When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (17 page)

With each day my enthusiasm for exploring the deep became less and less. It was a case of knowing too much. Then one afternoon, we were poking around the beach when my husband said, “I think I'll snorkel a bit before lunch.” He was out there about an hour or so when I said to the kids, “Look, your father is only in four feet of water muddling around. He'll be all right. Let's have lunch.”

Halfway through the meal, their father joined us, visibly shaken. He had been snorkeling when a large shark began to encircle him. The waiter standing nearby smiled and said, “This isn't Sea World, you know. It's the South Pacific.”

He was absolutely right. What did we know about what lurked down there? We didn't know which coral to touch or which fish to pet. All we knew was Jacques Cousteau sitting around a table eating lobster and talking French.

The next day, we were at the beach early.

The kids were playing cards. My husband was tallying up our credit card expenses. I was needlepointing a pillow top of John Wayne.

Time to Go Home

No one has to tell you on a vacation when it is time to go home.

It's nothing obvious like ripping out your last traveler's check or running out of malaria pills.

It can be as simple as standing in a line waiting for a bullet train in Japan, and suddenly you are being shoved aside and you yell, “Those pushy French again! This isn't the Maginot Line you're defending, sweetie, it's only a seat on a commuter train!”

You're testy and you know it.

You are sick of being served sheep's eyeballs and having some idiot say, “Bloomingdale's sells this as a delicacy in their Christmas catalog.” If someone tells you an icon is over 2 million years old and is only steps from the bus, you yawn and say, “Describe it to me.” Your homing instincts kick in. A carnival could fill the streets outside your hotel window and you opt to stay in your room and watch CNN.

You're bored with your wardrobe and your hair. You're exhausted from packing and rearranging all those stupid souvenirs you couldn't live without, and you're fed up to here with people quoting battles and dates.

My husband can always tell when I'm on Vacation Overload. I turn into Leona Helmsley.

You know the ads that used to appear in the airline magazines, where the headline reads spotless! but NOT TO LEONA HELMSLEY. CAN YOU SEE WHY?

I know why! There are four hand towels and two bath towels hung on the bar in my bathroom and there should be four bath towels to go with the four hand towels. Incompetent sows.

I don't know why I take everything out on my surroundings, but I do. If my soap is the size of a credit card, I cry. If my bedspread weighs a hundred and thirty-seven pounds and I have to remove it, I have a temper tantrum, and if the paper strip across the toilet seat is broken, I fall apart.

My hotel room is either too big or too small. There is no pleasing me on the last days of a vacation. It's someone's law—the shorter your stay, the more elaborate your room.

In Tokyo, we checked into a suite that had a boardroom table the size of my entire house, a bar, a concert grand piano, and five bathrooms. The ceiling over one of the tubs was mirrored.

“It figures,” I groused. “We're staying here one night. Why couldn't we have had these accommodations in Adelaide, Australia, when we were jammed in a broom closet for a week and had to turn off the TV set with our toes? Hurry up and unpack so I can sit in a tub, look at the ceiling, and watch my cellulite float.”

In Istanbul, I remember pausing just outside the room we had been assigned. I noted a small gold plate on the door that read Julio Iglesias Room. I kicked open the door. There were twin beds six inches off the floor, draped in tired royal blue satin ruffled spreads. The blue satin curtains sagged like a dirty diaper and had a few pins missing. The carpet was threadbare, the refrigerator door was ajar, and the radiator was a monument to ugly. “I don't care if Julio Iglesias comes with the bed,” I snapped, “I'm leaving.”

Usually, I am not like this. Accommodations are a part of the adventure. We have stayed in the best and the worst of them. We have been guests in Paradise where there is a hair dryer on the wall, a terrycloth robe on a hook, heated towel racks, toilet paper that is folded over into points, and a picture over the sofa of an eyeball in shades of green with a brass plate that reads Phoebe in Love.

We have also visited Flop City with a bottle opener on the door, a room key that dangles from a piece of wood the size of a tree trunk, a nude woman fashioned into a lamp with the switch in her navel, and nothing on the wall but the room rates.

During the last days of a vacation I form pictures of my house in my mind. For no apparent reason I will be looking at a prehistoric pot somewhere and I will say to my husband, “Did you turn off the coffeepot when we left?”

This makes him as anxious to get home as I am.

You can always tell when vacationers are going or coming. Travelers who are at the beginning of a trip laugh and tell jokes. Their clothes match. They see a line and they go to the end of it.

Those returning are impatient. Every plane they board is like the last one out of Baghdad and they are going to be on it.

Something else happens to me that I cannot explain. I become as American as the Fourth of July. I can't wait to see the Energizer rabbit march across the TV screen or Mayor Dinkins's picture welcoming me to New York City. I want to hear cabdrivers yell, “Get out of my face!” I want to eat hamburgers so fat I can barely fit them in my mouth. I want to hear English and see signs I can read and spend “real” money. I want Dan Rather to tell me how the world has fared in my absence. I want to smell clean clothes, drink tap water, and sleep in my own bed.

But reentering the world you have left for two or three weeks is not an easy thing. One must pay a price for exploring new cultures. You cannot just get on a plane, arrive home, and pick up life where you left it. You first have to go through a rite of passage, a ritual as old as man himself. It is called jet lag.

Jet Lag

Jet lag is a temporary disruption of the body's normal biological rhythms after high-speed air travel through several time zones.

That's a classy way of saying your body will never be the same again. You will sleep when everyone else is awake, camp outside supermarkets at three a.m. waiting for them to open, nod off during a root canal, and possibly damage your biological clock and give birth at the age of fifty-three. You could die from jet lag.

There have been a couple of feeble attempts to deal with the malady. A drug called Melatonin has been used effectively on sheep, but how many sheep do you know who are frequent flyers?

A few years ago when scientists began to take the problem seriously, they even did some research and discovered that eating and drinking light and exercising helped make the transition from time zone to time zone easier. Like I'm going to sit in my seat and pretend I'm rowing a boat or raise my knees to my chin or roll my shoulders back and forth. Get outta here! The only aerobic exercise anyone gets on a plane is disengaging oneself from the jaws of the folding door of the restroom which threatens to digest you.

My husband has an interesting theory. He figures if he refuses to change his watch he can play around with the difference and eventually catch up an hour at a time.

The real truth is a couple of years ago the kids bought him a runner's watch for Father's Day. He never could set it. It's easier to pop out to Stonehenge and measure shadows than it is to get the right time out of him. Ask him the hour and prepare to grow old.

We were on the way back from Tokyo and I made the mistake of asking him the time. He said, “Wait a minute. I have to find my glasses.” After several minutes of searching, he said, “Do you have a pencil handy?” Then he proceeded to calculate, tabulate, subtract, and divide, and by the time he came up with the time, we were in another time zone. Finally he said, “Why do you want to know?”

I said, “I want to know when to sleep.”

He said, “Your body will tell you.”

I must have sat there an hour before my body said, “It's nine p.m., Erma, and in another hour I am going to crash.”

I said to my body, “You know, you'd be doing me a big favor if you could just stay awake and eat a six-course dinner and watch Jewel of the Nile. Trust me, you'll be a better person for it.”

My body said, “Why should I believe you? That's what you told me the year you took me to Australia. I've never been the same.”

“Give me a break,” I pleaded. “Do I ask you for much?”

Halfway through Jewel of the Nile, my body defied me and dozed off. Four hours later the lights of the plane went on and the steward announced, “Breakfast.”

My body jerked to attention and said, “What are you trying to pull, dimbulb? I just ate. Besides, you know I sleep on Sundays.”

“It's not Sunday, it's Monday. Now have a hard roll and shut up!”

My body didn't speak to me for a long time. As we approached Hawaii, I nudged it again and whispered, “Time to eat breakfast.”

I heard it mumble, “We did that, remember?”

“Well, do it again.” We were at odds with one another the entire trip home. I made my legs walk when they were asleep, closed my eyes when they were wide open, ate dinner in the a.m. and breakfast in the p.m., trying to adjust.

In Los Angeles, as the plane emptied, it occurred to me we looked like a transport of derelicts. There was a steady stream of passengers with eyes that sparkled under a rosy glaze, disheveled clothes, twisted hair that stood on end, and enough bags under their eyes to keep twenty porters employed for a year. They had the look of people with no will to live.

Homecoming

Vacations fade fast. Their memories are obliterated by little things. You arrive home to discover your car has died. Neighbors inform you the power went off while you were gone and your freezer will smell like a fertilizer plant when you open the door. Somehow, it escaped someone's attention that your garden hose was left running and floated your house to a new zip code.

If all that doesn't take the hats and horns out of your trip, distribution of the souvenirs will.

Rarely does anyone appreciate what you have gone through to get these gifts home. They have no meaning. The primitive necklace that you bargained for in Tanzania is held at arm's length by a friend who sniffs, “Is this another one of these things that I have to put in the freezer first to kill bugs?”

Children are the worst. I once babied a large Mexican hat the size of a satellite dish. It wouldn't fit under the seat on the plane or in the overhead bin. I had to wear it most of the time. Our son looked at it, said it smelled, and kicked it under his bed.

The fur drum we dragged home for one of them from the Bahamas literally came alive when we turned the furnace on. We saw it scaling the wall one day.

A couple of years ago when we returned from the Orient, I spread all my souvenirs out on the dining room table and circled it slowly for hours trying to figure out who deserved any of it.

My husband came into the room and said, “Did you give the silk kimono to your mother yet?”

“You know,” I said slowly, “I have to think about that. She likes to get dressed as soon as she rolls out of bed. It would just hang there in her closet. Besides, it's not her color so I'm keeping it for myself.”

“You could give her the tea set.”

“I could, but I'm not. I don't have a nice tea set, and besides, I heard her say once that tea upsets her stomach.”

“So you're going with the woodblock print?” .

“I was until I got to thinking you would have to have been at the factory to appreciate all the work that goes into them. Actually, I've got the perfect spot for it in the living room.”

“How about the glass necklace?”

“You really think so? I don't think Mother has the chest for it. I'll keep that for myself. I'm leaning toward the T-shirt.”

“I thought you bought those for your aunts.”

“We never see them,” I said, “so I kept three for myself and decided to give each of them a pair of chopsticks.”

“Smart idea. They're nice ones. They were expensive.”

“On the other hand, I might have a dinner party with a theme some night. Maybe I'll give them a Christmas ornament and brochure on the history of the silkworm.”

“They'll be choked up.”

“What kind of a crack is that! Maybe I'll keep all of the T-shirts and give Mother a fan.”

“I thought you were giving the fan to Brenda who watered your plants and brought in our mail.”

“She's down to boxes of matches from the hotel. Look, it's not how much something cost, it's the thought that counts.”

“So you're still looking for something for your mother.”

I took the fan out of the box and opened it. It would just fit into my purse and I could...

I saw my husband looking at me. “Is that the best you can do for a woman who gave you life, raised you, and stood by you during the good times and the bad times of your life?”

I threw in a panda bear entwined around a pencil. “Now are you happy?” I asked.

One tries desperately to cling to joyous, carefree days and all the cultural enrichment you experienced on a trip, but it isn't easy with the inevitable post-vacation visit from Stan and Doris.

OK, so you don't expect to reenter your city on donkeys under a canopy of palms. And you certainly don't expect your friends to line the streets waiting for you to say something meaningful from a hillside. But is it too much to ask of a small group to listen to you talk about your trip and politely say, “That sounds like such fun. I hope you took pictures”?

Stan and Doris also travel and plan their vacations down to the last detail. They believe that timing is everything. When they visit St. Peter's in Rome, the Pope says Mass. When they fly over Hawaii, a volcano is erupting ... on their side of the plane. It never rains on Stan and Doris. They plan it that way.