The Vacationers: A Novel (11 page)

“She’s fine,” Jim said. “She doesn’t bother me.”

Franny glared at him. “You’re a bad liar.” She had liked this about him for most of their marriage, but now, as she said it aloud, it occurred to Franny that this was a flaw.

The cobblestone streets were pitched, heading up- and downhill. There was a little shop selling Mallorcan pearls, and Franny ducked in, Charles and Lawrence trailing behind her. She bought two strands, both blue and satisfyingly lumpy, and strung one around her own neck and one around Sylvia’s.

“Mom,” Sylvia said, fingering her new necklace, “I think my stomach is actually going to eat itself. Like, my stomach is going to think that the rest of my body is trying to kill it and it will attack the rest of my organs like parasites. And then I’ll be dead in an hour.”

“You’re welcome,” Franny said, and hooked her elbow in Sylvia’s. “Let’s follow the lovebirds.”

“Oh, please,” Sylvia said. She looked over her shoulder
to make sure no one else was close enough to hear. The pedestrian-only streets were filled with well-dressed people of all ages—dapper white-haired gents in thin sweaters and loafers, rambunctious teenagers licking each other’s necks. They made it a block before they hit Bobby standing by himself in front of a clothing store.

“Ditched her?” Sylvia said.

“She’s in there,” he said. The store was blasting dubstep so loudly that they had to raise their voices to be heard. “I couldn’t take it.”

The mannequins in the window were wearing asymmetrical dresses printed with three different patterns, clothing that Frankenstein might have sewn.

“Barf,” Sylvia said. “This is clothing for blind strippers.”

“Well, she likes it, Sylvia, okay?” Bobby crossed his arms.

“You know, I’m going to go in and check on her,” Franny said. “It’s no fun to shop alone.”

Charles and Lawrence were trailing behind, and Sylvia watched as they walked in and out of a sunglasses store, a shoe store, a candy store. They did everything together. She wondered if her parents had ever been like that, even before Bobby was born. It seemed unlikely.

“Where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Didn’t say anything to me.”

“Are you okay?”

“What do you mean? Of course I’m okay.” Bobby’s hair was getting long, and the dark curls hung to his eyebrows.

“Jeez, nevermind.” Sylvia peered into the dark hole of the clothing store that had just eaten her mother.

The store was dense with racks of skimpy, sweatshop-manufactured clothing. Franny walked through, touching things as she went, recoiling from all the shiny, stretchy fabrics. She finally found Carmen in the back, near the dressing rooms, with a pile of stuff over her arm.

“Can I help?” Franny said, putting out her hands. “Here, let me hold all that while you look.”

Carmen shrugged and offloaded the stack into Franny’s waiting arms.

“You and Bobby have fun today? We missed you at the Graves House, it really was something. I think secretly every writer imagines their house becoming a museum. Or having a plaque, at the very least. So many plaques.”

Carmen gave a half-smile and continued to paw through a rack of sequined tops. “Oh, you know, museums aren’t really my thing.”

“Well, it’s not really a museum, it’s just a house. Where a writer lived. So it’s more about snooping around than looking at art.”

“I don’t read that much.”

Franny smiled with her lips closed, a tight line. This was a grown woman, she reminded herself, a person who supported herself and made her own decisions. This was not her family. This was not her problem. “Mm-hmm.”

“Oh, you know, I did just read a really good book, though,
on the plane,” Carmen said, pausing with her hand on the hanger of a spectacularly ugly dress. Franny’s heart leapt, even as she was trying to convince it to temper its expectations. “It’s called
Your Food, Your Body
. I think you’d really like it, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” Franny said. It could be sociology, she thought, or anthropology, a study of cultural norms through their natural dishes, an investigation of stereotypes through the meals our ancestors have given us. Franny loved books about food—maybe this was it, the moment she’d been waiting for, the moment that Carmen opened her mouth and proved that she’d been paying attention all along.

“It’s about what kind of diets work best for your body type—like, for example, I’m small and muscular, which means no complex carbs. My Cuban grandmother would murder me if she was still alive, no rice and beans!” Carmen opened her eyes wide. “It’s really interesting.”

“That does sound very informative,” Franny said. “You ready to try some things on?”

Carmen shrugged. “Sure.” She plucked a single dress out of Franny’s arms, made out of transparent plastic, like a garment made out of Saran wrap. “Isn’t this one cute?”

“Mm-hmm,” Franny said, unable to say more.

The tapas bar Joan had recommended was in the tangle of small streets near the Plaça Major, which also had a Burger
King and a pizza place, both of which were crowded with Spanish teenagers. There was a crowd spilling out of the restaurant, which made Sylvia fold in half like a toy with dead batteries. Determined, Franny wiggled her way through the packed bar to the hostess, and they were seated before long—Joan had made a phone call on their behalf. As he’d mentioned to Franny, his parents knew the owners. It was a small island, after all. “What a sweet boy!” Franny said over and over again, to no one in particular. “What a sweet, sweet boy.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Too bad his name is Joan,” pronouncing it like an American, rhyming with
groan
, a woman’s name. His mother socked him in the arm.

“Joe-
ahhhhhn
. And you’re getting awfully muscly,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment.

Bobby and Charles began to order by pointing—an overflowing plate of blistered green peppers covered with wide flakes of salt, toasted pieces of bread with dollops of whipped cod, grilled octopus on a stick. Plates appeared and were passed around the table with great moans of pleasure. Franny looked at the menu and ordered more—
albóndigas
, little meatballs swimming in tomato sauce;
patatas bravas
, fried potatoes with a ribbon of cream run back and forth over the top;
pa amb oli
, the Mallorcan answer to Italy’s bruschetta.

“This does not suck,” Sylvia said, her mouth half full.

“Pass the meatballs,” Bobby said, reaching across her.

“Más rioja!”
Charles said, raising his glass toward the center of the table, clinking glasses with no one, because everyone
else was too busy eating. Franny and Jim sat next to each other on the far side of the table, the backs of their chairs wedged against the wall. Charles and Lawrence got up to go look at the tapas in the glass cases along the bar, and the children were occupied with the food still in front of them. A sizzling plate of steak landed on the table, and Bobby speared an enormous piece with his fork and then dangled it over his mouth like a caveman.

“So?” Franny said. Jim rested his arm on her chair, and she let it stay, just to see how it felt.

“I think it’s a success.” Jim’s face was only a few inches away, the closest it had been in what felt like months. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and he looked the way he’d looked as a young man, blond and scruffy and handsome. Franny was caught off guard, and jerked her chair forward, knocking his arm away. Jim recovered quickly and knit his hands together on the table. “At least, I think so.”

“The kids are good,” Franny said. “Though I really don’t know about that girl.” Carmen had eaten only the peppers, which she complained were too oily.

“Have you seen her powders?”

“What does that mean?”

Jim smiled a very small smile and lowered his voice. “She has baggies full of powder, and she puts it in everything she eats. In water, in her yogurt. I think it might be Soylent Green.”

Franny surprised herself by laughing, and fell a few inches
closer to Jim’s chest. “Stop,” she said. “I’m not ready to laugh with you.” She thought of the girl, younger than Bobby, her baby boy. Her jaw stiffened so quickly that she thought it might crack.

Jim raised his hands in surrender, and they both turned back to the far end of the table. Charles and Lawrence were on their way back, each carrying two plates of tiny, gorgeous bites.

“Get that over here,” Franny said, patting the empty table space in front of her. “I’m starving.”

JIM DRANK HIS COFFEE BY THE POOL. IT WAS ALREADY
warm outside, and the tall, narrow pine trees stood static against the backdrop of the mountains on the other side of the village. It had been almost a full week, and he was still tiptoeing around Franny, still breathing quietly, still doing whatever she said. If she had wanted him to sleep on the floor, he would have. If she wanted him to turn off the light when she was tired, he did. They had been married for thirty-five years and three months.

The first divorces happened quickly—a year or two into an ill-planned marriage, and they were done. The second wave happened a decade later, when the children were small and problematic. That was the one that the child psychologists and playground moms fretted about, the kind of divorce that caused the most damage. It was the third wave that Jim hadn’t
seen coming—the empty-nester crises of faith. Couples like him and Franny were splitting up all over the Upper West Side, couples with grown children and several decades of life together behind them. It had to do with life expectancy, and with delayed midlife meltdowns. No one wanted to believe they were midlife when they hit forty anymore, and so now it was the sixty-year-olds buying the sports cars and seducing the younger women. At least that’s what Franny would have called it. Clear as day, a simple case. But of course nothing was ever simple when the lech in question was your own husband.

The back door clanged shut. Jim looked over his shoulder and was surprised to see Carmen heading over to join him. She was wearing her workout clothes, which she seemed to have in place of pajamas or blue jeans, whatever else one would wear casually around the house. Carmen always looked ready to drop to the ground and do fifty sit-ups, which Jim supposed was the point.

“Morning,” she said, setting her tall glass of green liquid down next to his mug on the concrete. “Mind if I join you?”

“Of course not,” Jim said. He tried to remember a moment when they had been alone together, but couldn’t. It was possible that they’d been left alone in a room while Bobby went to the bathroom, maybe, but even that seemed unlikely. He gestured to the chaise longue beside his, and she sat, knitting her fingers together and stretching her palms away. Her knuckles cracked loudly.

“Sorry,” she said. “Bad habit.”

They both took sips of their drinks and stared out at the mountains, which had taken on a bluish tint from the cloudless sky above.

“So,” Carmen said. “I’m sorry about what’s been going on with you and Franny.” She placed one hand flat over her glass. Jim wondered if it tasted like sawdust, or if it had the flavor of chemicals, a thousand vitamins ground to dirt. “It must be hard on both of you.”

Jim ran a quick hand over his hair, and then did it again. He pursed his lips, unsure of how to proceed. “Huh,” he finally said. “I’m sorry, did Fran talk to you?”

“She didn’t have to,” Carmen said, lowering her eyes. “The same thing happened with my parents. Bobby doesn’t know, but I can see it. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to him.”

“Huh,” Jim said, still at a loss. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said, the words coming out faster now. “I mean, I was in high school, just a little bit younger than Sylvia, and it was really hard. My parents were going through this really tough time, but didn’t want us to know, but of course we knew, and my brothers and I were all in the middle of it, even though they thought we had no idea.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” His coffee was getting cold. Jim looked back toward the house, hopeful that someone else was stirring, but there was no sign of life.

“If you ever need to talk to anyone about it, you can talk to me,” Carmen said. She put her hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Just between us.”

“Thank you,” Jim said. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for, or what she knew. All Jim was sure of was that he wanted to be rescued by a small plane. They didn’t even have to stop, they could just swing by and lower a rope. He would climb up all on his own.

There was no food left in the house. Franny had forgotten how much food her children could consume, and everyone else, too, always nicking little pieces of the bread she was saving for the next day’s panzanella.

“Who wants to come grocery shopping with me? I’ll throw in lunch. Who’s with me?” she asked the room at large—Charles and Lawrence were off exploring a nearby beach, and Carmen and Bobby were off running up and down the mountain. Jim was reading in the living room. Only Sylvia was standing near enough to hear, directly in front of the open refrigerator door.

“God, yes. Please.”

Franny hadn’t driven a stick in several decades, but those muscle memories never really went away. Jim offered a three-minute refresher course, slightly alarmed at the thought of Franny driving on foreign roads, but she insisted that she knew what she was doing. Sylvia crossed herself as she lowered her body into the car. “Just get me back alive in time for Joan.”

“As if I’d kill you without giving you the chance to see him
again,” Franny said, and turned the key in the ignition. She put her left foot down on the clutch, and her right on the gas, but the movement was not as fluid as it had once been, so many years out of practice, and the car lurched forward. Franny’s face purpled, and Sylvia screamed. Jim was still standing outside the car, his hands gripping tightly at his elbows.
Gallant
men always drove stick, and taught their children. It was an important life skill, like having good knives and speaking a foreign language. Franny waved Jim off and backed out slowly, her spleen somewhere in her throat. “It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to Sylvia. “I know what I’m doing. Everyone relax.”

According to Gemma’s notes, there was a super-sized grocery store about thirty minutes away, closer to the center of the island, larger and better stocked than the one Franny and Charles had gone to in Palma. Franny felt better once they were on the highway—there had been a few gentle stalls at stop signs on the road through Pigpen, but so what, no one was grading her. Once they were moving at a good clip, she felt her legs relax into a good rhythm, this one down, this one up. Sylvia hit buttons on the radio, which seemed to play only dance music and seventies American pop—Franny cried out for Sylvia to stop when she got to a station playing Elton John.

“It’s like the land that time forgot,” Sylvia said.

“I think you mean it’s like the land that forgot time. This is the way it should be—Elton John on the radio and the best ham in the world. And family.”

“Nice afterthought, Mom.” Sylvia rolled her eyes and stared out the window.

The highway downgraded when they hit the outskirts of Palma, slowing to a one-lane road with stoplights, which meant that Franny had more opportunities to make the car stutter, die a little death, and then be revived. They were sitting at a red light, just a few miles before they were to hit the grocery store, when Franny noticed a large compound to their right—the Nando Filani International Tennis Centre. Without thinking, she made the turn.

“Pretty sure this isn’t the grocery store,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, zip it. We’re having an adventure.” Franny slowly pulled through the tennis center’s open gate and into the parking lot.

Nando Filani was Mallorca’s best and only hope at a grand slam or a gold medal. Twenty-five and surly, he stalked the edges of the court like Agassi or Sampras, hitting enormous serves that aced his opponents more often than not. He’d gotten in trouble a bit on the tour—someone’s teeth had been knocked out, which he swore was an accident with an errant ball—and this tennis school was his way of paying reparations. Tennis players, after all, were supposed to be ambassadors of goodness, all white shorts and silver platters. It was a sport for the civilized, not merely the athletic. Franny had played a bit in high school, though she’d never been much good, but it was the only sport that all four Posts could stand to watch, which in turn meant that it was the one sport they could talk about with
one another. Sylvia cared about it the least, of course, but every few years there was a player handsome enough to keep her minimally engaged.

The air was full of thwacks and grunts—the sounds of balls hitting racquets, of tennis stars in the making. Franny hurried around from the driver’s side of the car to a fence just beside the main buildings. Through the fence, she could see a dozen rows of tennis courts, many of them filled by children. Franny murmured appreciation for a diminutive brunette’s excellent serve, and then hurried back across the parking lot. Sylvia leaned against the side of the car.

“Mom.”

Franny grasped the fence on the other side, which hid another row of courts, these less populated by children.

“Mom!”

Franny turned, her face open and confused, as if Sylvia had woken her from a dream. “What is it?”

“What are we doing here?” Sylvia slowly peeled herself off the car and trudged over to her mother’s side. It was warmer at the bottom of the mountain, and the sun was shining directly overhead. “It’s too hot.”

“We’re looking for Nando, of course!” It was smack between Wimbledon (which Nando had won the previous year, though this year he was runner-up to the Serb) and the US Open (which he hadn’t ever won, being better on both clay and grass), and so it seemed possible that he actually might be at home, training. “Come on, I want to go inside.”

Sylvia slumped onto Franny’s shoulder. She’d been taller than her mother since she was eleven. “Only if you promise that if, for some ungodly reason, Nando Filani is standing directly inside that door, you will not speak to him, and we can turn around and go directly to the grocery store.”

Franny lifted a hand to her heart. “I swear.” They both knew that she was lying.

The office was clean and modern, with a large dry-erase schedule on one wall and a pretty young woman sitting behind a counter. Franny grabbed Sylvia by the elbow and marched straight up.
“Hola,”
she said.

“Hola. Qué tal?”
said the woman.

“
Habla inglés?
My daughter and I are enormous fans of Filani’s, and we were wondering about lessons. Is it possible to sign up? We’re in Mallorca for about ten days, and we’d just love the chance to play where he played. You must be so proud of him.” Franny nodded at the idea of all that national pride, wrinkling her nose for all the mothers in Mallorca.

“Lessons for two?” The woman held up two fingers.
“Dos?”

“Oh, no,” Franny said. “I haven’t played since I was a teenager.”

“One?” The woman held up a single finger. “Lessons for one?”

Sylvia twisted her body into a pretzel. “Mom,” she said. “I respect that you’re trying to do something here, but I’m not exactly sure what it is, and I’m pretty sure that I have no
interest. Or sneakers.” She pointed to her flip-flops and waggled her slightly dusty-looking toes.

“Do you have a list of instructors?” Franny put her elbows on the counter. “Or any reading material? About the center?”

The woman slid a brochure across the counter. Franny picked it up, pretending to read the Spanish until she realized the reverse was printed in English. Her eyes skimmed the short paragraphs and the glossy photographs of Nando Filani until the very bottom of the page. In a large photo, Nando had his arm thrown around the shoulder of an older man. They were both wearing baseball hats and squinting into the sun, but Franny could make out the other man’s features clearly enough.

“I’m sorry,
perdón
, is this Antoni Vert?”

The woman nodded.
“Sí.”

“Does he still live in Mallorca?”

“Sí.”
The woman pointed north. “Three kilometers.”

“Mom, who is that?”

Franny fanned herself with the brochure. “Does he offer lessons? Here? By any chance?”

The woman shrugged. “
Sí.
More expensive, but yes.” She turned her chair toward her computer screen and hit a few buttons. “He had a cancellation tomorrow afternoon, four p.m.?”

Sylvia watched her mother quickly dig through her purse, swearing a few times before finally landing on her wallet. “Yes,” Franny said, not looking at Sylvia or the receptionist, only the photo in the brochure. “Yes, that will do.” After she
signed her name, she turned around and walked calmly out the door, leaving Sylvia standing at the counter with an open mouth. “Weren’t you in a hurry?” she called from outside. Sylvia made a face at the woman behind the counter and hurried back to the car, unsure of what she’d just witnessed, but positive it was something she could tease her mother about for decades to come.