by Lisa Alther
“Three months.”
“Uh, a three-month-old fetus couldn’t very well wear a gown, could it?” She started wondering how to signal for Amy to summon her back to the clinic.
“I also make fabric envelopes decorated with lace and beads, for the fetuses too small to wear gowns—or tuxedos in the case of the boys.”
“I see.” Jessie realized Mrs. Pendragon’s crown wasn’t the only thing about her that had come unglued.
“Would you like to see some of my designs?”
While Jessie was wondering how to say no to a cruise guest without getting reprimanded by management, Mrs. Pendragon whipped out her iPhone and pulled up some photos. Jessie swiped through shot after shot of sad little withered creatures in miniature wedding dresses or tuxedos.
“So my outfits allow parents to give their babies a proper burial.”
“I didn’t realize cemeteries would bury fetuses, clothed or not.”
“We have a law in Indiana stating that all fetuses must be either buried or cremated.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Don’t you think that these poor little abandoned babies should be well dressed when they meet their Savior in heaven?”
“But fetuses aren’t people yet, Mrs. Pendragon, at least in the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
“But they are in the eyes of the Lord.” She nodded knowingly.
Jessie always got nervous around those who believed they were channeling the Lord. “So once the fetuses are dressed in your outfits, will cemeteries bury them?”
“Some will. My husband, Don, who died several years ago, operated a whole-family cemetery in our Indiana hometown. He created a special section just for fetuses and stillborns and infants, with a brass plaque identifying it as BABYLAND. He also allowed puppies and kittens to be buried there.”
Jessie glanced around, trying to locate the nearest exit. She pulled out her pager, pretended to look at it, and said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pendragon, but I have an emergency in the clinic. I’ll have to take a rain check for lunch.”
“I didn’t hear your pager beep.” She eyed Jessie suspiciously, as though accustomed to losing her audience in mid-harangue.
“I felt it vibrate in my pocket.”
“Well, I look forward to many more lunches with you, Jessie, as our cruise continues. And I thank the good Lord for bringing you on board and into my life.”
Jessie smiled and nodded, reflecting that Mrs. Pendragon must not have yet figured out that her new pal was an enthusiastic abortion supporter. “Yes, it’s been great fun, Mrs. Pendragon. I’ll see you later.”
As Jessie raced from the dining room, she began to feel angry. If you dressed aborted fetuses in wedding gowns and tuxes, it was to emphasize that they were little murdered people who should have been allowed to grow up and become brides and grooms. Even if you assumed this to be true, why did their needs trump those of the adult women who had unwittingly or unwillingly conceived them? Jessie thought about friends she knew before Roe v. Wade who had died from illegal abortions or from self-inflicted attempts to miscarry. She thought about the young girls she had treated in the ER, pregnant from being raped by uncles or neighbors. Young men died in war. Young women died in childbirth, or from trying to prevent it. Jessie had worked for much of her life so that her children and grandchildren would be spared both. But she had failed. Worldwide, a woman still died from an illegal abortion every seven minutes. And during the past 3,400 years only 8 percent of them had been war-free.
She drew a deep breath to calm herself. The sooner the Rapture occurred, the better. If all the fundamentalists of every persuasion got swept up to paradise, leaving behind only the heathens, this world might become a pleasant place.
Captain Kilgore was announcing over the PA that the harbor of Djibouti was off the port side. Once beyond it, the ship would pass through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait into the Red Sea. To celebrate their uneventful passage through the pirate zone, a special Pirates’ Tea Dance would be held on the main pool deck at 4:00 p.m. There would be free pirate-themed cocktails and a steel band!
Jessie went out on the walking deck to check out Djibouti. Concrete platforms seemed to float on the surface of the bay. On the platforms were the inevitable stacks of multicolored shipping containers. Orange, blue, and yellow cranes perched over the containers like Day-Glo praying mantises. Beyond the shoreline stretched low, arid gray mountains.
Jessie had kept busy on this cruise, dashing from port to starboard and back again, binoculars banging against her chest, in order to inspect all the sights on both sides. Ben had told her that the word posh had been coined by the British en route to and from India on ships around the Cape of Good Hope. It stood for “Port Out, Starboard Home.” Passengers hiring those cabins could occasionally glimpse the lands they were passing by, rather than looking always at the endless sea. But for this reason, those cabins were more expensive, hence the term posh.
* * *
—
When Jessie arrived at the pool deck, every person on board who wasn’t working elsewhere appeared to be present. She and Ben were expected to put in appearances at these social functions when they weren’t on clinic duty. The sky was bright blue, and the sun was beating down with tropical intensity. Some passengers had dressed as Captain Hook or Blackbeard, though most looked like Keith Richards on a bad day. Many still in swimsuits lay in lounge chairs, drinking cocktails with swizzle sticks shaped like tiny corsair swords.
Jessie spotted Charles Savage, released from norovirus quarantine, playing cards at a teak table with four other older men, all wearing blue baseball caps reading NAVAL VETERAN. Nearby sat Rodney Mullins, his bandaged foot propped on a stool. Beside him perched a woman with ramrod posture who clutched a beige handbag to her chest like a halfback protecting a football during a line drive. She seemed an unusually rigid mate for a man with a diamond-patterned snake tattoo winding up his forearm.
Jessie went over to the bar and ordered a drink called a Bacardí Buccaneer. As the band played in a dizzying array of musical styles, many passengers danced on the teak-floored pool deck. Iris Pendragon and a dozen others were bounding across it doing the Electric Slide, reversing directions in unison, like a school of fish. Sometimes they collided with other passengers, who were tangoing or mamboing. Somehow the setting for the Somali pirates had shifted from the Middle East to Texas and Argentina. It was as though the inhabitants of a nursing home had had their Ensures spiked with amphetamines. Clearly most had not been awake all night fretting about marine marauders.
Inexplicably, the steel band started playing “Memories” from Cats. Mona Paradiso was dressed as Tinker Bell, in a forest green bathing suit and a filmy green miniskirt with a jagged hem. A Sherwood Forest cap perched on her curly auburn hair, and she wore green spike heels. Small translucent wings extending from her shoulder blades quivered as she sang about the good old days, when life was beautiful and filled with happiness.
Jessie took a large gulp of her Bacardí and watched a gentlemen host wearing a navy blue blazer, white trousers, and a paisley ascot invite Gail Savage to dance. Gail was wearing white capris and a halter top that amply displayed her firm breasts and flat stomach. Her blond ponytail lashed as she and the host swirled across the deck in a swooping Viennese waltz. Many couples stopped dancing to move aside and make room for them. Rodney Mullins was watching Gail with what appeared to be a sneer.
Jessie spotted Ben in his officer whites standing near the band, seemingly transfixed by Mona in her winged forest green slut outfit. Mona was scanning the crowd as she sang. Once she spotted Jessie, she smiled faintly and nodded at her. Jessie waved back with her fingers.
As Gail Savage continued to circle the deck in the arms of the dapper host, Jessie spotted a young man in a blue jumpsuit lurking in a corner of the deck, studying the waltzers with a gaz
e full of menace. He wore a rolled red bandanna around his forehead. He was clearly a maintenance man, but what he was doing at the pool party was less clear. Maintenance men, like roaches, were never supposed to emerge from the belly of the ship in daylight.
Mona was singing relentlessly about the sunrise and the dawning of a new day and the determination not to give in to despair. Jessie took another hefty swig of her Bacardí and realized that she was getting sloshed. Blessedly, Mona was coming to the end of this song so crammed with lines that threatened pain for Jessie if she listened too closely.
As the crowd applauded, Mona bowed and backed away from the band. The band lurched into “Jamaican Farewell.” A male singer, disguised as a castaway in bare feet and tattered cutoffs, seized the mike from Mona. Ben rushed up to Mona, and the next thing Jessie knew, Ben and Mona were cha-chaing back and forth by the steaming hot tub. So much for Ben’s unquenchable devotion to herself, thought Jessie blearily.
A chef was carving a sculpture from a block of ice the size of a side-by-side refrigerator. Like a well-equipped torturer, he had an entire arsenal of tools—a chain saw, handsaws, hammer and chisels, a die grinder with an array of bits. He was working fast in the afternoon heat, and chips were flying in every direction. Jessie joined the onlookers so she wouldn’t have to watch Ben and Mona’s mating dance.
Setting down on a table what remained of her Bacardí, she watched the chef chip and drill and saw until gradually Johnny Depp emerged from the block of ice, incarnated as Jack Sparrow in a large tricorn hat. People began clapping as they recognized the distinctive face. Next the chef started hacking and scraping an untouched chunk of ice to one side of Johnny’s head. Eventually everyone realized that it was turning into a parrot, one perched on Johnny’s shoulder. They cheered and someone whistled. Another chef playfully placed a black eye patch over Jack Sparrow’s left eye and stuck a dangling hoop near his earlobe.
Suddenly a glass panel under the starboard railing crumbled to the deck in tiny shards. A woman standing by the railing started screaming. A second panel shattered in place. Jessie could see a spiderweb of cracks emanating from a small hole through its center.
“Pirates!” several people yelled.
Some, thinking it a joke, started guffawing.
Jessie moved over to the railing and discovered that it was no joke. Two speedboats, each carrying a long extension ladder with hooks on top, were approaching the ship. Both boats held six young men wearing T-shirts and gym shorts. Most fondled AK-15s that were pointing skyward. A couple of them clutched what looked like either bassoons or grenade launchers.
“Everyone inside!” yelled an officer into the singer’s microphone. “Repeat: Everyone inside! This is not a drill! Repeat: This is not a drill! This is a real attack. Everyone inside. Return to your cabins and perform the Safe Haven procedures!”
A mad scramble for the doors ensued. Jessie stayed put and watched the pirates several decks below her. They resembled her son, Anthony, and his motley pals when they were stoned in high school. Their battered boats maneuvered closer and closer to the side of the ship, boarding ladders extended well past their bows.
The next thing she knew, Gail Savage was helping the young maintenance man in the bandanna headband pick up a square teak table, scattering across the deck the stack of playing cards sitting on it. Together they tossed the table over the railing. It tumbled several stories down and grazed one of the boats, knocking an AK-15 into the sea. The pirates looked up, scowling. One raised a grenade launcher to his shoulder and fired wildly upward. The grenade exploded overhead. Meanwhile, Gail and the young man had each collapsed a deck chair and were hurling them over the railing onto the skiffs.
A security guard on the walking deck down below had uncoiled a fire hose and was blasting the boats with pressurized water when an extremely loud siren began to pulse and wail. The would-be pirates dropped their weapons to clutch at their ears. The mouths of a couple opened in silent screams.
Captain Kilgore came on the loudspeaker from the bridge. “Everyone inside now! Sit in the hallway opposite your cabin and hold tightly to the railing overhead as we exercise escape maneuvers!”
Gail and her friend threw one last table at the pirates and then raced for the door, as did Jessie. The engine roared as the ship accelerated.
“That was very brave of you,” Jessie said to Gail as they pushed through the doorway side by side.
Gail shrugged. “Nobody is hijacking me!”
Jessie thought that if somebody did, he’d soon be begging her husband to take her back.
Jessie climbed the steps to her deck two at a time and careened down her hallway, past staff members sprawled on the carpet, clinging to their handrails overhead. She collapsed opposite her cabin and grabbed the railing as the ship cut through the water in a zigzag pattern that was no doubt throwing a huge crisscrossing wake that would swamp the small boats.
Mona, in her green bathing suit, was clutching the railing alongside Jessie. Her translucent wings were twisted out of shape. “There have to be easier ways to earn a living,” she observed.
“Nice outfit.”
Mona smiled. “Drago in the hair salon helped me assemble it. He says he knows all about fairies.”
“Are we having fun yet?”
“I think we’re okay. Those creeps can’t board when we’re going this fast.”
“Did you ever hear of a Greek poet named Constantine Cavafy?” asked Jessie.
“Sure. ‘Ithaca.’ We studied him in high school.”
“He wrote another poem, called ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ which I just read in a friend’s journal. Some unidentified city-state is expecting an invasion of barbarians, and the officials are donning their ceremonial garb to greet them. But by the end of the afternoon it’s announced that the barbarians aren’t coming after all. The citizens become very agitated, and the last lines are ‘And now what’s to become of us without barbarians. Those people were a solution of a sort.’ ”
Mona laughed. “Yes, we may need our pirates. Otherwise, we might have to face the fact that we’re pirates ourselves.”
Jessie nodded. Mona was evidently bright and politically aware, as well as talented.
“Hey, can I ask you something about that doctor you work with—Ben?”
“Yeah, sure, what?”
“What’s his deal anyhow?”
“What do you mean?”
“While we were dancing this afternoon, he told me he’d realized he couldn’t live without me. I hardly know the guy, but he wrote me a poem.” She handed Jessie a piece of paper.
On it were the opening lines of the love poem Ben said he had composed for Jessie. She started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mona.
“He gave me the exact same poem this morning, supposedly written for me.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Jessie fished her paper out of her pocket. Mona unfolded it, looked at it, and started laughing, too.
“You know what’s even funnier?” asked Mona. “I studied French so I could sing French opera, and I recognize this poem. It’s a translation of Jacques Prévert. Ben probably stole it off the Internet.”
Jessie shook her head disbelievingly.
“I think we need to plan some revenge,” said Mona.
“What do you have in mind?” asked Jessie warily. She enjoyed games with her grandchildren, but she was normally opposed to mind games with fellow adults. Still, Ben’s duplicity did merit a riposte.
Chapter 7
The Flappers Ball
Jessie and Mona were sitting at a small table outside a burger shack near the dog cages on the top deck. Mona was outlining her scheme to punish Ben for plagiarizing from Jacques Prévert. Jessie had spent the last couple of days dealing with injuries from the pirate attack—bruises and sprains as passengers ha
d collided with one another while rushing inside from the pool deck, a couple of cuts from the shattered glass panel. Two people had fallen down stairs as they raced back to their cabins. One man had gone into atrial fibrillation. Others were tossed around their hallways during the ship’s escape maneuvers. Nothing too serious, fortunately. Now they were halfway up the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal.
“Do you realize where we are?” Jessie asked Mona, to distract her from her lust for vengeance against Ben.
“It all looks the same to me. Water, water, everywhere.”
“We’re off the coast of what used to be called the Land of Punt. The Egyptian woman pharaoh Hatshepsut called it ‘the Land of the Gods.’ ”
“It sure doesn’t look very celestial now.” They gazed at an arid plain that stretched down to the gray water. It was dotted with stunted shrubs.
“Well, apparently in 1500 B.C. it was a paradise. Hatshepsut sent a fleet of five ships here. They found villages of huts on stilts and vast groves of date palms. Also giraffes, leopards, and hippopotamuses. They carried home to Egypt baboons, ivory, gold, ebony, and shoots of trees with sap that yielded frankincense and myrrh. It’s all depicted in bas-reliefs on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple.”
“And you know this how?”
“I got interested in Punt in medical school. We were studying rare diseases that we would probably never see, and one was the Queen of Punt disease. The Queen of Punt was portrayed in the bas-reliefs as having massive thighs and buttocks and a malformed gait. It turns out she had a complex of conditions triggered by a DNA genotype that codes for lipomatosis, achondroplasia, lipodystrophy….”
“I love it when you talk dirty to me,” murmured Mona.
Jessie smiled. She was starting to like this woman. She was funny. If only people could just leave it at the laughter. It was once romance revved up that everyone’s carefully caged demons came out to cavort.
“So we’ll both write Ben a love poem stolen from the Internet,” Mona continued relentlessly. “And we’ll send them to him with notes saying that we’re so enchanted with his poem to us that we want to pursue the relationship. Then we can sit back and watch him try to figure out how to juggle two willing women on one ship without either finding out about the other.”