The Vacationers

“Mom, who is that?”

Fra

The woman shrugged. “Sí. More expensive, but yes.” She turned her chair toward her computer screen and hit a few buttons. “He had a cancellation tomorrow afternoon, four p.m.?”

Sylvia watched her mother quickly dig through her purse, swearing a few times before finally landing on her wallet. “Yes,” Fra

Fra

“He was very famous,” Joan said. “All the women loved him. My mother, she loved him. Everyone. He was not as good as Filani, but he was more handsome. In the early eighties. Very long hair.”

“Huh.” Sylvia kicked her legs back and forth. “I mean, how interesting. My mother basically had a heart attack, but not as much of a heart attack as she’s going to have when she tries to actually play te

Joan laughed, and then tossed a grape into his mouth. “What about you, Sylvia? No boyfriend at home in New York?”

Sylvia dunked a chip into the guacamole and then lowered it gently onto her tongue. It was hard to try to be seductive when they were talking about her actual life. She shook her head and chewed. “Everyone in New York sucks. Or at least everyone at my school. Do you say that, sucks? What’s the word for that?” She swallowed.

“Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I’ve had it up to my balls. Same idea.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me tienen hasta los huevos.”

A small airplane flew across the sky, a trail of white smoke behind it, a blank skywritten message. Sylvia watched as the thin white line bisected the otherwise perfectly clear blue sky. It looked like a math equation—x plus y equals z. Avocado plus onion plus cilantro equaled guacamole. Skin plus sun equaled burn. Her father plus her mother equaled her.

It had been a weird spring at home. Fra

Parents got stranger when you got older, that was obvious. You could no longer take for granted that everyone else’s family worked exactly as yours did, with the bathroom doors open or shut, with the pinch of sugar in the tomato sauce, with the off-key but effective bedtime lullaby. Sylvia had spent the last few months watching her mother ignore her father unless she was scolding him, and Jim was not someone who took well to scolding. Sylvia sat in her chair at the kitchen table and watched them silently spar. She wondered if it had always been this way, or whether it was only her more mature eyes that recognized the cold breeze between her mother and father. Sometimes in books she would come across a mention of his-and-hers bedrooms—old movies, too; TCM was full of women waking up alone in their dressing gowns—and think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species, as tiny-brained as dinosaurs. Sylvia didn’t think she ever wanted to get married or have children. Forget about the ozone layer, and tsunamis—what about di

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m finding all this sunshine very depressing.” She pulled one leg out of the pool and then the other, watching them drip dark spots onto the concrete.

Joan picked up the bowls of food and followed her into the dining room.

It was siesta time. They’d all been delighted to acclimate to the custom, and now everyone dragged themselves to their separate corners right after lunch, eyelids already heavy. Carmen slept on her back, while Bobby curled up like a seashell next to her, his mouth open. Jim fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, a book on his chest. Sylvia slept on her stomach, her face turned to one side like a swimmer. Lawrence slept like a child, with the covers up to his neck. Only Charles and Fra

Gemma had all the best bath products, of course: shampoos and conditioners, exfoliating scrubs, bars of soap with sprigs of French lavender embedded in them, bath gels, bubbles, loofahs, pumice stones, the works. Fra

“So?” Charles said. He was flipping through a magazine, one of Sylvia’s trashy ones from the airplane. “How’s it been?”

Fra

“I mean when it’s just the two of you.” He turned the page to a spread of women in sequined evening gowns.

“It’s like this,” Fra

“So you’re not mad?” The next page was the entire contents of an actress’s purse, spilled out and identified piece by piece. Chewing gum, a nail file, some makeup, a mirror, another pair of shoes, headphones, a BlackBerry. “What does she read when she gets bored?” he said to himself.