It is appalling how little Spanish I speak, but my sister Elaine has taken classes so while we are in Mexico and someone asks us a question I just gesture towards her, even if she doesn’t want me to. It is part of my emoji-lingual repertoire. Flexing your arm means, “that water bottle is tough to open, isn’t it?” Wiping my laptop means I have used too much sunscreen. Choking my hands around my throat means “the chef is worried whether you have allergies to seafood.” This was motioned to a Portuguese couple during a teppanyki dinner, during which Mexican chefs trained in Japanese flaming of food enjoy themselves a little too much.
My sister asleep in a lounge chair.
Me asleep in a lounge chair.
Vacations by women travelling with their husbands are known as boot camp. Vacations by mothers travelling with their grown daughters are known as Travels with My Ancient. The term for vacations with sisters is ‘parallel play’, just as when we were toddlers, because we spend contented hours without speaking to each other. We bring books to the dinner table. We do not judge each other’s food or swimsuit choices. I wondered if we should pose as a lesbian couple to get the romantic seating on the beach but Elaine said we look too much alike. “Isn’t that what happens to all couples?” I asked.
On day one of this vacation I swam ten laps of the pool, applied sunscreen religiously, read a history of al-Qaeda, sketched, ate prudently, snorkelled and went with Elaine on the double-decker bus to a restaurant elsewhere on the compound. Day two I bicycled at the fitness centre and played Plants vs. Zombies. I spent day three under a towel murmuring ‘agua’ to passing ladies with trays. It would be useful to Canadians if we could trot out this level of sunshine at home once a week in November instead of blasting our brains for a week with an airplane trip on either end.
The buffet building was a kilometre from our room, which made for a beautiful breakfast stroll by the ocean as we passed a promenade: prams draped with linen protecting the wee ones inside, open strollers with babies snacking on their feet, divas of babble, toddlers screaming their heads off, young disdainful rajahs and lustrous-cheeked children so deeply asleep they had fused with the parent carrying them.
A couple in the cabana opposite us at the adults’ pool.
Why a history of al-Qaeda, you may ask? I’m delighted to tell you. It was The Looming Tower by exceptional journalist Lawrence Wright, which details the road to 9/11 beginning with an Egyptian fundamentalist who became a martyr who begat some jihadists who begat Taliban and mujahideen and Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden and Isil and all the evil feels against a Western world too wrapped up in spending money. I am trying to understand whether our era, yours and mine, is aberrant, or what always happens when privileged people like me don’t pay enough attention.
As the week progressed I went from saying a few words in Spanish over and over (how are you and thank you) as some pompous show of my bona fides, to using my English as politely as I could (‘thank you very much’), neither of which showed much respect at my hosts’ language. I gave up the emoji-linguists up after I mimed a request for milk for my coffee by milking a cow. I was tired of acting like an idiot, for one reason, and also the Mexican woman watching me with level eyes made me realize I was not acting like an idiot, not at all.