The Vacationers: A Novel (2 page)

“Have you really not read it before?” Jim asked.

“When I was in college. Who remembers?” Franny flipped the page.

“It’s funny, I think,” Sylvia said. Her parents turned to look at her. “We read it in the fall. It’s funny and pathetic. Sort of like
Waiting for Godot
, you know?”

“Mm-hmm,” Franny said, looking back to the book.

Jim made eye contact with Sylvia over Franny’s head and rolled his eyes. The flight would board soon, and then they’d be suspended in air. Having a daughter whose company he actually enjoyed was one of Jim’s favorite accomplishments. The odds were against you, in all matters of family planning. You couldn’t choose to have a boy or a girl; you couldn’t choose to have a child who favored you over the other parent. You could only accept what came along naturally, and Sylvia had done just that, ten years after her brother. Bobby liked to use the word
accident
, but Jim and Franny preferred the word
surprise
, like a birthday party filled with balloons. They had been surprised, that much was true. The woman at the gate picked up her microphone and announced the pre-boarding call.

Franny closed her book and immediately began to gather her belongings—she liked to be among the first on board, as if she would have to elbow someone else for her assigned seat. It was the principle, Franny said. She wanted to get where she was going as quickly as possible, not like all these other lollygaggers who seemed like they’d be just as happy to stay in the airport forever, buying overpriced bottles of water and magazines they would eventually abandon in a seat pocket.

Jim and Franny sat side by side in reclining pods, seats that lowered almost completely flat, with Franny at the window and
Jim on the aisle. Franny traveled enough to accrue the kind of frequent-flier miles that would make lesser women weep with envy, but she would have gladly paid for the larger seats regardless. Sylvia was thirty rows behind them, in coach. Teenagers and younger children did not need to sit in business class, let alone first—that was Franny’s philosophy. The extra room was for people who could appreciate it, truly appreciate it, and she did. Sylvia’s bones were still pliable—she could easily contort herself into a comfortable enough shape to fall asleep. Franny didn’t give it another thought.

The plane was somewhere over the ocean, and the dramatic sunset had already completed its pink-and-orange display. The world was dark, and Jim stared over Franny’s shoulder at the vast nothingness. Franny took sleeping pills, so that she could wake up feeling rested and have a leg up on the inevitable jet lag. She’d swallowed the Ambien earlier than usual, immediately following takeoff, and was now fast asleep, snoring with her parted lips toward the window, her padded silk eye mask tethered to her head with a taut elastic band.

Jim unbuckled his seat belt and stood up to stretch his legs. He walked to the back of the first-class cabin and pulled aside the curtain to peer at the rest of the plane. Sylvia was so far back that he couldn’t see her from where he stood, so he walked farther, and farther, until he could make her out. Hers was the only light on in the last several rows of the plane, and Jim found himself climbing over sleeping passengers’ socked feet as he made his way to his daughter.

“Hey,” he said, putting his hand on the seat in front of Sylvia’s. She had her earbuds in, and nodded to the music, creating a shadow on the open pages of her notebook. She was writing, and hadn’t noticed him approach.

Jim touched her on the shoulder. Startled, she looked up and yanked the white cord, pulling the headphones out. Tiny streams of music, unrecognizable to him, poured out of her lap. Sylvia hit an invisible button, and the music stopped. She folded her notebook closed and then crossed her wrists on top of it, further blocking her father’s vision of her most intimate inner thoughts.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” Jim said, crouching down to an uncomfortable squat, his back braced against the seat across the aisle. Sylvia didn’t like seeing her father’s body in unusual positions. She didn’t like to think about the fact that her father had a body at all. Not for the first time in the last few months, Sylvia wished that her wonderful father, whom she loved very much, was in an iron lung and able to be moved only when someone else was nice enough to wheel him around.

“Mom asleep?”

“Of course.”

“Are we there yet?”

Jim smiled. “Few more hours. Not so bad. Maybe you should try to sleep a little.”

“Yeah,” Sylvia said. “You, too.”

Jim patted her again, his long, squared-off fingers cupping
Sylvia’s shoulder, which made her flinch. He turned to walk back to his seat, but Sylvia called after him by way of apology, though she wasn’t quite sure if she was sorry.

“It’s going to be fine, Dad. We’ll have a good time.”

Jim nodded at her, and began the slow trip back to his seat.

When he was safely gone, Sylvia opened her notebook again and went back to the list she’d been making: Things to Do Before College. So far, there were only four entries: 1. Buy extra-long sheets. 2. Fridge? 3. Get a tan. (Fake?) (Ha, kill me first.) (No, kill my parents.) 4. Lose virginity. Sylvia underlined the last item on the list and then drew some squiggles in the margin. That about covered it.

MOST OF THE OTHER PASSENGERS ON THE SMALL PLANE
from Madrid to Mallorca were nattily dressed, white-haired Spaniards and Brits in frameless glasses headed to their vacation homes, along with a large clutch of noisy Germans who seemed to think they were headed for spring break. Across the aisle from Franny and Jim were two men in heavy black leather jackets, both of whom kept turning around to shout obscenity-laced slang at their leather-jacketed friend in the row behind. Their jackets were covered with sewn-on patches with acronyms for various associations that Franny gathered had to do with riding motorcycles—one with a picture of a wrench, one with a Triumph logo, several with pictures of Elvis. Franny narrowed her eyes at the men, trying to summon the look that said It Is Too Early for Your Voice to Be So Loud. The most boisterous of the three was sitting by the window, a
moon-faced redhead with the complexion of a marathon runner in his twenty-fifth mile.

“Oi, Terry,” he said, reaching over the seatback to smack his dozing friend on the head. “Napping’s fer babies!”

“Yeah, well, you’d know all about it, then, wouldn’t ya?” The sleeping friend picked his face up off his hand, revealing a creased cheek. He turned toward Franny and glowered. “Morning,” he said. “Hope you’re enjoying your in-flight entertainment.”

“Are you an actual motorcycle gang?” Jim asked, leaning across the aisle. Younger editors at
Gallant
were always pitching features that had them test-driving expensive speed machines, but Jim had never ridden one himself.

“You could say that,” the sleepy one said.

“I always wanted to have a motorcycle. Never happened.”

“Not too late.” Then the sleepy one returned his face to his hand and began to snore.

Franny rolled her eyes aggressively, but no one else was paying attention.

The ride was quick, and they landed in sun-drenched Palma in under an hour. Franny put on her sunglasses and shambled from the tarmac to the baggage claim like a movie star who had relaxed into stout-bodied middle age. Commercial airlines were about as glamorous as Greyhound buses, but she could pretend. Franny had taken the Concorde twice, to Paris and back, and mourned the loss of the supersonic speed and the elaborately presented airplane food. Everyone in Palma seemed
to be speaking German, and for a moment, Franny worried that they’d gotten off at the wrong place, as if she’d been asleep on the subway and missed her stop. It was a proper Mediterranean morning, bright and warm, with a hint of olive oil in the air. Franny felt pleased with her choice of venue: Mallorca was less cliché than the South of France, and less overrun by Americans than Tuscany. Of course it had an overbuilt shoreline and its share of terrible tourist-infested restaurants, but they would avoid all that. Islands, being harder to get to, naturally separated some of the wheat from the chaff, which was the entire philosophy behind places like Nantucket, where children grew up feeling entitled to private beaches and loud pants. But Franny didn’t want too much of that elitist hooey—she wanted to please everyone, including the children, which meant having a big enough town nearby that people could go see movies dubbed into Spanish, if they wanted to fly the coop for a few hours. Jim had grown up in Connecticut and was therefore used to being marooned with his terrible family, but the rest of them were New Yorkers, which meant that having an escape route was necessary for one’s sanity.

The house they’d rented was a twenty-minute drive from Palma proper, “straight up a hill,” according to Gemma, which made Franny groan, averse as she was to location-mandated forms of cardiovascular exercise. But who needed to walk anywhere when they had so many bedrooms, and a swimming pool, within minutes of the ocean? The idea had been to be together, everyone nicely trapped, with card games and wine and
all the fixings of satisfying summers at their fingertips. Things had changed in the last few months, but Franny still wanted it to be true that spending time with her family wasn’t punishment, not like it would be with her parents, or with Jim’s. Franny thought that the major accomplishment of her life was producing two children who seemed to like each other even when no one else was looking, though with ten years between them, Sylvia and Bobby had had very separate childhoods. Maybe that was the key to all good relationships, having oceans of time apart. It might not even have been true anymore—the children saw each other only on holidays, and on Bobby’s infrequent visits home. Franny hoped that it was.

Jim sorted out the rental car while Franny and Sylvia waited for the bags. Even on vacation, Franny didn’t see the point in being anything less than efficient—why should they all have to wait to do everything? Jim had to drive, anyway, because all European rental cars were stick, and Franny had only very rarely driven a stick since her high school drivers’ education class in 1971. And anyway, there was no reason to spend more time than necessary at the airport. Franny wanted to get a good look at the house, go grocery shopping, pick bedrooms for everyone, find a spot where she could write, know which closet held the extra towels. She wanted to buy shampoo, and toilet paper, and cheese. The vacation wouldn’t officially start until she’d taken a shower and eaten some olives.

“Mom,” Sylvia said. She pointed to a black suitcase the size of a small coffin. “Is that yours?”

“No,” Franny said, watching an even larger bag slide down the luggage chute. “That one.”

“I don’t know why you packed so much,” Sylvia said. “It’s only two weeks.”

“It’s all presents for you and your brother,” Franny said, pinching Sylvia’s narrow biceps. “All I brought is one extra shroud. Mothers don’t need anything else, do they?”

Sylvia fluttered her lips like a horse and went to fetch her mother’s bag.

“Oh, those guys,” Sylvia said, and gestured with her chin toward the Too-Loud Motorcyclists. “I love them.”

“They’re overgrown children,” Franny said, sighing loudly through her open mouth. “They should have gone to Ibiza.”

“No, Mom, they’re The Sticky Spokes Rock ’n’ Roll Squad, see?”

Sleepy Terry had turned around to pick up his suitcase, a slightly incongruous orange rollie, exposing not only the pale crack of his bottom but also the back of his leather jacket, which read in giant block letters just as Sylvia had dictated.

“That’s a terrible name,” Franny said. “I bet they’ll spend the whole week drunk and killing themselves on tiny little roads.”

Sylvia had lost interest and was hurrying over to her own bag, now skidding down to the lip of the conveyer belt with a soft plop.

The Posts hadn’t vacationed in years, not like this. There
were the summer rentals in Sag Harbor, the
unhampton
,
as Franny liked to call it until it wasn’t true anymore, and then the one-month-long stint in Santa Barbara when Sylvia was five and Bobby was fifteen, two entirely different trips happening at once, a nightmare at mealtimes. It was too hard to travel all together, Franny had decided. She took Bobby to Miami by himself when he was sixteen, and granted him mother-free afternoons in South Beach, a trip he would later claim as the inspiration for attending the University of Miami, a dubious honor for his mother, who then wished she’d taken him on a trip to Cambridge instead. Jim and Franny and Sylvia once spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, doing nothing but eating barbecue and waiting for the bats to emerge from under the bridge. And of course Franny was often traveling on her own, covering trends in Southern Californian cuisine for this magazine, or a New Mexican chili festival for that one, or eating her way across France, one flaky croissant after another. Most days of the year, Jim and Sylvia were at home, cobbling together an elaborate meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, or ordering in from one of the restaurants on Columbus Avenue, pretending to argue over the remote control. Franny’s own parents, the Golds of 41 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, had never once taken her out of the country, and she took it as her duty to provide new experiences for her children. Sylvia’s tongue would soften, her Spanish would go from New York Puerto Rican Spanish to Actual Spanish Spanish, and someday, some thirty
or forty years down the road, when she was in Madrid or Barcelona and the language came back to her like her first lover, Franny knew that Sylvia would thank her for this trip, even if she was already dead.

The house was in the foothills of the Tramuntana Mountains, on the far side of the town of Puigpunyent, on the winding road that would eventually lead to Valldemossa. No one could pronounce
Puigpunyent
(the car rental agent had said
Pooch-poon-yen
,
or something of the sort, unrepeatable with an American tongue), and so when Sylvia insisted on calling it Pigpen, Jim and Franny couldn’t correct her, and Pigpen it was. Mallorcan Spanish wasn’t the same as proper Spanish, which wasn’t the same as Catalan. Franny’s plan was to ignore the differences and just plow ahead—it was how she usually got along in foreign countries. Unless you were in France, most people were delighted to hear you try and fail to form the right words. Franny and Sylvia stared out opposite windows, Franny in the front and Sylvia in the back, while Jim drove. It was only twenty-five minutes from the airport, according to Gemma, but that seemed to be true only if you knew where you were going. Gemma was one of Franny’s least favorite humans on the planet, for a number of reasons: 1. She was Charles’s second-closest female friend. 2. She was tall and thin and blond, three automatic strikes. 3. She’d been shipped off to
boarding school outside Paris and spoke perfect French, which Franny found profoundly show-offy, like doing a triple axel at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.

Heading up the mountain, Jim took several wrong turns on roads that looked too narrow to be two-way streets and not just someone’s well-paved driveway, but no one particularly minded, because it gave them a better introduction to the island. Mallorca was a layer cake—the gnarled olive trees and spiky palms, the green-gray mountains, the chalky stone walls along either side of the road, the cloudless pale blue sky overhead. Though the day was hot, the mugginess of New York City was gone, replaced by unfiltered sunshine and a breeze that promised you’d never be too warm for long. Mallorca was summer done right, hot enough to swim but not so warm that your clothing stuck to your back.

Franny laughed when they pulled into the gravel drive, so drastically had Gemma undersold her house—another reason to despise her: modesty. In the distance, there were proper mountains, with ancient trees ringing the slopes like Christmas ornaments, and the house itself looked like an actual present: two stories tall and twice as wide as their limestone at home, it was a sturdy-looking stone building, painted a light pink. It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face. A good third of the house’s front was covered with rich green vines, which crept across from edge to edge, threatening to climb into the windows and consume the house entirely. Tall, narrow pine trees
lined the edge of the property, their tippy-tops poking at the wide and empty sky. It was a child’s drawing of a house, a large square with an angled roof on top, colored in with some ancient terra-cotta crayon that made the whole thing radiate. Franny clapped.

The back of the house was even better—the swimming pool, which had looked merely serviceable in the single backyard photograph, was in fact divine, a wide blue rectangle tucked into the hillside. A cluster of wooden chaise longues sat at one end, as if the Posts had walked in on a conversation already in progress. Sylvia hurried behind her mother, holding on to the sides of her tunic like a horse’s reins. From the lip of the pool, they could see other houses tucked into the side of the mountain, as small and perfectly shaped as Monopoly pieces, their gleaming faces poking out from a blanket of shifting green trees and craggy rocks. The ocean was somewhere on the other side of the mountains, another ten minutes west, and Sylvia huffed in the fresh air, sniffing for salt particles. There was probably a university in Mallorca—at the very least, a swimming and tennis academy. Maybe she would just stay and let her parents go home alone and do whatever had to be done. If she was on the other side of the world, what difference would it make? For the first time in her life, Sylvia envied her brother’s distance. It was harder to mourn something you weren’t used to seeing on a daily basis.

Jim left the bags in the car and found the front door, which was oversized, heavy, and unlocked. It took a moment for his
eyes to adjust to the relative dark. The house’s foyer was empty except for a console table on the left-hand side, a large mirror hanging on the wall, and a ceramic pot the size of a small child on the right.

“Hello?” Jim called out, even though the house was supposed to be empty, and he wasn’t expecting an answer. In front of him, a narrow hall led straight to a door to the garden, and he could see a sliver of the swimming pool, backed by the mountains. The room smelled of flowers and earth, with a soupçon of cleaning products. Bobby would like that, when he arrived—ever since he was a child, when Jim and Franny would drag him along on their trips to Maine or New Orleans or wherever, staying in crumbling vacation houses with mismatched forks, Bobby made his disgust for the unclean known. He detested antique furniture and vintage clothing, anything that had had a previous life. It was why he liked Florida real estate so much, Jim thought—everything was always brand-new. Even the gigantic piles in Palm Beach were gutted every few years, their insides replaced with shinier parts. Florida suited Bobby in a way that New York never had, but he wouldn’t mind this, either. At least not for two weeks.