We stayed out of the sun, out of the grungy water, and away from Mom and Dad, who kept talking about the resort like it was some sort of heaven even though the day before it was all about selfish bastards. The difference: Dad reserved chairs under an umbrella at six in the morning with two magazines and a rock. He said, “When in Rome.” I didn’t know what that meant.
We met for lunch and Dad was clearly drunk. Mom said after lunch we had to come down to the beach and have some fun. “We didn’t come all this way for you not to swim in the Caribbean!”
So after lunch Bruce and I went for a swim, me in my one-piece bathing suit and him in his oversize surfer trunks, which looked even bigger on his lanky frame. There were no other kids on the beach. They were all in the crystal clear pool surrounded by drunk adults in bikinis. We trudged through the seaweed toilet water, and I didn’t mind it as much as I did the day before. I even took a few blobs of it and put it on my head. Bruce followed. We crowned ourselves prince and princess of the seaweed. I felt tiny fish brush past my legs but I still couldn’t see anything. I tried not to look down. I floated awhile in the water and asked the sea god to please get rid of the seaweed. I asked him to make the people at the resort stop being selfish bastards. I asked him to make me a famous artist.
Bruce and I played a game of catch where the water came up to my chest and it came up to his waist. I always tried to throw the little Nerf ball hard and high so he’d have to jump for it. Each time he jumped, his trunks ended up a little lower on his hips.
I thought this was funny, but Bruce didn’t, so he stopped playing catch.
Under the thatched umbrella, I asked Bruce why he got so mad at me for throwing the ball high.
“I don’t want my junk out for everyone to see,” he said.
“Junk?”
“You know—my penis?”
Mom disallowed weird names for body parts. I knew what an uvula was by the time I was four. And a patella. And a sternum. And a penis. I didn’t know what Bruce was learning at college, but junk was a step backward if you ask me.
Bruce ordered himself a beer. He was nineteen and in Mexico you can drink beer at nineteen. When the beer came, he drank it like he was drinking Windex.
“Why’d you order that if you don’t like it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
When Martín the bar waiter came back around, Bruce ordered a Mango Tango—the drink of the day. When it came, he drank it down like it was lemonade. He let me try a sip and it was good. But he wouldn’t let me have more than a sip. I went out to where the tide was coming in and I drew a few pictures in the sand with my finger. First, it was a fish. The water washed it away. Then, I drew my feet. The water washed it away. Then, I drew a pelican. It was a really great pelican and I wanted Mom or Dad to see it but they were still under the umbrella drinking Mango Tangos and the water came and washed the pelican away.
None of this is original, but when I was ten-year-old Sarah, I didn’t care about things being original. I just wanted to have fun on the beach and with my brother. I’d missed Bruce during his first year in college. Even though he was nine years older than I was, we were a good match. We both knew the right name for body parts (even if he’d stopped using them). We both still cleaned our rooms on Saturday mornings like we’d been trained to. We both still made grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches the same way and, even though he was so much bigger than I was, we had the same walk, the same logic, and the same curiosity about things.
The one thing that was different was how we saw Mom and Dad.
He told me, in Mexico—on night three when we went to the buffet restaurant together while Mom and Dad had a reservation at the hibachi at the Japanese place in the resort—“I think Mom and Dad are finally getting a divorce.”
I said, “They are not.”
I remember looking at him like he was breaking my heart. And I remember him looking at me like he knew he’d just broken my heart.
He said, “I thought you knew.”
“They’re normal.”
“So? Normal people get divorced all the time,” he said.
“They don’t even fight.”
“They fight all the time,” he said. “And they don’t even sleep in the same bed.”
“This is bullshit,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“They’re not getting a divorce,” I said.
“They’re only together because of us,” he said. “That’s the only reason they’re not divorced yet. Because of you. They’re waiting until you go to college.”
“Bullshit,” I said, stuffing tortilla chips into my mouth.
Bruce didn’t say much after that.
? ? ?