This weird thing happened to me once that I had forgotten about until recently. I tucked it away somewhere for years and suddenly, just like that, it popped back up. I’m going to have to, unfortunately, start at the beginning. I’ll try to be brief.
My dad works for Cunard Cruise Line and we get to go on free cruises. My parents, my sister, and me. One of the perks of the job. This was before anyone even went on cruises. Way before they were petri dishes for pandemics where you sailed around aimlessly for several weeks until you died. They were fun and civilized then. There were no drunken people falling off balconies only to be lost to the seas. No rock climbing walls or ten-story atriums. Ships looked like ships and people behaved like people.
We go on one, two a year. Usually to the Caribbean or Bermuda. But one year, when I’m fifteen, we get bumped off our cruise by Cunard Line days before we’re supposed to set sail. (As an employee we were always subject to the possibility of a last-minute ejection, but this was the first time it had ever happened.) I was bereft. It literally felt like someone was taking the Oscar out of my hands. My father, feeling badly, finagles us onto another trip on Costa Cruises. (This is the line that becomes famous when years later one of their ships sinks off the coast of Italy and the captain is one of the first to leave the ship. Which, if you know one thing about being a captain, it’s that that is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. My first thought when I see this on the news is “We went on a Costa Cruise!” I would venture to say we had a better time.)
We depart from San Juan on the Carla C for a week in the Caribbean. The Carla C is an old ship. The decks sagging in the middle, it’s like walking across a piece of plywood atop two paint cans. The ship even has its own theme song that the waiters force us to sing each night at dinner. Since this is an Italian cruise line there is a lot of mediocre pasta on the menu. The nice thing about pasta on an Italian line is it can only be so bad. (I much prefer Cunard Line, the British cruise line my father works for, truth be told. Give me a British ship’s officer over an Italian one any day of the week. Polite, sleek, blond men without arm hair thick enough to cut through their uniform sleeves. They don’t age well, sadly, but nobody looks better than a British officer at twenty. By thirty they look as though they’ve spent the last decade on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Weather-beaten with six dull yellow hairs left, skin several different shades of red that should only be seen in before photos at a dermatologist’s office, bloated from alcohol and almost toothless, their glory days already long behind them. But a Brit at twenty in a uniform? Well, there’s nothing more beautiful.)
My sister and I quickly make friends with whatever other teenagers are on board. At home I have no friends. The other teenagers in school I would never think to be so chummy with. But here, on the open sea, the old rules don’t apply. And the me that lives in Queens, well, nobody knows him. Being thrown together in these circumstances makes for quick easy friendships with the life span of a banana. Good for five, six days and then you toss it away. No emails to exchange, no phone numbers or Instagrams. No way of us knowing what each other’s lives are like outside the confines of the ship. There is no before and there is no after. And teenagers on vacation, as a whole, are much less cruel. Occasionally my sister, Maria, and I exchange addresses with the kids we meet on these cruises. Writing letters back and forth for several months, a year at most, before the novelty wears off and trying to re-create the excitement of the week we spent together becomes just another drudgery.
One cruise our luggage doesn’t arrive, and Maria ends up wearing the clothes of another teenager from Michigan for the week. They write letters to each other for a while. Her name was Kristy, and now I realize that was a sweet kid who did that. Sometimes kids can be so thoughtful without even knowing it. Usually they’re horrible, though. Anything otherwise is just a pleasant surprise.
On another cruise, when Maria is eighteen and I’m sixteen, we befriend some other teenagers from Queens and two young men from Atlanta, both twenty-four. Cute in the way young people are cute. I, of course, become instantly obsessed with the two young men. I exchange addresses, and when we get home I instantly write them an insane letter asking about colleges in Georgia. I’m ready to move to Atlanta in order to be near these men who I now saw as my friends and protectors. Kindly, one of them writes me back. (Can you believe it? Now of course, in retrospect, it’s a bit odd that an adult man in Georgia is writing to a sixteen-year-old in Queens, but the world was simpler then.) He recommends colleges to me. I’m moving to Georgia, I decide. These are my friends. We will become roommates and I will get a job. This is my new life now. Every letter you put out into the world meant your life could change with the response. Thankfully, they never write back after receiving my even more insane second letter. I have a vague memory of it and really wouldn’t be surprised if they’d turned it over to the FBI.
But here on the Carl C, on this cruise, I am fifteen and I make friends with a young married couple, Nancy and Jack. She is a teacher and he does something in business. They’re in their late twenties, I think, and from Los Angeles (the most glamorous place a person could be from as far as I was concerned). Again, I’m not sure why they’re hanging out with a fifteen-year-old but I was never drawn to people my own age. I was often told it was charming that I had an old soul. Now my soul matches my face, which is decidedly less charming.
I go to the shows on board with Nancy and Jack, play bingo with them, attend the midnight buffet (more pasta, we get it), even take a shore excursion. My sister joins us sometimes, I think even my mother. Mostly just me, though. I couldn’t possibly tell you what we talked about. But I could always pull some nonsense out of my ass when talking with adults. I don’t think I ever really behaved like a child, I had no one to do it with. But adults I knew, I watched them on TV for twelve hours a day. It was a much more exciting world to me. Who wanted to be my stupid age? Of course, now I would cut off my own ear to be fifteen again for a half hour, but that’s one of God’s sick little jokes, isn’t it? (As George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” One of the better quotes about the horrors of aging. Whenever I meet someone in their twenties I immediately want to show them a photo of myself in my twenties so they know I, too, once had my skin wrapped taut around my face.)
When we get home from the cruise (To this day I can still hear the song the waiters sang on the Carla C buzzing in my head. An insipid tune has an incredibly long shelf life. Or, as Noël Coward also famously said: “Strange how potent cheap music is.” You really should have known both these quotes. Especially the first one.) I become pen pals with Nancy and Jack. Really, just Nancy. She was the one who I most liked. And she writes back diligently and frequently. And for the first time I have an actual pen pal. Letters going back and forth between us on almost a weekly basis. I can’t imagine what I’m writing about, since the only thing I do is watch television. Probably that. And after a year we keep writing. And another year goes by. And another. And I feel like I know Nancy and she knows me. And our friendship grows over the years until I am suddenly twenty and Nancy and Jack have a new baby.
I’m a junior at Hofstra University on Long Island by now (I finally do have friends my own age. The trajectory of that usually goes—wanting older friends, wanting friends your own age, wanting younger friends, death), when I decide to take my first trip to LA to visit them.
Nancy and Jack live in Long Beach, which I discover is not a part of LA. If anybody tells you that it is, they are lying. Long Beach is to LA what Ohio is to New York City. Completely disconnected. I fly into LA and decide to spend the first few days in Venice, which from what I gather from Three’s Company has a boardwalk that people roller-skate along.
Today you could stay in any number of cute hotels with trendy furniture and small plates of tapas and a mixologist with a beard behind the bar. I would love to be in my twenties and poor now. There are so many options. Most of them taking place on a roof. We didn’t have roofs in the ’80s. Everything was inside buildings, not on top of them. Now there’s Soho House in DUMBO (which also didn’t exist) that has an entire restaurant, nightclub, and pool on the roof. Just being outside on a roof, holding a drink, makes everything that much cooler. Hats off to the person who from the sidewalk pointed up and said, “Let’s put bars and pools and restaurants up there.” When I was in my twenties, roofs were only for water towers and drying laundry. Now you get to stay in a hotel that’s cheap(ish) and cute that has good food and drinks with a roof deck and you can swipe on your phone to find someone to meet you on the roof and then fuck in your trendy, cheap(ish) room.
But then, if you were twenty and had no money, you stayed at a youth hostel. Which was as disgusting as it sounds. I stay in a room with bunk beds that I share with two backpackers from the Netherlands who kindly offer me from their creepy bag of nuts and dried twigs. I politely decline. The bathroom looks like something intended to hose down incoming prisoners rather than host Dutch students. Just drains and showerheads. With the right crowd, lighting, and director it could be an incredibly sexy scene. Unfortunately, real life rarely lives up to what we imagine and instead was just a badly tiled room of fungus and stink frequented by unattractive, naked Europeans. (I’m sure it had its good weeks; I was not there on one of them.)
My hopes of making a new friend are quickly dashed when the guy in the bunk above me lets out a fart so huge it turns the page of my book. I stroll the Venice boardwalk and it does not look at all like the opening montage from Three’s Company. It is filled with large tourists and drug addicts and cheap souvenir shops. Not one cute person passes me on roller skates. With nothing else to do I walk out onto the nearby beach and lie in the sun for the next eight hours.
The following day, horrifically sunburned, I get a bus for Long Beach. So far I’m having a terrible time, and based on my two nights at the youth hostel and eight hours tanning, have decided that Los Angeles is an awful place. I thought it would be filled with shirtless young men on bicycles and surfboards, jogging and waving, one after the other, like bottles on an assembly line. I don’t know where these guys were but they sure as hell weren’t at the fucking Venice Youth Hostel. My Playgirl fantasy replaced by bland midwestern couples in spandex drinking from large, sticky cups.
Nancy and Jack pick me up at the bus station in Long Beach (perhaps the most depressing sentence I have ever written). I am excited to see them, Nancy especially. The equivalent of a pen pal today is being friends with someone on Instagram that you’ve never met. You feel you know them, but in reality it’s like knowing a container of milk—you see it in your refrigerator several times a day but that doesn’t mean you’re friends.
I think I first know something is amiss from the moment they pick me up. You know how when you date someone and your first impression of them is, “I hate this person,” but then you later think, “Oh, I was too hard on them, I actually like them,” so you date them for a year only to realize your first impression was correct and you do hate them? That’s kind of what this was like. My stomach dropped the instant I saw them. Something looked off, and my first thought was to flee, but I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t pull my phone out of my pocket like you lucky sons of bitches. I told myself this was all in my head. Nancy hugs me so hard my back cracks. Not the kind of hug that says I missed you, more the kind of hug that says save me. They take me to their car where Nancy’s mother-in-law waits for us, and I can tell instantly that she hates me. I have no idea why. She says hello to me in a manner that indicates she’s on to me and whatever I was planning on trying won’t work with her. We go directly to a restaurant that is not Applebee’s but very much resembles Applebee’s.
At dinner we catch up and I try to convince myself this is going to be fine. Everything’s going to be just fine. You’re too judgmental, I tell myself. (I actually wasn’t judgmental then. I am now, though.) Nancy barely speaks. The mother-in-law glowers at me. Jack is perfectly friendly, seemingly oblivious to the tension at the table. Their one-year-old child is with us, sitting in his high chair. I desperately look to him for any clues on what the fuck is happening here, but he just drools uselessly. Oh, how I wish I were back at the youth hostel sharing a bag of muesli with Gijsbrecht and Oslop!
I try to engage Nancy in conversation. “How has teaching been?” She murmurs a noncommittal response while looking to her mother-in-law for approval. The large mother-in-law in the brightly colored clothing of a game show contestant, continues staring at me arms folded, as though she is waiting for a long overdue apology. Any sane person would’ve gotten themselves drunk by this point in the evening. But my mother has so ingrained in us the importance of being the perfect guest that I don’t feel it is within my rights to say, “What the fuck is your problem, lady?” (As Italian-Americans, when I was a child my father grew tomatoes in our backyard. Every August we would have fresh tomato salads at dinner. Sliced tomatoes, olive oil, and salt. And when the tomatoes were finished we would dip our bread (Italian-Americans have bread at every meal) into the bowl and sop up all the remaining juice. When we were old enough to be invited to someone’s house for dinner (I think I was only ever invited once, and it was with my sister), my mother, petrified that we would show up at this house and dip our bread in whatever tray or bowl of juice or sauce of any kind they had on the table, drums into our heads, “You are NEVER to do this outside of the house, do you understand me! NEVER! SWEAR!” You’d think we were biting off the heads of chickens at our kitchen table. This was something, my sister and I, of course, would have never thought to do at someone else’s house. Ironically, though, after that, and for the rest of my life, whenever I’m at someone’s house for dinner, it takes all of my self-restraint not to take a piece of bread, lean across the table, and dip it into the salad.)
When the bill comes the mother-in-law reaches into her purse and pulls out several coupons she hands to the waiter. All of their entrées are apparently free and I am left to pay for mine. She pays for their beverages with rolls of pennies and does not leave a tip for the waiter. How did this woman never come up in any of the letters Nancy writes to me?! It would be all I would be writing about day and night. “Guess who paid for her dinner with rolls of pennies again? I hate her sooo much!” And what were we writing about in these letters, anyway? I have no possible idea, clearly nothing with remotely any substance. Nothing more than cross-country cocktail party chitchat. Barely one conversation stretched out over the course of half a decade.
Later, back at their condo, which abuts a golf course, after we drop off the mother-in-law (byeeeeeee!), I turn in early. We have a big day tomorrow. Nancy and I are taking their son to Disneyland. I’ve never been and am hoping the presence of giant beloved characters from childhood strolling among us will help to restore some semblance of normalcy. Once in my room I sit and face the walls, unable to sleep. Today, you would pull out your phone and text “you can’t believe what a nightmare this is” to every single person you know. But then you had to just sit with it. There was no way to get it out. Nobody to help you gauge your sanity.
We leave early the next morning for Disneyland. Nancy barely speaking. How was this the same person from the Carla C? I remembered Nancy as funny and kind and curious. Or was she just a person I talked to and our friendship was based only on the fact that she talked to me back? Who was this stranger driving me to the happiest place on earth?
Once there, Nancy finally opens up, she is planning on leaving Jack, she tells me. She cries and grabs my hand tightly as Cinderella asks us if we want a photo. I do, actually, but it’s not the best time. I give Cinderella a look that implies “Can you maybe circle back around to us?” It is very difficult to enjoy Disneyland while someone tells you that their life has fallen apart. I try to be supportive, but really I’m barely twenty and freshly gay and a suburban thirty-five-year-old woman’s unraveling marriage is not my idea of a sexy spring break. I should be in San Francisco on the lap of some flannel-wearing mustached slab of beef instead of trying to coax an unhappy schoolteacher onto Space Mountain. Besides, how well do I know this person? I would’ve been better off just knocking on any random door and staying with whoever would let me in. All these letters in the mail as worthless as supermarket flyers. Somehow we manage to get through the day. I cheerlead as best I can when I want nothing more than to get the fuck out of California. This state was clearly not for me.
The following day we again pick up the mother-in-law for a trip to the mall. Hell is other people. (That’s Sartre. Another quote you should know.) Jack and the mother-in-law root through the housewares department of Nordstrom while Nancy and I look for baby things as I count down the hours until my flight home. I chatter inanely about how we don’t have Nordstrom in New York and she tells me, “I’m leaving.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving. Now. Tell them I’ve gone.”
“You can’t leave NOW.”
“I can’t take it any longer,” she tells me. “I’ve got to go.”
“But we’re in Nordstrom. They’re right over there,” I say, pointing to Jack and the mother-in-law.
“I’m sorry.” And she turns to leave.
“You can’t go,” I tell her firmly, panicked. “Not like this!” And she stops. She doesn’t say anything. But she doesn’t leave. And I find myself caught in the middle of something that unsettles me and I have no one to talk to. (And I guess she doesn’t either, but I am too young to realize this. Or to help. Or do anything.)
Dinner repeats itself. Another horrible restaurant and more strained conversation. My patience for the mother-in-law now worn thin. I’m no longer quite so concerned with being the perfect guest. I meet her stare. You want to play this game, lady, let’s play. Gay people are very good at cunty looks. We hone them like a musician practicing for the Philharmonic. (I give them now without even realizing. A slight shift in emotion and I’m suddenly Joan Crawford.) And before the meal ends that night, I hold the stare so long I get the mother-in-law to look away first. The waiter puts down our check.
“It’s on me,” I say, still holding the stare as she reaches for her coupons.
I am back in my room in their condo asleep when I feel something. A presence. And then an arm around my waist. Someone pressing against me and I jump. Nancy has crawled into bed with me, her hand on my thigh. I shoot out the other side of the bed. “What are you doing?!” She pats the mattress, as if I should join her. “I’m gay!” I blurt out. I’ve told very few people at this point, but I can see I need to wield it here. And then I make it seem as if I’m really torn up about coming out when in reality I’m not. It’s like the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But I need to shift the focus off of her and onto me. My only goal to get her out of this room. If there were a hotel I could walk to now, I would. I give up my secret so easily. Manufactured gay drama is my only way out of this situation. It seems to subdue her somewhat. My supposed unhappiness eclipsing hers for the moment. She tells me she wishes I could stay here with them in Long Beach forever before she finally retreats to her room. The sadness lingers long after she’s gone.
The next morning is my flight back to New York. I walk into breakfast as if nothing has happened, when Nancy tells me my flight has been delayed. It feels like someone has punched me in the face. “My flight has been delayed?”
“Yes,” she says, “they don’t know when it’s leaving. Why don’t you stay another day?” If I had to crawl to the airport on my hands and knees at this point, I would. I say I would prefer to go now anyway. That I have to get home. And she finally relents, and Nancy and Jack and the baby drive me to the airport. And I say goodbye very quickly, I remember that. And I know I’m never going to see them again and I’m never going to write to Nancy again. “Thanks for everything,” I say, grabbing my backpack as I disappear into the terminal.
A few weeks later, when I have stopped thinking about this, and the whole experience has been reduced to a tidy anecdote, I get a letter from Nancy. The envelope is quite thick. The thickest letter I have ever received. And I never open it.