Finally, they are actually on board after swiping their new IDs, and are immediately greeted by smiling stewards proffering trays of complimentary champagne and orange juice. Samantha thinks this is more like it, though it will be the last free drink of the cruise.
Her mother is entranced by their mini-suite: balcony, fancy bathroom amenities, a safe, a captain’s log of activities thick as a paperback, and a welcoming note from their cabin stewards, Alphonso and Julian. Their luggage is already in the room. The second bed unfolds from a sofa near their sliding glass door to the balcony. Samantha will take it, leaving her mother the bed closest to the bathroom. Everything is snug and ingenious.
Time for lunch—their first experience of the buffet. In recent weeks, her mother has complained of nausea, merely pecks at food. An X-ray found a shadow on her lung, a mass, and the surgeon’s appointment to biopsy it will be two days after their return. She says she can’t possibly eat a meal, but opts to attempt a little snack after viewing the gleaming line of offerings. When they finish, all that remains on her plate is a large pile of clean chicken bones.
They are not yet under way. Samantha settles her mother on one of their balcony chairs, then goes to scout out the ship’s library. She finds hundreds of pristine hardbacks. No Steinbeck, her mother’s current kick, but she selects a stack for her inspection. Underfoot, she detects the slightest motion. She returns to join her mother on the balcony, watching as Seattle stretches away, then shrinks to a vanishing point.
While her mother naps, Samantha continues her exploration of the gym and spa, listening to the white-jacketed attendant’s explanation of toxin-ridding treatments and Embarkation Specials, four yoga classes for the price of three. She figures out how to read the restaurant screens displayed around ship, colored bars indicating the number of open tables; she acquaints herself with the key to the surcharge venues, which they will avoid. Even if Samantha pays, her mother won’t enjoy it if it’s a surcharge restaurant.
After dinner, they catch the last five minutes of a comic’s routine consisting of two bald jokes plus one poking fun of his mother that her mother doesn’t get. Looking in through the casino on their walk back, Kathryn is disappointed to see that all play is for paper scrip. Slots to her mean a shower of nickels in the stainless-steel well, real wealth that blackens the fingers.
Day 2.
Samantha is up before six thirty, while her mother still sleeps soundly. Samantha’s three sons at home—twelve, ten, and the youngest that they kept trying for past a miscarriage, now seven—are currently under Mark’s watch; she feels astonished to wake with time on her hands. She ventures off alone to the buffet with her novel; they have agreed on this plan since her mother is not a breakfast eater. Samantha waits at the buffet entrance for the velvet rope to be drawn back. She stands behind a man from Texas with his wife, whom he met in Tokyo, the two of them now living in Alabama. She learns through chitchat that he is a Korea vet, air force; that he once lived at a base in the northwest and doesn’t like rain; and that they cruise frequently because “Life is like a roll of toilet paper: The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.”
Samantha uses her graduate school waitress skills to transport her dishes of oatmeal, berries, omelet, and coffee, Dos Passos’s fat trilogy, U.S.A., tucked under her arm. She is happy to sit by the window for an hour alone after breakfast, reading and watching the sea, gray and tossed, and the smudges of islands on the horizon. She is already wearing her yoga pants and goes straight to class at eight, where she is bemused by the gently rolling sensation beneath her feet in Mountain pose, and the inverted view of sea and sky outside the floor-to-ceiling windows during Down Dog.
Her mother is awake when she returns, so they review the multipage list of shore excursions, dozens upon dozens. Samantha points out the Level One activities with easy walking. Her mother favors the helicopter ride to the mushing camp where she can pet the husky puppies, until she sees the price.
They begin shipboard rounds, stopping first for her mother’s coffee, then pause at a table in the lounge so Samantha can enter the drawing for the Picasso linotype. Her mother thinks the linotype stinks, wouldn’t want it if she won it. The day passes in a pleasant tedium of rambling and watching the sea and reading their books and dozing and visiting the radiant buffet.
Samantha awakens in the middle of the night to a decidedly pitching ship. Her mother gets out of bed to pee, and Samantha springs up to steady her against the rolling. The creaking of the brand-new ship dispels the hotel-at-sea illusion. It’s a vessel, without doubt. Being tossed.
Day 3.
When Samantha opens her eyes again, the sky is clear, sea calm. Berries and oatmeal and omelet and coffee and novel. Yoga in the middle of the ocean.
They take their first shore excursion: Mendenhall Glacier and Salmon Bake. Her mother adores all—the storytelling bus driver, the gentle hiking paths around the glacier she manages well with her walking stick, the views of Juneau. For dinner, they sit at a picnic table overlooking a creek, piney and damp, and are serenaded by a cheerful folk singer. They have two hours on their own. Instead of taking the tour bus back to dock, Samantha proposes a short walk in town, then a walk to the ship. Her mother also hankers to shop and loves to walk, so agrees.
The walk back turns out to be farther than Samantha thought, a misleading bend in the road revealing at least another half-mile. The embarkation deadline looms in thirty minutes, and the ship hovers in the distance, a smooth, ivory toy. Her mother is seriously flagging, her face drawn and grim. Could this have been Samantha’s major life error, ruining the birthday cruise and perhaps sending her mother to the emergency room? Her mother says she needs to sit, but there is no place to sit, and no time to sit if there were a place.
Of the little traffic on the road, all of it is coming toward them; the wrong direction for hitching a ride. Then Samantha sees a taxi headed opposite and waves it down. At first the driver passes them and she thinks he didn’t see, but he drives just far enough to do a U-turn at a wider place in the road. He deposits them directly in front of the gangplank with twenty-five minutes to spare. Samantha thinks he probably saved their cruise, and maybe even her mother’s life, and wonders how big she should make the tip for that.
Day 4.
Skagway: a two-hour streetcar tour. Their guide, Jeannie, reports on the 5:1 single men to single woman ratio in Alaska: “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”
Later, riding the narrow-gauge White Pass train, waterfalls flash by the windows, with views of the cliffs around curves where they can see the tail end of the train winding after them. Her mother fusses, trying to get her camera, a birthday gift from Steve, set in time for the changing scene. Each missed waterfall represents failure: “If I were nimble there’s no end to the beautiful pictures I could be taking,” she moans. Riding down, the passengers are instructed to change sides to receive the benefit of the opposite view. Her mother is downcast about missing a particular waterfall, now on the opposite side. It’s all she can talk about for the rest of the ride.
The only way Samantha can stay patient with her is to remember how relatively little time is left, with or without the mass in her chest, so that enjoying and appreciating her mother becomes inextricably bound to losing her. But this does work, so it’s the technique she uses.
Returning to their mini-suite they find that either Alphonso or Julian has spent considerable effort shaping a towel into a bunny with Andes mints for eyes. Her mother snaps photos of the towel art resting on the crisply made bed. A photographic subject that can’t elude her, she takes pictures of it from every angle. Neither of them can figure out how the artist got the towel to stay in place so perfectly. Starch?
Samantha thinks they should rehearse “Sentimental Journey,” the duet they sang when she was child, for the passenger talent show and the chance to win two free cruises. Her mother gets uncontrollable giggles at the thought. Samantha doesn’t know why Kathryn can’t fin
d the harmony after a lifetime of hitting it like a professional. She finally figures out that her mother can’t hear her, so she sings louder and aims at her ear. Her mother locates the notes. They polish up “Moon River” and others for possible encores.
Day 5.
Her mother says please, no talent show. Samantha has already privately given it up. Cruising day in Glacier Bay: They watch the creamy icebergs glide by their stateroom balcony. Her mother has her camera strap looped around her wrist for extra security. Samantha sits mesmerized by the glowing white against the uncannily blue water. Her mother contentedly snaps away, gobbling up the whole landscape to digest it at a later date.
Samantha knows this is her mother’s nirvana: a trip with just the two of them, although she loves Samantha’s family and is a spectacular grandmother. But somehow, as early as Samantha can remember, she’s been the one entrusted with her mother’s inner life—the confidences, confessions, complaints—all of it expressing a grievous sense of lack. Samantha has figured out she can’t fill it. Even if it were her job, which it’s not, it’s unfillable. But this is what Samantha can afford to give her mother for this birthday: one week of all of her, every scintilla, though the calendar counts down on their charmed shipboard bubble. Kathryn takes picture after picture after picture.
Day 6.
Ketchikan: Samantha has been here before, during a summer in graduate school, cleaning fish in a cannery; she didn’t remember cruise ships docking then.
Together they spend shore time in the giant souvenir emporiums. Cruise-destination Ketchikan bears no resemblance to the cannery town Samantha lived in. She slept in a tent city with other workers and ate pancakes cooked over a fire grate for supper every night. At first the fish weren’t running and she hung around the streets in town with the others. She’d while away the day in the diner with a book while it rained, hamburgers and homemade pie, or loiter in the dusty drugstore she’d invent errands to go to. She was reading Pynchon’s V that summer, all summer, so in addition to rain and salmon-bloody gloves and hair nets and long rubber aprons and sliming spoons at the ends of thin hoses, she was gripped by the feel of an impenetrable story across time and geography full of characters she continually lost track of.
Then her mother’s missing finger. Back home in Portland while Samantha was cleaning fish, Kathryn had felt only the nick as she reached in to clean the chute of the running lawnmower. People don’t usually ask about her mother’s healed finger stump, but the salesgirl at the souvenir emporium surprisingly does, and Kathryn tells the story, which always includes the bit about living alone in the house and taking care of a big yard all by herself, the reason she had to sell, though she still misses it terribly, even the yard work. The story contains equal and opposite complaints: having the house and not having the house. Samantha remembers the phone call from Steve she got in Ketchikan—word gotten to her through the fish company, no cell phones then—and how she returned home on the next ferry when the salmon were just hitting the peak of their run. That’s when the overtime pay started, fish cannery gold.
Of course, you don’t blame someone for having such a terrible accident. But Samantha can’t help picturing her mother, shoving the mower to and fro with irritation as she managed a difficult corner. She could afford to hire someone, but insisted that the exercise was good for her. Always angry, though, as she pitted her slight weight against the machine. She’d be angry at a clogged chute, angry she was alone to deal with it, angry that the backyard—missing its swing set, its wading pool, its balance beam—was all her job. So angry she wouldn’t think to turn the mower off. So angry her motions would be sudden, fury fueling them.
Night after night for the rest of that summer the two of them stared at the red, angry stump, stitched and oozing, as Samantha daubed, padded, bandaged. When it happened, Kathryn had screamed for help and the next-door neighbor, the one she had feuded with for years about Princess the barking dog, came to her aid. The neighbor found the finger part and wrapped it in ice. The neighbor called 911 and Steve. The doctors said if they reattached the top joint, the finger would be stiff and unfeeling and useless. It would get in her way. So she came home from the hospital with the bandaged stump, and when people asked with concern what happened, she told about taking care of the house, all by herself, with that big yard.
They reboard and retreat to their stateroom with their emporium gifts for Samantha’s family and Steve’s family: sweatshirts and T-shirts and fossils and antique trading beads. When they emerge for dinner, people are breaking up from clusters of whale spotting. Apparently, a pod of thirty or so whales spouted and cavorted on both sides of ship and neither Kathryn nor Samantha looked up from their books to note the spectacle off their mini-suite balcony. Samantha fetches her field glasses and Kathryn her coat. No sign of them.
It’s the optional Dress Like You Mean It night, which means sequins and shiny shoes and many roaming shipboard photographers, offering portraits. Samantha continues in jeans and sandals and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, but regrets the lack of something more silky. Her mother has given up her yellow shirt with a picture of a yawning puppy and humorous caption about not doing mornings, but still wears a T-shirt with writing, this time a map of the Oregon coast. So it’s for the best Samantha did not bring dressier clothes.
They are greeted warmly by the Filipina hostess who always secures them an immediate window seat in the Royal Court, and are led to the table by the tall Indian maître’d who says it’s nice to see them again. Kathryn is in love with the maître’d, who spoke to them in a formally gracious manner on their first night until Kathryn tried a few words of her childhood Hindi on him and his surprise broke through the corporate mask to ask, how did Madam come to know Hindi? They swapped locations—her missionary Dhamtari and Mussoorie for his Bangalore, and though they didn’t overlap in India’s vastness, it was enough for Kathryn to stake her claim of affiliation.
Samantha forces herself to accompany her mother to “Legs, Legs, Legs,” the evening’s showgirl feature. She reminds herself it is not a true sacrifice if she says even one sarcastic thing or rolls her eyes or even discreetly falls asleep, so she the watches the entire glittery spectacle. She has to admit that the gymnast couple hanging from suspended scarves is pretty good. She watches the kick line with a critical eye, having been a member of a state champion dance team in high school, coached by a woman who was all about synchronization.
They skip Vegas night, but head to the Chocolate Paradise buffet. There are many jokes in the elevator on the way to the dessert party about death by chocolate being a good way to go—jokes made mostly by elderly people who know a thing or two about death. Choco partygoers are greeted by waiters carrying champagne on trays; Samantha withdraws her reaching hand after learning the price per glass that will be swiped to her ID card. There is a giant ice sculpture of a whale, also an enormous chocolate sculpture of a cruise ship amid chocolate waves. Low romantic lighting. The crowds streaming in from the Palace Theater, having just watched seminude showgirls, help themselves to platefuls of desserts from a boggling expanse. Samantha wonders—a kind of sexual release? Her mother selects an array, later marveling that the indigestion that prevented her from ordering an entrée at dinner is unaffected by an infusion of chocolate raspberry cake, mousse, macaroon, profiterole, and éclair.
Their nightly bulletin has instructions for debarkation. Kathryn and Samantha will opt for gray luggage tags, which will put them among the last ones to leave the ship. Her mother would like to stay for another loop if they could, do it all again.
Day 7.
Victoria Day, last full sail day.
At breakfast, diners to the left and right of Samantha point simultaneously to a whale spouting on the port side. She looks up from her book just in time to miss it.
She completes her yoga series of four classes, resolving to begin a newly mindful way of life at home.
The children of the Buccaneer Club are sometimes paraded throug
h the decks and lounges wearing their pirate bandannas. Their keepers lead them in their signature chant: Yo ho ho and a yo ho ho! From stem to stern we’ll go Go GO! The spiky-haired Aussie art auctioneer in the Diamond Atrium, listing the important features of the limited-edition linotypes for sale, interrupts his flood of impassioned pedagogy to smile insincerely at the shouting children on the atrium balcony overhead. Elderly passersby comment, “How sweet!” and “Aren’t they having fun!” But there is something enraged and manic in the children’s shouting. They know they have been penned away from the adults for the entire voyage, the parents having more fun without them, so for once the exhortations of their keepers make sense: Shout in faces of adults and force adults to smile back. The keepers must enjoy this, too, having been required to invent amusements for the children for a solid week while the parents sipped the Daily Cocktail (“Octopus Hug,” “Endless Sunset,” “Full Fathom Five”) in souvenir glasses, while lying on lounge chairs that are really beds. There are beds everywhere on the ship with adults sprawled on them, mouths open.
Kathryn wears her new Inside Passage map T-shirt, so Samantha can consult their current position by gazing at her mother’s flattened chest. Her mother had some years ago stopped wearing a brassiere. One day she said, enough of that. Most of the passengers seem to be sporting their port purchases, so that they have become a vast, place-labeled herd, as if no one can remember their location unless wearing it.
Samantha pops her head into the hall to listen each time the ding-dong signals the cruise director’s instructions. These will invariably be news of a jackpot bingo round or a shopping talk by Harry (diamonds, tanzanite, alexandrite, white quartz, ammolite, and watches). They are told never to be in port without Harry’s mobile number; he will use his clout to intercede with shopkeepers not discounting items deeply enough for the VIP status the cruisers should rightfully enjoy. Samantha wishes the ding-dong announcements would just once contain a timely suggestion to look out the port or starboard deck for spouting whales, but all suggestions lead to jewelry, jugglers, and the Jackpot Jumbo Wheel. Kathryn and Samantha have, on the last cruising day, discovered a most beautiful lounge on the top floor at the most forward part of the deck, and spend some hopeful time on watch with Samantha’s field glasses, but the sea will yield them no whale.
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