Behind the bathroom was Father’s bed, which reached from wall to wall in a big triangular shape, fitting into the nose of the boat. The walls around it had built-in cubbyholes and a small wooden bookshelf where he kept his book of dirty limericks as well as other books by Ogden Nash and Jack London. Above the bed was a square hatch that could be opened for air or escape, if necessary. Underneath Father’s bed were storage tanks for water. They carried all their freshwater with them, and the fluid was doled out like liquid gold, though Girl hated the plastic-y taste.
Father insisted that Brother and Girl learn the nautical vernacular for everything and had even sent the children a young sailor’s dictionary to New York for them to memorize, but they didn’t. Girl thought it was dumb to call ropes lines or, even worse, halyards. They were just white nylon and cotton ropes with a hint of blue thread running through them. They didn’t need a special name, in her opinion, but if Girl used the word rope her father would suddenly act as if he was struck deaf—same thing if Girl said bathroom instead of head, or called the galley a kitchen. Front was fore and back was aft, port meant the left and starboard was the right. That made Girl mad. She was left-handed, and she wanted the left side to be called starboard. It was so much prettier sounding than port.
Girl straddled the empty space of the cockpit with her legs, each foot solidly on one of the teak benches that had roughened to gray in the salty air. Girl first came to know teak in this dried silver state, her hands and feet learning its texture as she traversed the boat monkey-like on all fours when they were underway. When they oiled the deck and benches at the end of each summer and returned the brown tackiness to the boards, Girl was always disappointed. The chore of rubbing linseed oil by hand into the wood in long, even strokes wasn’t an unpleasant one, but it gummed up the feel of the wood and held the soul of the teak at bay, trapped beneath a layer of emollient. Besides, the boat was named the Ghost, and ghosts were white, gray, or silver. They were never golden brown. Girl steered the boat with the five-foot-long tiller, made of varnished wood as thick as her forearm, coming to a phallic knob at the end.
“Most people stand to one side to steer with a till,” her father said, “but if you stand like this, with one foot on each side and the tiller between your legs, you can feel the rhythm of the waves in your body, and you’ll make course corrections instinctively. Besides, you aren’t tall enough to see over the dodger if you stand in the cockpit itself.”
Girl was ten in 1983, and not yet five feet tall. With one foot on each built-in storage locker Girl added eighteen inches to her height, just enough to see over the blue canvas windbreak at the very back of the forty-four-foot sailboat. The tiller rose between her legs and Girl gripped it in front of her stomach, slightly uncomfortable about the sexuality of it. Her shadow rendered her a long-haired boy with a foot-long erect penis. Girl disliked looking down at her hand holding this rod in the same way her father and brother held their bodies when they peed off the deck, so Girl kept her eyes on the horizon and avoided looking at the tiller. It wasn’t that Girl minded steering this way, actually, but she didn’t want her father to make a joke about her having a penis, and Girl hoped he didn’t notice her shadow. Girl and Brother had seen strippers rubbing poles between their legs on a dirty movie their father had left in the VCR for a week the year before. Brother was one year older than Girl, and he watched that tape over and over in the living room until Father returned it to the video store. Girl wanted to watch the cartoon movie they rented, Shinbone Alley, but Brother was bigger and always got his way. The dirty movie was called The Van, and it was kind of fascinating, but Girl could only sit through it once. The movie caused a tickling between her legs, and she didn’t like to feel that while sitting next to Brother. Girl was never sure if her father left the dirty movie accidentally or as a gift to his son.
Actually, the Ghost wasn’t really forty-four feet long. Years after the boat was sold, Brother looked it up in the Alaska registry of vessels, and they learned the sailboat only measured twenty-eight feet. Their father had inexplicably added sixteen feet to the length. As a child, though, forty-four was the number Girl took as fact as solidly as she knew her address or age. As a child, forty-four feet was the length of her yard back home, almost, or as big as a floating Winnebago. Girl told everyone, “My dad has a forty-four-foot yacht,” which they probably didn’t believe. Some of the kids thought Girl had made up her father entirely. What kid in suburban New York has a father who lives in Alaska, let alone one who
