Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Day Five

FRANNY AND SYLVIA DROVE WITH JOAN, AND CHARLES, Jim, and Lawrence followed behind them. It was Franny’s idea to make a pilgrimage to the Robert Graves House in Deià, even though Franny claimed not to know anything about Robert Graves aside from the 1976 TV movie version of I, Claudius, which Jim said made her a heathen. That was right before they got into their separate cars and drove the forty minutes north. Sylvia was excited to get out of the house, but would have preferred a trip to the beach, despite the obvious drawback of having to deal with sand. This was like going on a school field trip with her mother, a pleasure she hadn’t had since elementary school, when Franny routinely volunteered to accompany the class to the zoo or the Museum of Natural History, when she would then shirk her duties and run amok, waddling in front of the penguins like the rest of the children. At least Joan was along for the ride. Franny made him drive, of course, because he knew where he was going and wouldn’t destroy the stick shift of the tiny tin box of a rental car, and also because she liked to sit in the front seat and be driven around islands by handsome twenty-year-olds. If Jim could objectify someone barely out of the teens, so could she.

“Sorry that we’re all crashing your date with Joan today, Syl,” Franny said, winking at her in the backseat. Joan checked her reaction briefly in the rearview mirror, his eyes faster than a snake.

“Let’s try to stay adult here, shall we?” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry that my mother is sexually harassing you, Joan. No le prestes atención.” She crossed her arms over her chest, secure in the fact that her mother would be adequately annoyed and therefore stay quiet for the rest of the ride. Franny turned to look out the window and hummed something to herself, a song that had nothing whatsoever in common with the song playing on the car’s cheap radio, a Céline Dion song that came and went as the mountain roads unfurled ahead of them. She rolled the window down halfway, enough for the air to send her short dark hair across her face.

Sylvia leaned back, curling her body into the corner of the seat. The car was the size of a pedicab, and about as secure. The chassis rocked side to side as they climbed a hill, and Sylvia closed her eyes, happy that if she was going to die on the mountainous roads of Mallorca, she at least would have had the last word with her mother. It wasn’t fair to be annoyed with her, but Sylvia was anyway. Obviously her father was worse, and the one to blame, but Sylvia had been inside their marriage for long enough to know that it wasn’t that simple, nothing was, certainly not a relationship twice as old as her. In the back of the car, with her eyes shut tight, New York felt farther away than an ocean, not that she missed it. Surely there were parties going on, woo-hoo, at someone’s empty house, with bottles of booze and lemonade all poured into some giant vat of vaguely citrus-tasting awfulness, but she would never go to a party like that again. One would think that a lifetime of being a good girl followed by one stupid mistake would pretty much even out, but one would be wrong.

There were four people from her class also going to Brown, but two of them she would immediately never speak to again, an obvious and unspoken agreement based on the fact that they hadn’t exchanged more than three words in all of high school. The other two were the problem: Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. If Sylvia could have chosen two people to excommunicate for the rest of her life, to actually push a button and have them vanish off the planet, it would be Katie Saperstein and Gabe Thrush. Both together and separately.

Sylvia and Katie had been good friends—mud masks, sleepovers, shared Googling of half-naked movie stars. Katie was plainer than Sylvia; it wasn’t cruel to say so—she had brackish-colored hair and a nose that always looked like she’d just walked into a plate-glass door. Once, when Katie was frustrated by how long it was taking to grow out her bangs, she cut them off at her forehead, creating, in essence, a small, growing horn. They both wore terrible clothes (that was the point) from the Salvation Army, ill-fitting jeans and ironic T-shirts advertising places they’d never been. Since tenth grade, they’d been close, eating lunch together most days on one of the stoops around the corner from school, with Sylvia ignoring Katie’s blatant overuse of mayonnaise and Katie teasing Sylvia about her resistance to bacon. It was a good friendship, one that might have survived the leap across the chasm into college life. They’d talked about rooming together, even, but that was before Gabe ruined everything.

That was how it went, Sylvia had to remind herself. Even though she vastly preferred blaming Katie, the pug-faced slut, it was really Gabe who had done her wrong. They hadn’t been exclusive, of course. No one was, except for the idiots who pretended that they were engaged and went home and had sex during their free periods because their parents weren’t home and the maid wouldn’t tell. Most people just floated around, too afraid to say what they wanted and too afraid to get it. Gabe had made a habit of coming to the Post house on a weekly basis. He and a few friends would ring the bell sometime in the afternoon, that magical zone during which Franny was bound to be working in her office and Jim was still at the magazine and no one would ask many questions. Sylvia thought it was hysterical how little her mother knew about her life, when her job was supposed to be about paying attention to details. Franny knew everything about how to make mole according to some Mexican grandmother’s recipe that she learned in Oaxaca in 1987, but she had no idea that Gabe Thrush was coming over to lick her daughter’s rib cage on a regular basis.

They hadn’t had sex, obviously. Sylvia could scarcely imagine Gabe paying less attention to her, but having sex seemed like it was probably the one way to make that happen. He had tried once, she thought, but didn’t know for sure. Mostly it was just rolling around in her bed with her shirt open or off, praying that no one walked in. Sylvia considered the romance the greatest achievement of her life to date, in that Gabe was good-looking (unlike some of the mutants she’d kissed out of boredom at summer camp) and popular, and when he called her on the telephone, they actually had amusing conversations. The problem was that Gabe Thrush was having similar relationships with half their class, including, it turned out, Katie Saperstein.

Unlike Sylvia, Katie had no mixed feelings about putting out. She walked into school on a Monday with a giant hickey on her neck and Gabe Thrush on her arm. Sylvia watched the two of them walk through the double doors, practically oozing postcoital smugness, and felt as snubbed as Katie’s nose. That was in April, just before they all found out about who got in where. Since Sylvia was no longer speaking to Katie or Gabe, she had to hear the good news from Mrs. Rosenblum-Higgins, their largely ineffectual college counselor—wasn’t it just great, going to Brown with her friends? They were friends, weren’t they? It was that weekend that Sylvia went to the party and got too drunk, that weekend when all the photos were taken, that weekend when Facebook exploded and she considered ratting out someone in the Mafia just to be put into witness protection.

The car did another shimmy, as if threatening to go on strike, and Joan turned abruptly up another steep hill—the road had no guardrails, no fences, nothing separating them from plunging to their depths if Joan had to suddenly veer.

“How far are we, Joan?” Sylvia asked. The scenery outside the car’s windows looked much the same—sunny and bright, with houses the color of rustic pottery. They passed a field of gnarled and twisted trees, their branches heavy with enormous lemons.

“Deià is a few kilometers more. We are nearly there.” Joan was dressed down, in a simple cotton T-shirt, but he was still wearing his cologne. Sylvia could smell it from the backseat. She thought about Gabe Thrush trying to wear cologne, standing in the middle of a crowded floor at Macy’s, getting spritzed by hundreds of overeager young saleswomen, and laughed. If either of them tried to get anywhere near her in those lonely first days of college, she would set them on fire in their sleep. They didn’t deserve her. No high school boy did. She was better than that, Sylvia knew, bigger and better and ready to shed her skin like a snake.

“Good,” she said, arranging herself as sexily as possible in the backseat. “I’m sure my mom has to pee.”

The house was just past Deià proper, on the road that led out of town. It had been a museum for just half a dozen years, but like many writers’ homes that are open to the public, great pains had been taken to make the house look little changed since Graves’s prime. If anything, newfangled items had been removed and replaced by their earlier counterparts, so that the house felt like something of a time warp, still punctuated by the clacking of typewriter keys instead of laptop computers. Jim admired the simplicity of the house, which was like most others in the area, a pale stone building with curved brick doorways and cool floors. They’d somehow beaten the native Mallorcan and the girls, and were already wandering around the small museum’s grounds. A friendly woman led them around the two halves of the wide plot, pointing out the highlights of Graves’s impressive garden. The heavy floral smell of jasmine floated over the bright faces of the zinnias and the massive tangles of bougainvillea. Charles fancied himself a naturalist and bent over to fondle the colorful leaves of the violets and the cosmos.

“I would kill to have a garden like this.” Even at their summer house in Provincetown, they had only window boxes. In the city, their apartment overlooked the Hudson River, but the patio was dark most hours of the day, pointing as it did into the cold backs of several taller buildings.

Lawrence laid a hand on his shoulder. “We could always move out of the city for real. Buy a bigger place on the Cape. Less dunes, more dirt.” He could so easily picture Alphonse staggering among the planters, picking a tomato with his chubby baby hands. That was the kind of parent Lawrence wanted to be: encouraging and adventurous. Let the baby play in the dirt, let the baby explore.

“Please,” Jim said. “Good luck getting him out of there.” For a moment, Lawrence thought he meant the baby, but no, of course not. He looked toward Charles, relieved that their limbo status was still a secret. It was probably the way straight couples felt in those first tender weeks of pregnancy, when the egg and sperm had mingled but were so vulnerable that they might not take.

There was a hooting noise at the front entrance, and then a loud laugh as Franny scrambled up the shallow incline toward them. “Are we all moving here?” she asked. “Because I don’t think I can do that drive again.” She kissed Charles on the cheek, as if it had been weeks since she’d seen him last. “Poor Joan had to deal with us screeching and praying the entire time.” She turned around and winked at Joan and Sylvia, now a few feet behind her.

“Would you like the tour of the house?” the docent said kindly, perhaps wanting to hurry them out of the way. Franny puffed out her lip and nodded enthusiastically, as if Robert Graves had been her favorite writer for her entire life and she could hardly believe her luck, being on this sacred ground. It was one of the things that drove Sylvia the craziest about her mother, the mad look on her face when she wanted someone to think she was paying special attention. The woman led the adults through to the house, and Joan and Sylvia followed behind.

When they were enough feet away from her parents that they wouldn’t be able to hear her, Sylvia said, “I’m sorry about my mother.”

“She’s not bad,” Joan said. “My mother is a little, eh, too.” He wiggled a hand by his ear, the universal sign for crazy.

Sylvia couldn’t imagine Joan having a crazy mother, let alone a mother at all. Or a father. Or ever needing to use the bathroom. Or blowing his nose. He stepped aside to let her follow the group into the house, and she got a mouthful of his cologne, which, mixed with the garden jasmine, made her breath catch in her throat. Joan was too much, a water fountain in the middle of the Sahara, a long-shot horse winning the Triple Crown. She couldn’t take it. Sylvia hurried toward Charles and took his hand, elbowing Lawrence slightly out of the way.

They looked at the sparse living room, the kitchen with its gorgeous AGA stove, the pantry full of British cookie tins, their bodies crowding together in the roped-off sections of the floor. They trooped upstairs and looked at offices that could have been abandoned long enough to fetch a cup of tea. They marveled over the tiny bed, where Graves had successively slept with two wives and a mistress.

“Can’t be the same bed,” Charles said. “No woman would accept that.”

“This is not Manhattan, dear,” Franny said. “I don’t think there’s a mattress store on the corner.” She swiveled around, looking for the docent, but the woman had left them to their own devices. “I guess we’ll never know.”

“What do you think, Joan?” Franny said, making eye contact with the tutor. “Have you been here before?”

“On a school trip, yes,” he said, nodding. “We learned one of his poems, ‘Dew-drop and Diamond.’”

“Do you still know it?” Franny pumped her hands together, beckoning Joan toward her. He squeezed through the doorway, past Jim and Charles and Lawrence, until he was standing in the very center of the room, his body pulling the caution rope taut. “Go on,” Franny said, “go on. I just love poetry.” Sylvia shrank backward and stared at a spot on the floor.

“‘She like a diamond shone, but you / Shine like an early drop of dew . . .’ That’s in the first part, I think. What is the word, stanza?”

Joan closed his eyes for a moment, running the words over again in his mind. “Yes, that’s how it goes.”

Franny reached out and grabbed his biceps. “Good Lord, boy.” She let go and fanned herself. “Is anyone else getting warm?” She looked up at Jim and had a sudden flash of the girl, that stupid girl, and felt her cheeks get even warmer. She let go of Joan’s arm.

Lawrence chuckled, and Charles gave him a look. “What?” Lawrence said. “That was hot.”

Sylvia was glad to be near the door, and made a swift exit down the stairs, followed closely by her father.

They’d somehow missed the video presentation, a twenty-minute loop projected in a room as clean and bare as a Quaker meetinghouse, and so Jim and Sylvia went there, scooting in just after it began, joining another group of tourists. Franny wouldn’t follow them in for fear of being bored to tears, and Charles would rather rub his hands against the rosemary bushes and imagine his life on a craggy mountaintop than sit in a dark room, so they were safe for the moment. Sylvia sat next to her father, but far enough apart that their hips didn’t touch on the stark wooden benches.

The voiceover to the video (“I, Robert Graves”) seemed to be narrated posthumously, and Jim and Sylvia both laughed several times. Robert Graves came off like a hilarious eccentric egomaniac, with children riding donkeys down to the beach and an unstable mistress who had jumped out the window and survived. “This is better than reality TV, Syl,” Jim whispered, and she nodded, in full agreement. It truly was an advertisement for leaving the city life behind, for finding a parcel of perfection and staying there, no matter how remote. Jim and Franny had never thought about leaving New York, not seriously. She would travel for periods of time while on assignment, but Jim’s work couldn’t exist elsewhere. He wondered if that was something Franny resented him for, shackling her to Manhattan. It didn’t seem likely, but neither did the thought of Madison Vance.

She’d started the previous summer, just after her senior year at Columbia. The magazine had a solid internship program, with scores of bright young people doing menial tasks for no pay. They were at the copy machine, running back and forth to the supply closet, sorting the book room, taking detailed notes (for what reason, Jim was never sure) in meetings. The most promising interns were occasionally given things to do: fact-checking, research, reading the slush. In the fall, she’d been promoted to editorial assistant, a real job with benefits and a 401(k). Madison wore her long hair loose, and after she’d been in his office—this was well before anything happened—Jim would find strands of blond, like filaments of gold, stuck to his furniture.

It was embarrassing, how easily it had happened, how little effort he’d had to exert.

“Cool, huh?” Sylvia said.

“Yep,” Jim said, his eyes refocusing on the screen. Instead of watching still images of Robert Graves at work, Robert Graves with his family, Jim saw Madison Vance’s naked body. He’d been surprised the first time he’d reached his hand inside her skirt and felt her pussy, waxed and cool, as smooth as a hotel pillowcase. It was the kind of thing Franny would never have done on principle—she was full bush, always, and proud of it, like she was some kind of 1970s Playboy Playmate. Madison was the opposite, the slick result of youth raised on Internet porn. She’d groaned the second Jim slid his palm against her clit. When he was her age, he’d barely known what a clitoris was. He regretted so much of what happened, but there were moments that refused to leave his brain. Jim loved his wife, he loved his wife, he loved his wife. But it had been something, after so many years, to move his hand against someone new, not knowing how her body would respond, or how she would shift herself into his touch. He was sweating now, despite the air-conditioning. The film was long, and he was glad. The last thing he wanted was to look his daughter in the face.

Carmen didn’t like missing workouts. For her clients, hitting the gym twice a week was the absolute minimum. That was maintenance. You lost muscle tone with any more time away. Taking two weeks’ vacation was practically begging to return to sloppy squats and lots of panting. She’d tried to set her clients up with a substitute trainer while she was gone, but Carmen didn’t trust the other professionals at Total Body Power not to try to steal them permanently. Jodi was the second-best at the gym, a real killer, and she’d been circling for weeks, after seeing Carmen’s name crossed off the schedule. July in Miami was not a joke. Even though it was the off-season for Florida residents, the gym was busy with tourists who got passes from their hotels, and their bodies needed help more than most.

She was doing some circuit training by the pool. Push-ups, burpees, standing squat jumps, invisible jump rope. Bobby swam languid laps and occasionally called out words of advice.

“Atta girl. Explode!” Bobby was still learning the lingo.

They’d met at Total Body Power almost six years ago, when Bobby was two months out of college and still living off the Post credit card. He’d signed up for the premium package—twelve sessions with a trainer, twice a week, for six weeks. He told Carmen he was serious about getting into shape. He’d never been remotely sporty, and had no hand-eye coordination. Bobby’s long body had been like a wilting zucchini, the same thickness from top to bottom. Carmen knew just what to do. She’d put him on daily protein powder and had him lifting more weight every week. Bench presses, dead lifts, kettle-bell swings. Bobby did pull-ups and push-ups and jumping jacks. She knew all the machines, and slid the key into heavier and heavier slots. By the end of the six weeks, Bobby’s arms had nearly doubled in size, and his stomach, which had always been nearly concave, showed signs of an emerging six-pack. Carmen was an artist of the body, and she had made him from scratch.

They hadn’t slept together until the very end, that last week. Bobby was sorry that the sessions were coming to an end, and he knew that his father would object if he charged another thousand dollars at the gym. He asked Carmen out for a drink, not knowing if she poisoned her body in that way or any other. She said yes, and they met at the bar at the Del Mar hotel. Bobby had picked one of the less glitzy bars on the strip on purpose, not knowing how Carmen looked when she was out of her gym clothes, and not wanting her to feel uncomfortable, but he needn’t have worried. She arrived five minutes late wearing Lucite heels and a white dress that ended only a breath below her firm, round bottom.

“Zip it,” Carmen said, and started her squats. She pivoted her body so that she was facing away from the pool. She would be forty-one in a few months. Everyone at the gym said that forty was the new twenty-five, and they were right. She was thinking about running a marathon, or maybe doing a triathlon, or maybe both. The difference was in the muscle groups, and in the toning. To run, you needed solid hamstrings and quads, which were good for riding the bike, too, but once you got in the water, it was all about your back and your core. Carmen visualized herself in the water, a swim cap tight around her head. She imagined breaking the surface of water with each breath, drawing in exactly as much energy as she needed to take the next stroke. She would finish in the top of her age bracket, if not higher, that much she knew for sure. Lots of her clients at the gym were in their forties, bodies pouchy from childbirth or laziness. Carmen would never let herself be like that, soft and passive. She was strong.

Bobby hoisted himself out of the pool and lay down, dripping wet, on the recliner closest to Carmen. The sun was directly overhead, but he didn’t mind. His whole family pretended they were vampires or cancer victims, deathly afraid of a little vitamin D, but Bobby liked getting some color.

“So,” Carmen said, stretching out one calf and bending herself in half over it, her toes lifted toward the sky, “what’s up with your parents?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” She pulled her left leg back and straightened out the right one. “Tension much?”

Bobby rolled over onto his stomach. “They’re always like this.”

“My ass.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were we talking about your ass? Because I am way more interested in that conversation.” Bobby lifted his head and raised his eyebrows.

Carmen walked over and sat down next to Bobby, both of their bodies too big for the narrow lounge chair. “I’m serious. Are your parents okay? They seem so, I don’t know, touchy.”

“They’re fine. They’re always like that. I don’t know. It’s a transition, you know? My dad just retired. Can you imagine retiring? That’s like saying, ‘Okay, world, I am officially too old to be of any use. Put me on the ice floe, or whatever.’”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, like Eskimos? Anyway. I’m sure that’s all it is.” Bobby shifted onto his side, to make more room, and Carmen lay down in the space, curling her dry, warm body next to his wet one.

“Why did he retire, then, if you don’t think he wants to feel like an Eskimo, or whatever?” Bobby put his wet hands around Carmen’s waist and pulled her close. She smelled the tiniest bit like sweat, which he’d always found sexy.

“I have no idea,” Bobby said, “but I’d really rather talk about something else. Like getting you out of these pants.” He slid one wet hand into the waistband of her Lycra shorts.

Carmen squirmed away from him, pretending to be disgusted. She stood up and shook herself off, ridding herself of imaginary cooties before slowly peeling off all of her clothes. “We should go on vacation more often,” she said, and jumped into the pool. Bobby was hard before he could follow her, and tripped over his bathing suit as he followed her in with a great big splash.

After Joan was dropped off at home and the rest of the group was fetched, everyone set out for dinner in Palma proper. Joan had recommended a tapas restaurant, and Franny had taken copious notes about what to order. This was her area of expertise, her chief joy in life, figuring out what to put in her mouth next, and when. It was out of the question to go before nine, but Bobby was starving to death and Sylvia was moping, so Franny rounded up the troops and loaded the cars and barked directions to the city.

The plan was to walk around town before dinner, which seemed to be everyone else’s plan as well. They parked the cars on a narrow street by the cathedral, a massive gray pile just off the beach. After a few days in Pigpen, Palma felt like being at home—the city was lively, the streets filled with couples and families and dogs, everyone strolling slowly and drinking at small tables outside. Bobby and Carmen walked ahead, holding hands.

“Look,” Franny said to Jim, who shrugged. “Maybe it’s love after all?”

“She’s fine,” Jim said. “She doesn’t bother me.”

Franny glared at him. “You’re a bad liar.” She had liked this about him for most of their marriage, but now, as she said it aloud, it occurred to Franny that this was a flaw.

The cobblestone streets were pitched, heading up– and downhill. There was a little shop selling Mallorcan pearls, and Franny ducked in, Charles and Lawrence trailing behind her. She bought two strands, both blue and satisfyingly lumpy, and strung one around her own neck and one around Sylvia’s.

“Mom,” Sylvia said, fingering her new necklace, “I think my stomach is actually going to eat itself. Like, my stomach is going to think that the rest of my body is trying to kill it and it will attack the rest of my organs like parasites. And then I’ll be dead in an hour.”

“You’re welcome,” Franny said, and hooked her elbow in Sylvia’s. “Let’s follow the lovebirds.”

“Oh, please,” Sylvia said. She looked over her shoulder to make sure no one else was close enough to hear. The pedestrian-only streets were filled with well-dressed people of all ages—dapper white-haired gents in thin sweaters and loafers, rambunctious teenagers licking each other’s necks. They made it a block before they hit Bobby standing by himself in front of a clothing store.

“Ditched her?” Sylvia said.

“She’s in there,” he said. The store was blasting dubstep so loudly that they had to raise their voices to be heard. “I couldn’t take it.”

The mannequins in the window were wearing asymmetrical dresses printed with three different patterns, clothing that Frankenstein might have sewn.

“Barf,” Sylvia said. “This is clothing for blind strippers.”

“Well, she likes it, Sylvia, okay?” Bobby crossed his arms.

“You know, I’m going to go in and check on her,” Franny said. “It’s no fun to shop alone.”

Charles and Lawrence were trailing behind, and Sylvia watched as they walked in and out of a sunglasses store, a shoe store, a candy store. They did everything together. She wondered if her parents had ever been like that, even before Bobby was born. It seemed unlikely.

“Where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Didn’t say anything to me.”

“Are you okay?”

“What do you mean? Of course I’m okay.” Bobby’s hair was getting long, and the dark curls hung to his eyebrows.

“Jeez, nevermind.” Sylvia peered into the dark hole of the clothing store that had just eaten her mother.

The store was dense with racks of skimpy, sweatshop-manufactured clothing. Franny walked through, touching things as she went, recoiling from all the shiny, stretchy fabrics. She finally found Carmen in the back, near the dressing rooms, with a pile of stuff over her arm.

“Can I help?” Franny said, putting out her hands. “Here, let me hold all that while you look.”

Carmen shrugged and offloaded the stack into Franny’s waiting arms.

“You and Bobby have fun today? We missed you at the Graves House, it really was something. I think secretly every writer imagines their house becoming a museum. Or having a plaque, at the very least. So many plaques.”

Carmen gave a half-smile and continued to paw through a rack of sequined tops. “Oh, you know, museums aren’t really my thing.”

“Well, it’s not really a museum, it’s just a house. Where a writer lived. So it’s more about snooping around than looking at art.”

“I don’t read that much.”

Franny smiled with her lips closed, a tight line. This was a grown woman, she reminded herself, a person who supported herself and made her own decisions. This was not her family. This was not her problem. “Mm-hmm.”

“Oh, you know, I did just read a really good book, though, on the plane,” Carmen said, pausing with her hand on the hanger of a spectacularly ugly dress. Franny’s heart leapt, even as she was trying to convince it to temper its expectations. “It’s called Your Food, Your Body. I think you’d really like it, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” Franny said. It could be sociology, she thought, or anthropology, a study of cultural norms through their natural dishes, an investigation of stereotypes through the meals our ancestors have given us. Franny loved books about food—maybe this was it, the moment she’d been waiting for, the moment that Carmen opened her mouth and proved that she’d been paying attention all along.

“It’s about what kind of diets work best for your body type—like, for example, I’m small and muscular, which means no complex carbs. My Cuban grandmother would murder me if she was still alive, no rice and beans!” Carmen opened her eyes wide. “It’s really interesting.”

“That does sound very informative,” Franny said. “You ready to try some things on?”

Carmen shrugged. “Sure.” She plucked a single dress out of Franny’s arms, made out of transparent plastic, like a garment made out of Saran wrap. “Isn’t this one cute?”

“Mm-hmm,” Franny said, unable to say more.

The tapas bar Joan had recommended was in the tangle of small streets near the Plaça Major, which also had a Burger King and a pizza place, both of which were crowded with Spanish teenagers. There was a crowd spilling out of the restaurant, which made Sylvia fold in half like a toy with dead batteries. Determined, Franny wiggled her way through the packed bar to the hostess, and they were seated before long—Joan had made a phone call on their behalf. As he’d mentioned to Franny, his parents knew the owners. It was a small island, after all. “What a sweet boy!” Franny said over and over again, to no one in particular. “What a sweet, sweet boy.”