I held my grandfather’s hand as we walked through the marina’s gravel lot, which was filled with old dusty cars and a lopsided RV. A stand of eucalyptus trees shaded a crooked, dirty yellow house. A sign in one of its cracked windows said Donahue’s Marina: Office, and that was where my grandfather led me. We passed another sign, this one hand-painted onto pressboard and hung crookedly on the chain-link fence: “If you’Re Dog shits here YOUR to pick it up!”
“Look, Daddy,” I pointed.
My grandfather didn’t stop to read it, but I took the sign as further evidence that something wasn’t quite right. Surely this wasn’t where we’d be buying our yacht? My grandfather had taken great pains to explain the difference between a boat and a yacht to me. All summer he’d taken me to shop for yachts. We’d looked at shiny, white ones with fiberglass hulls and huge, tinted windows; antique Chris-Crafts with blue canvas awnings, chrome fixtures, and teak decks—whatever caught his eye in the LA Harbor Log. Those boats had been in marinas at the outer edge of the harbor with a view of the open sea and a fresh breeze. Those marinas had guard shacks, lawns, and palm trees; they had concrete pilings and docks, nylon ropes coiled neatly by their cleats. My grandfather and I had walked down wide, stable docks, his large hand engulfing mine, while he talked to friendly men in golf shirts who gave me free key chain floats and koozies.
So when he took me to Donahue’s for the first time, to sign the paperwork for our new yacht, I thought he’d made a mistake. To get there, we’d driven down a dusty, potholed road. We’d crossed three sets of railroad tracks and passed a cargo terminal. We had almost been smashed by a semitruck whose driver proceeded blithely along in spite of my grandfather’s having called him a “motherfucking bastard” through the open window of our Mercedes.
You couldn’t even really tell you were near the ocean until the road rounded a bend, and suddenly, there it was: a smooth channel of blue surrounded by a shipyard and docks, way at the back end of the harbor, on the border between San Pedro and Wilmington, as far from the open sea as you could get and still be on water.
In the dim shack, my grandfather sat down at a desk with Chuck, the marina’s manager, while I was relegated to a greasy vinyl couch nearby. If I sat the wrong way, I slid backward, sinking into the dip between the cushions and the back; if I sat too close to the front of the cushion, I found myself sliding down toward the filthy linoleum floor.
The office was musty. Someone had dusted recently, but they’d missed big swathes on the end table, and a dead fly sat in the gold tin ashtray. As I looked toward the back of the building, behind Chuck, I could see where the scarred linoleum ended in a jagged line, revealing hard-packed dirt below. A few dead leaves had blown in through the gap between the bottom of the exterior wall and the dirt.
I sat as straight as I could so that my skin wouldn’t make contact with the greasy couch, but also to be polite.
“I want you to make a good impression on Chuck,” my grandfather had said in the parking lot. “Remember who you are, where you come from.”
I recognized this directive as part of being “Sir Richard,” as much as the Old Etonian tie and imprinted checks. Being “Sir Richard” also meant that, on occasion, my grandfather’s English accent would become slightly more pronounced, and I would be expected to be on my best behavior. “Noblesse oblige,” he’d explained once and left it at that.
Chuck, red-faced and breathless, filled out a bill of sale. His body melted over the sides of his creaky office chair, and he wiped the sweat off his forehead with the same hand he’d used to hand me an old Brach’s butterscotch he’d dug out of a desk drawer. The plastic wrapper had stuck stubbornly to the sticky candy, and after a while I’d given up and hidden it behind me, pushing it into the crack between the cushions of the couch. Chuck called me “sweetheart” and “darling” in a way that bothered me.
“Now, darling, are you excited to see your grandpa’s new boat?” he’d interrupted their conversation to ask. “You’re just going to love what your grandpa’s bought for you. Just wait until you see it, sweetheart.”
He called my grandfather “Sir Richard” in the same tone, but my grandfather didn’t seem to mind at all.
Finally, the men stood to shake hands, and then we went down to the dock to see our new boat. It was low tide, and the wooden ramp angled steeply over rocks coated with sea mud. The mud was olive brown, a color like the one I’d sometimes make on bad days in art class, a putrid mixture of brown and green and gray. The air smelled of the salty mud, of dead fish and, although I didn’t recognize it at the time, of raw sewage. The ramp bounced beneath Chuck and my grandfather’s heavy steps, and the weathered wooden dock rocked as we walked along it. Every now and then, part of a plank was missing, and I could see the shady, green water below. We passed a few dozen boats—all in various states of disrepair, painted in dirty shades of white or pastels—until we came to the end of the dock, where the biggest boat in the marina listed hard against the end tie. Its eighty-three feet of once-white paint was peeling; rust dripped like tears from the nails in its wooden hull. Its portholes were dusty and dark. The ropes that tied it to the dock were encrusted with black mussels. A thicket of sea squirts and algae grew peacefully just below the boat’s waterline.
“Well, there she is. Isn’t she beautiful?” Chuck said as my grandfather looked the ship up and down, end to end.
“Yes,” he said, looking at her hull, “she is. She’s got great lines. She’s solid.” I saw the pride blush slowly across his face, his bushy eyebrows raise with pleasure.
• • •
That night, my grandfather took Marilyn and me out to dinner at the Hungry Tiger to celebrate his purchase. Even though it was built in the middle of a shopping center parking lot, the Hungry Tiger looked like an old inn, the Admiral Benbow from Treasure Island, built of cobblestones and dark wooden beams. I was always disappointed when we went in, though, because it was just another restaurant inside: a large room packed with tables covered in goldenrod cloths, walls lined with framed prints of tigers, and bookshelves whose ancient-looking volumes were glued to the wood; I knew this because I’d tried once to pick one up.
We were seated in roomy leather chairs on wheels. Marilyn and my grandfather were handed heavy menus bound in leather, and I was given a paper child’s menu. I ordered a Shirley Temple.
“Bring her extra cherries, if you would,” my grandfather commanded the waiter, a pale young man whose acne-scarred cheeks were studded with sparse, black hairs. “We’re celebrating!”
When our drinks came, we clinked glasses and said cheers, my grandfather and I more loudly than Marilyn. Wreck that it was, I was excited about the boat. The way my grandfather described it, owning a boat meant trips to exotic places, whale watching anytime I wanted, living the pirate-buccaneer-sharpshooter-swashbuckler lifestyle to which I seriously aspired. I’d watched every Errol Flynn film on video and ridden my spring horse in the backyard, using a broom handle as a lance, until it had collapsed beneath my weight. I wanted him to name the boat “Athena,” after the warrior goddess from my book of Greek myths.
As Marilyn took a sip of wine, she gazed at something farther away than the restaurant’s wall.
We ordered: my grandfather, steak; Marilyn, red snapper; me, fried shrimp. Another Shirley Temple was commanded without my having to ask.
My grandfather began to talk, his voice happily bombastic, about what would be done to the boat, what items purchased, what trips were to be made—the Panama Canal, perhaps? The canals in Europe? Yes, the canals in Europe. Hawaii. Mexico. Alaska.
Marilyn grunted in assent once in a while, but if you actually paid attention to her, you could see she wasn’t listening. She was still staring across the restaurant, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes shinier than normal. I reached a hand under the table to hers and held it. Her soft fingers squeezed mine for just a moment, then went limp again.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?”
“Nothing, sweetheart, I’m fine,” she said.
“What? Something’s the matter?” my grandfather wanted to know.
“Nothing, Richard,” she said, her voice a little harder.
I couldn’t imagine why she was upset. I replayed the short ride to the restaurant in my mind. Had we said something to hurt her?
My grandfather started talking again, about engines we’d need to overhaul and the anchor and chain we’d buy, trips to Seattle and San Diego.
“Are you okay?” I whispered. She didn’t answer, but instead turned her head a little toward my grandfather, as if she were paying attention. He kept talking.
Across the restaurant, an amorous couple held hands and looked soulfully into each other’s eyes, the side of the woman’s bare foot sliding slowly along the man’s leg. I looked back at Marilyn and my grandfather—his annoyance with her sadness slowly rising—and tried to gauge who would explode first. I prayed silently and desperately for the waiter to not screw up our order, for my grandfather’s steak to be a true medium-rare, for the cooks to be swift in the performance of their duty.
Again I asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Marilyn hissed and withdrew her hand. She took another sip from her glass, then put it on the table roughly. My own eyes got teary. I’d just been trying to help.
Our food came. I didn’t feel much like eating. My grandfather tucked a napkin into his collar and draped it over his chest. He cut into his steak with gusto, then threw the pink plastic “rare” marker onto his plate.
“Goddamned steak is overcooked.” He pulled off the napkin and looked around for our waiter, who’d chosen that exact moment to go missing.
“Waiter!” my grandfather shouted in his best Royal Navy–officer voice. When no one appeared immediately, he began again, repeating, “Waiter! Waiter!” as if he were an air-raid siren. Dining in the restaurant had come to a standstill; everyone stared. A woman swiveled on her bar stool to get a better view. The amorous couple raised their eyebrows and smirked. A manager dressed in a double-breasted suit, not much older than our waiter, rushed up to quiet my grandfather. He seemed slightly afraid of us; restaurant managers were almost always slightly afraid of us. I didn’t really blame them.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked.
“Yes, you can fucking help me. This bloody steak is overcooked.” My grandfather flicked a hand toward the plate. The manager whisked it away.
I stared at the napkin in my lap, feeling everybody’s eyes on me. I contemplated running out of the restaurant, but I knew my grandfather would chase after me, dig his fingers into my shoulder, and pull me back. Once during a restaurant scene, I had left the table for an extended dawdle in the restroom and was soundly chastised upon my return, which had drawn even more stares. What I really wanted to do was crawl under the table.
Life at the Hungry Tiger slowly got back to normal. There was the gentle clink of silverware on plates, murmured conversations.
“Well, you two, eat!” my grandfather insisted. “Don’t wait for mine. Yours will be cold.”
I looked up. Marilyn sat in stony silence, her plate untouched, the sad red snapper turning mushy. A tear welled slowly up and over her lower eyelid, rolling down her creamy cheek until she wiped it away with the back of her hand.
• • •
“Why aren’t you excited about the boat, Mommy?” I asked Marilyn. We were driving, me eating the trail mix we’d just bought at the store. Melted goo from the white-yogurt-covered raisins coated my fingers.
She didn’t say anything for a second, but when she did, she sounded tired, wary. “I don’t know, honey. I’m just…concerned.”
“About what?”
We stopped at a light. She turned and looked at me, her sunglasses hiding her eyes. “You know about Daddy’s first boat.”
I nodded my head. In our living room, by the front door, on the wall above the liquor table, hung a framed and matted photograph of my grandfather’s first boat. She was a decommissioned U.S. Navy patrol craft, a two-hundred-foot subchaser from World War II that he’d bought used from someone else. Ships and boats were always changing hands in the LA Harbor in more-or-less shady deals. Her postservice name was the Sirocco, and my grandfather had kept that name because Errol Flynn had owned a sailing yacht named the Sirocco, after the Mediterranean wind.
The Sirocco, Marilyn said, had started the same way as our new boat, only she didn’t know what she was getting into then. At first, she’d liked the idea of owning a yacht; it sounded glamorous and fun. But the Sirocco was a wreck, and as my grandfather began the expensive task of renovating her, he spent so much money that he and Marilyn couldn’t afford the rent on their house in Benedict Canyon. They moved on board to save money before the ship was even close to being finished. For a few years, they lived with the sounds of hammering and welding, the inconveniences of an unfinished kitchen, unreliable plumbing, a leaking hull, and a leaking deck. They moved their belongings from room to room and deck to deck to make way for the construction. But they still couldn’t pay their bills; sometimes welders would come knocking on Marilyn’s bedroom door to ask for their pay. She couldn’t keep jewelry because it kept disappearing. At the end of those few years, the ship was still unfinished, and when they finally sold it, they were practically bankrupt.
“Anyway,” she said. “I just don’t want to go through that again. And here we are, with another boat.”
“Maybe this time it’ll be different,” I said, trying to cheer her up. But perhaps in the back of my mind, I was a little worried too. I didn’t really know what bankruptcy meant, but I knew it was really, really bad. Adults spoke of bankruptcy the way they spoke of death; it was the thing that made people homeless.
We stopped at another light.
“Well, it is a smaller boat,” she said, as if she were trying to believe me. She looked at me and smiled, then noticed my hands. “You’re always such a mess, Kelly. Here,” she said, handing me a Wet One from the stash she kept behind her seat.