Top Three Mortifications #3: On Board the Ferry

The first time I saw her I was throwing up in the women’s bathroom on the slow boat from Hyannis.

 I was sea-sick and I couldn’t make it to the men’s room. I couldn’t even make it to the toilet. The seas were so rough the boat almost turned back. But I guess they were half way across by then, so what difference did it make.

Some people never get seasick. My mom never gets sea sick. Supposedly my dad never gets seasick. But I get the sea sick gene of course. 

Some people are lucky. I’m not. If I fill in the boxes on a multiple choice test at random, I’ll get every answer wrong. Seriously. I left my book bag on the school bus, no one found it, no one turned it in. Those books were gone forever. And I knew it would happen. I wasn’t even surprised. I finally talked my mom into getting a dog, and it was some crazy mutt from the Bide-a-Wee home that growled unless you threw kibble at it. The next one ran away. The last one died from some weird kidney condition. Finally I gave up on pets. My mom liked to say “You can’t win ’em all – but you can definitely lose ‘em all.”

Put that on my gravestone.

So anyway, I was thinking about all that shitty stuff and all the other shitty stuff like the Northridge earthquake that was the whole reason we moved to Nantucket in the first place, because it wrecked our house, no one could fix it and of course we had no insurance. So we had moved from one crumby apartment to another for years, in worse and worse parts of town, Inglewood finally, until Grandma died and she left us what my mom always called “That disgusting little hovel on New South Shore Road”.

Mom never wanted to go back there and she never should have. Nantucket killed her. I couldn’t see the future on the way across the Sound that morning, I’m not some psychic or something, but everything felt bad to me. Or fuck, I don’t know -- maybe it was precognition, it sure seems that way looking back, but probably I was just miserable. Anyway I was going over and over this stuff, leaning over the sink, gripping the sides, when that big old flat-bottomed ferry crested a swell and slammed down with this huge crash that made everything shudder, and flipped my stomach and I thought, why did I ever order that disgusting clam chowder? And that brought the rest of it up.

Which was the moment she walked into the bathroom, the girl I had had tried to talk to as we shuffled along, boarding the boat. What did I say? Something lame – “Pretty windy, huh?” I must have looked scared because she laughed and said, “I love a rough ride.” That laugh. It knocked me off my foundations. I thought of the jagged crack down our living room wall after the earthquake that got our house red-tagged and then condemned.

And an hour later I’m retching my guts out in front of her and there’s nothing but shock and disgust and contempt on her face, and then she was gone and the door slammed shut behind her.

And there was nothing left but the aftershocks.