Wanderlust (3 page)

Love was immediately associated with travel, now between Seattle and Vancouver. On one of my trips I was able to stay in his room in his father's home. Now we finally went where we had known for months, or maybe years, we were headed. I was newly nervous and awkward as he removed my clothing piece by piece, and I did the same for him. We'd both imagined ourselves confident and experienced people of the world, in my case on no grounds whatsoever.

I saw him a few more times on weekends that spring, and in the weeks after my final exams. I marveled at our extraordinary privilege.
I must have, I realized, been passing in-love people all the time, without understanding their world. I didn't want to exit this place of warmth and pleasure, didn't, in fact, understand that you could. I couldn't imagine why you might have to, because to be in love felt expansive. It included the whole world, made anything possible. I was so happy about two things, the way I felt about Graham and my upcoming trip to Spain, that it didn't immediately occur to me that they might be at odds. I didn't anticipate the pain of parting ways.

The night before I was to fly, I drove Graham back to his father's place and stayed too late, feeling like a hollow was opening up in my chest every time I tried to leave. Finally I sped home, sobbing all the way. Halfway along Barnet Highway, between Burnaby Mountain and the inlet shore, sirens invaded the haze of my emotional emergency, and I pulled over. The officer asked me what was wrong. I took a moment to bring my breathing under control, then choked out, “I just said good-bye.”

“Ya just said good-bye, eh?” he repeated back, not cruelly, and handed me a ticket. “Try to slow down now, okay?”

chapter two

M
aria José taught engineering,
and Toni was a dentist; they were in their forties. They spent most of the year in Valencia, but in the summer retreated to a breezy, white stucco hillside home in Moraira, where Toni also kept a practice. The children were named for their parents. Maria José Jr., at two a tottering bundle of baby fat, was sandy-haired and blue-eyed like her mother, while Antonito, at four, had his father's tawny skin and black hair. Maria José's parents would come to visit for weeks on end, as would her sister. Toni's parents had a house nearby. I was unsure about my job description, but it seemed to be: Be around most of the time, speak English to the kids, and baby-sit solo as needed.

I was given a cubby perched on the roof of the two-story home. To get there I exited the main floor of the house onto a veranda, then climbed a set of outdoor stairs. The room was just big enough for a single bed, a shelf, and a chair. Its chief attraction was the wide window, which gave me a panoramic view. Moraira sits on a southfacing bay, and the house was on a hill on the east side, so I could see the scrubby, sand-color hills that surrounded the town, a tumble of white stucco homes with red-tiled roofs, and the Mediterranean, which shifted from iridescent gray in the dawn to bright aquamarine in the late morning. When I first took in the view—mine for the
next two months—I felt the charge of dumb luck. The next minute I felt lonely. Here I was, queen of my castle, with no Graham, no one to share.

The family had a summer routine with almost no daily variation. Every morning after breakfast, I loaded up on towels and water toys and walked the children down the hill to the beach, where we set up camp under an umbrella. Sometimes Maria José Sr. walked with us, and sometimes she came a little later. Sometimes the children's grandparents were there too, making me feel particularly useless, so keen were they to baby-sit. In the early afternoon we returned home and had lunch. Afterward I took the children to the swimming pool down the street.

Then the most chaotic and work-intensive portion of the day began. Both children had to be bathed, dressed, and combed in preparation for the hours ahead. Antonito was manageable, but Maria José Jr. usually chose this time of day to pitch a fit. Her mother discouraged napping during the day in hopes that she would sleep at night, so she was always exhausted, and screamed and sobbed until she ran out of steam. Toni would come home from work during this period, and by seven o'clock, somehow all five of us managed to be dressed and ready to face the evening.

Their nightly routine was as fixed as their daytime schedule, and I usually accompanied them. From the house we drove down the hill, past an enclave called El Portet and the beach I went to every day, over a rocky outcropping, and down into the center of Moraira, a village with pharmacies and ice cream parlors, a marina, a cathedral, and pedestrian plazas lined with restaurants that served whole fried fish and paella. After parking we went for a walk on the waterfront, sometimes stopping to talk to their friends. Maria José tried to introduce me to young people she thought would be
simpatico, like a nanny from France, who told me she was granted a full day off every week, and an obese Californian brunette, Abby, who along with her brother was staying with a Spanish host family as part of a student exchange.

Always, we ended up at a restaurant called Casa Dorita, sitting outside on the cathedral plaza, amid a large group of Maria José and Toni's friends. At first they asked me polite questions about where I was from and what I studied, but their attention quickly returned to things that mattered, which mostly consisted of news about their children and gossip about their circle. I couldn't blame them. Common ground eluded us, and my Spanish was too creaky to bridge the gap as a sparkling conversationalist.

Casa Dorita was family-run, named for the matriarch, Dora. Three of her kids worked in the restaurant. Pepe, nineteen, and Nuria, seventeen, took turns tending bar and waiting tables, while their older sister—also Dora, in her twenties—worked in the kitchen with her fiancé. Pepe had bristly brown hair and a five o'clock shadow, and was immediately friendly, asking me about Seattle and patiently waiting out my answers. He was doing his
mili
—his military service—by day, which involved a lot of zipping around in a Zodiac on maneuvers. Sometimes they pulled in at El Portet Beach, where I took the children. He said he would look for me there.

My employers' version of family life was fascinating and strange. I couldn't imagine my parents so socially engaged, every day of the week, and I'd never lived with extended family so close: Cousins and grandparents were people I saw at most a few times a year. But observation of the Spaniard in his natural habitat could hold my interest for only so long. About a week in, it became clear that I wouldn't have any days off. Nor did I really have any freedom of movement. I could walk to the beach or swimming pool, but the center of town was too
far. When I ran out of sunscreen, I couldn't even do something as simple as go buy some myself—I had to ask Maria José, or arrange to be taken to town. I wasn't sure what I'd expected of the family—sightseeing trips?—but I was boggled at the tight circle that formed their world. With a growing sense of alarm, I saw that this was going to be my summer. My days were spent talking to a four-year-old, and my evenings to adults who were older than me and alien, or reading the handful of novels I'd brought. If I stayed in I could read, but I feared running out of English books, since I had no way to get more. This wasn't the way it was meant to be at all. I wanted adventure. But as the baby-sitter, I was also baby-sat. My tower, with its glamorous and enviable view—a view to write home about, which I did, in misleadingly jaunty tones—was a jail.

I had to take emergency action. I sensed a possible loophole in my well-monitored world, and that was the nighttime. After dinner Toni and Maria José couldn't possibly need me—couldn't possibly demand me, I thought, after I'd been on tap all day—and going out at night seemed to be accepted local young-adult practice. Abby, the Californian, had told me that her brother went out all night with his Spanish hosts. All I needed was an entrée. A native guide.

One night as the extent of my prisonerlike status was sinking in, we were down in the town taking the evening
paseo
, and, unusually, Maria José and Toni accepted an invitation at a restaurant that was not Casa Dorita. Antonito began playing with a friend, and little Maria José fussed noisily and tried to climb onto her mother's lap. I saw an opportunity, possibly my only one for who knew how many more days, and I didn't want to spend another evening in my tower. “Why don't I take her for a walk?” I suggested. Her mother looked grateful, and I picked up the child and sat her astride my hip. “Now don't you start screaming,” I whispered to her as we walked away.

I had maybe twenty minutes to accomplish my goal, plus the possibility of toddler mayhem at any second. I didn't think I could have the conversation I hoped to have with Pepe in full view of Maria José, Toni, and their crowd, so I had to succeed before they descended on Casa Dorita. I rounded the corner toward the restaurant rehearsing Spanish words in my head. Luckily Pepe was behind the bar, which opened onto the plaza.
“Hola,”
I said. He tickled Maria José under the chin, free from the intergenerational fear that afflicts my own culture. He asked me what I'd been up to, and seemed genuinely distressed to learn that I'd been neither to a certain beach bar nor to a particular
discoteca
. “Why don't you come out later tonight?”

Maria José and Toni accepted the idea right away. Pepe was a known quantity, son of their longtime restaurateurs, and would deliver me home. And so my tour of Costa Blanca nightlife began later that evening, on the back of Pepe's motorcycle.

When I realized that Maria José Sr. and Toni didn't mind at all if I went out after the children were in bed, I started abusing the privilege. Regarding the night as the only time that was my own, I maximized it by staying out late, often until three or four in the morning. The consequence, since I had to get up when the children did, was that soon my days were passing in a sleepy haze. But that never stopped me from going out again. At 11:00 PM, all I could think about were the two or maybe five hours of freedom stretching ahead. After the children went to bed, I primped and brushed my teeth and climbed to my tower. From there I could see the road in the distance, winding over the ridge from the village center and around the beach at El Portet. One headlight meant a motorcycle: hopefully Pepe's.

He seemed to know someone everywhere: old friends from school, friends from the
mili,
foreigners he'd come to know in the restaurant over the years, and, all along the coast, bartenders and waiters who didn't charge him for drinks. I wrapped my arms around his torso and we rode on two-lane highways to towns like Dénia, where we walked on a crowded boardwalk and he explained how to mix a favorite cocktail. He told me that his friends called him
“el más moro,”
which as near as I could figure out meant either the most macho, the most sexist, or the most Moorish. The Moors had left half a millennium earlier, but up and down the coast you could see, in the words on maps, evidence of their culture. Every place that began with “Al ” or “Ben” came from an Arab word: Alicante, Alcázar, Almoines; Benissa, Benigánim, Benidorm.

One day Maria José came to pick us up at the beach, and got into a yelling match with an older man about a parking space. I watched from a short distance, and realized that I had no idea what they were saying. Other than a few exclamations—
“¡huevos!”
—it wasn't Spanish. In the car, after she'd regained her calm, I asked what language she'd been speaking.
“Valenciano,”
she said. It was a local dialect similar to Catalan. The old man had accused her of not being from around here, of having the parking skills of a tourist. In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was
from
here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my hometown. My family tree was made up entirely of people who'd moved from one place to another. The irony was that the Morairans assumed that I, though alien here, had a connection to home like their own. I was the representative of something that didn't exist, and so felt fraudulent. I also envied them.