By Paulette Perhach
Grand Prize Bronze winner in the 20th Annual Solas Awards
Just when she thought she was international enough to tan topless…
From far too close, a man’s voice asked, “Anyone sitting here?”
I turned my head, keeping my parts held down to the towel, to see two guys standing over me, a bucket of beer in hand, blocking out the Caribbean sky. They were older by about a decade, at least in their 30s, and, although they were topless, too, something about their manufactured smiles gave me the impression that they had booked this cruise as part of their search for those coeds they saw in American Pie 5.
The one with the rainbow-tint reflective Oakleys pointed at the two lounge chairs next to me, like right next to me, lounge chairs I had assumed would remain empty or, if needed, dragged away in observance of the unspoken personal space radius that I’d seen as the norm among the women in this sacred sanctuary I’d come to calling the Boob Deck.
Stomach down, I saw no option but to report the truth. I had come to the Boob Deck alone, so no, no one was sitting there.
They creaked into the lounge chairs, and Tinted Oakleys now lay as close to me as he would have been had we been lying in bed together.
I stuck my face back in my book, tucked in my arms to cover any side-boob, and prayed, “Please don’t talk to me. Please don’t talk to me.”
“So…”
Here we were, no doubt, at Step 2 in a fool-proof plan hatched in their room and sealed with a high-five.
They asked me questions — about my hometown, work, the cruisey b.s. that you let sail into the air and off with the breeze, and I answered then put my face in my book each time. But the cruise was winding down and, obviously, they hadn’t had their afore-fantacized orgy yet, so they wouldn’t give it up. I relented, put the book down, and resigned to the fact that I would have to let these douchebags think they were getting somewhere.
Oakleys offered me one of their beers. Here we go with Step 3, but I took it anyway because it wasn’t $9 and I knew their presence was about to cost me my time. I put it to my lips and tipped it up while keeping my chest pressed to the chair, as if I were a participant in a main-pool deck drinking game where I had to lie across the bar like a snake and take a shot without choking.
More questions, while I looked at my face and bare shoulder reflected in his mirrored Oakleys. It dragged on, me stuck there in a conversation that belonged on the main deck, cutting into my Boob Deck Me Time. Holding my face up with my head turned to the side, while keeping the rest of me flush against the chair started to hurt my neck.
Soon, I noticed another kind of pain, an ominous prickling I knew well.
My back was burning in the sun.
But I can’t just flip over, I thought. My boobs are under there!
~ ~ ~
Only the worst kind of person complains about a free vacation, even if it is on a contrived lap around the same ports filled with the same trinkets, a guided tour caged into the roped-off areas that are only foreign in the technical sense, a conveyor belt of tourist transports arriving even before the wake of the last cruise ship has settled, in a factory of safe entertainment painted up to look like travel. Therefore, on this family trip, I put on a smile, so as not to be the worst kind of person.
Already in my early 20s and not yet having left North America, I had dreamed of being a great international traveler since I was 3, when I told my daycare my mom was taking me to Europe, which she most certainly was not. I longed for somewhere real and un-branded. No logo or tagline, just life.
Instead, I posed for forced pictures in front of the company’s logo. The casino sat empty, low-ceilinged and already haunted by the ghost of smoke, with pictures of smiling people winning money on its ads. The ATM waited to charge its $6 fee. I felt trapped on a buoyant shrine to all that I had longed to escape in America.
Inside our cabin with a single port hole window, I didn’t feel like I could breathe in all the way. Outside our cabin, with the ads and the announcements and The Others, I didn’t feel like I could breathe out all the way.
My family and I claimed lounge chairs with towels on the main pool deck, just pecking distance from the strangers herded in next to us, kids squealed as they ran through the narrow passages between chairs, and everyone tried to look like the people on the brochure. Inside, our photos sat on a wall to be sold back to us.
The crew intrigued me, as they were mostly international hires, and I felt the desire to give them a knowing nod as we passed in the halls, as if to say, “I hate these people, too.”
I circled the ship like a penned-up dog, looking for a way out.
It wasn’t until the end of the second day that I finally found something new: A little swinging door, marked with an all-caps sign, “ADULTS ONLY,” with a no-cameras symbol underneath, blocking a stairway that led up to open sky.
Being an adult, I climbed those stairs. I found a near-empty deck wrapped around the smokestack of the ship, where, sprawled across one of the lone reclining chairs of this deserted island, lay a woman, face down in nothing but the sunshine and a thong.
The next day I recruited my sister and we pushed back the little swinging door, climbed the narrow stairs. We passed half-naked women and dragged lounge chairs to a generous distance, like normal people.
The steel drum music from down below was nearly carried off by the wind as we reclined and, with the nonchalance of French women on the Riviera (or so I had to imagine), we untied our tops and dropped them to the deck beside our chairs. I introduced the skin of my bare chest to the sun, and the Caribbean breeze wafted past parts that had never felt the air in a public place, and that feeling — any feeling you’ve never felt before, those that promise that the world is so vast and life so short that the surprises will never run out — told me that after all this sightseeing, I was finally traveling.
That was days ago. Now, under the hot blanket of my burning skin and the stare of the Tinted Oakley sunglasses, I tried to calculate how long I had been in that position: too long for a moley person whose ancestors evolved their melanin levels on the arctic line, now even closer to the equator than back home in Florida, a person who had already spent her youth crisping her skin at the beach.
These guys were nowhere near leaving.
“Oh really,” I said, “Ohio, huh.”
Yes, burning, burning flesh.
My options were:
A. To pick up my bikini top, inch those two triangles of dignity between me and the towel until they were hopefully covering everything, fumble for the dangling strings with my fingers and, with my face smashing into the chair, squirming on my belly like a fallen baby penguin, trying to tie my top back on, then rolling over, and, (after a nip check), seeing Tinted Oakleys looking down at me like I’m the weirdo.
B. To let my back sizzle and pop like a slice of cheap buffet bacon, for whatever amount of time it would take these Boob Deck sightseers to drink through their bucket of beer and use all their internet-researched tactics to try to get me back to their room, then buy a $26 bottle of aloe in the gift shop and spend the rest of the trip trapped in the dark of my room screaming into the service phone, “More ice, dammit!”
Or, C. There was option C.
(Option C cup)
While I weighed the fate of my skin, the sunshine bit down.
I considered the horror stories my mom texted me from her dermatologist’s office.
I considered how, in life before the Boob Deck, I had so carefully doled out permission to see my bra buddies. Multiple dates…usually. Proof of non-creepiness. Must be funny, at a minimum.
Here these creeps were going to get front-row seats when they had not made me laugh and I would rather puke up that morning’s margarita than think about them enjoying the sight of my nipular neighborhood.
But the moles! The cancer seeds sprinkled across my back, soaking up ultraviolet radiation like Melanoma Miracle-Gro, ready to burst and kill me dead in my 30’s before I even had a chance to see lava or make out with an Italian guy.
But I couldn’t just flip. Could I?
As if to answer, the pain singed again. I’d have to decide soon or the sun would decide for me. A few more minutes and it’d be the $26 aloe and the blister popping. Think of the pus. The oozing. My nephew was just a boy.
So fine. Fine! This was the Boob Deck, after all. I was a certified boob-decker. I was a traveler, I was adventurous, and my boobs were, too.
Therefore, in the middle of our casual conversation, in between an “uh-huh” and a “huh!,” I steadied my resolve and raised myself up on one elbow, then I rotated my body, laid my back on the shaded relief of the towel, and my breasts flopped into the conversation.
The reflective sunglasses and the guy’s conversational tone stayed steady while, not two feet from his face, my nipples squinted in the sun. I stayed steady as well, as if this was who I was and had always been — someone who didn’t mind discussing the merits of last night’s lobster dinner while seeing all of my own Creation reflected back at me in the mirror of a stranger’s sunglasses.
But inside, the person I had always been squirmed under the bright light, beating down on me and exposing me at such a short distance in front of two guys who were worse than strangers. Whereas the sun was burning me at my back, the stare from behind those Oakleys was burning even harder in the front. I wanted to cross my arms to cover myself, and, like a suspect in an interrogation room with a one-way mirror, yell, “I know you’re in there, watching me!”
My squirm did not dissolve, but I stayed long enough for it to seem that it had never been there, to show them that yes, I was brazen. Yes, I was international. I was a Boob Decker.
As soon as that was clear to everyone, I thanked the reflective glasses for the beer, stowed my breasts, and walked down the stairs, to the door that had no warning from the inside looking out, and I swung it back from whence I came. But I still had that original feeling I felt before this experience had been desecrated, one I knew I wanted to chase.
~ ~ ~
I did see lava. I did make out with an Italian guy, underneath the Milky Way in the middle of the Bolivian Salt Flats, no less. I traveled enough to see I was a total spoiled brat for complaining about a cruise, even to myself. And I grew into my womanhood enough to be able to say, “No, no one’s sitting here, and no one’s going to.”
I have made my own way, neither by leaning fully in to corporate travel, nor fully rejecting it. An all-inclusive in Costa Rica here, a grungy couch surf in Colombia there. Up all night in a grass hut in Thailand and sleeping in at a boutique hotel in Paris. Most recently, when we hit up the easternmost island of the Bahamas at the tail end of shoulder season, my best friend and I would skinny dip at sunrise, two women, in our freedom, in our world, under the gaze of no one but the sun.
~ ~ ~
Paulette Perhach is a former Peace Corps Volunteer and regular contributor to The New York Times. Her work has previously appeared in Vox, Elle, The Washington Post, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. She’s the author of two multi-million-reader viral essays.
Her book, Welcome to the Writer’s Life, was published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books, part of the Penguin Random House publishing family, and was selected as one of Poets & Writers’ Best Books for Writers.
She blogs about a writer’s craft and life at welcometothewriterslife.com and leads meditation and writing sessions through A Very Important Meeting.