Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Day Two

MOST OF THE OTHER PASSENGERS ON THE SMALL PLANE from Madrid to Mallorca were nattily dressed, white-haired Spaniards and Brits in frameless glasses headed to their vacation homes, along with a large clutch of noisy Germans who seemed to think they were headed for spring break. Across the aisle from Franny and Jim were two men in heavy black leather jackets, both of whom kept turning around to shout obscenity-laced slang at their leather-jacketed friend in the row behind. Their jackets were covered with sewn-on patches with acronyms for various associations that Franny gathered had to do with riding motorcycles—one with a picture of a wrench, one with a Triumph logo, several with pictures of Elvis. Franny narrowed her eyes at the men, trying to summon the look that said It Is Too Early for Your Voice to Be So Loud. The most boisterous of the three was sitting by the window, a moon-faced redhead with the complexion of a marathon runner in his twenty-fifth mile.

“Oi, Terry,” he said, reaching over the seatback to smack his dozing friend on the head. “Napping’s fer babies!”

“Yeah, well, you’d know all about it, then, wouldn’t ya?” The sleeping friend picked his face up off his hand, revealing a creased cheek. He turned toward Franny and glowered. “Morning,” he said. “Hope you’re enjoying your in-flight entertainment.”

“Are you an actual motorcycle gang?” Jim asked, leaning across the aisle. Younger editors at Gallant were always pitching features that had them test-driving expensive speed machines, but Jim had never ridden one himself.

“You could say that,” the sleepy one said.

“I always wanted to have a motorcycle. Never happened.”

“Not too late.” Then the sleepy one returned his face to his hand and began to snore.

Franny rolled her eyes aggressively, but no one else was paying attention.

The ride was quick, and they landed in sun-drenched Palma in under an hour. Franny put on her sunglasses and shambled from the tarmac to the baggage claim like a movie star who had relaxed into stout-bodied middle age. Commercial airlines were about as glamorous as Greyhound buses, but she could pretend. Franny had taken the Concorde twice, to Paris and back, and mourned the loss of the supersonic speed and the elaborately presented airplane food. Everyone in Palma seemed to be speaking German, and for a moment, Franny worried that they’d gotten off at the wrong place, as if she’d been asleep on the subway and missed her stop. It was a proper Mediterranean morning, bright and warm, with a hint of olive oil in the air. Franny felt pleased with her choice of venue: Mallorca was less cliché than the South of France, and less overrun by Americans than Tuscany. Of course it had an overbuilt shoreline and its share of terrible tourist-infested restaurants, but they would avoid all that. Islands, being harder to get to, naturally separated some of the wheat from the chaff, which was the entire philosophy behind places like Nantucket, where children grew up feeling entitled to private beaches and loud pants. But Franny didn’t want too much of that elitist hooey—she wanted to please everyone, including the children, which meant having a big enough town nearby that people could go see movies dubbed into Spanish, if they wanted to fly the coop for a few hours. Jim had grown up in Connecticut and was therefore used to being marooned with his terrible family, but the rest of them were New Yorkers, which meant that having an escape route was necessary for one’s sanity.

The house they’d rented was a twenty-minute drive from Palma proper, “straight up a hill,” according to Gemma, which made Franny groan, averse as she was to location-mandated forms of cardiovascular exercise. But who needed to walk anywhere when they had so many bedrooms, and a swimming pool, within minutes of the ocean? The idea had been to be together, everyone nicely trapped, with card games and wine and all the fixings of satisfying summers at their fingertips. Things had changed in the last few months, but Franny still wanted it to be true that spending time with her family wasn’t punishment, not like it would be with her parents, or with Jim’s. Franny thought that the major accomplishment of her life was producing two children who seemed to like each other even when no one else was looking, though with ten years between them, Sylvia and Bobby had had very separate childhoods. Maybe that was the key to all good relationships, having oceans of time apart. It might not even have been true anymore—the children saw each other only on holidays, and on Bobby’s infrequent visits home. Franny hoped that it was.

Jim sorted out the rental car while Franny and Sylvia waited for the bags. Even on vacation, Franny didn’t see the point in being anything less than efficient—why should they all have to wait to do everything? Jim had to drive, anyway, because all European rental cars were stick, and Franny had only very rarely driven a stick since her high school drivers’ education class in 1971. And anyway, there was no reason to spend more time than necessary at the airport. Franny wanted to get a good look at the house, go grocery shopping, pick bedrooms for everyone, find a spot where she could write, know which closet held the extra towels. She wanted to buy shampoo, and toilet paper, and cheese. The vacation wouldn’t officially start until she’d taken a shower and eaten some olives.

“Mom,” Sylvia said. She pointed to a black suitcase the size of a small coffin. “Is that yours?”

“No,” Franny said, watching an even larger bag slide down the luggage chute. “That one.”

“I don’t know why you packed so much,” Sylvia said. “It’s only two weeks.”

“It’s all presents for you and your brother,” Franny said, pinching Sylvia’s narrow biceps. “All I brought is one extra shroud. Mothers don’t need anything else, do they?”

Sylvia fluttered her lips like a horse and went to fetch her mother’s bag.

“Oh, those guys,” Sylvia said, and gestured with her chin toward the Too-Loud Motorcyclists. “I love them.”

“They’re overgrown children,” Franny said, sighing loudly through her open mouth. “They should have gone to Ibiza.”

“No, Mom, they’re The Sticky Spokes Rock ’n’ Roll Squad, see?”

Sleepy Terry had turned around to pick up his suitcase, a slightly incongruous orange rollie, exposing not only the pale crack of his bottom but also the back of his leather jacket, which read in giant block letters just as Sylvia had dictated.

“That’s a terrible name,” Franny said. “I bet they’ll spend the whole week drunk and killing themselves on tiny little roads.”

Sylvia had lost interest and was hurrying over to her own bag, now skidding down to the lip of the conveyer belt with a soft plop.

The Posts hadn’t vacationed in years, not like this. There were the summer rentals in Sag Harbor, the unhampton, as Franny liked to call it until it wasn’t true anymore, and then the one-month-long stint in Santa Barbara when Sylvia was five and Bobby was fifteen, two entirely different trips happening at once, a nightmare at mealtimes. It was too hard to travel all together, Franny had decided. She took Bobby to Miami by himself when he was sixteen, and granted him mother-free afternoons in South Beach, a trip he would later claim as the inspiration for attending the University of Miami, a dubious honor for his mother, who then wished she’d taken him on a trip to Cambridge instead. Jim and Franny and Sylvia once spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, doing nothing but eating barbecue and waiting for the bats to emerge from under the bridge. And of course Franny was often traveling on her own, covering trends in Southern Californian cuisine for this magazine, or a New Mexican chili festival for that one, or eating her way across France, one flaky croissant after another. Most days of the year, Jim and Sylvia were at home, cobbling together an elaborate meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, or ordering in from one of the restaurants on Columbus Avenue, pretending to argue over the remote control. Franny’s own parents, the Golds of 41 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, had never once taken her out of the country, and she took it as her duty to provide new experiences for her children. Sylvia’s tongue would soften, her Spanish would go from New York Puerto Rican Spanish to Actual Spanish Spanish, and someday, some thirty or forty years down the road, when she was in Madrid or Barcelona and the language came back to her like her first lover, Franny knew that Sylvia would thank her for this trip, even if she was already dead.

The house was in the foothills of the Tramuntana Mountains, on the far side of the town of Puigpunyent, on the winding road that would eventually lead to Valldemossa. No one could pronounce Puigpunyent (the car rental agent had said Pooch-poon-yen, or something of the sort, unrepeatable with an American tongue), and so when Sylvia insisted on calling it Pigpen, Jim and Franny couldn’t correct her, and Pigpen it was. Mallorcan Spanish wasn’t the same as proper Spanish, which wasn’t the same as Catalan. Franny’s plan was to ignore the differences and just plow ahead—it was how she usually got along in foreign countries. Unless you were in France, most people were delighted to hear you try and fail to form the right words. Franny and Sylvia stared out opposite windows, Franny in the front and Sylvia in the back, while Jim drove. It was only twenty-five minutes from the airport, according to Gemma, but that seemed to be true only if you knew where you were going. Gemma was one of Franny’s least favorite humans on the planet, for a number of reasons: 1. She was Charles’s second-closest female friend. 2. She was tall and thin and blond, three automatic strikes. 3. She’d been shipped off to boarding school outside Paris and spoke perfect French, which Franny found profoundly show-offy, like doing a triple axel at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.

Heading up the mountain, Jim took several wrong turns on roads that looked too narrow to be two-way streets and not just someone’s well-paved driveway, but no one particularly minded, because it gave them a better introduction to the island. Mallorca was a layer cake—the gnarled olive trees and spiky palms, the green-gray mountains, the chalky stone walls along either side of the road, the cloudless pale blue sky overhead. Though the day was hot, the mugginess of New York City was gone, replaced by unfiltered sunshine and a breeze that promised you’d never be too warm for long. Mallorca was summer done right, hot enough to swim but not so warm that your clothing stuck to your back.

Franny laughed when they pulled into the gravel drive, so drastically had Gemma undersold her house—another reason to despise her: modesty. In the distance, there were proper mountains, with ancient trees ringing the slopes like Christmas ornaments, and the house itself looked like an actual present: two stories tall and twice as wide as their limestone at home, it was a sturdy-looking stone building, painted a light pink. It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face. A good third of the house’s front was covered with rich green vines, which crept across from edge to edge, threatening to climb into the windows and consume the house entirely. Tall, narrow pine trees lined the edge of the property, their tippy-tops poking at the wide and empty sky. It was a child’s drawing of a house, a large square with an angled roof on top, colored in with some ancient terra-cotta crayon that made the whole thing radiate. Franny clapped.

The back of the house was even better—the swimming pool, which had looked merely serviceable in the single backyard photograph, was in fact divine, a wide blue rectangle tucked into the hillside. A cluster of wooden chaise longues sat at one end, as if the Posts had walked in on a conversation already in progress. Sylvia hurried behind her mother, holding on to the sides of her tunic like a horse’s reins. From the lip of the pool, they could see other houses tucked into the side of the mountain, as small and perfectly shaped as Monopoly pieces, their gleaming faces poking out from a blanket of shifting green trees and craggy rocks. The ocean was somewhere on the other side of the mountains, another ten minutes west, and Sylvia huffed in the fresh air, sniffing for salt particles. There was probably a university in Mallorca—at the very least, a swimming and tennis academy. Maybe she would just stay and let her parents go home alone and do whatever had to be done. If she was on the other side of the world, what difference would it make? For the first time in her life, Sylvia envied her brother’s distance. It was harder to mourn something you weren’t used to seeing on a daily basis.

Jim left the bags in the car and found the front door, which was oversized, heavy, and unlocked. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark. The house’s foyer was empty except for a console table on the left-hand side, a large mirror hanging on the wall, and a ceramic pot the size of a small child on the right.

“Hello?” Jim called out, even though the house was supposed to be empty, and he wasn’t expecting an answer. In front of him, a narrow hall led straight to a door to the garden, and he could see a sliver of the swimming pool, backed by the mountains. The room smelled of flowers and earth, with a soupçon of cleaning products. Bobby would like that, when he arrived—ever since he was a child, when Jim and Franny would drag him along on their trips to Maine or New Orleans or wherever, staying in crumbling vacation houses with mismatched forks, Bobby made his disgust for the unclean known. He detested antique furniture and vintage clothing, anything that had had a previous life. It was why he liked Florida real estate so much, Jim thought—everything was always brand-new. Even the gigantic piles in Palm Beach were gutted every few years, their insides replaced with shinier parts. Florida suited Bobby in a way that New York never had, but he wouldn’t mind this, either. At least not for two weeks.

Jim walked through the archway on his left, into the living room. As in the photos, it was stylishly underfurnished, with only two low sofas and a nice rug, with paintings on the walls in places where the sun wouldn’t hit them directly. Gemma was an art dealer, or a gallerist, or something. Jim’s vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous. The living room led into a dining room, with a long wooden farm table and two rustic-looking benches, which in turn led into the large kitchen. The windows above the sink looked out onto the pool, and Jim paused there. Sylvia and Franny were lying on neighboring chaises. Franny had unwrapped her shawl from her shoulders and placed it over her face. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her legs splayed out to the sides—she was sunbathing, albeit with most of her clothes on. Jim exhaled with satisfaction—Franny was already having a good time.

To say that Franny had been uptight in the preceding month would be too delicate, too demure. She had been ruling the Post house with an iron sphincter. Though the trip had been meticulously planned in February, months before Jim’s job at the magazine had slid out from under him, the timing was such that Fran could be counted on to have at least one red-faced scream per day. The zipper on the suitcase was broken, Bobby and Carmen’s flights (booked on Post frequent-flier points) were costing them hundreds of dollars in fees because they had to shift the flights back a day. Jim was always in the way and in the wrong. Franny was expert in showing the public her good face, and once Charles arrived, it would be nothing but petting and cooing, but when she and Jim were alone, Franny could be a demon. Jim was grateful that, at least for the time being, Franny’s horns seemed to have vanished back inside her skull.

The far end of the kitchen spat Jim out into the narrow hall opposite the entrance. On the other side of the foyer were a small bathroom with only a toilet and a shower stall, a laundry room, a study, and a single bedroom with its own bathroom attached, what Americans called mother-in-law suites, a place where you could stash the person everyone wanted to see the least. Normally, Jim would have claimed the study for his own, or at least fought Franny hard for it, but then he realized that he wouldn’t have anything to do there—there were no deadlines looming, no pieces to edit, no writing to do, no queries to be made, no books to read for any purpose other than his own pleasure and edification. He needed a desk like a fish needed a bicycle, that’s what the bumper sticker would have read. Gallant would soldier on without him, telling the intelligent American man which books to buy, which soap to use, and how to tell the difference between Scotch and Irish whiskey. Jim tried to shake off his discomfort with this, but it lingered as he made his way into the bedroom.

The room was cozy, with a quilt covering the double bed, a large dresser, and a writing desk in front of the window that faced the far side of the house. Uncharitably, Jim thought about whether they could put Bobby and Carmen in that room, and not upstairs, where the rest of the bedrooms must be, but no, of course they would give Charles and Lawrence the most privacy. There was an old-fashioned key sitting in the lock on the inside of the bedroom door, which made Jim happy. If they were all going to be in this house together, at least they could lock the doors. Jim briefly fantasized about locking himself in and playing possum for the rest of the day, a lazy man’s Walter Mitty.

Sylvia and Franny banged in from the outside just as Jim was pulling the door closed.

“The pool is great,” Sylvia said, though she hadn’t been in. “What time is it?” She had the wild look of someone who hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine. Sylvia could have stayed up for three more days, easy.

“Want to sort out the bedrooms?” he said, knowing that Franny would want to choose theirs. “I thought Charles and Lawrence . . .” Jim started, but Franny was already halfway up the stairs.

Predictably, both Jim and Sylvia fell asleep as soon as they were given a bed in which to do so. Franny dragged her bag from the trunk of the car into the foyer. Gemma had left a small dossier on the house, pool, and surrounding towns in a red folder on the kitchen counter, and Franny leafed through it quickly. There were a few restaurants at the bottom of the hill—some tapas, some sandwiches, some pizza—and a serviceable grocery store and vegetable market. Palma, the largest city on the island, which they had just circumnavigated on their way from the airport, had everything else they could need—department stores for forgotten bathing suits and such, Camper shoes made on Mallorca. Gemma herself was fully stocked with beach towels and suntan lotion, pool floats and goggles. There were clean sheets on the beds and more in the linen closet. Someone would come the following weekend to service the pool and take care of the garden. They weren’t to lift a finger. Franny closed the folder and knocked her knuckles against the stone countertop.

It wasn’t fair, the way women had to do absolutely everything. Franny knew that Gemma had been married a handful of times, twice to an Italian with a job in global finance, once to an heir to a Saudi oil company, but there was no way that any man would ever have typed up a list of instructions and usual information for his home, unless of course he were being paid to do so. It was the kind of thoughtful touch that only women were intrinsically capable of, no matter what any quack therapist on television said. Franny heard a rumble upstairs—Jim’s nasal passages had never taken well to transatlantic flights—and shook her head. She did some yogic breathing, the kind that Jim thought sounded like a sweaty Russian in a bathhouse, as if he were in a position to judge, and tried to clear her mind, to no avail.

Just because no one else had slept on the plane and the rest of her family seemed perfectly content to slip into a vampiric schedule out of laziness didn’t mean that Franny had to, too. She fished her sunglasses out of her purse and set out into the world, leaving her slumbering family members unprotected from the local evils, whatever they might be. She pulled the heavy front door shut behind her and began to walk down the hill in the direction of the local market, as directed by Gemma’s careful instructions. Someone needed to buy food for dinner, after all, and Sylvia’s Spanish tutor was scheduled to come over at three-thirty, after he was done with church, Franny guessed, seeing as they were in a Catholic country. She didn’t care one way or the other, only that he arrived more or less on time and didn’t make Sylvia’s Spanish any worse. Kids needed to be occupied, after all, whether they grew up in Manhattan or Mallorca, or, God bless them, on the mainland.

They would drive to a larger supermarket later, maybe tomorrow, but for now all they needed were a few things to make for dinner. Franny was the mom, which meant that all the planning fell to her, even if anyone else had been awake. No matter that Jim no longer had a job—some retirees took up cooking as a hobby, turning their kitchens into miniature Cordons Bleus, filling drawers with brûlée torches and abandoned parts of ice cream makers, but Franny couldn’t quite imagine that happening. Most retirees had chosen to leave their jobs, after decades of service and repetitive-stress disorders, and that wasn’t what had happened to Jim. What had happened to Jim. Franny kicked a loose rock. They’d always enjoyed vacations, the Posts, and this seemed like as good a send-off as any, complete with days at the beach and views to kill. Franny wished she had something to break. She bent over to pick up a stick and flung it over the cliff.

The road to the small town—really just an intersection with a few restaurants and shops on either side—was narrow, as they’d noticed driving up the mountain, but walking along the side of the road, Franny felt as though it had shrunk even further. There was hardly room enough for a fleet of bicycles to whiz by her, let alone a car, or, God forbid, two, going in opposite directions, but whiz they did. She clung to the left side of the road, wishing that she’d thought to pack some sort of reflective clothing, even though it was still the middle of the day and anyone driving could see her plainly enough. Franny was not a tall woman, but she wasn’t as short as her mother and sister. She liked to think of herself as average size, though the averages had of course changed over time, Marilyn Monroe’s size twelve being something like a modern size six, and so on. Yes, it was true that Franny had gotten thicker in the last decade, but that was what happened unless you were a high-functioning psychotic, and she had other things to think about. Franny knew plenty of women who had chosen to prioritize the eternal youth of their bodies, and they were all miserable creatures, their taut triceps unable to conceal their dissatisfaction with their empty stomachs and unfulfilling lives. Franny liked to eat, and to feed people, and she wasn’t embarrassed that her body displayed such proclivities. She’d gone to one horrible Overeaters Anonymous meeting in her early forties, in a stuffy room in the basement of a church, and the degree to which she recognized herself in the other men and women sitting on the folding chairs had scared her away for good. It might be a problem, but it was her problem, thank you very much. Some people smoked crack in alleyways. Franny ate chocolate. On the scale of things, it seemed entirely reasonable.

The grocery store was a modified farm stand with three walls and two short rows of open shelving with canned food and other staples. A handful of people were on their way in or out, some on bicycles, and some pulling their cars off to the nonexistent shoulder of the road. Franny wiped the sweat off her cheeks and started to pull things off the small shelves. There was a cooler in one corner with some sheep’s milk cheese wrapped in paper, and dried sausages hung from the rafters at the other end of the room. A woman in an apron was weighing the produce and charging the customers. If Franny could have chosen another life, one far from New York City, this is what she would have chosen: to be surrounded by olives and lemons and sunlight, with clean beaches nearby. She assumed the Mallorcan beaches were clean, not at all like the filthy Coney Island of her youth. Franny bought some anchovies, a box of dried pasta, two fat links of sausage, and cheese. She bought a small bag of almonds, and three oranges. That would do for now. She could already taste the salty cheese melting into the pasta, the tang of the anchovies. Surely there was olive oil at the house—she hadn’t checked. That didn’t seem like something Gemma would overlook. She probably had her own oil pressed from the trees on her property.

“Buenos días,” Franny said to the woman in the apron. If she was being truly honest, Franny was slightly disappointed that the women in the market were all wearing perfectly normal clothing, with mobile phones sticking out of their pockets, just like women in New York. It was even true in Mumbai, that a woman in a sari would whip a cell phone out of her pocket and start talking. When Franny was young, everywhere she went felt like another planet, like some glorious wonderland on the other side of the looking glass. Now the rest of the world felt about as foreign as a shopping mall in Westchester County.

“Buenas tardes,” the woman said back, quickly weighing and bagging all of Franny’s items. “Dieciséis. Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Franny plunged a hand into her purse and felt around for her wallet.

All of Franny’s friends with children were so excited for her, to have Sylvia finally heading off to school. It’ll be like a vacation, they said to her, a vacation from being a full-time parent. What they meant was, You aren’t getting any younger, and neither are your children. Some of her friends had children who weren’t even in high school yet, and their lives revolved around piano lessons and ballet class, like Franny’s had so many years ago. Or like it might have, if she’d worked less. They all complained about not having any free time, about never having sex with their husbands, but really they were bragging. My life is too full, that’s what they were saying. I have so much left to do. Enjoy menopause. While it was true that Franny was going to have her life back in some way, it wasn’t going to be the life of a twenty-year-old, all late nights and hangovers. It was going to be the life of an older person. She was six years away from a senior discount at movie theaters. Six years of looking at Jim in the kitchen and wanting to plunge an ice pick in between his eyes.

“Gracias,” Franny said, when the woman handed her the change.

Sylvia had passed out immediately in the smallest bedroom, which looked like it had been built for a nun: a bed hardly wider than her slim teenaged body, white walls, white sheets, painted white floor. The only thing un-nunlike about the room was a painting of a naked woman in repose. It looked like one of Charles’s, and she was used to those. He loved to paint those tender triangles of pubic hair, often of her mother in her youth. It was what it was. Other people had the luxury of never seeing their mother naked, but not Sylvia. She stretched lazily, her pointed toes hanging over the end of the bed. The house smelled weird, like wet rocks and frogs, and it took Sylvia several minutes to remember where she was.

“Me llamo Sylvia Post,” she said. “Dónde está el baño?”

Sylvia rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. The single window in the room was open, and a nice breeze came in. Sylvia had few thoughts about Spain: it wasn’t like France, which made her think of baguettes and bicycles, or Italy, which made her think of gondolas and pizza. Picasso was Spanish but looked French and sounded Italian. There was the one Woody Allen movie that took place in Spain, but Sylvia hadn’t actually seen it. Matadors fighting bulls? That was Spain, wasn’t it? She might as well have woken up in a sunny bedroom somewhere on the island of Peoria, Illinois.

The bathroom was down the hall, and it looked like it hadn’t been renovated since 1973. The tiles on the wall above the bathtub and behind the sink were the color of split-pea soup, a food group that Sylvia planned to happily avoid for the rest of her life. There was no proper shower, just a handheld nozzle on a long silver neck that began at the hot and cold knobs. Sylvia turned the hot one and waited for a minute, running the water over her hand to feel when it got warm. She waited for a few minutes, and when the warmth didn’t arrive, she turned the other knob, stripped off her clothes, and climbed in. She had to stoop in order to get the nozzle to reach her head and was able to really dampen only one body part at a time. There was a bar of soap in the dish, but Sylvia couldn’t quite work out how to wash her body with one hand and douse herself with freezing– cold water with the other.

All the towels in the bathroom seemed to have been made for little people—Thumbelina-sized people, people even shorter than her mother. Sylvia tried to wrap her upper and lower parts with two of the glorified washcloths. She combed her hair with her fingers and looked at herself in the mirror. Sylvia knew she wasn’t bad-looking, she wasn’t deformed, but she also knew that there was a vast chasm between her and the girls at her school who were beautiful. Her face was a little bit long, and her hair hung limply to her shoulders, neither short nor long, neither blond nor brown, but somewhere in the middle. That was Sylvia’s whole problem: she was the middle. Sylvia couldn’t imagine how she would explain herself to someone else, to a stranger: she was average, with blue eyes that weren’t particularly large or shapely. Nothing anyone would write a poem about. Sylvia thought about that a lot: so many of the world’s best poems were written before their authors were really adults—Keats, Rimbaud, Plath—and yet they had packed so much beauty and agony into their lives, enough to sustain their memory for centuries. Sylvia stuck out her tongue and carefully opened the bathroom door with the hand holding the towel around her waist.