Suitable Precautions (8 page)

About halfway through the last class we had this guy come in all covered in foam and hockey kind of equipment and a mask, and he was this make-believe attacker. We were supposed to go up one at a time and scream in his face
I am not a victim!
in order to empower ourselves. If we wanted to, we could kick him in the crotch, and, just in case we didn't know where his crotch was, like if we'd been sleeping through
all those date rape videos, or something, he was wearing this big bull's eye on a kind of paper plate thing between his legs. Alice was the only one who did it. Who kicked him, I mean. I didn't do it because I thought it must be a pretty crappy job to have to come to a gym and get kicked in the balls by fifty sixth-grade girls, no matter what kind of gear you're wearing. He's probably some junior cop trainee and this job, which they say is part of serving the community, is actually new-cop hazing, and everybody at the station is snickering when he comes in the next day and has to sit at his desk with an ice pack on his junk. But Alice did it.

She walked right up to him and looked him in the hockey mask and screamed
I am not a victim!
in a voice that gave me the shivers. Seriously. Then she wound up her foot like she was a cartoon donkey, or something, and totally socked him. I mean, the guy is wearing his paper plate shield and a jock and foam and who knows what else, and he actually crumples to his knees. The female cop was all like, Uh, well done, oh-kay, but you could tell she hadn't been expecting that one. It's funny, right? You could tell that on the one hand she was proud of herself, like she'd taught us Krav Maga, or something, and on the other she was worried, like, What have I done here? But that's sort of the thing about Alice. She does that to you, once in a while.

What?

Yeah, right. Surprises you.

Some people think she's kind of a loser, or whatever, but she's totally not. She'd be cool. I mean, she's not as mature as me about this kind of stuff, obviously, but I'd talk to her about it. I'd just tell her that I did it first and it'd be fine.

It's not like this stuff is any more slutty than what Margot wore in Cuba last year. She had this bikini that was the sluttiest
thing I'd ever seen, honest to God. First of all, it was crocheted. And not crocheted like some Polish grandma spent hours pulling the stitches tight, but totally loose so you could see patches of skin. Wide weave, for sure. Her boobs were hardly even covered, and it's not like she had a lot of boobs then. She was just coming off the no-food diet and a quarter would have covered things up. I don't even know what would have happened if she'd got it wet because when she came out of the hotel and started walking to the beach, my dad freaked and smothered her in his beach towel like she was on fire or something, and Margot started screaming that he was trying to oppress her. It was wild.

Everyone at the hotel beach bar was totally on Margot's side. Think about it: you're at the beach when all of a sudden a girl in a skanky bikini is screaming for your help because some fat dude is wrestling her to the ground. What do you do? These Brazilian guys who didn't speak English ran up and tried to pry them apart, and my dad kept saying, She's my daughter, she's my daughter, but who knows what that sounds like in Brazilian or whatever, and so one of the guys punched him in the face and broke his nose. There was blood everywhere. Seriously. There was a bunch of screaming and crying and my mother kept saying, You've ruined Christmas, you've ruined Christmas, but it was hard to know who she was saying it to. Probably Margot, because Margot has a habit of ruining everything. After that the hotel people hated us because they had to close the pool to clean out the blood that got sprayed in there. And Margot bought that bikini at The Bay. I mean, get over it.

If I were Margot, I'd have a plan. I mean, what is she going to do, spend her life at Food Giant watching old ladies cruise the aisles for Depends? Whatever. Maybe that's why
she was trying to starve herself to death. Her life was just too depressing to put another Pop-Tart in her mouth. I don't know. But I can tell you that by the time I'm seventeen, I'm not going to be slicing salami for picky moms in stretch pants. I'm going to move to New York, or L.A., or just someplace where people don't get excited about the new roof on the community centre. I'll get a job in a restaurant and write postcards home so my parents don't flip: Hi Mom. Alphabet City is nice. The local Welcome Wagon brought me a Brie wheel. Whatever. That's what I'm saving for now. I even quit smoking. It's too expensive.

So I think, what do I care if a bunch of nerds see these? It's not like that does anything to me. I'm not an idiot. I know what I'm doing. And yeah, Alice will totally do it too. I'm her best friend. She trusts me. But the point is your ad said that if I brought in another girl I'd get paid more, and you never said how much.

M
AIRIN WAS ON HOLIDAY, in the strictest sense of the word. The sense in which she was entitled to wear oversized sunglasses and red toenail polish, a black head scarf, should the wind prove too much for her pale blonde curls. She was trying not to think about the missed appointment, because that's what holidays were for, weren't they? Trading hard decisions for simple ones. What would you like? José the bartender had asked her on the first day as she dangled her painted toes in the pool, legs covered in goosebumps. Rum and Coke, please, she said after a moment, and within seconds, ta da—breakfast. The efficiency both startled and pleased her; it was so easy to get exactly what she wanted.

And that was why people came. For the sun, the sand, the cheap drinks mixed by attractive, dark-skinned men who smiled and said,
De nada
when you thanked them. They didn't come for these unseasonably cool temperatures and an ocean that washed dead fish and bottles onto the beach.

It's colder than it should be for the time of year, José said every morning to the pale tourists in their windbreakers. I'm sorry.

Mairin had brought only one sweater with her, a three-quarter sleeve black cardigan with iridescent buttons. You won't need more than this, her mother had said, folding it gently into the American Tourister suitcase. You just throw it on over a sundress and no problem! Mairin, wearing the sweater over her new blue and green bikini, shivered. She leaned back onto the deck chair and let the plastic webbing gently bite the fleshiness of her thighs. She put on her sunglasses to stare at the overcast sky, unobserved.

Mairin had spent a lot of time at the pool over the past ten days, long enough to make a habit of having a drink when José started his shift at ten each morning, and to find out that he had a wife and two little girls. Oh, Mairin had said, yes, she would like to see a picture, and José had taken the creased paper out of his breast pocket and smoothed it out on the bar with careful fingers.

“Maria,” he had said, pointing to the smaller girl whose face was mostly covered by a thumb-sucking fist. “And Pené-lope,” he pointed again, the girl frowning, her face slightly turned away from the camera as though someone had unexpectedly called her name.

“They're beautiful,” Mairin said.

“Like their mother.” José refolded the photo and put it into his pocket. “Isabella. And you?”

“No,” Mairin said. “No kids.”

By the early afternoon she often found herself drunk and sleepy, teetering back to her room, fingers brushing against the rough bark of palm trees. Every day the maids gave her
new towels that smelled of bleach. They folded them into swans. Two swans, kissing, with flowers in their towel-beaks. If Mairin was very drunk, she put the flowers in her hair and smoothed the towels over herself, dreaming of clean, white, disinfected beaches. She made a point of showering and dressing for dinner, even though she dreaded the American-style pulled pork she endured sitting beside the fat German who was perpetually sunburned despite the weather, who chewed with his mouth open and said, tiny pieces of pork flying towards her, Mairin, you are very beautiful. After dinner she escaped to the beach, walking through the rain with her sandals in her hand, dehydrated, smelling of meat, make-up washing from her skin. Later she fell asleep under the towels on her bed thinking, The End, as though she were a character in a tremendously boring film noir. There was already some comfort in the routine.

But right now the beach chair was biting harder, the webbing probably leaving red marks on her skin. Her cue for another drink. Don't be sloppy, Mairin told herself as she strolled towards the bar. Sloppiness, her mother said, is the sure sign of a tart, and a real lady acts like a cupcake, not a tart.

“Rum and Coke, please, José,” Mairin said as sweetly as possible. And suddenly there was the glass in her hand. Easy.

If only it were sunny. Her mother had told her to get a tan.

“Men don't like pasty-faced girls, Mair,” she had said at the airport. “You need to relax in the sun, get some colour. You look tired.” She hooked a thumb in the direction of a kissing couple at the taxi stand. “Maybe if you didn't look so tired, you wouldn't need your mother to see you off.”

“I don't need you to,” Mairin had said.

“Oh, come on now.” She pushed some hair behind Mairin's ear. “You look just like Mary Tyler Moore, only with better hair. Don't worry, you'll find someone.”

The airport hummed with the sounds of families snaking their way to check-in desks, trying to sweep their lolling children off the floor, saying in brittle voices, Hold Mummy's hand.

“See?” her mother said. “I told you six o'clock wasn't too early. You young girls are all the same—you think the world will wait for you if you're twenty minutes late. But it won't, and don't you forget it.”

The check-in line shuffled forward.

“This'll be good for you,” her mother said, patting her hand. “You just need a break, a change of pace to get you out of the funk you're in these days.”

“I'm not in a funk,” Mairin said.

The line moved again.

“I'm your mother, Mairin. Not an idiot.”

“Next, please,” the ticket agent said.

The agent was thin in a way that made Mairin uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed too big for her reddened eyelids. She had the appearance of an overworked racehorse.

“Yes,” Mairin said, “I'm next.”

The horse-faced woman eyed Mairin's large backpack.

“I'm going to have to ask you to check that bag, ma'am,” she said mechanically, her large teeth catching her lips. “It's oversized.” She offered a plastic baggie in which to carry anything medically or legally necessary for the duration of the flight—Mairin's wallet, her passport, eyeglasses, a new pack of birth control pills, her asthma inhaler, and a fistful of tampons.

“God, Mair,” her mother said, eyeing the tampons. “It's only a five-hour trip.”

“Thank you,” Mairin said to the ticket agent as she took her boarding pass.

“Did you see that woman's face?” her mother asked as they walked over to the security checkpoint. “You'd think they'd put her in the back. On the telephone, or something.”

“Gate eleven,” Mairin said, speeding up.

Her mother held her elbow with two hands.

“I wish you'd tell me what's the matter,” she said.

“I just need a vacation, like you said.”

“Everyone needs a vacation. I'm talking about whatever it is that's been making you look so tired.”

“Mom.”

“Okay, don't tell me. And walk as fast as you want. Don't worry about my hip, which is getting worse, by the way, that's what Doctor Smolkin says, but you wouldn't know that because you don't even bother to talk to me anymore. Your own mother!”

Mairin gripped her baggie. “Mom, stop it.”

Her mother planted herself with a rubber-soled squeak in the middle of the airport. She rubbed her hands up and down Mairin's arms.

“Oh fine. I know, I know. You go on, have a good time. Leave your crabby old mother behind and go find some nice man on the beach. We'll talk when you get back. Go on, go.” She shooed Mairin like she would a pigeon.

Mairin walked under a sign printed in several languages: PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. She glanced back to see her mother exaggerating the up and down flap of her hand and straining her neck forward like an anxious turtle. It was the kind of wave she usually reserved for mentally
disabled children she saw drooling in their wheelchairs on special education buses. See, Mairin, she would say reproachfully, waving as the children squealed and thrashed, even the retards make an effort.

Mairin waved back to her mother and then made her way through security and to the airport bar.

“Rum and Coke, please,” she said to the bartender before being informed by the bored-looking man that he was not permitted to serve alcohol at that hour of the day. So Mairin had waited an hour on a hard plastic chair outside gate eleven, legs crossed, baggie in her lap, bleeding, she found out later, right through her jeans: “Excuse me,” the woman behind her in line had whispered softly over the tinny sound of the final boarding call, “but I think you've had an accident.”

She had since bled through the two bathing suits she had brought; the blue and green bikini was a purchase from the hotel gift shop. José had told her it was pretty, that the blue was the colour the ocean should be, that he was sorry, again, that it was so cold.

“That's okay,” Mairin said. The program on the television behind the bar was interrupted by the local news station. The muted mouths of the news anchors opened and closed in foreign shapes that Mairin could not lip-read. “It's not your fault.”