Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Day Eight

THE PREVIOUS EVENING’S THREATENING WIND HAD blossomed into full-on rain. Gemma hadn’t warned them about the possibility of inclement weather, and Franny was furious. She hobbled from the bed to the window and watched skinny raindrops ping against the taut surface of the swimming pool. It was Saturday, one of their few weekend days in Mallorca, not that there was much of a delineation between the week and the weekend. Still, Franny felt cheated, and planned to go downstairs and complain. First, she hobbled back around the bed the long way and into the bathroom, where she was so shocked by her own reflection that she actually yelped. After waiting a moment to make sure that no one was coming to her rescue—another thing to complain about—Franny moved closer to the mirror.

She had somehow managed to hit herself with her racquet, that much Franny understood, hard enough to knock herself to the ground. The bump rose out of her center part, a lone volcanic mountain in an otherwise peaceful valley. “Ugh,” Franny said. She tied her black robe more tightly around her waist, as if that would distract anyone, and swanned her way down the stairs as slowly as Norma Desmond, wishing for the very first time that she’d thought to pack a turban.

The chest in the living room had been well stocked with board games: Monopoly and Risk, Snakes and Ladders. Charles had made a brief but impassioned speech in favor of a game of charades but was quickly shot down. They decided on Scrabble, and Lawrence was winning, being the best at math, which everyone knew was all it took to truly succeed. He knew all the two-letter words, the QI and the ZA, and played them without apology, even when it made the board so dense that it was difficult for anyone else to take a turn. Bobby, Sylvia, and Charles all stared hard at their letters, as if simple attention alone would improve their odds.

“I’m pretty sure you’re cheating,” Bobby said. “I wish we had a Scrabble dictionary. Sylvia, go look one up on your computer.”

“Screw you. You’re just mad you’re losing,” she said, rearranging the tiles on her rack. She had two O’s. Moo. Boo. Loo. Fool. Pool. Polio. Sylvia always played the first word she saw, and didn’t care if she set up the next player for a double word score. She laid down MOO. “Give me seven points, please.”

Lawrence rubbed his hands quickly over his face, up and down. “Sylvia, sweetheart, you’re driving me crazy. You can do better than that, I know you can.”

“Let her play how she wants to play, Lawr,” Charles said, swatting him affectionately on the wrist. “Now, let’s see . . .” He played BROMIDE, crisscrossing Sylvia’s MOO, a bingo. Charles and Sylvia both cheered.

“You so don’t get it,” Bobby said.

Carmen was not a fan of word games, or of board games at all, and she’d been sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, flipping through Sylvia’s airplane magazines. She’d read them already, and knew the pictures by heart—this television star was looking skinny, this one was looking fat, and they were wearing the same bikini! Every few minutes she would get up and slowly walk behind Bobby to look at his letters, and the board, and then circle back to her chair like a discontented house cat. The last time they’d gone on vacation, two winters previous, Bobby and Carmen had gone to an all-inclusive resort called Xanadu. The resort was on a Caribbean island, and because all the food and alcohol had already been paid for, they felt like high-rolling celebrities, exactly as the resort’s brochure had said they would. They had six margaritas at once at one of the swim-up bars, and when Bobby later threw up all over their hotel room, they didn’t particularly mind, because it had all been free, and they weren’t responsible for cleaning it up. They rented Jet Skis and went parasailing. They had sex in a cabana at the far end of the beach—twice in one day. The other people at Xanadu had been great—all other couples like them, ready to dance until dawn and maybe slip a tongue down someone else’s throat when their girlfriend or boyfriend went to the bathroom. It was just fun. Nothing serious, nothing boring. Even though mostly they’d just sat around on the beach, it still felt like doing something. They were tanning, they were drinking, they were dancing. That was a real vacation. Being locked up in this house on Mallorca felt like the day in the fourth grade when Carmen’s mother had forgotten to pick her up at the library after school.

“Bobby, can I talk to you for a minute?” she said, standing up again and letting the magazine flutter from her hand to the floor.

Bobby looked at the board, and at Lawrence, and at his sister. “Play slowly,” he said, and followed Carmen out of the room and into the kitchen.

“Did you talk to your parents yet?” she asked, once they were out of earshot.

“What?” Bobby looked over her shoulder, making sure no one else was close enough to eavesdrop. It had always been one of his sister’s talents.

“About the money. It’s really not that much. And if you could just pay it all off now, the interest . . .” Bobby stopped Carmen by clamping his palm over her mouth. “Hey,” she said, and peeled it off.

“Listen, they’re my parents, okay? I know how to talk to them.” Bobby crossed his arms over his chest and blew an errant curl off his forehead.

“Okay, if you say so,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve already been here awhile and you’re sort of running out of time. And why didn’t you tell me about your father’s job? I didn’t realize he was really leaving the magazine, like, for good.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “me neither. I mean, I guess my mom told me, but I wasn’t really listening. It’s fucked up. I don’t know, maybe now’s a bad time.” A great chorus of shouts carried over from the living room. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?” He didn’t wait for her to respond, and pushed past her back into the living room. Carmen sat by the window and watched the rain, all the while trying to figure out a way to make a bolt of lightning go through the window, through the walls, and directly into Bobby’s chest. She was only trying to help. They never spent more than an afternoon with her family, and they were twenty minutes away. Carmen thought she might make a list of everything she did for him, just to have it written down on paper so that she could actually see it in black and white. The Posts weren’t that great, if they’d never taught Bobby how to treat a girl. The rain didn’t stop until after the sun went down.

Bobby needed to get out of the house. After the Scrabble tournament (Lawrence in first place, Charles in second, a reluctant Jim in third after a single high-scoring game, Bobby in fourth, and Sylvia in a distant fifth) and a low-key dinner, Franny was in high gear about a movie marathon starring someone Bobby had never heard of and was sure he couldn’t give two shits about. He needed to get out of the house. Carmen was ignoring his little touches, still irritated, and so he asked his mother for the keys.

“Sylvia,” he said. The thought of a night out alone in Palma was intoxicating, but he didn’t know where to go. “Send your tutor an e-mail and ask him where the best bars in town are. Somewhere fun.” Across the room, he saw Carmen’s eyebrows flicker upward, but he chose not to acknowledge it. She wasn’t invited.

Joan was quick—he sent over a list of three spots in a place called Magaluf, a town just outside Palma known for its clubs. They were for tourists, he said, but when there were really good DJs, all the Mallorcans went, too. The best one, Joan said, was called Blu Nite, and tonight there would be a DJ called Psychic Bomb. Sylvia begrudgingly admitted to having heard of him, and Bobby had seen him spin lots of times at home.

Bobby didn’t like going out by himself—in Miami, if he wasn’t with Carmen, he’d be with a whole posse of his boys from the gym, other trainers and some select clients, or sometimes even his college friends, though he didn’t see them as much as he used to. Some of them had gotten married, and one had even had a baby. No, thank you—that was Bobby’s philosophy. The idea of Carmen coming along and harping on him without his mother around to muzzle her up was so awful that Bobby really had only one choice in wingperson. It was hilarious how the Posts all probably thought that Carmen was mute, when all she did was tell him what he was doing wrong. At the gym, at the laundromat, in bed.

“Syl, you want to come with me?”

Sylvia was locked again into her computer screen, marveling at the thought of Joan somewhere nearby doing the same thing. Bobby had never asked her to do anything with him before, except maybe order burritos from the place around the corner, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d heard him correctly.

“You want to come with me?” he repeated himself.

“Um, yeah, sure,” Sylvia said, slowly closing the lid of her laptop. “Give me a minute to get dressed.” She hurried upstairs and threw open her suitcase, rooting around like a pig in hopes she would find a treasure trove of things she hadn’t actually packed. The thought occurred to her that she could find something truly perfect to wear to a cheesy nightclub if she snuck into Carmen and Bobby’s room, but Carmen had been acting like a freak all day, and if she wasn’t going with them, something must be weird. So Sylvia picked out her tightest jeans and a T-shirt she’d had since the fifth grade with a picture of the Jonas Brothers on it and hoped for the best. She hadn’t even meant to pack it, but it was small and tight, and she hoped the Spanish were as into nostalgic irony as she was.

Blu Nite was on a corner, down the block from a sushi restaurant and a bar that promised karaoke. Sylvia was wearing her nicest shoes, a pair of black ballet flats, and she couldn’t help but notice that every other woman she saw was stalking around on a pair of stiletto heels like they were trying to irrigate the sidewalk. It had stopped raining, but the streets were still slick with water, with lots of little reflective pools just waiting to soak your feet. Bobby didn’t seem to notice that Sylvia kept leaping over puddles, and was hurrying to keep up with him.

“Do you have a fake ID?” he asked, barely turning around to look at her.

“I only have to be eighteen. Which I am. So, no.” Sylvia jogged for a few strides until she was next to him.

Bobby was wearing what he would wear out in Miami—a nice pair of dark jeans, an untucked button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone, and a silver necklace that Carmen had given him for Christmas. He glanced at Sylvia, clearly regretting his decision to invite her along, and then nodded toward the door of the club. “Whatever. Let’s go in. I need a drink.”

Blue neon tubes lined the walls, which struck Sylvia as a little bit too obvious of an interior decorating choice. It was still early, and so the crowd was fairly thin, but there were several clumps of girls dancing together in the center of the large room.

“Is this all a club is?” Sylvia asked, but the music was loud enough that her brother either couldn’t hear her or could ignore her without seeming rude. She’d been expecting a light-up dance floor like in Saturday Night Fever, or, at the very least, a velvet rope. Blu Nite was one giant room with black leather sofas along the walls and a cluster of high glass tables near the bar, where the single men seemed to congregate. They were all dressed like Bobby, with shirts covered in printing at odd angles, as if all the clothing in Spain had gotten mangled in the printing machine, and now the logos were creeping over everyone’s shoulders instead of being square in the middle of their chests. It was the classic Euro look—shiny and well groomed to the point of New Jersey. She was still looking around when she realized that Bobby was across the room, belly up to the bar.

“Get me something,” she said, hurrying behind him.

Bobby nodded and raised two fingers at the bartender. “Dos!”

The DJ booth was at the far end of the bar, on a raised platform. Sylvia could see only Psychic Bomb’s head bobbing in time to the music—he’d just faded from something into a Katy Perry song she recognized, and the girls on the dance floor all squealed.

“Here,” Bobby said, pushing an enormous glass into her hands.

“What is it?” Sylvia sniffed at the rim—it smelled like cough syrup.

“Red Bull and vodka.”

Bobby had one, too—they stood there for a minute, Sylvia sucking the sweet drink through a long straw, and Bobby gulping his back with large swallows. Bobby’s glass was empty almost immediately, and he returned to the bar to get another.

“Thirsty?” Sylvia said, when he came back.

“I was just really needing to get out of the house, you know?” Bobby spoke without looking at her. He scanned the room, his head moving in time with the music. “Carmen was driving me fucking crazy.”

“And Mom?”

“And Mom.” Bobby looked at her, finally. “I can’t believe you still live with them.”

“Only for another month.” Sylvia tried to sound chipper.

“Honestly?” Bobby said. “I have no idea who they are. When I was a kid, they fought all the time, and when you were a kid, it was like sunshine and rainbows. I have no idea. At least now they’re looking more like people I recognize.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re fighting all the time,” Sylvia said. Had they really not told him anything? Bobby had always seemed so grown-up, so adult, that she’d assumed he would have known everything long before she did. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Yeah?” Bobby said, but he wasn’t really listening to her. Sylvia felt sorry for him, sorry enough to keep her parents’ secret. He lived so far away, what was the difference? When he visited for Christmas, they would all go out to dinner and be civil and her parents would still be her parents and her house would still be her house, if only in Bobby’s imagination. “I’m going to dance,” he said, and left her sitting there. Psychic Bomb faded into a song with a faster beat, which sounded like something that would have poured out the open window of a packed car with Jersey plates.

Sylvia stayed put, stunned, and watched as Bobby quickly finished his drink, set the empty glass down on the bar, and then made his way onto the dance floor, swiveling his hips like a gyroscope. Sylvia opened her mouth and let it hang there, voluntarily slack-jawed. Bobby moved quickly into the orbit of two distinct groups of dancing girls, and both circles opened up to let him in. The girls on the left were taller and blonder, and seemed to be speaking German. The girls on the right were smaller, mousier—Brits, maybe. (Sylvia was not surprised that the native Spaniards did not yet seem to be in attendance—it was still their dinnertime, after all.) Bobby shimmied into the center of the circle on the right, eliciting even more squeals. One squat girl, with a dark brown bob that swung from side to side as she danced, seemed particularly excited about Bobby’s arrival, and reacted as if she’d been expecting him. She positioned her body in front of Bobby’s, her knees straddling his left leg, so that it looked like they were in a two-person limbo contest. Sylvia turned toward the bar, unable to watch any more.

There were some stools at the high glass tables, and Sylvia sat down. It wasn’t that Sylvia didn’t like to dance, it was more that she’d never really learned how, and even if she had, she didn’t see the point in grinding against total strangers. It reminded her of the photos, and how they would never go away; even though she’d untagged herself and flagged them for inappropriate content, there would always be someone new who’d seen them, or who had been at the party, waving another camera in her face. Dancing was something for luckier, less stupid people. Sylvia wished, for the millionth time, that she’d been born in a more civilized century, when dancing was about learning steps and executing them en masse, like a drill team, everyone waltzing together. The twentieth century had been bad (the flappers, the hippies), but the twenty-first was even worse. Sylvia thought of Tolstoy, and Austen’s grand balls, with protracted wistfulness. What was unfolding in front of her was a pathetic travesty. A cocktail waitress swanned by, and Sylvia flagged her down, pointing to her now empty glass and nodding. Another.

An hour later, Blu Nite had started to fill up. There was as much Spanish being spoken as German or English, which made Sylvia feel less like a colonizing imperialist. She’d lost Bobby in the crowd—he’d surfaced once at her table, sweating and panting and smiling, and once at the bar, when she was going for a glass of water, but other than that, he was just another body making the place into a massive, thumping Romper Room for adults. Two hours later, Sylvia was getting tired. She’d had two glasses of sangría after the disgusting vodka and Red Bull, which wasn’t a lot, but given the lack of moisture in the room and the uncharacteristic lack of snacks (the Spanish were excellent at snacks), Sylvia was feeling a little bit drunk and more than a little ready to go home. She slid off her stool and made her way across the room to the bathroom. She’d pee first, then find Bobby and convince him that the place sucked and that they should leave.

There was a line for the women’s restroom, which was not surprising. Sylvia shuffled against the wall and took her place. All the other girls were glued to their phones, texting and e-mailing and on their Facebook pages. Sylvia had a small pang of grief at not being able to do the same thing. She missed her phone, despite the fact that she hated most of the people she knew and didn’t care what they were doing all summer. She would have checked her e-mail to see if Joan had written back. She would have looked at the clock to see what time it was in New York, what time in was in Rhode Island (which was the same as in New York, of course, but it felt good to think of it as so separate and far that it be acknowledged as such). Sylvia shifted from foot to foot. She was getting sweaty, not from actually moving around but just from being next to so many bodies, and she stuck her nose toward her armpit to check on her smelliness. The girl behind her gave her a look, and Sylvia rolled her eyes. Across the very narrow hall, a short line had started to form for the men’s room, too, which Sylvia found satisfying in a vaguely feminist way. She was all for equality. The men weren’t sure what to do, though, not having trained for moments like this throughout their entire lives, and the guy in front banged on the door.

A minute later, the lock turned, and Sylvia watched as her brother and one of the mousy Brits tumbled out, their faces still attached like two warring vacuum cleaners. Her lipstick was smeared on his cheeks and neck. They squeezed past the guy who had banged on the door, who sneered at them less aggressively than Sylvia would have done, had she been in his position.

“Um, hello?” she said, tapping her brother on the shoulder.

“Oh, hey, Syl,” he said, sounding remarkably casual. He pulled back, leaving the Brit gaping like a caught fish. His shirt was open at the neck, unbuttoned almost to his navel, and the Brit dug her fingers into his sparse chest hair. Bobby’s eyes were having trouble focusing on Sylvia, and she had to force herself not to look away.

“What the fuck are you doing?” All the other women waiting for the bathroom had let their phones fall to their sides, happy to have a live show instead.

“This is my new friend. She’s on vacation, too. Right?” The girl looked up from Bobby’s chest and nodded.

“This is fucking gross, is what it is. Do you know that he has a girlfriend? Who is here with us? Who no one likes, but he brought her anyway? Do you even know her name?”

“I’m Isabel Parkey!” Little Isabel cocked her head to the side, confused about who to be annoyed with. “We were just having some fun,” she said in a British accent, as posh as someone in a BBC miniseries.

Bobby kissed her on the cheek and then physically turned her around and pushed her back toward the dance floor. “I’ll meet you out there—let me talk to my sister for a minute.” Isabel shrugged. A new song came on—a golden oldie, maybe Kylie Minogue—and she jumped up and down, her troubles forgotten. “Let’s go,” Bobby said to Sylvia, his voice now so low that she could barely hear him over the thumping and the singing along. She could tell that the other women waiting for the bathroom were straining to hear him, too.

“Not yet, I still have to pee,” she said. “But that does not mean that we’re not going to talk about this. You are gross, you know that? Who does that?”

Bobby wiped off his cheeks and mouth with his shirttail. His belt was unbuckled, and he refastened it. “Whatever, Sylvia. I’m not married to her. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“But you live together. She is your girlfriend. You force us to hang out with her. And then you treat her like this? That is so fucked up. Like, the worst kind of fucked up.”

If he were a nice brother, the kind who asked her questions about her life, he might know about Gabe Thrush and her stupid friends and how she was never, ever going to have sex with anyone in her entire life because of boys like him, but he didn’t know anything at all. If he were a nice brother, and less pathetic, she would have told him all about their parents and how the whole world was ending and no one seemed to care. A lightbulb went on over Sylvia’s head. “You do this all the time, don’t you?”

Bobby couldn’t resist smirking with pride.

Sylvia could no longer contain her rage, and began to pummel her brother in the stomach. The other girls on line for the bathroom shrank back against the wall, getting themselves as far out of arm-swinging range as possible. Those who were merely keeping their friends company but didn’t really have to go fled back onto the dance floor. No one stepped in to rescue Bobby, possibly because Sylvia’s punches were cartoonishly amateur and didn’t seem to be wounding him in the slightest. After a little while, she stopped. “My knuckles hurt, you asshole.”

“Let’s go,” Bobby said, and this time Sylvia slumped after him, furious and still having to pee so badly, but ready to not have so many people staring at her. They wound their way through the club—even more packed now—careful to avoid Isabel and her friends, who had yet to relinquish their corner of the dance floor. They’d made it all the way to the front door before someone stepped in front of them, purposefully halting their progress. Sylvia closed her eyes, sure that it was going to be the Spanish police, arresting her for assaulting her brother in a public place.

“Ciao, you found it!” Joan kissed her on both cheeks and clapped Bobby on the shoulder. “It’s a good place, yes?”

Sylvia smoothed out her shirt, which she had only recently realized was in fact so small and tight that you could see the indent of her belly button, which was almost as bad as being able to see her nipples. Could he see her nipples? Sylvia’s cheeks burned. He had kissed her. His face, his mouth, had been right next to hers. Her stomach lurched as it had when driving down from Pigpen, the small car flying around wet corners, dangerous and fast.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” Sylvia managed.

“Hey, we were just on our way out, man, but we’ll see you,” Bobby said. “Ready, Syl?”

Joan stood there expectantly. She couldn’t figure out a way to ask him for a ride home, or tell him how badly she had to pee, or to say that her brother was an asshole, and she’d only just realized it, so Sylvia leaned in close and whispered to him in Spanish, I wish I could stay. She tried to look wistful, the kind of face that a French actress would make before stepping onto a train, never to be seen again, and then walked out of the club as quickly, scissoring her legs together so hard that she was sure the denim would wear out.

Sylvia held it until they got to the car, a few blocks away, and then unzipped her pants and dropped into a squat in between cars. Her pee was warm and splashed against the cobblestones, running in a ragged stream down the sloped street. Sylvia would have cared, but it felt too good. She thought about Joan coming after her, like someone in a romantic comedy, and finding her with her jeans pulled taut against her thighs and her bare butt wedged between two bumpers. Bobby was already in the driver’s seat, waiting. He could wait.

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.