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.