Alice on Board Read online

  “I couldn’t do that in a million years,” I said to Rachel. “I’d drop it on a passenger, first thing.”

  “Here’s a hint,” she told us. “If that ever happens, sink to the floor and hold your ankle.”

  “What?” said Pamela.

  “Moan a little, and all the sympathy will be on you,” she told us. As I said, Rachel knew the most amazing stuff.

  Before we turned in that evening, each of us was given two long-sleeved white dress shirts and black bow ties to wear when serving meals, to go with the black pants we’d been required to bring with us; two short-sleeved white shirts for serving breakfast or lunch; and two black T-shirts with SEASCAPE printed on them that we were to wear with shorts when we cleaned the rooms.

  And once again, we fell into bed without any midnight party, almost too tired to dream.

  I woke to an earsplitting alarm and sat up, startled, confused, my heart pounding, desperately trying to remember the instructions for what to do in an emergency.

  “What the heck?” Pamela was saying, as murmurs filled the room.

  “What time is it?” asked someone else.

  I grabbed whatever clothes were handy, making sure to put on shoes. That much I remembered.

  When we emerged on the lounge deck, sleep-befuddled and disheveled, dragging our life jackets behind us, the first vermilion of a sunrise appeared in the sky, and my watch said four fifty-five. I would discover, as the summer wore on, that the Chesapeake had some fantastic sunrises and sets.

  Quinton was there timing us, and he frowned at those who forgot their life jackets and had to go back. We sucked in the fresh, cool air of early morning and swayed slightly as we stood in a row and finished waking up.

  Ken McCoy and Dianne were also up and dressed, as though their morning had started hours before.

  “This is the only emergency drill you’ll get, other than the routine muster we do at the start of each new cruise,” Ken explained. “So if the alarm rings again at an ungodly hour, you’ll know it’s the real McCoy.”

  He gave step-by-step instructions for putting on the life jackets, and Dianne and Quinton went up and down the row, making sure each strap was secure. Dianne made me take mine off and put it on again before I passed inspection.

  Next we were each assigned a specific spot on the ship where we were to report. Both Gwen and I got the lounge deck, starboard aft, or “LSA.” In case of fire, report and listen for further instructions. If we heard the “Man overboard!” alert, we were to race to our designated places, scan the water for the missing person, and, if spotted, keep pointing to the spot, never taking our eyes off him, while the ship turned around and the passenger or crew member was rescued. If the order was given to abandon ship, we were given the specific staterooms that were in our care during a muster. Our job was to see that all passengers were safely out of their staterooms and had put on their life jackets correctly.

  Various possibilities played out in my mind. What if a passenger was in the shower? On the toilet? Were we to go in and drag him out?

  “Don’t worry,” Ken added at the end of his little speech. “One of us—Quinton, Dianne, or I—will be on each deck helping out.” And then, before the session was over, we had to take partners, each of us removing our vest and putting it on again, checked by our partner.

  This was a different kind of morning. It may have been Sunday in Baltimore—I heard a church bell ringing at seven—but at six thirty the deckhands were pushing carts across the dock and up to the hold of the ship, carts loaded with crates of Florida citrus, boxes of New York cheesecake, grapes from California, pasta and wine and flour and coffee… .

  Quinton checked off each shipment, each crate, and as the morning wore on, all the activity brought locals and tourists down to the waterfront to watch. I began to feel we were onstage.

  Once we had cleaned ourselves up and eaten breakfast, Quinton assigned us a place to stand when passengers began arriving that afternoon. A florist’s truck pulled up with a huge bouquet of exotic flowers for the cabinet just inside the entrance on the main deck, and Dianne helped Ken set up a folding table for refreshments in the lounge.

  “You’d think we were expecting the queen,” I said to Emily as we passed each other in the hall.

  “We’re waiting for the captain,” she said. “That’s even more important.”

  I wondered if there would be sailors flanking the gangway when the captain arrived. Rachel and I were arranging napkins by the punch bowl, and the engineer was tinkering with an air-conditioning unit beneath one of the built-in couches that lined the wall at the bow. Frank had just stood up and slipped his tools in his belt when we saw a taxi unload a passenger on the street and watched the man in the white uniform pay the driver.

  Frank walked over to the window and peered down. “What the bloody hell?” he murmured.

  * * *

  Whatever that was about, we didn’t have time to debate. All we got from Josh, who knew Frank from other trips, was that it wasn’t the captain we’d been expecting. Meanwhile, the crew was told to eat an early lunch; passengers would start boarding at one.

  I put on my short-sleeved dress shirt and took my place just inside the entrance on the main deck. Already I could hear Ken greeting guests who were wheeling their luggage up to the gangplank, welcoming them to the Seascape. My job was to check their boarding passes and direct them to their staterooms. There was no elevator, so folks who found stairs difficult had taken rooms on this level, where the dining room was located.

  Most of the passengers came aboard smiling broadly, eager for the adventure, and that made the crew even more enthusiastic. It was sort of like being in a school play, the way the audience’s reaction can energize a cast.

  “This is so exciting!” a woman said to me, clutching her purse tightly under her arm as she came through the gangway. “It’s my first cruise.”

  “Mine too!” I told her. And, checking her name tag, I said, “You’re up the stairs and to your left, Mrs. Schield.”

  “I’ve never been on a maiden voyage before,” a chubby man said, coming up next. “Every woman here a maiden?” And he winked.

  Oh, brother! I thought. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Knott,” I said cheerfully. “You’re on the Chesapeake deck, two flights up, and your bags will be delivered shortly.”

  This was the day the deckhands dreaded, I could tell. Though they wore their crisp white shirts and shorts, they were already wet with perspiration. They sprinted through the hallways, a bag in each hand, sometimes two, or another beneath an arm. They were running partly to deliver luggage in a hurry and partly to escape the passengers who stood in their doorways, calling that they were still missing a bag or that they’d been given the wrong luggage.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll sort things out,” I assured the man who had come back out of his room at the end of the hall. “We take good care of the bags.”

  The strap of his camera seemed to pull his neck forward, and he studied me a moment. “There better not be any smoking,” he said. “My wife’s allergic. They promised us there’s no smoking in the dining room.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Jergens,” I told him. “She’ll be fine.”

  Slowly the noise level rose as more and more people arrived, and the cartloads of bags coming down from the Renaissance Hotel were higher still. The deckhands worked relentlessly, while passengers were already exploring the ship, peeking in each other’s rooms, standing in doorways to chat, and impeding the deckhands’ progress.

  “Would you like to go up to the lounge?” I kept suggesting. “There are refreshments in the lounge… . Would you like to meet the other passengers in the lounge? … Perhaps you could continue your conversation in the lounge over refreshments… .”

  Josh looked at me gratefully as I got a boisterous group of four to head for the stairs.

  There weren’t any children, and we were glad of that. No pool equals no kids, someone said. And when I heard big-band music wafting from the s
ound system, I realized we had a shipload of retirees—empty nesters, anyway. Flavian appeared in the hallway, a monstrous duffel bag in one hand, two smaller bags in the other. His forehead glistened. He grinned as he passed, but I’ll bet we were both thinking the same thing: ten one-week cruises, ten embarkings, ten disembarkings, bags up, bags down… . Emily had told us that the turnarounds were the worst—the weekends these passengers got off and a new crowd got on—no time at all to ourselves.

  Everyone seemed in a friendly, festive mood, though—until, that is, a man in a cowboy hat came down the stairs and faced me: “The letter I got said there would be lunch, and all we can find up there is cheese and crackers,” he said.

  My mind raced through the day’s program. No one was assigned to the dining room until dinnertime. Only Rachel and Barry, the afternoon’s lounge attendants, were keeping the refreshment table replenished. Surely the man was mistaken.

  “Lunch?” I said. “Oh, I don’t think so. But—”

  “It says lunch!” he insisted, reaching inside his jacket pocket for a piece of paper. He unfolded it and thrust it under my nose.

  I took the letter and skimmed the lines: Welcome aboard the Seascape … a thoroughly modern cruise ship … Passengers are invited to board from one o’clock on … a light lunch will be available in the lounge.

  “I believe there’s also fruit and coffee … ,” I began.

  “That’s not a lunch,” he said. “Where’s all that gourmet food they brag about? We got on a plane at eight this morning, and all we’ve had to eat is one damn bag of pretzels. We were expecting lunch, like the letter says.”

  “Let me go find out,” I said, keeping the letter, and off I went to find Dianne.

  I ran into Quinton instead.

  “I hate to bother you,” I said, “but the man over there says they were promised lunch.” And I gave him the letter, signed by the company’s president. I could see Quinton’s jaw stiffen as he read it.

  “I never okayed this,” he said. “Never even saw it. You don’t say ‘lunch’ when it’s finger food, you say ‘refreshments.’” He handed the letter back. “I’ll have the chef send sandwiches to his room,” he told me.

  Everything was different with passengers on board. No slouching through the halls lugging a bucket, no sinking down in a deck chair to catch my breath, no letting my hair fly around my face or simply pulling it back without combing it first.

  I was continually aware of my appearance, my posture. Was my shirt tucked in? Were my nails clean? Passengers continued arriving all afternoon. I had barely directed the last couple toward their stateroom when the obligatory muster took place.

  A memo to each passenger announced that an emergency drill would be held before dinner, so when the alarm sounded, I raced to crew quarters, grabbed my life jacket, and went up to my assigned emergency post on the lounge deck. Passengers were coming out of their staterooms, orange life jackets dangling awkwardly from their hands. They joked with each other about manning the lifeboats or jumping over the rail.

  I saw our cruise director for the first time—a thirty-something woman, forty, maybe. “Please listen carefully to our instructions and remain outside your staterooms, wearing your life jackets, until one of our crew checks you out,” Stephanie Bowers said. People paid attention not only because of the megaphone she was using, but also because she was gorgeous. Her brown hair was shoulder length and streaked with gold, her eyebrows delicately arched, her shirt showed just the right amount of cleavage, and she wore a skirt that hugged her hips. “Place the life jacket over your shoulders, like so,” she said, demonstrating with her own, “the opening in front. Now thread the black strap through the ring on your left side… .”

  “Whatever you say, baby,” I heard a man murmur.

  I walked slowly along the line of passengers, Gwen coming at me from the other direction, assisting where we could. I couldn’t begin to fit the puffy orange jacket around the body of an enormous woman who was already embarrassed by the effort, and I congratulated myself that I got the strap through the ring at all, laughing with her when she tried out the attached whistle for distraction.

  The men, I discovered, did not want any help but seemed to have more trouble getting the straps right than the women. I was glad when Ken McCoy appeared on the scene and I could bypass the frustrated man with straps all going the wrong way.

  Ken gave a two-minute talk on ship safety, then Stephanie took the megaphone again and said she would be making some announcements after dinner regarding the excursion schedule. And finally, when the all-clear signal was given, people gave relieved sighs, yanking off their life jackets and going back inside to stow them under their beds. I was happy too.

  “Glad that’s over,” said Gwen, who somehow managed to look as elegantly put together as she had at the beginning of the afternoon. She and Yolanda had done each other’s hair in elaborate coils before we’d started the trip, threading beads into them on either side of their faces.

  Passengers were gathering at the rail now, and Gwen and I joined them. A crowd had collected on the dock below to watch the gangplank being lifted and swung onto the bow of the ship. Already we could feel the vibration of the engines.

  Now two deckhands on the pier were unwinding the lines that held us to pilings—one at the bow of the ship, another at the stern. Looping the lines around their arms like a lasso, they tossed them into the hands of two sailors on deck, then made the leap from shore to ship. The engine noise grew louder still as the bow thrusters in the depths of the ship moved us slowly away from the dock.

  People we didn’t know waved at us, and we waved back. The wind in our faces grew stronger, the space between us and the dock grew wider. Then I heard Dianne saying, “Girls—galley duty, pronto,” and we remembered we were part of the crew. We headed downstairs to change into T-shirts and shorts, to spend the evening scraping plates and filling the dishwasher—course after course after course.

  Pamela and Natalie had it easy that night—shadowing some of the more experienced stews to learn how to turn down the beds when the guests were at dinner; put a chocolate imprinted with an S on each pillow and a program of tomorrow’s events, plus the weather forecast, beside it. Pull the blinds, turn on the bedside lamp… .

  But Gwen and Liz and I were in the galley till ten thirty. I was glad I wouldn’t be there every evening—the dishes and all that cleaning up of the dining room afterward. You’d be surprised at how much grown people can spill on the floor. I was wiped.

  When we got off at last, smelling of grease and detergent, Gwen opted for a shower and sleep, but Liz and I needed to unwind, so we decided to go up to the top deck for twenty minutes to cool off.

  We were climbing the narrow staircase from the Chesapeake deck to the observation deck when we heard Dianne’s voice just above us. “… too big a hurry,” she was saying. “That letter was just an example—people expecting lunch. We’re the ones who take it on the chin! And not a word to us about what happened to Captain Sawyer. Not even Ken knew about the switch.”

  “We’ve put up with worse than this.” Quinton’s voice.

  Liz and I should have left, but we didn’t. We just stood there, frozen, on the stairs, our heads below floor level.

  “One of the reasons we agreed to take this on was that we got to sail with Sawyer,” Dianne persisted.

  “Well, it’s not in the contract, Dianne. We’re here, the ship has sailed, we’ve got a captain, we make it work, that’s all. Nothing says we have to sign up for their fall cruises.”

  Liz and I were already backing down the stairs when the conversation stopped. I don’t know if they’d realized someone was listening or not.

  3

  MITCH

  When we woke the next morning, we were already docked in Norfolk, with its huge shipping port and naval base. It was weird to go out on deck and find a completely different landscape from the one you saw the day before.

  Another cruise ship, slightly larger than
ours, was just leaving port, and a few early risers were already at the rail, watching it move away from the dock. It reminded me that we weren’t the only cruise line on the bay. Most of the others, though, added New England and Nova Scotia or the Bahamas to their itineraries. But the Seascape and the Spellbound, according to Josh, wanted to be Chesapeake Bay exclusives, sailing spring, summer, and fall, and eventually getting the lion’s share of the market.

  I didn’t have to be told to eat a good breakfast, and afterward I reported to the linen hold for clean sheets and towels, then set off for my block of fifteen staterooms. It was hard not to get distracted by the planes flying in now and then and by the submarine one of the guys detected, trolling the water a ways out.

  I’d been instructed not to start cleaning until the bell rang for breakfast. Since passengers could go anytime between seven and nine, this meant keeping an eye out to see when people left for the dining room, so we could rush into those staterooms and clean them.

  You learn a lot about people when you clean up after them. Some left their quarters immaculate—clothes hung up, toiletries neatly assembled in one place, towels folded, even though we’d replace them with fresh ones. Other people left their towels on the floor, slippers askew, bottles and tubes and jars scattered around the sink, and dirty laundry dumped in a corner.

  Those of us who cleaned staterooms would have two hours or so off in the afternoon before beginning our evening stint clearing tables during the dinner hour and scraping dishes in the galley.

  “Anybody want to tour a battleship?” Barry asked when Gwen and I returned our buckets later and were heading for the showers. He and Mitch were coming up from crew quarters, obviously ready to leave.

  “A battleship’s about the last thing on my wish list,” Gwen said, “but go for it.”