All Adults Here(99)
“No,” Barbara said. She was still young enough to make decisions. Barbara walked past Bob, nearly tripped over a sleeping cat—oh, she would miss those cats at night—and walked straight up the stairs into her bedroom and packed a small overnight bag. She’d figure out the details. For now, this was enough.
“Where are you going, Barb?” Bob asked, his eyes wide. He watched her walk back down the stairs, back through the door, and back toward her car.
“I’m going to my mother’s for a bit, Bob,” Barbara said. “I’ll be in touch. The juice you like is in the milk aisle, just so you know, at the store. On the right. Just past the milk.”
Bob opened his mouth but no words came out. Barbara put her bag in the back seat, shut the door with a thunk, and then drove toward Heron Meadows. It was temporary. Everything was temporary. It was an illusion to believe otherwise. But nevertheless, it did feel good.
Epilogue
Months later, when Birdie and Astrid were planning their honeymoon, Astrid looked up Alaskan cruises and finally found just the right one: This summer, come along as we explore America’s icy frontier! This six-day cruise is round-trip out of Seattle and then sails right up the Pacific Coast, stopping in Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway before its final stop in beautiful Vancouver, Canada! The days are long, and from our decks you’ll be able to see bald eagles, whales, bears, and sea lions. All this, plus glaciers and 1,200 lesbians! Now that’s what we call a cruise. Astrid booked it on the spot.
The baby—Porter’s baby—Eleanor Hope Strick, who Astrid had decided she was going to call Hopie—was six months old. She was tiny and well behaved, with a bald head and perfect circles for eyes, like a cartoon. Astrid had hemmed and hawed about going away, leaving them all alone, but Porter had insisted that she’d be fine—Nicky and Juliette had offered to come and stay to help—and so the newlyweds rolled their pulley suitcases to the airport and flew across the country to set sail.
The boat was enormous, much larger than Astrid had expected, though she’d seen photographs on the website. A hotel on water! And not the kind of hotel that Astrid was used to staying in, but a behemoth of a hotel, with a casino and a theater and three swimming pools and five different restaurants. She couldn’t tell if the idea was to enjoy the boat or enjoy the world outside the boat—maybe it depended on the person. They were in a sea of women waiting to board, everyone excited and anxious and hauling their luggage, some kissing, some bickering with their wives or girlfriends or friends, some jostling with strangers about their spot in line, just like any airport departure gate where men had been willed out of existence. There were more young women than Astrid had expected—women in their forties, with a few maybe even still clinging to their thirties. She’d imagined it would be all old ladies like her and Birdie, a sea of gray hairs, like the water aerobics class at the Rhinebeck YMCA.
“Here we go,” Astrid said. She was a reluctant traveler. They’d gone to Disney World once, when the kids were ten, seven, and five, and Astrid had briefly lost Nicky while Russell took the bigger kids on Space Mountain, and the horror of it had lingered for the rest of their trip. She snapped at the children whenever they wandered out of her line of sight; she shouted when Elliot accidentally sent a pat of cold butter flying across the hotel restaurant. After that the Stricks never went anywhere they couldn’t get to in their station wagon. And where would she have gone alone? Now it had been so long that she’d forgotten the point of travel in the first place. The boat looked too big, and for a moment, Astrid worried that it would sink immediately after they were all aboard, like a giant bath toy plunged to the seafloor.
* * *
—
Their room was on the Verandah Deck, the sixth floor out of ten. Uniformed staff lined the halls. “I feel like we’re on Downton Abbey,” Birdie said, bowing.
“Or the Titanic,” Astrid whispered as she opened the door to their room, which looked like any other hotel room, only with furniture that was all bolted to the floor, and none of the stupid knickknacks that always drove Astrid crazy—decorative ceramic sea stars, a bowl of inedible fruit. Maybe cruises were for practical people. All along the deck outside their room, there were heavy chairs and bins, everything cemented to the ground so that it didn’t fly off into the ocean and knock a dolphin unconscious (Astrid assumed). There were two life preservers in the closet, ready for the muster drill they’d been warned about—before the ship set sail, everyone had to practice getting to their rescue stations, where they would be counted and, theoretically, saved from a watery death. It seemed an ominous start to a voyage, but those were the rules.
On her first honeymoon, Astrid and Russell had taken the train to Montreal. It was April, and colder by far than they’d expected, and they went home with their suitcases stuffed full of extra layers, purchased in Canadian department stores as needed. What else did she remember? They’d played gin rummy in the hotel lobby, betting each other peanuts, though the bartender kept refilling both their bowls, so it didn’t matter much one way or the other. They’d made love every day. Astrid thought about mayflies, who lived for only a day, and tortoises, who lived for a hundred years—neither creature had remotely the range of experience a person could have. How funny, how ridiculous, for Astrid still to be the same person that she’d been in that hotel lobby, sitting across from Russell Strick.