He pays and we walk back, still holding hands, arms swinging. He kisses me on the side of the mouth and it makes me want to have sex with him but his parents are in the cabin next to ours, and we don’t have the porn or the egg-shaped vibrator we use at home. I use the vibrator in the morning after he leaves for work and think about having sex with him and it is better than the actual sex, which is confusing—how thinking about a thing can be better than the thing.
We show our IDs and the guy welcomes us back on board. Then we navigate the hallways until we find the right elevator. It’s day four and I’m starting to learn my way around; it makes me want to stay longer despite the fact that I get seasick, that we have to eat dinner every night with his parents. We say goodbye to his mother and open the door to our cabin and she opens the door to hers and we hear his parents talking. I know what they’re saying without being able to hear: he asks what we did, if we had fun; she asks if he lost any money, how much.
“We should start fucking really hard right now,” I say, “like we just couldn’t wait.”
I jump on the bed and he opens a bottle of red wine, pours us each a plastic cup. I like plastic cups, though. They don’t break.
“The headboard banging,” I say, rocking back and forth so it knocks gently.
“Stop that,” he says.
I pick up the towel shaped like a monkey, a pair of my sunglasses on its face. I fling it open and they go sailing. Every day it is some new towel animal on the bed.
He takes off his shoes, his shirt. I take a sip of my wine and set it on the table. Then I pick it back up and take another sip. I don’t like his parents and don’t pretend to like them. It is nothing against his parents, in particular.
“What time is it?” I ask.
He looks at his watch. “Four forty-two, there’s a clock right there.”
“Bingo before dinner. It’s so cliché.”
“Well,” he says, “people like bingo. And you can win a lot of money at bingo.”
“I never win anything.”
“Everyone says that.”
“No, seriously—I’ve never won anything in my life.” I think about whether this is true or not and find that it is. “I won a necklace at an auction once but I had to pay for it. It cost me like four dollars.”
“You have to tell yourself you’re going to win. You have to imagine the money already in your pocket.”
“I do that sometimes but when it doesn’t work it’s even more depressing. I’d rather know I’m going to lose and then, if I ever win, it’ll be like a sign or something. It’ll signify an important shift.”
My boyfriend won this cruise in a slot tournament. He still had to buy our plane tickets, though, and rent a car to get us to the departure point. And then there are the bottles of wine and the drinks in tourist bars and other incidentals like Carnival tank tops, things I want just to see if he will buy them. I look at the letters stretched across my chest, the C already begun to peel, and wonder why I chose pink.
“I guess I better get dressed,” I say, taking another sip. I place the cup between my thighs so I don’t have to reach any farther than I have to. “Oh—did you find any weed?”
“Shhh,” he says, looking at the wall. “I got enough for one joint. I’m going to smoke it tonight.”
“What if it’s laced?”
“It’s not laced,” he says.
“How do you know? You bought it from a stranger with a towel on his head.”
“A turban. Don’t be racist.”
“I’m pretty sure it was an actual towel,” I say. “When I was in college I had this striped terrycloth dress and I wore it all the time, like I was a kid. I didn’t even want to take it off to wash it.”
He goes into the bathroom and I pour myself another glass because I’m on vacation, because soon I will have to go to bingo with his parents and eat dinner with his parents and I’ll have to smile and be polite, which are things I do anyway but I don’t like feeling like they are required. I turn on the TV, which is playing the same movie we watched last night, and then get out of bed and look through the closet. I brought five dresses, one for each night. Before we left, his mother told me I had to wear dresses in the evenings because the dining room is semiformal, but the last cruise she went on was in the early eighties, when cruises and airplanes were still for the well-off.
I choose a low-cut black dress I’ve had for two years but never worn. Then I sit on the bed and pick up the schedule, check to see what’s going on. There is a new schedule every day and I like to read about all of the things I won’t do. I like that there are options.
When he comes out, I have him tie my dress in the back, adjust my boobs before turning around.
“Wow,” he says. “How come you’ve never worn this before?”
“Because it’s for prostitution and cruising.”
“We’ll have to take more cruises,” he says, squeezing my ass, pressing me into him.
His parents are seated in a booth when we arrive, one of the dancers calling out numbers. I wonder if the dancers share rooms on the bottom level where the workings of the ship keep them up at night. I wonder if they have sex with one another or with the cruisers or if all sex is off-limits and there is a contract about these things. I imagine beautiful young dancers left at various ports of call.
“You look nice,” I say, touching his mother’s gold bracelet. She’s wearing a blue dress with matching shoes and bag. We sit and she tells my boyfriend he has to go up to the stage to pay for the cards and he gets back up and walks to the front. He has a confident but self-conscious walk: shoulders thrown back and chest out, looking straight ahead but smiling pleasantly like he might stop and chat with somebody at any minute.
His mother pushes her card between us and then a waiter comes and offers us small, free drinks because it’s happy hour. We all take one and his mom and dad scoot theirs into the middle of the table. They’re nice people, really, but I don’t have anything to say to them. His father was in Vietnam, like my father, but he’s the kind of veteran who subscribes to a magazine, who saved up the money to go back. My father’s brother died in Vietnam and my father hitchhiked across the country to visit him in the hospital but he was already dead. Then he had to go back to war.
“I love this dress,” his mother says, and I look at my boobs, which are large and pale and mostly exposed.
“Thanks. It’s not something I would wear at home, obviously.”
“The weather is supposed to get bad tonight,” his father says, smiling.
My boyfriend hands me a bingo card and I wonder where I put my seasick bracelet; it didn’t work but it was something—it made my wrist itch and pressed a pattern into it.
“One time I went deep-sea fishing and all the men were throwing up over the sides while I ate lunch,” his mother says.
“I was so sick the other night—what night was that—Monday? I just laid in bed and couldn’t even watch TV,” I say.
“You better not drink too much,” my boyfriend says, placing a hand on my knee.
I take another sip of my free drink, cold and electric blue. The next game starts and I mark off the free space. I only get two numbers for a long time and then I get a bunch in a row but they’re scattered and somebody yells bingo and waves an arm in the air.