Already, I revise the past. I make it sound like the boat was our first real point of contention. Back in Connecticut, we didn’t just argue about the boat. Michael and I had much bigger problems. We weren’t in a great place. As a couple, I mean. We didn’t see the world the same way. We fundamentally disagreed. We weren’t—how do I put this? How do I put this now?
Never told Juliet this so maybe not such a great idea to write it down. I wouldn’t put it past her snooping. (HEY, JULIET. If you are taking the time to read this, you must be A] really, really bored, or B] confined to a hospital bed.) When I was still working at Omni, I used to sneak down to this freshwater marina near the Long Island Sound in the middle of the workday. Just to look at the boats. In my corporate uniform. Nobody ever said to me, What are you doing here? Nobody ever asked me a single personal question. Like it was the most natural thing for a guy in business wear to walk around the docks in the middle of the day asking the cruisers where they’d come from or where they were going. Then I’d go back to work w/ some B.S. about where I’d been.
There was a boat of Canadians, a mother, father & two kids, sailing the most beautiful gaff-rigged sailboat. I’d watch them for long stretches, the kids playing w/ buckets & kayaks & mom and dad working on the boat, or just sitting on deck…
One day an older gentleman came up to me.
Some boat, he said.
I know, I said.
They live on that boat, he told me. Already been around the world once.
Me & the old guy stood there looking at the boat in silence. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything so badly. I mean, until then, I’d never really envied somebody else’s life.
People think they’re running from their problems, the man said. But those people are not running from problems. They just want different problems. They don’t want the problems of paperwork and traffic and political correctness. They want the problems of wind and weather. The problem of which way to go.
I looked over at the guy. He had a full head of gray hair that sprouted out the sides of his MAGA baseball cap.
Harry Borawski, he said, extending his hand. You’d be surprised how affordable a boat like that is.
* * *
—
After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had—I don’t know—thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes—but at the margins. At the center, there was administration. Michael worked until six or seven p.m. All I wanted by then was a handoff for that final hour. At bath time, both kids in the tub, slippery and hairless, as I tried to keep one or the other from going under, I would whisper, Please come home, come home.
The days were long and shadowy, but no matter how well or poorly I felt I had done as a mother, the final hour of the day was the worst. How time dragged at the end of the day. I’d kept the children alive the entire day but feared some unforeseen disaster in the last ten minutes.
Sometimes the panic made it hard to breathe. I felt like an Irish lass caught in the fields at dusk with my apron full of potatoes. Should I drop the potatoes, save myself, and run? Or slow my progress by carrying them carefully through the dark woods?
I could have gotten from that marina to the Long Island Sound in 8 nautical miles. And from there to Portugal in 3000 more.
But I swear I have never once considered leaving Juliet.