Dear Abby

by Barnett, Peggy

  Dear Abby

  by Peggy Barnett

  ☼

  Dear Abby

  Copyright © 2012 Peggy Barnett

  Cover Design © 2013 Ruthanne Reid

  All rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to, xerography, photocopying and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ABBY DOESN’T BELIEVE IN MUCH OF ANYTHING.

  If she was fanciful, if she was one of those fiction writers who can invent whole worlds out of a single meaningful social taboo, she might have the imagination to believe in a god. Any god. But she doesn't, so she can't.

  All the same, the serving woman is a bit of a goddess. That's the only way Abby can describe her. Out of everyone and everything in this overly-clean and pre-packaged little hell-hole, only this woman has caught Abby's eye. She's not sure why. Abby doesn't sleep with women, although she can admire a nice pair of breasts, attractive features, beautiful hair. It doesn't have to mean she wants have sex with the rest of the collection, though.

  Maybe because there's something oddly authentic about this woman. But there shouldn't be, and that's what is making her stand out. She's a resort worker, they're all the same, really. They're meant to be visually interchangeable to the tourists, all dressed in the same brown tailored shirts and cream shorts, all the women with their hair back in buns, all the men clean shaven. They're meant to be moving furniture, ignored and paid their pittance and sent off the resort to live their real lives beyond the too-white walls and too smooth-paths.

  Maybe it's the way that the woman's hair is so black it shines blue. Maybe it's because the smooth, high-cheeked planes of her face speak of local ancestry, and the rich smoky colour of her skin tells of a heritage untouched by Spanish conquistadors or Western marriages.

  Abby is projecting, she knows this. She's exotifying the serving woman and it makes Abby snort with disgust at herself.

  And yet… Abby can't take her eyes off the woman. If it were possible, if there were such things, then perhaps the woman might have been a little bit of a goddess. Of course, she couldn't really be one. Goddesses don't serve daiquiris to fat, sweating tourists on faux-marble pool patios. At least, Abby didn't think so until now.

  And yet… the server has a way of walking that makes her look like she's not quite touching the ground, and there’s something almost too-white about the sclera of her eyes.

  Shading her eyes from the Riviera sun, Abby squints down at her notebook. The pages are made too-white by the glare, in turn hurting her eyes, even through her ridiculous oversized sunglasses. She rubs the warm metal of the spiral binding, flicking her pen between the fingers of her other hand, around and around in a circle.

  She can't take notes out here. It's too bright, and the warmth is making her drowsy. But her suite was too air conditioned. She'd turned the air down, but it was still… fake smelling. Too sterile. Too much like nothing at all. At least the scent out here is authentic. The air is filled with the soft tang of salt wafting up from the beach, unwashed sweaty bodies, palm trees and viciously tended greenery, chlorine, the overpowering artificial coconut reek of sunblock creams and tanning lotions, the musk of spilt beer baking into concrete, the burnt grease of the snack hut, the drift of cocoa and banana and melon liquor.

  A perfume that Abby knows well and intimately. And is beginning to hate with a passion.

  When she'd signed on with the agency magazine as a travel writer, she'd had visions of temples in Tibet and river rafting in the Rockies. She'd mentally prepared herself to eat bugs and strange stews, to sleep in the snow, to get a sunburn in the desert. She'd envisioned a dust-smeared and poorly mended backpack, covered with patches and snatches of fabric she'd picked up along the way to shore up the holes and tears that travel would rip into the canvas. She'd researched the best hiking boots, the best mosquito netting, the most durable miniature laptops with the longest batteries. She'd imagined the interior of the Central Americas, climbing mountains in Peru and ruins in Brazil.

  She had not, not once, envisioned package tours and all-inclusive resorts, and the agony of the real culture being just one sheet of glass, one low marble wall, one stretch of impeccably paved highway away. She never imagined the frustration of being kept outside, of being patted on the head by the locals and directed back towards the bar; of the exasperated, maternalistic sighs of the cleaning staff when she tried to strike up a conversation, the way they herded her towards the group activities on the beach like a curious child being shunted into a day care play-time to keep her from an attack of the incorrigible whys; the veiled condescension she got from the concierges when she asked which bus would take her into town, off the resort, into the middle of the lives of the people who worked around her.

  "Cute, silly gringo," they all said with their eyes. "She wants to 'discover' our culture. Thinks by walking around off the resort for a day she'll find out what it really means. How insulting."

  And it is insulting, for everyone involved. Because Abby has no illusions that she can write the great article that will finally get her bosses, the tourists, the self-absorbed vacationers to at least appreciate that there was a world beyond the resorts, but she can at least try to get other people to care about it.

  She doesn't want to discover anything, she doesn't want to be another in a long line of people who point to what already is and lay claim to the glory of it.

  She wants to be invited to learn, and then allowed to explain. She wants to share it. She wants to taste the food, the real food, the meals that everyone prepares for themselves. She wants to listen to the radio, chat in the evenings with the locals. She wants to learn how to make their clothing, and how to wear it.

  She just wants the experience. She just wants the chance.

  And yeah, maybe that is selfish, Abby can admit that. Maybe it is more of that White Western Man mentality that she was raised within and can never seem to totally shake no matter how hard she tries. Maybe it's her barging around and demanding access somewhere that she has no right to be, violating the last bastion of privacy and calling it research, calling it a record for posterity. Saying that her desire to learn trumps anyone else’s desire to protect.

  But it eats her up inside, every time they send her to one of these falsely cheerful Caribbean paradises. She hates watching the employees around her parodying their own culture, their own traditions, making a mockery of their own lives for the sake of drunken, ignorant tourists. She wants to break through the stereotypes of the cultures around her—the sombreros and the tequila—and just cherish what she finds underneath. Not exploit. Not repackage. Not impose new stereotypes. Just… cherish.

  And to help her readers do the same.

  The problem is that nobody, on either side of the equation, seems to want it too.

  Her bosses don't care about the life of the world off the five star luxury resorts, and most of the time it seems that the people who work on them have no desire to share their real lives with Abby. She can't push, she can't force them to want to share, so all she can do is sit in the posh restaurants or lounge in the rows of hammocks on the fine-sanded beaches, and pretend that the dichotomy isn't tearing her apart.

  There is nothing Abby can do about any of it.

  ☼

  Going to resorts alone is a bit embarrassing. The concierge realizes immediately that she'
s a mystery reviewer, they always do, and so not only is she alone but they won't leave her alone. The kindness quotient goes through the roof, the solicitations and bonus luxuries become cloying, and the deference is grating. Abby is thirty-two years old, has no boyfriend, no husband, no kids, and a job she has grown to hate. She can't even bring a friend along on these research trips anymore, because then she has to actually pretend that she is having a good time for ten whole days.

  Abby is back on the patio by the pool this afternoon, deliberately sat in the chairs that the not-goddess is serving, because she wants a closer look at the woman. There's no story here at the resort. Abby could write a whole magazine full of praise for the Riviera Luxuria and never have to get up off her arse to experience any of it. She's done it all, and it's never different. The snorkeling trips with the so-called authentic local meals on the boat after; the shopping bus-ride into some tourist-attracting market town; the zip-line and parasailing adventures; the walking tours of the local ruins; they're all the same.

  All carefully choreographed so that the tourists see just enough of the “authentic,” but never too much of reality.

  It is a world populated by smiling cherub children and generous, gracious farmwives, and confident, competent artisans. And none of it is about what they watch on TV, and how they spend their Friday nights, and what they do when they meet someone they want to marry.

  Abby could praise this resort to the high heavens and never have to leave her lounge chair, because it never changes. This pre-packaging of the exotic is disgusting. And it's taken nearly ten years, but Abby's just disgusted with herself for being part of the machine that perpetuates it.

  She sips the last of a piña colada that is no better nor any worse than any of the thousands she's drunk before, and taps her pen against her bare knee. Abby hasn't written a thing about the Luxuria in her notebook.

  Which, she'll admit, is new. Usually she at least tries to put in the appearance of effort.

  Maybe this really is it. Maybe this is the last assignment. Maybe she'll go back home with her suntan and her empty notebook and get called up in front of the boss for failing to deliver an article. Maybe he'll threaten to fire her and remind her how many other people are lining up for the chance to take seven all-inclusive vacations per year all around the world for the sake of a write-up. And maybe this time Abby will say, as she always longs to say, "Fine! Give it to them, then! I quit!"

  Abby scowls up at the sunlight filtering down through the palm branches.

  It's a satisfying fantasy, but then what? She has a ten year span on her resume between graduating from the journalism program and now, where all she's done is vacation and write fluff editorials. Then there's the advice column where she answers the trite, inane questions from self-important people who don’t want real answers to their travel questions—they just want Abby to point them to the most convenient travel package that her company offers. That's not the sort of thing that will get her a job with a real newspaper, doing real investigative journalism, writing about real lives, real tragedies, real triumphs. Making a real difference.

  She's got to feed her cat somehow. She's got an apartment to pay rent on, a car to keep up, a man that she has dinner and sex with but she can't quite get to commit to committing, and the last trickle of student debt to kill off.

  She can't afford to quit, no matter how miserable she is.

  And isn't that an irony. Miserable in a fake paradise.

  In the distance a group of young men holler and splash, trying to attract the attention of another group of young women in bikinis that leave exactly nothing to the imagination. Abby wants to be generous to the young men, but stereotyping wouldn't exist if it isn't wasn't partially true, after all, and each of the young men radiates self-centered, self-important just-graduated douchebaggery.

  All-inclusive doesn't mean the staff! Abby wants to snarl when she sees one of them make a grab for a towel-boy as he walks by the edge of the pool, but she holds her tongue. They'd just laugh at her, call her an old bag with her one-piece suit and her wide-brimmed hat and her silly little notebook and then ignore her. Or begin pursing the staff more aggressively in retaliation.

  Or get the towel-boy in trouble. And, for all she knows, ruin his lucrative side-business. It happens. Abby isn't an idiot. She's been to enough resorts, hung around enough of the right kind of tourist, who thinks that whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so to speak. And who is Abby to judge if she's seen some of the locals taking the tourists for a ride, milking a few extra dollars or a few extra orgasms out of the silly, selfish people who come to their countries and prance around like peacocks? Both sides know exactly what's going on, after all, when money and bodily fluids are exchanged.

  Abby's never done it. She has to account for everything she spends on the resort, and she doesn't make enough on the side to be able to afford a clandestine grope with a local. Besides, she isn't sure she has the guts for it. Casual sex, orgasms with another person just for the sake of orgasms, hasn't ever appealed to her.

  She toys with the straw of her depleted drink, rolling it between the pads of her fingers, and wonders what it would be like to be confident in one's own body, in one's own sexuality. To feel as if the skin and muscle she pulls around herself every day fits properly. That there are no odd wrinkles in the seams, that every gesture and posture is the result of awareness and deliberation.

  That's the way the not-goddess moves, Abby realizes, and as soon as she thinks of the woman, her eyes find her in amid the sea of turquoise patio chairs and yellow sunshades. She is wearing a fabric neckerchief today, like the rest of the employees—patterned in a tacky neon pink and yellow tropical design. What surprises Abby is that, when she reaches out to clear off the empty plastic glasses that the group beside Abby has left by their patio chairs, she turns and looks directly at Abby.

  "Something for you?" the not-goddess says.

  Abby jumps, forgetting that the object of her fascination probably knows that she's been staring.

  "Ah… water? Please? And, here," she holds out a folded bill. It's too much for a tip, makes it look like she's trying to buy the not-goddess's attention for the rest of the day, to ensure that she gets quick and quiet service. Well, so what if it does.

  What Abby really wants is for the not-goddess to have to come closer and hover by Abby long enough for her to read the woman's name tag. The server smiles, and her teeth like pearls against the brown-purple of her lip-gloss. Abby rolls her eyes at her own clichéd comparison, but its suitable nonetheless. Abby can't tell the woman's age—somewhere between twenty-two and forty is her best guess.

  The not-goddess takes the bill and it vanishes discreetly into her breast pocket.

  Ixazaluoh, her name tag reads. That is a very, very non-Spanish name.

  Is that a first or a last name, Abby wonders. She'll have to look at some other employees' name tags to find the pattern. If this is her first name, why on earth would a girl's parents name her something so complicated and obviously historical? Was it meant to be a finger at the man? Or to celebrate their heritage? Or…

  But staring at a nametag also looks a lot like starting at someone's breasts, and Abby realizes it too late. She flicks her gaze away quickly, ashamed at being caught out, and more ashamed still to be behaving like one of those douchebag tourists who think it's their right to be lewd to resort workers. As if skin colour and wealth, and country of origin, gave you the right to treat the employees like accoutrements and added luxuries, instead of human beings.

  Ixazaluoh smiles, a sort of secret curling of her purple-brown lips that means that she finds Abby's mortification amusing—if a bit juvenile—and sashays away toward the pool bar.

  "Oh, god," Abby groans and covers her face with her hands. She can't look away for long, though, because Ixazaluoh walking with her back turned to Abby will afford her the chance to figure out just why the way she moves is so enthralling.

  None of the other tourists seem to
be staring at Ixazaluoh as she passes by. None of them even look at her. Abby would have thought that Ixazaluoh would have been flagged down to fetch more drinks, at least be wolf-whistled by the douche bags in the pool, but they all behave as if they can't see Ixazaluoh.

  It's as if Ixazaluoh is only real, only visible to Abby. Which is ridiculous, the stuff of blockbuster films and scary books. But no, look, Abby tells herself. The way that the child in the water wings skirts around Ixazaluoh without looking up at her, the way the bartender doesn't acknowledge or speak to Ixazaluoh, just puts a glass of water down on the bar that Ixazaluoh herself transfers to her serving tray, the way the drunk man in the tilly hat weaves to the side, leaving just enough room for Ixazaluoh to squeeze between him and his wife without touching either.

  Goose pimples march up Abby's arms and despite the clear, bright sunlight and baking Mexican heat around her, she is suddenly, inexplicably chilled. Abby curls up on her lounger, pulling the gauzy wrap from the back of it to curl over her shoulders.

  And then the strangest thing yet: as she passes the pool, Ixazaluoh dips one sandaled foot into the water. Just a brief touch, the kind you'd use to rinse the sand off your toes, and it catches Abby's attention. Why? Such a strange motion, why would she…?

  Ixazaluoh looks up at Abby, looks right at Abby and grins. She walks toward Abby, the cup of water balanced expertly on her tray, and it takes a few seconds for Abby to realize what is strange about it. It's not the way she walks, the way her hips move and the way her feet don’t seem to touch the ground. It's not the smoothness of her step, nor the deliberateness of every gesture.

  No. It's the way that despite the fact that she just had her foot in the water, she is leaving no footprints behind. It is the way that Ixazaluoh has no shadow.

  ☼