“Buenas tardes,” the woman said back, quickly weighing and bagging all of Franny’s items. “Dieciséis. Sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” Franny plunged a hand into her purse and felt around for her wallet.
All of Franny’s friends with children were so excited for her, to have Sylvia finally heading off to school. It’ll be like a vacation, they said to her, a vacation from being a full-time parent. What they meant was, You aren’t getting any younger, and neither are your children. Some of her friends had children who weren’t even in high school yet, and their lives revolved around piano lessons and ballet class, like Franny’s had so many years ago. Or like it might have, if she’d worked less. They all complained about not having any free time, about never having sex with their husbands, but really they were bragging. My life is too full, that’s what they were saying. I have so much left to do. Enjoy menopause. While it was true that Franny was going to have her life back in some way, it wasn’t going to be the life of a twenty-year-old, all late nights and hangovers. It was going to be the life of an older person. She was six years away from a senior discount at movie theaters. Six years of looking at Jim in the kitchen and wanting to plunge an ice pick in between his eyes.
“Gracias,” Franny said, when the woman handed her the change.
Sylvia had passed out immediately in the smallest bedroom, which looked like it had been built for a nun: a bed hardly wider than her slim teenaged body, white walls, white sheets, painted white floor. The only thing un-nunlike about the room was a painting of a naked woman in repose. It looked like one of Charles’s, and she was used to those. He loved to paint those tender triangles of pubic hair, often of her mother in her youth. It was what it was. Other people had the luxury of never seeing their mother naked, but not Sylvia. She stretched lazily, her pointed toes hanging over the end of the bed. The house smelled weird, like wet rocks and frogs, and it took Sylvia several minutes to remember where she was.
“Me llamo Sylvia Post,” she said. “Dónde está el baño?”
Sylvia rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. The single window in the room was open, and a nice breeze came in. Sylvia had few thoughts about Spain: it wasn’t like France, which made her think of baguettes and bicycles, or Italy, which made her think of gondolas and pizza. Picasso was Spanish but looked French and sounded Italian. There was the one Woody Allen movie that took place in Spain, but Sylvia hadn’t actually seen it. Matadors fighting bulls? That was Spain, wasn’t it? She might as well have woken up in a sunny bedroom somewhere on the island of Peoria, Illinois.
The bathroom was down the hall, and it looked like it hadn’t been renovated since 1973. The tiles on the wall above the bathtub and behind the sink were the color of split-pea soup, a food group that Sylvia planned to happily avoid for the rest of her life. There was no proper shower, just a handheld nozzle on a long silver neck that began at the hot and cold knobs. Sylvia turned the hot one and waited for a minute, running the water over her hand to feel when it got warm. She waited for a few minutes, and when the warmth didn’t arrive, she turned the other knob, stripped off her clothes, and climbed in. She had to stoop in order to get the nozzle to reach her head and was able to really dampen only one body part at a time. There was a bar of soap in the dish, but Sylvia couldn’t quite work out how to wash her body with one hand and douse herself with freezing- cold water with the other.
All the towels in the bathroom seemed to have been made for little people—Thumbelina-sized people, people even shorter than her mother. Sylvia tried to wrap her upper and lower parts with two of the glorified washcloths. She combed her hair with her fingers and looked at herself in the mirror. Sylvia knew she wasn’t bad-looking, she wasn’t deformed, but she also knew that there was a vast chasm between her and the girls at her school who were beautiful. Her face was a little bit long, and her hair hung limply to her shoulders, neither short nor long, neither blond nor brown, but somewhere in the middle. That was Sylvia’s whole problem: she was the middle. Sylvia couldn’t imagine how she would explain herself to someone else, to a stranger: she was average, with blue eyes that weren’t particularly large or shapely. Nothing anyone would write a poem about. Sylvia thought about that a lot: so many of the world’s best poems were written before their authors were really adults—Keats, Rimbaud, Plath—and yet they had packed so much beauty and agony into their lives, enough to sustain their memory for centuries. Sylvia stuck out her tongue and carefully opened the bathroom door with the hand holding the towel around her waist.
“Perdón!”
There was a boy attached to the voice. Sylvia shut her eyes, hoping that she was hallucinating, but when she opened them again, he was still there. Maybe boy wasn’t the right word—there was a young man standing in front of her, maybe Bobby’s age, maybe younger, but definitely older than she was.
“Oh my God,” Sylvia said. She didn’t want to notice that the complete stranger who was staring at her while she was wearing very tiny towels was handsome, with dark wavy hair like someone on the cover of a romance novel, but she couldn’t help it. “Oh my God,” she said again, and hurried around him, taking the smallest steps possible, so that her legs were never more than two inches apart. When she was safely on the other side of her bedroom door, Sylvia let the towels drop to the floor so that she could use both of her hands to cover her face and scream without making any noise at all.
“A doctor, that’s so wonderful,” Franny said. She was fawning, she could feel herself fawning, but it was out of her hands. There was no stopping the flirtation once it was in motion; she could sooner have stopped a speeding train. There was a twenty-year-old Mallorcan in her dining room, and she wanted to cover his body with local olive oil and wrestle until dark.
“Probably, yes,” he said. The boy’s name was Joan, pronounced Joe-ahhhn, and he was to be Sylvia’s Spanish tutor for the next two weeks, coming over for an hour every weekday during their stay. Joan’s parents lived nearby and were friendly with Gemma. (She’d mentioned some gardening club they had in common—Franny had stopped reading the e-mail. Training succulents, maybe.) He’d tutored before, and charged only twenty dollars per hour, which was absurdly inexpensive, even before Franny knew what he looked like, but now seemed like a crime against beauty. The boy was in his second year at the university in Barcelona, home for the summer, living with his parents. He probably ate dinner with them, too! Bobby had never once come home for an entire summer. As far as Franny knew, he’d never even considered it. Once he’d left for Miami, New York was no more home to him than LaGuardia Airport was. Franny felt her cheeks begin to flush, and she was glad to see Sylvia lurking in the hall when she looked up.
“Oh, good, here’s my daughter now. Sylvia, come meet Joan. Joe—ahhhn!” Franny waved her over. Sylvia shook her head and stayed put in the shadows. “Sylvia, what’s the matter with you?” Franny felt her soft, melty feelings about Joan begin to move toward embarrassment at her daughter’s childish behavior.