Cabin Buddies

The waiting area outside the cruise terminal was abuzz with bright new outfits and happy chatter. It was enough to make even the most reserved introvert start to feel a bit of excitement.

I was standing with Jack and Ciara, two regulars of the social group. Jack was tall and rugged, something to do with landscaping; Ciara tall and willowy, worked in an office of some sort. They weren't an official couple, as far as I knew, but they seemed to have hooked up for the cruise. That was sort of the way the group worked. Thirty somethings, mostly divorced, intent on maintaining the hard playing lifestyle of their twenties, looking for like-minded dating partners to do it with.

Jack was explaining the different cruise drink payment plans. I smiled politely and nodded, thinking how different from theirs my life would be when I got to be their age.

Denise bustled up in a pretty pastel pantsuit with her clipboard in her hand. She was the mother hen of the group, forty-something and no longer trying so hard to pretend she was any younger.

"Hector," she said, ushering me a step aside, "I'm afraid there's been a mix up with your reservation. Somehow your single cabin didn't show up on the final printout." She gave me a concerned look. "They're working on it,... but we may have to double you up with someone."

This came as a bit of a rude surprise. One of the only reasons I'd finally agreed to come on the cruise in the first place had been her assurance that I'd be able to have a single. It wasn't that I was antisocial really, but I had my limits.

"You know Mrs. Pendergast, don't you?"

Mrs. Pendergast was an older woman, well into her sixties. She wasn't a regular member of the group, but it amused her sometimes to hang with a younger crowd. The group let her tag along to some of their events. I was going to have to share a room with Mrs. Pendergast?

"Apparently she got sick and had to cancel at the last minute. So we have an opening. She was sharing a room with"--Denise consulted her clipboard--"a Ms. Crenshaw. I don't know her, but I'm sure she's very nice. It's a double room, and you know how it is on a cruise. You don't spend that much time in your room anyway."

I didn't even try to return her smile.

"They're still working on your single, of course. I just wanted to let you know the fallback plan."

Not only losing my single, but having to spend the cruise being polite to an old lady? In Denise's mind, that was what the social group was all about.

--

People were already starting to go into the terminal building when Denise came back, this time with an attractive young woman at her side. I wondered if it was Denise's daughter, there to see us off.

"Hector," she said, peering at me over the top of her glasses, "this is Molly Crenshaw. I've been explaining our predicament."

The girl gave me a weak smile. She was pretty, with shortish brown hair swept back behind her ears, wearing white shorts and a light blue top. She didn't look like she could be a day over twenty-one. Not at all what I had pictured as a travelling companion for Mrs. Pendergast.

"It's a double room," Denise was explaining. "I'm sure they'll be able to rig up a partition if need be. But this will be the first cruise for both of you. It will be nice to have a buddy to help you find your way around. I'm sure the two of you will hit it off."

Molly was still looking at me rather uncertainly. This apparently wasn't exactly what she had signed up for either. She looked back at Denise. "Well... if his other room got cancelled..."

Denise was delighted. The registration mixup had been solved in an efficient and social-group-positive way. I couldn't believe she was being so cavalier about putting a guy and a girl who didn't even know each other into the same room together.

"They're still working on my single though, right?"

"As far as I know. You'll be able to check with the Bursar once we get on board."

Denise had more than enough smile for the three of us. They called our area for boarding.

"See you on board," she said, bustling off with her clipboard.

--

Going up the gangway onto the ship itself kind of blew me away. You entered onto the mezzanine level of what looked like the fanciest mall I'd ever seen. There was an atrium that rose several stories high with glass elevators gliding up and down and fancy shops and glittering lights on every different level. On the floor below us a fellow in a tuxedo was playing a grand piano. All of this right in the middle of the ship. Molly's eyes were as wide as mine.

They'd told us to have lunch while the luggage was being brought on. Molly and I had come aboard with a bunch of other social groupers, but they'd all buzzed off one way or another leaving the two of us by ourselves. We found a little sandwich and salad buffet.

"So, your first cruise?" I asked. I was pretty sure I'd be able to get the room situation straightened out, but there was no harm in being polite.

She assembled a forkful of salad. "Mrs. Pendergast is a patient at the clinic where I work. She's pretty chatty, you know. She kept talking about this fantastic cruise she was going on. But she needed a travelling companion to come along and sort of look after her." She shrugged. "I don't know, she has a way of getting what she wants."

"Is she all right?"

"Denise says she's afraid she might be coming down with something. She's a bit of a hypochondriac. But the tickets are already paid for, and I'm already here, so Denise said I should just come along on the cruise without her." She gave her little shrug again and took a sip of iced tea. "Your first cruise too?"

"I'm not really a member of the social group, actually. I went on a nature hike with them one time and ended up on Denise's list. So now she sends me emails every time she has some big event. She was kind of persistent this time. I think they needed to sign up a certain number of people in order to get a discount or something."

Molly nodded and stabbed a crouton. "Well, it is a cruise. It should be fun. And it'll be nice not to have to keep tabs on Mrs. Pendergast all the time. There's gambling, you know. When we get far enough out to sea."

"You gamble?"

"Of course. Poker, black jack. Machines mostly, but sometimes at the tables. I have a system. It's a lot of fun."

--

After lunch I asked my way up to the Bursar's office. Molly came along to make sure that everything worked out. The Bursar looked me up in his computer. Apparently, when Mrs. Pendergast had cancelled, they'd looked to fill the vacancy with someone from our same group. I was the only one in a single, so they moved me in to fill her spot and gave my room to someone else. He double checked, but there weren't any other singles available. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me my key card.

I was flabbergasted.

"Well," said Molly, "we might as well go check it out at least."

We found our way down to the deck where the cabin was located. The room itself was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A chair, a little night stand, a mirror on the bathroom door, a bed against the wall. That was it. We looked at each other.

"Kind of smaller than I would have thought," I said.

"Yeah," she agreed.

I corralled a passing steward.

"Um, we were supposed to be getting a double room?" I showed him the printout.

"Yes, yes," he said in his helpful foreign accent. "Very nice double cabin."

"But there's only one bed."

"Double bed," he explained. Then he gestured toward the porthole on the wall. "Ocean view!" He smiled, happy to have been of service, and went on about his way.

Molly didn't look altogether convinced.

I sighed. "Let me go talk to the Bursar again..."

But she was sizing things up. Sunshine was streaming in through the porthole. Our two suitcases had been placed in a little niche beside the bathroom door, side by side.

"All the other rooms are probably just as small," she said. "On this level anyway. And they seem to have already given your other room away." She looked at me. "Do you snore?"

It wasn't a question I was expecting. "I don't think so. No one's ever complained."

"Well, Mrs Pendergast does, apparently. That's the one thing I've been dreading the most." She looked back at the room. "I guess this is just what double rooms are like on cruise ships. Maybe it's not so bad. At least you don't snore. We're kind of on an adventure anyway. Maybe we should just try and make the best of it."

She made it sound as if sharing a room with a complete stranger of the opposite sex was no bigger a deal than sharing a table with him at lunch. She sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the schedule of the day's activities as if the issue had already been decided.

"Shuffleboard lessons at three o'clock," she noted. "Bingo at four thirty."

I sat down on the chair. So instead of getting a room of my own I was going to have to share this one? Surely there must be some other alternative. What if... what if I asked Denise to ask Ciara to move in here with Molly and let me bunk with Jack? Ugh! I cringed at the thought.

"A magic show tonight in the forward theatre."

I looked around. How would it even work? The room was so tiny. There was only the one bed.

Molly was studying a map of the ship. "What do you think we should do first?" She'd not only accepted the fact that we'd be rooming together, she was ready to head out and start exploring.

"Um... why don't you just go ahead on your own? I've still got a couple things I need to take care of first."

I couldn't tell if she was a bit hurt that I didn't want to join her. But she shrugged it off. "Well, OK. Then I guess we can just meet back up here later."

--

I didn't really have anything I needed to take care of, I just wanted a little time to sort things out. I was pretty bummed that they'd given away my single. And I wasn't sure how I felt about Molly's matter-of-fact-ness. Was she really so used to sharing rooms with random guys?

Still, if I did have to share a room with someone, Molly was probably no more objectionable than Jack or Mrs. Pendergast. She was more my age, she seemed pretty easy going. If we'd been thrown together as partners at a workshop breakout session, I wouldn't have objected.

But sharing insights at a breakout session wasn't exactly the same as sharing a cabin on a cruise ship. I'd had to share rooms with strangers before, but they'd always been guys. What you did was you put on your blinders, you put up your shields, you went about your business, you let them go about theirs. You tried to be polite. At least that's the way it worked with guys. Did it work that way with girls too?

I guess I'd find out.

--

The ship must have cast off soon after we came on board, but so smoothly that we hadn't even noticed. By the time I found my way up on deck we'd already cleared the harbor and were quite a ways out from land. I stood at the railing and watched the waves roll by. I wondered whether I might get seasick, but the deck was as firm and steady as any sidewalk on the mainland.

The ship turned out to be a whole little city unto itself. There was a miniature golf course at one end and a climbing wall at the other. The top deck held two full-sized swimming pools, each already surrounded by sun bathers glistening in cocoa butter. The lower decks held lounges and theaters and eateries and nightclubs. There were shops and kiosks on every level; a sports bar, a wine bar, two piano bars, a margarita bar ("Hi, Jack! Hi, Ciara!"); and any number of different ways to get from any one place to any other: by stairs, by elevator, by main passageway, by side passageway.

Later in the afternoon I sat down at a little coffee shop toward the stern of the ship and nursed a cup of lapsang souchong. Seagulls were gliding along in our tailwind. I'd been making good progress on a couple algorithms at work, and I went over some of the key steps in my mind. It was nice being out of the cubicle for a change, sitting in the sunshine, daydreaming instead of coding, watching the seagulls hover and veer.

My thoughts eventually wandered back to my room situation. I still couldn't understand why Molly was being so agreeable about sharing the cabin. It dawned on me that maybe she didn't think she had any other choice. Maybe she thought that since she was only here as Mrs. Pendergast's guest, she had to do whatever Denise asked.

And so maybe she wasn't really all that used to sharing rooms with random guys either. Maybe she was just doing what she thought was expected. A fellow shipmate--a sort-of member of the same social group she was sort of a member of--needed a place to bunk. She had an empty spot. Didn't shipboard etiquette kind of dictate that she offer to share? But then, by the same token, what did shipboard etiquette expect of me?

I finished my tea and ambled back toward the front of the ship. A raucous game of volleyball was taking place in one of the pools. Someone called my name.

"Are you going back to the room? I forgot my card."

It was Molly. She gave her little shrug. She was wearing a bright yellow bikini. It was fairly conservative, the kind she could wear to the gym, but it called your attention to her shapely legs and her slender tummy. We made our way down the labyrinth of passageways toward our lower deck. The people we passed would have naturally assumed that we were together.

"I figured out about dinner," she said. "Everybody has an assigned time and an assigned table. Ours is in about an hour. We can go together if you want."

After a couple of wrong turns we finally found our corridor and our little room. It hadn't gotten any bigger in the time we'd been away. But there was a fresh bath towel sitting on the bed, folded into a sort of soft-origami swan.

"Look how cute," Molly said. "The housekeepers must have been in."

She put her things on the nightstand and fiddled in her suitcase for some clothes. "I'm just going to take a quick shower first." She went into the bathroom, taking the swan along with her. I sat on the foot of the bed and took a look at the schedule. The walls were thin enough that I could hear the water splashing.

She came out wrapped in the towel. "It's too cramped to get dressed in there," she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. She looked around the room, a bit awkwardly.

So this was one of the guys-and-girls-sharing-a-cabin rules that I wasn't really familiar with. What was I supposed to do while she got dressed? Step into the bathroom to give her some privacy? Or just ignore her, the way I would if I was sharing the room with a guy?

She wasn't completely sure how to play it either. She turned to face the mirror, but that only put her sideways to me. So she turned all the way around, facing the outer door. She tried to give the impression that changing clothes in front of a cabin mate wasn't that big a deal. So I tried to follow her lead.

I didn't stare, and she had her back to me, but it was hard not to notice what she was doing. She started by putting on her bra, but as she was pulling it up, her towel slipped, revealing the two round, pretty cheeks of her bottom. She quickly pulled the towel back into place, and I quickly forced my eyes back to the schedule. So it was only with my peripheral vision that I was able to see her stepping into her panties and skirt and buttoning up her blouse.

Finally she sat on the chair to fasten her sandals. Our eyes met again. "Dinner is supposed to be smart casual." she remarked.

I took that to mean that my polo shirt didn't quite cut it. I'd brought a couple button-down shirts, and so I went over and got one from my suitcase. She nodded approvingly and turned to the mirror, fiddling with her hair. I took off my polo shirt and put on the button one.

--

The dining room was immense, with big round tables like in a reception hall. Molly and I were assigned to a table with some of the other people from our group. I let Molly sit next to Ciara. There was nobody on my other side, which was fine with me. Molly and Ciara found some girl stuff to talk about. The general conversation at the table seemed to be about motorcycles. Denise stopped by to see how everyone was doing.

Molly had the chicken and I had the fish. We resisted the aperitifs, but we both had a glass of wine with our meal. Valentin, our engaging Bulgarian waiter, brought us the chit. We had both just assumed that wine was included in the meal, but he explained that it would be added to our room bill.

"Will they charge it to Mrs. Pendergast?" Molly whispered, afraid they might.

"We'll figure it out," I whispered back, signing for both of us.

The magic show didn't start until eight o'clock, so after dinner Molly suggested we just wander around. She showed me the little art gallery she'd discovered on deck six where it met the central atrium. Photographs of interesting doorways on old, rustic buildings. Just past the art gallery was a little gift shop. We went in, and Molly looked at the jewelry counter. She asked the lady to bring out a necklace that caught her eye. I leafed through the post cards, but I didn't really have anyone to send one to.

We still had forty-five minutes until the show, so I took Molly up to the miniature golf course. We didn't bother keeping score. I made a couple lucky shots. Then, on the next-to-the-last hole, Molly's shot went wild and bounced onto the next green over. It ricocheted off a bumper and coasted down, curving gently, right into the cup. A perfect hole in one into the wrong hole!

"Whoa!" I said. "Remind me never to play you for money."

She raised her putter and blew on the end as if it were a smoking rifle barrel. "You should see me at pinball."

The magic show was a lot of fun. The magician wore a black hat and cape and his pretty assistant wore a slinky black dress. They did all the traditional tricks with rings and scarves and giant cards.

Then, for the grand finale, the magician announced that he was going to make his assistant disappear right before our very eyes. He had her stand at the front of the stage with her arms up and out to the crowd. He waved his wand and--Presto!--she didn't disappear, but her dress did! It was just gone! She kept standing there for a second with her breasts completely exposed and nothing covering her at all except a tiny g-string thong. Finally she realized what had happened. She shrieked, covered herself with her hands, and ran offstage, letting us see that her backside was just as shapely as her front.

The magician was shocked that his trick had backfired. Shocked! But the audience was applauding wildly, and so he turned and bowed. And as he swept off his hat, what should fall out but the assistant's little black dress. He picked it up and gave us a sly grin.

The assistant came out to take her bow, wrapped in a white ship's towel just like the one Molly had been wearing. When she saw what the magician had in his hand, she snatched it back from him with a nasty glare. The crowd ate it up. Molly was laughing as much as I was.

--

After the show we went back up on deck and strolled a while in the cool night air. The ship was plowing along through moonlit waves, stars twinkling in the sky. Toward the stern, lively dance music was thumping up from the nightclubs below. We found our way down to check it out. We spotted Jack and Ciara in the hip-hop club amidst the flashing strobe lights and pulsing lasers. Jack raised his glass and Ciara called something we didn't quite catch.

Further on was the salsa club, throbbing with its own level of intensity. Then came the golden oldies club, somewhat more subdued. And finally a relatively quiet lounge where we sat down and shared a bottle of sparkling water.

"It's pretty amazing, isn't it?" Molly said. "I never thought there would be so many different things going on. A whole resort on a single ship! And they can just hoist up the anchor and sail us away to wherever they want to take us."