Spring came, and although Girl and Mother talked every now and then, they didn’t see each other in person. Girl asked Mother to look at wedding dresses with her, but she replied, “I can’t picture all four of us in the same room together, let alone at the wedding.”
Girl went dress shopping alone, without a single friend or relative who thought this union was a good idea. It didn’t matter. Girl would marry this man no matter what anyone else thought.
Mother’s anger finally broke.
“What can you and I do to get Stepmother and Samson to make up?” she asked Girl. Within a week the four of them met at a restaurant, and no one mentioned the fight, or apologized. They just went on like it hadn’t happened. When Stepmother reached her spoon into Samson’s bowl of ice cream, he didn’t say a word, though he didn’t eat any more of it.
name change
Girl walked down the aisle in her white princess dress. She had bought it from a classified ad in the newspaper—the only bridal gown she could afford—but it was beautiful, and thick satin, not that flame-retardant crap a lot of bridal stores sold. It didn’t have a train, but you can’t have everything. When Girl walked out of the church—ran, actually, holding hands with her new husband—she became Wife. She had always wanted to be Wife, had decided to change her name as soon as she could, but now … let’s be honest, it was a little weird. Part of her missed being Girl, like when she wrote a check and had to stop and think for a minute, sometimes starting the first letter wrong and having to draw that “W” over the beginnings of the “G.” The “G” had more grace to it. The “W” was stiffer, less round. Now her high school friends would not know how to look her up in the phone book, but that was a small price to pay. She was starting her own family. She belonged somewhere now.
moving on
“I need you and Brother to come over for dinner tonight,” Mother told Girl one night. “We have something to tell you.” Girl could not imagine what was too important for a phone call, but she sensed it wasn’t something good.
“We were on vacation in Mexico, and I saw a little sailboat bobbing on the water. It looked so peaceful,” Mother said.
“Then I realized that I wasn’t depressed in Mexico,” Stepmother added.
“So we bought a twenty-eight-foot catamaran,” Mother said.
“I was a small watercraft instructor back at Camp Ononda,” Stepmother interrupted.
“I gave my notice at work, and we are going to live on a sailboat,” Mother said. “My parents died at sixty-one and sixty-six. If I only have ten years left, I’m not spending it in the office.”
“I already got us a contract doing sunset sails for gay and lesbian couples in Mexico,” Stepmother added.
Girl and Brother looked at each other. This was insane. They both knew that Stepmother’s experience sailing dinghies on a lake twenty years before was nothing compared to the open ocean.
“And the dogs?” Girl asked. George, the dog she brought back from Alaska, still lived with Mother, and Stepmother had a snaggletoothed Shih Tzu that she had impulse-bought on one of her manic shopping binges.
“They are coming with us,” Mother said.
“And the cat, too, of course,” Stepmother added, picking up the twenty-pound cat and placing him on her lap.
“We are putting the house on the market this week, so you’ll need to clean out any of your old things that you still want,” Mother said.
You weren’t depressed because you were on vacation, Girl thought, but said nothing. She understood that her parents deserved freedom. Girl was engaged and Brother was in college and they were twenty and twenty-one, respectively. Girl understood that Mother had done her time parenting—she always told Girl that children were an eighteen-year commitment. Girl still felt abandoned. She didn’t feel like she had moved past needing a mother. Girl was sad to her bones.
But oh, the irony of it! She had prayed for years, “Please, God, let Stepmother move somewhere far, far away, like Antarctica.” Now she finally got her wish and Stepmother really was moving far away, but Girl forgot to specify that she didn’t want her mother to go, too. Better she had not prayed at all.
That January, Mother and Stepmother paid to fly Girl and Samson down to Key West to visit them on the boat. Brother had gone for Christmas. “He’s not in a relationship, Girl, so I think it’s really important that Brother isn’t alone for Christmas,” Mother had explained. There wasn’t room for all of them on the boat, and Samson and Girl couldn’t afford a hotel. It had been Girl’s first Christmas without her mother, but she had managed. The worst part had been singing Christmas carols without her in church.
When Mother picked them up at the airport, she was deeply tanned. When the gray in Mother’s hair stopped being premature and became age-appropriate, she had started dyeing it, and the sun had bleached the dye in her hair to a weird yellow that was half-grown out. Stepmother was wearing a black captain’s hat and a nose ring. Girl tried not to comment—she tried not to even look at it—but she couldn’t help herself.
“You pierced your nose?” she asked.
“I got you! I have been waiting to get you and Brother back for embarrassing me my whole life! I finally got you!” Stepmother laughed. “It’s a fake,” she explained, taking the ring out of her nostril. “See? It’s a magnet. But it was broken, so I got it on sale, and it hurts. I was waiting and waiting for you to say something so I could take it out.” Stepmother had always thought Girl’s and Brother’s hair and clothing choices were done “just to spite me,” even though, as teenagers, they were far more concerned with being cool than they were about embarrassing Stepmother.
They rode in a gray, inflatable boat out to “the hook.” Mother and Stepmother had tried to rely on their anchor at night, but after drifting twice into other boats, they had given in and rented a mooring—an underwater concrete pillar with a cable running to the surface.
Their catamaran looked fat and stunted, not sleek like a motorboat, nor graceful like a sailboat. They had lost their mast. It was the oddest-looking thing Girl had seen on the water.
“So we were feeling pretty good about ourselves, and we decided to enter the Wrecker’s Race,” Mother explained.
“We got talked into it!” Stepmother was seething. “And your mother wanted the free T-shirt!”
“We were at a bar with a bunch of live-a-boards and they had these T-shirts from last year’s race,” Mother said. “I wanted a T-shirt, too! Plus, they told us that there were free appetizers and a party after the race.” She didn’t look regretful at all.
“Ten-thousand-dollar T-shirt, Judy,” Stepmother said, with no humor in her voice.
“We talked Madeleine and Penny into being our crew. It was a lovely, sunny day and we got there early,” Mother said.
“We were right out in the front row, just bobbing up and down and waiting for the race to start,” Stepmother added. “Then I turned around and looked behind us and saw all the other boats lined up for the race and I knew we were in over our heads. So I started the engine and turned around—”
“But the race had just started and there were like fifty boats coming toward us in the opposite direction,” Mother interjected.
“So we were crossing in front of one of the schooners,” Stepmother continued.
“And there were tourists all up and down the rail, and their sails were full,” Mother said, enjoying the story, even though she knew how it ended.
“And they hit us! It was not our fault,” Stepmother said.
Samson interjected, “If you were motoring and they were under sail, they had the right of way.” He had grown up waterskiing on lakes and knew more than Girl did about the rules for boating in populated areas. In Alaska, where the children had sailed with Father, there were very few other boats to contend with.
“They hit us,” Stepmother repeated. “And broke off our mast.”
“We ripped a hole in their side,” Mother said, in a fair’s fair tone of voice, an evilly happy loo
k in her eyes.
Oh God, Girl thought. The tourists had paid good money for that race. There were a few tall ships in Key West, called schooners, over a hundred feet long. There was no way they could stop forward motion when Stepmother cut in front of them.
“We have a call in to the boat repair place,” Mother said. “Which means we’ll get to stay in a slip in the marina for free while they repair it. Did you know Lloyd’s of London is the only company that insures boats? And they ring a bell every time one goes down. I wonder if they rang the bell for us.”
“They keep insisting it was our fault,” Stepmother said. “But I told them, we were power-sailing. Yes, we had the motor going, but we had a sail up, too. We were sailing. They hit us.”
The dogs barked a greeting to Girl as they pulled abreast of the Sea Gypsy. They wore pet-sized yellow life vests and seemed to have adjusted to living onboard. Mother took them to shore a few times a day in the dinghy, because although Muffin had never been fully housebroken and would pee anywhere, Mother had been unable to train George to pee on a plant at the back of the boat.
Their boat was as cluttered as their house had been. Father had run a tight ship—everything had to be stowed away before they left harbor. Stepmother’s papers and pens and loose coins and little shells and seeds she had gathered topped every flat surface. They had an unsecured TV, and when the family motored out to the reef, it flew from one side of the cabin to the other, crashed against the wall, and came to rest on the built-in bench.
The first thing Girl noticed was the clutter, and the second thing was the smell. Mother and Stepmother were proud of this boat—it cost more than their house had—and showed Samson and Girl their berth and the tiny “head” or bathroom. Mother explained how to pump the toilet and admonished Girl not to flush toilet paper, but to put it in the grocery bag hanging on the wall. There were two built-in beds over the pontoons, and a large cabin at the bow of the boat where Mother and Stepmother slept. Samson and Girl had one berth, and on the other side was the cat’s berth, the main source of the smell. Humid sea air infused with dirty litter box and a trace of urine-soaked toilet paper flooded the entire cabin.
That night, Samson and Girl rolled back and forth in their bed to the motion of the waves. The hot smell and constant movement made Girl sick to her stomach. Samson and Girl whispered about Mel Fisher, a local treasure hunter, who lost one of his children when their boat sank due to disrepair. For the first time, Girl worried that she wasn’t going to make it out of this vacation. She had never doubted her parents’ ability to keep her safe, but it was obvious that they had no idea what they were doing, and she knew that the ocean could be dangerous.
Mother and Stepmother lived on the boat for two years, and in spite of Girl’s misgivings, nothing that terrible ever happened. Sure, they crashed a few times, and Mother got all sorts of bruises and once even a flesh-eating bacterial infection in her thumb. Thankfully, they gave up on sailing to Mexico. “I just couldn’t figure out how to deal with the dogs when we were out of sight of land,” Mother explained. “George would have had to hold it for two days, and that didn’t seem fair.” Eventually they bought a trailer on a canal with deep water access, but once Mother got on land, she was done with sailing.
They did have one last adventure, though. Some friends of theirs were sailing to Cuba, and invited Girl’s parents to follow along in the Sea Gypsy. They had gone so far as to hire a man on as crew, but then they decided the trip was beyond their skill set.
“It’s a good thing, too,” Stepmother told Girl. “He had already stowed his things on the boat, and after he left we found naked Barbie dolls and a penis pump. That wouldn’t have gone over very well in customs.”
Their friends invited Stepmother and Mother to crew on their larger boat, and they sailed over without much trouble.
“When we got there, customs boarded the boat,” Mother said. “And they were really upset that we had brought hard boiled eggs. They have no salmonella in Cuba, so they didn’t want to let American eggs come to shore. They were going to make us turn around.”
“I offered to throw the eggs overboard,” Stepmother interrupted, “But that got them even more upset.”
“Finally, we agreed to eat the eggs in front of the customs officer, and then put the shells in a Ziploc bag and promised to bring them with us when we left,” Mother said.
The trouble started on their return trip. The waves were a little rough, and Stepmother got seasick, so she went below decks.
“That’s the worst thing you can do when you are seasick,” Girl interrupted.
“I know, but you can’t tell Stepmother anything,” Mother said, continuing the story. “So Stepmother went below and the waves were rolling, and she hit her head, and must have passed out. Mary went down to check on her, and Stepmother jumped on her back and started punching her.”
“I had amnesia,” Stepmother explained. “I thought they were kidnapping us and taking us to Cuba.”
“So I heard the noise and went down, and found Stepmother on top of Mary, and had to explain to her that we weren’t being kidnapped.”
“I was so confused. I kept asking, ‘Am I a comuniss? Are you a comuniss?’”
“I explained to her that she hit her head, and she’d get it for a while, then a few minutes later, she’d start asking if she was a communist again,” Mother said.
“Once I came back to myself I felt just terrible, and I apologized to Mary,” Stepmother said. “But they turned the boat around and went back to Cuba,”
“We were closer to Cuba than the United States,” Mother added.
“And they just left us on the docks!” Stepmother said. “Can you believe it? There I was with a concussion and they just left us and took off!”
“Everyone was very nice in the hospital,” Mother said. “I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I hadn’t brought any money because it is illegal for an American citizen to spend money in Cuba. But they just assume that when you go to the hospital you bring someone with you to take care of you, so they made me a bed next to Stepmother, and every time they brought her meals, they brought me one, too. I was responsible for changing her sheets and bathing her. That’s just how they do it down there. But Girl, their hospital was so poorly equipped. They only had little samples of medicine. Sometimes they gave Stepmother Tylenol, sometimes Advil, depending on what they had.”
“I am going to organize a shipment of medication and send it to Cuba,” Stepmother said.
“So when the doctors said Stepmother was okay to leave, we had to call Stepmother’s parents to send money. They had to wire money to ‘an itinerant American living in Cuba,’” Mother said.
“There I was, fifty years old, and having to wire my parents for money,” Stepmother said. “It was so embarrassing.”
“So we had to call the US embassy, and NASA sent a really old plane down to get us. It was the scariest looking plane I have ever seen. I didn’t think it would make it back to the United States.”
“I called Mary and her husband again to apologize, even though it wasn’t very nice of them to leave us like that when I was injured,” Stepmother said. “But they won’t speak to me. I think they should apologize to me!”
Girl just rolled her eyes.
a different kind of commitment
Mother and Stepmother spent the winters in Key West, and returned north to a little cabin an hour outside of Rochester in the summer. While they were gone, Mother and Girl spoke on the phone nearly every day. Girl noticed a change in Mother. She and Stepmother were fighting more, though Mother wasn’t very vocal on why.
“I started throwing dishes,” Mother said. “It feels really good to throw dishes—it’s really quite satisfying when they crash. You should try it.” Girl was astonished, but also kind of proud of her. It was about time Mother stood up for herself. The next call surprised her, though.
“Girl, I just wanted you to know that I have committed Stepmother against her will at dePoo Hospital
. I talked with her psychiatrist, and Stepmother is very angry with me, but we agreed that it was necessary.” Slowly, the story came out.
Stepmother had fallen back in love with an old lover, the one with the long red hair. Stepmother was calling her and writing her love letters, and even sent the woman ten thousand dollars to help her pay her bills. Mother had asked her to stop communicating with this woman, but Stepmother refused. Mother and Stepmother had broken up, and when it became apparent that Stepmother was abusing her medication, Mother committed her to the mental-health center.
“I don’t think this woman did anything wrong,” Mother told Girl. “I think she was as baffled by Stepmother’s behavior as I was.”
“Your mother cried a lot when Stepmother was in the hospital,” one of Mother’s closest friends told Girl. “But she never said she missed her. She only said over and over that she didn’t want to rebuild her life again.”
Girl was strangely sad. She had wanted for Stepmother and Mother to divorce for her whole life, but she didn’t expect to feel any sort of loss over it. Still, when they reconciled a few weeks later, she was disappointed. She wanted so much better for Mother than how Stepmother treated her. But Stepmother was regulated now—Mother had explained that Stepmother had increased her meds in order to feel high all the time, but the doctors had gotten her levels back to normal—and Mother of course took her back. The next time Mother called Girl, she told her that they had sold the trailer and bought a large house on a canal on the other side of the island. “It may seem sudden, but it was something we’ve discussed for a long time,” Mother explained. This became a pattern: every time their relationship was on the rocks, they resolved it by purchasing something big and expensive: a new cabin, an RV, a bigger house.
an un-commitment
Girl woke up at 2:00 a.m. because Samson wasn’t there. Even in her sleep, she was waiting for him to come home and pull the blankets back, waking her just enough to resettle herself against him. But he never came, and so Girl woke alone in the empty bed. She called his work and his coworker said that Samson had left on his motorcycle hours ago. Terror flushed Girl’s face hot; her pulse quickened. She finally registered the missed call notification on her phone, and she dialed in to her voicemail with shaking hands. She had known it would come to this sooner or later. The recording said, “Will the family of Samson Chevy please call Strong Memorial Hospital …”
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