Happy
Aruba, Cats
Poolside. 1:47 PM. 82°F. Wind from the northeast at 12 knots.
Three cats on a lounger. Brown, brown, black. The black one is hiding. The blind one is smiling. The loud one is about to say something.
Moxie on the subject of ranch dressing:
“Sunscreen. SPF 50. And is that ranch dressing?”
It was. It always was. The couple from Waukesha, Wisconsin, had packed a three-ounce bottle in a Ziploc bag, nestled between a travel toothbrush and a sleeve of Tums, and carried it through security at Mitchell International with the quiet determination of people who knew what they liked.
Maisie had heard them explain this to the bartender. She heard everything. When you cannot see the world, the world narrates itself to you, unsolicited and in extraordinary detail.
A partial census of the pool deck, conducted by Bagheera from the shadow beneath the lounger canopy, 1:51 PM:
One man, Detroit Lions hat, backstroke, cautious.
One woman, paperback, umbrella, his wife presumably.
Two Ontarians, freshly pink, vowels round as river stones.
One additional Canadian behind the towel stand. Blue Jays shirt. She almost said something about him but then didn’t. Then did.
“There’s one behind the towel stand.”
This was, for Bagheera, the equivalent of a keynote address.
On the question of why here:
It makes sense if you think about it. You are in Ohio or Ontario or Michigan. It is February. The sky is the color of a dishrag. It has been this color for four months and will remain so for three more. You could go to Cancun, but the water. You could go to Florida, but Florida.
Aruba: four hours from Toronto, five from Chicago. Direct flights. English spoken. The beaches face west, so the Caribbean just sits there, turquoise and still, like a lake that made better choices. The trade winds keep the heat honest.
You don’t come here to discover anything. You come here to stop.
2:00 PM. Bingo.
Rosa set up the folding table near the shallow end with the efficiency of someone who had done this one thousand times, which she approximately had.
“Every single day,” Moxie said.
“Every single day,” Maisie agreed.
The guests arranged themselves in plastic chairs. They had finished lunch. They had consumed, collectively, an inadvisable quantity of Balashi beer. They were going to sit in the equatorial sun and wait for someone to say a letter and a number that matched a letter and a number on their card and they were going to feel, briefly, something like joy.
“That’s not boring,” Maisie said. “That’s the dream.”
Moxie wanted to argue. Arguing was his vocation, his art form, his cardio. But the sun was on his belly and the wind was right and a blender was running somewhere and he thought: maybe not today.
“It’s perfect,” Bagheera said, loudly, then looked as though she wished the lounger would swallow her.
Silence.
B-7. G-52. A woman from Manitoba shrieked. The steel drums played something that used to be Bob Marley and was now just vibration and warmth. Maisie pressed her shoulder into the cushion and felt the sun on her face, which was, to her, a kind of seeing. Moxie closed his eyes. Bagheera watched everything.
This went on for some time.
The iguana.
It came around the planter box the way iguanas do: slowly, mechanically, with the absolute confidence of a creature that has never once reconsidered a decision. Three feet long. Gray-green. Eyes like stones at the bottom of a clear stream.
Bagheera was behind Maisie before the iguana’s second step.
“What is that. What is that what is that.”
Maisie yawned. “Big lizard.”
Moxie was on the concrete, puffed, electric, positioned between the creature and his family. “This is our chair.”
The iguana stopped. It looked at him with one eye. The eye contained, it seemed, several centuries of unbroken patience.
“You’re new,” it said.
“We’re guests.”
“Everyone is a guest. The Canadians. The Midwesterners. The cats.” A slow blink. “You come. You sit. You leave. Then you come back.”
“Why?” Moxie said. His tail was still enormous, but his ears had tilted forward.
The iguana turned its head toward the sea. The water was a blue that didn’t exist in nature except here, where it had apparently decided to exist permanently.
“One happy island,” it said, and walked on.
Poolside. 2:14 PM. 81°F. Wind unchanged.
Three cats on a lounger. Brown, brown, black. The black one was no longer hiding. The blind one was still smiling. The loud one, for once, had nothing to add.
B-12. Someone won.