The thing about cruising is that, while eavesdropping is hard to avoid — at least for some of us — you can, in general, have as much or as little discourse as you like with your fellow passengers.
There are those who know the name of the majority of their fellow travelers — passengers and crew— by the end of the voyage. There are others who smile amiably, pass the odd comment on the weather or the likely flavor of the red dessert second from the left, but otherwise go their own way.
There are a few who make their presence known and felt.
Yes, Leah Treusault came to mind. Petronella, too, though for different reasons.
Even at poolside the next day, even while I read, she discoursed me relentlessly, relating in great detail how she’d watched two passengers take towels without checking them out according to the rules.
I felt sorry for anyone eavesdropping. I felt sorry for me.
When she discovered she’d left her sunscreen in her cabin, I did not offer to share the tube in my bag.
I read in blissful peace for several chapters.
Only when I heard “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, excuse me, sorry, excuse me, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear” heralding Petronella’s return did I realize she’d been gone a considerable time.
She collapsed into her deck chair beside me.
Her hands were empty. None of the pockets in the long-sleeved smock she wore over knit pants bulged.
“Where’s your sunscreen?”
“Oh! I forgot. I never reached my cabin, I was that upset. A passenger fell on the stairs. I was right there. I was going down. She and her friend were going up. Poor thing. Horrible, horrible, horrible. She screamed in pain. Well, after she regained consciousness she did. Then she—”
“She was knocked out?”
“—screamed. Though, first, she sort of whimpered and made moaning sounds. Oh, yes. She was unconsciousness. She fell backward and hit her head on the landing. And she must have been up at least three steps. I didn’t see her until she started to fall. She sort of squawked. She screamed later, after she came to,” she explained earnestly, as if I might have thought she screamed while unconscious. “It must have hurt her poor head. That’s why I took off my sweater and put it under her head, to cushion it from the hard floor.”
“She asked you to—?”
“The poor thing wasn’t conscious yet. But it was only common decency. Though some would have denied her comfort,” she said with dark disapproval. “The emotion of that poor girl falling…”
I was torn. My curiosity nudged me to try to find out more. My experience of Petronella said I wouldn’t get much information, though there’d be lots of words.
“Everyone crowded around, saying things, but I acted. For her comfort. Poor soul. Her friend standing there, doing absolutely nothing. Even when she screamed, it was clear she was in shock.”
I needn’t have wrestled with whether to ask her questions. Her words flowed on.
“She insisted it wasn’t her silly high heels, though of course it was. She kept saying she’d tripped. On those shoes, as anybody could see. I was telling her that when the medical team arrived and said what she needed was peace and quiet. They sent everyone away. I had to stay, though, because I was a witness and there was a ship’s officer asking questions. And they still had my sweater.”
“You don’t have it now, either,” I pointed out. The thought of adding that sweater to what she already wore made me realize I’d become quite warm myself, sitting in this sun.
“No, no, I don’t. They were so kind, so considerate. They begged me to get on with my day and enjoy it and they promised to have my sweater delivered to the cabin when they moved the young woman.”
“Good, good. I’m going in the pool.” I stashed my reading device and started to unbutton my coverup. “How about you?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” was her unsurprising response.
Turned out, as she informed me, she refused to own, much less wear, a swimsuit.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” she repeated. But in this instance her tone implied she’d made a moral choice and those who didn’t make the same choice were somehow immoral. Or, at the very least, demonstrating seriously flawed judgment.
I’m about in the normal range of figures. I have friends and family, though, who allow themselves to be limited by their own or others’ tut-tutting — real or imagined — into never venturing into a pool on a hot day. One of the most satisfying sensations there is.
In this moment, Petronella represented all that held back my mother, my great-aunt, my dear friends from enjoying that sensation.
It griped me, despite my best resolutions not to be griped by her or at her.
“Well, I can.” I stood and dropped my coverup, refusing to feel self-conscious. I also took out the sunscreen and handed it to her. “Even if you stay here, you need this. But you should come in the pool, too.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly.” Though she did take the sunscreen.
I walked toward the pool.
“Sheila!” Petronella cried.
I turned back.
“Are you sure? Is it safe? I mean…” She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “Can you swim?”
I made brief eye contact with the young man “life-guarding” for a pool that was to Olympic pools what T-ball was to the major leagues.
He didn’t quite wink.
I limited myself to a firm and cheerful, “Yes.”
As I spent a good amount of time floating in the outdoor pool, with timeouts in a hot tub, I found myself applauding all — but especially the women — who braved swimsuits regardless of whether their shape matched the prevailing views of body beautiful.
* * * *
From the machine that dispenses soft ice cream into cones, where I’d stopped for a mid-afternoon snack, I recognized the voice of Grandpa’s Sailboat on the Label rising over recorded reggae music.
“Don’t be chintzy on the scotch.”
Past the ice cream machine, I could look down the line of stools at the poolside bar, which had some exotic name, but everybody called the poolside bar. The bartender — younger than Jason, with golden skin, whether from sun or genes — flushed, turned away from the customer and lifted the bottle. But he didn’t put more alcohol in the glass, which looked to my unpracticed eye to be at regulation level.
The Grandpa’s Sailboat on the Label guy sat sideways, his back mostly to me. His position gave him a clear view of the closest hot tub.
I was glad I’d used only the farthest hot tub.
The young bartender added ice and turned back to the man. “Here you are, sir.”
Would he fall for it?
I took a healthy lick of my ice cream cone.
“That’s better. Used to be you could get a decent drink on these bathtubs, but—” He broke off to drink.
“What did you say before about the woman who fell on the stairs?”
I suspected encouraging passengers to gossip didn’t get a lot of space in the crew member’s manual, but I approved his ploy to redirect this annoying grandson of the boat owner on the bottle.
I settled in to a good licking rhythm and listened.
“She went down like a sack of bricks. Bam. Going up the stairs one second, falling backward the next, and wham on her head. She’d’ve had padding if she’d landed on her ass.” Time out for him to laugh at his own witticism. “Though her friend would have had even more. The badunkadonk on that one … Anyway, some idiot woman, who’d first screamed like a banshee, kept trying to pull her around and stuff something under her head. I kept saying ‘Don’t move her. Don’t move her at all.’ ”
Petronella? Had to be. I sure hoped the woman who fell wasn’t litigious. Though she couldn’t get anything from Petronella, since she had nothing.
“In the meantime, the other knockoff Housewives of Wherever low-rent trophy wives come from—” He hadn’t been critical when he’d been ogling the redhead or now, describing their derrieres. “—who was with her stood like a statue with no expression at all. She might as well have been doing her nails for all the attention she paid to her friend.”
The bartender said something too low for me to catch.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Barracudas, for sure. Who—”
“I didn’t say—” the young bartender started in alarm.
“—needs friends like that, huh? But at least she wasn’t doing the woman on the ground harm like that screamer. I told her — first rule, don’t move the person. But she kept yanking the woman’s head and stuffing things under it. Finally, a crew member showed up and got rid of everybody.
“I was glad to go. Let the professionals help her and it got me away from the iceberg would-be-friend and the hysterical old bat.”
He gestured widely with his glass, flinging ice cubes and dribbles of liquid. The bartender jumped back. Not fast enough.
“Gotta move quicker, kid. But you got that supply of clean stuff over by the buffet.” He started to turn on the bar stool toward me.
I stepped back where the wall would block his view of me, then around another corner, as the young bartender appeared from the opposite side of an elevator bank, heading toward the buffet area. I took the final bite of ice cream, disposed of the last inch of cone, then caught the elevator.