Lost in the Resort

Time spent watching and writing about other people

Last weekend, my best friend Dana and I went to a resort in Cancun, just the two of us. It was our first time traveling together in our 10 years of friendship. Everyone kept asking if we were celebrating anything, and while we weren’t really, I like to think we were celebrating each other, and health, and being together after these hard last five years.

Most of traveling amounts to people watching. There was a big wedding Saturday night at the resort. All the employees asked us if we were there for the wedding, and again, we just said “no” sheepishly, as if it was a weird and embarrassing thing to NOT be in Cancun for one of the three weddings happening on campus that weekend.

We kept our eyes open for the brides. We felt like we’d know when we saw them. I spotted the first in the pool bathroom. I saw nothing of her but her white slide sandals that said “BRIDE” across the top, peaking out from the bottom of the stall. One eye spy item checked off the list.

The second bride, we knew right away. She was tanner than the giant entourage following her. Her teeth looked to be whitened- or the glow from her white mini dress was reflecting up and into her mouth. All heads turned to her. Friends cheered as she walked by.

Ah, there she is.

At the pool, we were flanked by a giant family wedding party. The bride and groom’s sides were just meeting each other for the first time. Aunt greeting aunts. Uncles slapping uncles on the back.

What could’ve been awkward turned out seamless. Both families seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Dark tanned, taut skin. Beer bellies. Various tattoos on forearms and backs. An accident from the same part of middle America.

They traded stories of other vacation mishaps, all involving heavy drinking. The short sister drove the Mercedes drunk on Marco Island. A brother remembered the relief of the car’s AC. Having multiple 6 packs of beers in Puerto Rico ( a place they noted was a “third world country”). A husband tells his tale of vomiting into a hotel room sink, and red-faced laughed about the housekeeper’s reactions.

Each story garnered squeals and groans. Maybe remembering the sick of it all. But they kept ordering tequila shots, vodka lemonades, and Jameson on the rocks.

I wanted to be mad at them. After all, they chose the dedicated quiet pool where there was barely any music and everyone was reading or keeping to themselves. But none of them seems embarrassed or ashamed by one another. Just grinning at their own ruckus behavior.

“We're tough to get along with, and even tougher to keep up with,” said the patriarch of one side of the family. They called one sister a whale and a future brother-in-law a Gorilla. One woman says she always gets mistaken for being “the dead sister.” I imagined a small tick being etched into the victim’s brain every time an insult was hurled. But no one got upset.

The older 60-something siblings lined up the pool with a handmade “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY” sign and printed out 8x11 of their elderly mother. All six siblings groaned and said, “let’s get this over with” before the picture was taken but they all cheered and hugged once it was done.

An uncle was chastised for sitting further away from the group. He didn’t fight the comments and snares. And when his pizza was delivered, he carried it over to the pool and called out the others to come and get a piece and left the plates at the edge.

I thought, “NO! Do not leave it! You won’t have any left for yourself! Your family will take it all!”

But then when he came back, I thought he was retrieving his plate, but instead, he sat down a heaping pile of folded napkins and quietly said, “Here you go,” and smiled at the group with admiration before returning to his solitary corner pool chair.

How lucky to be loved so unconditionally. I think about my large family. We do not drink ourselves sick but there have been many times when all 20 of us are out and my mom and her sisters’ laughs carry loudly over the entire restaurant. How at small concerts, my family members are the only ones up at the front, dancing wildly. How we constantly bring up memories and remember-whens when we’re all together. A folk telling tradition to keep our dead alive. We do it loudly.

I’ve often wondered, especially when I was younger, what those who shared space with my family thought. I hope they thought we were lucky.

I will see my big family in July, like I do every year. I look forward to it all year, every year. A week in Michigan, being loud, lying quietly on the beach, speaking in a hushed tone with my aunts about things that did not go so right this past year.

We will be without my uncle for the first time. My heart feels leaky and achy thinking of him on the beach at sunset last year and all the years before. There is such a hole. But my cousin had a new baby girl. And my sister, my connecting lego piece, won’t be there this year because she will be 9 months pregnant. And for the first time in my life, I won’t be able to stay the whole week because I have a show.

The years are ever changing. I know that. The family at the Cancun pool knows that. That’s why they’re gripping each other’s shoulders so tightly and laughing so annoyingly.

On the last night of our trip, Dana and I sat on our room’s patio at sunset, talking about the friendships we lost. A topic I have a hard time breaching. My trachea turns into a delicate, splintering piece of wood when it comes up. I push through it, though. We talk about our grief without naming it grief.

We say, “Thank God we are on the other side.” We then go have a vodka lemonade.

________

Kindle pool reading by Dana

I read “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” by Sally Rooney while in Mexico. It’s the third book of hers I’ve read, and I’m still unsure if I’m a total fan. I love her characters and appreciate the loose and almost confusing way she writes dialogue. I have a hard time writing dialogue, so I love to see someone do it freely and (seemingly) effortlessly.

I have a hard time with any characters who don’t speak their mind and get things off their chest immediately. I constantly am saying to myself a version of, “Why are you going home alone instead of just saying the ONE thing you truly feel?” It infuriates me whenever I read books or watch TV. But I was thinking last night that maybe I spend all my time with open heart sleeved people. I can’t imagine a world in which things are kept so inside for chapters, for years.

I still enjoyed the read and recommend it. Still trying to finish Lincoln in the Bardo.

I’m leaving my job the first week of June, and can’t stop listening to “Lost in the Supermarket” by the Clash on repeat. I got a root canal. Spencer comes home from tour tomorrow! And as always, I want to lay my head in all my friends’ laps (or vice versa), while we share big beers in the backyard.

Xoxo