacularly crafted dessert. The buffet? Who were we kidding? This was a cruise, not a nonstop all-you-can-eat gorge at a Furr’s Cafeteria! We l
oved the dining room so much it barely bothered us when the man who was seated one table over asked the waiter if the mango salad had meat in it, if the vegetable soup had meat in it, if the peach compote had meat in it and then went ahead and ordered a hamburger. His wife was also no day in the park; she wanted to know how everything “was prepared,” and that included salad, soup, the main dish, and everything else she could possibly think of, including the ice, asking if it was “prepared with filter, mountain spring, or distilled water?”

  After that question, the waiter stood there, silent for a good several seconds, deciding, I’m sure, whether he should deliver a nice, sharp slap to her with the laminated menu, bother to actually find out the origin of the water, or jump overboard and catch a cargo ship hauling very messy but very quiet wood chips back to his homeland of Croatia, where people were too busy trying to keep frostbite at bay to inquire about such ice-making nonsense. Initially, I thought perhaps the wife’s madness had a method, as in maybe she was kosher or a vegan, but it didn’t. She was just an average run-of-the-mill pain in the ass who paid eight hundred dollars for an interior cabin with no window and then expected to be doted on simply because she was an asshole with an extra eight hundred bucks from her tax return who wanted to take a trip on the ocean but was too cheap to pay to see the ocean, just to get seasick from it. You know from the moment you spy the hordes of passengers in an enclosed space who has a window cabin and who doesn’t. The people who dress identically in style and palette or in T-shirts from another vacation have a window. The people who didn’t brush their hair this morning don’t. The people who eat with utensils have a window. The people who subsist on a diet solely consisting of finger foods, mostly fried and of some variety of meat, and are more than adept at using a toothpick instead of a fork, don’t. The people who encounter the man-sized dolphin character that stalks the ship both day and night in search of passenger prey and get a picture taken by his evil sidekick photographer for ten dollars have a window. The husband who stubbornly insists that his wife sidle up to the dolphin while the dolphin isn’t looking and quickly snaps a frame, then proclaims, “I just saved ten dollars, Dolphin! What do you think about that? Watch out for that tuna net!” doesn’t. They are the same people who would travel in the wheel well of a jetliner for a discount on the fare, then complain that the snack mix only had one almond in it. Damn right they’re getting in the lifeboats last should it come down to that. And my neighbors the next table over were just of that ilk. That became all too evident when the waiter would explain a menu selection, as in, “It’s chicken broth and vegetables,” and she’d ask, “Is that French? Is that the French way do it? I only want it if that’s the way the French do it,” or “Do you have anything with ginger in it? I am captivated by the taste of ginger. Ginger fascinates me.”

  By this time, I was almost hoping that we would actually strike an iceberg or at least a sharp rock, because the opportunity to puncture her life vest with a toothpick stained with barbecue sauce, accidentally knock her out of my lifeboat with an oar, or deny her access aboard my floating door was simply too delightful not to imagine. “No,” I would say as I pushed her back into the frigid, inky water after she scrambled onto my float like a wet jackal. “This spot is saved for Jack Dawson, but I do believe I just saw a twisted, knotted ginger root float by that you could gnaw on until hypothermia sets in. Look on the bright side, though! You finally got to see the ocean!”

  That fantasy went into four-wheel-drive mode when their dinners eventually arrived and I took a gander at her table manners, which included taking a long, overly involved sniff of every forkful before she dared put it in her puckery, picky mouth.

  Another irregular, most likely windowless person I saw in the dining room was a man who carried a separate little satchel especially for the condiments he brought from home, including spices and exotic salts, all shelved seperately in secure little compartments within their condiment travel case. Not only did he have a wider variety of salad dressings than the chefs on the ship, he possessed every flavor of salad dressing known to Wishbone and Paul Newman, including a bottle of sesame ginger, which would have been enough to drive another windowless passenger on the ship simply wild with fascination.

  Still, even with the sniffing episode, meat questions, and Purse of Flavors in the dining room, I was not even close to scurrying back to the Bacteria Buffet, where all the windowless finger-food passengers chowed down and spewed body fluids all over one another while wearing swimsuits and displaying copious amounts of body hair. There were, however, times when you could not escape the Buffeteria because you were sitting right next to them or telling them outwardly what cowards they were in several days’ time (which honestly should have brought me dizzying joy in itself, but instead made me furious during my rampage as they continuously chewed on the pickings from the buffet that they’d rendered portable by wrapping them in paper napkins and stuffing them into purses or pockets, lest fifteen minutes pass without the opportunity to feed or consume something).

  “Didn’t you hear the man?” I found myself, days after our journey had begun, yelling to a group of buffet people as I stood on the banks of a glacial river near Juneau, dressed from head to toe in pliable yellow rubber like a weathered, salty old sea dog trying to hawk frozen fish sticks. “The guide just said that if we don’t get one more volunteer to sit in the front row, we’re not going on the river float! Now I don’t want to be in the front row either, but my best friend volunteered, so I had to volunteer, and that means we need one more volunteer to equally distribute the weight in the raft, so someone in this group has to stop being afraid and lazy and raise a hand!”

  Everyone had heard the guide, including me. That was precisely the problem. As soon as we were assigned a raft and had gathered at the river, our guide informed us that it had been raining every day in Juneau for the past three weeks, and that meant that the current was stronger than usual. Much stronger, he added. Much, much stronger, he tacked on after the add. So strong, in fact, that what was typically a nice, casual waft down the river had now developed into Class III rapids, which, to an outdoorsy, challenge-seeking person might seem like a piece of cake, but to someone like me, who has an anxiety attack when a fat kid cannonballs into a six-foot-deep pool, it could pose a possibility of an issue. Plus Jamie had volunteered for the front row after our guide made that disclosure and said that he needed volunteers for the front because that was the especially wet part of the raft, then stared at Jamie, saying nothing for an uncomfortably long period of time until she relented and I was forced to follow. True, we were the two youngest people in our group, but I had no idea that kind of pressure was so effective on my best friend. Had I been aware of this Achilles’ heel, I would have been using it on her like a swami during every lunch period in high school, saying, “I know you love Wendy’s, but we ate there yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that. Today feels like an Arby’s day, and so does tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” and then looked her square in the eyes until the spell was cast and I was scarfing on a Beef ’n Cheddar and laying the foundation for getting my gall bladder ripped out in twenty years.

  “If no one else volunteers,” the guide said after staring at every other person to no avail, “we’re just not going, and that means no gourmet sausage and cheese snack at the end.”

  So, as a reward for our involuntary volunteerism, our guide generously suited us up like greenhorns getting ready to wrangle crab pots in yellow slicker wear and life jackets so we wouldn’t get “very” wet. By the time we got back to the bank of the river, a little middle-aged barrel of a man named Denny had been sacrificed by his beehived Texan wife, who was taking the last bite of a cheese danish when we arrived, to round out the front-row occupancy. He looked scared to death, and scrambled in between Jamie and me for the middle seat, stating that his chances of falling overboard were far less if he had a lady cushion on either side of him.

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bsp; The guide instructed us to grip the wooden board we were sitting on with both our hands, with our “outside” hands at the end of the board and our “inside” hands between our legs, although with the amount of gear we were wearing and the mass of the slickers, I couldn’t even reach the board with my “inside” hand. It’s all right, I thought to myself, don’t panic. It’s not that big of a deal, he’s an adventure guide, he’s paid to make this little river-rafting excursion seem much more exciting than it is so we all think we’re getting our money’s worth. This isn’t going to be any bigger of a deal than Splash Mountain, I tried to convince myself. Still, I looked over at Jamie and she looked over at me, not saying anything but letting me know she was scared shitless, too. Then the guide explained several times what we should do in case we got knocked out of the raft, and that we needed to try our best to get back in as quickly as possible because the water of the river had just melted off of the glacier and was only a couple of degrees above freezing.

  Oh, sure, I thought, put on the big act. Get us all nice and frightened.

  Then, with a push of the oar, we were away from the bank and floating down the river. Several other rafts filled with cruise passengers dotted the water ahead of us, bobbing along and drifting with the current. They didn’t seem to be going too fast, I noted as I watched them for clues as to what was going to happen to our raft next. And then, bink!—just like that, I heard some short, pierced screams and one of the rafts was just gone as if it had simply slipped off the horizon.

  I caught my breath and tightened my grip on the board with my outside hand. I held my breath and watched the water. It was getting foamy. It was getting fast. It was starting to rush.

  I heard another cluster of screams, and I looked up just in time to see that the second raft had dropped off, too.