The Vacationers: A Novel (16 page)

Men were terrible, that was the truth. Men would do anything, say anything, just to get a girl to take her clothes off. They were liars and cheaters and awful people, all of them. She’d always thought of her brother as an older version of herself, a test batch of genetic material, but lately she wasn’t sure. Maybe there was something else that came with having a penis, a partial moral blindness located in a secret chamber of the heart. It made her feel like there were bugs crawling all over her, like someone was standing too close behind her and breathing heavily. Bobby’s behavior was disgusting, even as identified by someone currently urinating on a public street. Her sordid behavior was out of necessity, like when you’d see mothers letting their little boys pee against trees in Central Park. They didn’t think they were watering the plants, they were avoiding carrying around a piss-soaked child for the rest of the day! Sylvia had made a decision. Bobby had done no such thing. He had let himself slip and slip and slip. He didn’t even feel guilty! At least their father seemed to realize that he’d done something wrong. She shook off, relieved and empty, and stood up, careful to step out of the puddle.

A group of women rounded the corner, headed to Blu Nite or another place like it, and Sylvia watched as they teetered along together, speaking Spanish quickly and tossing their
long, dark hair over their shoulders. European women had it so much easier. All they had to do was open their mouths, and they sounded smart and sophisticated, and they always had small hips and big boobs, like sex robots made in a laboratory. Sylvia looked down at the ground as they passed. Joan’s sort-of girlfriend probably looked like that, like someone who could unself-consciously meet strangers while wearing only a bikini. Sylvia hoped they couldn’t smell her pee.

After they’d passed, Sylvia hurried the long way around the car and folded herself into the passenger seat. Bobby was holding his head in his hands, pitched forward so that his moppish hair was dangling over the steering wheel.

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?” He spoke without moving.

Sylvia fastened her seat belt. “I don’t know yet.” She could hardly keep track of what secrets she was keeping for whom.

This made Bobby shoot up straight. “No, Syl, you can’t!” His breath was boozy, and his eyes were red. Sylvia had never seen her brother like this. He was always so composed, like their father, even-keeled and amiable. She didn’t know what to make of him in this new state, cracking like a discarded Easter egg. “Please,” he said.

“I’ll think about it, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, and turned the key in the ignition. He wasn’t good at driving the stick shift, either, and they stalled four times on the way to the highway, each time making Bobby slouch lower and lower in his seat, as though the accumulated
humiliations were physically hurting him. It took an hour to get home, and when they pulled into the driveway, Bobby put out his arm, preventing Sylvia from getting out. “Wait.”

“What?” Sylvia was glad to have gotten home alive, and was dreaming of her bed, maybe checking Facebook to see if she needed to hate anyone more than she already did. The Internet was excellent for confirming one’s worst fears about the human race.

“I’m really sorry you had to see that.” Bobby paused. “I mean, I’m really sorry you had to see that side of me. When I see you guys, I like to pretend that part of me doesn’t exist, you know, like it stays in Florida. Shit, I don’t know.”

There was a light in Sylvia’s bedroom window, which she’d left on by mistake. Otherwise the house seemed quiet; everyone had likely retreated to their own corners for the night. Sylvia felt sorry for Bobby, that he’d have to crawl into bed with Carmen, his guilt coming off him in stinky waves like a cartoon skunk. But not so sorry that she would sit in the car with him and wait it out. It wasn’t her job to make him feel better.

“Sucks for you,” Sylvia said, opening the door. “But it sucks even more for her. Or, actually, you know what? It sucks more for you. Because she could get a new boyfriend. But you can’t change the fact that you’re an asshole. I love you, Bobby, because you’re my brother, but I honestly don’t like you very much right now.” And with that, she slammed the door and huffed inside, not waiting for him to move or even respond. He wasn’t her problem.

THE CURTAINS WERE OPEN AND THE SUNLIGHT STREAMED
in through the window, onto Bobby’s pillow. He tried to turn away, but the whole room felt lit up like a film set. He frowned, peeling his eyes open as slowly as possible, as if the light would hurt any less.

“I guess you don’t want to come for a run with me, huh?” Carmen said. She was standing at the foot of the bed, already in her exercise clothes and sneakers. “Have fun last night? It was great when you came in. I’m sure you don’t remember. It was really something else. What were you drinking? The whole room still smells. That’s why I opened the window.”

Bobby did remember: he remembered his sister’s disappointment, and the British girl’s tongue on his dick, and the way the Red Bull tasted when it came back up. “Ugggh,” he said,
not wanting it to happen all over again. He turned onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow.

“Oh, I’m sure you feel like crap,” Carmen said. “So I’ll just see you later, I guess, yeah? I wanted to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, okay? So this is not about me, Bobby. This is on you.” He heard her pivot on her rubber soles and squeak out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her. The reverberations sounded like a truck running over his skull. All he wanted was more sleep—sleep could do anything. It could make him feel human again, it could make him forget. Before he drifted off again, Bobby felt a lurch in his stomach and scrambled out of bed and into the bathroom as quickly as he could, almost making it to the toilet before throwing up again, and littering the bathroom floor with tiny pieces of everything left in his stomach, which wasn’t much. He thought, for only the first time that day, that if he had to choose between living and dying, dying might be easier.

Sylvia was awake but pretending not to be. The only thing she was looking forward to was that it was Sunday, and therefore Joan would not be coming over, which of course was a bad thing, because it was the only thing making the trip even remotely enjoyable, but if he had come over, it would mean that he would have to see her hungover, which wasn’t pretty. Not
that Sylvia ever felt actually, clinically pretty, but there were those odd days when her skin behaved and her clothes behaved and the mirror behaved. This was worse than normal, though. The inside of Sylvia’s mouth felt like it had been dried with paper towels all night long, her saliva blotted into nonexistence. She reached for her telephone, the poor dead soldier, and held it over her face. If it worked, she would have swiftly pressed a few buttons and started scrolling away, but all she could do was look at the icons for the apps. The Wi-Fi didn’t work upstairs, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She could imagine what she had missed: new pictures of Gabe and Katie kissing like brain-damaged guppies or pressing their cheeks together like they
couldn’tstandtobeapartforasecondlonger
. Everyone else would be posting pictures of the parties they were at, or vacations with their families, everyone at the beach and tan and flaunting it. There might even be new and embarrassing pictures of someone else, someone to take the spotlight away from her. She swung one leg out of the bed at a time, crab-walking out as far as she could without raising the rest of her body.

Standing up straight made her head feel wobbly, but it wasn’t so bad. She’d had worse hangovers—twice. The first time was when she was fifteen and the whole family went to a wedding of one of Franny’s friends in Northern California wine country, and every table (including the teenage table, where Sylvia was sitting, miles away from her parents and everyone else she knew) had bottles of wine that were replaced with a rapid frequency. The second time was when she and
Katie Saperstein accidentally drank too many wine coolers before a school dance “as a joke” and spent the whole night in the school bathroom, the same place where they had to pee a hundred times a day, reminding them of their mistake forever and ever, or at least until graduation. This wasn’t as bad as either of those times, but it was bad enough that Sylvia knew she’d have to dig through her mother’s bag for some aspirin.

Sylvia shuffled to the door of her room, opened it, and stuck her head out as an exploratory venture. There were sounds coming from downstairs—Charles and Lawrence, she thought—but no movement on her floor. She shuffled farther into the hall and put her ear against the door to her parents’ room. They would both be awake by now—her father never slept past seven, and her mother was incapable of feeling left out, and so even she rose early when there were other people around. Sylvia knocked once and waited. There wasn’t any sound, so she opened the door. The bed was empty, as she’d suspected. “Mom? Dad?”

When there was no answer from her invisible parents, Sylvia shuffled the rest of the way into the room, and into their bathroom. Her mother traveled with a small pharmacy—sleeping pills, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, antacids, antidiarrheal tablets, Benadryl, calamine lotion, Band-Aids, Neosporin, floss, nail clippers, nail files, the works. Sylvia rooted around until she found the pills she wanted and swallowed them down with a gulp of water from the sink, which felt so good that she did it a few more times, lapping straight from the tap like a dog. She
looked at herself in the mirror and began a semi-thorough investigation of her pores. Her face was blotchy, and there were little pimples on her nostrils. She smiled widely, and then bared her teeth. As long as Bobby didn’t try to speak to her, she’d be fine. The thought of seeing Carmen wasn’t appealing, but then again, it never was. Sylvia turned around and wobbled back in the direction of her bedroom.

Her parents’ bed had been hastily made, with the thin cover pulled up to the pillows, but nothing tucked in. On Franny’s side (it was the left side, with the messy stack of books and magazines and two half-full glasses of water), the pillows were dented and askew. On Jim’s side, they were perfectly straight, as if her father’s head hadn’t moved all night. Sylvia walked around to his side of the bed and sat down. She pulled back the cover and put her hand on the bottom sheet, feeling for warmth. There was no trace of her father in the room except for his empty suitcase and a pair of his shoes tucked neatly beside the dresser.

Sylvia had always known that her parents had issues—that was the word people liked to use. They fought, they belittled each other, they rolled their eyes. Everyone’s parents were like that when no one was watching. Sylvia had never actually confirmed that with any of her friends, but it had to be true. It was like discovering that Santa didn’t exist, or the Easter Bunny, or that no one actually liked their extended family. This was doubly true for parents who had been married as long as Franny and Jim. It was a normal part of life, being annoyed at the
person you were always with. Healthy, even. Who wanted parents like on fifties television, with pot roasts and implacable smiles? Even so, Sylvia had never even entertained the possibility that one of her parents had cheated on the other one until she started hearing the whispered fights through the walls. Now instead of seeming normal, it all just seemed sad. Her head still throbbed, and her mouth was dry again. Sylvia pushed herself back up to standing, even more mad at Bobby for helping the whole world go to shit, instead of just their parents.

The werewolf movie had gone back for reshoots, which meant more work for Lawrence. He wasn’t surprised—it was the bad movies that needed the most coddling, from the actors to the producers to the location scouts. He stood with his back to the fridge, laptop in his arms. The director had had a last-minute change of heart about the ending (Christmas for all, werewolf love) and had instead shot a version in which Santa Claws had leapt to his death from the sleigh. Reshoots were necessary, and the remainder of the fake hair had already been returned. It was the sort of thing that would have taken him days even if they were at home, but from Mallorca, with the spotty Internet, Lawrence saw the rest of the vacation sliding from mediocre but tolerable to actually hellish. They should have just gone home when they got the e-mail, whatever the end result. Charles seemed to be slipping, too, purposefully
avoiding conversations they’d spent the last year having incessantly, and Lawrence worried that he’d changed his mind.

Franny and Charles were sitting at the kitchen table, munching on pieces of fruit and reading magazines—Franny had finally come into possession of Sylvia’s airplane reading material, and was glued to an article. Charles had his sketchbook out and was drawing, but Lawrence doubted he was paying much attention, choosing instead to read over Franny’s shoulder. Franny was one of the earliest hurdles in their relationship—Charles’s parents were ancient and infirm, unlikely to put up a fight about his suitors, but Franny was vocal. Her opinion mattered. They’d gone to a dinner party at the Posts’, the table filled out by another couple (the Fluffers, Franny called them later—“Just pretty window dressing, so that you wouldn’t notice me taking notes”), whom they hadn’t seen since. The food was divine—Franny had cooked for days, and it showed, with dishes more elaborate than anything Lawrence had ever eaten except on holidays at his grandmother’s house. There was a salad with pieces of grapefruit in it, and asparagus wrapped in pancetta, and a rack of lamb with the kind of mustardy crust that Lawrence thought you could get only at a restaurant. She’d been friendly and warm, as Charles had said she would be, but there was no mistaking the glint in her eye. Franny was judging every word that came out of his mouth, the way he cut his meat, the way his hand searched out Charles’s thigh under the table. Not for anything funny, of course, just to squeeze, for reassurance.

Franny pointed to something on the left-hand side of the page, and Charles erupted into laughter. She leaned into his shoulder, an easy, comfortable motion she’d done thousands of times over almost forty years, since two years before she and Jim were married. Lawrence and Charles had been together for almost eleven. Even now that they were married, sometimes it felt like he could never catch up. Lawrence was just about to interrupt their cozy moment and ask what had been so funny when Bobby, looking significantly worse for wear, shambled into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Franny said, sitting up straighter. “Do you want some breakfast?” She scooted out from behind the table and around to the fridge, where there were now three people crowding into a very small space.

“Sorry,” Lawrence said, “let me get out of the way.” He swung his laptop over his head, like a suitcase he didn’t want to soil after jumping overboard, and waded back to Charles.

Bobby opened the fridge and stood there, red-eyed and blurry. “There’s nothing to eat.”

Franny made a noise. “Don’t be ridiculous. What are you in the mood for? Want some pancakes? French toast?”

“That makes you fat,” Bobby said. “I need protein.”

Without bristling at his surly tone, she continued. “Eggs? Maybe some bacon and eggs?” Franny looked up to him for approval. Bobby’s eyelids hung at half-mast.

“Fine,” he said, but he didn’t move or close the door. Franny reached around him to grab what she needed from the
refrigerator shelves. He stood still, a statue that smelled of dank armpits and a night of fitful sleep.

“I think Carmen’s already up and at ’em,” Charles said, nodding his chin toward the window. They all turned to look. She was alternating between jumping jacks and burpees, up down, up down, out in, up down, up down, out in. Bobby turned the slowest of all, and let out a thin wheeze of air when he saw her.

“She’s pissed,” he said. “She only does doubles when she’s pissed.”

“What’d you do, tiger?” Charles said, amused.

Bobby shrugged and dragged himself over to the table. Lawrence scooted over to make room, and Bobby collapsed into the nearest seat. “Nothing.
God.
Nothing.”

“Women.” Charles said, rolling his eyes, then quickly shrugging toward Franny.
I don’t know,
he mouthed.

“You know what they say about women . . .” Lawrence started, but the look on Bobby’s face made it clear that whatever joke he was about to tell wouldn’t be worth it. They all sat in silence, waiting for Bobby’s breakfast to be ready.