The Summer Houseguest
Not all our rental experiences are disasters. For several summers we leased a cunning gray-shingled summer cottage directly on the beach on Cape Cod. Renting somebody else’s life is the most convenient way to have our fantasy and leave it too. Living in other people’s homes, cooking in other people’s kitchens, even doing other people’s dishes, has the allure of novelty that is at the heart of any leased vacation experience.
We intentionally chose a place that was a total contrast to the way we live at home. The furniture was authentic battered wicker. The once-flowered cushions were bleached to a pastel wash by years of insistent sunlight. Chaste white muslin curtains flapped at the windows. In the kitchen, cups and dishes of various sizes and patterns, some fetchingly chipped, were arranged in cozy stacks on open wooden shelves. The paint on the pine-plank kitchen table had been worn away by years of scrubbing, leaving only faint traces of Wedgwood blue clinging to the grain. On top of the table sat a sparkling glass pitcher of chilled lemonade, beads of condensation clinging to its curved surface. The place was three thousand dollars for the month of August. Ralph Lauren would have paid a lot more for a one-day photo shoot.
We would leave behind our workaday lives of rushing, getting, spending, and narcoleptic television viewing. Clothing wouldn’t matter. We would spend the day in our bathing suits. Nor would food. We’d buy our dinner from the local fishermen. Instead of swimming a mile’s worth of laps at the Westport Y, we’d swim in the bay, to the lighthouse and back. We’d read on the deck, walk on the beach, pick up shells, and watch the stars. The idea was to reduce life to its basic elements and simple joys.
We didn’t count on the houseguests. It is not possible to rent a beach house within five hours’ drive of one’s hometown without being visited by people. This is especially true if I have actually invited them.
One of my problems is that I like to be nicer than I actually am. While this personality discrepancy is better than being unkind, it does create a lot of confusion and pain for me as well as for others. I mean well, at least initially. I miss my friends. I want to see you. I want to show you this darling cottage and share all the fun we’re having. Then, after about an hour, I want you to go home.
After the Labor Day weekend, when the last of the summer houseguests has thanked us for a lovely weekend, gotten into the car, and driven away, leaving us with an empty refrigerator, dirty sheets, soggy towels, and something we will have to find a box for and mail back to them, I am moved to boot up my laptop and bang out a hostess note that, if I had the nerve to mail it, would solve my summer houseguest problem forever.
“Dear Summer Houseguests,
“Now that the summer season has passed, here in our rented beach house, Larry and I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being such perfect guests, and to reiterate the house rules so that your visit next summer, should we rent again, may prove to be an even greater success.
“What to bring. You will need a bathing suit, a toothbrush, dental floss in case of native corn, your own sunblock, and proof of passage back to where you came from. Travel lightly. Steamer trunks will be confiscated. I am not Jane Austen. Yours is not to be a visit of nineteenth-century duration.
“The house gift. It is necessary to bring a small offering, preferably a large, cooked meal that can be eaten cold with the fingers, along with a good supply of paper plates. An SUV-ful of zucchini from your garden is not welcome and will be considered a hostile, provocative act. A new blender is an especially thoughtful idea. Last summer’s blender, you will remember, burned itself out in a valiant five-speed attempt at pesto sauce. This is probably as good a time as any to let you know that we lied about the chewy little white chunks that clung to the linguini. They were not unosterized pignoli. A white rubber spatula also makes a nice house gift.
“Meals. There will be a traditional welcoming dinner of corn on the cob and lobster. Further meals will not be provided. Do not be fooled by the splendor of this meal or the graciousness of your hosts. You are on hospitality death row. Make the most of it. Let me butter your corn. Larry will insist upon cracking your claws.
“Help. Do not offer to help us clear the table. Don’t even pretend to get up from your place; we’ll slam you back down in your chair. By Saturday breakfast, even before the zinnias we put on your night table begin to wilt, you’re on your culinary own. The coffee’s in the refrigerator, and the filter papers are on the pantry shelf. I take mine black with half a teaspoon of sugar. Larry likes a little milk.
“Make yourself at home. Whenever you get hungry, you should feel free to help yourselves to whatever is in the pantry or the refrigerator. Now it is our turn to pretend to hoist ourselves up from our lounge chairs and yours to insist that you will not be waited upon. Make your choice quickly. Do not open the door and stare. Whenever the refrigerator door is opened, a light goes on in me. Although as a hostess I am by now certifiably brain-dead, the twenty-five-watt glow reflected off the white interior enamel produces the same effect upon me, splayed out on my chaise, as an electrode applied to the nerves of a formaldehyde frog on a laboratory table. I twitch with phantom hostess guilt. (Larry doesn’t do guilt; he just won’t get up.) If you do not conclude within seconds that there is nothing to eat except baking soda, I will feel compelled to assist you to that conclusion by reciting the contents of the refrigerator and the pantry: ‘Mayo, but no tuna; salsa, but no chips; a humid box of Grape-Nuts—and if I were you, I’d smell the milk.’
“When you’re at home and you have no food, you go shopping. When you’re making yourself at home in our home and there’s no food, you should also go shopping. The A & P, which is air-conditioned, is a mile and one-half down the road on the right and is a nice place to visit, especially at low tide. Remember, I don’t eat bluefish, Larry doesn’t eat anything that flies, and you use a lot of paper towels. While you’re there, would you please pick up two copies of the newspaper so that Larry won’t have to erase your crossword puzzle?
“Laundry. There is no laundry. There are no towels. In the event that wetness occurs after swimming or showering, guests are requested to jump up and down on the deck until the condition clears up. In order that subsequent guests may also enjoy clean sheets, please sleep on top of the bedspread.
“Conversation. We will not ask you if you had a good night’s sleep if you will not ask us. Keep all remarks before 9:00 A.M. to a simple ‘Good morning.’ Since we are not responsible for the weather but only feel as if we are, statements like ‘I love a rainy day at the beach’ are regarded as insincere and passive-aggressive. So are the questions ‘Is there anything I can do?’ and ‘Where do you keep the ice cubes?’ Unwelcome topics of conversation include periodic reports that you are ‘unwinding.’ (You are not unwinding; you are feeling the first heady symptoms of malnutrition.) Larry particularly resents estimates of the height of the stack of mail that awaits you on your desk. Please be especially careful not to tell us how lucky we are to be able to be on vacation for a whole month. We are not on vacation. We are entertaining you. Permissible subjects of conversation include our dreams, my tan, and your stretch marks.
“Weather. After two consecutive days of rain, the impulse to go home is a healthy one and should be acted upon.
“Your departure. Do not strip the bed. (See ‘Laundry,’ above.) Do not leave anything behind. If you do, you may buy it back next Wednesday between 11:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. from the Sisters of the Immaculate Visitation at Saint Mary’s by the Harbor thrift shop.
“Off-season communications. If either of us should, in the course of speaking with you during the winter months, even suggest the possibility that we might rent a cottage again next summer, please be good enough not to remind us of it next spring.”
Having a Terrible Time
We like to think that we choose our vacation destinations freely, but in fact, most of the time the choice is made for us by the elusive, fickle finger of fashion. Countries, like children’s n
ames, go in and out of fashion: Tiffany gives way to Nicole; Matthew to Jason. Suddenly it’s time to talk Turkey, rent a villa in Tuscany or an apartment in London, cruise to Alaska, or visit Belize, a country we hadn’t even heard of. At the turn of this new century, travelers, lemminglike, were converging en masse on Antarctica. We haven’t yet visited Antarctica, or the North Pole, Australia, New Zealand, or China. Larry, of course, is raring to go, but I resist. As I get older, these places seem to be moving farther away. They have come to constitute their own special category on my list of future trips: too far to go, but not too far to have been.
If there’s any criterion by which one might predict America’s next popular vacation spot, it may be our enthusiasm for visiting countries with which we’ve recently been at war or which have otherwise been brought to their knees—Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and, any minute now, Afghanistan. If Hilton builds in Tora Bora, will they come?
When we decided to go to Chile a few years ago, we found ourselves ahead of the fashion curve. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were the trend-setters, the Joneses up with whom others would soon have to keep. We were surprised that the consistent response to our choice of that particular destination was, “What made you go there?”
Nobody ever asks, “Why France?” “Why Italy?” or “Why England?” Visiting England is like visiting your mom. She’s old and has nice manners, cheap theater tickets, and lots of curious old relics in her attic that are fun to look at over and over again, like Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace. Best of all, she speaks English, she loves us, and she’s finally learned how to cook. Chile, apparently, is a different story.
Everybody knows why Ferdinand Magellan went to Chile. For him, it was a natural: he was looking for the Strait of Magellan. Nazi-hunters were looking for Martin Bormann. Drug runners go to Chile looking for dope. But why did we go? I blame it on the laundry and my lifelong tendency to get carried away.
I am a romantic. I’m a pushover for a good-looking landscape—a craggy peak, an arid desert, or a frozen tundra. Just whisper “Tierra del Fuego” in my ear and I am instantly aroused and unable to resist the call of the wild or pay attention to the voice of reason saying, “You hate cold, you hate windy, you hate uninhabited.”
It is my practice to unload the contents of the dryer onto our king-size bed and fold the darks and lights neatly into piles of his and hers, all the while distracting myself from the tedium of the chore by watching television.
This particular afternoon, I viewed a travel documentary on Chile. There, before my marveling eyes, I saw people who could have been me or Larry sand-boarding down the sand dunes in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It looked like such fun!
By the time I had matched all the socks, I was transported to the center of Chile, where the same happy people were poised at the edge of the volcanorimmed waters of Chile’s stunning Lake District. Just one commercial later, they were in Patagonia, and it was there that I became one with them, galloping through the rugged wilderness. In the background were the mountain peaks I would climb the next morning, after I got off my horse.
This was the most extraordinarily gorgeous country I’d ever seen! I had to go! So intense was my desire that it honestly didn’t cross my mind until we got to Chile six months later that I was now sixty-three years old and I had never ridden a horse. Nor, for that matter, had I ever gone surfboarding on water, never mind sand, or climbed a mountain. And, by the way, Larry, who knew how to do all three, hadn’t bothered to remind me of this, which is another reason that he had a very good time in Chile and I did not.
Larry doesn’t care where he goes on vacation; for him, go and vacation are the operative words. Larry will travel anywhere to do anything, and no matter what happens, he’ll have a wonderful time. I tend to think this is because he is basically much less sensitive and discriminating than I am, although, to be fair, he might say it’s because he is essentially a much happier, more open-minded, and less demanding and judgmental person.
Given our division of labor—he does nothing, I do everything—I was the one who spent hours on the phone with my on-line travel agent, insisting that there was too such a thing as sand-boarding in the Atacama Desert, that I had seen it on a TV documentary, that it was practically my main reason for spending a small fortune to go to Chile, and that I would cancel the trip if she couldn’t locate someone to rent us sand boards, whatever they were, and find us a suitable dune.
However, when we actually got there, it was Larry who was able, in spite of the high altitude, to drag himself and his sand board up a two-hundred-foot sand dune, strap his feet sideways, one in front of the other, onto a narrow strip of wood, keep his balance while keeping his knees bent, and slide smartly down the sandy incline. I was the one who stood at the bottom taking pictures of his many descents. (It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to sand-board. Stopping to take a rest and a swig from my water bottle at six-inch intervals, I made it halfway up the dune. I even strapped my feet onto the board at an angle and succeeding in assuming an upright position before I realized that I had already had arthroscopic surgery in one knee and it would make a lot more sense if I just sat down and pretended I was on a toboggan. This proved humiliatingly ineffective since sand is not like snow, my behind is several inches wider than the board, and even after giddy-apping my heels vigorously and repeatedly into the dune, nothing budged.)
Larry and I love to swim. It seemed only natural that I make careful arrangements with our travel agent to make sure we had an opportunity to go swimming during our two-day visit to the Lake District in central Chile.
It had not escaped my notice that the lakes might be fed by runoff from the surrounding snow-covered volcanoes and therefore might be prohibitively cold. After all, no one was swimming in the documentary. “What,” I asked my beleaguered agent, “is the average temperature of the water in February?” After making a number of contacts with her people in Chile, the word came back: somewhere between fifty-five and sixty-two degrees.
“Is that Fahrenheit?” I pressed, just to be sure. (Large issues, such as “Do I really want to go to Chile, or is viewing the documentary enough?” tend to escape my notice, but when it comes to the details, I’m a terrier.)
We would need wet suits. The research for the perfect suits began in the yellow pages and quickly moved on-line, where I located two at $375 apiece and had them mailed on approval. Assisted by each other and a spray can of PAM, Larry and I were able to struggle into ours in under a half hour, which is OK if you’re not competing in a triathlon. The wet suits took up so much space in our luggage that we had to ditch our foul-weather gear, which, it turned out, we could have used in the third and last part of the trip, while mountain climbing in the freezing-cold, wind-driven rainstorms in Patagonia.
Unfortunately, by the time we got to the Lake District, I was already suffering from insomnia, which can be brought on by changing time zones, being at high altitudes, and having a bad time. I was spending my days yawning and watching Larry have fun, and my nights sitting up in bed, watching him sleep. It is not easy maintaining good sportsmanship, never mind a marriage, under these conditions.
Meanwhile Larry, who insists upon preserving all of his bodily functions no matter where he is or how hostile or disruptive the circumstances might be, especially for others whom he is supposed to care about, remained oblivious to my condition.
“Did you have a good night’s sleep?” he’d ask each morning.
“I was up all night,” I’d say—not to make him feel bad or guilty, but just because it was true. After all, if you’re not going to be honest with the person you love, especially when you’re on vacation together, well, then, what’s the point?
“Funny, you were snoring at five A.M. when I got up to pee,” he’d say, planting a little kiss on my cheek, throwing back the covers, and leaping out of bed.
What would this vacation have been like, I wondered, if I were on my own? I might have met someone
who enjoyed planning vacations, so that I could have just relaxed and had a good time. I might have met a guy who didn’t spy on me at night and didn’t know how to sand-board, someone with whom I might have had something in common, like insomnia.
I was too tired to swim that day; I stayed in the hotel, which I had specifically selected because it was located on the best lake, and watched Larry. The water temperature was sixty-five. He didn’t wear his wet suit. He swam two miles. I didn’t take any pictures.
Our next and final stop was Patagonia. Although Patagonia is located in el sud, it is nevertheless the coldest part of Chile. It is almost in Antarctica. This counterintuitive situation is caused by the equator, which has a way of disorienting people who live above it into thinking that south means hot and north means cold.
Nor had I fully absorbed the idea that when you are ineluctably drawn to words like remote outpost, you have to figure that there are no commercial landing fields nearby. The item on our itinerary that read “Fly to Punta Arenas, transfer by van (six hours) to your hotel” had escaped my notice. Romantics tend to skip over parenthetical information.
Although I had made all the arrangements to stay in a hotel that had a stable, it was Larry who went galloping off into the Patagonian pampas on his silver steed, leaving me slumped on the beginner’s nag, led around on a string by a grouchy gaucho who apparently wasn’t being paid enough to kick my horse in the flanks from time to time, just to keep him walking.
Traveling while Married Page 7
