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Several summers later my lover and I took the morning ferry boat to Provincetown. We sailed through Boston Harbor at nine into a dense fog. This caused great disappointment outside on the deck because it was late August and quite probably the last chance to tan. Liat and I put our sweatshirts on and I wiped the mist off a pair of sunglasses with my kafia; then Liat put the sunglasses on and went inside to buy breakfast. Around the deck, people twisted into windbreakers, while others, blinking, popped their heads through sweater holes and wrapped their sneakered feet in towels already damp with fog. A few people offered their newspapers with dispirited snaps to the chill wind until at length a dozen fluttered, like gray, skewed sails, tiny and low on the vast deck which was covered in gay people; and sometimes the wind dislodged a page and wrapped it fast around somebody's face, while other pages fluttered in our wake—briefly—then vanished. Other people pinned their papers to the deck with shoes and radios (still mainly silent) and read from an unsmiling crouch. Cups of coffee were being brought up from below, then held steaming at grateful, puckered lips; bloody marys, too, in plastic cups, with stalks of faded celery jammed into the almost overflowing ice, appeared in civilizing numbers. So, quickly, propriety raised its bones within our foggy hide. |