Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “What is it, Liz?”

“I’m not quite sure how to put it,” she said staring out to sea, “except that I’ve been feeling a little... you know... bulky.”

I assured her she didn’t look bulky.

“No, but I feel it,” she protested. “I packed on an extra twenty pounds for the crossing, and most of it went... you know... exactly where I didn’t want it to go.” She smiled self-consciously. “I was just gonna say that if you’re going to put photos in your book, I’m wondering if you’d allow me to see what you’re going to put in that might have me in it?”

I assured her she could approve any photos that were used (the irony being that one of the two or three she eventually liked was a glorious shot of her taken from behind as she sat topless on the prow of the port hull, in a high wind, her hair flying, her arms thrown to the sun—a shot featuring the very portion of her anatomy that she had apparently been so reluctant to expose).

While they are not the least bit alike, I tended to think of Liz and Aleksa as a pair, a sort of matched Island set—in part because they are the same age and because Aleksa too attended St. Anthony’s High School, although she did not start rowing until she enrolled at Stony Brook University on Long Island. She eventually rowed for Dowling College, where she now coaches and from which she holds a post-grad degree in early childhood development. It is an unlikely complement to her full-time job as an emergency first-responder in North Babylon and her part-time career as a volunteer firefighter in Deer Park. Both are jobs in which she sees and must take in stride what she called “some of the most shocking violence” known to humanity. Meanwhile, there is a small-town innocence to Aleksa, epitomized in part by her admission that if she had to get off Long Island, driving on her own, she would be “totally unable” to find her way through the merciless bottleneck of freeways, underpasses, and bridges that connects the island to New York City and to the rest of the world beyond.