Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Small world,” the blond boy says when he puts together that a teammate from his high school soccer team is in Alison’s dorm at Princeton.

  “In the sense that our worlds are small,” she retorts.

  He laughs. “Good point, Ali.”

  “Alison.”

  “Good point, Alison.”

  The players serve and spike against a dichromatic backdrop of sand and sky. They clutch their knees and say, “Whew,” after a particularly aerobic play. They watch Alison. She leaps and dives, flinging herself after the ball with abandon. Her body is lithe and athletic. Even when she’s still, an energy simmers about her. When the wife of the man in the dolphin swim trunks catches him staring, he pretends to be extremely absorbed in the view of the ocean.

  From her spot in the sand, Claire watches and wonders whether the sluicing beauty of her sister’s movements will be hers, too, someday, when she grows up. She doubts it, but this doesn’t really make her sad. It is enough to bask in the warmth of her sister’s light.

  When the game ends (defeat for the team of the overinvested man, who now declares the game to have been “all in good fun”), the blond boy approaches Alison. They talk a bit. The other boys eye him with annoyance and self-recrimination, then turn their attention to the communications major, reassessing. The blond boy touches Alison’s shoulder, then trots off down the sand. When he’s gone, she brings her hand to the spot he touched and brushes her fingertips against her own soft skin.

  * * *

  AS AFTERNOON slips into evening, the guests drift away from the beach. They spend the hours before dinner recovering from the day—the sun, the heat, the booze, beauty so vivid their eyes crave a rest from it. They shower. They check in with the office. (Their expertise is needed to resolve some particularly thorny issue, and they provide the solution with relief; or they are told to enjoy their vacation, things are chugging along just fine without them, and for the rest of the evening they are cranky and short-tempered.) They have sex in the fluffy white hotel beds. Afterward, they eat the mangoes from the welcome baskets, letting the creamy juice run down their hands. They investigate the small bottles in the minibars. They flip on televisions by force of habit, watch a few minutes of a news program from Saint Kitts, a Miami Vice rerun, a documentary about a reggae singer who is neither Bob Marley nor Jimmy Cliff. They sit on the balconies, smoke loose joints rolled with the mediocre grass they’ve managed to procure on the island, and watch the night begin: the sun go down, moths bloom from the darkness, the palms turn to shadowy windmills, the first faint stars pierce the sky.

  The sisters lay side by side on Claire’s bed and let the air conditioner blitz their bodies. One day on the beach and already Alison has turned nut-brown. Her freckles, faint apricot this morning, are auburn sparks. Claire’s skin, meanwhile, is angry pink.

  “You poor thing,” Alison says.

  She fetches the bottle of aloe vera from the kit in the bathroom and squeezes some into her palm. She soothes her sister inch by inch. Claire closes her eyes and slips into the blind dream of her sister’s touch.

  Alison has been away at college for four months. Sometimes at home Claire goes into her sister’s room and sits on her bed. The room looks as if Alison went out just a minute ago. On the desk there are messy piles of snapshots and, mixed in with the pens and pencils in a blue ceramic mug, a tube of sparkly strawberry lip gloss. (Once, she opened the tube, slicked some on, and inhaled her sister’s smell on her own lips. She has not dared to do this again.) There are band posters on the walls. The clothes her sister didn’t take to college are sloppily folded in the dresser. But the room no longer feels inhabited. Sometimes, when she closes her eyes, she cannot picture her sister’s face. She cannot hear her voice, and when this happens a wave of panic washes over her.

  Now the hotel room they share is humid with Alison’s presence, and everything Claire has missed comes rushing back. Her sister’s savage nail biting. Her habit of stroking her scar through her clothes when she’s thinking. The way she dances a little, small private movements, when she moves around a room. Her sister is a secret whispered in her ear.

  * * *

  WHAT DOES a father think about when he wakes at dawn on the second morning of vacation? The damned birds. The roosters crowing away, from somewhere behind the resort. Some incessant yellow-breasted bird making a high-pitched racket on the balcony. (This is the bananaquit, an infamous island nuisance.) He throws on a robe, goes out to the balcony, shoos the bird away, and returns to bed. But it is back a minute later. He does this three times, thinking with increasing agitation of some prior guest in this suite who must have offered the bird scraps from his room service pain au chocolat. He tells himself to relax. He’s awake anyway now, might as well get his day started. He kisses his wife, who is still sleeping soundly, and steps onto the balcony to appraise the morning. It is a clear day. A few squat clouds move slow as cruise ships across a pure blue sky. Faraway Cay appears so near he half believes he could reach out and touch it. He can make out individual palm trees on the shore. He can see the cay’s black rock faces, mossed with growth, and the shadows of its ravines. The cay’s intense greens simply do not exist at home. A father reflects momentarily that most people will live their whole lives without getting to see a place this beautiful. He reiterates to himself, as he tries to do often, that he is fortunate. He paused to allow a similar reflection on the shuttle ride from the airport to the resort, a journey whose features—children playing in dusty yards; women sitting somnolently behind dented tin pots at roadside stands; concrete houses that must once have been turquoise, yellow, pink, but whose paint had nearly all peeled away; strays—summoned the equivalent features of his own life: his beautiful daughters, wife, house (the eaves tufted now with shimmering snow), Fluffernutter the dog.

  His thoughts are interrupted by a mechanical noise. A tractor is making its way along the beach. He notices now that the sand, which was immaculate yesterday, is strewn with mats of brown seaweed. Two men in overalls are raking the seaweed into piles. The tractor follows after them, scooping up the piles. Behind the tractor, a fourth man uses a push broom to smooth away the tread marks.

  A father stands on the balcony and watches this procedure for some time. He understands now that the beach is not naturally pristine, which, he admits, should have been obvious, and this knowledge taints his enjoyment of it. His reaction bothers him. Why should these men’s labor make him appreciate the beach less instead of more?

  As his second day at Indigo Bay unfolds and he grows accustomed to the resort’s beauty, to the bushes everywhere weeping pink blooms and the brazen teal water, he begins to perceive a new set of information. He notices, for instance, that the milk at the breakfast buffet in the open-air pavilion is ever so slightly sour, leaving an unpleasant aftertaste on his tongue. He does not say anything about this. He does not ask the woman who greeted his family so warmly at the pavilion’s entrance to rectify the situation. He simply registers it. He also registers that in a few places at the resort he routinely catches the whiff of certain unmistakable odors. At the far side of the swimming pool, warm garbage. At the turn in the gravel path that leads from their room to the beach, sewage. He would never dream of complaining about such things, as other guests might. He likes to think he wears his affluence tastefully. He does not move through the world expecting things to be perfect. He tries to like everything and everybody as much as he can. Even this orientation toward the world he recognizes as a benefit of the position he occupies. It is easy to make allowances when you live a fortunate life.

  Only now it is all a bit spoiled, isn’t it? This same disappointment every year; childish, he concedes, but there it is: he still hasn’t found paradise, not quite. Because, like everywhere else, when you get down to it, it is all just bodies and their manifold wastes and where to put it all, it is all just disorder two days from taking over. The week before he flew down here, a blizzard had prevented trash pickup in Manhattan for a few days. O
n his walk from Grand Central to the office, the sidewalks were piled five feet high with black trash bags. At street corners, the garbage pails were overflowing, the pavement around them littered with chicken bones, half-eaten hot dogs, diapers, frozen rivers of old coffee. He saw a little terrier in a red sweater urinate at the base of a pile of trash bags; he saw a thick beige puddle beside another pile, and stared at it curiously for a moment before the smell hit him and he realized it was vomit. As he walked past all of this he had fixed an image of a tropical beach in his mind and thought, Thank god I’m getting out of here. But now that he is out, now that he is here, he cannot help but wonder whether the only damned difference is the bougainvillea, whether this place is nothing but the same old ugliness, spackled with an unconvincing veneer of beauty.

  * * *

  A YELLOW rubber ball rises high in the air. A dozen children dash across the sand to catch it. It is ten in the morning, the start of the resort’s daily hour of children’s games and relays. While the children play, their parents use the free time. At the moment the yellow ball reaches its apex, a mother shudders with the force of her first orgasm in a month. Another mother is getting close and hoping ferociously that her husband lasts. A husband and wife who fully intended on sex snore in bed. Couples drink tequila sunrises in the hot tub, read on the beach, pound away side by side on treadmills in the fitness center. A wife poses for her husband in front of the ocean, trying her best to hide her soft thighs. For a moment their children slip from view. Briefly, they seem not to exist at all.

  * * *

  CLAIRE IS no good at games. She falls during the crab walk. “Come onnn,” her partner urges during the three-legged race. Two strides into the egg-and-spoon relay the egg rolls off her spoon and cracks on her foot. But most of all she is no good at the mysterious process by which children sift out into pairs and clusters, securing their buddies for the week. Even Axel from Belgium, who doesn’t speak English, slips right in with another rowdy boy. They kindle friendship so quickly it leaves her dizzy, as if she’s been spinning; when she stops, the world tilts back into place and the business of making friends is done, settled, without her.

  * * *

  THE FAT one brings the family’s lunch. They watch him come up the beach, the heavy tray balanced on his shoulder. He stumbles. French fries rain onto the sand.

  “I apologize,” he says when he reaches them. “I’ll bring you more chips.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. There’s still plenty,” the mother says encouragingly. “Clairey, sweetheart, no writing.”

  The little girl freezes, caught with her index finger in midair. The word she had been writing was chips. She was up to p. She shoves her hand down at her side. She can feel her finger itching with the half-finished p and the s. She will have to finish later.

  “Leave her alone,” Alison snaps at her mother. She takes Claire’s hand, raises it to her lips, and gives it a peck.

  The mother sighs. This habit of her younger daughter’s emerged a few months ago, her index finger wiggling and looping through the air. “I’m writing,” Claire had mumbled when the mother asked what was going on. They’d met with the school psychologist, a mistake—after that Claire got furtive about it, sneaky, only doing it when she thought no one was paying attention. It is a constant struggle for the mothers: How do you know what is merely odd and what is worrisome? How much damage can you inflict upon your child if you treat something like it is one when it is really the other?

  After Clive sets out their food on the low tables between their chairs, he takes a small towel from his pocket and wipes the sweat from his brow.

  “Must be hot out here in long pants,” the father says.

  Alison shoots him a disapproving look, which he ignores. If fathers only said things their teenage daughters approved of, they would never speak at all. The mother and father exchange glances. A change has come over their daughter. Lately, her teenage moodiness carries a whiff of moral judgment. Newer still is this sighing dismissiveness, as if they are hardly even worth the effort of her judgment. Make no mistake, she’s a college girl now.

  “It’s not so bad,” the fat one mumbles. “Are you having a cold winter at home?”

  “Brutal,” the father says. “It’s been snowing nonstop. I envy you, waking up to this every day.”

  “We do have our hurricanes,” the fat one says.

  “You had a bad one this season, right? José?”

  “Luis.”

  The father claps his hands together. “Luis! That’s the one.”

  “We had six hundred homes and many of our schools destroyed.”

  “How awful,” the mother says.

  The father cannot comprehend how people can be willing to live in a place where something like this can happen. He decides that a sense of the perpetual potential for destruction, for incurring a total loss, must be baked into people’s temperaments here from birth, so that living like this is easier for them than it would be for him. Which is not a deficit in his character, for presumably if he had been born here he, too, would be such a person, able to bear unpredictability with stoic equanimity. He pauses to imagine himself as such a person—a pleasurable leaving-behind of himself as he enters a self more connected to and at peace with the planetary vicissitudes.

  “Tell me something,” the father says. “Where do you recommend for some local food? You know, something authentic.”

  The fat one gives him the name of a restaurant in town. His friend works there; his friend gives tours of the island and the cays, too, “At a good price.” The mother and father smile and thank him, but something silent is exchanged between them: they enjoy receiving local knowledge, but they are also on guard for local slipperiness.

  Up and down the beach, fathers sign bills for lunches and drinks. They try not to think about the numbers. Five bucks for their kid’s Orangina, eighteen for their wife’s goat cheese salad. They do not want to linger on the ways they are being nickel-and-dimed in paradise. Besides, what price can one put on such moments? Here is the sea, the blue water and the milky froth. Here is the soft, sun-warmed sand. The grains of sand on earth, a father read somewhere, are fewer than the stars in the universe. How unlikely, then, what an unbelievable stroke of luck, his family on this beach.

  * * *

  SOME TIME later, the skinny one comes to clear the family’s plates.

  “What are the sisters planning the rest of the day?” he asks.

  “We’re going to build a castle, right, Clairey?” Alison says.

  “Did you know I was this year’s Carnival Sandcastle Competition champion?”

  “Is that so?” Alison sweeps her hair off her neck and gathers it into a ponytail.

  “For true. Well, honorable mention.” He grins. “If you girls need any consultation on your design, just let me know.”

  “We like to build our sandcastles solo, thank you very much,” Alison says with a fetching smirk.

  Edwin squats in front of Claire. “And you, little miss? Do you, too, prefer to build your sandcastle solo?” He smiles at her.

  Claire nods rigidly.

  He laughs. “Okay, little miss.” He tousles her hair. “See you later, sisters.”

  As he heads off down the beach, the mother notices that her daughter has her eyes on him, watching him go.

  * * *

  THE SKINNY one is the prince of the sand. The social hierarchy of the guests flows through him. Those he anoints with his gregarious approval seem to possess an invisible status. It is true he takes a lot of breaks and his tendency to stop and chat slows down service on the beach, but this is forgiven, even embraced. What’s the rush? They’re on island time. He is adored, too, by the young children, who follow him around like a fan club.

  Then there is the fat one, Gogo, clumsy in the sand, clumsy with a tray of cocktails on his shoulder, clumsy adjusting the umbrellas to keep up with the movement of the sun, his voice rarely rising above a mumble. But he is Edwin’s friend. The closeness betwe
en the skinny one and the fat one is clear. When they pass each other on the sand they exchange high fives and chummy insults. Often, Edwin returns from his break with a grease-spotted paper bag in hand—lunch for Gogo.

  When a guest asks Clive about their friendship, he says simply, “We’re best mates.”

  “Me and the Goges?” Edwin says, asked the same question. “We come up together from small. Me and he go back to primary. Who you think it was named he Gogo? I’d tell you why but he’d kill me.”

  One sundown, the man with the dolphin swim trunks is jogging down the beach when he sees Edwin struggling to drag a stack of chairs across the sand. Clive hurries over and, without a word, lifts the load from him. The man feels something crack in him. He loves his wife, don’t get him wrong, but somehow he had forgotten until this moment—maybe he has forced himself to forget—the sweetness of friendship.

  * * *

  THE SISTERS do many things together. They collect seashells. They trade underwater messages in the pool: “Mayonnaise is gross.” “Fluffernutter is the world’s best dog.” In the ocean, Alison scoops Claire into her arms and Claire wraps her arms around her sister’s neck.

  “Our ship sank and Mom and Dad and everybody else is dead,” Claire says. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

  “See that island out there?” Alison says, pointing to Faraway Cay. “We’re going to have to swim for it. It’s our only chance. Can you make it?”

  Claire nods, sober and brave.

  They build castles, Claire happily submitting to her sister’s vision and management. She fetches buckets of water and collects twigs and pebbles, while Alison carves bridges and archways and spiral staircases to the sky.

  Edwin comes by and appraises their progress. “Look at your bridge there caved in. Guess you girls aren’t having much luck building solo after all.” He grins.