* * *
There is this about trips:
Catherine is the one who took us on vacations. I mean where people sit in the sun around the pool on a Caribbean island. The first trip she took us on, we had just been married. Catherine organized everything; the three of us went to the Cayman Islands. I had only been on one airplane before, and that was when William flew me East my senior year in college. I could not believe that I was sitting in the sky, and I had to act nonchalant about it, and I tried to. But it was astonishing.
At least for the trip to the Cayman Islands I had that one plane ride already behind me so I could act natural, or feel sort of natural. But as soon as we got off the plane and stepped out into the blinding sunshine and then took a van to the hotel, I felt quietly horrible. I had no idea—no idea at all—what to do: how to use the hotel key, what to wear to the pool, how to sit by the pool （I had never learned to swim）。 And everyone there seemed so sophisticated to me, everyone else knew exactly what they were doing; dear God, I was petrified! Bodies were splayed about in the lounge chairs, slathered with greasy stuff that made their skin shine in the sun. Someone’s hand would go up and a ponytailed waitress would appear in shorts and take their drink order; how did they all know what to do? I feel invisible—as I have said—and yet in that situation I had the strangest sensation of both being invisible and yet having a spotlight on my head that said: This young woman knows nothing. Because I did know nothing. And William and his mother pulled up lounge chairs together and sat in them facing the wide ocean before William turned to see where I was, and he waved his arm for me to go over to them. “Lucy,” said Catherine, “what’s the matter?” She had a canvas hat on with a wide brim. Her sunglasses were directed at me. I said, “Nothing.” I said I would be back out soon, and I went to our room—though I got lost and was on the wrong part of the floor for a while—and when I got into our room I cried and cried. And I don’t think either of them ever knew this.
Except when I went back out to them as they were lying in their lounge chairs, Catherine was very kind to me, and she took my hand, and she said, “I think this is too much for you.”
Catherine’s room was next to ours, and each room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a little patio, and the furniture was a light beige and the walls were white. From our room I could hear Catherine going in or out to her patio; I could hear the sliding glass door. At night I begged William to be quiet when we made love; it alarmed me to think of his mother right there. In that tiny house I grew up in I had heard my parents’ sexual noises almost nightly, and they were horrifying, appalling high-pitched sounds my father made. I slept very badly that week in the Cayman Islands.
* * *
—
Once the girls were born, I would watch them by the pool, and Catherine would sit next to William and they talked. One time I said to Catherine, “When you were young, did you go on trips like these?” She was reading a magazine and she put it down on her chest and looked straight ahead at the ocean. “No, never,” she said. She picked her magazine back up.
* * *
—
I always hated those trips. I hated every one of them.
* * *
—
One time—we may have been married for five years or so—we took a trip at Thanksgiving to Puerto Rico and we stayed at a place much fancier than the hotel on Grand Cayman, with lots of green grass around it and a huge swimming pool, and then the ocean out in front. Maybe because it was Thanksgiving, I don’t know why, but I missed my parents awfully, I even missed my brother and sister. And I collected quarters—I went to the man at the front desk and got as many as I could without telling William or Catherine—and I made a phone call by the long bank of payphones; they were lined up in an area of the lobby that was sort of private, and there was mahogany wood behind all these payphones. And I called home, and my father answered. He sounded very surprised to hear me, and I did not blame him; I very seldom called my parents. He said, “Your mother’s not home,” and I said, “That’s okay, Daddy, don’t hang up.”
And he said, nicely, “Are you okay, Lucy?”
And I said, I blurted it out, I said, “Daddy, we’re in Puerto Rico with William’s mother and I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do in a place like this!”
And my father, after a moment, said, “Is it pretty there, Lucy?”
I said, “I guess so.”
And he said, “I don’t know what you do, either. Maybe you can just enjoy the scenery?”