Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  Her parents start talking at her. Cruise ship, slide, something, something. She pulls one of the lounge chairs into the sun and lies down. She takes out her Walkman and lets “Big Poppa” drown her dad out. A minute later her father hails one of the beach waiter guys like he’s a cab. Awful. But the guy doesn’t seem to notice, or care, or something. She turns up the volume on her Walkman and pulls the headphones down around her neck, hoping he’ll hear what song she’s listening to. He introduces himself. He’s Edwin. He is skinny and super-friendly with her parents, like all his life he’s dreamed of meeting the Thomases of Westchester, who are totally eating it up. Her dad orders her a fruit punch, which … she guesses he can inhabit whatever alternate reality he wants.

  When Edwin comes back, he’s hunched under the weight of a tray of excessively garnished cocktails and she wants to disappear, because lying on this chaise lounge while he labors is so uncomfortable. The thing she can’t figure out is, if she is honest with herself, she does not find this arrangement uncomfortable because a person is doing something for her, but because a black person is doing something for a white person. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him to have his job. So what does it mean, exactly?

  When he asks if she’ll come play in the volleyball game in the afternoon, she shrugs, tells him maybe.

  “More of a sunbather, are we?” he says.

  Her entire body flushes. Not me! she wants to tell him. I’m not just some ditzy sun worshipper. But there is no way to convey this without protesting too much and coming off even worse.

  He winks at her and continues down the beach.

  Her fruit punch, actually, is delicious. The sun on her skin is delicious. Maybe she is wrong to have such a stick up her ass about the whole situation. Maybe she should, as a general thing, just shut up and be grateful. But lately she is beginning to suspect that gratitude (as an emotion, as an action) is a colossal scam. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter—everyone is expected to be grateful for what they have, whatever that is. Once, in high school, she snuck into the city with her girlfriends to smoke clove cigarettes in Washington Square Park and try to get invited to an NYU party, and on the way downtown from Grand Central they had a taxi driver who’d been a chemical engineer in Pakistan. When she asked if it frustrated him to do what he did now, he said no, just the opposite, he was grateful. It was a familiar story. In my country I was a lawyer, I was a doctor, I was a professor, but I’m grateful to drive this taxi in America, I’m grateful to bus these dishes in America, I’m grateful to clean up the vomit of fraternity brothers in this dormitory at an Ivy League university in America. Meanwhile, Alison is expected to be grateful for her Audi, and for she doesn’t even know how much her parents pay for her college tuition, and for their beautiful vacations and the beautiful teeth she possesses after years of orthodontia. So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON when she hears Edwin yelling about the volleyball game, she pushes herself up from her chaise lounge. She will show him who she is.

  “Want to come watch me play, Clairey?”

  Her sister’s face lights up at the invitation. Sometimes her power to make her sister happy terrifies her.

  She’s nervous when she pulls her tunic up over her head. Though she knows she’s pretty, cute, arguably even sexy in a girl-next-door way, she is always nervous when she reveals her scar to people for the first time. She isn’t insecure about it, exactly; it’s more like the nervousness she feels at a dance recital just before she leaps onto the empty stage.

  When her torso is exposed, it happens like it always does. Her teammates stare with the obviousness of cattle. When she catches them at it, they avert their eyes oh-so-politely. She loves catching people looking at her scar, shaming them with a glance.

  As the players manage the ball back and forth over the net in sequences of sloppy bumps and sets, she imagines them imagining what happened to her. A wash of dark scenarios projects like a movie montage against the limpid blue sky. She sees herself thrown from a car onto one of those boggy meadows beside the highway, gnashed by a neighbor’s Akita, cut open on a surgeon’s table.

  The real story is her favorite, but she guards it closely, not wanting to dull it by too frequent visitation. She was four. It was summer, and her family, which did not yet include Claire, was at a campground on a lake. They went every summer, and she never liked it. The bottom of the lake was soft, like stepping in dead things. It was night. She was sitting around a fire with her parents roasting marshmallows. Her parents turned away for a moment and when they looked back, she was in the fire. Her father dove in and scooped her out—she was in the flames for only a few seconds, just long enough to be marked by them forever. At the hospital, when her parents and the nurses asked her what happened, she just shook her head, unable to explain. As her parents tell the story, it is a mystery: whether she tripped and fell or whether, dazzled by the flames or propelled by some wild impulse, she jumped.

  “I could have died,” she told Drew the first time she let him see it. When he touched the smooth, pink surface of the scar gently with his fingertips, as if it might still hurt, she loved him. It’s true—she could have died. In a way, her whole life grows out of that moment. Edwin will begin to see it now: she is a person to whom things have happened.

  A woman on her team is talking through the earth-shattering conundrum of whether she and her husband should go on the excursion to the old sugar estate and rum distillery. “I wanted to go, but I’ve heard it’s a drag. Apparently it’s mostly about the history of sugar cultivation on the island, the plantation system and that stuff?”

  That stuff, i.e., slavery? Alison purses her lips to indicate to Edwin that she does not approve of the woman’s comment. She hears everything her teammates say twice—once as herself, and once as she imagines he hears it. The woman’s husband, a man with dolphins on his pink swim trunks, serves the ball into the net.

  “Almost, honey,” the woman says. “I would just like to have a week here where I don’t have to think about how awful the world is. I’m a defense attorney. I know it’s awful.”

  Fair enough? Alison isn’t sure. You don’t get to decide, do you, when to care and when not to care, when to see the big picture and when to zoom in so super-close on your own life that your desire for a massage fills your entire field of vision?

  There are a few other college kids playing, and they set about the unavoidable business of identifying the hall mates, teammates, bunkmates that connect them. “Small world,” remarks a boy who initially says he goes to school in Connecticut, and only when prodded lets “Yale” cross his lips, a confession he makes with an irreproachable mix of sheepishness and élan. Small world. Small world. Like it is some crazy cosmic coincidence, rich people overlapping with other rich people. If he weren’t so cute—yellow-haired and tall, with a certain anemic quality she finds appealing—she would be done with him already. Instead, she flirts.

  The other girl her age squeals when the ball comes near her. She adjusts her bikini top to maintain just the right revelation of boob. She says, “Did I do good?” in a baby voice when she sets up a spike for one of the guys. Alison doesn’t get it. Okay, fine, she gets it. In a way you can hardly blame the girl, because it works. The boy with the hemp necklace is eating it up. But can someone please explain to her the appeal of a guy who can be reeled in by that kind of thing? What you want is a guy who is a little afraid of you. And you want to be a little afraid of him, too.

  While the other girl swats the scary ball away, Alison leaps and spikes and pushes off powerfully from the sand. She can feel eyes on her—Connecticut boy’s, Edwin’s. A vacation is its own world, compressed and powerful, like a planet with stronger gravity. If you play it right, it can teach you things about yourself you can’t learn the other 358 days of the year. It is her first day here and already it is happening.
The vacation is finding its promise.

  When the game is over, Connecticut boy approaches her. She can smell his sweat. It makes her think of Drew, salty and nice. He tells her about the bar in the white marble lobby where the liquor is watered down but where he’ll be, anyway, tonight, around ten P.M. He touches his hand to her shoulder, then trots off down the sand.

  * * *

  I MIGHT have it all wrong. Maybe Alison did not stand naked on the balcony on our first night on Saint X. Perhaps she did not play volleyball with such vim and vigor in order to impress a boy from Yale, on the one hand, and a local employee, on the other. Perhaps the scar on her stomach was not her most sacred vanity. I’m trying to triangulate the truth, to inhabit my sister’s mind. Impossible tasks, to be sure.

  What I can say is this: While the details of this story may be products of my imagination, I trust its broad strokes and core themes. I believe that for my sister, our family vacation coincided with one of those brief, intense intervals of identity formation we all experience from time to time in our lives. She arrived at Indigo Bay at that critical moment when the girl cuts herself on the shards of her own reflection and watches, baffled and thrilled, as the blood begins to flow.

  * * *

  ALISON WEARS her pale pink slip dress. Her “fuck-me, I’m-a-baby” dress, as summarized by her friend Dan, who was in love with her but not something enough for her to consider a viable romantic option.

  Connecticut is already there.

  “Hey,” she says, exquisitely low-key.

  “Hey.”

  He is drinking a rum and Coke. He is even cuter than she remembered from earlier. He has one of those old-fashioned faces, the kind you can picture in black-and-white. For a moment she sees him in an army uniform and one of those little caps. The image excites her—a young man in the trenches, the secret personal sufferings of war, but also the part where she takes him and implants him in this scene while he sits here next to her in his button-down and has no idea that in her mind his face is smudged with dirt and he is living on rations of tinned meat.

  She orders a tequila shot. She opens her throat and drinks it in one go, and though it burns she does not permit herself to react. She is a girl in a tiny pink dress, downing tequila like a champ.

  They talk. In addition to playing cello in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Connecticut is a German major.

  “Why German?” she asks.

  “I wanted to be able to read Rilke in the original.” He rolls his eyes at himself, which she recognizes as the correct move. Nobody likes a snob, but everybody likes the discernment that allows for snobbery.

  “How do you say, ‘You must change your life,’ in German?” she asks, raising her eyebrows like, Of course I read Rilke. Actually, she doesn’t—she remembers this quote from a paper she wrote freshman year of high school comparing and contrasting Rilke and, for some reason, Keats. She got an A. Mr. Conti put the paper up on the projector as a positive example.

  “Du musst dein Leben verwandeln,” Connecticut says. “Or something like that. So what about you? Do you know what you’re going to major in?”

  “Probably something that will drive my parents crazy.”

  They talk awhile longer, letting the thing build. He asks if she wants to go for a walk and she says yes. He charges her drinks to his room, which would be romantic if his parents weren’t obviously paying for it. They leave the bar for the beach. They kick off their shoes. The sand is soft and cool as cream. For a few minutes they walk along the water’s edge, their fingertips brushing against each other’s, letting their banter slow and the force of the night and this thing they are creating together fill them. When they reach a cabana he gestures at it, she nods, and he takes her hand and leads her in. Easiest thing in the world.

  She has kissed quite a few boys since Drew, and Connecticut is particularly enjoyable. He does not use his tongue a lot, which she likes, because sometimes in the midst of making out with a boy she will think about what a tongue actually is and feel paralyzed. He kisses her neck a lot and she likes that, too. It is all very, very nice. But there is something about this niceness that doesn’t sit right. She feels it like a cold gel applied to the moment. She is moving through this scenario the way she would work through a math problem she knows she will get right.

  She knows why it is so easy for her, this and so much else. She knows the substance of the reserves inside herself that make the world a comfortable place to navigate. It is her mother and father loving her like crazy. It is the dappled lawn of her childhood home with its soft mown stripes of green and darker green. It is “fantastic insight!” written in a teacher’s delicious cursive in the margin of an essay. It is the gothic magnificence of the Princeton campus, through which she strolled all autumn in mesh shorts and flip-flops and a messy ponytail. It is every witticism she’s ever tossed off in a circle at a party and the impressed faces of the people who heard it. It is the people she knows and their reserves—their happy childhoods, their bright memories, their educations, all the beauty they have seen, out and out like ripples on the glassy surface of a pool in a secret glade they carry collectively within them. They are spinning it together, she and Connecticut, good fortune igniting on itself under the tropical stars. Is there anything more obvious in the entire world?

  When he touches her thigh under her dress, she freezes. Not actually freezes. She keeps doing what they’re doing. But inside. She is not very experienced, truth be told. She was with Drew forever, but she’s learned in the past few months that all that experience is actually just one experience. They were babies when they started dating and they figured everything out together, and what if they figured it out weird? She hasn’t had an orgasm with anyone else and she knows it’s because she’s afraid that if she does, the guy will look at her funny because her orgasms are weird and she didn’t know it. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to take the nice kissing with her and leave.

  She presses a finger delicately to his lips. “I should go,” she whispers.

  “Are you sure?” He strokes her thigh higher up this time. It is the first thing he does that she doesn’t like. He looks down at his lap, where his boner pushes against his khaki shorts. Her stomach flips. Back in her room with her sleeping sister—that’s where she wants to be.

  “I’m sure.” She scrunches her nose, cute as a button.

  He wraps his arms around her waist. “But I want to kidnap you,” he says, and buries his face in her hair.

  “Not tonight,” she says.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see.”

  She stands, smooths her dress. He reaches for her hand, and she holds his for a moment, then lets it slip through her fingers as she turns and walks back toward the lights of the resort.

  * * *

  “TELL ME something,” her father says the next day, as Clive gathers up the french fries he spilled in the sand. “Where do you recommend for some local food? You know, something authentic.”

  Alison winces. Her father asks this every year, at every resort, on his bullshit search for some local color, the Real Wherever. She can’t stand how pleased he is with his question, like he expects Clive to be super-impressed by his desire to get off the beaten path. (Does he think Clive wants his favorite local spot to be invaded by hordes of tourists?) Her father wants to be able to say, Now, this is delicious, of the conch creole at some hole-in-the-wall, whether or not it is better than the conch creole served at Indigo Bay. Her mother wants to tell the cook on the way out, You have a beautiful restaurant, with her sweet little smile, when the truth is if she thought folding chairs and ceiling fans instead of AC were so great, she’d eat at places like this back home, too, which of course she doesn’t. Then her father wants to take his mediocre photos of the place and blow them up and hang them on the living room wall so their friends will inquire about them at dinner parties and he can tell them about this amazing little spot he discovered.

  That isn’t fair. As parents
go, hers aren’t so bad. Isn’t it better at least to have the inclination to leave the bubble? Well, maybe better for them, but shouldn’t the people who live here get to keep some places to themselves? But maybe the people who live here want people like her parents to come to their restaurants; maybe her notion that they’d rather the tourists and their money stay away is just that, a naïve little notion. She could go around like this forever, trying to decide.

  “People like Spicy’s. Their roast crayfish is quite popular,” Clive says.

  “Roast crayfish,” her father says. “Fantastic.”

  * * *

  LATER THAT afternoon, Alison finds Edwin standing behind the open-air restaurant. “Hey, Mr. Carnival Sandcastle Champion.”

  “Watch out. The girl’s feeling frisky today.”

  She snorts.

  A cook calls out from the kitchen, “Order up!”

  “Duty calls?”

  “Nonstop till three.”

  “What’s at three?”

  “Break. I usually take it down there, past those rocks at the end of the beach.”

  * * *

  WHEN THE hour comes, her parents are snoozing away. She tells her sister she’s going to the bathroom. At the jagged black rocks that mark the end of Indigo Bay, she scrambles up and over, stumbling, then regaining her footing. She crests the rocks and sees Edwin sitting in the sand. He looks up.

  “What are you doing here?” he says sternly. For a moment she worries she misunderstood. Then he tosses back his head and laughs.