Do Not Become Alarmed(10)

“Everyone on the ship is too ancient for that. And there are sharks here. And riptides.” Liv had once been caught in a riptide, at a beach with no lifeguard, on a Hawaiian vacation with her parents when she was fifteen. She had watched the beach getting farther away, and thought This is how it ends. When she finally made her way in, she’d collapsed exhausted on the sand. “There’s an animal preserve,” she said, “with howler monkeys and coatimundis.”

“What’s a coatimundi?”

“A small mammal with a stripy tail.”

“We have skunks in LA.”

“Wait, that’s four hours in a bus.”

“Just shoot me now.”

“How about a zip-line tour of the rain forest canopy?” she asked. “Forty-five minutes by bus each way.”

Benjamin perked up. “Seriously? I wonder what kind of rig they use.”

She should have known it would be cables and carabiners that would lure him, not monkeys. She swung her legs off the bed and headed out of the cabin before he changed his mind. In the corridor, she ran into Perla, their stewardess.

“Will you go outside tomorrow, ma’am?” Perla asked.

Liv felt a guilty twinge. “Going outside” meant getting off the ship, which for Perla meant a chance to use a phone card to call her kids in Manila. Every time Liv saw a stewardess plumping pillows in an open cabin, she was stunned by the heartache of it. Never seeing her kids. Missing out on the tiny changes, the lost teeth, the dawning look of some small discovery on their faces. Making strangers’ beds while your children learned to read. Perla didn’t need praise for her towel-animal skills or questions about her kids’ ages. She needed Liv to get out of the cabin so she could get her work done early and call home.

“Yes!” Liv said. “We’re going outside.”

Perla looked pleased, and Liv was embarrassed that they’d been such homebodies. Ship-bodies.

She knocked at Nora’s door and Nora said yes to the zip-line tour. “I invited the Argentinians to join us for dinner,” Nora said. “Gunther and Camila.”

“Great!” Liv said. “See, we’re sophisticated people of the world. We have international friends! We zip-line!”

At dinner, Camila sat between Benjamin and Raymond, wearing a black dress and a gold necklace as thick as Liv’s little finger. Gunther sat on Liv’s right, and leaned forward to say, “Did you see this video in the cabin? The crew interviews?”

“Yes!” Benjamin said. “Who signed off on that?”

“I think it must be a joke,” Camila said. “Someone in the publicity department is taking revenge. And no one has noticed.”

Gunther said, “If there is class war on this ship, I am telling you, we are outnumbered.”

Yuri arrived with a bottle of Chilean red that Gunther had ordered, and they straightened in their chairs. Yuri poured the first taste for Gunther.

“It is fine,” Gunther said, waving his hand over the glass. To Liv, he said, “All this sniffing, the wine is always fine.”

With a barely perceptible frown, Yuri started to pour. Liv sensed that he didn’t approve of Gunther invading their table. She looked to Raymond, who gave her an equally perceptible smile.

“Have you always lived in Argentina?” she asked Gunther, thinking of Nazis—she couldn’t help thinking of Nazis.

“Of course,” he said. “Since my grandfather’s grandfather came from the Volga.”

She didn’t know exactly where the Volga was, but Marcus would know. She could quiz him later. An endive salad arrived. “Did a lot of Germans migrate there?” she asked.

“Also Italian and French,” he said. “You know this joke? ‘An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is English.’”

She didn’t know the joke. “What about the indigenous people?”

“They are there, too.”

“But not in your family?”

“Are they in yours?” Gunther asked, with a meaningful smile at her pale hair.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t done a cheek swab. I’m Norwegian and Swedish and a little Irish.”

“It is the same for us,” Gunther said. “We are immigrants. There is a pride in my country in not being mixed with the indios, like our neighbor countries. It’s not a nice thing, this pride.”

“They say they are taking the zip-line tour tomorrow,” Camila reported, across the table.

“Oh, this is terrible!” Gunther said, putting down his wine glass. “You will be thrown from tree to tree like a sack of potatoes!”

“Have you done it?” Nora asked.

“Never!”

“He hates all shore excursions,” Camila said. “We went swimming with dolphins and he despised it.”

“Animal abuse!” Gunther said. “These noble creatures do not want to see ugly tourists in bathing suits.”

“Wait,” Benjamin said. “Do you think dolphins have aesthetic taste in human beings?”

“Of course,” Gunther said. “They must jump and clap and sing for us, and humiliate themselves. Prostitution. They are being pimped. Let them go.”

“You think dolphins feel humiliated?” Benjamin asked.