Sailing Into Something More

I teach yoga for a living, which means I spend my days telling other people to breathe through the hard parts. Twenty-eight years old, five years of teaching, and I can cue a room of forty strangers into a handstand without breaking a sweat. So you'd think I'd have my own life figured out by now. You'd be wrong.

The honest version is that I'm competent everywhere except the part where I want something and go get it. My last relationship ended eight months ago, if you can call three months with a carpenter named Dean a relationship. Before that, a string of short things that fizzled. The one time I felt truly awake was six years ago, with a woman from my teacher training, and I've been circling back to that memory ever since like a tongue finding a sore tooth. I want to be the version of myself who doesn't second-guess wanting. I just haven't met her yet.

So when Friday came around in late October, I did the thing my therapist keeps suggesting. I booked myself a solo dinner at a nice restaurant and told nobody.

The restaurant is called The Silo, which sounds like a joke until you see it. It's an old grain elevator on the working waterfront, converted a few years back into this industrial-chic cathedral of steel beams and hanging lights, with windows the size of barn doors looking out over the black lake. Our little Great Lakes city pretends it's fancier than it is, and The Silo is where it does the pretending. I'd been saving it for an occasion, and then I decided that being alive on a Friday was occasion enough.

I'd asked for a window table. The hostess, a young woman with a clipboard and a nervous smile, walked me through the dining room toward a two-top right at the glass, harbor lights glittering beyond it. Someone was already sitting there.

She was maybe thirty-four, short silver-brown hair, a charcoal sweater that fit like she'd chosen it in about four seconds and been right. She had a glass of red in front of her and a paperback face down on the table, and she looked up at us with an expression I can only describe as patiently entertained.

"Oh," the hostess said, stopping so abruptly I nearly walked into her. She flipped a page on her clipboard, then flipped it back, like the problem might resolve itself if she checked twice.

The woman at the table raised an eyebrow. "Is this a mutiny or a seating?"

"I am so sorry," the hostess said. "We have two reservations under the same table. Seven o'clock, window, party of one. Both of you. I don't know how the system let it happen, it double-booked and I didn't catch it, and we're fully committed tonight, every table, I checked twice."

The woman looked at me. I looked at her. Somewhere behind me a party of eight was laughing at something.

"Well," she said, and slid her menu an inch to the side, making the empty seat across from her into an invitation. "I'm eating alone, you're eating alone, and the view's better with two people pretending not to stare at it. Want to share? I don't bite, and they'd probably let you switch tables if I turn out to be awful."

Here's where I should tell you that the old me would have made an excuse and eaten a sad burger at the bar. But the old me has been getting on my nerves lately.

"Sure," I said. "I'm Imani."

"Fiona." We shook hands across the table. Her grip was firm and brief, a working woman's handshake. "Fair warning, I've had a long shift and I'm going to order the expensive fish."

"Good. I was worried I'd get stuck with someone ordering a side salad and apologizing for it."

The hostess hovered, wrung a final apology out of herself, and fled. Fiona picked her wine list back up and slid the other one across to me.

"So," she said, "what do you do when you're not being double-booked?"

"I teach yoga. Hot yoga, mostly, which means I spend my days watching people discover muscles they didn't know they had, usually through the expression on their faces."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, low and unguarded. "And you do that all day and then come sit down for dinner? My hat's off. I get paid to stand on a rope ladder over black water at four in the morning and I still complain about it."

"That doesn't sound like complaining, that sounds like bragging. What is it you climb ladders onto?"

"Ships. I'm a harbor pilot. Big freighters come into the lakehead, and once they're past the breakwater my job is to get them up the channel and into their berth without turning a six-hundred-foot piece of steel into a very expensive reef."

I put my menu down. "That's a real job? I thought pilots were airplanes."

"Everybody thinks that. And yes, it's a real job, and yes, it's exactly as nerve-wracking as it sounds the first hundred times and then it's just Tuesday." She turned her glass by the stem. "The channel up to the docks is narrow and the wind doesn't care about your plans. You spend forty minutes giving orders in a language the crew half understands, and if you get it right, nobody ever thinks about you at all."

"That's the strangest job description I've ever heard. You're invisible when you succeed."

"Invisible and well paid," she said, and grinned. "I can live with it. Your turn. Explain hot yoga to a woman whose entire fitness routine is climbing ladders in freezing spray."

"It's yoga in a room heated to about a hundred degrees. People sweat out their week, they shake, they swear at me silently in downward dog, and then at the end everybody lies flat on the mat and somebody usually falls asleep and snores."

"And you like it."

"I love it," I said, and it surprised me a little how fast that came out. "It's the one hour a day where everybody in the room agrees to be exactly where they are. Nobody's checking their phone. They can't. Their hands are busy not falling over."

Fiona nodded slowly, like I'd said something she recognized. "That's the thing I love about the water, honestly. You can't be anywhere else on a ship's bridge. There's no almost paying attention. Either you're watching that channel or you're about to find out what a buoy costs."

The waiter came and we ordered, her the expensive fish like she promised, me the lamb, and we split a bottle of something red she picked without looking past the second page of the list. The wine was good. The company was better, which is not something I say lightly, because my track record with dinner conversation is a museum of dead ends.

"So Imani," she said, refilling both our glasses without asking, which I liked more than I expected to, "does the yoga teacher have a person? Somebody who falls asleep and snores on your couch?"

"Nope. Just me and a very judgmental cat. What about you?"

"Nobody steady. I lived with someone for three years, a few years back, and since then it's been casual things that stay casual. Partly the job. Hard to build a life around a woman who's on a ship at four in the morning twice a week."

"Doesn't stop you from trying?"

"It stops a lot of people from trying," she said, easily, no wound in it. "I don't blame them. I do know what I want, though. And at my age that's worth more than it used to be."

"What is it you want? Besides expensive fish."

She looked at me over the rim of her glass, and something in it was warm and unhurried, like she'd already checked the channel and knew the water. "Dinner with interesting company. A walk along the pier after, if you're not in a hurry. And somewhere in there, I'd like to hear more about this version of you that comes out when nobody's checking their phone."

The food arrived. We ate. And somewhere between the harbor lights and her second story about a Greek captain who argued with her in three languages, all of them wrong, I realized I wasn't second-guessing anything at all. Not the table, not the wine, not the way I kept catching myself leaning in when she talked.

"You're staring at the lake," she said, "or you're staring at me and using the lake as cover."

"Cover," I admitted. "Badly."

"I've been guiding ships for six years. I know a bad cover job when I see one." She topped up my glass again. "So here's a thought. I keep a boat at the marina, a little pilot launch, and I have Saturday off for the first time in two weeks. I could show you the harbor from the water. The whole city looks different when you come at it from the lake."

"Are you asking me out, Fiona, or recruiting me?"

"Can't it be both?"

"Recruiting sounds like there's paperwork," I said. "Is there paperwork?"

"Notarized waiver and a life jacket that clashes with your coat."

"Then I'm in. Tonight, though. I want to see it while it's dark."

She checked her watch, which was a chunky diver's thing, and frowned a little at it. "Tonight I can do better than the launch. There's nothing like the harbor after the bars close and before the ore boats come in. You sure? It's cold out there."

"I teach hot yoga for a living. I have never once been cold on purpose."

"Then finish your wine," she said, "and we'll go make you cold."

We split the bill without ceremony, my idea, and she didn't fight me on it, which I appreciated. Outside the wind had picked up and the flags on the pier were snapping. She walked like somebody who knew which patches of pavement iced over first, cutting a line down the hill toward the water that avoided all of them.

"So how long have you had the boat?" I asked, hands jammed in my pockets.

"Six years, same as the job. It came with the territory. She's not much to look at but she's honest."