I did not kill Maree. This is
important. As tempting as it might have been, Maree is alive and well, a cheerful
smile plastered on her overly tanned face, on a cruise boat somewhere along the
Rhine.
I am an overly opinionated woman. I
know that about myself, but hey, everyone has their growing edge. Somehow, from
the first time Maree spoke, I hated her.
This was my first cruise. I’ve been
mentioning this particular European river cruise line to my husband for five
years, hoping to subliminally implant the idea somewhere in his brain that
maybe, just maybe, we could go for our twentieth anniversary. It worked. On
June sixteenth, we boarded a fancy river boat in Amsterdam to sail down the
Rhine.
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| Heidelberg, Germany |
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| Strasbourg, Germany |
And Maree welcomed us. Was it her
voice that grated on me? The breathy inflections? The way she approached us
like we were kindergarteners? Was it her cheerful—her endlessly
cheerful—attitude about everything? “Here we are! Ready to board our coaches!”
“Wasn’t that view of the castle spectacular?” “Isn’t our captain doing a
fabulous job?” “It’s not rain! It’s liquid sunshine!” Seriously, this woman
probably celebrates colonoscopies: “Wasn’t that a spectacular polyp?”
Even her appearance bugged me. Yeah,
I know I’m being petty but bear with me. She had very bleached hair and
noticeable knobby cheek implants. Whenever I looked at her face, I tried to
imagine what the plastic surgeon used to get those perfectly symmetrical
spheres on each cheekbone. Ping pong balls? Walnuts? She was older than me, and
maybe that’s unusual for a cruise director, so the dye job and new cheeks were
an effort to reclaim youth. (I’d like to reclaim mine, too, but probably without
the extra parts.)
Every morning, her voice beckoned to
us over the intercom: “Good morning lovely guests! In fifteen minutes, join me
for our first outing!” Evenings, she directed the entertainment. Trivia games.
Music presentations. Lectures. These Maree bookends to our day made her
inescapable.
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| Colmar, France |
One evening, she pushed me over my
limit. “They’ll never find her body,” I whispered to my husband.
“You need more wine,” he said in
reply.
Around day five, I noticed lines of
fatigue around Maree’s overly mascaraed eyes, but the perkiness, the relentless
perkiness, remained. We visited a castle high on a hill, Maree leading us up
this long, winding path, dragging her wheeled suitcase that contained all the
necessary cruise director stuff she might need, like extra earphones for us and
directional placards. I saw her looking down, taking a deep breath. I realized
she was tired. Very, very tired.
If she got us up every morning, took
us on tours all day, and entertained us every night after dinner, she was
working sixteen-to-seventeen hour shifts. EVERY DAY. And these cruises are
booked back-to-back for several months. No rest for the weary.
How did she do it? If I worked at
that pace, I wouldn’t be able to remember my name. I wouldn’t be cheerful to
the tourists in my charge, I’d be muttering the f-word.
I came to have new respect for her
upbeat attitude. Maybe the cheek implants were to hold her smile up when she
was too tired to do it. Maybe her breathy way of speaking helped her save her
voice.
Maybe I should temper my tendency to
be all judgey.
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| Top pic: from Mt. Pilatus in Lucerne, Switzerland. Bottom: Lake Lucerne |
We finished our Rhine vacation,
which was absolutely amazing, by the way, and said goodbye to the fabulous crew
that took care of us. I looked for Maree and offered a heartfelt “thank you.”
I picture her today, greeting yet
another new group of passengers, that perky smile on her face as she says,
“Welcome, wonderful guests. We are so glad you are here.”
And yes, Maree will likely end up in
a project of mine! What characters have you met on your travels?
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| Oland, Sweden (after the Rhine trip!!) |
