The Vacationers: A Novel (18 page)

Sylvia froze with half an asparagus spear sticking out of her mouth, a green cigar.

“He sells them at the gym, at Total Body Power. But also at other places, like fitness conventions. You know Amway? It’s kind of like that.” Carmen had an aunt and uncle who sold Amway, and it wasn’t really the same thing, but she knew the look it would put on Franny’s face, the way the word would sound in her ear, cultish and cheap.

Sylvia spat out the uneaten half of her asparagus. “Wait, what?”

“What is she talking about, Bobby?” Franny said, knitting her fingers together under her chin. “This is crazy!”

Jim leaned back in his chair. The feeling he experienced wasn’t surprise or disappointment, but a very slight letting out of air, like a balloon slowly emptying. It was the sensation of Franny’s focus shifting away from him and onto their son, the kind of feeling no father ever wanted to admit that he enjoyed. His poor son was doing him a righteous favor, whether he wanted to or not. Jim half wanted to try to kiss Franny right then, to see how distracted she’d become, but no, that might ruin it. Instead, he remained quiet and tried to focus on what was being said.

Bobby’s stare remained fixed on his plate. He held his fork in his left hand, and his napkin in his right. He didn’t turn back to Carmen, or direct his chin upward to face his family. She was doing this to him on purpose. He told the truth to the moist chicken now cooling in front of him.

“It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just to make some extra money. The market’s been slow for the last couple of years, and Carmen thought . . .” Here he paused, closing his eyes. “It’s not her fault. I needed to make some money, and she got me a job at the gym.” Bobby looked up and made eye contact with his mother, who was still holding her hands as if in prayer. “I’m an assistant trainer, and I sell the Total Body Power Powder. It’s not bad. I’m much healthier than I was before.”

“Tell them the rest.” Carmen made a tiny smacking sound, satisfied. She wasn’t going to let herself smile, but she sure as hell was going to make sure everything came out that she thought should come out. He’d made her wait long enough.

“There’s
more
?” Franny made a noise like a fish on dry land.

“Take it down a notch, Fran,” Jim said, jeopardizing his newly secure position.

“Wait, so you’re a personal trainer now, too?” Sylvia said. “Like, people pay you to force them to do sit-ups? Like a gym teacher? Do you have a whistle?”

“What’s in the powders?” Lawrence wanted to know. “Is it that Xendadrine stuff that’s supposed to give you a heart attack?”

“Jesus!” Bobby said, pushing his chair back from the table. Carmen looked smug. Everyone else waited for him to continue. It wasn’t that working at a gym was so sordid, it just wasn’t what people like the Posts
did
, that’s what they were all thinking. Charles and Lawrence experienced pangs of guilt at this internal admission, having been discriminated against for their entire lives, and still occasionally hollered at on the sidewalk by morons in passing cars. Franny felt like a failure. Sylvia was trying to imagine her older brother wearing a sweatband and a Britney Spears–style microphone, doing dance steps at the front of an aerobics class. Jim, who had paid for Bobby’s college education, was the most disappointed, though he knew enough to mask such feelings. He had long suspected that Bobby’s career might not be going quite as gangbusters as he wanted everyone to think, and wasn’t entirely surprised by this new information. “Fine,” Bobby said, shaking his head. His soft curls bounced, as pretty as they’d always been, and Franny began to tear up.

“I started selling the powders because it seemed like a good way to make money more quickly, but in order to do that, I had to buy them in bulk, like, really in bulk, and they haven’t been as easy to unload as the manager at Total Body Power made it seem. They’re really good, all whey protein, but the shakes come out kind of grainy if you don’t mix them with enough liquid, and there’s an aftertaste.”

“You get used to it,” Carmen said. “Bobby doesn’t even drink them anymore, but I do. They’re really good for your muscle recovery after a workout.” Bobby gave her a sharp look, and she stopped talking.

“Eww,” Sylvia said, and Franny pinched her, hard.

“Anyway, I used my credit card to buy the powders from the distributer, and I haven’t been able to pay off my card in a while, and so it’s just getting a little, you know, expensive.” Bobby’s cheeks were the color of the wine, a red so deep they were nearly purple.

“How much are we talking, honey?” Franny leaned forward and reached for Bobby’s hands. The room was completely silent while everyone waited to hear the number.

“A hundred and fifty. Or so.” Bobby let his mother stroke his hands but wouldn’t look at her.

“A hundred and fifty?” Franny wasn’t thinking. She’d begun to brighten, and looked over her shoulder at Jim, confused. He frowned.

“A hundred and fifty
thousand
?” Jim asked.

Carmen was the only one who didn’t make an audible
reaction, because she already knew the figure in question. It was $155,699, actually, but Bobby was rounding down. He hadn’t told her until it was nearly half as much, and that was a year ago, shortly after he began to work at the gym. It had been sweet watching him, Carmen wanted to tell his family that—seeing him holding a heavy bag steady for a middle-aged woman who wanted to get rid of her upper-arm wattle was nice, and Carmen liked that she could teach him things. Give him pointers. Some of the trainers had been to kinesiology school, but most of them were just gym rats who’d stuck around long enough to make a good impression. Bobby was neither, a pale New York City half-Jew who’d never done more than jog on a treadmill. The ladies found him unintimidating, and he reminded them of their sons up north. He was popular. If he’d only stuck to that, it would have been fine. They probably would have been married by now, maybe even living closer to the beach. But Bobby had liked the idea of easy money, and what was easier than making a milkshake?

Bobby nodded. The purple in his cheeks had shifted into a slightly greenish tint.

“Hmm,” Jim said. “We’ll talk about this later, son, okay? I’m sure it’ll all be fine.” He spoke with his most solid voice, then Franny withdrew her hands, and stood up, searching for a tissue. Sylvia laughed—she’d never heard so large a number said out loud so casually. Her bank account had approximately three hundred dollars in it. She used her parents’ credit card whenever she needed to, which wasn’t often. Charles and
Lawrence held hands under the table. Charles wanted to remember to tell Lawrence that this was one of the possible perils of having children—having to bail them out. The chicken smelled heavenly, like butter and garlic and some tiny green things that Franny had snipped out of the planters by the pool, and he was starving.

“Well,” Charles said. “Would someone pass the wine?” Bobby lunged for the bottle on the table, delighted to have something else to do. “Lawrence, how are your werewolves coming along?”

Lawrence began to talk at length about the reshoots in Canada, about the waylaid bags of fur, and though everyone peeked at Bobby in their own time, even Franny made a show of listening to Lawrence talk about the movie, listening as if their lives depended on that rickety sleigh.

Franny and Jim lay next to each other, side by side on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Even before Jim had left
Gallant
, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars would have been a large sum, but now that there was only Franny’s inconsistent income and even more inconsistent royalties coming in, it was enormous.

“We could cash out some stocks,” Franny said.

“We could.”

“But is it our responsibility?” Franny flipped onto her side,
making the bed buck like a small ship on a choppy sea. She rested her face on her hands, and looked as young as she ever had, despite the worried lines between her eyebrows.

“No, it’s not,” Jim said, and rolled over to face her. “Not directly. Not legally. He’s almost thirty. Most young people have debt. Anyone who goes to law school has three times as much debt as that.”

“But they’re lawyers! And can make it back! I just don’t know if this is one of those times when we’re supposed to let him figure it out for himself. Clearly he meant to—he didn’t bring it up, she did.
God
, that woman. And to think, all night, I was really starting to like her. But she did that to him on purpose!” Franny was getting agitated. “I know, I know,” she said, lowering her voice. “They’re right next door.”

Seeing his wife in such a state should not have thrilled Jim, but it did. It was rarer and rarer for Fran to get so riled up about something that she could discuss only with him—now that the children were so old, they no longer needed to have the endless conversations of their late youth and early middle age, wherein they would talk about their offspring’s friends and teachers and punishments and all the ensuing guilt and pride for days on end.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, and reached out to stroke her face, but she was already rolling back toward the windows, settling in for sleep, and so he reached only her back, but when she didn’t shrug him off, it felt like a small gain.

All the lights were out—even Bobby and Carmen’s, Sylvia could tell from the dark crack of air underneath the door. Something was off, in addition to Bobby’s bank statements. She didn’t know what it really meant to be in debt, but Sylvia imagined men with fedoras and briefcases knocking on the door and threatening to cut off meaningful body parts.

At home, she knew all the noisy stairs, which wooden planks creaked and which ones didn’t. Here, she had to guess and so just stayed close to the banister, placing each foot carefully and slowly before moving down to the next step. She wanted to check the living room sofa. There was no evidence that her father hadn’t been sleeping in bed with her mother, but their room had just felt
strange
, that’s how Sylvia would have described it, had anyone asked, which they wouldn’t. It felt strange in the same way some places felt haunted, when she just knew that there were ghosts present who were friendly or not but definitely dead.

The downstairs was all dark, too, except for a single light in the dining room that someone had left on by mistake. The house was cool, and Sylvia shivered. She nudged her way over to the wall between the foyer and the living room and squinted into the darkness. She could make out the couch, but not well enough to see if there was anyone sleeping on it. She took a step
closer but felt like she’d stepped into the middle of an ocean, completely unmoored and lost, and so she retreated to the wall, touching it with both her hands. “Dad?” she said, quietly. There was no response. Even if he’d been asleep, her father would have answered her. Sylvia waited for what felt like forever and then repeated herself.

Of course he wasn’t there. Everything was fine, except the things that weren’t. Her parents were screwed up, but maybe not as screwed up as she thought. Sylvia was relieved, and embarrassed that she’d even wanted to check. When she was a little girl, and had a nightmare, her father had always been the first one on the scene, opening closet doors and poking his head under the bed. That’s all she was doing—making sure that the monsters were pretend. Sylvia felt immediately tired, though she’d been wide awake until just that moment. She could hardly make it back up the stairs and into her own bed before falling asleep, so secure was she in her fact-finding mission.

FRANNY BUSIED HERSELF IN THE KITCHEN, MAKING
Tupperware containers of snacks that wouldn’t melt in the sun. Gemma had the glass ones, of course, nothing plastic. Franny would have to be careful loading up the beach bags. No one wanted shards of broken glass with their grapes. The plan—her plan, which she hadn’t yet shared with anyone but Jim—was to take a field trip en masse, the whole group. They would drive to the nearest beach, which wouldn’t be so crowded on a Monday morning. They’d sit and bake there all day, splashing around and eating
jamón
and
queso
sandwiches from the local vendors. Gemma had two large beach umbrellas, and mesh folding chairs with low seats built for sunbathing. Franny would wear her large straw hat, and Bobby would be as happy as he’d ever been. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

One by one, her guests trickled out of their bedrooms.
Charles and Lawrence liked the beach and were easy to convince. Sylvia was nervous about seeing Joan and was more than happy to put him off for the day. Bobby said yes, and Carmen said yes, though they appeared in the kitchen separately and seemed not to be speaking to each other. It wasn’t even nine o’clock before Franny had the two cars packed up for the day, and they were off.

Gemma recommended three beaches: Cala Deià, opposite the Robert Graves House, which was remote and rocky and “rather magic” (no bathrooms, no snack shops); Badia del Esperanza, a wide “golden sandy paradise” (high possibility of children/tourists); and Cala Miramar, “a functional beach within a half-hour’s drive. Lots of Spanish families. Less-than- glorious bathrooms on-site.” (No more exciting than a trip to Brighton Beach.) How could they argue with paradise? Surely children wouldn’t be at the beach at this hour, when they should be napping or parked in front of cartoons. Franny plotted out directions to the Badia del Esperanza, and gave a copy to Charles, who was driving the other rental. Sylvia sat in the backseat of her parents’ car. At the last minute, Bobby had joined her, as if choosing to do so at the last moment would mean that no one would notice. Sylvia raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, and neither did Bobby, who immediately wedged a towel behind his head and fell asleep, or at least pretended. Jim and Charles drove in tandem, going slow around the hairpin turns, willing the tiny cars to climb and descend the winding hills with ease.

The beach was a twenty-five-minute drive over the mountains—up, up, up, then down, down, down. Jim drove under Franny’s close supervision—
Watch out, watch out, watch out
or
Oooh, look, guys, sheep!
depending on how harrowing the roads were. Sylvia read her book until she felt like she was about to barf, and by then (she had a strong stomach when she wasn’t hungover, and she’d slept as well as she ever had the night before) they were nearly there.

“Hey,” Sylvia said to her brother, and jostled his leg.

“What?” Bobby said, and looked at her warily.

“What did you say to Carmen? Clearly you told her about the girl. Otherwise, why would she have done that to you, right?” Sylvia was genuinely curious—she tried to imagine Gabe Thrush coming to her and telling her about his stupid indiscretion, instead of just showing up at school holding hands with Katie Saperstein. She might even have forgiven him.

“I didn’t.” Bobby raised a finger to his mouth and shushed her. Then he pointed to their parents.

“Oh.” Sylvia scrunched up her face. “So why was she so mad?”

“Shit, Syl, I don’t know, because I went out without her, and got drunk, and came home and puked. Do we really need to talk about this right now?”

“We’re not listening,” Franny said from the front seat.

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Great.”

They were close—the air was saltier. Sylvia decided to let it drop. It was strange to see Bobby this much—when he came
back to New York, he never stayed more than a few days at a time, and even then he was always running around with his friends from high school. They never saw each other for more than a meal. She wondered if he’d always been this surly and defensive, or whether something had changed—those looming dollar signs—more recently. There was no way to know. She’d always thought that siblings were pretty much the same people in differently shaped bodies, just shaken up slightly, so that the molecules rearranged themselves, but now she wasn’t sure. She would have told Carmen the truth. As it was, Sylvia felt the information starting to rot inside her, like a dead rat on the subway tracks.

Jim parked in a slanted spot on the side of the road, and Charles pulled in two spaces behind them. They all loaded up their arms with Franny’s supplies and humped the lot of it down a steep set of stairs to the sand, walking past a barrier of narrow pine trees.

Gemma was right—the beach was glorious. Once they were through the trees, the beach opened up like an unfolded map, with more and more clean, bright sand in both directions. There were several clusters of people—umbrellaed colonies here and there—but on the whole the beach was quiet, and the water was nearly empty. The water! Franny wanted to run toward it with her hands clasping open and closed like a lobster’s claws, to hold on to it, a shimmery dream. The Mediterranean was richly blue, with tiny waves lapping in and out. One woman stood some ten feet out, her legs submerged up to her knees and
her hands on her hips, elbows winging out to the sides. There was no music playing, no beach volleyball. These were serious sunbathers, the early risers, and dedicated swimmers. Franny led the troops halfway down to the water, and carefully set down her bounty. She flapped out her towel and unfolded an umbrella. She lathered herself with a low-SPF sunscreen—what was the point of coming to a beach and not leaving with a bit of a tan, after all?—and looked around, satisfied. There was sweat on her upper lip, and she wiped it away with a finger.

“I’m going in!” she announced, and peeled off her gauzy cover-up. She dropped it onto her towel and turned away, hoping no one was looking at her thighs. There was a pitter-patter of running feet behind her, and before Franny knew it, Carmen was in the water, sloshing through with high knees until it was deep enough for her to dive, and then she was gone.

Sylvia curled up like a sleeping dog in the narrow and shifting shade offered by the umbrella.

“You know that the sun will not actually set you on fire, right?” Bobby said. He was lying on his back, with his T-shirt thrown over his face.

“I’m a delicate flower,” Sylvia said. She stuck out her tongue for emphasis, but Bobby was no longer looking. On her other side, Charles and Lawrence had set up shop on an impressive scale—magazines, chairs, their shoulder bags weighing down
the corners of the beach towels. They were both reading novels, and Charles had his camera in his lap, in case he saw anyone he’d like to paint. Lawrence had also brought his laptop on the off chance that the beach had Wi-Fi, which it didn’t. There was a large hotel just up the road, and he planned to duck away at some point to send some e-mails, or really just to hit the refresh button in hopes that the agency had written again with some news, asking them to call. The beach was too lovely to ignore, though, and Lawrence was more than happy to loll around for a few hours. The water was warm enough to swim in but brisk enough to be refreshing, and so they took turns splashing around and then baking on the sand.

Franny stood in the water and tried to look as European as possible. She wasn’t going to take her top off, but she could do the rest—sunglasses, a simple suit, an air of nonchalance. Carmen was swimming laps again, the current bringing her farther from the shore, but she seemed determined, and Franny doubted that she would need to be rescued. She had a good, strong stroke, dragging the water underneath her with every motion.

“Maybe she’ll drown,” Jim said, appearing next to Franny. “Would that make things better or worse?” He was wearing a thin cotton polo, which the wind pushed against his lanky torso. Jim’s resolute refusal to gain weight like a normal middle-aged person was always high on the list of things that drove her crazy. Bobby and Sylvia both seemed to have been born with this gene, which made Franny wish that it were
possible to give such things in reverse, though she’d long held on to the idea that being chubby gave one character. Being thin led to nothing but cockiness. Maybe that’s why Bobby was in this pickle. If he’d been an overweight child, perhaps it could have been avoided.

“Oh, stop,” Franny said. She crossed her arms over her soft middle, pushing together her breasts. It felt absurd to still be conscious of her body in front of her husband, but after that girl,
that girl
, Franny had reverted to the behavior of a bulimic teenager, minus the purging—eating a second helping of dinner after Jim had gone upstairs for the evening, or when he wasn’t looking. Sneaking in an ice cream cone when she ran errands. Putting on her Spanx in the bathroom, with the door closed.

“So it sounds like Bobby did more than get too drunk the other night,” Jim said.

Franny quickly looked over her shoulder at her kids, some twenty feet away. Bobby was sitting up and staring at the water, his elbows resting on his knees. “I couldn’t tell what happened, could you?”

“Didn’t sound good.”

Bobby stood up, dusted off his bottom, and walked slowly into the sand. He nodded at his parents when he passed them, but kept going. Franny and Jim watched him wade slowly into the sea before he inelegantly dropped to his knees. He flipped onto his back and began to float, his body just a few inches
above the sand and bits of seashells. Franny watched her son bob for a few minutes before his whole body began to thrash around as if he were being attacked by an invisible shark.

“Fuck!” Bobby said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He struggled to stand up, and began to hobble back to his towel. The other beach patrons turned to look. “I think something bit me.” He was clutching his calf, just above his right ankle. Carmen had heard the commotion and swum closer, her head and shoulders above the surface.

Jim hustled to his son’s side. “Here?” he asked, pointing to where Bobby was clutching his leg. The skin was raised and turning red, in a lacy pattern. Bobby lost about twenty-five years immediately, his face as open and expressionless as a baby’s right after its very first shot—that wide surprise. Growing up in the city meant little exposure to stings and bites of the natural variety, unless they were ornery pit bulls walking down Broadway. Franny pushed Jim out of the way, and knelt in the sand next to Bobby.

“Sweetie, are you okay?” She reached out for his leg but then withdrew her hand. “Can I touch it?”

Sylvia had rolled onto her side and was watching with some amusement. “Did karma bite you, Bobby?”

“Sylvia!” Franny shouted. They never yelled at the children—it just wasn’t in their nature. They cajoled, they teased, they wheedled, but they never yelled. Sylvia recoiled as if she were the one who’d been stung, and hid underneath her umbrella.

Jim weighed his options. He’d seen it done before, and it would make the burning sensation stop, but being peed on by your father would sting, too. He led Bobby, limping, off to one side of the beach.

“Just do it,” Bobby said. He turned his head, defeated. “Like this could get any worse.”

“Let’s go in the water,” Jim said, “out of the way. Just watch where you step.”

They walked on the dark, damp part of the sand until the very end of the beach, where they stood against the rocks. Bobby closed his eyes and winced in anticipation. Jim pulled down the waistband of his bathing suit and slid his penis out, aiming for Bobby’s leg. He
had
seen it done before, but never like this. He wanted to explain to Bobby that he was still his child, that even though Bobby had made mistakes, and he had made mistakes, there were years and years of love built up between them, that they could go without speaking for decades and Jim would still love him. Jim wanted to tell Bobby about how much shit he had cleaned off his bottom when he was a baby, about all the times that Bobby had shot golden arcs of urine directly into his face. This was purposeful, this was nothing! But it didn’t feel like nothing. Jim sighed, and a warm stream was released.