The Evolution of Jane Read Free Page B

my roommate on the trip. But I knew the eco-bag-lady was somehow meant for my cabin. There was an unaccountable, hideous inevitability to it.
    I also thought of the possibility of sharing a cabin with Martha, of course: perhaps forcing the issue of whether we were or were not still friends by cramped, elbow-jostling intimacy, perhaps to punish her for her disloyalty with constant cold companionship, or perhaps just to have an extended sleepover as in the halcyon days of youth. I wasn't too clear on my motives. But I did realize that Martha probably got to have her own room, like the teacher on a class trip to Washington, D.C. For my hubris in hoping to share a cabin with her, I would be rewarded with the weirdo in the kimono and Ashanti headdress.
    I listened almost impassively as Pablo, a very young Ecuadorian with curly black hair and the only crew member who spoke English, gave us our room assignments, and my roommate fears were confirmed.
    She waved at me.
    I waved back.
    Around us rose a confused competitive murmur. Our room was one of only two on an upper deck. Other passengers looked suspiciously at me and the roommate. A silent question rippled through the group: Would our room be better than theirs? Or worse?
    It was better. It had windows and a door that opened out onto the deck. The cabins below were prettier, bigger berths, with walls of varnished wood. But they smelled of fuel, and their little portholes were useless. You couldn't open them for air because they were nailed shut, and they were far too cloudy to let in the sunlight. In my cabin, though my knees bumped my roommate's if we both sat on the bunks at the same time, the fresh chill of the air blew through, from door to bright, open window. I was grateful for that breeze, for although we had not yet begun to move, the slight swaying of the boat was already making me a little seasick.
    "Just like Charles Darwin himself," said my new roommate, with a reassuring pat on the back.
    Our cabin was not much bigger than a train compartment. Pablo ducked his curly head in the open door to tell us we must each take only one shower a day, or two short showers. Martha had the other cabin on the upper deck. I saw her walk by as Pablo added that we should not flush toilet paper down the toilet, but deposit it in the wastebasket, which he would empty frequently. He spoke in a beautiful, lilting English, which I barely listened to, so intent was I on Martha, incongruous, unexpected, out of place, a fossil, my seashell in the Andes.
    My roommate introduced herself as "Gloria Steinham, no relation." I guessed she was about my mother's age, and I suspected that even in that cramped space, her knees would seldom have a chance to bump mine, so infrequently did she sit still long enough to get in the way. She told me she was a science teacher, which perhaps I should have guessed, as she seemed to be wearing around her neck all the specimens she would need for an entire unit on shells, seedpods, or canine teeth. Then she announced that she was never seasick, and that she did not snore.
    "Which is a blessing," she said.
    "My mother's a teacher, too."
    "She should have come with you!"
    I tried to picture my mother on the
Huxley.
    "Well, if she could be captain, maybe," I said.

2
    E ACH MORNING, my mother could be heard saying the same thing: "Chaos." She would murmur it in her soft voice as she mulched her garden or buttoned her coat or stared out the window at a cloudless sky. "Chaos." For years I thought "chaos" was an exclamation of some sort, an expression of abstracted joy, not unlike "wow," for my mother smiled as she said it and shook her head, as if in wonder.
    When I think back, her mild observations of chaos were not so much complaints as welcomes, greetings, like a sailor breathing in the salt air. Even her hair looked windblown in anticipation. I used to imagine my mother as a sea captain, like her sea-captain grandfather, Frederick Barlow.
    My middle name, as I've