Rich and Pretty (12 page)

T
he water looks the way Lauren expects it to: unreal.
Seen from above, unfolding all around them, the color of toothpaste. There's an impossibility to it, but also that disappointment she's thought, until this point, specific to the experience of encountering a famous, much-reproduced work of art in its original form. Come face-to-face with the
Pietà
and feel nothing profound. Gaze upon those Bacon triptychs and feel no more disturbed than any other day. So now, leaning forward in her seat to peer out of the window that is, for some reason, set a couple of inches in front of the seat rather than comfortably abutting it, she takes in the expanse of the sea and thinks the things you're supposed to think (like jewels, like silk, so blue, etc.) but feels unmoved nonetheless. Not that she isn't looking forward to getting into that water. She's not insane.

It's the day before Thanksgiving, and the airport is crowded, but so, too, more surprisingly, is the plane. She did not know about this, before; that a significant subset of our fellow Americans say fuck all to grace and grub with their racist great-uncles,
get onto planes, and fly off to resorts where the only concession to the holiday is a turkey and cranberry sandwich on the lunch menu. Lauren's parents were unthrilled when she bailed on what's one of the family's last remaining rites.

“Oh, a bachelorette trip, that's nice,” her mother said, meaning the same thing every mother says when she uses the word
nice
.

It's the latest way she's found to disappoint her mother: denying her the pleasure Lauren knows she derives from seeing all three of her children, arrayed around the table, just like old times. Lauren feels sorry for her mother, a terrible truth. She'd gone to college, married a sweetheart, and taken a job at the doctor's office thinking of a future of three or four children, vaccinated and checked up,
gratis,
by the Doctors Khan. That had all come to pass. Why the pity, then, if everything had gone swimmingly? Because it wasn't enough. Even with the scholarship, there was scrimping related to Lauren's schooling. Her parents consider Macy's a splurge.

They had singled her out for this not because she was smart, though she was not dumb, but because she was theirs, and therefore special. Plus her mother had in her, deep somewhere, a feminist feeling about the thing. Lauren suspected that her mother harbored fantasies of being a doctor herself, and that filing insurance claims for the Doctors Khan was the closest she had come to it. Bella wanted more for Lauren. She still did, needled her about things like a title change, and flextime, and business cards, things she must have studied up on, having no personal experience with them. At least, then, there was some concession, some good news.

“The good news I won't be able to tell you in person is that I'm getting promoted,” Lauren had told her mother.

A squeal, a sigh, and so many questions: more money, more responsibility, a new title, a new role, her own office, new business cards?

She's happy she's got this to give back to her mother. She's made it! Or she's making it. It was worth it! Or at least it seems more so now. Lauren's always been held to a standard different from the ones against which her brothers are measured. Theirs is more forgiving, and against theirs, well, they're both sort of succeeding. Ben believes in real estate. Alexis helps him with staging: fluffing pillows and putting a frozen apple pie in the oven to evince a sense of hominess. Just picturing them in their hatchback, the magnetized door sign advertising Ben's credentials and telephone number, is depressing, though in truth they probably make more money than Lauren does. It's true that Adam had broken their dad's heart by foundering in community college, then giving it up to work at a nursery and landscaping business that belonged to the father of a high school friend. He lives at home, but this seems, in some odd way, to please them.

Lauren tries to imagine what the Brooks family's attempt at togetherness in her absence will look like, but can't dwell on it because it makes her feel too guilty. She's a terrible daughter.

The resort has sent two black SUVs.
The drivers (one smiling, one stoic) load their bags, and they pile in: Lauren, Sarah, and Amina in one, Meredith and Fiona in the other. Amina has endless arms and legs, thin, brown, bangled. Her jewelry clangs and clatters as she moves. Amina's specific combination of grace and ungainliness makes Lauren think of a giraffe. She's known Am
ina since high school, not particularly well, but in that school, in that circle, even simple acquaintance came with a certain intimacy, one that could last for years. It wouldn't have been perceived as a breach had Lauren called Amina, after years of their not having spoken, to ask a favor.

“It's beautiful, my God,” Amina is saying, peering out of the tinted windows. She speaks with the oddest of accents, Amina does, a cocktail: her father's Etonian English mellowed by her mother's distinguished Dhundari, to say nothing of the parade of schoolteachers who conducted her education in American schools the world over—first Istanbul, later Berne, then Addis Ababa, finally New York. She came to the States at ten; indeed, it was from Amina that Lauren assumed the role of “new girl” in sixth grade. As Amina shades her eyes to get a better look, her bangles clatter against the glass. The effect is ladylike.

Sarah's cheeks are flushed, and her hair wavy, though the air isn't all that humid. Eighty-eight, the average high in late November—Lauren looked it up. Forty degrees warmer than back home at midday, where the office is empty anyway and no one cares that she's on a tropical vacation instead of eating that thing called stuffing that comes from a box that's secretly Lauren's favorite part of the meal, precisely as it was designed to be by the chemists who came up with it. Thanksgiving is perhaps unique in being the holiday where people defend the specific eccentricities and nuances of their family's way of doing things and spend years reifying them, re-creating them with their subsequent replacement families. Lauren has sentimental feelings for certain things, of course (cinnamon toast, an indulgence permitted when
she was home sick; the smell of chlorine and the memory of visits to the indoor pool, a winter ritual), but Thanksgiving isn't one of those things.

The resort looks like a gigantic house, which is precisely what it once was. A
plantation,
they say the word proudly, it's not as shameful here as it is back home. The thing is perfect, naturally. The palm trees have been planted to achieve symmetry. The sea is an even more preposterous color, seen up close. The woman behind the desk greets them with convincing sincerity.

They have only just arrived, of course, but it seems almost like the others have been there for a few days, or been here before. They seem relaxed, they seem unfazed, even as they coo over the resort, check their phones, Fiona actually gripping Lauren's arm and squeezing it with an enthusiasm that seems feigned, and anyway, odd, because they don't know each other that well either, she and Fiona. She was the girl in college (there's one in every college) who was almost suspiciously well dressed. She transferred away to Parsons after two years, but she and Sarah have remained close—her presence here surely means they're closer than Lauren realized. Lauren admires Fiona's fashionable eccentricity. She's wearing a hat.

Everyone seems at home, or more at home than Lauren is. She always feels a bit odd in hotels. It's true she hadn't wanted to come, is deeply skeptical of spending days on end with a gaggle of girls. Over that arc of time, conversation becomes consensus, and groups turn into something else, gangs, almost. Still, as wedding rites go she has to suppose this is better than a night out in one of those neon underlit limousines, drinking champagne, singing
karaoke. Now that they're here, Lauren is excited to go to her room, to shower the plane off her body, to put on a bathing suit, to sit by the pool with a book. She's brought two, even though she suspects that everyone else will expect there to be a lot of group conversation. She doesn't particularly have anything to say.

Even after the grandeur of the lobby, the room is a surprise. The floor tile is cheap, the wall color offensive, but the bed sprawling, and the bedroom spills out onto an indoor-outdoor room and from there, just the outdoors: green grass, a winding path, and that sea; it's still there, it wasn't a dream. The air-conditioning is on with conviction. The porter deposits Lauren's bags and she realizes she doesn't have any currency, whatever it is they use in this country. She gives him a five-dollar bill, hopes that's enough, or not too much to be an insult. Anyway, he doesn't say anything. The bathroom is strangely old-fashioned, but the water in the shower is wonderfully hot. Her skin feels oily and her hair smells like fast food. She uses the shampoo provided for her convenience, not caring what effect it might have on her hair. She can't afford this, none of this. It's a little faded, the luxury, but it's luxury all the same. Sarah is paying for the hotel, for all five rooms. She insisted and in the end no one fought her on this. It's not as though she doesn't have the money.

Lauren rubs sunscreen over her body. You have to work at sunscreen or it just sits there on you. There was mutual consent that they'd meet at the bar, where the woman at the front desk told them they could order snacks or sandwiches until the restaurant opens for dinner. She is hungry, actually, almost starving. She puts her bathing suit on, then a dress over that. She wants to eat,
quickly, a shrimp cocktail—which sounds suitably tropical and ridiculous, the sort of thing you'd only order if you found yourself in a hotel—then she wants to lie on a chaise by the swimming pool, fall into the cold water, wrap herself in a big and ridiculously fluffy towel. She wants to read and then fall asleep and then wake up and continue reading, but in the end she leaves her book in the room and finds the bar.

Fiona is already there. She's involved with a cocktail, taking pictures of the view with her phone. She's wearing the same hat, an exclamation mark to underscore her height.

“Amazing, right?” This by way of hello.

Lauren sits at the table Fiona has commandeered. The bar is empty, only the bartender behind the bar. A beautiful smile there, too. Maybe it's because they're black that their smiles seem so bright. Maybe this is a racist thing for her to think.

“To be sure,” she says. Which is, she realizes as she says it, an insane thing to say, some accidental attempt at Englishness. She gets that way with accents sometimes.

Fiona doesn't seem troubled by this. She's wearing dark glasses. Her hair looks reddish in this light. She's pretty, Fiona. “I'm having a mai tai,” she says, the tone confessional.

Lauren laughs, because she thinks she's supposed to. “That sounds good.”

“It's good, my friend, highly recommended.”

So Lauren signals the bartender and orders one, as well as some french fries, called chips here, a colonial holdover.

“You're in food, yeah?”

“Cookbooks.”

“I'm a terrible cook,” Fiona says. “I'm English.”

Lauren laughs again. “I don't actually cook, either,” she says. “Not much. The cookbooks we publish, they're by celebrities. Easy recipes. Chocolate cakes with mayonnaise in them, tacos made out of store-bought rotisserie chicken.”

“My husband does the cooking.” Fiona sips her drink. She's graceful. “He's always trying to do these ambitious things from magazines. Recipes that begin with things like ‘Dig a hole in the backyard.' He makes a terrible mess. Dirtying every bowl in the house, that kind of thing. You're married?”

“No.” The bartender brings her drink. Lauren shakes her head for emphasis. “Not spoken for!”

“Last woman standing.” Fiona sips her drink.

“Something like that.”

“But you have a serious boyfriend, right? I remember Sarah saying something about that.”

“Had. We're not together anymore.”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay,” she says. The chips have arrived. “Anyway, been a couple of years.”

Fiona nods. Her eyes have wandered out to the view.

The weird thing about travel: You go, and then you're there. You've been looking forward to it, or dreading it, or thinking about it, whatever, and then all of a sudden there you are. It's been a month since Sarah told Lauren about this trip. Four weeks of worrying about the expense (and there was that: bathing suit, sunscreen, taxi to the airport; her paychecks have yet to reflect her new salary, and anyway, the change won't be that dramatic), yearning for the sun, bristling at the thought of an expanse of qual
ity time with these four girls, but delirious with the thought of freedom from routine. She hasn't left New York in three years. Those three years ago, she went with Gabe to Denver for the wedding of an old friend of his. That was the last time. She needs a change.