Traveling while Married

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  LA DOUCHE NE MARCHE PAS, read a sign in the same hand on a note attached to the shower. The sign invited us to use the public baths in the center of town.

  “This may be more authenticity than I bargained for,” I remember thinking as I sat naked on a long, slatted wooden bench, waiting with a lot of other naked women, who were also getting stripe marks on their buttocks. A matron carrying a stack of frayed towels escorted us to the shower room. There, standing in full view of one another and the matron, we were allowed one pull to get wet, one minute to soap up, and another pull to rinse off.

  DÉFENSE DE SIFLER ET CHANTER (No whistling or singing), read a huge sign on the concrete wall. As if.

  (If you’re the sort of person who insists upon having a wonderful time while you’re on vacation, authenticity may not be your thing.)

  Doing Nothing

  In contrast to our madcap honeymoon, which was marked by eccentric adventures, our first decade of married life was an exercise in stunning conformity.

  We got married in our twenties because that’s when everybody else was getting married. Then we had two children right away because everybody else was doing that. We even moved to the suburbs because that’s where everybody else was moving.

  In short, with a few extra dollars in our pockets and two children in diapers, we abandoned our youthful ideals and joined the middle class and the ranks of those whose heads would be displayed on pikes in the event of a revolution.

  In February, when everybody else went to the Caribbean for a week, we did too. When they got back, they said they had had a wonderful time. We said we had too.

  They went because they needed a rest and wanted to go to an island paradise, relax in the sun, and have someone cater to their every whim.

  We didn’t have any whims and we didn’t believe in paradise, not even as an afterlife experience. Nor did we think we needed to lie down for a week. Nevertheless, we went. We didn’t have minds of our own at the time.

  Which paradise should we choose? Anguilla, Angilla, Angola, Angora, Attila, Ayatollah, Antilles, Lesser Antilles, Greater Aunt Tilly, Petite Aunt Tilly, Barbados, Barbuda, Big Barbuda, Baby Barbuda, Barbarola, Barbarossa, Barbasol, Barabas? It was confusing.

  Some of these islands were half-French and half-Dutch, or half-English and half-Rockefeller, or half–Club Med and half-Hilton. To get to some of them you had to take a big plane, then a little plane, then a little boat, and then a rusty taxi. To get to others you had to take two big planes and one little plane and then one motorboat, one rowboat, and a dugout canoe. At some of them you turned in all your money for a necklace of wooden beads. At others you just turned in all your money. The basic idea was to be carefree.

  The first day was usually taken up with the wonder of it all: suddenly it was summer, warm instead of cold, green instead of gray, and the children weren’t with us. Best of all, there were always plenty of orientation activities on the first day: the welcoming complimentary tropical drink with plastic monkey, registration, bungalow finding, room showing, tipping, chaise dragging, towel renting, and salamander appreciation.

  Day two was always a sobering experience. We would learn for the first, second, or third season in a row that we could not read on the beach. It was just too hot to concentrate. Too hot even for Jackie Collins.

  And so, like two amphibious creatures in a PBS nature documentary, we would lie in the sand until some internal signal as old as life itself would tell us that we had preheated to 350 and it was time to make our way to the sea. There, we would submerge and swim about for several minutes before retracing our steps up the beach to resume our patient vigil on the sand. After a preordained period of time, the amazing cycle of nature would begin again, and back we’d go to the sea. And we’d do all this without ever laying eggs.

  We became so bored that Larry began to look forward to dinner even though it was the same menu every night—local fish with a hibiscus blossom, pureed taro root with a hibiscus blossom, and a hollowed-out pineapple filled with tropical fruit.

  My major daytime activity (besides watching the sweat pool in my belly button) was getting a tan. This was before anybody had ever heard about global warming or the ozone layer. This was when melanoma sounded like an imported fruit. Getting a tan was pretty much the whole point of going to the Caribbean. It was something to bring home with you in midwinter, something to make other Caucasians who didn’t have one feel conspicuously pale.

  Getting a tan was serious work, a complex and delicately nuanced procedure. Where should I lie down? What should I lie down on? A towel? A chaise? Where to position it vis-à-vis the sun? Should I use my reflector? How much iodine should I put in how much baby oil? Then, after the carefully choreographed application of the oil, came the time to turn to Larry and say those five little words without which no meaningful tanning could occur: “Will you do my back?” It was important not to have strap marks—everybody knew that. But only a very few knew to tip their head backward from time to time to allow the sun to tan that place at the top of the neck that is usually shaded by the chin.

  Typically, by the third day, Larry would alternate pacing the beach with demonstrating to other people’s children how to build drip castles. By day four he resumed smoking. Now each time he lit up, I had my choice of two new activities—looking daggers or hurling invectives.

  Usually, as we neared the end of our stay, I had projected my fury onto the steel band, who would not stop playing “Yellow Bird” although I had sent them many anonymous notes, which at least gave me something to do.

  On the final day we often found ourselves wondering if it is true that if you tear the tails off salamanders, they will grow back.

  Amazingly, it took us three such vacations before we realized that we didn’t like the Caribbean.

  What we didn’t understand then that we do understand now is that Larry and I don’t go on vacation to relax. Vacations are for work. We’ll have plenty of time to rest when we get home.

  We do stop for beauty, but we don’t always think the same things are beautiful. For instance, I don’t particularly like sunsets, especially Caribbean sunsets with palm trees. Even when I’m right there, sitting on the beach, virtual reality intrudes: I see the photo on the wish-you-were-here postcard or the calendar from our insurance company. For many summers, just to keep him company, I’d sit with Larry on the beach on Cape Cod, staring at the horizon, watching the red blob of the sun pass behind dark, messy shreds of clouds and disappear very, very slowly into the ocean. All the while—for at least twenty minutes—Larry is making appreciative moaning and gasping noises.

  “Isn’t it beautiful!” he says, forgetting he’s with me.

  “If you saw that in your sink,” I say, “you’d reach for the Comet.”

  We don’t like to unwind. There’s nothing Zen about us. It’s not unusual to come upon Larry relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon, working a crossword puzzle, vacuuming the rugs, and washing the dishes. I can talk on the phone, answer my E-mail, and moisturize without feeling the least bit stressed. People who like us think of us as energetic and productive. People who don’t, think we’re workaholic freaks who won’t last much longer. The point is, a transatlantic cruise would not be a good vacation choice for us, unless our ship came under enemy attack or ran into the perfect storm.

  Since the Caribbean years, we have made a conscious effort to avoid do-nothing vacations. Occasionally, though, as a result of careless planning or bad luck, we find ourselves with nothing to do. For instance, in the spring of 1993 we got stuck in Paris during Pentecost, a holiday weekend so holy that it lasts for four days and everything is fermé, including museums, concert halls, and most of the restaurants. We were frantic. We sat in the Tuileries, glared at the flowers, and entertained anti-Pentecostal thoughts. When we got tired of that, we roamed the streets, seeking entrance to something, anything. On one of our many such excursions we found an open pharmacie. We roamed the aisles pretending the place was the Louvre. We examined
the items appreciatively, as if every L’Oréal were a Leonardo, every toothpaste a Tintoretto, and every shampoo-conditioner a Toulouse-Lautrec. Hungry for more, Larry the art lover went off to Notre-Dame to count the gargoyles. I made a desperate purchase, went back to the hotel, and dyed my hair champagne blond. It was something to do.

  During a trip to Turkey, a daylong rainstorm brought me to such a frenzy of inactivity that I abandoned my career as a freelance writer and became a rug merchant.

  We were in Kalkan, a village on the Mediterranean that sounds like dog food but is otherwise very attractive. We had the car packed and were about to drive east toward Antalya when it began to rain and with such force that we ducked into the nearest shop—not surprisingly a rug store—to seek cover.

  The rain did not let up for hours. For a while we admired the kilims. The owner (an engaging woman named Henrietta) unfurled one rug after another for our admiration. When there seemed to be nothing left to do, we bought a small kilim. It continued to pour. By the time the rain finally abated, I was the store owner’s United States rug rep.

  My friends at home were enormously supportive. When the first kilim shipment arrived in its burlap shroud, they showed up in my driveway, their checkbooks in hand. I went out of business six months later, when my friends ran out of floor space.

  Sometimes we fall off the wagon and try to relax. We kid ourselves into believing we can do it—just this once—and get away with it. Why else would we have signed up for a weeklong barge trip through the waterways of Burgundy? Is there anything more confining, sedentary, slow, and tranquil than a barge trip?

  We had a fabulous time for the first few minutes. The scenery along the gently winding canal was reminiscent of my childhood picture books—rows of poplar trees, tiny stone villages, castles, grazing cows, jumping fish, rolling hills, and patchwork-quilted fields. It was heavenly. I’m not sure about Larry, but I think I relaxed, if you can be relaxed at the same time that you’re saying, “Wow, I’m so relaxed.”

  Within hours, the miles and miles of relentless, uninterrupted tranquillity and nonstop loveliness started getting on our nerves. An occasional fisherman standing on the bank, a quaint straw hat on his head, an old-fashioned bamboo pole in hand, might have broken the monotony were it not for the tedious local custom of waving, which obliged us to wave back—from the moment we drifted into view until the moment we passed out of sight. According to Larry’s calculations the barge was moving at two and a half miles per hour.

  “The frail elderly can move faster on walkers,” he said as we waved and paced the deck while grinding our molars down to the gum line.

  The next day, Larry paid a visit to the captain to explain our predicament: we were professional athletes whose muscles would atrophy if we were not allowed to jog in place on the deck for at least an hour each day.

  He got the captain’s permission, but it was rescinded almost immediately when the other forty-eight passengers, now blissfully relaxed, complained that the pounding and panting were threatening their peace and were not what they had in mind when they signed up for a barge cruise.

  Undeterred, Larry the mediator went to the captain with another proposal: we would get off the barge whenever it stopped to go through a lock. Then we’d run alongside the barge on the towpath and get back on board at the next lock.

  It was “pas normal,” the captain said, but he agreed.

  Since we ran more than twice as fast as the barge drifted, we kept passing it. Even though we waved every time we went by, the formerly relaxed voyagers found us unnerving and were now talking about wanting their money back.

  If it weren’t for the bikes stowed on board, intended for passenger use when the barge made the occasional stop in a town, we would have had to jump ship.

  Larry made what was to be his final visit to the captain. Would he let us get off with the bikes every morning after breakfast and then meet us at a designated place and allow us to reembark every evening in time for dinner?

  It’s “pas normal,” Larry added conspiratorially, but so what? We wouldn’t tell if he wouldn’t. We would not bike back and forth on the towpath in view of the barge. We would immediately venture into nearby towns and visit tourist sites. We would be gone all day. We wouldn’t be seen or heard from until dinnertime. The captain jumped at the chance.

  Larry misses his work when he goes on vacation. He calls it up whenever he gets a chance. How are his divorces and his zoning hearings? Have any decisions come down? Have any checks come in? He’s more likely to call when we’re vacationing in the United States. When we’re abroad, he feels so far away that it’s easier on him emotionally to make a clean break. This makes him particularly vulnerable to the siren call of international advocacy, even though people who live in foreign countries live under legal systems that do not resemble our own. Nor does he let the fact that he is not licensed to practice law in any other country discourage him.

  In the fall of 2000, we stayed in a friend’s authentic thatch-roofed cottage in the tiny village of Kinvara on Galway Bay. After three extremely quaint days, we reached our tolerance for inner peace and outer rain and were ready for some utter chaos. It came just in time, in the form of a land dispute that Larry learned about while hanging out in the local pub.

  Contractors from the big city were threatening to build a residential development of twenty-three tract homes in this village of 342 souls, eleven pubs, and one broken-down castle, where nothing has changed in fifty years, where plumbing pipes run down the outside of buildings, where cows pasture by the side of the roads as if they thought they were in India, and where nobody’s even heard of Lycra or hand weights.

  The villagers wanted to fight back. Larry let it slip at the pub that night that he was a lawyer with a specialty in land use. He volunteered to help them.

  One of Larry’s more sober potential clients, speaking for the others, questioned the relevance of American to Irish zoning laws, but Larry patiently allayed their fears by explaining that they deviated in only the smallest details. Of course, if they actually had to go to court, they would need to hire an Irish lawyer, but essentially the issues were the same: Would the increased traffic adversely affect the cows? Would the proposed houses interfere with the neighbors’ view of the castle? Larry assured them he dealt with such routine matters all the time in Westport, Connecticut.

  The papers had to be filed in three days. There was no time for delay. For the balance of our stay the neighbors gathered in our living room on a daily basis to plot and plan against the wily city folk. The builder’s plans were permanently unfurled on the kitchen table, surrounded by Padraic McKinney, Connor Joyce, Prather Houlihan, Kathleen Donovan, and Larry O’Lawyer. Larry was no longer doing nothing. Neither was I—I was a barmaid, serving pints of Guinness. We were on vacation. There was work to be done.

  The Modified Marital Plan

  Multiple-couple travel tends to occur about five or ten years after the honeymoon, when bride and groom are pretty much done plumbing one another’s depths, and wonder is reduced to what’s for dinner. (My Aunt Lily did take her psychiatrist on her honeymoon, but the circumstances were extraordinary. It was her fifth marriage.)

  In no way should the desire to invite another couple on vacation be taken as an indictment of the marriage; rather, it represents the inevitable, if sober, triumph of reality over the eternal, if heartbreaking, appeal of the romantic myth. We all have to grow up. Marriage loves company. Who has not seen or been part of a couple dining together at a restaurant in total silence, but has anyone seen two couples at the same table, utterly mute from soup to nuts?

  Traveling with another couple is a lot like being married to them, so it is important to make a suitable choice. Liking them is, of course, fundamental, but it’s not enough. They have to like each other. Larry and I once went on a sailing vacation in the Greek islands with a couple from California who, unbeknownst to us, did not. This became clear on day three while we were moored near the sacred island of
Delos. Henry, always a bit of a cutup, applied low-fat salad dressing all over his body instead of tanning lotion, causing his wife, Adele, to call him “totally disgusting.” (The little bits of pimiento clinging to his chest hairs were unappetizing.) In retaliation, Henry set himself adrift in the lifeboat, and Adele locked herself in the only bathroom on the thirty-two-foot boat. Larry took Henry’s side. I took Adele’s. One week later, Henry and Adele filed for divorce. We were almost next.

  Nor can you be sure that you will enjoy vacationing together even if you like them and they do like each other. Some irritating vacation behaviors cannot be predicted, no matter how hard you try. “Will you feel compelled to comment on my calorie intake each morning?” is not a question most people would think to ask a prospective traveling companion. Nor do you necessarily think to ask if your travel companions have to find a local gym so they can do their full workout each day. And how could you possibly know that she will betray you by taking twice as much luggage to Mexico as she said she would, or that he would summon the waiter with “El checko, por favor”?

  On the other hand, there are a number of predictable areas of concern that can be inquired about in advance, which is why savvy traveling couples negotiate prenuptial and separation agreements before plighting their traveling troths.

  Assuming you’ve agreed upon a destination, a discussion of accommodations is the obvious place to begin. It is a good way to determine whether your prospective traveling companions think that a vacation is a time to spend liberally or be cheap, without confronting the issue of money directly. For instance, the time has long since passed when Larry and I found it amusing to share a bathroom at the end of the hall, even with friends. We have enough trouble sharing one with each other. Failure to achieve consensus on so important a matter as a three-star château versus a no-star yurt should be taken as an indication of terminal incompatibility.