Potemkin’s Boats

by Amy Barnes

My father was a bathtub captain when I was ten. He loved floating newspaper ships, with plastic Weeble captains and Lego gangplanks. Each morning, he strode into the bathroom with the purposeful walk of a soldier marching to a suburban war. 

My mother set only one rule: he couldn’t fill the bathtub himself. That was the same rule she set for me. 

She bought him a red flashlight from the dollar store, so he could be a roaming lighthouse. He wielded it with the pride of the Navy man he once was, with Popeye tattoos fading on his upper arms. 

Every day he put on the captain’s hat from their anniversary cruise. They had entered the ship’s talent contest as Captain and Tenille and won matching cruise keychains. 

He began roaming the hallways at night, flashlight in hand. 

“Where’s your mom?” He shouted into my bedroom.

My mother began locking their bedroom door, with the only key on her cruise keychain. It’s easier this way. She told me. I often heard her lullabying him to sleep like she was Lauren Tewes on the lido deck.

He kept a captain’s log on Post It notes. Star date 5579, like their cruise state room door number. While he planned his day from the toilet seat, my mother sat at her desk drinking yesterday’s coffee until he got bored. She’d read a few pages of a book, stack the newspapers for recycling, and take a brief nap in her chair. 

My father loved playing Battleship. When he wasn’t floating ships in the bathtub, he lined up and counted the battleships over and over and over again. One day, he dropped them in the kitchen sink he’d filled with water. I had to throw the game away when he turned on the garbage disposal and ground the plastic ships into dust. 

He sobbed that day, unable to muster the energy to wave flashlight warnings at our neighbors.

“I let my men down. They were destroyed by the enemy.” 

I had only seen him cry one other time when his father died. He pulled his starched white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away his loss. After that day, he perched on the bathtub edge all day, idly folding paper into stacks of boats. 

“I’m creating an armada.” 

He announced it at dinner. I shook my head in appreciation, but quickly went back to meatloaf and mashed potatoes. 

On a cloudy Saturday, my mother was napping after a particularly hard night of patrols. My father shone the flashlight at her closed eyes until she stumbled to her feet. 

“What is going on?” I heard her ask over Wacky Races. 

We found out quickly. He had gotten up early and ran the water in every sink. Bathroom. Kitchen. Laundry. Each one was sloshing and full of boats made from magazines, napkins, and newspapers. It took all day to drain the sinks and gather the sodden boats in trash bags.

He went to bed early, clutching Battleship bits he dug out of the kitchen sink.

The next morning, my mother found him face down in the overflowing bathtub. She shut the door and called an ambulance. I can only imagine how she discovered him, mummified with soggy boat paper, and his flashlight bravely flickering.