August in Paris (2 page)

Though I have neither superpowers nor a signature form-fitting costume, I do have something in common with comic book heroes. I have a historic nemesis. Mine is a 72-year-old Italian lady from Philadelphia, my first husband's mother. 

This defender of decency, aka “Grandma Grace,” has strong opinions and she sticks by them. Mickey Mouse, Marriott hotels, Jesus, and Coca-Cola are in. Barack Obama, Pepsi, and Marion Winik are out. Also on the blacklist, I learned during our trip to New Orleans for Vince's college graduation, is that ancient symbol of the French monarchy, the fleur-de-lis. I was admiring one in an abstract assemblage by one of the artists who hang work on the iron gates of Jackson Square. “What a cool painting,” I said.

“I hate that floor de less!” she retorted in her squeaky, somewhat Marge Simpson–ish voice. “And look! It's everywhere!”

“But it always has been,” I told her. “It's, like, the official symbol of New Orleans.”

“Only since 2004!” she replied heatedly.

Grandma Grace and I got along for about a half hour in the mid-'90s, both stoned on grief and somewhat delusional after the death of the young man who was her son and my husband. Before that and ever since, she has found little to appreciate in my character. Perhaps I seem to her to be a nasty cross between a controlling Jewish American Princess and a self-indulgent smartypants. Perhaps I am. Still, you might think the fact that I produced and raised her darling grandsons would redeem me.

On the contrary, she has tried to protect them from me as best she can.

In recent years, as the boys have grown up, our rendezvous are fewer and farther between. The last was at Hayes's graduation from Georgetown in 2010, for which she came down on a bus from her home in the Poconos. The ceremony went smoothly enough, but Grandma Grace does not enjoy celebrations of the chaotic, alcoholic sort my offspring and I go in for. She spent most of Hayes's graduation party in the basement reminiscing about Catholic school with a guest who unwittingly admitted having attended one. When I returned her to the Greyhound terminal, she literally leapt from my car with her roller bag and fled.

The stressfulness of this occasion was a chilling preview of what might go down in 2012, when Vince would graduate from Loyola in New Orleans. He would walk across the stage with his best friend since age three, Sam Shahin, whose parents have played a major supporting role in our lives. They were the family I wanted to be with—the family that likes me, for God's sake.

The significance of this graduation was even greater because New Orleans was the city where I had met the boys' father. My encouraging Vince to go to college there had been a way of strengthening our bond to a place I loved. From the moment I arrived at Mardi Gras in 1983, I had recognized this tropical mutant of a city, this mecca of Sodomites and Gomorrahns, as my spiritual hometown. Among the misogynist gay guys, the drunken yet genteel Southerners, the skinny black people in kitchens, the fat white people on porches, the characters out of Tennessee Williams and Ellen Gilchrist and Anne Rice, I somehow fit right in. 

Of course, that was in the years before the accursed fleur-de-lis took hold.

Ever since Hayes's swan song at Georgetown, I have been strategizing the final Big Easy commencement. I had to accept, finally, that my usual approach to Grandma Grace—saccharine toadying punctuated by flashes of rage—would be as successful as it had ever had been, which is to say, not very. I would do better if I knew how (at least I think I would), and I have no doubt that our difficulties are as much my fault as hers. In fact, I've noticed that whenever I've written about our troubles, readers are just as likely to take her side as mine, which I love to hear. She herself has no interest in reading anything I write, which is probably for the best.

The good news about Vince's graduation was that some of her other family members would attend with her, making arrangements, sharing flights and hotels. This was excellent. I could rent my own car and stay with my friends, swooping in only for key events. To further increase my chances of emotional survival, I decided to take not only my children, Hayes and Jane, but our dog Beau. (Ever since Southwest started letting small pets travel in the cabin for $75, I have become that nutty old lady who won't go anywhere without her dachshund.)

Vince's graduation was held in the Superdome, now the pimped-out Mercedes-Benz Superdome, having put its 2005 nightmare of semi-televised raping and thirst in the past. When I arrived with children and cousins in tow, I learned both the Shahins and the Grandma group had saved us seats.

What to do? Well, my 11-year-old daughter Jane and I had joined Grace at the baccalaureate mass the day before, the only ones who had. I could tell by the faint smile that hovered briefly on her lips that she was glad to see us. And what if she was annoyed now? How much more annoyed could she be? I sat with my old friends, who had been through so many of the joys and trials of the last 20 years with me, and we launched into the nostalgia and boohooing. 

Little Loyola New Orleans put on quite an extravaganza, complete with a medieval-castle stage set, jumbotrons, confetti explosions, and a jazz band. I couldn't help teasing Hayes about the contrast between this and the commencement at Georgetown, which had been of the high-school gymnasium variety. The only diversion from the name-droning was provided by the school's mascot, a bulldog, who lounged onstage during the proceedings. 

After the ceremony, I met Grace in the aisle.

“That was amazing,” I effused, “wasn't it?”

“No,” she told me. “Hayes's was way better!”

I don't think the cake and champagne on the plaza convinced her either. But if things had ended at that point, I would have had the moral victory of keeping a smile on my face no matter what.

Alas.

Since it happened to be Mother's Day, the kids suggested we celebrate with brunch at Café du Monde. As the hour approached, I was still driving around town trying to scoop up all the sleeping partiers, and I put in a call to Grace. “Yeah, Mar,” she said grimly by way of hello. Her use of this nickname never seems affectionate, but perhaps it is—I can hardly claim to understand her.

Finally, we were assembled: the nine of us clustered around pushed-together tables at the crowded café, waiting. It occurred to me to try to organize our order in advance. Since the beignets come three to a plate, I could figure out how many orders and simplify the process. Like an idiot, I asked Grace and her group what they wanted.

“We each want one,” she said. 

“One beignet or one order of beignets?” I said. “They come three to an order.”

“We know that,” Grace told me. “We were here yesterday! We each want one."

One. One what? Now the aunt and uncle joined her, pointing to the table and chiming in. Perhaps I should have been able to understand that they each wanted their own order, but I could not. I snapped my head in the other direction and stared into the napkin holder, breathing heavily. My children watched me with trepidation.

Just in time, the elderly Polish waitress arrived to circumvent the violence. In a matter of hours, we would all be fleeing with our roller bags.

Good-bye, dear New Orleans, good-bye. I take with me my college-educated, Tabasco-swillin', bass-playin', crawfish-addicted Saints fan. I take with me two large plastic cups, once brimming with the finest of Bloody Marys. I take as well my Mother's Day gift, purchased by the kids from an artist in Jackson Square. The fleur-de-lis would have been good, but they found something better still: a painting of google-eyed aliens with the motto IT COULD BE WORSE lettered across it. 

As they say in New Orleans: Yeah you right.

This is the first in a series of 134 articles about the Atlantis resort I will be writing to fund my upcoming Visa bill.

Family vacations are all about creating magical memories, and here's one we Winiks will treasure from our four-day visit to the Bahamas back in the summer of 2001.

It was 11 a.m., Day Two of our trip. Hayes and Vince, my 24- and 22-year-old sons, were chillaxing on our 11th-floor balcony. Fragrant smoke wafted through the railing over a phantasmagoric vista: mangrove and hibiscus, vast freeform pools surrounded by flotillas of lounges, a DJ in a gazebo spinning Usher for the midmorning mojito crowd, and beyond all that, the turquoise sea. In the other direction, we could see right into what we had dubbed the Factory, a complex of loading docks and warehouses through which trucks and workers streamed continuously. Our Terrace View room, as the reservation agent described it, was just $500/night on summer special.

Inside, 12-year-old Jane had finished reviewing the map of the water park that is the centerpiece of the Atlantis resort (and you don't pay anything extra for it, which is a phrase I will be using only once in this article). “Let's go!” our energetic leader shouted at her slowpoke troop. Meanwhile, Vince's girlfriend Shannon was trying to determine which of her bikinis was most likely to survive the Leap of Faith.

Suddenly, on a whim, I slipped out to the terrace. My sons watched me curiously as the last time I'd taken a hit of pot, in the early 2000s, I spent the next nine hours locked in my bedroom considering institutionalization as my New Year's party rolled on without me.

FAQ: How do you buy drugs at Atlantis?

Easy, dude, it's right on the beach! Find one of the gypsy jet-ski rental guys the notice in your hotel room warns you not to have any dealings with. Vince recommends Mr. Pointy Tooth, who is the kingpin of the operation.

So, yeah. Whoa. I was really, really wasted. Sternly I ordered myself to remain calm.

“Come on, Mommy! You said you would go on the slide today!” Jane said, and if I could say no to that sweet, beautiful youngest child of mine, we wouldn't have been at Atlantis in the first place. I have never been to a resort in my life, never wanted to go to one, have always been the Paris-on-$10-a-day type of traveler. But somehow we started hanging out with these rich friends who were all Atlantis this, Atlantis that, and Jane was hooked. I thought, what the hell, we'll do it once.

Once is right.

I trailed my group through acres of resort landscaping, which shamelessly combined real vegetation, birds, and sea creatures (a manta ray the size of my Yaris) with faux caves and waterfalls, all of it nestled among turreted pink hotels and seahorse monuments. It was sort of Mesoamerican, sort of Egyptian, sort of Greek, sort of Gothic—an Epcot Center of ancient civilization! Bizarrely, it also featured giant blowups of the trippy characters of Cartoon Network's Adventure Time, like Finn the Human, Jake the Dog, Lady Rainicorn, and the Lumpy Space Princess.

“Do you think they paid Adventure Time or Adventure Time paid them?” Jane wondered.

I think everybody pays them. The 2,900 hotel guests, at least one of whom, in the Royal Tower Bridge Suite, is in for $25,000/night; the day-trippers at the water attractions, the gamblers at the casino, the revelers at the nightclubs, the yacht crowd at the marina, all of us.

At last we plopped our tubes into the Current, a mile-long river ride. As we bobbed dreamily beneath the palm fronds and buff Bahamian lifeguards, my head, initially propped on my hand in a jaunty pose, sank toward the pillowy tube. Mmmm. The lovely soporific effect was way better than marijuana psychosis.

“Wake up, Mom,” I heard Jane say, and I opened my eyes. I was turned backward, facing Hayes, who was laughing evilly. Our tubes were inching up some sort of conveyor belt.

“Mom! We're about to go over the falls!” Jane said, trying to spin me around.

What? I clapped my hand over my sunglasses. Was this the vertical 200-foot drop off the peak of the Mayan pyramid into the shark tank?

Jane spent the next three days imitating my pitiful scream as I went over the edge—less a woo-hoo! than the sort of plea for mercy once heard at the Spanish Inquisition.

“Mom! Wasn't that great?” said Jane, dragging me onward to the Abyss, a body slide entered from a platform tucked beneath five-story-high yellow tulips that somehow recalled
The Hunger Games
. But no time for literary musings. I had to stay with my family.

Of course, I eventually took the wrong fork and ended up in a watery cavern alone. Just as I caught sight of Jane in the distance, scouting around for me, I accidentally slid down a chute into a pool. I sat dumbfounded until my hero came bounding around a curve.

“Mom,” said Jane, “I think you might be taking too much of your medication.”

Cheapness and generosity run side by side in me. Atlantis kicked those warring impulses into full-on battle. After just a couple of days of $12 cocktails and $40 entrées and $7 bottles of water (all charged with cartoon-character plastic room keys), I began to lose my grip. It seemed like a bargain when dinner at the Bobby Flay restaurant was only $323, compared with the $453 I'd dropped at Nobu or $466 at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's little hut on the beach. Though I'd never had much sympathy for people who run up credit card bills in the tens of thousands, suddenly I understood how it could happen. When you're so out of your league, it all becomes Monopoly money. And you have to eat. Once the fam had whipped through the mountain of trail mix, beef jerky, and energy bars I'd imported from Trader Joe's, what could we do but hit the $25 breakfast buffet? Twenty-five dollars—you forget what that can buy in the real world. Anyway, I think it was only $20 for Jane. I ordered myself a cup of coffee and sneaked bites off Shannon's plate (even though the waiter promptly removed my silverware to prevent just this).

That night, I got a little cranky on the 10-mile walk back to the room through the medieval passages, underwater ruins, and Bulgari-store jetways. The big kids were racing ahead to get ready for their night out, and Jane was peering curiously into the video game arcade. She asked me if she could buy something, I believe; anyway, there was some request that involved money. I was feeling overspent and underappreciated. In fact, I was feeling like my mother, who for all her many virtues was a life-long lousy tipper. Basically, it had been a long day of intoxication and constipation. So I yelled at Jane and she got huffy and stomped off.

And there I was, crossing the torch-lit
Hunger Games
lagoon by myself. Should I make a left at Chichen Itza or head straight to the barracudas?

Then I saw Jane, lurking up ahead in a stand of palms. Mad as she was, she wasn't going to let me get lost. She continued this tiptoe surveillance procedure all the way back to the hotel, where we quickly made up. After all, we had our dolphin swim ($264 for two) the very next morning!

Jane and I cuddled in bed and watched the Food Network, while the others ran off to get wasted and throw their money away. I had given the boys my mother's blackjack system, a creased and yellowed photocopy with ragged edges and penciled notations. After a half-century of avid gambling, my mother died in the black. Yet even with the secret paper, her young descendants lost more than $700 in a couple of nights.

Hayes, I heard, dropped $300 worth of chips in the sand during a party with some girls who had flown in by private jet. Unbelievably, he later found them—then lost the stack on a single bet. Vince, on the other hand, found an unspent $20 on the dresser one morning and ran back to the casino before coffee. When he returned without it, he nonetheless seemed to believe that because he had been up $60 the night before, he had won, despite the fact that his activities had bankrupted his newly founded music production company. One more night and I think my gambling-fiend sons could have gotten comped for the room.

On our last day, as the losses were toted up, Jane surveyed her brothers coldly: unshaven, hungover specimens of fiscal irresponsibility. She shrugged. “I've lost all respect for you,” she said.

For me, she suggested a day at the spa and swimming laps, as well as a break from my “self-absorbed” fixation on reading the comments people post on my columns.

Meanwhile, there was so much of Atlantis we had not yet seen. We'd missed at least three expensive restaurants, and I had just learned you could snorkel in the aquarium. I never got over to the yacht marina to check out the so-called “millionaire Starbucks.” At least we got to spend some quality time with Jackie, a 38-year-old dolphin mother of three. Jackie had an amazing story: she'd been cooped up in some off-brand fish park in Mississippi until it was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. After months swimming around the debris-filled Gulf, her whole posse had been rescued and relocated to Atlantis. Honeymoon heaven! Three of them got pregnant the first year.

For me, it was back home to Baltimore, where we arrived to find my hot, sticky house overrun by mice and fleas. Within seconds of our arrival, we were all vacuuming, scrubbing, and spraying, transformed from pampered travelers to embittered custodial staff.

“We're in the Factory,” said Jane sadly.

And so we will be until next year, when I plan to take our vacation at an eco-resort in the jungle with 12-step meetings.