First there is the paper folio of tickets, parents’ excitable talk. During long afternoons, your sister holds away the delicate, flimsy sheets, but she points out her printed name there, and yours. Then, the sudden bustle of departure: the four of you crammed into the backseat of your neighbors’ station wagon, the drive down to the city along the river. A ramp up into the broken concrete of the old piers on the west side. Unloading a mountain of matched canvas luggage, huge checker cabs line up behind, honking to move you on—there is novelty and thrill even in that. Finally, there is the boarding of the ship: a smoothly suppressed urgency, acres of royal blue carpet, brass railings. Your cabin is two rooms; a fruit bowl wrapped in bright yellow cellophane. 

After the toy horns and waving on deck, the city is pushed away, leaving only the ship and the immense water. It is not the storybook sea of childhood illustrations. It is the whole world. Within two days that ocean rises up, big and dark, a heavy, roiling green, under hooded autumn skies that warn you—when you are chaperoned out there by an incautious, joyful mother, through the double doors to the deserted, howling decks—that nothing will be as you expect it. Deck chairs, lashed together, skitter and jump against those restraints, straining toward the dark water beyond the rail. As long as you have that hand to hold on to—that joyful face, soaked already, eyes smiling, to look into—for at least that long it’s exciting, rather than terrifying. The spray is salt in your mouth and stinging eyes, the wind an oboe drone in your cold red little ears. The doors, caught by the gale when your mother opens them, nearly knock you both down. Inside again, they slam shut behind you. A sudden silence descends, waiting for resolution. You are still holding her hand. She is still smiling.

Then, there are a million little things; a week back then accreting those details into an eternity. Public spaces: an endless procession of circular couches and smoked glass in novel arrangements. A lifeboat drill, led with theatrical charm by a crewmember dressed in the wardrobe of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. His rolling patter, almost manic, deflecting the risk below the instruction. The lifeboat behind him so small it’s only a model, a set. 

Being dressed for dinner. Your mother, able to tie a tie on you; your father, only on himself. Being introduced: “gentleman” for you, “little lady” for your sister. These words are known to you from a ritual of gentle chiding, a spur to better behavior, and in your suburban New York childhood they appear publicly only on Television. The Ladies here introduced are a blur of chiffon, viscose, periwinkle and tangerine. Well-preserved faces. The Men: shoes as glossy as oil. 

There is the sense, gradually dawning, that your parents—your mother perhaps especially—come from people who crossed the Atlantic; that you yourself therefore do as well. In 1976, at five years old, you grip this thread; it appears to make sense of something. Later it will not; though you continue to grasp, it trails behind you attached to no object, to no toy ship. You will have to keep moving.

Down in the cabin, in the North Atlantic gloaming, dark water heaves behind thick glass, very close. The heft of it demands respect. Your sister, three years older, normally so fearless, is in the bunk below hugging a pillow, big eyes watching. 

And your parents are getting ready, transforming—your father in his “cricket suit” (tails) and your mother in your favorite: a flowing emerald gown with open sleeves that clip to bracelets at her wrist. A porter is on the way to keep watch while they are out. You wait, your attention now drawn to the perfectly spherical light bulb mounted just above the bunk, so close. It glows with warmth, seductive, like a perfect fruit or the sun itself. It hums, calling out to you, merging with the deep thrum of the ship’s engines, felt through the whole of your little body. You reach. You cup the globe of its burning heat in the tender palm of your open hand. And in the screaming pain, you cannot pull it away.

At once, they are parents again: that delicate balance of dismay at your foolishness (“What were you thinking?”) and sympathy. Sympathy that could keep the ship afloat. Your father gives his share. He—a doctor, after all—holding your palm in his own larger hands, inspecting the burn, his love expressed in ministering to a five-year-old boy with solemnity, seriousness, and with total earnestness. The ship does not sink.

In compensation for the throbbing pain, a trip to the infirmary, carried in your pajamas, sister in her embroidered nightgown, parents still in evening clothes. A salve. A bandage. 

Then, the parents do go out and have their evening. The porter comes, and sleep.

More dinners, collars and ties. The onboard ritual of afternoon tea. The shipboard world serene, repetitious. You believe that things will stay this way. You will stay five years old. Your hand will heal onboard. The world has an agreed-upon structure, there is safety in that. You believe that your parents will remain fixed inside this structure. 

That your parents will remain at all. 

Your mother, years later now, is gone. Your father, an old man, loiters near the lifeboat station.

Barely perceptible in that bright society above, but manifest late at night, in the dark, in your little bunk—in cabins alone, or in cabins close with the breath of other bodies—is the only constant thing: the swell of the ship, rolled over and back, weight displacing against the tide-tugged immensity below; mass in motion, forevermore.

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James Gibbs is a writer and Company Dramaturg with The Builders Association, a NYC-based multimedia performance company. He wrote or co-wrote all of its recent large-scale productions and his work has appeared at major venues nationwide, including B.A.M. in Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in Storyscape Journal and been anthologized in The Writers Studio at 30, published by Epiphany Editions.