pier pressure

Carajo, los Americanos

Alvaro Guevara, Bottoms Up (~1916)

There are so many fake boobs in Turks & Caicos, the beach squeaks.

In the customs line, children are shrieking, crying, dropping iPads and fake cell phones. On the flight, I sat next to three of them, one of them soaking in a soiled diaper all the way from New York, the smell so ghastly my seat mate and I both spent the flight covering our noses with our shirts. On the occasions I wasn’t speaking to the 4 year-old across from me, she was hitting my arm with her mermaid sticker book and dropping marshmallows in the aisle.

There are three double-wide strollers that can barely fit within the stanchions. The Asian family of four in front of me attempts to bend underneath the stanchion belt three times. Each time their backpacks catch the belt so they trip and drag it with them, upsetting the line. In front of me, a child much too old for a double-wide stroller makes his 5-year old brother suck his thumb. In another double-wide, an 8 year-old is sitting with a paper bowl full of cavatappi, which keeps spilling out onto her legs and the floor. Parents are screaming across the line to each other as they fill out customs forms—WHERE WERE YOU BORN? MEDINA. M-E-D-I-N-A.

“That’s Kendall Jenner’s favorite beach,” Molly texts me. I’m having shrimp ceviche and pineapple juice at the beach bar. I’m reading about the slaughtering of Pueblo and Taos Indians in 1847. Not quite a beach read—the hanging of six “insurrectionists” who spit the final words Carajo, los Americanos before they’re hung on a cottonwood tree. Two of the writhing bodies in their last moments find each other’s hands, my book says, and interlock their fingers tightly until their “muscles loosened in death.”

At breakfast, a retired couple settles next to me. Their waiter introduces himself as Marco. The man asks: “Where you from, Marco?” Mexico, he says, Cancun.

“Oh, okay—there’s a bunch of ‘em from Cancun,” the woman says to her husband. They have a drawl I can’t place. Her husband speaks Spanish. Her? “Muy muy muyyy poquito.” She’s wearing a pale pink visor that says “Pier Pressure” and underneath is text that allows me to locate them: “Lafayette, LA.” Her husband holds a 3-minute conversation with their waiter about the Sargasso Sea. They mean to be perfectly nice. All over the resort, shocks of white hair in Tommy Bahama lay a loving hand on the back of the waiters, the pool-cleaners, the bell boys, and exchange niceties.

The sand is as shock-white as the hair of its clientele, and the water is the fabled aquamarine of all beach postcards. The towels are the same bright teal, the beach umbrellas and cabanas blinding white. The license plates say “Beautiful by Nature” in Papyrus font. Patches of my ass have gone deep red from haphazardly applying a goopy sunscreen that’s “better for the reef” than aerosol, or so say the teenagers at the front desk.

The staff wear blue flower clips in their hair and white dresses with the same blue coral pattern. They place full glasses of milk on the tables of teenage boys enjoying plain white bagels and clicking through Snapchat, Havaianas off under the table. At dinner, the children under 10 wear Bose headphones and watch something on their iPad. A father throws his daughter around in the pool. Aged women with bleach blonde hair and scant bikinis read Colleen Hoover and pummel frozen drinks. Maureen and I order fish from the specials menu, which is invariably written with two-to-five modifiers like “Fresh flown in never frozen line caught Wild Scottish Salmon.” I drink a Chablis that tastes like tonsil stones.

Two boys in the pool play one’s best understanding of Would You Rather. “Would you rather pay for nothing…orrr…would you rather pay for nothing but food?” The other boy responds: Wait…what? The first explains again “Like you pay for nothing OR you pay for nothing but you do pay for food.” The other boy responds, “What?? Well, I’d rather pay for nothing.” NO, the first boy begins again before there’s a huge splash in the pool behind me. Then, “Hi, Dad.”

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The Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley information reached me immediately through a Page Six suggested Instagram post. I felt a vicious calm. The song “Margaret” had been ringing in my head because I couldn’t stop thinking about the adage “When you know you know.” I didn’t feel I knew. I loved my boyfriend, but I didn’t know. We’d only been dating 8 months. I certainly hoped. I talk about it with Isabel at length—how guilty it makes me feel, how insecure and traitorous and how I feel I’m pre-meditatively dooming my relationship by doubting myself. You’re supposed to know, I cry to her. I wonder if this is how couples who met on Hinge feel, like the circumstance has cast a pall on the romantic narrative. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

There’s a seafood extravaganza at the resort where I take my first crack at crab legs. When I pull them apart a stream of crab juice shoots directly across the table and onto Maureen’s neck. We’re talking about a friend of hers who can’t get pregnant. It’s so premeditated, I tell her. You never think of it that way. You always imagine it’s some brilliant, happy accident.

It was interesting to see how quickly all built narrative fell away in such quick succession in your late 20s. Being pregnant so rarely began with a moment of shock and elation together in the en suite bathroom.

Next to us, I watch a woman suck her crab legs with all the nonchalance of a 30-something in starchy resortwear. She wipes her hands and reaches for her partner’s. Until their muscles loosened in death.

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A girl I know tangentially posts on Instagram that her sister has died in a mountaineering accident. In the caption she writes “I promise I’ll find you in the next life.” The sentiment haunts me for days, imagining her sister’s loneliness after death. When Maureen leaves the room it can feel too far.

We spent the day at a seaside villa, with two pools and mahi-mahi tacos for lunch and a frozen Blue Curacao drink for me. We’re playing cards on the dock with stairs that lead right into the water, though the sea is too choppy to do anything but sunburn on the white daybeds and fight over the rules of Gin Rummy. She tells me I’m “mystified” by pregnancy. She lets me hear her list of baby names only a day after she says she can’t, she wants to keep them a secret. Someone always knows a Max they hate, or a Nolan, or an Otis. Bonnie used to date a Nolan—I think to myself—that was so awful.

Now it’s rare that we fight or cry when we see each other, but we used to always fight and cry. Invariably the fight was about something that was really about how we don’t see each other much anymore, how we stopped knowing each other in any holistic ways since our early 20s, how we now felt misunderstood by each other. It was horrible to lose your siblings to their partners, who loved them so much better.

When she tells stories about her loneliness in college, how she didn’t have a car or more than two food swipes a day and she’d just eat peanuts in her room and watch Psych, I feel sick to my stomach. I was 16 then. I guess I never texted her. I never visited her at school. I don’t even remember what we were like then. I know I was still sleeping in the bottom bunk, which used to be hers. When I was young, she would let me sleep in there with her. We played spaceship there, too, our menagerie of beanie babies lining the perimeter. We filmed scenes of our home-baked horror movies on a Flip camera in that room. She caught me once sneaking a pad from her top drawer and told me to stop being sneaky about it, just ask if I needed one.

I cry when I leave her at the airport. I feel guilty my flight is before hers. She has to spend an hour in the busted Turks & Caicos airport, 6 months pregnant without air conditioning. But she’s happy to be alone for a minute, anyway, with space to text her husband about picking up Shaker-style counter stools in Staunton.