Rich and Pretty(33)
“The good news I won’t be able to tell you in person is that I’m getting promoted,” Lauren had told her mother.
A squeal, a sigh, and so many questions: more money, more responsibility, a new title, a new role, her own office, new business cards?
She’s happy she’s got this to give back to her mother. She’s made it! Or she’s making it. It was worth it! Or at least it seems more so now. Lauren’s always been held to a standard different from the ones against which her brothers are measured. Theirs is more forgiving, and against theirs, well, they’re both sort of succeeding. Ben believes in real estate. Alexis helps him with staging: fluffing pillows and putting a frozen apple pie in the oven to evince a sense of hominess. Just picturing them in their hatchback, the magnetized door sign advertising Ben’s credentials and telephone number, is depressing, though in truth they probably make more money than Lauren does. It’s true that Adam had broken their dad’s heart by foundering in community college, then giving it up to work at a nursery and landscaping business that belonged to the father of a high school friend. He lives at home, but this seems, in some odd way, to please them.
Lauren tries to imagine what the Brooks family’s attempt at togetherness in her absence will look like, but can’t dwell on it because it makes her feel too guilty. She’s a terrible daughter.
The resort has sent two black SUVs. The drivers (one smiling, one stoic) load their bags, and they pile in: Lauren, Sarah, and Amina in one, Meredith and Fiona in the other. Amina has endless arms and legs, thin, brown, bangled. Her jewelry clangs and clatters as she moves. Amina’s specific combination of grace and ungainliness makes Lauren think of a giraffe. She’s known Amina since high school, not particularly well, but in that school, in that circle, even simple acquaintance came with a certain intimacy, one that could last for years. It wouldn’t have been perceived as a breach had Lauren called Amina, after years of their not having spoken, to ask a favor.
“It’s beautiful, my God,” Amina is saying, peering out of the tinted windows. She speaks with the oddest of accents, Amina does, a cocktail: her father’s Etonian English mellowed by her mother’s distinguished Dhundari, to say nothing of the parade of schoolteachers who conducted her education in American schools the world over—first Istanbul, later Berne, then Addis Ababa, finally New York. She came to the States at ten; indeed, it was from Amina that Lauren assumed the role of “new girl” in sixth grade. As Amina shades her eyes to get a better look, her bangles clatter against the glass. The effect is ladylike.
Sarah’s cheeks are flushed, and her hair wavy, though the air isn’t all that humid. Eighty-eight, the average high in late November—Lauren looked it up. Forty degrees warmer than back home at midday, where the office is empty anyway and no one cares that she’s on a tropical vacation instead of eating that thing called stuffing that comes from a box that’s secretly Lauren’s favorite part of the meal, precisely as it was designed to be by the chemists who came up with it. Thanksgiving is perhaps unique in being the holiday where people defend the specific eccentricities and nuances of their family’s way of doing things and spend years reifying them, re-creating them with their subsequent replacement families. Lauren has sentimental feelings for certain things, of course (cinnamon toast, an indulgence permitted when she was home sick; the smell of chlorine and the memory of visits to the indoor pool, a winter ritual), but Thanksgiving isn’t one of those things.
The resort looks like a gigantic house, which is precisely what it once was. A plantation, they say the word proudly, it’s not as shameful here as it is back home. The thing is perfect, naturally. The palm trees have been planted to achieve symmetry. The sea is an even more preposterous color, seen up close. The woman behind the desk greets them with convincing sincerity.
They have only just arrived, of course, but it seems almost like the others have been there for a few days, or been here before. They seem relaxed, they seem unfazed, even as they coo over the resort, check their phones, Fiona actually gripping Lauren’s arm and squeezing it with an enthusiasm that seems feigned, and anyway, odd, because they don’t know each other that well either, she and Fiona. She was the girl in college (there’s one in every college) who was almost suspiciously well dressed. She transferred away to Parsons after two years, but she and Sarah have remained close—her presence here surely means they’re closer than Lauren realized. Lauren admires Fiona’s fashionable eccentricity. She’s wearing a hat.
Everyone seems at home, or more at home than Lauren is. She always feels a bit odd in hotels. It’s true she hadn’t wanted to come, is deeply skeptical of spending days on end with a gaggle of girls. Over that arc of time, conversation becomes consensus, and groups turn into something else, gangs, almost. Still, as wedding rites go she has to suppose this is better than a night out in one of those neon underlit limousines, drinking champagne, singing karaoke. Now that they’re here, Lauren is excited to go to her room, to shower the plane off her body, to put on a bathing suit, to sit by the pool with a book. She’s brought two, even though she suspects that everyone else will expect there to be a lot of group conversation. She doesn’t particularly have anything to say.
Even after the grandeur of the lobby, the room is a surprise. The floor tile is cheap, the wall color offensive, but the bed sprawling, and the bedroom spills out onto an indoor-outdoor room and from there, just the outdoors: green grass, a winding path, and that sea; it’s still there, it wasn’t a dream. The air-conditioning is on with conviction. The porter deposits Lauren’s bags and she realizes she doesn’t have any currency, whatever it is they use in this country. She gives him a five-dollar bill, hopes that’s enough, or not too much to be an insult. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything. The bathroom is strangely old-fashioned, but the water in the shower is wonderfully hot. Her skin feels oily and her hair smells like fast food. She uses the shampoo provided for her convenience, not caring what effect it might have on her hair. She can’t afford this, none of this. It’s a little faded, the luxury, but it’s luxury all the same. Sarah is paying for the hotel, for all five rooms. She insisted and in the end no one fought her on this. It’s not as though she doesn’t have the money.