A perfectly prepared margarita (rocks, salt, subtle with the triple sec, less so with the tequila) placed in your hand when you didn’t even ask, with an itty-bitty half lime floating up top, something local, grown just down the street where the patchy pavement gives way to dirt, which then surrenders to jungle, can almost take the edge off a day of truly shitty airport mishaps. Let’s not recount them. Airport mishaps are dull. They’re like dreams. We convince ourselves that ours are potboilers, cliffhangers, whodunits. They’re not. And yet, despite the entirely predictable debacle that was our direct flight from LAX to PVR, in business class no less because those were the only seats left for which we could use miles and so drained our entire account, we still managed to arrive at Villa Azul Paraiso before the Solomons.
They should have been here more than an hour ago, so I’m sure they’ll breeze in any minute dying to share their own travel horror stories. But if Roberto—who greeted us in a freshly pressed white zip-up coat that looks like it belongs to a doctor, not the house manager of a luxury Mexican beach rental—hands them margaritas of the same caliber as the one I am currently sipping, perhaps they’ll get distracted and spare us the details.
Clementine and Peter have gone off exploring. The villa’s wide whitewashed open corridors stretch out in either direction. There are two bedrooms to the right and three to the left, including the master with the rain forest shower and soaking tub carved from volcanic rock. They all have views of the ocean. Every inch of this house does. It’s built tall, wide and shallow, with no walls on the ocean side save for the bedrooms, and built on a curve that matches that of the private beach below. The kitchen and dining room sit one floor down. Up a flight is a deck with a hot tub and chairs for stargazing. And on the ground floor: Ping-Pong tables—two of them in case you want to get a proper tournament going—and the swimming pool. I’m standing in the villa’s main living room. It’s one of three, and the only one with comfortable furniture. I know all of this because I studied the website for this place like I was studying for the GREs, which is the last time I studied for anything.
Clem comes bounding in, bikini clad, demonstrating the kind of enthusiasm I was hoping for when we first told her about this trip to celebrate her father’s fiftieth. But she had quickly calculated that this trip meant she wouldn’t see Sean or her friends for seven whole days, and that those seven whole days would fall on spring break, when there would be parties or hangouts that she would never recover from missing, and she didn’t much care that every room has ocean views, or that every bedroom has its own bathroom, or that there would be three meals a day prepared by a full-time staff.
Except for the ocean views, this pretty much summed up her life back at home.
“The wi-fi here is sick,” she says. “I sent Sean a pic of the view from my room and he texted back, like, in seconds.”
“What did he say?”
She ignores my question. It was a dumb one, but I’m tired from the airline snafus and I’m sucking up the last few drops of a midday margarita, so admittedly, I’m a little off my game.
“I’m going to go lie by the pool.”
The pool is only ten feet from the beach, and there’s a faucet to wash the sand off your feet before you dive in so you don’t clog the drain. I walk to the balcony to take a look. Yep, there it is: two floors below, shaped like a kidney, with six cushioned loungers and palapa umbrellas that won’t provide the kind of UV protection my nearly albino daughter needs.
“Sunblock,” I say.
“Duh,” she replies and trails off down the central staircase.
Roberto returns with a pitcher. “More for you? And one for the mister?”
Why not? I let him fill my glass halfway so it’ll look like I’m still nursing my first margarita when Peter returns from escorting our bags to the master bedroom. I take one for him, too, even though he’s more of a bourbon guy.
“Muchas gracias,” I tell Roberto. He smiles, nods and disappears.
I stand at the railing and take in the vast blue of the ocean and a deep breath of the warm perfumed air. I look down at Clem who sits in a chair with her back to the beach, staring at her phone.
Peter comes up behind me, kisses my shoulder and takes the margarita from my hand. “FaceTime with Sean?”
“No doubt.”
“What could they possibly have left to say to each other?”
“I can’t imagine.”
He takes a long sip of his drink. His shirt is soaked through with sweat. “Ahh. This is nice.”
“Did you check out the volcanic tub?”
“No. That sounds unpleasant.”
“You don’t bathe in lava. It’s volcanic rock. It’s supposed to be good for the pH balance in your skin. Or something.”
“Got it.”
“It’s in the master bath. Along with the rain forest shower.”
“Oh. I didn’t really look. I put our bags in the bedroom that way.” He points to the right. “It has a gorgeous view.”
“Every room has a gorgeous view. That’s the whole thing about this house.” I point to the left. “But the master is that way. Quick—let’s grab it before they get here.” I start to make my way toward the left-wing bedrooms even though I already know how this is going to end, and it is not going to end with me soaking in a volcanic tub.
“I thought we’d leave that one for Solly and Ingrid.”
“You did?”
“Jen.” He’s already defensive.
I have a choice. I can point out that we are paying exactly 50 percent of the not insubstantial rent on this house. I can point out that I’m the one who found this particular villa, that Ingrid sent links to places shy a bedroom or with half-mile hikes down treacherous cliffs to unswimmable beaches. I can point out that even though Peter is six months older than his best friend and business partner, he defers to Solly like a browbeaten younger brother. I can point out that the Solomons vacation far more often than we do and never spare expense; that luxury like this is commonplace to them, and so we deserve that fucking rain forest shower and volcanic tub because it will be fucking special to us.
In short, I could choose to start an epic battle a mere fifteen minutes into our holiday.
Instead I say, “But it’s your fiftieth birthday.”
“Solly’s, too,” he replies.
I don’t say any more. This trip is meant to celebrate both, but Solly’s birthday isn’t until October and Peter’s is on Wednesday, and any way you cut it, it’s just not the same, and we both know it.
“And besides”—he rubs my arm a little—“that side has the three bedrooms so the boys won’t need to share. It makes more sense like this.”
I also don’t point out that Ivan, who’s five years old, still sleeps with his parents. And that even though Ingrid claims he stopped breast-feeding last summer, I suspect he still sneaks in a good suck in the middle of the night when Solly’s fast asleep.
I sigh. “Fine.”
Peter leans in for a kiss. “You’re the best.”
Just as this peace is forged, the bell chimes. Once. Twice. Then Solly’s thunderous voice: “Hellooooo? Anybody home?”
Roberto opens the door balancing a tray of margaritas. The taxi driver is there, too, helping with the luggage. Seven bags for the four of them. Solly peels a few bills from a large roll of pesos he has stuffed in his pocket. I read in our guidebook that it isn’t customary to tip taxi drivers unless they go the extra mile, like helping you with luggage or unloading groceries, and in that case a few dollars should suffice. Though I’m still working out the exchange rate, I can tell from the driver’s face as he accepts the cash that Solly didn’t read about, or doesn’t care about, what’s customary.
Ingrid passes on the drink, but Solly takes his and downs half of it before coming straight for me, arms outstretched.
“Hello, gorgeous.” He squeezes a little too hard, but that’s the Solly way. His hair is expertly gelled. His light blue linen shirt is dry and crisp, like he ducked into the airport lounge for a shower and shave. He steps back, takes in the view and raises his drink before polishing off the rest of it. “Hello, beautiful house! Hello, dream vacation! Hello, second half century of life!”
Solly and Peter embrace and slap backs. Peter kisses Ingrid on both cheeks. Ivan lets me pick him up and he hands me some sort of LEGO robot for inspection before quickly snatching it back again. Ingrid’s long dangly earring gets caught in my hair and it takes Solly’s help to untangle us. All the while, Malcolm stands on the perimeter, fumbling through his backpack.
I haven’t seen Malcolm since my last trip to New York to visit Maureen nearly two years ago. He’s grown a half foot and now sports facial hair that, despite its haphazard look, is probably carefully curated. He’s still got the same big, sad eyes.
“Hi, Malcolm.”
He looks up from his bag and gives me a shy smile. He takes a few tentative steps toward me, and in an effort to minimize his suffering, I keep the hug quick and businesslike, trying not to give anything away about how it feels to see the little boy I used to know suddenly standing before me a full-grown man at seventeen.
Look, I have a daughter who is right now sitting by the pool filling out a bikini in the most enviable way when it was only yesterday she paired a striped Hanna Andersson tent dress with polka dot leggings. Change happens. I know it all too well.
“I want a snack.”
Ingrid crouches down so she’s eye level with Ivan. “Let’s get settled in and then we’ll get you something pronto. Okay?”
“Ding dong.”
Ingrid looks from Ivan to me with an apologetic shrug. “It’s something he just says sometimes. I’m not sure why.”
“I want a snack now,” Ivan whines. “I’m huuungry.”
Roberto reappears, this time with a bowl of chips, some guacamole and a plate of sliced mango. He’s with another man: younger, shorter, heavier and wearing the same white zip-up coat, only his is slightly dingy.
“Please. I will help you with the bags,” the younger man says, grabbing two in each hand.
Peter points toward the bedrooms to the left. “Let’s take them that-a-way.”
Solly sticks out his hand. “Hi there. I’m Solly.”
The man puts two of the bags down and wipes his palm on his jacket. “Enrique.”
“Enrique. Nice to meet you. Thank you for your help.” Solly reaches for the roll of cash again. Enrique is going to be waiting on us for the next seven days. He is part of the villa’s staff. We are expected to leave a generous tip at the end of our stay, not to press pesos into his palm every time he lends a helping hand.
“Solly,” I whisper. “Put the money away.”
Solly shrugs and stuffs the wad into his pocket. He looks to Peter and points to the left. “This-a-way?”
“Three bedrooms,” Peter says. “Plenty for everyone.”
“Grand.”
“Grand,” Ivan mimics. His mouth is stuffed with mango, juice running down his chin.
The men, including Malcolm, take the bags toward the bedrooms, leaving Ingrid, Ivan and me standing in the living room.
“What a view. Ivan, honey, isn’t this a lovely view?”
“I don’t like views,” he says.
We go to sit down. Ivan climbs into Ingrid’s lap and wipes his sticky hands on the floral cushions.
“You wouldn’t believe our day,” Ingrid begins.
Ingrid and I have managed to forge something resembling a real friendship. I wasn’t sure this would be possible given how close Maureen and I were, and given the fact that Ingrid is eighteen years younger than Solly, but more important, she’s fifteen years younger than me. When Solly took up with her, I was forty. She was twenty-five: an entirely different species. But now she’s thirty-two and she’s a mother, and the vast echoing gulf between us has contracted, even if I still sometimes hold her impossibly thin limbs and perfect skin against her.
“Malcolm didn’t get in from New York until two a.m. That’s two o’clock in the morning!”
“Yes, Ingrid. I know what a.m. means.” She laughs, which I’m glad about, because I was going for funny, but instead it came out bitchy.
“Maureen, in her infinite wisdom, booked his ticket on the last flight out of JFK. It was due in at one-fifteen but it was forty-five minutes late. Not that it makes such a difference at that hour. I mean, a quarter past one in the morning isn’t exactly a reasonable time to collect someone from the airport to begin with. Solly went to pick him up, of course, and when they got back to the house Django started barking and then freaked out when he saw it was Malcolm, so much so that he peed all over the foyer, and the chaos woke Ivan, who isn’t the best sleeper under ideal circumstances.” Ivan turns around in her lap and shoots her a proud grin. She pats his head. “So Maureen got exactly what she wanted. We’re all exhausted and cranky.”
Ingrid typically doesn’t rag on Maureen in front of me out of deference to what was once a tight allegiance, but the truth is it’s hard to maintain a close friendship from clear across the country, especially when one friend is spending so much time with the other friend’s ex-husband’s new wife.
“Sounds hellish,” I say.
“Indeed.”
“You know what would help?”
“What?”
I lift up my empty margarita glass. “One of these.”
“Oh, no. I can’t. I’m not drinking.”
When you are thirty-two, and you are a woman, and you suddenly stop drinking, it can mean only one thing.
“Are you . . . ?” I look at her belly, hidden behind Ivan, who has his thumb in his mouth and the kind of heavy-lidded blank stare kids get seconds before falling asleep.
She looks down at her midsection and then back up at me. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Not that. I have my hands full already with this one.” She gives Ivan a squeeze. He snuggles deeper into her embrace, and then he’s out.
Having never had a boy, I think all boys are handfuls. I’m not saying Clementine was a perfect child, but she played quietly with toys that mimicked real life—houses, buses, schools, farms and little plastic figures to inhabit these places, onto which her primary goal seemed to be imposing a sense of order. When Ivan or other boys play, they typically want to smash, crush and kill. This is a big generalization, I know, but look at that cushion. Clem never would have wiped her sticky hands on a couch cushion. She would have reached into my bag for a wet wipe or found a sink, or, more likely, she would have skipped the mango altogether because she hated few things more than having sticky hands.
“I’m on a new health regimen.” Ingrid kicks off her clogs and pivots on the couch, moving Ivan with her, bringing her long legs up and stretching them out. Her toes are painted sky blue. I meant to get a pedicure before leaving, but we needed a new suitcase, and Clem needed a new bathing suit, and I had to arrange for someone to feed the cat, and also there’s the matter of my book deadline that came and went two months ago. “My nutritionist has me off sugar and alcohol.”
I don’t understand why you’d need to hire a nutritionist to tell you to avoid sugar and alcohol. That seems like basic, entry-level stuff. “She took you off sugar and alcohol right before a vacation?”
“It’s a he. And it’s been a few weeks, actually.”
“But . . . why?” I also don’t understand why someone with Ingrid’s body would consult a nutritionist in the first place.
“Oh, just general health. I’ve been tired. Lacking energy. A little foggy.” I want to say—Welcome to your thirties, or Welcome to motherhood, or Just wait, it only gets worse—but after my last comment, I don’t trust myself to sound appropriately jokey. “He’s got me on proteins and limited complex carbohydrates,” she continues. “I think it’s actually working.”
Whatever Ingrid is or isn’t drinking, is or isn’t eating, shouldn’t have any impact whatsoever on my capacity to fully embrace my fuck it I’m on vacation attitude and fulfill my destiny of gaining five pounds in the next seven days.
“Well, that’s good,” I say. “At least it’s working.”
“And it’s been great for my writing,” she says, managing to braid her hair expertly while lying down beneath a sleeping child. “My word count has been off the charts since I started. Or at least off the charts for me. I know there are people who do three thousand words a day and I’ll never be one of those people, but I’m hitting almost a thousand, even on the days when I have to pick up Ivan early from preschool, so for that alone it’s been worth the deprivation.”
It never takes Ingrid long to bring up writing. It’s my cue to offer advice as the seasoned YA novelist with three books published and a fourth that’s two months overdue. But I haven’t written anything in ages so my word count is roughly zero, and also, I’d do anything to delay the inevitable ask of would I consider sending the draft of her book to my agent when she’s done, so I change the subject.
“Why is it that all children look like angels when they’re sleeping?” I nod toward Ivan. It’s true. His shaggy blond hair frames his face, his cheeks red from heat, his long dark lashes, the blue-gray tint of his eyelids. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen Clem’s closed eyelids in years. I no longer know what she looks like when she sleeps.
Ingrid laughs. “Because looks are deceiving.”
I’M A BIG BELIEVER in unpacking. I don’t care if the vacation is for only one night; I always put my clothes away in drawers, my toiletries into bathroom cabinets, and my suitcase in a hidden spot so it can’t serve as a reminder that too soon it will need repacking.
Peter does not share this compulsion. He’d live out of a suitcase for months. The upshot is that I inevitably end up unpacking for him because the sight of his suitcase is just as disruptive to me as the sight of my own.
Once I have everything put away neatly and our luggage tucked under the bed, I change into my tankini and the new pink gauzy cover-up I bought when I took Clem bathing suit shopping at Nordstrom. The department where she found her suit and I found the cover-up is for “juniors,” but I convinced myself I could pull it off by choosing to take Clem’s silence as approval.
I put the expensive sunblock on my face and the cheap stuff on my body. My complexion tends toward olive, yet I try and model sun safety for my daughter who gets her fairness from her father. More than a few times when Clementine was younger I was mistaken for the nanny. People saw my dark hair and brown eyes and my pale golden child, and things just didn’t add up. Now that she’s older, and she is getting my high cheekbones, I can see the ways in which she is starting to look (just a little) like a more beautiful version of me. But Clem rejects this observation wholeheartedly.
I finish by applying the sunblock to the tops of my feet, the one place I do tend to burn, and then reach into the drawer for a hair band before remembering that although I didn’t get that pedicure, I did manage to get my hair cut just short enough that I can’t wear it up anymore. I told my stylist to go for something a little edgy, but instead I walked out with a full-on suburban-mom bob.
Peter is lying on the bed, reading his book, still in his clothes from the flight. His eyes look like Ivan’s did just before he passed out with his thumb in his mouth.
“Aren’t you going to come down to the pool?” I ask.
“Eventually.”
“But everyone is headed there.”
He puts his book down on his chest. He looks me up and down. “I like that thingy you’re wearing.”
“It’s a cover-up.”
“Come here.” I walk closer. He takes the edge and lifts it, examining my tankini underneath. “I like the suit, too. You didn’t wear the one I hate. The one with the built-in skirt that looks like something my mother would wear.”
“I didn’t even pack it. Happy birthday.”
He smiles, takes my wrist and pulls me down onto the bed next to him. His shirt is still damp with sweat and he smells. “Take a nap with me.”
“Come to the pool with me.” I try to wriggle out of his embrace, but he has me in a tight lock.
“You’re a bully,” he says.
“And you’re lazy.”
“And a little bit misanthropic. Don’t forget that.” He kisses me quickly with the first hint of what will be a full beard by the time our week comes to an end. Forget a five o’clock shadow—Peter grows stubble by noon, and he didn’t bother to shave yesterday in anticipation of our trip. His beard will come in white, just like his thick head of hair. He went white before I met him, somewhere in his early twenties, so he long ago made his peace with it. I don’t tolerate it on my own head—I packed a brown touch-up stick for my roots that looks like a lipstick and doesn’t really work—but I do love his white hair. I always have.
“Want one?” Peter is holding out a half-eaten pack of Life Savers. Butter rum. My favorite flavor. Peter always buys a pack of Life Savers for each of us before we board a flight. It’s a strange superstition he inherited from his grandmother that we have fully adopted in our family. We suck on them as the plane takes off and believe that this small act guarantees us safe passage.
I open my mouth and he pops one in.
“Hey,” he whispers in my ear. “Do you think Richard Nixon did it with Pat in this bed?”
“I’m pretty sure when Richard Nixon stayed here he got the master suite with the rain forest shower and volcanic tub.”
Peter gives me a little shove and I stand up. I grab my hat and sunglasses. “I’m going to go sit by the pool.”
“I’ll be down in a few.” I know this means it’ll be at least an hour, probably more. He’ll nap, he’ll spend an inordinately long time in the bathroom, he’ll probably pick up the New Yorker from the desk where I left a copy and stand in the middle of the bedroom reading an article from beginning to end. It doesn’t matter. This is vacation, and the whole purpose of this particular sort of vacation is that there is no corralling to do. Everyone can and should move about at his or her own pace. Except for showing up to the dinner table at the agreed-upon hour, there is nowhere anybody has to be at any particular time.
“No hurry,” I say. He likes this. The vacation version of me. He takes a pillow from my side of the bed, props it under his head and goes back to his book.
CLEM IS STILL STARING at her phone, but she’s not on FaceTime with Sean, she’s scrolling through whatever app she’s into these days. She doesn’t ever email, or use Facebook, because, as she’s pointed out, “I’m not, like, a hundred years old.” I follow her on Instagram and Snapchat. There are YouTubers whose channels she subscribes to and sites she combs for deals on vintage T-shirts. She still texts with some of her friends and obviously with Sean, but I notice that she texts far less frequently than she used to. I’ve learned from reading about teenagers, which I do because I have one and because writing about them is my vocation, that there are new apps and sites and ways to communicate and share information that I can’t see or uncover, even though, like any good parent, I try to keep a close eye on everything she does online.
Solly is the only other person down at the pool. He’s sporting a straw fedora and American flag swim trunks. He has a fresh margarita and some sort of toasted sandwich on a plate with tortilla chips.
“It’s a torta,” he says, holding it out toward me. “And it might be the most delicious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I stopped in the kitchen. I met Luisa. She doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish but I was able to communicate, through the international language of gesturing to my stomach and making a pouty face, that I was nursing a monster hunger. And so she whipped this up for me and changed my life forever because, I’m telling you: She is a fucking magician. Here. Have a bite. Don’t ask me what’s in it because I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“He tried to get me to taste it, too, and I was, like, ewww,” Clem says without looking up from her phone.
I walk over to Solly and I take a bite of his sandwich. He’s right. It’s delicious.
“Shall I have my new best friend, Luisa, make you one?”
I look at my watch. It’s 3:15. In an email exchange with the rental company we settled on dinner for our first night to be served at 6:30. I figured we’d all be tired from traveling and might want to turn in early.
“No, thanks.”
I want to bug Clem to put down her phone, to make eye contact and conversation, to maybe turn her chair around to face the gorgeous private beach and calm waters of the bay, but I decide to give her a one-day pass. Good for today only. Tomorrow I will nag. I will threaten to take the phone away. I will hand her one of the three YA novels I brought along that I know she’d love if she’d only give them a try. None of them was written by me, because I know how she feels about my books, but two of the titles are by writers I know a little bit, and they are all three about teen love and angst, which she’s in the thick of with Sean, so she’ll relate. She’s the kind of kid who wants a mirror in a book rather than a window. Assuming, of course, she wants the book at all.
“Jenna, you’ve outdone yourself. My hat is off to you.” Solly takes his hat off, then puts it back on again. “This place is spectacular.”
“Thanks, Sol.” I settle into the chair next to him, across the shallow end of the kidney from Clem. “You only turn fifty once.”
“Thank God for that.” He lowers his lounge chair and turns his face up to the sun. “You know . . . I’ve been thinking . . . as I reach this midpoint in my life—”
“Midpoint? Just how long are you planning on living, Solly?”
“Don’t be a buzz kill. I know that’s hard for you, but try, okay?” He squeezes my knee affectionately. “As I was saying, as I reach this midpoint in my life, I realize that these are the moments that matter. Time with the people I love the most. In a place that is beautiful. With a sandwich that’s sublime. What could possibly be better?”
“Aw, fucknuggets.” Clem tosses her phone onto the towel by her feet. “The wi-fi is down.”
“Clementine. Language.”
“Please, Mom. Spare me. Solly just dropped an F bomb, like, thirty seconds ago.”
“You’re sixteen. Solly is fifty.”
“Solly is still forty-nine!” He raises a toast with what’s left of his margarita.
Malcolm unlatches the gate from the beach. I’d assumed he was holed up in his room, probably on a device similar to Clem’s, but no, he’s already been out for a walk. He’s holding a starfish in his hand.
“Whatcha got there, champ?” Solly asks.
I think I see Malcolm bristle a little. After all, he’s seventeen. Not five. And Solly’s forced camaraderie can annoy anyone, so why shouldn’t it annoy the son he sees only twice a year, the son for whom he’s done little to earn that camaraderie?
Malcolm holds up the starfish. “It’s for Ivan. I thought he’d like it.”
“Oh, he will. Knowing him, he’ll probably try throwing it like one of those Japanese star-shaped weapon things.”
“A shuriken.”
“A what?”
I’m about to tell Malcolm to rinse his feet so the pool won’t clog, but I don’t need to. He’s already found the faucet and he’s doing it on his own.
“A shuriken. That’s what those Japanese star-shaped weapon things are called.”
“Look who’s a smarty-pants.”
“I take martial arts, Dad.”
“Of course. Of course. I know that.”
“Clem? Did you say hello to Malcolm?” I ask. “It’s been a long time since you two have seen each other. You know, you used to bathe together.”
“Yeah, Mom, you’ve only mentioned that, like, a thousand times. And I saw him earlier on his way out. Of course I said hello.”
“She did,” Malcolm says. “I can confirm it. And I can confirm that I said hello back. And I can also confirm that we used to bathe together, because my mom has a picture of us in the bath.”
It’s nice to hear that this old picture of the kids survived Maureen’s move to her new apartment with her new boyfriend, Bruno, whom she has told me she will never marry because marriage is bullshit.
“I know that picture,” Clem says. “We have it, too. You had an Afro.”
I’m not sure it’s still okay to say Afro, especially in the presence of someone whose mother is African American, so I shoot Clem a look.
“Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Because I said Afro? For your information, Mother, Afro is not a bad word.”
Malcolm laughs and rubs his hand over his short-cropped curls. “That was an epic Afro.”
“Yeah, but . . . I think I like your hair better now,” Clem says, looking at him from behind her sunglasses. He’s shirtless, with baggy khakis rolled up to his knees. He’s lean, but muscled, with a tattoo on his right calf, some kind of swirling pattern in black ink that barely stands out against his light brown skin. I can’t believe he got it with Maureen’s approval. Can you get a tattoo without parental approval? I make a mental note to look that up.
Malcolm takes the chair next to Clem, turning it around so he’s facing the ocean. She gets up and turns hers around, too.
“It’s nice to see them together again,” Solly says. “Feels like the old days.”
EVERYONE SHOWS UP TO DINNER on time. The table is set with multicolored napkins, blue and white Talavera pottery plates and a large pitcher filled with birds-of-paradise. I wear the nicest dress I packed, the one I planned on saving for Peter’s birthday on Wednesday. I bring my pashmina in case I’m not warm enough. I worried about all this openness when I studied the website. Doesn’t it ever get cold? What about rain? The description said only something vague about the house being built for comfort as well as unsurpassed luxury, which I took to mean that nobody is going to freeze to death at Villa Azul Paraiso.
Roberto and Enrique stand ready to take our drink orders, freshly slicked back hair and tropical flowers pinned to the collars of their white coats.
“Please.” Roberto gestures to the open balcony. “Enjoy the sunset and the appetizers before we sit down for the dinner.”
I suppose I should make very clear here that this is not a level of service with which I have any sort of familiarity. At home, I prepare our dinners. Peter can step in if the need arises with an excellent three-bean Texas chili and a perfectly passable repertoire of soups. At home, nobody offers us drinks—Passion fruit or hibiscus margarita, anyone? At home, nobody beckons us to the balcony to enjoy the sunset while we nibble on mini shrimp tostadas. At home, nobody sets such a whimsical dinner table. We do have someone who comes to clean our house once a week—Alice, a fortysomething cranky musician from Seattle who never figured out a plan B and resents every minute she spends folding our underwear—but that’s as far as we go with the domestic staff. So while I may be enjoying this level of service, I’m not 100 percent comfortable with it.
“Muchas, muchas, muchas gracias,” I say as Enrique hands me my first margarita of the evening, which also happens to be the first hibiscus margarita of my life.
Peter stares at me. He’s trying to tell me to cool it with the muchas, but muchas and gracias are about the only two words of Spanish I know.
I shrug. “I’m grateful. Sue me.”
I appear to be the only one who thought to dress up. The men have donned short-sleeved button-downs and shorts, Malcolm paired a black T-shirt with his rolled-up khakis and Ivan is already in his pajamas. Clem is wearing spandex pants and a cropped tank top. I’ve stopped asking her why she goes to school dressed like she’s going to the gym because she’s only following a trend. When I drop her off in the mornings, she’s one of a sea of girls whose labia are on full display.
And Ingrid, well, it doesn’t much matter what Ingrid wears; she always looks like she just stepped out of a magazine. Not a fashion magazine, more like a home design spread, something showcasing the perfect cook’s kitchen or a library with books arranged by color, and there she is stirring up a hollandaise or reading a vintage red-spined copy of Light in August, looking elegant in a blousy shirt, ripped jeans, bare feet.
“Roberto,” Solly begins.
“Yes, sir?”
Solly moves in closer. Rests a hand on his shoulder. Lowers his voice, like he’s sharing a secret, but not so quietly that we can’t all hear perfectly. “Hey. I’m a Roberto, too. Robert. Robert Solomon, but everyone calls me Solly. So from one Roberto to another—drop the ‘sir,’ will you? ‘Solly’ will do just fine.”
“Okay, Solly.”
Solly reaches into his pocket for his iPhone. “Can you acquaint me with the sound system here?” He shuffles his feet and wriggles his hips in an embarrassing effort to demonstrate his dance moves. “There must be some way to get some tunes playing.”
There’s built-in surround sound with an iPhone docking system, which Solly would know if he’d bothered to read the emails I sent him. He’s hard-core about his music. He’d be insufferable for seven days if he couldn’t play DJ.
I look over at Clem. She’s holding a drink the same color as my hibiscus margarita, talking to Ingrid and Ivan. I know she drinks sometimes. I’m not naïve. And also, I read her texts. A few weeks ago she barfed on Ariella’s parents’ Turkish kilim runner. She puts on a good show—I might not have even known she was wasted when she got home that night, delivered safely by a sober Sean in a Lyft. But since I can see her texts on my laptop (WTF Clem? That rug is expensive! My parents are gonna kill me!) I busted her, and she cried, and I made her stay in the following weekend, hardly a punishment, because we let Sean come over and they made pizzas and watched Napoleon Dynamite for the ten-thousandth time. Anyway, I don’t think she’s brazen enough to drink in front of me, but just in case, I go in for a closer look.
“It’s a hibiscus spritzer, Mother,” she says. “Hibiscus juice and sparkling water. Want a taste? It’s kinda gross.”
Ivan is walking in tight circles around Clem, faster and faster until he falls down.
“He napped for three hours,” Ingrid says. “He’ll never go to sleep tonight.”
The sun has slipped away, leaving the sky a Rothko of pink, orange and a deep purple-blue. Solly has hooked up his playlist and the house fills with music—Cesária Évora, a Cape Verdean who sings in Portuguese, so not an entirely apt choice, but still, she fits the feel of the evening just right. When Cesária Évora died a few years ago, her obituary described her songs as infused with sodade, the Creole term for “nostalgic longing.” It’s how I feel right now, gazing at the multihued sky: a nostalgic longing, even though I’ve never been to Puerto Vallarta, never even been to Mexico. It makes me want to pull my husband close, forgive him the millions of things he does every day to make me hate him just a little bit. Because, like Solly said, these are the moments that matter, spending time with the ones you love most. So it could be nostalgic longing, or it could very well be that I’m kind of drunk. Either way, I look for Peter, but he’s not here.
“Where’s Peter?” I ask Solly, because Solly is Peter’s other other half.
“He had to take a call.”
“A call? It’s Saturday night. We’re on vacation.”
Solly puts an arm around me and says softly, “Work crisis. Give him a break, okay? It’s not like he wants to be dealing with this now.”
Three years ago, Solly and Peter started a bagel company that aimed to bring New York bagels to Angelenos starved for the real thing. If it doesn’t sound like the most original idea, that’s because it isn’t. But Solly believed that if the bagels were good, and if the marketing was right, and if they could figure out some sort of app for on-demand delivery to supplement the brick-and-mortar spot in Santa Monica for which he’d already signed a two-year lease on a whim, they could make a fortune.
A fortune would be a gross exaggeration, but the business is doing well, and they are making money, though I always suspect Solly is making more of that money than Peter.
Solly brought the business cred to their endeavor; he grew up the scion of a mattress empire and went to Harvard Business School despite having been, according to Peter, who was his college roommate for four straight years, a mediocre student at best. Peter brought the design expertise, having worked at first for magazines, and then for years at a fragrance company, where he developed a staunch aversion to perfume, which is why I no longer wear any.
Peter nailed it with the Boychick Bagels logo—it’s simple and retro and you see young people wearing the T-shirts and tank tops and hoodies all over Los Angeles. They went through several ideas for names: Bagel Buds (sounded like they were selling bagels and weed), Bagel Bros (douchey), Bagel Boys (only slightly less douchey). Since Peter isn’t Jewish, I suggested Bagel Goys, but they decided instead to go full Yiddish, even using a Yiddish-style font for the logo.
At first I wasn’t sure about Peter going into business with Solly. He had a solid job with health insurance and a 401(k). We never had to worry about the size of my book advances or my lackluster sales. I worked hard, I contributed to the family, but we didn’t have to rely on my income to keep us afloat. Still, Peter wanted to take this leap. He was tired of his job and he wanted a change and of course what I wanted was for Peter to be happy.
Peter never agreed to shoulder the breadwinner burden alone and it’s not what I wanted either, for him or for us. We both grew up in households where our parents took on traditional gender roles. Our fathers never changed a diaper and they made the money and all the big decisions. Our mothers didn’t work until they both found themselves middle-aged and divorced. Peter and I set a different course for ourselves, and yet when the opportunity to start the business with Solly arose, it forced us to take stock. I realized we’d slipped quietly into something resembling a 1950s marriage—he made the money, I made the house run smoothly.
We agreed this would have to be a family endeavor with both of us firmly on board. I need you, Peter said. He pointed out that I managed our finances and paid all our bills and had a far better understanding of what was reasonable and what was fantasy for Team Carlson. So together we did the research. We looked at the numbers. We learned that four out of five businesses fail in their first year and that the ones that survive can take years to turn a profit. We had some savings, sure, but for us, the risk was huge. If Solly’s whim didn’t pan out it wouldn’t make a difference to him—he’d just fall back comfortably onto his piles of mattress money. What would happen to us?
As usual, Solly had answers. He and Peter would be equal partners but he’d put up the seed money. Peter would start drawing a salary right away. We’d keep our health insurance. Our 401(k). The venture wouldn’t fail. Overhead would be low and the markup high. By year two, Solly swore, they’d be in the black and they’d be splitting profits down the middle.
The business is now in its fourth year. It is, by start-up standards, a smashing success. And yet, even though I know Solly has his money to recoup, it still doesn’t seem like Peter is an equal partner. He’s more like Solly’s right-hand man. I’ve stopped mentioning this to Peter; it’s a sore spot between us so I leave it alone. All I know is that Peter works tirelessly and puts in longer hours than Solly. I’ve watched Peter grow from a talented designer into a marketing guru and brilliant entrepreneur. He’s my husband, so I’m allowed to brag.
The on-demand option is gearing up to go 24/7 and has been a royal headache. The app falls within Peter’s domain, as do so many pieces of the company, but still, I don’t see what’s so important that he’d have to deal with it now, on a Saturday evening on the first night of our vacation, though I do have an inkling about who is on the other end of that phone call.
“Where did he take the call, Solly?”
Solly shakes his head. “Come on, Jen. We haven’t even sat down to eat yet. I know how important it is to you that we all dine as one, and so does Peter, so you can rest assured he’ll be back in a minute. Have another margarita.”
“I don’t want another margarita.”
A bell rings. Not the doorbell. It’s Roberto, ringing a little brass bell. The dinner bell.
“Ding dong,” Ivan shouts.
Solly squeezes my elbow. “Take a seat. I’ll go grab him.”
I so want this vacation to go perfectly. I want everything infused with specialness. This isn’t only because we spent more money on this trip than we’ve spent on any other vacation we’ve ever taken; there’s another calculus at play. Peter is turning fifty. We’ve been together almost twenty years. In two years our daughter will be out of the house. And six months ago my doctor called after my annual mammogram and asked that I come in for a “sit-down conversation.” Peter sat next to me squeezing my hand. She told us we were lucky to have caught it early, as if all three of us had stage-one breast cancer, and that with minimal treatment I should be shipshape. I worried about trusting my life to someone who would use the term shipshape, but I finished radiation three weeks ago and she was right. Things look good and I’m feeling fine. Anyway, all of these factors add up. These seven days are high-value days. Every minute counts double, triple, even. So I let Solly go collect Peter, and I polish off my hibiscus margarita.
I choose a seat next to Clementine, across the table from Ingrid, and I ask Enrique to remove the birds-of-paradise so we can all see one another. On the menu tonight: prickly pear cactus enchiladas and jicama salad, rice and beans for Ivan and maybe Malcolm if he’s a picky eater, too, but not for Clem, whose culinary adventurousness has always filled me with pride.
The food hasn’t even been served yet, and Ingrid is frowning at her plate. She picks it up, looks at the back of it, and puts it down again. Enrique is making the rounds with the large dish of enchiladas, so she beckons Roberto over.
“So sorry . . . Do you know . . . Is this pottery lead-free?”
“Lead-free?”
“Yes. Is it free of lead? Much of the traditional pottery from Mexico is made with a lead-based ceramic glaze. It’s very dangerous to eat off of plates that contain lead.”
Roberto says something to Enrique in Spanish. Enrique says something back.
“Yes,” Roberto nods. “It is lead-free.”
Ingrid rubs her hand over the plate and examines her palm, like she’s checking for dust. “Would you mind . . . Do you have paper plates in the kitchen? I’m happy to go get them myself.” She starts to stand up but Roberto motions for her to stay put. “I will get for you.”
“Two, please,” she says and she takes Ivan’s plate and her own and hands them both to Roberto.
Solly and Peter return, taking the seats at opposite ends of the long table.
“Sorry about that, everyone. Bagel emergency. All peachy now. Wow, does this food look incredible. I don’t know what this is, but it looks incredible.”
“It’s enchiladas,” Enrique says, holding the dish for Peter to serve himself. “Please.”
Peter is the first person to whom I show my writing, my first editor, in part because he has an excellent vocabulary and always catches me when I repeat words, which I tend to do, so I can’t help but notice that he just said incredible twice.
“Who was calling you?” I’d decided not to say anything. Hadn’t I decided that? Didn’t I calculate that when the minutes are high value it’s important to try not to ruin a single one of them?
“Just someone from the office. We’re dealing with a glitch. Let’s not bore everyone.”
“Just someone from the office?”
Why am I doing this on my vacation? The very time I set aside to escape anxiety and insecurity, to be less controlling, the time I planned to try to be, as they used to say at Clem’s preschool, my best self. Everyone stares down at the lead-ridden plates.
Peter takes a bite of his enchilada and then looks up slowly and locks his eyes onto mine. “Jonas. Jonas from tech. Like I said, it’s all cleared up now.”
“Good,” I say and manage a smile. We’ve moved on from Cesária Évora to something a little too clubby for my taste. I dig deep for some of that sodade, but it’s gone; slipped away, like the sun.
I CAN TELL by the way Peter brushes his teeth that he’s still mad at me for grilling him at the table about the phone call. He takes his frustrations out on his molars, and he’s not being kind to his gums. He doesn’t want to tell me he’s mad, because then I’d proffer my side, and we’d both dig in, and this is the first night of our seven-night dream vacation. We’re supposed to be having the kind of sex we never find the time to have at home.
“I didn’t know that my life was missing prickly pear cactus. But it was. There’s been a prickly-pear-cactus-sized hole in my life all these years.”
Peter comes out of the bathroom and cocks his head at me. “A prickly-pear-cactus-sized hole?”
“Yep.”
He smiles. We’ve brokered an unspoken deal. We will leave the earlier events of the evening alone. It’s better this way. It’s what we both want.
“Can you believe Malcolm?” I ask.
“Believe what about him?”
“Can you believe him? How grown-up he is. And how handsome.”
“He was always a good-looking kid.” Peter climbs into bed next to me. “Clem could hardly take her eyes off of him.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“How is that ridiculous?”
“Because she’s madly in love with Sean. She excused herself right after dessert so she could go back to her room and spend the rest of the night FaceTiming him.”
Peter laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“I just think it’s funny that you, of all people, could believe a sixteen-year-old girl wouldn’t go all weak in the knees over an older boy who looks like Malcolm. So what if she has a boyfriend? And I hate to say it, because Sean’s a good kid, but there’s not much of a contest there.”
“There is, because she’s in love with Sean.”
“Ha. She’s sixteen. What does she know about love?”
“Sixteen-year-olds know plenty about love. They think about love all the time. Their romantic ideals haven’t been derailed by things like adult responsibility or the general mundanities of everyday living.”
Peter reaches for a magazine and adjusts his reading light. “Maybe,” he says. “I guess you do know more about this than I do.”
What he means is that because I write about teenagers, I know more about teenagers. What he doesn’t mean is that I know more about this because I habitually read Clem’s texts including the ones with Sean. Early on, when Clem first got an iPhone, and I first downloaded the app to my laptop that allows me to see her texts, I told Peter about something I’d read that made me concerned that Clem wasn’t treating another girl at school kindly. Peter told me to stop reading her texts. He said it was an invasion of her privacy and creepy to boot. Instead, I just stopped telling him, keeping every insight, every revelation, to myself. The result is that I get a window into the lives of teenagers that’s useful when it comes to writing about them, and also that I know far more about our daughter than he does.
Clem and Sean have the kind of relationship it would be difficult to put in a book. It’s too sweet, too romantic and way too innocent. They’re sixteen-year-olds who profess their love for each other incessantly and still haven’t ever had sex. It’s a mother’s dream and no reader would believe it.
“Here’s a shocker,” I say.
Peter peers at me from behind his magazine. “Yes?”
“Ingrid tried talking to me about her manuscript again. Not five minutes after getting here. She was boasting about her daily word count, clearly angling for me to ask to see it.”
“Solly says it’s really good.”
“What does Solly know about young adult fiction?”
“He said it’s for younger readers. Not little kids, but not teenagers either.”
“It’s middle grade?” How does Peter not know the terminology? I’ve been working in this field for more than a decade.
“I guess so.”
“So what does Solly know about middle-grade fiction?”
Peter folds the magazine and puts it on his nightstand. He props himself up on his side, facing me. He takes my hand, and rubs his face with it. His stubble won’t be soft for another day or two. “Why does this bug you so much?”
I sigh. “It’s just that . . . I’m sure Ingrid looks at me, at what I do, and thinks: if she can do it, why can’t I do it?”
He holds my hand between us and squeezes it. “You do make it look easy. But that’s just because you’re a pro at what you do.”
“Yeah, I’m a pro who can’t finish her fourth book.”
“Come on. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
This is Peter’s way of trying to sound encouraging, but he doesn’t see that he can often come off as dismissive. On some level I’ve always suspected that Peter sees me as a housewife who found a hobby that occasionally nets her a modest income. That the challenge of writing a book for young readers isn’t a real challenge, because people who write for young readers aren’t real writers. When I’ve tried talking to him about this, how it feels diminishing, he accuses me of projecting my own insecurities onto him.
I’m not going to carry your baggage for you is one of his favorite comebacks.
“What happened to Ingrid’s jewelry business?” I ask him. “Why doesn’t she just stick with that? She made beautiful jewelry.”
That’s how Solly and Ingrid met. Solly hired her to design a bracelet for Maureen. It was supposed to be a gift for their tenth wedding anniversary, but by the time the piece was finished, so was the marriage.
“It shouldn’t matter to you if Ingrid wants to write a book. Live and let live. And I’m sure you’re right about Solly’s analysis. What does he know? But really, it has nothing to do with you or what you do and you shouldn’t let it threaten you.”
“It doesn’t threaten me.”
Peter raises one eyebrow.
“Okay. Yeah. I get it. But I’m not going to send it to Laurel. I know that’s what Ingrid is after, but I wouldn’t do that to Laurel. It isn’t fair. Laurel has to deal with more than her fair share of shitty submissions.”
“Fine,” he says. “I’m sure you’ll figure out a good excuse if it comes to that.”
“And it’s not like Ingrid needs the money. Not that there’s much money in publishing anyway. But what little there may be, she doesn’t need any of it.”
“I thought we were done.”
“We are.”
“And I thought you liked Ingrid. I thought you two were friends.”
“We are.” I do like Ingrid. I really do. Despite the fact that she broke up the marriage of a couple I adored, despite the fact that she thinks writing a book is easy, despite her paranoia about lead in her dinner plates, I really do like her. Most of the time.
Peter slides closer to me so that our bodies are touching, then he puts an arm around me and pulls me closer. He presses his face into my neck and kisses me there. Then he puts his mouth to my ear and he whispers, “I know this is our first night here, and it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I’m really tired. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I say.
He rolls away from me and turns off his reading light. “Consider yourself on notice,” he says. “You are not getting off this easy tomorrow night.”
I’M NOT A GOOD SLEEPER. This wasn’t always so. I started having trouble around the time I turned forty, when my doctor kindly told me to get used to it, that poor sleep goes hand in hand with growing older, like growing older wasn’t already a raw deal. At home I partake in the occasional puff of medicinal marijuana, and that does help somewhat, but for obvious reasons, I didn’t bring any along with me to Mexico.
Peter is snoring away. He’s dodged the middle-aged insomnia like he’s dodged many of the other afflictions of aging. He isn’t getting soft in the middle. He doesn’t need reading glasses. Even with the white hair, he still looks like a boy.
I watch him in the dark. The rise and fall of his chest like a metronome. His breath goes in two beats, out two beats. Steady Peter. Dependable Peter.
Most of the worries that keep me up at night are either irrational or insignificant—they grow in the dark and shrink in the light of morning. Did I say the wrong thing to that mother of Clem’s friend or Did the electrician overcharge me or Did I remember to roll the windows all the way up in the Prius? I think of my subconscious as a storage shed for worries—most are useless, throwaways, but hidden in there are some real gems. What if my cancer comes back? Who was Peter really talking to?
I check the clock on his bedside table. It feels like it should be later, but it’s only 11:47. And back home it’s only 9:47. So I guess it’s no wonder I’m still awake.
Next to the clock sits Peter’s iPhone.
Maybe I’ll be able to sleep, I figure, if I can just put to rest my stupid paranoia. If Peter were awake, and he knew I couldn’t sleep, he’d probably show me the phone himself to prove to me that, yes, it was Jonas from tech who called in the middle of the cocktails and mini shrimp tostadas on the balcony.
I slide out of bed. The tiled floor is cool on my bare feet. I pick up his phone. It’s powered down. I turn it on and wait for it to come to life, making sure it’s on vibrate so it doesn’t wake Peter with an errant ding. His lock screen is a picture of the two of us in sunglasses and baseball hats with toothy smiles. It’s from a hike we took up Runyon Canyon on New Year’s Day. I push the home button and punch in his four-digit security code—Clem’s birth date and month—the same code I use on my own phone.
I touch the green icon. The list of recent calls pops up.
On the top of that list, the most recent call, the one that came in at 7:04 p.m. and lasted for almost eleven minutes, not an inexpensive conversation considering we don’t have an international calling plan, did not come from Jonas in tech.
It came from Gavriella Abramov, Peter’s beautiful twenty-eight-year-old assistant.