Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  Before Mary could answer, Susan heard a sound—the toilet flushing. She blinked in the darkness as Pat crossed the room, returning to bed. Susan was in her stateroom, in her own bed, still without an explanation.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Scientist study the movements of particles and predict their paths. But who can predict the shifts and changes of the human heart?

  —from The Twisted Band

  by Max Merriwell

  Susan stood on the observation deck as the ship approached the dock. She had woken early after a night of restless dreams. The day was bright and clear and cool, and she had come to the observation deck to watch the ship dock.

  They were stopping for a day and a night in the town of Horta on Faial Island. Faial was part of the Azores archipelago, a group of nine islands in the North Atlantic. Susan had read about the Azores in her guidebook. Located 740 miles east of Portugal, the Azores were originally settled by that country and are now a part of Portugal.

  From the observation deck, Susan considered the town of Horta. Whitewashed houses clung to the hills rising from the harbor, their red-tiled roofs shining in the sun. A gray horse pulling a cart ambled along the cobblestone street that followed the waterfront. It was still early morning, and she could see shopkeepers opening their shutters, setting out their wares.

  The sun was warm on her face, and it looked like it would be a beautiful day. A light breeze tousled her hair. She was looking forward to getting off the ship, wandering through the town. She didn’t want to think about Max or Mary or Weldon or quantum physics.

  “Good morning.”

  She glanced in the direction of the voice and saw Tom, crossing the deck toward her. “Good morning,” she said, surprised to see him.

  He gestured up at the bridge. “I was up there and I decided I’d better come down and protect you.”

  She looked up at the bridge. The sun shone on the windows, which reflected the brilliant blue sky. “Protect me from what?”

  “From Geoffrey, the ship’s navigator.”

  Susan blinked, startled. “The ship’s navigator? Why do I need protection from the ship’s navigator?”

  “The other night, when you and I were watching that UFO, Geoffrey was up on the bridge.” Tom gazed at the town, clearly choosing his words carefully. “Geoffrey is a bit of a ladies’ man,” he said slowly. “Yes?” Susan was baffled. She didn’t have a clue where this was going.

  “Well, Geoffrey was up on the bridge just now, and he suggested that I ask you out to dinner. Well, actually, he said that if I didn’t ask you out to dinner, he’d come down here, introduce himself, ask you out himself. I figured that it’s my duty as a security officer to protect you from that.” Tom shook his head. “You wouldn’t want to go out with Geoffrey.”

  “I don’t even know Geoffrey,” Susan said. She was having a hard time getting a handle on this.

  “Trust me—you don’t want to know Geoffrey. Do you have any plans for tonight?” he asked.

  Susan shook her head.

  “I know a restaurant in a little village, not too far from here have the night off, and I thought you might like to get off the ship. This restaurant has the best seafood on the island.”

  She finally realized that he was asking her out on a date. How strange. She hadn’t been on a date with anyone except Harry since college, when she and Harry had started going together. “Seafood,” she murmured. She studied his face, then returned his smile. “And you’re just asking me out to protect me. As part of your duty as a security officer.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Of course, there are some duties I enjoy more than others.”

  She nodded slowly. “I guess if it’s your job, I have to go along with it.”

  He nodded. “I suppose you do,” he said solemnly.

  She glanced up at the bridge. “Shall we wave to Geoffrey?” she suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Tom said. “I think it would just encourage him. I’ll tell him you’ve been taken into protective custody.”

  Susan returned to the stateroom where Pat was just waking up. Susan told her friend that she’d be having dinner with Tom that night.

  “That’s great!” Pat said.

  Susan shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been on a date since before I married Harry I never liked dating anyway.”

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  “It always made me feel like I was participating in some kind of ritual that had rules I didn’t understand. Seemed like everyone understood the rules except me. Getting engaged to Harry was such a relief.”

  “You make your own rules,” Pat told her.

  Susan nodded. That sounded like something Mary Maxwell would say.

  “Or ask Tom what he thinks the rules are,” Pat said. “Tom’s a nice guy. You’ll go out to dinner. Sounds like he has a lovely romantic evening planned. You’ll have a fine time.”

  Susan hoped she was right.

  Late that afternoon, Susan stood on the promenade deck, near where the gangway led down to the dock. It had been a lovely day so far. No sign of Weldon or Mary. No uncontrollable dancing. No wolves. She and Pat had left the ship and wandered around the small town, having lunch in a cafe by the waterfront. They hadn’t talked about quantum physics at all.

  A breeze carried the aroma of roasting sausage up from the dock below. A man had set up a grill at the end of the dock, and he was doing a fine business selling to the vendors who had come to offer their wares to the tourists.

  Vendors selling jewelry, postcards, and souvenir trinkets had set up their stalls on the dock. They called out their wares in Portuguese and English; passengers shouted to each other over the crowd.

  “Sam, come here and look at these bracelets,” called a woman in a pink-flowered muumuu. “They’re such a bargain!”

  “Never buy anything at the dock,” Tom said from the railing beside Susan. “It’s never a bargain.”

  She turned to look at him. She hadn’t seen him since early that morning.

  He wasn’t in his uniform. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt patterned in turquoise blue flowers and his eyes looked very blue. He was wearing faded jeans, well-washed and comfortable. If he hadn’t spoken before she looked at him, she might not have recognized him.

  “You’re out of uniform,” she said.

  “Out of uniform and off duty. At least, I’ll be off duty as soon as I’m off the ship. When I’m on board, I’m never really off duty. But tonight, I’m leaving my pager behind.” He grinned.

  Seeing him in civilian clothes, she felt nervous.

  “You’re frowning,” he said. “Why’s that?”

  “Just thinking,” she said. She hesitated, then said, “I guess this is a date. This may sound silly, but I’ve never known how to behave on dates. It always seemed to me that there were some kind of rules that I never learned.”

  He frowned. “Only one rule,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “Once we’re off the ship, we don’t talk about the ship any more.” She thought for a moment. “I can manage that.”

  He spread his hands. “That’s the only rule.”

  She smiled at him. “You look good out of uniform,” she said. She thought she saw an expression of relief flicker across his face.

  “You ready to go?” he asked.

  “Ready when you are.”

  He led the way to the top of the gangplank, greeting the man who checked her cruise card at the security station. “Hey, Don, how’s it going?”

  “No problems.” Don’s eyes lingered on Susan for a moment. Then he smiled. “Have a good time.”

  Susan had the definite impression that she had been sized up.

  As they walked down the gangway, she said, “So I suppose Don will be asking you about me later.”

  Tom shrugged, looking sheepish. “Well, he’s already congratulated me on asking you out. I think Geoffrey’s been talking. Or maybe Ian.” Tom glanced at her. “Sorry. Being on the crew of a cruise ship is kin
d of like living in a very small town.” They reached the end of the gangway. “You ready to stop talking about the ship?” he asked.

  “Ready.”

  “Then come on.”

  He took her arm and led her through the crowd, waving aside vendors who held out trays of jewelry, handfuls of postcards. He called out to them in Portuguese and headed in the direction that they waved.

  “You speak Portuguese?” she called over the noise.

  “A little. I speak a little Portuguese, a little French, a little Spanish, a little Italian, a little Greek. Just enough of every language to get myself in trouble around the world.” He glanced at her, grinning. He seemed much more relaxed now than he had on the ship. “Just enough to find a cab. Here we are.” They had reached the waterfront street. He waved to a battered black Toyota with numbers painted in yellow on the side. The car pulled over.

  “Hello, my friend,” the driver called through the open window. He was a gray-haired man wearing a cap tipped back on his head at a jaunty angle. His neatly trimmed beard and thin mustache gave him a roguish look. “Where are you going?”

  Tom named a village and a restaurant and the driver smiled. “Very good,” he said. “There is a festival in the village today.”

  Tom opened the taxi door for Susan, then slid in beside her. “What sort of festival?”

  “Music, dancing, a carnival! It is to celebrate the miracle of Saint Erasmus. Five hundred years ago, he rescued all the fishermen of the village from a terrible storm. So today, the village feasts.”

  “Saint Erasmus,” Tom said. “That’s Saint Elmo, the patron saint of sailors.”

  “I’ve read about Saint Elmo’s fire,” Susan said. “But I’ve never seen it.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I’ve never read about it. But I’ve seen it a few times.”

  She bit her lip, wondering if he was laughing at her. Then she decided that she didn’t care. He could tease her if he wanted. “Then we have the perfect balance,” she said. “Book learning and real life experience.”

  The taxi had turned away from the waterfront and was jouncing up a narrow cobblestone street. Through the open windows, Susan could see the whitewashed walls of the houses, so close she could have reached out and touched them. Where the whitewashed walls were chipped, Susan could see black stone.

  The driver kept up a running commentary as he drove. “These houses, they are built of black lava rock, cut from the hills. They come from the fire of the volcano. The white—it comes from limestone, which came from the sea. So our houses come from fire and water, the volcano and the sea.”

  Children playing in the street scattered to the sides as the taxi approached, standing by the houses and staring in the taxi windows at Tom and Susan. When Susan smiled at them, they waved and called to her in Portuguese.

  The taxi was approaching the edge of town when Susan heard goats bleating. The taxi slowed and stopped. A herd of goats filled the cobblestone street. The goatherd, an old man with a crooked stick, shouted at his goats and urged them forward. The animals crowded past the car, peering in the windows with wide yellow eyes.

  “It is good luck,” the driver shouted over the bleating goats. “Meeting one goat on the road is good luck. Meeting so many—it is the very best luck.”

  Susan laughed as a goat stuck his head in the window, then leaned back as he stretched out his neck, trying to nibble on her shirt. She bumped into Tom and he put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. He was laughing, too. He reached past her and tapped the goat on the nose. “That’s enough luck,” he told the goat. The animal looked offended and withdrew. “I think it’s even luckier to have a goat eat your clothing,” Tom told Susan.

  The car lurched, throwing them together, and turned a corner, leaving the goats and the houses behind. Suddenly, the harbor was spread below them. The Odyssey was a toy boat, sparkling white against the blue water. The sun was a flattened red disk, bisected by the horizon.

  “Look,” Susan said. “The sun is setting.”

  “Maybe we’ll see the green flash. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve read about it in Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator. When conditions are just right, the Earth’s atmosphere bends the light of the setting sun so that the last bit of light is a brilliant green.”

  Susan laughed. “I read about it in a Jules Verne story, but I’ve never seen it either.”

  The taxi slowed, following a rough, winding road that ran along the top of a ridge. For a moment, they passed behind a clump of trees, and the sun vanished from sight.

  “You’ve been looking for years,” Susan said, “and you’ve never seen it? Are you sure it really exists?”

  Tom shrugged. “Nope. Could be that someone with too much imagination made it up. But I’ll keep looking anyway.”

  She smiled at him. “I don’t think you’re as practical as you pretend,” she said.

  The road emerged from the trees, and Susan saw the sun again, still lower in the sky, just a fraction of its bright disk above the horizon.

  “Almost there,” Susan said.

  Another clump of trees blocked the view, then the road curved and the sun was visible again, just a sliver of red at the horizon. As Susan watched, the last touch of red disappeared and she saw a brilliant green light, just for a moment.

  She turned to look at Tom. “Did you see it?”

  He was shaking his head, looking startled. “I guess it does exist.” Susan grinned. Irrationally, she felt that she was somehow responsible for the green flash, as if by talking about it she had helped cause it to appear. As the taxi turned into a valley, she saw a cluster of lights below, a small village in a natural harbor.

  The taxi took them to the main square, which was crowded with people and booths. The big stone church that formed one side of the square was decorated with tiny white lights; colored lights festooned the trees and the booths. As they got out of the taxi, Susan could hear music from the far side of the square—guitars and singing. Men in the booths were calling to the people—she couldn’t understand the words, but she knew what they were saying. “Come try my game. Come buy my food. Come and spend your money and be happy.”

  When Susan was a child, the nearby church had held a carnival to raise money each summer. For a week, the church parking lot was filled with rides and cotton candy stands and booths where you threw coins on plates and rings over bottles and spun a wheel to win a giant stuffed dog. Susan had loved that carnival. Each year, that carnival transformed the mundane parking lot into someplace exotic and wonderful, a place where anything could happen.

  “The restaurant is over this way,” Tom said, taking her arm. “Oh, let’s go to the carnival first,” she said. “Come on!”

  She gave him no time to disagree. Without hesitation, she led him across the street, heading for the music, the barkers, the booths. Children with sparklers ran beneath the colored lights, calling to each other. The aroma of roasting sausage and barbecue and frying bread filled the air.

  Susan stopped at the edge of a crowd that was watching a man demonstrate a set of kitchen knives. The man chattered at an enormous speed as he slashed an aluminum can in half, then used the same knife to cut a ripe tomato into thin slices. “I could swear that the same guy sold knives at the state fair when I was a kid,” she told Tom, “except the guy at the state fair had a Brooklyn accent.”

  They walked past a game of chance where you could bet on a spinning wheel and win a garish clock. They passed a game where young men threw baseballs at targets to win stuffed animals for young women. Susan wondered whether Tom would stop to try to win her a toy. Harry would have done that. Harry would have insisted on winning the biggest stuffed dog, whether she wanted it or not. Susan was relieved when Tom glanced at the toys and kept walking.

  A moment later, he stopped at a shooting game. The target was beside a puppet theater where marionettes hung lifeless. When Tom hit the bullseye, the theater lit up and the puppets danced. Tom smiled at Susan. “Better than an ugly toy
,” he said, and she smiled back.

  Susan stopped at another booth, where people tossed coins at a stack of sparkling glassware. If a coin stayed on a plate, the person won that plate. Susan watched as a determined young woman tossed coin after coin, trying to get one to stay on the topmost piece, a spectacular cut-glass platter. Every coin the woman threw bounced off the platter and fell among the other glassware, ringing against the plates and cups as it fell.

  “Do you have any coins?” Susan asked Tom. He pulled a handful from his pocket and held them on his flattened palm. He looked amused. He was humoring her.

  “These things are impossible to win,” he said.

  She nodded, taking the coins from his hand and holding them out to the teenager who manned the booth. “Which one?” she asked him, and he pointed to three coins of the right denomination. The woman who had been trying to win the platter had stopped to watch Susan and Tom.

  Susan felt good. She felt strong. She felt ridiculously confident. She wasn’t sure why. If this was someone’s dream, she thought, she would win the platter. If this was a story someone was telling, she would win. It was only right.

  She took the three coins the teenager had indicated, and she returned the rest of the money to Tom. “The secret,” she told him, “is not to throw it too hard.”

  He nodded, still smiling.

  She tossed the first coin, lofting it high in a gentle arc that carried it to the platter. It hit with a musical “ping” and bounced away.

  “A little too high,” she said. “It had too much energy when it hit.”

  Tom nodded again. His eyes were narrowing and she could see that he was wondering how seriously to take all this. The woman who had tried to win the platter was still watching. Another woman came up. The first woman spoke to the second woman in Portuguese, then they both watched.

  Susan tossed the second coin, going for a lower arc. It hit the platter and barely bounced, but it had too much forward momentum. It skidded right off the side.

  “Too low,” Tom said, and she nodded, holding the last coin pinched between her fingers. She faced the platter again, carefully measuring the distance with her eyes. Then she tossed the coin, lofting it high, but just high enough to reach the platter, giving it no more energy than it needed.