She looked at me with an expression of total disbelief. “Oh, that’s a lie.”
“And my mother is seventy-four. Or seventy-five. I’m not sure which it is.”
Helga gave me a disgusted look and turned away.
Well, it was true, and if she didn’t want to believe it, too bad. I won’t say it’s usual for people to be married as long as fifty years. I get the impression that people tend to get tired of each other after twenty or thirty years, and split up, and there are some people who don’t want anything as permanent as marriage and just live together. And people who don’t even know each other who have children because the Ship’s Eugenist advises it. Whatever Helga had heard, it had been a garbled or twisted version of this.
My parents were a strange pair. They’d been married for fifty years, which wasn’t usual, and they hadn’t lived together for eight years. When I was four, my mother got an opportunity she had been looking forward to for the study of art under Lemuel Carpentier, and she’d moved out. I guess that if you’ve been married as long as fifty years, and apparently expect it to go on for maybe fifty years more, that a vacation of eight years or so is hardly noticeable.
To tell the truth, I didn’t know what my parents saw in each other. I liked and respected my father, but I didn’t like my mother at all. I’d like to say that it was simply that we didn’t understand each other, and that was partly true. I thought her “art” was plain bad. One of the few times I went to her apartment to visit, I looked at a sculpture she’d done and asked her about it.
“That’s called ‘The Bird,’ ” she said.
I could see that it was meant to be a bird. Mother was working directly from a picture and it looked just like it. But it was so stiff and formal that it had no feel of life at all. I said something about that, and she didn’t like the remark at all. We got into an argument, and she finally put me out.
So part of it was misunderstanding, but not all. For one thing, she made it quite clear to me that she’d had me as a duty and not because she particularly wanted to. I firmly believed that she was just waiting for me to go on Trial, and then she’d move back in with Daddy. As I say, I didn’t like her.
When we got to the far side of the harbor, instead of coming directly back, as I somehow had thought we would, Ralph turned us so that we were traveling out at an angle toward the mouth of the harbor. Traveling that way, we were running at an angle through the waves, too, and the chop increased tremendously. We would go up in the air, and then quite suddenly down again, and after a few minutes of this, I was starting to feel queasy. It was a different sort of upset than I’d been suffering earlier in the day. This was nausea and accompanied by a whirling in the head.
I said to Helga, “Can’t we go straight back? I’m starting to feel sick.”
“This is the quickest way back,” she said. “We can’t sail directly into the wind. We have to tack, head into the wind at an angle.”
“But we’re going so slow,” I said. It was the slow way we rammed into waves, surged high, and then pitched down on the other side that threw my stomach off stride.
Ralph yanked on the line that was attached to the boom, and swung it over from one side of the boat to the other, turning the tiller at the same time, and we headed back in toward the quay in another slow tack. By that time, I was feeling miserable.
“Don’t throw up,” Helga said cheerfully. “We’ll be back soon enough.” Then she raised her voice. “You’ve had it your fair turn, Ralph. Let me take over.”
“Oh, all right,” Ralph said, quite reluctantly.
Helga ducked back to the stern, taking the tiller and the boom line from Ralph. She nodded at me. “She’s feeling sick,” she said.
“Oh,” Ralph said. He came forward and sat down beside me.
He looked at me and said, “It takes a while to get your sea-legs. After you sail for a while you get used to it.”