Slightly surreal, with a wealth of implied history — a big story in a small package.
My wife Caroline couldn't stop talking about the women knitting all over the ship. There were a hundred and thirty of them, one told us in the elevator, on the way to the chocolate buffet. A tour organized by a yarn store just outside of Rochester. Some were young, some old. They sat together in groups of three and four, knitting in the ship's lounges, dining rooms, on deck chairs; they knitted before breakfast, under the mid-day sun, and well after midnight. They sipped iced tea and strawberry daiquiris.
"I can't imagine going on a cruise to knit," Caroline said. "Can you imagine anything more boring than that?"
It wasn't a question I was supposed to answer.
Caroline and I were on the cruise to Nova Scotia for our twenty-fifth anniversary. I arranged for fall flowers and fresh fruit to greet us every morning, chilled champagne every night. We had sex the first day at sea. Then Caroline bought a suitcase full of perfume at the duty free shop. And I played blackjack until the casino closed at dawn.
On the second day, the ship's captain presided over the renewal of our wedding vows at sunset on the promenade deck. A knitting group formed nearby as the ship's photographer, a bossy Filipino man with a permanent scowl, angled us into the most unnatural position for a portrait.
"You must face away to look close," he said. "Trust me."
Then the flash blinded us both and the group of women sat quietly, knitting.
"They left their husbands and families at home," my wife would tell me later.
"Over a hundred women on a ship without their husbands," she said, as she trapped her filet mignon with her fork and clenched her jaw like our son Daniel did when he was nine and the dentist billed us bi-monthly.
I took Caroline's hand in mine, and said, "Remember when you took those piano lessons? Remember how much you enjoyed it?"
"That was fifteen years ago. And I was horrid. You used to leave the room when I played."
A large group of grey-haired women in knit sweaters entered the dining room. For a moment it felt as if they all smiled together, in step, like synchronized swimmers.
"I wonder how long it takes to knit a whole sweater," I said.
I don't know what I was thinking. But when I looked up, there was a tear in my wife's eye. I saw it glisten in the light just before she turned away from me and stared out into the dark waters of the moonless night.
Mary Lynn Reed lives and writes in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Her fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, Karamu, Happy, Night Train, and Per Contra, among other places.