5. Social Life and Anti-Social Life: On a Cruise You Really Can Have It All!

As I have expounded on at length already: It was clear to me and my husband, within a couple hours of boarding this ship, that the apparent majority of the guests were Red Sox fans from Massachusetts. We didn’t have to interview anyone to figure this out; we did not ask the cruise director, “Can you give us a demographic breakdown of who’s traveling with you this week?” Simply walking around, we heard the nearly inimitable squawk of Massachusetts everywhere we went; and the Red Sox t-shirts, caps, and conversations were all around us. One evening I stepped into an elevator and there were a few people standing in there silently; the man against the back wall looked at me and said, “15-2 Sox!” (I think that’s what he said. Frankly, it went in one ear and out the other.) I said as politely as I could, “Yes? I don’t really follow the Red Sox.” A woman on the wall opposite me said, laughingly, “A Yankees fan!” I grinned and said, “No, no. I’m from Connecticut and to be completely honest, I just don’t give a crap about baseball.” A woman standing to my right let out a whoop and held her hand up for me to high-five. “I did go to Fenway Park once,” I admitted, “when my husband dragged me. But I read a book through the whole game.” The man at the back wall looked chagrined and mystified, and everyone else in the elevator laughed.

It wasn’t that there was no one on the cruise who my family could “match” with socially — but we were definitely outliers of some kind in this artificial community. As such, we did not socialize with others in any kind of organized way — there was no “hey, you all wanna go to Family Karaoke tonight?” or “How about we meet you at the outdoor chessboard on Deck 7 tomorrow afternoon?” No: we kept ourselves to ourselves, for the most part.

The Red Sox fan of our household is the least socially outgoing person of the three of us; the more outgoing adult member of the household (that would be me) doesn’t give a crap about sports and uses sportsball games mostly as punchlines to comments either insulting to sports fans or marginally self-deprecating. This combination put us at a disadvantage on this particular ship. Nonetheless, my husband I enjoyed walking around people-watching. There was, for example, the time we were strolling through the atrium and saw a guy who was dressed, head to toe, including tips of hair, exactly like Rod Stewart ca. 1982. We smiled and walked on, waiting until we were a discreet distance away before we began to giggle and discuss “how weird do you have to be to be a guy in his late 60s walking around outfitted to look exactly like Rod Stewart?” We figured, “Benign loon”; agreed that he definitely added to the ambience of the place; and moved on.

The more time we spent hanging around the big public spaces, like the dining rooms and the pool areas, it became clear that most of the people in our age group were traveling in large packs — family reunion type situations, or the kind of thing where two or three families had banded together to do a huge group vacation. It was obvious to me and my husband that we would be spending a lot of time just the two of us, or just the three of us, with our daughter folded in, since we didn’t have automatic friends on board. This was fine, but I did think it’d be nice to have someone else to talk to once in a while.

This did happen a few times. One fine morning when most people were on port excursions, my husband and I went to sit in one of the hot tubs and we spent a few minutes talking with a woman in her 60s from Massachusetts, who joined us after we’d been in the tub about five minutes. She told us that she was part of a very large group of travelers who were on the cruise to see a show being put on by a group of pop singer impersonators. “They’ve got a huge fan base where we live,” she told us. “They’re doing a show Friday night, you should go!” Apparently somewhere in central Massachusetts there’s this crew of guys who get up regularly at various clubs and they do Rod Stewart concerts, Elvis Presley concerts, and one of them is, we were told, an excellent Mick Jagger. “That explains the Rod Stewart lookalike we walked past the other day,” I said to my husband. “It also explains the Elvis I saw last night,” he remarked. I said, hurt, “You didn’t tell me you saw Elvis last night!” He said, “I guess it slipped my mind.”

I met one woman, from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who was traveling with one of her girlfriends. “Usually there’s four or six of us who travel together,” she told me. “We been doing this twice a year for years. This time it’s just me and my one friend, and she’s not coming out of our room — she’s been in bed every day so far.” “Is she sick?” I asked politely. “Nah, she’s not sick, she’s just got some problem, I dunno.” The lady was having a terrible week because she’d thought she’d have company on the trip but in essence she was traveling solo. Talking to me was probably the most fun she’d had since she’d left Woonsocket, and that’s really not saying much. I felt bad for her. That night I saw her from afar in the dining room and she was seated all alone at a two-top, eating and looking out the window very sadly. It was obvious that for some people, like the lady from Woonsocket, this was a vacation that was just a huge flop. There wasn’t anything I could do to fix it but I did cross paths with her a couple more times, as the week went on, and I always stopped to chat with her. When I ran into her on Friday afternoon, I told her to go see the Legends show, happening that night, which it turned out she didn’t know about. She seemed genuinely happy to have something to look forward to — besides getting back to Woonsocket, I mean.

The matter of “who you dine with” is apparently a big deal on most cruises. I’ve read Tina Fey’s essay about going on a cruise many times, and she had a lot to say (pretty much all negative) about how it sucks to be on a cruise where you have to eat all your meals at an assigned table with assigned tablemates. David Foster Wallace’s classic cruise essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” also talks about this phenomenon. One aspect the three of us really liked about the cruise we went on was that we didn’t ever once have to sit at a table with anyone else. Call us anti-social snobs if you must; but we really wanted to just eat by ourselves. Our meals were the times when we re-grouped as a tight family unit: it was basically just like eating dinner at home, except, duh, I didn’t have to cook and no one had to clean up afterward (except those getting paid to do so) and we didn’t have cats yowling up at us trying to stick their filthy little paws into our chicken cutlets. (We did all miss our cats, to be honest, and spent a lot of time speculating as to what our cats might do if set loose in the dining room.) I think that for more extroverted people, the assigned-seats style of cruise dining might be a pleasant thing, novel and exciting. For us, it would have been utter fucking hell. In this very important sense, it is very clear to me (in retrospect; I hadn’t really thought about it before we actually booked the trip, astonishing but true) that the “freestyle” cruise mode is the only way we can go, if we’re going to travel this way. Otherwise, to be blunt, I think my husband will have a nervous breakdown. If he has to be charming to strangers for more than about three hours in a row, he gets too tired; to have to engage in that kind of thing, three meals a day, for 7 days, might kill him. I get it.

Our household motto might be something like “You don’t annoy me too much, I won’t annoy you.”

There were a few mottoes, spoken or unspoken, of the majority of the guests on this ship. These mottoes were not second nature to us, since we are boring quiet people who don’t wear shirts with obscenities printed on them. These mottoes were, roughly, in no particular order, “Party All the Time,” “Speak Loudly and Carry a Big Drink,” and “Don’t Worry About How You Look.” As a general rule, people traveling without children were either buzzed or downright drunk, regardless of the time of day, and this same population seemed to have little care for what we might call personal dignity. It astonished me to see the manners of dress (or lack thereof) people didn’t mind putting out there. My qualms aren’t based on prudishness but are obviously based on something we could attribute to, I suppose, class snobbishness or my own general sense that there is a way to present oneself and a way to never present oneself. The men on this ship were so sloppily attired, it left me at a loss. Married, as I am, to a man who basically cannot bring himself to wear shorts in public, on the grounds that it’s undignified, if not downright slatternly, I’ve gotten used to a certain look on men to whom I stand in close proximity.

That look was hard to come by that week; proximity, easy. I saw a lot of men walking around in ill-fitting t-shirts, ill-fitting tank tops, both often printed with slogans and images not printable in a family paper. (My husband told me about some that he’d seen, horrified, and asked me, “Who wears these things in public? Who?” All I could say was, “Well, those guys do, I guess?”) You can just imagine the sorts of shorts I saw all over the place. It was Thursday, I believe — the cruise was almost over — before I saw a man other than my husband strolling about the ship wearing pants and a button-down shirt. (He looked good.)

Where I live, there’s definitely a lot of sloppy clothing, and God knows there are a lot of people who are not interested in being fashionable or stylish. Even so: it’s clear that even without taking these things into consideration, there is a kind of decorum assumed, across this city, across ethnic, class, and other demographic lines, that just did not exist on this ship. I spend time in posh neighborhoods here, I spend time in seriously not-posh neighborhoods. I’m all over the damned place. I’m on foot, walking around all the time, I’m on buses, headed crosstown. I see every kind of person there is to see in this little city, and I’m telling you, the attire that was normal on this ship would be garnering some clucks of disapproval here in New Haven, regardless of neighborhood, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity. Now maybe, maybe it’s true that if we took New Haven and said, “pack for a week-long cruise to the Bahamas” we’d wind up with some people who dressed the way these people on this cruise did. But in all seriousness: I don’t think there would be nearly so many t-shirts with boob jokes on them. A few, maybe. But not this many.

Some of you may be wondering, “What did the Hausfrau wear on her vacation?” and the answer is, I wore pretty much exactly what I wear when I’m going about my business at home in the summertime. I wore a black cotton blend pencil skirt, black or grey t-shirts, and comfortable shoes (on this trip, mostly leopard print clogs). When it got chilly I put on a denim jacket. There was nothing at all shocking about what I wore, nor did I look sloppy or slatternly, thank you very much.

Much as my wardrobe did not change while I was on the ship, my basic behavior did not turn toward the particularly hedonistic, though I was politely urged to let my hair down many times. I had two drinks, on two separate occasions; this is the equivalent, on a cruise, of being teetotal. My husband had a few gin and tonics over the course of the week, a couple of beers. The majority of guests, however, were — and I really don’t think I’m exaggerating — always walking around with some big tall drink in their hands, and I’m not talking about a Dunkin’ iced coffee. When I noticed people swaying as they walked, I had to think about whether this was a question of sea legs or sobriety. It was, if I stopped to think about it too hard, a bit of a bummer. Men seemed to party harder than women, and have less sense of propriety overall, perhaps because they were partying so much harder. And I write all this, mind you, as someone who didn’t spend time hanging out in the casino at night, or at any of the dance clubs or karaoke bars or anything like that. This was just me, a matronly type, skulking about the boat looking for places to read my book between the hours of, say, 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

There was one time when my husband and daughter asked me to meet them for dinner at a restaurant and I wound up getting horribly lost on the ship and had absolutely no clue how to get to my desired location. There are maps and guides all over the place but the fact remains, fore and aft don’t come naturally to me and given the multiple elevator banks on any given deck, it’s easy to get confused and disoriented very quickly. Thus it was that at 7 p.m. I found myself weaving back and forth on the ship — stone cold sober, mind you — trying to figure out how the hell to get to this one restaurant that I thought I knew how to get to.

I mean, here’s the thing about being on a cruise: your options are deeply finite. You can only go so many places on a ship, and it has a definite beginning, middle, and end. It’s not like being on a lonely road someplace where you think, “Well, I’m in Springfield, if I keep riding I’ll wind up in Northfield, that’s not so bad, right?” No. You’re on a ship. Eventually you will hit a wall or a railing and on the other sides of those walls and railings are ocean. So you will turn around and start over again.

Honestly, I think I spent twenty minutes circling around, walking through the casino (iccchh) and then thinking, “Aha, I’ve found it,” heading confidently toward the right only to realize I had landed myself in a very dimly lit bar where people were gearing up to sing Aerosmith and Taylor Swift to the best of their abilities. I walked up half-staircases and down half-staircases and I went hither and thither and yon and I only found my family by the grace of good luck when they found me, actually, coming through the Photo Gift Shop, or whatever they call the place where you’re supposed to drop wads of money on pictures of you and your family and friends having such an awesome time on your cruise.

“Where’ve you been?” my husband asked me.
“I have no fucking idea,” I said truthfully.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we were not willing to pay whatever astronomical charges would be asked if we wanted to use our cell phones on the ship. Roaming charges, wifi fees, whatever: we were too stingy to rack up these charges. As a result, we could not communicate with each other in the manner to which everyone’s accustomed nowadays. I couldn’t text my husband saying “Jesus, I just got lost in a karaoke bar, how do I get to you?” and have him reply, “You moron, you go LEFT at the karaoke bar, then left again, and we are here.” Not that my husband would ever text me telling me I’m a moron, that’d be deeply out of character.

No: for us to keep in touch with each other, we got in the habit of leaving handwritten notes — written on paper — on the bed in our cabin. “Gone to read and look at water,” a note might read, “meet you at cabin at 12.” “Meet you for dinner in Garden Cafe at 6.” “Gone to return library book, back soon, 4 p.m.” It was, to be honest, all very quaint.

It might be, I suppose, that everyone else is drinking so much because they can’t find the people they’re traveling with and they don’t know what else to do with themselves, so they figure, “What the hell, I’ll just go have a drink, Bob is sure to walk by eventually….”

Life on a cruise is, in a lot of ways, a throwback-to-the-year-1995 experience. For example, I met someone and became friends with them purely on the basis of chance. How often does that happen these days?

This was one of the Port Days, when most people scurried off the ship to go do wholesome things with their kids or to go get snockered on an actual beach somewhere. On this morning, my daughter went off to hang with whatever small number of kids signed up for the cruise kids’ program that day, my husband went off to go read his book, and I went to get a pedicure at the cruise ship’s spa. This would turn out to be an enlightening experience — I learned, a la the heroine in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, that I am not taking care of myself the way real women do*. I was seated in the waiting area filling out paperwork when a woman with greying-blonde wavy hair sat down across from me with her own little clipboard of paperwork. “Taking advantage of the massage special today?” she asked me conversationally. “Oh, no,” I said, “I’m just getting a pedicure. That’s more than enough excitement for me.”

The woman chuckled and as we finished our paperwork we chatted. It turned out that she was from New York City, and had worked in publishing for many years. I said where I was from, in Connecticut, and that I’d been a bookseller for a long time, and she told me that her in-laws lived in my small city, too. It turned out we had quite a few overlapping life-elements — little interests, common tastes — and she said, “We should get together and have coffee sometime! Like we would if we’d met in real life.” I agreed wholeheartedly, and we exchanged first names just as my name was called: it was time for me to enter the spa and become a new woman. Or get some newly painted toenails, anyhow.

I followed the petite salon staffer, a woman with perfect hair and nails, natch, into a room where there were a few of those big puffy vinyl-covered salon chairs lined up facing a bank of windows; I had a remarkable view of the Atlantic. I picked out my nail polish color and as I sat in the chair the beautician turned on the massage panel and the chair began to beat up my back. There must be people who like that sort of thing, but I really don’t; however, I would have felt bad saying anything about it, so I let my back get mauled by the chair while the lady soaked my feet and clipped my nails and began to try to draw me out. It was clear to me immediately that this young woman was mystified by me: at the time I sat down in her salon, I did not already have polish on my feet. “How long has it been since you had a pedicure?” she asked suspiciously. “Maybe three years? Four years? It’s been a while,” I said. She examined my feet. “You have a lot of calluses,” she scolded me. I tried to explain that I walk everywhere and as such my feet have calluses, but she would have none of it. She soaked my feet and worked on my nails and eventually took up a cheese grater to scrub at my feet. “That’s a Microplane grater!” I said with amusement. “How do you know that?” she asked, looking at the device in her hand. I explained that I own several Microplane graters and that I use them in my kitchen. She seemed skeptical that a Microplane would ever be used for something other than removing calluses. “For grating cheese, or ginger, or chocolate,” I explained. “They’re very well-made.” “Well,” she said, scrubbing at my feet, “they are. And they are very easy to clean,” she added pointedly. I watched as my dead skin piled up on the paper toweling at the foot of the puffy chair. It was vile, but also fascinating. She worked so hard, with religious zeal: she was obviously shocked and horrified by me, and mystified as to how an adult woman could not care about her feet this much.

Mind you, I feel like I take fairly good care of myself. And I do care about my feet; it’s just that foot beauty isn’t one of my highest priorities. I clip my nails and stuff like that! Other aspects of personal aesthetics rank more highly. My hair, I can assure you, is in great shape. Since far more people see my hair than ever see my feet, I really think I’ve got my priorities straight.

The beautician, having painted my nails, then tried to get me to purchase a number of expensive skin-and-nail-care products, none of which I considered for even a moment. I walked out of the salon with my new feet and as I walked past the waiting room I remembered the lady, let’s call her Beverly, who I’d met an hour before. I paused, and then went up to the reception desk. “Hi,” I said. “There was a blonde lady who was about to get a massage this morning, is she still around?” I explained that if she was, I’d like to leave a message for her. The staff established that she was, in fact, still on-site, and kindly gave me a piece of paper and a pen so I could write her a note. I scrawled, “It was nice to meet you — if you’d like to get in touch to have coffee sometime, here is my room number.” I left the spa feeling cheerful. Even if our paths didn’t cross again, I’d made a good-faith effort to make a new friend, and there’d be no hard feelings if she didn’t get in touch (after all, time is limited, on a cruise); it seemed like a mitzvah, really, to even make the gesture. Also excellent: as it was only 10.30 in the morning, I had the rest of the day to loll about on lounge chairs reading.

I was ambling across Deck 12, thinking I would head back to the cabin to meet my husband and then we’d find our daughter and go have lunch, when I ran into Beverly, the blonde from the salon. Translated into my local vernacular, this would be like running into a new friend on Orange Street, the morning after meeting at a cocktail party at which you’d discovered that you’ve both been living in the neighborhood for six years, two blocks away from each other. In other words, it should have been inevitable, yet somehow it wasn’t.

“I got your note!” she said happily. We compared notes on our mornings (unanimous positions: pleasant; though I imagine she enjoyed her massage more than I enjoyed having a cheese grater applied to the soles of my feet) and I said I was looking forward to having my family make fun of my toenails. “Speaking of which, I need to find my family,” Beverly said. She had a vague idea of where her husband was, but her son and parents had gone off together and she was unable to locate them. “They’ve gotta be around here somewhere,” I said. “The library? The games room?” “That’s what I’m hoping,” she said. She said she’d phone me after she conferred with her family about their plans for the next day or two, I said Fabulous, and off we went.

Late in the afternoon when my family convened in our cabin for the pre-dinner changing of clothes and so on (adding a sweater, changing shoes, going from bathing suit into shirt and pants), the phone rang. Everyone in the room froze. “Who could be calling us?” my daughter asked, real alarm in her voice. She had been led to understand, thanks to us, that phones were useless on the ship.

“I bet it’s my new friend!” I said. Everyone looked at me with surprise: I’d made a friend? Who would phone me?

Sure enough, it was Beverly. “Hi!” she said. It was like a totally normal phone call from someone I knew, except it was happening on a ship, in the middle of the ocean, with a total stranger. My husband and child listened, bemused, as I made plans for an actual social occasion. “It’s great that you made a friend,” my daughter said when I got off the phone. “I made a new friend at my program today too.”

My daughter, by far the most gregarious of the three of us, had made so many new friends by the end of her week on the ship that she could fill an autograph book with notes from them all. My husband — surprise, surprise — made no new friends, though, true to form, I’m not sure he cared or even noticed. I am now Facebook friends with Beverly, and we’ve had some amusing little exchanges online, and discovered that her husband knows a guy who used to live down the street from me, whose ex-wife is still a day-to-day friend of mine. I expect that if Beverly ever comes to town to visit her in-laws, she’ll send me a Facebook message when she needs a break from family, asking, “You wanna meet for coffee while I’m in town?” and I’ll say, “sure, there’s a place about three blocks from your in-laws….”

We will, of course, exchange phone numbers, then, in case we need to text each other, and we will bring our acquaintanceship up to 2018 standards. But it will always have begun in an old-fashioned way. It’s just a shame, really, that when we met for our breakfasts (bagel and lox for me, a croque madame for her) we couldn’t really dress for the occasion the way it deserved — and we were, unfortunately, still surrounded by people wearing dopey baseball caps and t-shirts with crass slogans. We needed hats worthy of Rosalind Russell and Myrna Loy; we needed car coats and dress gloves.

Beverly, when you come to New Haven, we’ll go shopping. I know just the place.

*there’s a scene in this novel when Our Heroine goes to a salon and is told by the facialist that she’s RUINING HER FACE by not using special skin care products and that using soap on one’s face is a moral failing on a scale you cannot begin to fathom because it’s so awful.

May 24, 2018 0

4. All the Dining Options in the World, except Tuna Salad

Everyone talks about how great the food is on cruises. Even so, I boarded the ship with careful optimism on the matter. I figured that some food would be great and some food would be mediocre and that if we were lucky no one would get food poisoning and that it was basically unfair to expect much more than that.

The fact that everyone you talk to raves about cruise food is also the kind of thing where my innate snobbery gets in my way. Let’s face it, people in general are assholes and idiots and their idea of good food seldom overlaps with mine; and what’s more, it seemed impossible to me, on almost scientific principles, that there could be genuinely good food both in the specialty restaurants and at the buffet. I just believed that it was the kind of trick that just couldn’t be pulled off. I will be brutal here: I was wrong. I ate my words (or thoughts) while on this cruise, happily and greedily, and in one notable case I ate so much I basically disgraced myself. For meal after meal, there were wonderful things to eat, the overwhelming majority of dishes very well executed to boot. There were a few missteps, sure; but overall, and considering the scale of operations, these chefs and kitchen workers pulled off incredible, incredible feats, three times daily.

The menus at the big cafeteria-style dining hall (where we wound up taking most of our meals) fascinated me. Having had no preconceived notions of what might be on offer, I was surprised by the range of items that you could always get. It was obvious that the chefs were working very hard to cater to several basic demographics all the time — you could break it down to “picky eaters and non-picky eaters.” But their work showed much greater cultural and, really, psychological subtlety and cleverness. The result was that picky and non-picky eaters from many cultural backgrounds were, I thought, nicely accommodated by the cruise.

For example: in some ways, breakfasts are the trickiest meals to serve to large groups of people, because it’s the meal where people show the least flexibility in their selections. Ask almost anyone, “What do you have for breakfast?” and they’ll say, “Every morning I have ______.” Could be eggs, could be a bacon and cheese sandwich, could be Maypo, could be pancakes. These are typical American breakfasts anyhow. All right, maybe not the Maypo, but you take my point. However, around the world, breakfast works very differently, right? A lot of Asian countries, people have congee, which is rice cooked into a mush and served with little bits of savory stuff (often leftover from the previous night’s meal) sprinkled on top. It’s awesome. But most Americans would find it really fucking weird. The Asians, for their part, would, I imagine, look at a bowl of Frosted Flakes and go, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

In the UK there’re people who hang onto this very classic notion of a proper fry-up — bacon, egg, sausages — and the cruise had everything laid out for those who wanted that fry-up, right there. Baked beans, toast, fried potatoes, every variant I could think of, was just waiting for us on a platter. You could get a delicious muesli, with or without fresh fruit mixed into it already; you could get several types of hot cereals (grits, oatmeal, Cream of Wheat being the ones I now remember — no, no Maypo, but you have to given them major points for the Cream of Wheat). You could get bagels and cream cheese; there were, as a compromise on serving bagels and lox, little cups of salmon mousse with capers, always available. You could get eggs poached and served on English muffins with spinach or Canadian bacon or smoked salmon, liberally dosed with Hollandaise sauce; you could get biscuits and white gravy; you could have someone make you an omelette, filled with God knows how many different cheeses and vegetables and meats. This all, by the way, doesn’t even begin to take into account the quantities of fresh fruit available to everyone. My daughter, who mocks me for my reluctance to buy fresh fruit, was in heaven. She got plate after plate of cantaloupe, of honeydew; slabs of fresh pineapple; bowls of blackberries. Furthermore, thrilling to behold were the piles of strips of bacon — platter after platter of bacon — I’d never seen so much bacon in one place. My husband was quite pleased.

If you, Ugly American that you might be, just wanted a bowl of Frosted Flakes, there was an ample supply. Also Rice Krispies, Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Froot Loops, and a few other basic, familiar American cold cereals, all in those adorable Variety Pak boxes that I always wanted to get when I was a kid. My daughter was thrilled to be allowed to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch, something I refuse to purchase for home consumption on school days. We’re a Grape Nuts/Raisin Bran household, by and large, and truly no one complains, but I totally get how once in a while Junk Cereal is called for. Over the summer I allow a couple boxes of Junk Cereal into the house, and it’s always cause for celebration. This was Cinnamon Toast Crunch was, for my daughter, Summer Vacation in April.

Lunches in the cafeteria were even more impressive than the breakfasts; the dinners were often astounding. The crew would place little table cards around the dining room to announce “Caribbean Night!” or “Italian Night!” or “Grill Night!” and I’d think, “well, okay, let’s see what this is.”

It was always fucking awesome, is what it was. Ok: the Asian fried rices could have used some more zip, and the meatloaf that they served on American night was far too salty for me. But these complaints are minor, I tell you, so minor that I feel bad even writing them down. Also, after we got off the ship, my husband told me, “I think the reason you thought the meatloaf was too salty was that it had bacon in it.” “There was bacon in the meatloaf?” I gasped. I don’t eat bacon. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I really think there was. I didn’t want to tell you at the time.”

I mulled this over for a bit. I really hadn’t sensed “bacon” in it; I just tasted “salt.” But he would know, he would. My husband is an ace bacon-eater. “It’ll be ok,” I said. “Yom Kippur is coming up in a few months.” My daughter looked at me, worried. “Are you mad, Mama?” “No, no.” I wasn’t thrilled, it’s true, but as issues go, this is a small one. And to be honest, I prefer to dwell on how good everything else was. There were these dumplings, for one thing, that were really just, you know, flour and water, but it was Caribbean night and I think they’d been fried in coconut oil and they were just….. really, really good. I had two, my daughter had two, I think my husband had three.

The fact was: whether they were doing “down home American” or “seafood night” or “Italian night” or whatever the hell they were doing, there were invariably at least 20 delightful entrees to choose from, and just as many side dishes. At lunchtime, if you wanted to have a sandwich you could have a very good panini (vegetarian, vegan, and meat options available) or you could make yourself a cold-cut sandwich. Basically, at all times, you had so many choices that it was genuinely hard for me to imagine the kind of person who just couldn’t find food to make them happy on the ship. My husband and child agreed with me wholeheartedly. And we paid attention to how other people were eating, too. There was one family we sat next to one lunchtime, a woman and her son who seemed to be about eight or nine years old. He appeared to be, like my daughter, the kind of kid who wanted to try lots of different things and was pretty enthusiastic about all of it but then in the end what he really wanted to eat was two ice cream cones. Watching him plow through his food was just hilarious; his mother and my husband and I chatted about how on this trip, we didn’t feel bad about letting the kids eat all the ice cream they wanted. Though the build-your-own-hamburger station was very impressive, no one in my family got hamburgers, not even once. That’s how solid the offerings were.

But there were definitely some people who never ate anything except hamburgers and french fries. I’m not sure if this is because that’s all they eat in general, or if they were afraid of everything else, or if these were forbidden foods at home, so they were living it up on the cruise; but there were definitely people who for lunch and dinner got a hamburger with a huge pile of french fries, period. It struck me as kind of sad, personally, and I think the lady travelling with her little boy felt the same way. Some people are more flexible than others, food-wise, and some people think it’s fun to even stretch a little, in culinary terms. For that last group, the food on this cruise was a form of entertainment in and of itself.

There was one aspect of the food that could have been improved on, but I feel bad even mentioning it, since it’s obvious the kitchen staff is working like dogs and they’re skilled and smart and good at what they do. However, I have to be honest.

The desserts had a more up-and-down run. When they were good, they were quite good indeed, but more often they were either not of interest to me (I’m not a big fruit dessert person) or on the weak side. It just isn’t easy to make chocolate cakes for 2400 people. I totally get that. I think also that in my own family’s case, we’re so accustomed to eating homemade cake that something has to be pretty damned exquisite-tasting before we will pay attention. Beauty is not what we’re after in our cakes; we’re after taste and texture. The cruise was a little disappointing on these counts, with the cakes… though I did not have a chance to taste the opera cake, which my husband said was very good indeed…. but there were two notable exceptions.

One was a chocolate cake that did not have any special billing I can recall. It was on offer the same evening that a “five-spice chocolate cake” was available and I remember that I looked at the five-spice one and thought, “no way.” I opted for the simpler cake — a dark, fine-crumbed cake with a smooth layer of dark chocolate ganache between the layers and poured on top — and my husband and I compared notes when we sat down.

My husband took the five-spice chocolate cake, but then regretted it. “The flavor of this is weird,” my husband said, “though… it’s not bad…. the texture, I don’t like the texture, though.” He looked sort of wistfully at my very plain cake.

“This one’s pretty good,” I said, taking a second bite of my chocolate cake. My daughter, plowing through a bowl of ice cream, asked if she could try some of my cake. Taking a bite, she made the expression she makes at table that means, “I am thinking about this really hard, and I am declaring this good enough that I would eat two more pieces of it if you let me.”

The best dessert, however, by miles and miles (nautical miles or otherwise), was one of the least fancy of the items on offer during the week. You could tell the chefs didn’t think too much of it, even, because they put it out at lunchtime. Oh my god. Fools. Fools. They should have saved it for some grand extravaganza dinner event.

It was a vanilla pound cake.

I know, you’re like, “So the fuck what?” Who cares about vanilla pound cake? But oh: this was not just any stupid vanilla pound cake. It was absolutely wonderful. It had a more coarse crumb than the pound cakes I usually make, but dear god, the flavor. It had this very smooth and true vanilla smell and taste. We put slices of it into bowls so that we could pour caramel sauce over it. The caramel had been intended to go with something like, I don’t know, rhubarb cobbler, some fruit thing that I would just never, ever eat — but they don’t stop you from pouring caramel over whatever you want. I mean, if they were serving Maryland fried chicken and you wanted to add some caramel sauce to your chicken and maybe some of the French fries you’d grabbed from the Hamburger Grill section, no one would bat an eye.

Holy shit, that caramel sauce.

My husband said, “I don’t think this came from a jar.”

I said, authoritatively, “There is absolutely no way this came from a jar.” I recognized in the sauce the element of burnt sugar that no store-bought caramel sauce ever seems to have. This was a sauce that had been brought just to the edge of what some would call “disaster,” cooled immediately, and thickened, had a little cream added to it. (Well, ok, they must have made this in vast pots, so “a little” could mean, like, six gallons, but you know what I mean.) This was not an insipid, weak caramel sauce; nor was it just a thick, oily, gelatinous mixture: it was dark, opaque, pourable-in-ribbons. Oh, it was wonderful. I had two servings because I knew I’d never eat it again, and then went back for a third piece of the cake. I will spend the rest of my life trying to recreate that cake and sauce.

My family will not mind one iota.

Many, many families clearly wanted simpler, easier desserts. The idea of thinking about dessert is not their idea of fun. They want something direct, sweet, enjoyable, easy. So: The ice cream cabinet, which was staffed and at which you had to wait in line, was always fun. They’d have eight flavors of hard ice cream for you to choose from — nothing too exotic, but good, and served soft enough that small children wouldn’t have a hard time eating ice cream cones if that’s what they chose. There was your basic chocolate, vanilla; one day there was rum raisin. There was always a sherbet, which I tried (lime) and enjoyed very much. My daughter liked the kiwi sherbet, which looked just like the lime but tasted quite different indeed.

The first time I got in line for the ice cream, at my husband and child’s urging — they were already installed at our table with large bowls of the stuff — I stood next to a massive man in a tank top that read “HARLEY-DAVIDSON.” He was heavily decorated with old ink and was not someone I’d’ve been inclined to mess with. A couple of small children, however, had no fear of him, and stepped right in front of him as he was about to step up to the counter to peruse the signage and plot his order. It’s possible he would have been annoyed but at that precise moment, another massive biker dude paused to my right and said to him, “Hey, I’ll be at our table, over there —” gesticulating by tilting his head in some direction or other. The biker to my left said, “I”ll get you some butter pecan, that sound good?” The second biker said, “Yeah!” and disappeared into the stream of people carrying plates of fries and burgers and god knows what all. The second biker was one of the guys who just wanted a burger and a shitton of fries, but I found it touching and amusing that his buddy knew he had a weakness for, of all things, butter pecan ice cream. The second biker dude was clearly worried that the little kids would eat all the ice cream and there’d be none left for him, and you had to be sympathetic; at least a dozen children under the age of six were swarming around us all, often unaccompanied by parents. It was a little Lord of the Flies, to be honest.

By this point — several little kids had been served, no harm done, and I had moved up in the line a little — I could see the signs announcing the flavors. “There’s no butter pecan,” I said to the biker. “They have pistachio, but that’s not the same thing at all.”

“Oh, no, really?” he said, with genuine dismay on his face, “I could have sworn they had butter pecan! “I hope your friend won’t be mad,” I said. He sighed and stepped up to place his order. “What do I do, just get one chocolate and one vanilla?” He asked me, as if I’d know what to do, like I was the biker’s girl and I’d know what the Plan B should be. “I guess so?” I said. “I mean, he’s bound to think one of them’s ok as a substitute, right?” “Yeah,” he said, decisively. “I’m ok with either one, so he can pick whichever he likes better.” Within a minute he was walking off to his table with two bowls of ice cream.

It wasn’t until Thursday that the ice cream stand had butter pecan on offer. I hope that biker got at least two bowlsful.

For all of my being so impressed with the kitchen on this cruise: There was one time when my husband and I watched a woman totally lose her shit over the kitchen’s inadequacy, as she perceived it. She was standing at the cold-sandwich-assembly station, one day at lunchtime, and was loudly berating the meek man behind the counter. He had one job, which was to carve slices of roast beef and ham and turkey for people to put on sandwiches. “I just don’t understand what the problem is,” she said. I paused, staring very carefully at the trays of cubed cheese and cornichons: I didn’t want to have this lady’s vitriol land in my direction, but I wanted to find out what her issue was. It turned out that she was enraged — and very unfairly taking her rage out on the perfectly nice roast-beef-carving-station-guy — because the cruise had not supplied her with tuna salad for sandwiches. “How hard is it to make tuna salad?” she demanded. I debated the question with myself for a moment: it isn’t at all difficult to make tuna salad, but one does have to have tuna available for the purpose. Was it possible that the kitchen didn’t have any tuna for making tuna salad? Sure it was. It was possible that they had tuna for this purpose but that they had planned to provide tuna salad during meals yet to come on the cruise. Clearly it mattered not to this woman: her issue was that tuna salad was not available on a daily basis. “I spoke to one of the chefs in the kitchen,” she said angrily to the man behind the counter, “and they told me they could give me a turkey sandwich — but I don’t want a turkey sandwich, I want a tuna salad sandwich! Is that so much to ask?”

Lady: it’s too much to ask. We’re in a situation, after all, where it’s not like someone can say, in a desperate attempt to accommodate you, “No problem, I’ll send my guy out to Stop and Shop, we’ll get some Bumble Bee and everything will be fine.” We’re out on the ocean for god’s sake. The food available is what it is, it’s finite, but — here’s what killed me about this — there was so many good food options available to everyone, 24/7: could this lady really, seriously, not find something that would be ok for her to eat?

It’s true I am someone who takes a very dim view of children who’re picky eaters, though I try to be accommodating and understanding about it, because I’m not a total asshole (believe it or not). I’m, like, a part-time asshole, okay? But this lady! She was a grownup! She was in her 40s, and she was just losing her shit over lack of access to tuna salad. It didn’t speak well for her in a larger sense, and I found myself thinking, “Probably 98% of the people on this cruise are pretty nice people who would never pull this kind of shit on the staff here, but then there’s that wild card 2%. And god help the staff in dealing with that two percent.”

When I got to our table, my husband and child were already seated and plowing through their own lunch selections. Sotto voce, I said to my husband, “I saw this woman just completely losing her shit over how there’s no tuna salad.” “I heard her too,” he said, shaking his head. Our daughter said, also in low tones, “I don’t understand how someone could be mad about no tuna salad, not with food like this.” She paused. “And I really, really like tuna salad.”

I have to say: I am proud of the fact that I have a ten year old who never, once, in all of her years, has thrown the kind of shitfit over a meal that that woman threw over a tuna salad sandwich. Maybe the issue wasn’t really the tuna salad. Maybe it was something else. Maybe her subconscious was really upset over a death in the family or her daughter’s just flunked out of school or who knows what. But in the moment, she was making a mountain out of a molehill (or, of tuna salad), and I have to say, if that woman were my child, I would have grabbed her firmly by the arm, right above the elbow, and guided her out of the dining room silently.

And we all know what that means.

May 22, 2018 0

3. The Hausfrau is Not From Boston, and Officially Has No Comment. (However, she’s got a lot to say — off the record.)

An ongoing theme of our trip on this cruise was “How Bostonians Act While on Cruises,” a matter that can be summed up pretty succinctly: on the whole, they act like drunken boors. I suppose this is how Bostonians often act when they’re in Boston too, so I don’t know why I should have been jarred by this, but yet I was. It may be that ships dominated by New Yorkers, or even people from Minnesota or Indiana, also suffer this problem, but as I’ve not experienced such cruises, I cannot verify or deny this. I can only attest to what I saw in this Boston-dominated crowd.

In this case, by the way, Rhode Island counts as Boston.

I don’t have hard numbers but it definitely appeared — my husband remarked upon it daily — that at least 70% of the people on the ship were from Boston or the nearby environs. We sailed out of New York City but it was for sure a Red Sox Nation event, not a Yankees crowd at all. Occasionally people would ask me where I was from, and my response, “Connecticut,” definitely caused moments of confused need-to-ponder-that-for-a-moment; Red Sox Nation has a complicated relationship with Connecticut.

At one point, while I was waiting for an elevator, a man struck up a conversation with everyone else who was standing around waiting and asked me if I was a Red Sox or a Yankees fan. I said, “I’m from Connecticut, and I really don’t care,” I said; I was beginning to weary of this Red Sox bullshit. “No really,” he asked me. “Really,” I said. “I don’t care.” “Republican or Democrat?” he asked me. “No comment,” I said, and he hooted. “You really are from Connecticut!” he said appreciatively. “Smart lady.” I had passed, but it was a close call.

In general, by the way, people did not discuss politics in public spaces on the ship, which was a relief to me.

When I went to the ship’s library* (which is kept under lock and key 95% of the time, like a medieval collection, even though the stuff here is utterly worthless and could be replaced in toto for about $300) I noticed that there was one copy of Connecticut writer Randy Howe’s “Why I Hate the Republicans” and three copies of his “Why I Hate the Democrats.” (Both published in 2004, by the way.) I found myself grimly wondering, “might things get ugly on this ship? Do fights break out on cruise ships?” — but as I said, not once did I hear anyone discuss anything explicitly political in nature, let alone witness any social tension between guests based on race, ethnicity, or anything like that (and the population was more diverse than I’d’ve guessed it would be). I imagine that wives and girlfriends boat-wide had said to their husband, “Just shut up this week, okay? Talk about sports. Talk about Avengers movies. Anything except politics, just this once!” And the husbands heeded their wives.

It could also be that people were distracted from politics by virtue of being blotto for hours and hours on end. By four in the afternoon, the first day, I’d say 75% of the boat’s guests were absolutely snockered. Remember that we only boarded at 1.30. The ingestion of alcohol by most cruisers was clearly swift and efficient, like a novocain shot before dental surgery.

To be honest: throughout the week it often felt like the only sober guests on the boat were children, me, or my husband. Every person we saw seemed to be holding an alcoholic beverage. All the time. Ten in the morning — “Bloody Marys!” For someone like me who doesn’t drink a lot under pretty much any circumstance, and who finds drunkenness deeply unamusing, it was a little depressing. Everyone was in very high spirits, and friendly enough, and there’s really nothing wrong with that, but there was also this sense of being in a place where — well, the last time I can remember feeling this way was when I was a student at the University of Connecticut, and it was Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night. The dominant theme was “everyone here is fucked up and loving it, except for you.” If you don’t want to be fucked up-drunk, being on a cruise can be a little awkward, socially speaking.

We learned how to avoid the worst locales for this sort of thing; we learned how to stake out comfy spaces for ourselves that buffeted us to some degree from the churning hordes. A cruise is a delicate dance for the introverted.

The first night we all wanted to test the road a little, so to speak, and we decided to try to go have a fancy sushi dinner at one of the specialty restaurants. Unfortunately, it took us a rather long time to establish that it wasn’t going to work out, and by the time we understood that we couldn’t be seated for sushi until 9.30 p.m., it was after seven p.m. By this point I was feeling overwhelmed and cross, and my daughter — who had dressed up prettily for the occasion — was feeling overwhelmed, cross, and a little seasick — and we fell back on going to the vast, complimentary, buffet for dinner. This felt like a massive failure, but in retrospect I don’t know why. I guess we had such high hopes, but the reality was that we didn’t know how to arrange things so as to make the hopes come true. There are all these protocols about making reservations and plans that we just didn’t understand until it was basically too late. We were all bummed out about this, but shouldn’t have bothered feeling this way, because going to the big huge buffet was really pretty damned great. My husband and I talked it over a couple of nights ago, standing in our kitchen. “The company really doesn’t give you a good guide to how the food situation works on the ship,” I said. “I think it’s one of those things where you do it once, you learn the ropes, and after that you have a grip on things and you know how to do it right.” “I guess so,” my husband said. “I mean,” I went on, “I only realized after we were home that one of the restaurants on the ship that I thought looked good — it wasn’t one of the extra-cost places, it was complimentary! Complimentary Thai food. We would have liked that!” My husband’s eyes widened. “Aw, man!” he said, genuinely wounded. “I know!” I said. “But it’s really on us at some level for not having figured it out.” “Well,” my husband said — and I knew what he was thinking, but wasn’t saying: “Next time we’ll get it right.”

The fact was, despite our cruise-incompetence, we ate quite well. I don’t know what we were expecting to find at the huge cafeteria-style restaurant, but what we found was, I want to say, infinitely better than I thought it would be. All of us cheered up, to be quite honest, when we realized that even the “free” food would involve lots of very, very decent options. This was not a place where we’d face sad microwaved meals and or things that looked like TV dinners. (Ok, actual in-the-foil-tray TV dinners would have been a novelty, I admit, but considering the money we’d shelled out, it would not have been amusing for more than about 20 minutes.) My daughter was particularly enchanted by the pasta station. That first night, after the Major Sushi Disappointment, I was hugely relieved to see her home in on the pasta (serious comfort food for a sad little girl), laser-like and practically slobbering when we watched a chef assemble a plate of spaghetti for a blue-haired teenager on line in front of us. “Excuse me,” I asked the girl, “but is that an Alfredo sauce he’s putting together for you?” “It is!” she said, turning and giving me a big smile. “Doesn’t it look good? And they have all these things you can add on, if you want, too.” She stepped to the side a little and gestured: there were pans with cooked spinach, chopped up bacon, green peas, chopped olives, grated Parmesan, all with little spoons, and you could put as much as you wanted on your plate of pasta. “I want that!” my daughter said, having totally forgotten the Sushi Fiasco. The blue-haired teenager smiled at her and said, “Alfredo’s my favorite.” “Mine too!” said my daughter. And I thought, “We’re gonna be okay here: God Bless You, blue-haired stranger.” The blue-haired kid was all right; my daughter would be all right; I would be all right.

I agonized over the lost sushi dinner over the next few days, by the way. Several times I tried to get us in; I never succeeded. We did attend a sushi-making demonstration, after which my girl snagged about three pieces of sushi, but it wasn’t the same thing, and I knew it. I made plans in my head to make this up to her in the next few weeks, once we were home, because I felt so terrible about it — having a sushi dinner on the ship was one of the three things she most wanted to do during this vacation. But every single time we tried to get to the sushi place, we couldn’t get a seat. I don’t really want to harp on this restaurant-incompetence thing (whether the problem was with us or the cruise line) but it was really frustrating. We just couldn’t get it right with the “specialty restaurants,” most of the time. The one time it worked out was a night when it was just me and my husband dining because my daughter had decided to do the kids’ program thing during the dinner hour (an additional $6 fee, totally worthwhile).

Several times we had this experience, wherein my daughter would dress up for dinner, we’d make a go of it, and fail miserably. She’d wind up at the big buffet, feeling weirdly overdressed because everyone else in the room was wearing shorts and t-shirts. She was a good sport about it because she is, truly, an exceptionally good-natured kid, but if we had a different sort of child, this kind of thing would have meant week-ruining disaster.

Our second evening, we did go to one of the fancier places, which also turned out to be one of the “complimentary” restaurants. Not that we understood this at the time we asked to be seated, mind you. But that was the night my daughter fell ill just as our meal was served to us, and in the end she never ate it. (She didn’t puke, thanks for asking, and I made sure we left the table before the horror of puking in public became a possibility. But she sure didn’t feel good, and seeing her sitting at the table with tears in her eyes, the food in front of her, made it clear to me that The Evening Was Over for me and for her.) My poor husband ate his dinner alone in a grand dining room at an elegantly set table. He brought me my meal on a takeout platter, for me to eat in the room. (Incidentally that meal was one of the two I consumed that I deemed not quite as good as it should have been — I had a lovely dish, a risotto, but as I ate it I came to realize it had been over-salted. As quibbles go, this is very minor, and no one should take it as a slam against the food on this cruise.

A number of people have asked me what it was like sleeping on the ship, and I’ve said that for the most part it was quite pleasant. That night of the failed Fancy Dinner, however, was also the night that the ship sailed through some very turbulent waters. None of us slept well. It was quite dismal. It was comparable to the bad sleep you get as the parent of a newborn. We would start to drift off to sleep, doze for half an hour, and awaken, feeling awful. As with our not knowing how to get into one of the special restaurants, we couldn’t tell if we felt awful and couldn’t sleep because we were loser naive newbies or if this was just objectively speaking bad sailing and everyone on the ship was having the same kind of trouble. It turned out it was very bad indeed — later in the week my husband and I chatted with a woman who had gone on multiple cruises, yearly, for more than thirty years, and she said that that night was by far the worst night she’d ever had on a ship. This made us feel a lot better: the problem was just that it had been a horrible night, not that we were unusually pantywaisted. Obviously it’s not that we were happy to’ve learned that everyone was so miserable, per se; but there’s a relief in knowing that the fault isn’t yours for being stupid or not planning well.

The day after that bad night, we were kind of dragging our asses around, but it was all right because, after all, we weren’t obligated to do anything. Anything. Our daughter, who awoke feeling groggy but strangely game, ate breakfast and went happily to the children’s program — she was in the Dolphin group and having a blast — and my husband and I took our books and read in various cozy nooks scattered around the ship. We met up for meals, but otherwise, we each did pretty much what we pleased.

The day we landed in Florida, at Cape Canaveral, the ship emptied out. It seemed that most people had decided to shell out what I felt were ludicrous amounts of money to go on various stupid excursions. You could go to Disneyworld or you could go to a beach someplace or you could go scuba diving or whatever the hell; I don’t even know what the options all were, but I’d glanced at the list and said, “I’m not paying $250 so we can go do that!” and declared that this was a day for us to just enjoy the ship. Unwind. I made an appointment to get a pedicure, something I hadn’t done in possibly three years (fuck, it might have been five years). Everyone got into lines on Deck Four or whatever it was to disembark to have Organized Fun, and we settled in for a happy day of, I don’t know, Disorganized Non-Fun, which is, of course, our idea of a nice time.

So we hung around. The weather was warm, the sky was sunny and blue, and much as New Haven in the summertime is lovely because the Yalies are gone, the ship was a much more pleasant place to be with so many people on land. The three of us met up for meals, taking most of them at the large buffet-style cafeteria that ran down the middle of the 12th deck, near the outside area where there were swimming pools and hot tubs. My husband and I tried out one of the hot tubs; it was okay. We sat in the surprisingly crowded library and watched a dancer try to help people sign out books. We walked through the duty-free shopping area and gawped at the things you could buy: booze, cigars, perfume, jewelry I would never wear personally, ongepotchket watches. Everything was, even if duty-free, priced to involve fairly serious money, and while I know enough about booze to know that there were some good deals to be found, on the whole, this wasn’t a place where I wanted to shop for fun. What’s more, I really don’t have any use for Life is Good t-shirts or beach towels. Basically, all the merchandise was there for people whose tastes were not like ours. We spent a solid 90 minutes trying to find something we’d want to splurge on, and left empty-handed. If we ever go on a cruise I’d like to see things like racks of, I don’t know, Chuck Taylors, or 100% cotton oxford cloth shirts in dignified colors and prints, or bowties. Other things I’d be happy to shop for: jewelry made out of old watch parts; aprons and tablecloths from the 1940s; table service from cruise lines of the 20th century. (That could be a goldmine, people. Think about it.)

*The ship’s library is maintained, as best I can tell, not by an actual librarian but by members of the ship’s Entertainment Crew. The young woman who watched as I checked out a book was a blonde dancer. I didn’t have to ask her if she was a dancer to know that she was a dancer. She was obviously a dancer. My suspicions were confirmed some nights later when we saw her and her colleagues perform an incredibly energetic Tribute to the 70’s, one of the most glittery shows I’ve ever seen, and I’m no stranger to glittery shows.

May 2, 2018 0