The Vacationers

“Buenas tardes,” the woman said back, quickly weighing and bagging all of Fra

“Sixteen?” Fra

All of Fra

“Gracias,” Fra

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 su

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 pla

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,” Fra

“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—Fra

“Oh, good, here’s my daughter now. Sylvia, come meet Joan. Joe—ahhhn!” Fra

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.