The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,13
Coke in the washer to get the fish-blood smell out of your clothes,” she said.
“Dad says you used to puke through the whole season. How can you miss it?” I asked.
“Perhaps your father should try fishing when he’s six months pregnant.”
—
Nice one, Mom.
Pregnant.
With me.
Everything is always my fault.
Sally and Izzy just stood there with fake smiles pasted on their faces, as if they were watching a dance choreographed by my mother and me where we alternate playing the tragic heroine depending on whose song is loudest. She loves fishing, but not my dad. I love my dad, but I’m tired of fishing. Especially when it gets between me and other things I love.
—
“Earth to Alyce,” Dad says, swinging his legs over the side and climbing aboard. He caught me sitting on the fish hold, flexing the toes of my rubber boots, admiring my extension.
“Did you put the groceries away?” he asks.
“Of course; labeled all the cans, too.”
Canned goods go under the floor in the galley, and my job is to write the contents on the top of each lid so you can read them by looking down from above. Apparently I learned to write by spelling corned beef hash and kidney beans on the tin lids. Every single thing on this boat is either about me or about how my parents lived their lives through me. “Do you want the big bunk?” Dad asks.
“Really? I can have it?”
It’s a great bunk. Dad had wanted Mom to be happy, and being a man of very few words, he’d widened the bunk for his pregnant wife and thought that would be enough. Maybe it had worked for a little while anyway.
I fly down into the fo’c’sle and quickly claim the space before he changes his mind. I can hear my uncle moving totes around on deck, and without even seeing him I know there’s a cigarette hanging from his lips and a steaming mug within his reach, no less than six Lipton tea bags in it. Uncle Gorky is a recovering alcoholic, so he has other vices to see him through a fishing trip.
Dad starts up the engine and the noise down here is deafening, although I know it won’t take long to get used to and soon will sound no louder than a purring kitten. I breathe in diesel, the smell of my childhood, of sleeping in the belly of this boat that has always made my dreams bouncy. I never sleep as well anywhere as I do here on the Squid. And now I get the big bunk, too, which even has a little shelf built in for all my favorite books to make it cozier. See how hard my dad tried?
There’s a nail sticking out of the wooden beam, and I remember the bouquet of dried wildflowers my mom had hung there, even though flowers are supposed to be bad luck on a boat. Maybe they were? I hang my pointe shoes on the nail and scramble up to help untie.
Dad is already talking on the VHF radio, which is the only time he actually seems to enjoy talking. The slow, drawling voice on the other end is obviously Dad’s oldest fishing pal, Sunshine Sam. People are known by their boat name first, followed by the skipper name. Chatham Frank, Dixie Don, Chanty Ken. I hate that everyone calls Dad Squiddly George. But it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat, so he must have expected it when he bought the Squid. It’s also bad luck to have bananas on board, whistle in the wheelhouse, and leave town on a Friday, but we’ve done all those things at some point. If he did change the name, he says it would be the F/V Alyce and then he’d be Alyce George, and that’s not much better.
I listen to Dad and Sunshine Sam speak their strange boat language.
“Oh yeah…” Long pause. Interminably long pause. “Yep, Marty over at the Cape.” Long, long pause. “Twenty-two pounder…”
“Huh…” Long pause.
“ ’S that when he gaffed his own leg?”
It’s like speaking in code.
—
“You going to dance for me?” Uncle Gorky hands me a mug of tea.
I shrug, sliding into boat-speak as easy as pulling on my rain gear. Dad is unrolling charts and plotting our course, a bit more focused than usual, as if it’s the first time we’ve ever left the harbor. I know he heard Uncle Gorky’s question, but you’d never know it by looking at him.