How Stella Got Her Groove Back (8 page)

Two young men who work here at the Castle Beach Negril and are called social directors come along, wearing khaki shorts and white T-shirts. Yesterday the color must’ve been yellow, because Abby and the other woman who greeted me at the activities desk as well as the woman in the game room downstairs were all wearing yellow T-shirts and khaki shorts. They too are social directors and Abby explained to me that their job is to make sure the guests are happy entertained don’t want for anything have all our questions answered before we have a chance to ask and to make sure we are having a great time which is why Norris and Gillette are on their way over here to solicit us for a game of volleyball. The Italian guy closes his eyes holds his long arm up pushes the palm of his hand against an invisible wall and says, “Not today, guys. I’m too hungover.”

“Oh, come on, Ben, you can sweat it out,” says Norris, who is a deep chocolate brown and oddly handsome, but could use a set of braces and perhaps a baseball cap to cover up that humongous oval head. “It’ll be good for your body.”

“I don’t think I can,” Ben moans.

The other fellow is parading further down the beach and I can hear him giving the spiel to other people. Norris is now looking at me. “Stella, you look like the athletic type. Come on.”

“How’d you know my name?” He of course is wearing a name tag that says, as big as day, NORRIS.

“You met my friend Winston, and he told me he met a lovely American woman and that she was wearing braids in her hair. So what do you say?” And he holds his volleyball up on the tips of his fingers and begins to spin it. He is looking at me the way Quincy does when he’s trying to sweet-talk me so he can get his way.

“Oh why not,” I say.

“Oh what the hell,” Ben says and struggles to get up. He’s gotta be at least six five or six. “But when you see me tonight, Stella, please punch me as hard as you can if I tell you I’ve had more than two or three or four Beach Bomb Boombas, okay?”

“Why don’t you ask your wife to do that, Ben?”

“Are you kidding me? Sasha’s worse than I am. Look at her,” he says, laughing. When I look down at her she is grinning but it is clear that she doesn’t have a clue as to what we’re talking about. “Play big fun,” she says and drops her head back on top of her rolled-up towels.

We play for over an hour and it is big fun and I feel like I’ve lost at least five pounds of water. I’m also starving but can’t help running back into the ocean to cool off. I dry myself, gather up the book I have not opened and my yellow tote bag with the monkey dangling from the zipper, and head to the dining room for lunch.

I set my stuff down on a table and go over to the buffet line, which is pretty long. I find myself looking around the place pretending that I’m not really searching for anyone in particular but I’m a little disappointed when I don’t see him. I look at my watch. It’s one o’clock. What time does he eat lunch? I wonder. Stella, stop it. Just what exactly is going on here? Well, I say to myself, he certainly is a pleasure to look at, what’s wrong with looking with drooling a little bit for a change of pace I mean I don’t want to touch just look but I would like for my heart to thump again which would make twice in one day and to be honest I just want to see if what I felt this morning was a fluke. Who the fuck cares? Where could he possibly be?

“Would you like to join us for lunch?” I hear Ben say.

“Sure,” I say to him and his grinning wife.

I get some kind of seafood and a Caesar salad which they make for you right there and rice and beans and pasta and I’ll never eat all this food I just get it because it feels free which of course it isn’t it’s just already paid for.

Ben interprets for Sasha during lunch and tells me how he has his own tile company in Quebec and how this is the first time in years that he has taken any time off. Even though it is his honeymoon and not a vacation it was really hard pulling this off trying to get away for two whole weeks because the tile business is tricky and you have to be there for your customers and when I’m not there things fall apart and since this used to be my dad’s business and business has increased tenfold since I took over it is important for me to maintain my position because things are getting pretty competitive out there and if you lose your edge you have lost your edge. It occurs to me as I watch Sasha nodding in agreement that I haven’t once thought about my job or the pile of work I left and how tall the stack will be when I get home. I don’t care. It can all wait. My boss makes everything seem so urgent, as if the world will stop turning because we may miss an opportunity to make another dollar. I could sit out here and give myself heart palpitations if I think about my job for longer than three seconds but I am right now refusing to entertain the thought which is why I divert all my attention over to Sasha who is smiling at Ben and it is clear she is in love with this man. It is nice to witness. They are going to the pajama party. We agree to see each other there tonight.

• • • •

The sun wipes you out—my afternoon nap lasts almost two hours. I decide to sit out on my balcony and read a little of
The Grace of Great Things
by Robert Grudin which sounded good when I read the book jacket in the store but it turns out to be too academic and deep and not exactly beach reading so I put it down after a half hour and pick up
Black Betty
by Walter Mosley which I’ve been meaning to read since I read and loved
Devil in a Blue Dress
but there’s already a grisly murder on page two of
Black Betty
and I’m not much in the mood for death. I pick up the hardcover version of
Waiting to Exhale
by that Terry McMillan which I bought when it first came out and I’ve been meaning to read for a couple of years now and after reading like the first fifty or sixty pages I don’t know what all the hoopla is about and why everybody thinks she’s such a hot writer because her shit is kind of weak when you get right down to it and this book here has absolutely no literary merit whatsoever at least none that I can see and she uses entirely too much profanity. Hell, I could write the same stuff she writes cause she doesn’t exactly have what you’d call a style but anyway I can sort of relate to some of her characters even though the main reason I didn’t read this book was because from what I heard a couple of these women sounded too much like me although I’m not as stupid as a few of them. But I’m not in the mood to read about a bunch of woe-is-me black women. I sift through the rest of my books, skipping over
A Short History of God
and
The Between
which I heard was good but it’s got some supernatural stuff in it and maybe this could work for me like at home but not right this minute and the author’s name is Tanarive Due and she’s young and black and from Florida because I heard about her from the
Miami Herald
when I was down there and there’s
Moo
by Jane Smiley. I love everything she does—
A Thousand Acres
did it for me even before it won the Pulitzer—but I don’t feel like going to a satirical college today and there’s
Crossing Over Jordan
by Linda Beatrice-Brown though I’m not eager to take a little trip down memory lane all the way back to slavery either so I pick up something called
Going Under
by William Luvaas which sounds about right for some reason and this is what I settle on for the next two and a half hours.

• • • •

I feel so silly going through my suitcase looking for a pair of pajamas to wear to a disco. But I search anyway. The only jammies I brought was my cotton number which is boring as hell but cool especially for someone who is going to be sleeping alone for seven more nights. I
did
bring one sexy number I got from Neiman Marcus last year that cost me a fortune but I wouldn’t dare wear this because it looks like a slutty wedding gown and why did I pack the thing anyway oh yeah because Vanessa told me you should always pack at least one bewitching thing because you just never know and then I come across this almost but not quite sheer white cotton nightgown that has scalloped lace with little tiny pearls sewn in that fall right over your shoulder blades and it has a tiny little pink rose at the center of the neckline which is not too low and it also has a long sheer jacket to wear over it which has those pretty puffy sleeves you push up to your elbows. This is what I’ll wear. It is soft and sensual in an innocent sort of way and not too revealing unless I stand in the light and like why would I want to do that?

I take another shower. My third today. And choose a frosty pink Marilyn Monroe halter sundress which of course requires no bra but the cut of the dress makes your breasts look firm and supple even though it is really just a double layer of fabric you are looking at and panties just don’t seem appropriate for this dress so I don’t wear any. At home I go through a can of Shower Fresh FDS in a few weeks because I cannot stand the way I smell down there when I perspire, the reason why, I understand, more men don’t go down on women. Lord knows I wouldn’t which is another reason why I douche at least twice sometimes even three times a month depending on how much attention I’m getting and I don’t care what those gynecologists say about using up good bacteria and increasing your risks for infection because if that’s true then why do women’s bathrooms always smell like old fish? I’ll be glad when somebody invents a twenty-five-cent douche or feminine wipes dispenser and puts them in all women’s public rest rooms and an automatic Lysol atomizer wouldn’t hurt. I also have my little disposable cleansing wipes which I keep in my purse so that when I’m out and using the ladies’ room I won’t have to worry about adding to the smell. I mean, can you really smell too clean?

I let some of my braids or whoever’s braids they are hang down in back and in that ponytail action back on the top. I slip on some low-heeled white pumps and don’t dare put on any makeup since this suntan has given me my base and I just embellish it with some dark pink lipstick and a little eye pencil so I won’t look like I’ve been embalmed. I lotion my arms and shoulders and then mist myself with some Calyx Prescriptives which I’m getting totally sick of because even though I discovered it almost two years ago and for the longest time it was my own little secret scent, now every other woman in America who shops at Macy’s Neiman’s and Nordstrom’s seems to have discovered it, but I’m not in America am I?

• • • •

There is no buffet tonight so I walk through the dining room to one of the three restaurants we have to choose from and I can feel people looking at me, especially some of those old white men with their fat wives who are wearing white pantsuits with silver and gold lamé and big wide shoulder pads and little gold sandals with miniature clusters of fruit overflowing on their big toes. Most of the black men here look like linebackers and as it turns out most of them are in the NFL and this must be the spot because there are at least twelve of them with their fine young girlfriends or wives, each more beautiful than the next, and some of them are really working it and I don’t blame them—when you’ve got it like that do it like that and hell I give credit where credit is due. I am not envious of these young women with perfect bodies because I used to have one too and all I know is that after they’ve had a baby or two and they turn forty-two they better pray they look as good as I do.

I hope none of the people I met on the beach or that I played volleyball with and none of those social directors sit down at my table this evening because right now I just want to eat and listen to the band and decide if I really want to go to some stupid disco in a nightgown. The more I think about it the stupider it sounds. But in fact there is no band right now because all four of them are sitting at a table outside the restaurant where I’m headed and the drummer, whom I remember seeing last night, smiles and says, “Hello,” and I say hello back and he says, “Having dinner with someone?” and I say, “No,” and he motions with his hand at the empty chair and says, “Won’t you join us?” and I say, “Sure,” and sit down before realizing this is the third time in a single day that I have had companions and to think that my sister was worried about my eating alone! Maybe they were brought up to be extra polite in Jamaica I think as I sit down and listen to each of the young and not so young men introduce themselves. The drummer of course is the one who has his eye on me and the drummer of course is the least cutest of them all. I am tempted to give him some animal traits but I won’t because I will probably be struck by lightning for thinking ugly thoughts about someone who is only trying to be nice. I tell them my name is Stella and they all first discuss then concur that they don’t know anyone named Stella. The youngest of the bunch says, “You remind me a lot of a girl I know whose name is Zoleta.”

“Really,” I say and he is giving me the eye. I am almost ready to burst out laughing because I’m wondering if these young guys here have a thing for older women or is it that they’re just all very friendly because I haven’t been here twenty-four hours and already I’ve been in the company of more men who are paying attention to me than I have noticed in years. It is sort of refreshing.

“So what do you feel like?” the drummer asks.

“Excuse me?”

“For dinner, mon.”

“Oh, I’m not sure.”

“Could I recommend something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you eat meat?”

“Sometimes, just not pork.”

“Why don’t you eat pork?”

“It’s too disgusting.”

“Not Jamaican pork,” he says.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“So how about some seafood?”

“Seafood sounds good. Is it spicy?”

“Everything in Jamaica is spicy, mon,” and they all start laughing.

“Good,” I say, laughing right along with them. “It’s the reason why I came here.”

“Why’s that, mon?”

“To add some spice to my life.”

“Yeah, mon,” the drummer says and leans back in his chair and I suppose he’s thinking he’s the Spice Islands Man.

When the drink waiter comes I order my staple virgin piña colada and while I’m explaining to the band why I don’t drink alcoholic beverages I smell that citrus ocean and as I turn around to look who but Winston is standing behind me.