“Seriously?” Marla asks.
“Just kidding,” the captain says. “Though not really. There is, of course, a tipping point.”
Marla gives the captain a look, like a captain has no right to joke about tipping while they are trapped in open water, but Lila looks unconcerned. Lila sits perched on the boat like she’s sitting in her own living room—upright, poised, with the confidence of a woman who has systematically removed all of her body hair. Nothing bad can happen to a woman like that during her wedding week, not even in the middle of the ocean.
“So how about those Vacations in a Cup?” Lila asks, and Nat immediately opens the cooler.
“It’s Vacation in a Cups,” Marla says.
“Excuse me?” Lila asks.
“The plural is actually Vacation in a Cups,” Marla repeats.
“That’s how people have always said it,” the groom says with a smile, and Phoebe can recognize what Gary is doing because it’s what Phoebe does. He is trying to de-escalate the situation, trying to tease Marla’s comment into sounding funny. But Lila does not laugh.
“How do you know how the drink is pronounced?” Lila asks Marla, as if she is genuinely curious. “It’s a drink I made up.”
Before Marla can answer, Suz starts telling everyone the story of how Lila created the cocktail in their dorm one night and changed their lives for the better.
“Before that, we were always drinking stolen church wine,” Suz says.
“You stole sacramental wine?” Jim asks, looking at Lila like he’s both surprised and proud.
“For the record, I was never comfortable with it,” Lila says.
“Well, you certainly drank enough of it to get sick,” Nat says.
“It was … not award-winning wine,” Lila says.
Jim pretends to be a parishioner pausing before the Eucharist. “Excuse me, Father, is this a pinot?”
Everyone laughs, including Lila. Gary smiles, takes her hand.
“The last time we drank the sacramental wine, Lila vomited all night,” Nat says.
“The whole time she kept asking, Do you think we’re going to Hell, you guys?”
“After that, I swore I’d never drink again,” Lila says. “Unless the drink tasted like a vacation in a cup.’”
“And voilà, the Vacations in a Cup were born,” Nat says.
They spent many months during high school perfecting the recipe. And it’s clear that this is where the women want the conversation to stay—on the things they used to do together, the special, funny moments that had once bonded them.
“Right,” Marla says. “But if the singular is a Vacation in a Cup, then the plural has to be Vacation in a Cups.”
“That just sounds really dumb, though,” Suz says.
“Yeah,” Nat agrees.
“It’s not many vacations in one single cup, is it?” Marla says. “It’s a single vacation. Spread out in each individual cup.”
A heavy silence falls over the group. They are hardly away from land, and everybody already seems to have had enough of Marla. Lila just sits there, made speechless by her future sister-in-law, twice in one afternoon.
“Let’s drop it, Marla,” Gary says.
Gary says it with the weary tone of a brother who has been saying, “Let’s drop it, Marla,” his entire life. He puts his hand on Lila’s back and the gesture surprises Phoebe, even though it shouldn’t. There is nothing surprising here; they are a classic older man and younger woman combo. Gary is the stage and Lila is the song. Or maybe it’s more like, Gary is the house and Lila is the chandelier. Blond and dazzling in the way that suggests she’s never bought a loaf of bread at the store. And Gary, so handsome and sturdy, a man who is always bringing bread home from the store.
And yet, when she looks at Gary, she can only see the man in the hot tub, the man who once wanted to die. The man who read romance novels in college. She can feel that invisible wire between them, until Gary pulls Lila onto his lap and holds her close, as if he’s protecting her from his overbearing sister.
“For instance, you wouldn’t say, Please pass me some Sexes on the Beach,” Marla continues. “That just sounds gross.”
Nat and Suz look at each other and raise eyebrows, like there is nothing left to do at this point but ostracize the disturbance. Phoebe can tell that this is how they got through high school together, searching for each other’s eyes in the classroom, doubling over with laughter about a teacher who was more embarrassing than they were. But Lila doesn’t join in. She can’t openly mock her future sister-in-law, the future aunt to her children, the person who will be at her Christmas dinner table for all time.
Instead, Lila looks at Phoebe for help.
“Well, what is it?” Lila asks Phoebe. Then she turns to Gary. “Phoebe actually knows everything. She’s an English professor.”
How funny it feels to be looked at by all the wedding people. All these strangers who can see her. They are waiting on her to speak. To say something that will settle the moment, return them to normalcy, neutralize Marla. Phoebe is moved to be called upon like this. For too long, she had felt stuck in the depths of her house, in the void of her depression, where she was not actually real. Where nothing was real. As if she had slipped out of the known world without anybody noticing, except for Harry, who would follow her around all day, up the stairs, down the stairs, into the bathroom where he would sit with his serious face and watch. When she found him dead two days ago, she felt certain it was all over for her.
But now here she is, in daylight, on a boat, with the wedding people.
“Well?” Gary says. “How do you say it, Professor?”
He looks over at her for the first real time since they got on the boat, probably because the rest of them are also looking at her now. It has become safe to stare, safe to rest his eyes on her. She wants to savor this feeling. Package it, drink it later when she needs it, when she is back at home in the dark of her bedroom tomorrow, feeling like a piece of shit.
“It’s Vacations in a Cup,” Phoebe says. “You have to pluralize the head noun, not the modifier.”
“But no one would ever say Sexes on the Beach,” Marla protests.
