Jonathan Evison - This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

In your defense, it’s hard to blame you for losing your cool, when you’ve had such little help in raising Caroline. Bernard offers practically nothing in the way of guidance or discipline. Summoning his name doesn’t even make for a good threat. “When your father gets home. .” What? He’ll read the paper? Turn on the news?

Anyway, before the defense rests, let’s talk about motives (yours, not Caroline’s). Caroline stole cash from your purse; she filched your mother’s pearls, your diamond earrings from San Francisco. You caught her red-handed rummaging through your vanity. And after all she’s put you through. After all you’ve done for her. One good slap in the face deserves another, right, Harriet?

Okay, so maybe you overreacted. God knows, you didn’t mean to, God knows the pressure had been building for months, years, really. But twenty-four megatons was a bit much, don’t you think? Slapping her not once, but twice, pulling her hair, scratching her, pushing her against the wardrobe — that was a bit much.

The verdict is guilty, the sentence suspended indefinitely. Now, everybody, please, just get over it, and move on with your lives.

After an hour of stewing in her anger, pacing the length of her cabin, trampling the letter with each pass, and glowering at the yogurt container as she visualizes all the things she’d like to do and say to Bernard and Mildred, Harriet should be exhausted. Her spine should be aching, her feet should be throbbing. But instead her heart is beating a furious war cry. Desperate for occupation, she looks about the cabin for something to clean or organize. Alas, the cabin is spotless.

Maybe food is the answer, maybe she ought to feed this ravenous temper. But she can’t possibly go out in public, not in this state. Or can she? Yes, that’s exactly what she’ll do. Bernard and Mildred be damned. The Lord would see faithfully to their recompense. Whatever Bernard’s intentions, this cruise belongs to Harriet now.

Without delay, she retires to the light of the tiny bathroom, where she rinses her face, her spirits inexplicably high, as she begins reapplying her mascara. There are crab legs to be eaten, wine to be drunk. This is an opportunity to rejoice in her suffering, to let the good Lord confirm and restore her spirit. But it’s no use. Midway through her mascara, Harriet breaks down and begins to weep bitterly. Shunning her reflection, she lowers herself to the toilet and cries until her grief is exhausted, swallowing her agony in one hot lump, along with half a Vicodin.

Gathering her resolve, she continues her preparations for the launch party: fixing her makeup, sculpting her hair, donning her modest blue China dress, and applying a spritz of Tea Rose.

In the elevator, still slightly dazed, she’s joined by two middle-aged couples.

“Apparently, they’re mostly Filipinos,” one of the men says. “They all speak wonderful English.”

“That’s refreshing,” says the other man’s wife. “So many of the Mexicans don’t seem to speak the language.”

The elevator empties onto the Lower Promenade, where Harriet hobbles across the atrium to the Pinnacle Bar as cruisers file into the party two by two. Though bold in its decor, the Pinnacle Bar is equally confused. While the bar itself is firmly committed to an art deco theme — the rich colors, the lavish ornamentation, the geometric patterns — the surrounding seating area looks like the lobby of a Red Lion, bland colors, faux wood, and outsized, shapeless furniture. Perhaps forty cruisers are in attendance, the bulk of them split between the bar and the buffet line, almost exclusively middle-aged couples in formal attire, cumberbunds and dress fronts stretched tight across their bellies. Suddenly Harriet feels frumpish in her shapeless China dress, with its high neck. Her pearl earrings, her floral perfume, her sculpted hair — all of it feels dowdy. Removing her compact, she inspects her lipstick. The sight of her wrinkled personage does little to improve her outlook. Maybe crab legs will do the trick.

And a half glass of wine.

Heading straight for the buffet, Harriet loads up and retires to a table near the piano. As if on cue, a wispy fellow in a powder blue suit begins to tinkle the ivories softly beneath the chatter of the party. Within eight or ten bars, Harriet recognizes the melody, though she can’t put a title to it. A ballad, slow and sentimental, from her childhood, something from Mercer or Van Heusen, a melodic strain that conjures polka dots and moonbeams, summons held breaths and clasped hands and the streaming lights of a carousel. Innocence, that’s what it invokes, a world uncluttered by complications, unsullied by irony, untouched by despair.

Harriet takes a tentative sip of her wine and sinks deeper into her club chair as the distant refrains wash over her. Nobody seems to notice when the number winds down to its conclusion, and the piano man slips seamlessly into the next, “My Funny Valentine.” The wine proves to be a heady delight, coursing through Harriet’s limbs and numbing her temples. Spreading her cloth napkin across her lap, she turns her attention to the crab legs. Gracious, but they are unwieldy things! Plying her cracker, she goes to work on a giant pincerless leg, clutching it fiercely every which way, spotting her dress with each futile attempt to penetrate the shell. It doesn’t help that her hands are trembling, and the cracker won’t grip, and the light in the Pinnacle Bar is murky at best. Before she manages to exhume so much as a shred of meat, she abandons the enterprise altogether.

Frustrated by the ordeal, she pushes her plate aside without sampling the minted peas. Instead, she empties her wineglass in a single toss. She’s not at all certain she can get out of her chair without assistance, nor is she feeling in the least bit sociable, but the spell is broken. The longer she sits there with that heap of uneaten crab legs before her, hectored by thoughts of Bernard and Mildred, the more another glass of wine sounds like a good idea.

Powder Blue is tinkling his way toward the coda of “Moonlight in Vermont” when Harriet manages — just barely — to push herself out of the chair and set a wide base beneath her. Lightheaded from exertion, she leans momentarily on the table for support before casting off. Her legs are leaden for the first few steps, the world wobbling slightly on its axis. But once she begins wending her way through the crowded bar, reality begins losing its sharp edges, and the party assumes a slow-moving fluidity. Harriet feels surprisingly buoyant and, yes, pleasantly intoxicated amid the hive of surrounding activity. The air hums with snatches of disembodied conversation:

Keith and I prefer Panama, actually. .

What a coincidence! I was an actuary. .

That’s what we used to think, but it’s not. .

No kidding?

Our youngest is only thirty miles from Sarasota. .

Exactly. That’s what I told him. .

You should have seen the size of the mosquitoes. Like hummingbirds. .

Yes, I’m sure, I looked in the black bag — twice. Did you look in your purse?

With the closeness of the room, and the bottleneck at the bar, it’s difficult to discern who is standing in line and who is simply standing in place. Easing herself into the scrum, Harriet somehow finds herself at the front of the line in what seems like no time at all. Indeed, time itself seems compressed. Space seems endlessly navigable, if a tad blurry. Nearly everything is easier to endure under the glorious influence of white wine.

“Something white,” says Harriet, surprised — though not discouraged — by the heaviness of her tongue.