The Vacationers: A Novel (3 page)

Jim walked through the archway on his left, into the living room. As in the photos, it was stylishly underfurnished, with only two low sofas and a nice rug, with paintings on the walls in places where the sun wouldn’t hit them directly. Gemma was an art dealer, or a gallerist, or something. Jim’s vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job
description was superfluous. The living room led into a dining room, with a long wooden farm table and two rustic-looking benches, which in turn led into the large kitchen. The windows above the sink looked out onto the pool, and Jim paused there. Sylvia and Franny were lying on neighboring chaises. Franny had unwrapped her shawl from her shoulders and placed it over her face. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her legs splayed out to the sides—she was sunbathing, albeit with most of her clothes on. Jim exhaled with satisfaction—Franny was already having a good time.

To say that Franny had been uptight in the preceding month would be too delicate, too demure. She had been ruling the Post house with an iron sphincter. Though the trip had been meticulously planned in February, months before Jim’s job at the magazine had slid out from under him, the timing was such that Fran could be counted on to have at least one red-faced scream per day. The zipper on the suitcase was broken, Bobby and Carmen’s flights (booked on Post frequent-flier points) were costing them hundreds of dollars in fees because they had to shift the flights back a day. Jim was always in the way and in the wrong. Franny was expert in showing the public her good face, and once Charles arrived, it would be nothing but petting and cooing, but when she and Jim were alone, Franny could be a demon. Jim was grateful that, at least for the time being, Franny’s horns seemed to have vanished back inside her skull.

The far end of the kitchen spat Jim out into the narrow hall opposite the entrance. On the other side of the foyer were a
small bathroom with only a toilet and a shower stall, a laundry room, a study, and a single bedroom with its own bathroom attached, what Americans called mother-in-law suites, a place where you could stash the person everyone wanted to see the least. Normally, Jim would have claimed the study for his own, or at least fought Franny hard for it, but then he realized that he wouldn’t have anything to do there—there were no deadlines looming, no pieces to edit, no writing to do, no queries to be made, no books to read for any purpose other than his own pleasure and edification. He needed a desk like a fish needed a bicycle, that’s what the bumper sticker would have read.
Gallant
would soldier on without him, telling the intelligent American man which books to buy, which soap to use, and how to tell the difference between Scotch and Irish whiskey. Jim tried to shake off his discomfort with this, but it lingered as he made his way into the bedroom.

The room was cozy, with a quilt covering the double bed, a large dresser, and a writing desk in front of the window that faced the far side of the house. Uncharitably, Jim thought about whether they could put Bobby and Carmen in that room, and not upstairs, where the rest of the bedrooms must be, but no, of course they would give Charles and Lawrence the most privacy. There was an old-fashioned key sitting in the lock on the inside of the bedroom door, which made Jim happy. If they were all going to be in this house together, at least they could lock the doors. Jim briefly fantasized about locking himself in and playing possum for the rest of the day, a lazy man’s Walter Mitty.

Sylvia and Franny banged in from the outside just as Jim was pulling the door closed.

“The pool is
great
,” Sylvia said, though she hadn’t been in. “What time is it?” She had the wild look of someone who hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine. Sylvia could have stayed up for three more days, easy.

“Want to sort out the bedrooms?” he said, knowing that Franny would want to choose theirs. “I thought Charles and Lawrence . . .” Jim started, but Franny was already halfway up the stairs.

Predictably, both Jim and Sylvia fell asleep as soon as they were given a bed in which to do so. Franny dragged her bag from the trunk of the car into the foyer. Gemma had left a small dossier on the house, pool, and surrounding towns in a red folder on the kitchen counter, and Franny leafed through it quickly. There were a few restaurants at the bottom of the hill—some tapas, some sandwiches, some pizza—and a serviceable grocery store and vegetable market. Palma, the largest city on the island, which they had just circumnavigated on their way from the airport, had everything else they could need—department stores for forgotten bathing suits and such, Camper shoes made on Mallorca. Gemma herself was fully stocked with beach
towels and suntan lotion, pool floats and goggles. There were clean sheets on the beds and more in the linen closet. Someone would come the following weekend to service the pool and take care of the garden. They weren’t to lift a finger. Franny closed the folder and knocked her knuckles against the stone countertop.

It wasn’t fair, the way women had to do absolutely everything. Franny knew that Gemma had been married a handful of times, twice to an Italian with a job in global finance, once to an heir to a Saudi oil company, but there was no way that any man would ever have typed up a list of instructions and usual information for his home, unless of course he were being paid to do so. It was the kind of thoughtful touch that only women were intrinsically capable of, no matter what any quack therapist on television said. Franny heard a rumble upstairs—Jim’s nasal passages had never taken well to transatlantic flights—and shook her head. She did some yogic breathing, the kind that Jim thought sounded like a sweaty Russian in a bathhouse, as if he were in a position to judge, and tried to clear her mind, to no avail.

Just because no one else had slept on the plane and the rest of her family seemed perfectly content to slip into a vampiric schedule out of laziness didn’t mean that Franny had to, too. She fished her sunglasses out of her purse and set out into the world, leaving her slumbering family members unprotected from the local evils, whatever they might be. She pulled the heavy front door shut behind her and began to walk down the hill in the direction of the local market, as directed by Gemma’s
careful instructions. Someone needed to buy food for dinner, after all, and Sylvia’s Spanish tutor was scheduled to come over at three-thirty, after he was done with church, Franny guessed, seeing as they were in a Catholic country. She didn’t care one way or the other, only that he arrived more or less on time and didn’t make Sylvia’s Spanish any worse. Kids needed to be occupied, after all, whether they grew up in Manhattan or Mallorca, or, God bless them, on the mainland.

They would drive to a larger supermarket later, maybe tomorrow, but for now all they needed were a few things to make for dinner. Franny was the mom, which meant that all the planning fell to her, even if anyone else had been awake. No matter that Jim no longer had a job—some retirees took up cooking as a hobby, turning their kitchens into miniature Cordons Bleus, filling drawers with brûlée torches and abandoned parts of ice cream makers, but Franny couldn’t quite imagine that happening. Most retirees had chosen to leave their jobs, after decades of service and repetitive-stress disorders, and that wasn’t what had happened to Jim. What had happened to Jim. Franny kicked a loose rock. They’d always enjoyed vacations, the Posts, and this seemed like as good a send-off as any, complete with days at the beach and views to kill. Franny wished she had something to break. She bent over to pick up a stick and flung it over the cliff.

The road to the small town—really just an intersection with a few restaurants and shops on either side—was narrow, as they’d noticed driving up the mountain, but walking along the
side of the road, Franny felt as though it had shrunk even further. There was hardly room enough for a fleet of bicycles to whiz by her, let alone a car, or, God forbid, two, going in opposite directions, but whiz they did. She clung to the left side of the road, wishing that she’d thought to pack some sort of reflective clothing, even though it was still the middle of the day and anyone driving could see her plainly enough. Franny was not a tall woman, but she wasn’t as short as her mother and sister. She liked to think of herself as average size, though the averages had of course changed over time, Marilyn Monroe’s size twelve being something like a modern size six, and so on. Yes, it was true that Franny had gotten thicker in the last decade, but that was what happened unless you were a high-functioning psychotic, and she had other things to think about. Franny knew plenty of women who had chosen to prioritize the eternal youth of their bodies, and they were all miserable creatures, their taut triceps unable to conceal their dissatisfaction with their empty stomachs and unfulfilling lives. Franny liked to eat, and to feed people, and she wasn’t embarrassed that her body displayed such proclivities. She’d gone to one horrible Overeaters Anonymous meeting in her early forties, in a stuffy room in the basement of a church, and the degree to which she recognized herself in the other men and women sitting on the folding chairs had scared her away for good. It might be a problem, but it was her problem, thank you very much. Some people smoked crack in alleyways. Franny ate chocolate. On the scale of things, it seemed entirely reasonable.

The grocery store was a modified farm stand with three walls and two short rows of open shelving with canned food and other staples. A handful of people were on their way in or out, some on bicycles, and some pulling their cars off to the nonexistent shoulder of the road. Franny wiped the sweat off her cheeks and started to pull things off the small shelves. There was a cooler in one corner with some sheep’s milk cheese wrapped in paper, and dried sausages hung from the rafters at the other end of the room. A woman in an apron was weighing the produce and charging the customers. If Franny could have chosen another life, one far from New York City, this is what she would have chosen: to be surrounded by olives and lemons and sunlight, with clean beaches nearby. She assumed the Mallorcan beaches were clean, not at all like the filthy Coney Island of her youth. Franny bought some anchovies, a box of dried pasta, two fat links of sausage, and cheese. She bought a small bag of almonds, and three oranges. That would do for now. She could already taste the salty cheese melting into the pasta, the tang of the anchovies. Surely there was olive oil at the house—she hadn’t checked. That didn’t seem like something Gemma would overlook. She probably had her own oil pressed from the trees on her property.

“Buenos días,”
Franny said to the woman in the apron. If she was being truly honest, Franny was slightly disappointed that the women in the market were all wearing perfectly normal clothing, with mobile phones sticking out of their pockets, just like women in New York. It was even true in Mumbai,
that a woman in a sari would whip a cell phone out of her pocket and start talking. When Franny was young, everywhere she went felt like another planet, like some glorious wonderland on the other side of the looking glass. Now the rest of the world felt about as foreign as a shopping mall in Westchester County.

“Buenas tardes,”
the woman said back, quickly weighing and bagging all of Franny’s items. “
Dieciséis.
Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Franny plunged a hand into her purse and felt around for her wallet.

All of Franny’s friends with children were so excited for her, to have Sylvia finally heading off to school.
It’ll be like a vacation,
they said to her
, a vacation from being a full-time parent.
What they meant was,
You aren’t getting any younger, and neither
are your children.
Some of her friends had children who weren’t even in high school yet, and their lives revolved around piano lessons and ballet class, like Franny’s had so many years ago. Or like it might have, if she’d worked less. They all complained about not having any free time, about never having sex with their husbands, but really they were bragging.
My life is too full,
that’s what they were saying.
I have so much left to do.
Enjoy menopause.
While it was true that Franny was going to have her life back in some way, it wasn’t going to be the life of a twenty-year-old, all late nights and hangovers. It was going to be the life of an older person. She was six years away from a senior discount at movie theaters. Six years of looking at Jim in the kitchen and wanting to plunge an ice pick in between his eyes.

“Gracias,”
Franny said, when the woman handed her the change.