The Vacationers: A Novel (4 page)

Sylvia had passed out immediately in the smallest bedroom, which looked like it had been built for a nun: a bed hardly wider than her slim teenaged body, white walls, white sheets, painted white floor. The only thing un-nunlike about the room was a painting of a naked woman in repose. It looked like one of Charles’s, and she was used to those. He loved to paint those tender triangles of pubic hair, often of her mother in her youth. It was what it was. Other people had the luxury of never seeing their mother naked, but not Sylvia. She stretched lazily, her pointed toes hanging over the end of the bed. The house smelled weird, like wet rocks and frogs, and it took Sylvia several minutes to remember where she was.

“Me llamo Sylvia Post,”
she said.
“Dónde está el baño?”

Sylvia rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. The single window in the room was open, and a nice breeze came in. Sylvia had few thoughts about Spain: it wasn’t like France, which made her think of baguettes and bicycles, or Italy, which made her think of gondolas and pizza. Picasso was Spanish but looked French and sounded Italian. There was the one Woody Allen movie that took place in Spain, but Sylvia hadn’t actually seen it. Matadors fighting bulls? That was Spain,
wasn’t it? She might as well have woken up in a sunny bedroom somewhere on the island of Peoria, Illinois.

The bathroom was down the hall, and it looked like it hadn’t been renovated since 1973. The tiles on the wall above the bathtub and behind the sink were the color of split-pea soup, a food group that Sylvia planned to happily avoid for the rest of her life. There was no proper shower, just a handheld nozzle on a long silver neck that began at the hot and cold knobs. Sylvia turned the hot one and waited for a minute, running the water over her hand to feel when it got warm. She waited for a few minutes, and when the warmth didn’t arrive, she turned the other knob, stripped off her clothes, and climbed in. She had to stoop in order to get the nozzle to reach her head and was able to really dampen only one body part at a time. There was a bar of soap in the dish, but Sylvia couldn’t quite work out how to wash her body with one hand and douse herself with freezing- cold water with the other.

All the towels in the bathroom seemed to have been made for little people—Thumbelina-sized people, people even shorter than her mother. Sylvia tried to wrap her upper and lower parts with two of the glorified washcloths. She combed her hair with her fingers and looked at herself in the mirror. Sylvia knew she wasn’t bad-looking, she wasn’t deformed, but she also knew that there was a vast chasm between her and the girls at her school who were beautiful. Her face was a little bit long, and her hair hung limply to her shoulders, neither short nor long,
neither blond nor brown, but somewhere in the middle. That was Sylvia’s whole problem: she was the middle. Sylvia couldn’t imagine how she would explain herself to someone else, to a stranger: she was average, with blue eyes that weren’t particularly large or shapely. Nothing anyone would write a poem about. Sylvia thought about that a lot: so many of the world’s best poems were written before their authors were really adults—Keats, Rimbaud, Plath—and yet they had packed so much beauty and agony into their lives, enough to sustain their memory for centuries. Sylvia stuck out her tongue and carefully opened the bathroom door with the hand holding the towel around her waist.

“Perdón!”

There was a boy attached to the voice. Sylvia shut her eyes, hoping that she was hallucinating, but when she opened them again, he was still there. Maybe
boy
wasn’t the right word—there was a young man standing in front of her, maybe Bobby’s age, maybe younger, but definitely older than she was.

“Oh my God,” Sylvia said. She didn’t want to notice that the complete stranger who was staring at her while she was wearing very tiny towels was handsome, with dark wavy hair like someone on the cover of a romance novel, but she couldn’t help it. “Oh my God,” she said again, and hurried around him, taking the smallest steps possible, so that her legs were never more than two inches apart. When she was safely on the other side
of her bedroom door, Sylvia let the towels drop to the floor so that she could use both of her hands to cover her face and scream without making any noise at all.

“A
doctor
, that’s so wonderful,” Franny said. She was fawning, she could feel herself fawning, but it was out of her hands. There was no stopping the flirtation once it was in motion; she could sooner have stopped a speeding train. There was a twenty-year-old Mallorcan in her dining room, and she wanted to cover his body with local olive oil and wrestle until dark.

“Probably, yes,” he said. The boy’s name was Joan, pronounced Joe-
ahhhn,
and he was to be Sylvia’s Spanish tutor for the next two weeks, coming over for an hour every weekday during their stay. Joan’s parents lived nearby and were friendly with Gemma. (She’d mentioned some gardening club they had in common—Franny had stopped reading the e-mail. Training succulents, maybe.) He’d tutored before, and charged only twenty dollars per hour, which was absurdly inexpensive, even before Franny knew what he looked like, but now seemed like a crime against beauty. The boy was in his second year at the university in Barcelona, home for the summer, living with his parents. He probably ate dinner with them, too! Bobby had never once come home for an entire summer. As far as Franny knew, he’d never even considered it. Once he’d left for Miami,
New York was no more home to him than LaGuardia Airport was. Franny felt her cheeks begin to flush, and she was glad to see Sylvia lurking in the hall when she looked up.

“Oh, good, here’s my daughter now. Sylvia, come meet Joan. Joe—
ahhhn
!” Franny waved her over. Sylvia shook her head and stayed put in the shadows. “Sylvia, what’s the matter with you?” Franny felt her soft, melty feelings about Joan begin to move toward embarrassment at her daughter’s childish behavior.

Sylvia dragged herself into the dining room, moving as if her bare feet were made of glue. Glue that very recently had been seen almost entirely naked.

“This is Joan, he’s going to be your Spanish tutor,” Franny said, gesturing to the man, who Sylvia now was forced to shake hands with.

“Hi,” Sylvia said. Joan’s grip was a little bit soft, which made it easier to keep breathing. She might have died if he had a handshake as good as his hair.

“Very nice to meet you,” Joan said back. There was no wink, no acknowledgment of the run-in at the bathroom door. Sylvia slid into the chair next to her mother without taking her eyes off him, just in case he did make a gesture that indicated he had seen parts of her body that he shouldn’t have.

Franny had slept with a Spaniard once, when she was at Barnard. He was visiting for the year, and lived in the dormitory on 116th Street, just across the street. His name was Pedro—or was it Paulo?—and he had not been an expert lover,
but then again, neither was she, yet. Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise. All Franny could remember was the way he murmured at her in Spanish, a language she didn’t speak, and the sound of those
r
’s rolling off his soft, persistent tongue. Franny had hoped for some love letters in Spanish when he returned home, but by the time he left New York, they weren’t even seeing each other anymore, and so she hadn’t gotten any. Pedro-Paulo hadn’t been nearly as good-looking as Joan, anyway. The boy at her dining room table was built like an athlete and wanted to be a doctor; he had a strong chin with the slightest hint of a cleft at the center. He hadn’t come from church—he’d come from playing tennis with his father. They played at a tennis center about fifteen minutes away, the home turf for Mallorca’s most famous son, Nando Filani, who had won two grand slams already this season. Now all Franny could do was picture Joan in a sweat-drenched T-shirt, the muscles in his arms flexing as he ran for a shot. If Sylvia had been a different kind of girl, Franny might have been worried about leaving her alone with Joan for so many hours over the next two weeks, but things being as they were, she wasn’t.

“Mom?”

“Sorry, sweetie. Did you say something?”

“We’re going to start tomorrow at eleven. Is that okay?”

“Perfecto!”
Franny clapped twice. “I think this is going to be so much fun.”

They all stood up to walk Joan to the door, and Franny grabbed Sylvia by the hand as he climbed into his car and did a three-point turn to drive back down the hill.

“Wasn’t he
gorgeous
?”

Sylvia shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I didn’t really notice.” She spun on her heels and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, shutting the door with a loud clunk. As Franny suspected, she had nothing to worry about. It was only after Joan had gone home and Sylvia had gone upstairs that Franny realized that the age difference between her and the tutor was as wide as the difference between Jim and that girl, which made her audibly gulp, as if she could swallow her sickened feeling like a bit of traveler’s indigestion.

Everyone agreed that an early dinner was best. While she was boiling the water for the pasta, Franny put some olives out in a shallow bowl, with a second small bowl for the pits. She sliced the dried sausage and ate a few pieces before returning her attention to the capers and cheese. The sausage was a little bit spicy, with flecks of fat that melted on her tongue. Franny loved cooking in the summertime, the ease of almost every ingredient being at room temperature. She opened the jar of capers and let a dozen or so fall into a large bowl, into which she then grated some of the cheese. That was all they needed—oil and starch, fat and salt. Tomorrow they would eat vegetables, but tonight
they were truly on vacation, and eating only for pleasure. She should have tried to find some ice cream for dessert, but they could do that tomorrow, when everyone was there. Charles loved to buy the crazy local flavors, always: the dulce de leche, the Brazil nut, the tamarind. She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets, looking for a colander, and found it on the third try. The water was still only at a simmer, and so Franny kept opening and closing cabinet doors, just to see what else was on hand: a mandoline, pots large enough to boil lobsters, lost attachments to a stand mixer long forgotten in a dusty corner. The last cabinet she opened had two pull-out drawers stocked with pantry items. An extra box of dried pasta had been in here, and the olive oil. Franny pawed through, seeing what else she could add to their supper, what else was hiding. A jar of Nutella was in the back row, next to a crusty-looking jar of peanut butter. Franny looked out the window over the sink: Jim and Sylvia were still swimming, already cultivating the healthy glow they got every summer, no matter the weather or the location. Some people were just built that way, as though they could happen upon a triathlon and complete it without any training whatsoever. Even though Sylvia was bookish and wan for most of the year, eschewing organized sports of any and all kinds, she was her father’s daughter, competitive and built for physical exertion, whether she liked it or not.

Franny plucked the jar of Nutella out of the drawer and unscrewed the cap. It wasn’t even half full—hardly enough for the three of them to spread on toast in the morning, if they’d had a
loaf of bread. She was almost impressed with Gemma for entertaining such base pleasures, but it had probably been bought by some other guest, or for a small child’s sophomoric palate. Franny plunged her pointer finger into the wide mouth of the jar and dragged it around the edges, until there was a large crashing wave of the creamy stuff in between her knuckles. She put the whole thing in her mouth and pulled her finger out slowly, with a low moan. Franny screwed the top back on the jar and hid it in a different cabinet, one where no one else would look, just in case.