“Are you an actual motorcycle gang?” Jim asked, leaning across the aisle. Younger editors at Gallant were always pitching features that had them test-driving expensive speed machines, but Jim had never ridden one himself.
“You could say that,” the sleepy one said.
“I always wanted to have a motorcycle. Never happened.”
“Not too late.” Then the sleepy one returned his face to his hand and began to snore.
Franny rolled her eyes aggressively, but no one else was paying attention.
The ride was quick, and they landed in sun-drenched Palma in under an hour. Franny put on her sunglasses and shambled from the tarmac to the baggage claim like a movie star who had relaxed into stout-bodied middle age. Commercial airlines were about as glamorous as Greyhound buses, but she could pretend. Franny had taken the Concorde twice, to Paris and back, and mourned the loss of the supersonic speed and the elaborately presented airplane food. Everyone in Palma seemed to be speaking German, and for a moment, Franny worried that they’d gotten off at the wrong place, as if she’d been asleep on the subway and missed her stop. It was a proper Mediterranean morning, bright and warm, with a hint of olive oil in the air. Franny felt pleased with her choice of venue: Mallorca was less cliché than the South of France, and less overrun by Americans than Tuscany. Of course it had an overbuilt shoreline and its share of terrible tourist-infested restaurants, but they would avoid all that. Islands, being harder to get to, naturally separated some of the wheat from the chaff, which was the entire philosophy behind places like Nantucket, where children grew up feeling entitled to private beaches and loud pants. But Franny didn’t want too much of that elitist hooey—she wanted to please everyone, including the children, which meant having a big enough town nearby that people could go see movies dubbed into Spanish, if they wanted to fly the coop for a few hours. Jim had grown up in Connecticut and was therefore used to being marooned with his terrible family, but the rest of them were New Yorkers, which meant that having an escape route was necessary for one’s sanity.
The house they’d rented was a twenty-minute drive from Palma proper, “straight up a hill,” according to Gemma, which made Franny groan, averse as she was to location-mandated forms of cardiovascular exercise. But who needed to walk anywhere when they had so many bedrooms, and a swimming pool, within minutes of the ocean? The idea had been to be together, everyone nicely trapped, with card games and wine and all the fixings of satisfying summers at their fingertips. Things had changed in the last few months, but Franny still wanted it to be true that spending time with her family wasn’t punishment, not like it would be with her parents, or with Jim’s. Franny thought that the major accomplishment of her life was producing two children who seemed to like each other even when no one else was looking, though with ten years between them, Sylvia and Bobby had had very separate childhoods. Maybe that was the key to all good relationships, having oceans of time apart. It might not even have been true anymore—the children saw each other only on holidays, and on Bobby’s infrequent visits home. Franny hoped that it was.
Jim sorted out the rental car while Franny and Sylvia waited for the bags. Even on vacation, Franny didn’t see the point in being anything less than efficient—why should they all have to wait to do everything? Jim had to drive, anyway, because all European rental cars were stick, and Franny had only very rarely driven a stick since her high school drivers’ education class in 1971. And anyway, there was no reason to spend more time than necessary at the airport. Franny wanted to get a good look at the house, go grocery shopping, pick bedrooms for everyone, find a spot where she could write, know which closet held the extra towels. She wanted to buy shampoo, and toilet paper, and cheese. The vacation wouldn’t officially start until she’d taken a shower and eaten some olives.
“Mom,” Sylvia said. She pointed to a black suitcase the size of a small coffin. “Is that yours?”
“No,” Franny said, watching an even larger bag slide down the luggage chute. “That one.”
“I don’t know why you packed so much,” Sylvia said. “It’s only two weeks.”
“It’s all presents for you and your brother,” Franny said, pinching Sylvia’s narrow biceps. “All I brought is one extra shroud. Mothers don’t need anything else, do they?”
Sylvia fluttered her lips like a horse and went to fetch her mother’s bag.
“Oh, those guys,” Sylvia said, and gestured with her chin toward the Too-Loud Motorcyclists. “I love them.”
“They’re overgrown children,” Franny said, sighing loudly through her open mouth. “They should have gone to Ibiza.”
“No, Mom, they’re The Sticky Spokes Rock ’n’ Roll Squad, see?”
Sleepy Terry had turned around to pick up his suitcase, a slightly incongruous orange rollie, exposing not only the pale crack of his bottom but also the back of his leather jacket, which read in giant block letters just as Sylvia had dictated.
“That’s a terrible name,” Franny said. “I bet they’ll spend the whole week drunk and killing themselves on tiny little roads.”
Sylvia had lost interest and was hurrying over to her own bag, now skidding down to the lip of the conveyer belt with a soft plop.
The Posts hadn’t vacationed in years, not like this. There were the summer rentals in Sag Harbor, the unhampton, as Franny liked to call it until it wasn’t true anymore, and then the one-month-long stint in Santa Barbara when Sylvia was five and Bobby was fifteen, two entirely different trips happening at once, a nightmare at mealtimes. It was too hard to travel all together, Franny had decided. She took Bobby to Miami by himself when he was sixteen, and granted him mother-free afternoons in South Beach, a trip he would later claim as the inspiration for attending the University of Miami, a dubious honor for his mother, who then wished she’d taken him on a trip to Cambridge instead. Jim and Franny and Sylvia once spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, doing nothing but eating barbecue and waiting for the bats to emerge from under the bridge. And of course Franny was often traveling on her own, covering trends in Southern Californian cuisine for this magazine, or a New Mexican chili festival for that one, or eating her way across France, one flaky croissant after another. Most days of the year, Jim and Sylvia were at home, cobbling together an elaborate meal out of the leftovers in the fridge, or ordering in from one of the restaurants on Columbus Avenue, pretending to argue over the remote control. Franny’s own parents, the Golds of 41 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, had never once taken her out of the country, and she took it as her duty to provide new experiences for her children. Sylvia’s tongue would soften, her Spanish would go from New York Puerto Rican Spanish to Actual Spanish Spanish, and someday, some thirty or forty years down the road, when she was in Madrid or Barcelona and the language came back to her like her first lover, Franny knew that Sylvia would thank her for this trip, even if she was already dead.
The house was in the foothills of the Tramuntana Mountains, on the far side of the town of Puigpunyent, on the winding road that would eventually lead to Valldemossa. No one could pronounce Puigpunyent (the car rental agent had said Pooch-poon-yen, or something of the sort, unrepeatable with an American tongue), and so when Sylvia insisted on calling it Pigpen, Jim and Franny couldn’t correct her, and Pigpen it was. Mallorcan Spanish wasn’t the same as proper Spanish, which wasn’t the same as Catalan. Franny’s plan was to ignore the differences and just plow ahead—it was how she usually got along in foreign countries. Unless you were in France, most people were delighted to hear you try and fail to form the right words. Franny and Sylvia stared out opposite windows, Franny in the front and Sylvia in the back, while Jim drove. It was only twenty-five minutes from the airport, according to Gemma, but that seemed to be true only if you knew where you were going. Gemma was one of Franny’s least favorite humans on the planet, for a number of reasons: 1. She was Charles’s second-closest female friend. 2. She was tall and thin and blond, three automatic strikes. 3. She’d been shipped off to boarding school outside Paris and spoke perfect French, which Franny found profoundly show-offy, like doing a triple axel at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.