It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. Only a few hours until it’s time for predinner cocktails, though I could have one now. I could have several. Nobody would judge. Everyday rules don’t apply, time collapses—that’s what it means to be on vacation.
Instead I decide I need to clear my head. Get away from everybody.
I go and knock on Clem’s door.
“What?”
I don’t want to get away from Clem. When she was Ivan’s age it’s all I wanted, but now I know how soon she’ll be the one getting away.
I knock on her door and open it. “Want to go for a walk with me?”
“Ha!”
She’s lying on her bed. Still in her swimsuit, on FaceTime with Sean. I want to tell her to cover up, but I don’t.
“Hi, Sean,” I say.
I hear him say “Hi, Jenna,” but Clem doesn’t turn the phone around, so I can’t see him and what he may or may not be wearing.
“Come on, Clem. Come with me.”
“Um, that sounds great, but no.”
“I want to spend some time with you.”
“We just spent several hours together stuck on a tiny boat.”
“Please? I’ll take you to town and buy you something. Whatever you want.”
“That’s cool, Mom. But I don’t need a sombrero or a colorful wool blanket. I’m good.”
I close her door and make a mental note to chastise her later about the sombrero and blanket comment. I go to the kitchen to talk to Roberto. He’s there with Enrique and Luisa, all three engaged in various stages of food preparation.
“The dinner tonight,” Roberto says. “Chicken mole. It is much better than bonito, no?”
“Anything will be better than bonito,” I say.
Enrique looks up from dicing onions. “Bonito is not a nice fish.”
“If I wanted to go to town, to walk around a little bit and check out the shops or some art galleries, can you tell me where I should go?”
The three of them confer in Spanish. Clearly disagreeing, but lightheartedly. Nobody snaps at anybody, I see no signs of simmering resentments, no deep sighs, no whispered rebukes. They come to a consensus. Roberto reaches for the map in the drawer.
“Here,” he says, circling a several-block radius with a pencil. “It is good this area. For shopping and also for art.”
“And can you show me how to walk there?”
“Do you go alone?”
“Yes,” I say, since Clem has made perfectly clear she has no intention of joining me, and since there is nobody else whose company I covet.
“Then you take a taxi,” Roberto says. “I call for you.”
“I think I’d enjoy the walk.”
Again there’s a three-way back-and-forth in Spanish. This time Luisa talks over the men. I’m starting to understand that she’s the one in charge.
“No,” Roberto says. “You take a taxi. For a woman alone it is more better.”
“I thought you said it was safe here.”
“It is safe, yes. But for a woman it is not good idea to walk alone. In town is fine. But on empty roads, no. Is this not true where you live in the United States?”
I don’t feel like thinking about this question. It just agitates me more. “I don’t have any pesos,” I say.
“Is okay,” Roberto tells me. “Everyone here loves dollars.”
* * *
• • •
THE NEIGHBORHOOD the taxi drops me in is charming: tree covered, cobblestoned and full of people. All the bright, electric colors of the fruit stands, tissue paper flags, paintings, pottery, T-shirts and, yes, wool blankets lift my spirits. I know there are women who sing the praises of retail therapy; I have never been one of those women. But I do find that getting out, wandering around, interacting with strangers and generally joining the scrum of humanity has a way of calming me and putting things into perspective. At least for the moment.
I stop at a stand where a young girl is selling bracelets made of string with names woven into them. It’s hard to imagine that any locals would buy these bracelets and yet all the names are Spanish: Antonio, José, Miguel. And then I see the bright red one with Pedro in yellow stitching and I feel a wave of warmth for Peter. He loves me. We have built this imperfect but solid life together.
I reach out and touch the bracelet. The girl quickly unhooks it from her display and presses it into my hand.
“Cincuenta y siete,” she says.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure—”
“Cincuenta y siete,” she says again. She is a beautiful child with huge eyes beneath thick black bangs. One of her front teeth is capped in gold.
I take out my wallet. Peter will wear this bracelet when we are in Mexico to humor me but he’ll conveniently lose it as soon as we get back home. That’s okay. I don’t mind.
“Cincuenta y siete,” she says a third time, but her voice is raspy and adorable and she is smiling in anticipation of the transaction and it doesn’t feel at all like she’s giving me the hard sell.
I flip through the bills in my wallet but I don’t know how much money to give her.
“Three dollars,” I hear a voice say. “But I’m sure she’d happily take two.”
I turn to see that the woman who is speaking to me is the woman from the beach, the woman in black. She has on the same black sunglasses, though now she wears a burnt orange silk sundress and wide-brimmed straw hat.
I reach for three singles and hand them to the girl. She makes a move to tie the bracelet onto my wrist but I say, “No, it’s okay. It is for my husband. Muchas gracias.”
I turn to the woman. “Thank you,” I say. “I’m hopeless.”
“This is not true.”
“My husband,” I say. “His name is Peter.” I somehow feel obligated to explain why I’d buy something so stupid. “We always buy each other tchotchkes when we’re on vacation.”
My favorite of these gifts is the bedazzled hot pink model of the Eiffel Tower Peter brought me. I keep it on my dresser.
“Tchotchkes?”
“Frivolous things. The tackier the better.”
“I see.”
We’ve started walking away from the girl and her stand, down the cobblestoned street, side by side. I’m not sure where we’re going. I was about to head home but I no longer feel in any sort of rush.
“I am Maria Josephina.” The way she says her name, with the rolling r and the h where an American would put a j—it’s exotic and sexy. I didn’t look, but I’m guessing her name was stitched onto one of those string bracelets. After all, around here she’s just Mary Jo.
“Jenna,” I say.
We don’t stop our stroll to shake hands.
“It is nice to see you again, Jenna. I hope that you are enjoying your stay here in Puerto Vallarta?”
“Yes,” I say. “Very much. It is beautiful.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We came for a big celebration. My husband and his best friend: they’re both turning fifty.”
“So this trip. It is for your husband and his friend?”
“Well, it’s for all of us, I suppose. Our daughter is with us, too.”
“That is nice.”
We stop in front of a flower stand and she grabs two bunches of calla lilies. She hands coins to the man without counting them then hands one of the bunches to me.
“Here. For you. To take back to your villa.”
I bring them up to my nose and take a whiff.
“They do not have a scent,” she says. “This is why I like them.”
“Thank you,” I tell her. “You are very kind.”
“You can bring them to your husband. Calla lilies die in winter and come back to life in the spring. This is why they are the flowers of Easter. A reminder that in death there is always re
surrection.”
I have never given Peter flowers, and he has never given me flowers. This isn’t because he’s a hard-hearted husband, it’s because we have always, both of us, eschewed the cliché gifts. We discovered this about each other early on in our relationship. It was yet another sign that we were simpatico.
Instead of a ring, he proposed to me with a new bed. A gorgeous wood-carved queen four-poster from an expensive store on Beverly Boulevard. We’d walk by that bed in the window, draped in a striped Pendleton throw blanket, on the way from our duplex apartment to our favorite coffee shop, and I would stop to admire it every time. Back then, we were still sleeping on a futon.
And then one day I came home from work, a visit with a foster family in Reseda, and the drive back over the hill from the valley had taken me more than two hours in traffic. I was sweaty and hungry and I had to pee and I almost ran out of gas. The family I’d visited was so obviously in it for the measly monthly check and didn’t give a shit about the kid they were hosting, but that was hardly grounds for kicking the case to a real social worker, in fact in the foster care world it passed for success.
I let myself into our apartment, ready to tell Peter I wanted to quit my job, when I heard him calling from our bedroom.
In here.
He was lying on top of that four-poster bed. He’d lit candles (he wasn’t totally above indulging a cliché) and he had Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the stereo.
He asked me to marry him. He’d even bought the Pendleton blanket.
I wasn’t sure I believed in marriage. My parents and the parents of almost everyone I knew had divorced, leaving the women bitter and rudderless. I might not have been someone with clear life goals, but I knew what I didn’t want, and what I didn’t want was to become one of those women. And yet knowing how it might all turn out, knowing that domestic devil grass is an insidious foe, Peter made me want to take the chance.
Peter was reliable and steady and patient with a strong moral compass and he made me feel safe and loved. But he also made me feel giddy and sexy. And he made me laugh. And we liked the same things—we had many of the same books and we even had the same print from an exhibit at MoMA—and mostly liked the same people, and from the moment we merged our lives in that duplex, it felt, in the best of ways, like we’d always been together. I had the—ah, of course, this makes sense—feeling about Peter. And lest this sound too boring or predictable, it’s important to point out that in asking me to marry him Peter was taking a huge risk, engaging in a big romantic gesture, because Peter understood my ambivalence. Peter understood me.
It would be months before I quit my job. And three years before that bed would get moved into the guest room of our new house so that we could make room for a king-size mattress big enough for the two of us and our nursing baby.
“Do you have a husband?” I ask my new friend as we walk down the sidewalk holding our matching bunches of calla lilies.
“No.”
“Children?”
“Oh, Dios mío, no. For me, that is not an option.”
As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to think of unmarried, childless women with a certain degree of pity, which I try to pretend I am not feeling because I am at heart a feminist who doesn’t believe a woman needs a husband or a child to feel happy, accomplished or whole. But with Maria Josephina I do not need to pretend—she doesn’t stir up in me the slightest hint of pity, only envy.
“Where do you go now?” she asks me.
I think about this. Now I will go back to Peter. I will remember who he is and who we are to each other. I will bring him flowers for the first time in our twenty years together.
“Must you return to your villa?”
I look at my watch. It’s almost time for dinner.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m afraid I must.”
She walks me to the taxi stand.
* * *
• • •
I GIVE THE DRIVER a tip that is larger than the fare, as I did for the driver who drove me into town, and I ring the buzzer at the villa’s massive front doors. Peter answers. I haven’t seen him since our argument on the beach where he called me unattractive.
“Hi,” he says. “Did you have fun in town?” His tone is conciliatory and warm. As he steps aside to let me in, I see he’s been sitting in the living room with Ingrid and Solly, so I’m not sure if his demeanor is an act put on for the audience witnessing our reunion, or if he’s genuinely happy to see me.
I nod.
“Good,” he says and kisses my cheek. It’s a lingering kiss, soft and sweet. He doesn’t want to fight. Of course he doesn’t. I turn my face and I meet his lips. When he pulls back, he smiles.
“Those are pretty.” He’s pointing to the flowers.
I reach into my pocket for the bracelet and I dangle it in front of him. “I bought you something.”
He holds out his wrist. “I love it.”
I tie it on with a triple knot.
Enrique takes the flowers from me and places a margarita into my hand. It is cold and perfect, as always. It sounds improbable, because clearly he does this day in and day out for whoever is lucky enough to temporarily call Villa Azul Paraiso home, but I think Roberto’s margaritas are getting better and better.
“Where’s Clem?” I ask Peter.
He has pulled me onto his lap and he holds me tight around my waist. I lean into him. We are building a bridge back to each other made of small gifts and affectionate gestures.
“She went to town with Malcolm. They should be back soon.”
“She did? She walked to town?”
“They went to get an ice cream,” Solly says. “And when Ivan heard the words ‘ice cream’ he insisted on going too, but Ingrid wouldn’t let him, so he had a tantrum. And now he’s in our bedroom playing on the iPad.” Solly holds his margarita out until I clink mine against his. “Here’s to grown-ups.”
I know I shouldn’t let it sting that Clem turned down my invitation to walk to town only to agree to do the very same thing with Malcolm. If, as a parent, I internalized each slight or perceived insult, I’d spend my entire life licking my wounds. But still, I’m surprised she went with him given that when I last saw her she looked like she was settling into a long, bikini-clad FaceTime session with Sean.
“Poor Ivan,” I say.
Solly waves his hand at me. “Nah. Don’t shed a tear for that kid. He’s got the world on a string. It’s just that his mother here thinks he eats too much sugar. She thinks it makes him hyper. I think being a five-year-old boy makes him hyper.”
Ingrid smiles at Solly. He winks at her. I wonder if the reason Ingrid wouldn’t let him go along is not because she’s worried about sugar but because she’s worried about Malcolm: that whatever it is he’s done, it’s serious enough that Ingrid doesn’t trust him to take care of Ivan, which of course makes me worry about whether I should trust him around my daughter.
We have another round of margaritas on the balcony and we watch the sunset, which is just as spectacular as it was the last two nights, and so has lost a little of its luster the way all things do once they become predictable.
Roberto rings the bell for dinner.
Clem and Malcolm still haven’t returned.
“I thought they were just getting an ice cream. I thought you said they’d be back soon.” I’m trying not to sound hysterical.
“They’re kids,” Solly says, stepping in to answer for Peter. “They’re not great at keeping track of time. Or it’s possible they found something more enticing to do than suffering through another meal at home with their boring parents.”
“Call her,” I say to Peter.
“But we didn’t buy the international calling plan.”
“So what? So it’ll cost five dollars. Or ten. Call her.”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket and, seeing it, I st
art to feel my anger from earlier rushing back. It didn’t seem to bother him that we don’t have an international calling plan when he fielded six consecutive calls from his assistant. He pushes a button, holds the phone to his ear. He shakes his head. “Straight to voice mail. I’ll send her a text.”
I turn to Solly. “Can you call Malcolm, please?”
“I could, but the boy has never, not once, picked up his phone when I’ve called. It doesn’t seem to matter that I pay for his plan.”
“Can you try?”
“Jen,” he says, and he puts his arm around me, pulling me into one of his aggressive embraces. “Why are you getting your panties all in a knot? The kids are fine. They’re out having a good time. Let’s start dinner without them. We will survive if, just this one night, we don’t all sit down together.”
I look over to Peter. He shrugs. Back at home, in our normal lives, when we don’t have an expansive view of the Bay of Banderas, and Solly isn’t standing nearby with a margarita, he worries when Clem can’t be reached. But right now, right here, Peter plays it cool. “I’m sure Solly’s right. They’re probably out having fun. Let’s just go eat. They’ll be back soon.”
“Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”
Let’s face it: There is no way to utter that sentence that doesn’t make every person within earshot extraordinarily uncomfortable. Solly and Ingrid both make the uh-oh face.
“We’ll go get Ivan,” Ingrid says. “See you guys downstairs.”
When they’re out of sight, I take Peter by the arm and lead him over to the edge of the balcony so that we stand beneath an open sky that is turning dark and just beginning to show its stars.
“I know what this is about,” Peter says. “I know you talked to Gavriella. Let’s not do this now, okay? Not here. I’m sorry she called. She’s a handful. I’m dealing with it. But please . . .”
“Do you really not know what sort of trouble Malcolm got into back home? Did Solly really never tell you?”
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