Go Ask Ali

by Ali Wentworth

  I looked over at my elder daughter. She was sitting upright and frozen. (At least part of that could be chalked up to the fact that she has scoliosis and wears a brace.) We grabbed each other’s hands and squeezed hard. I racked my brain, trying to remember if her brace would float or not. How would I unstrap the brace when we were in the choppy water. . . . THE WATER! It’s not the thought of drowning that brings on hyperventilation, but (again) SHARKS! And don’t try to argue that there are no great white sharks in Massachusetts, because that is where they shot Jaws. Not to mention the fact that there have been more than a hundred sightings of great whites off Chatham in the past two years. And they are hungry because their usual feeding patterns have been disrupted. My ass is so meaty and plump right now, I would no doubt be the all-you-can-eat buffet.

  BAM! The airplane bounced again, knocking my head against the ceiling. Again, the whole group screamed in unison. A teenager in the seat in front of me burst into tears. I reached my arm over her left shoulder and patted her. She grabbed my hand. I was now stretched between my daughter and the teenager, desperately clutching their sweaty palms. It was silent but for the staccato breaths of panic.

  “It’s okay,” I kept whispering to them. Until another crack of blinding lightning and thunder split open the sky.

  “SHIT, WE’RE GOING TO DIE!” It just came out. I had lost control. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I was shark bait.

  In my spiraling panic, it occurred to me that my significant other, father of my children, and life partner was also starring in the nightmare. He hadn’t turned around once. He hadn’t asked if we were okay. He showed no concern. Oh God, he must have had a heart attack! Was he dead? Was it possible to distract the sharks with his body?

  I unclipped my seat belt and stood up to get a better view. If he was in a state of shock I would need to tend to him. And if he was dead, well, I would have to work out, get Botox, and cut my hair because I’d be out in the dating pool again. Perhaps he was weeping to himself and needed to hear the sound of my voice. I took two steps toward him, trying to steady myself as the floor buckled underneath me like the bouncy castle at a street fair.

  And then I saw: HE WAS MEDITATING!

  Was he fucking kidding me? We were on the verge of plunging to our death and he was practicing mindfulness? What happened to professing love, throwing his body over ours in the line of fire and burning metal? I was furious. Oh, did I have a mantra for him. My heart was thumping. I was trembling, thinking of ways to save us all, or at least me and my daughter (and the sweet teenager). After all, he was already journeying toward his greater power. I needed to check all my chakras if I was going to rip the rubber raft out of the hands of the other passengers as we descended.

  At this point I did what any mature adult in the situation would do: I threw a pen at the back of his head. He jumped and turned to me with a vexed expression on his face. As if to say, “What? Why are you bothering me?”

  I couldn’t respond. I was speechless. Save for a few startled yelps brought on by another bout of thunder.

  Suddenly, the fog parted and I could just make out the small flickering lights of the Nantucket harbor. We would live! But he would die because I was going to kill him! But the rest of us would live!

  I could see the cedar-shingled houses with perfectly manicured privets and the Brant Point lighthouse. I’ve never been so overjoyed to see land. Pretty land. Pretty land of my forefathers now owned by hedge-funders with flamingo swim trunks and nautical art. I deserved a four-pound lobster dipped in butter and salt. With at least two sides. And dessert, dammit.

  The plane landed, the windows still streaked with the pelting rain. In silent single file we departed chain gang–style off the plane. All of us still in shock and worried about a future with much PTSD therapy.

  And there was my husband ambling ahead of us checking his iPhone like it was just another day of travel. Dum dee dum, wonder what Trump just tweeted?

  My daughter and I spotted our friends waiting at the small, quaint airport gate. Their eyes were wide. They had witnessed the storm. They knew. We ran to them and threw our arms around them and held on for an uncomfortable amount of time. I burst into tears. Mama needed to exhale. The group of women, my girlfriends, all hugged and kissed and wiped away tears. My husband got the luggage. Still culling those emails.

  We jumped into a Jeep and drove off toward one of the pristine houses covered in pink roses that had been my saving grace when I was up in the air.

  I never discussed the event with my husband. The more quickly one makes peace with gender differences, the less angst and frustration one will suffer in life. And people do process things in different ways. I don’t have gender prejudice; I just think a woman wouldn’t find herself in a downward dog pose while on a runaway train. Maybe the lesson is not to expect that anyone else will save you. Or maybe the lesson is simply: When there’s a lightning storm with torrential rain and thunder . . . DON’T FLY!!!

  Chapter 13

  Ah Yes, Family Vacation

  I was lying on a lounge chair in Page, Arizona, in 110-degree heat. A record breaker. The air felt like a perpetual hair dryer, my lips were chapped, and five minutes after emerging from the pool I was completely bone dry again. Wait, this sounds like I’m complaining. And I’m definitely not, because we were on a family vacation and staying at a luxe-y resort where drinks named Serenity and Holistic Desert Green were offered without charge. I had read about the resort nestled in the mesas, blanketed in lavender light, on a lifestyle website. It had everything from hiking to a spa, but what titillated me the most was the fact that you could toast your own s’mores outside your suite overlooking the canyons. I realize I could burn my marshmallows over the stove in Manhattan and smoosh them with some Hershey’s chocolate and stale graham crackers, but I like to be in the great outdoors when I inhale chemically enhanced sweets. Maybe because my first s’more was at camp in the Adirondack Mountains. And you never forget your first time.

  I had indulged in the roasting-marshmallow ritual every night since we arrived at the resort. In my pj’s. Sometimes three or four of the gooey chocolate sandwiches a night. One evening my twelve-year-old daughter looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “Mom, enough with the s’mores . . . have an apple.” It stung worse than any rattlesnake bite.

  My husband and kids were tubing on Lake Powell all morning. I had very cleverly extricated myself from that particular family activity—something I can rarely do when we are all together on an adventure. We have developed into a very codependent, Eskimo-like squad. We occasionally all sleep together (after a scary movie, in a new place, or when my husband and I are panicking about our mortality), and on vacation we migrate from meal to pool to meal to activity to meal to sleep as a single unit. How I managed to break off from the group being pinballed from one side of the river to another on a steaming hot rubber tire, I hadn’t quite figured out. But it was blissful to be perusing the RealReal.com for vintage loafers under a white umbrella drinking a citrusy concoction called a Dream Catcher. . . .

  Originally I proposed renting an SUV and driving across country for our June vacation. I had this romantic idea of the kids hitting each other in the backseat, somebody vomiting, and my husband and me bickering about household expenses while the landscape of America flew by us. Let’s face it, those are the vacations we all remember. We once took our children to Positano, Italy, and I’m sure they don’t remember the stunning villas, the antiquated wooden boats we took to dinner, or the sea urchin pasta we nibbled on overlooking the sunset on Capri. No, they will remember the pasta with butter and cheese. And the fact that we let them watch Bridesmaids on the airplane back.

  The vague mental film clips of the vacations from my youth consist of my fainting after witnessing a lion disembowel a gazelle’s insides in Nairobi, the onslaught of thunderous rain in London, and dysentery in Cuernavaca, Mexico. But my warmest and most lucid memory is being lined up in the back of a Pontiac station wagon with pillows
and blankets, squeezed between my siblings, as my mother drove us to Cape Cod through the night. I remember the industrial smells, the phone lines whizzing by the windows, the sounds of the tollbooths, and the restroom stops as we scampered into gas stations in our footsy pajamas. I remember because of the excitement I felt in my belly. The feeling that summer had commenced and we were on our way to another season spent on the beach—sandy tomato sandwiches, ice cream trucks, lobster races, sailing, popping tar bubbles on the road, and long afternoons on a shady wooden porch. It’s the ketchup-stained bathing suits and melted Creamsicles that I want to replicate for my own children. The experience of just being and having the time to smell the roses (or beach plum blossoms as it were). Things that don’t translate on Finsta.

  As I sat back with my hair dripping down my shoulders, perusing the resort’s lunch menu, I recalled a family vacation my husband and I took our girls on a few years ago. One entirely devoid of tranquility. Or really anything positive.

  My mother had been calling one afternoon nonstop. I knew nobody was dead; when my mother wants an answer to something, she simply wants it immediately. After she left a fourth voice mail, I returned her call. Before I could get out “Hi Mom,” she blurted out, “I think we should go on a big family trip! You guys; Sissy, Angus, and their families, John and Jen and Fiona and Deitmar.” These being my siblings and their significant others. Now, the idea that a bunch of adults spread across the country could actually get their acts and calendars together to sync this imaginary trip was unfathomable. But my mother’s will is stronger than any assumption. “I hear the Galápagos Islands are incredible! And soon, the public won’t be allowed down there anymore! This is really our last chance to see all the indigenous flora and fauna.”

  She had me at the word “islands.” And the fact that ISIS didn’t have a strong agenda in the waters of Ecuador. As I was considering her idea, she blurted out, “Of course I’ll pay for the whole trip!” We were going to the Galápagos! Wherever the hell that was!

  As is typical in our family, members started dropping out as the date grew closer. My little sister was pregnant. My brother had too many commitments governing the small town of Mammoth Lakes. But most surprising, my mother bowed out. The conductor of the whole moving train. She just “wasn’t up to it.”

  This happened once before when I was twenty-one. My mother had curated a show of the three generations of Wyeth family painters (N.C., Andrew, and Jamie) and it was being historically unveiled in Moscow. I am a Russophile, having always been particularly enamored of Russian history. When my mother was pregnant with me she was reading the novel Nicholas and Alexandra. And it was in her second trimester that she decided to name me Alexandra after the sublime czarina. She didn’t finish the book until many months after I was born. And when she finally reached the horrific climax, she learned that Alexandra and her whole family were shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death by the Bolshevik troops. I suppose my infatuation with Russian history is based on my need for redemption.

  So when my mother asked me to accompany her on the trip I was touched and excited and raring to beat up some Bolsheviks. The morning I was set to meet her at JFK for the endless flight to Moscow, she called to say she had come down with the flu. I’ll never know if she was truly sick or just exhausted by all the preparation. But I was suddenly flying to Moscow solo. And she’s the one who always carried the sleeping pills. I remember standing alone in the security line with a gigantic North Face puffer coat and The Romanovs under my arm and thinking, “What the hell am I doing?”

  The trip was a life-changing, extraordinary adventure filled with beluga, vodka, a dalliance with a Bolshevik documentarian, and some black market drawings I smuggled home in my suitcase. If my mother had accompanied me, it certainly would have been a different experience—and one where I probably wouldn’t have woken up in a hotel room surrounded by a group of gaping Pakistani businessmen.

  The Galápagos trip was now me, my husband and kids, and my sister Sissy’s family. I considered a switch to Bermuda. The Galápagos struck me as a place that not only needed to be studied and researched ahead of time, but which also involved a certain amount of work during the stay (maps, binoculars, vegetation guides). Bermuda was a beach, a book, some rum, and, at worse, a dented moped.

  But while there was plenty of time for me to be lazy (sorry, introspective), I had children—children who needed to see the world and develop into cultivated and erudite adults. They had to earn their rum-soaked beach. It was their turn to appreciate and experience mind-expanding adventures, whether they wanted to or not. We once made them hike up to the Acropolis in sweltering heat; another time they had to ice-pick their way through a fjord in Iceland. These expeditions paled in comparison to the traumatic trek they were about to embark on.

  First stop, Quito, Ecuador. Not a spring break destination, but balmy nonetheless. We spent a night in the Hilton there before the family adventure company my mother had randomly googled sent us on a three-day voyage deep into the hills. I believe these tourism travel companies get double kickback points if they can get the tourists into the regions of a country people don’t usually venture to. You know, spread the money around. Imagine you’re a foreign family coming to visit Philadelphia and they sideline you to Scranton, Pennsylvania, for a few days.

  This is when I realized our trip might be veering off the Eat Pray Love fantasy and into more of the Year of Living Dangerously nightmare. We boarded a rusty bus that rattled for four hours through rocky terrain bordering a steep plummet into bottomless canyons. The ancient, rickety vehicle would have been impounded in the States. Naturally there was a deluge of rain and from the window it looked like a film noir that opens on the hills of Transylvania as the camera pans to Dracula’s ominous lair. My teenage nephew started vomiting in harmony with my eleven-year-old daughter’s wails. “Get me out of here,” she screamed over and over. There’s a bizarre sense of resonance when a child vocalizes (loudly) the exact thoughts in your own head.

  We finally reached a ramshackle town in the middle of the night. Practically sleepwalking, we checked into our hotel and collapsed. Well, “hotel” is a bit of a stretch, let’s call it a flophouse. My husband and I were confined to a miniature, rustic room (not rustic like a Montana lodge, rustic like a prison from the old west). WITH NO WINDOWS. Now, call me spoiled, but when I’m paying money to stay anywhere, I expect two things: a toilet and a window. I think that makes me human, not a princess.

  There wasn’t much to do in this town, which appeared to be deserted save for gangs of skeletal dogs and a brothel. The only activity we encountered when we drove around that morning was a communal pig roast. Pigs and guinea pigs. As we once owned two life partner guinea pigs, Archie and Lenny, we decided to take a pass. My daughters were traumatized enough. Suddenly the brothel seemed like the better activity for the afternoon.

  In those few days in (I forget the name of the town, but let’s call it Hogmeat) Hogmeat, we watched all the DVDs we brought with us. Some movies twice. And finally it was time to leave Hogmeat for the Galápagos. Don’t think we didn’t have to repeat the same treacherous, winding, near-death bus ride back to Quito. And yes, it rained again. This time we were joined by some chickens, which proved a nice distraction from the slippery tires, the vomiting, and the blood-curdling screaming.

  We all kept optimistic, sustained by the dangling carrot of the image of pristine islands popping out of the turquoise sea. We didn’t even mind it when we were packed into a tour bus without air-conditioning alongside sixty Japanese tourists who didn’t speak English and took rapid-speed photos of their seat cushions. We sighed a huge relief when the bus finally braked in front of a dock. A dock coated in bird shit.

  We huddled like refugees in matching tattered red life preservers on the dock awaiting guidance. In the water were scattered a few boats. A shiny, lacquered white yacht that should have been named Beyoncé, a Love Boat cruise line with all the bells and whistles and I assume a Lido deck,
and a rusty tanker that looked like the vessel from the movie Captain Phillips. It took about two hours for our group to be assigned to a dinghy covered in clay dust and heading toward our home for the next six days.

  Our bow pointed directly toward Beyoncé. I could see white leather chaise longues and what looked like an outdoor pool bar. Something Daniel Craig would climb onto in tight swimming trunks and strangle some bad guys before downing the rest of his martini. I decided I would sunbathe first and then order a virgin mojito. I was going to wait to have my cranial massage on the second day. But suddenly our FEMA dinghy took a choppy turn to the left and we were scraping the rusted metal side of the Captain Phillips boat. The Japanese tourists pulled out their state-of-the-art Nikon telephoto zoom lenses and started snapping away. We stopped; maybe we were dropping off some passengers? Passengers who had just joined the navy?

  Up the metal stairs with rope safety handles we went. Our (now sopping wet) luggage was flung into a colossal heap on the top deck. We rummaged through it like old ladies at an Irish linen clearance sale, desperately trying to locate our duffels. At one point I decided I’d take one of the bags on top and pray the owner’s clothes fit. It’s moments like that that I wish I were one of those anal travelers who tie a pretty fuchsia ribbon on the handle of their bag or use a kitten luggage tag for instant identification. My husband has a worn black Tumi carry-on, the same one everyone in the entire world owns. It is the one bag we can never find. On every single vacation we take.