Vacation Cereal

Dispatches From A Post-Covid Summer

I.

We arrive at the wine-country family resort where we are staying for three nights (and, I am reminded by my son Max, four days) with our extended family. I am nursing one of my multi-day headaches, already testing the limits of my husband’s patience with my uselessness. Somehow we are only 90 minutes from home but it is 20 degrees hotter. Now that we finally have a social circle slightly larger the one Tom Hanks did in Cast Away, my daughter Ramona has contracted a cold. In the heat, she looks like a melted creamsicle. My son asks if we will have the same room number as last time, which he of course he remembers, and I suddenly feel I would give anything in the world to have a child’s brain again. We have failed to bring any of his shoes. We find my sister at the check-in and my nephew, after a hushed negotiation with his mother, agrees to lend Max his new sandals. Other guests pretend to be amused at the remote-control cars that our kids keep smashing into their legs as they walk in and out of the lobby. I make a half-assed attempt at corralling them, and smile at a man holding a baby dressed in boy-gendered clothes and say something corny and a little sexist like “this is your future!” I realize that I would much rather converse with Wilson the volleyball than interact with human strangers.

II.

At the pool, there are so many moms. Chill Mom, who I’ve already established lives near us and whose name I have immediately forgotten, is getting an alcoholic beverage at the poolside bar, natch. She compliments my new bathing suit and we know she is cool because she is impressed, not disgusted, that it is from Old Navy and was like 3 for $10 and will stretch into a shapeless amoeba by the end of the summer but is totally good enough for the time being. There are a lot of high-waisted bikini bottoms, a lot of prudent sun hats, and amazingly, a number of moms who do not seem to have gotten their bathing suits from Summersalt, but simply purchased regular lady-suits with zero slimming panels. I start to envy them, but then remember that we can never tell a person’s internal pain from their outward appearance. Let us not forget, friends, that at the age of 22, Mariah Carey won two Grammys for her first album, looking like absolute perfection, and then got back in her town car and returned to the private prison in which she lived. My husband points to a mother cooing at her baby in the shallow end and says “you should get a bathing suit like that.” She is, to my relief, a woman whose body has, by all outward appearances, been through the same kind of pain as mine.

When we stayed here in March, people were furtive and the most nervous among us wore masks in the pool. We gave others a wide berth, especially the man with a giant tattoo of the Chevy logo on his back, who my husband kept referring to as a “disease vector.” Now, even the dude loudly explaining his off-menu drink to the bartender does not seem to have the rebelliousness required to be unvaccinated. The only vectors are the children, who cannot be controlled. In the water, my daughter, her nose gushing with boogers, approaches another little girl and introduces herself. The girl’s mother, who is wearing low-rise bikini bottoms with a stringy top, smiles and says “Alona, what a pretty name.” “Thank you,” I reply, and wipe my daughter’s face with the thick strap of my one-piece.

III.

At dinner, the cousins, age three to fifteen, sit at their own table, and the adults cannot believe our freedom. The cousins quickly create their own civilization, which they call Metroville. I am pretty sure that this is from Minecraft or something but I am still proud of their cleverness. One is the president, one is the king, one decides that he is the mayor because he has a hat. “You’re the plumber,” Max tells his younger cousin, “the mayor said so.” I inquire about their economy and the mayor tells me that they run on cryptocurrency. The fifteen-year-old, seated at the head of the table, begins to explain this concept to the younger children, who draw on their placemats and continue to discuss the assignment of the plumber role. I say something awkward to the waiter and my sister teases me and the kids entertain each other for the entire meal, despite my wondering out loud when it will end. Everyone agrees that it is like a no-hitter, I should not comment on it unless I want it to be over. My daughter walks past me to present her eldest cousin with the problem of a weird-looking carrot and how to dispose of it. He hesitates for a moment but eventually suggests she put it on his plate. I remember the summer he was born, falling asleep at the beach with him on my chest. The impossible lightness of his body on mine, the softness of his skin, sticking to my own skin.

IV.

For dessert, we walk across the street to the little country grocery store. Max insists on wearing his mask on the walk even though I have told him he doesn’t have to wear it outside anymore where there is space and even though it is still 85 degrees out. To distinguish himself from the younger kids, the eleven-year-old cousin rides a hotel bike as far as he can before we tell him it should stay on the property. In the freezer aisle, although I believe that I want to trust my son’s eating instincts, I do not let him get an ice cream sandwich the size of his face. He is five and sometimes his instincts tell him to pick up sharp objects from the sidewalk or punch his sister in the face or believe that a plastic gem from a Christmas cracker is a real diamond just because his friend Asa said so. When we were kids, on school holidays or on a trip, we were allowed the indulgence of mixing our regular “healthy” cereal with a sugar cereal, which we referred to as “vacation cereal.” I can can connect the dots, in this way, from my childhood restrictions to denying my adult self permission to order anything other than a “skinny” latte at Starbucks. But we did not all turn out that way, and am I such a monster for not wanting my kid to eat Fruity Pebbles every single morning and also, the thing about the sharp objects.

V.

Back in our hotel room, I allow Max only two of the complimentary gummy bears, since he already had some when we arrived, and also a popsicle and a Drumstick ice cream cone that he settled on after being denied the head-sized sandwich, and he informs me that I am the worst mother in the whole wide world. Three minutes later, he hugs me and apologizes. “You’re the best mama, you’re perfect,” he whispers. “I don’t want to be perfect,” I lie.

In a last-ditch attempt to get the kids to shower, I promise to sing them the “diarrhea song” while they wash. My son bursts from the bathroom, very clean thank you, to announce that I have had diarrhea. Upon further investigation, he discovers that all of the adults in the vicinity have at some point in their lives had diarrhea. It is almost too much for him to bear.

VI.

I am so tired from the previous night’s insomnia, and the still receding headache, that I go to bed with my children. But before I do, I muster the energy to pick a fight with my husband. He sleeps on the couch so I can be in the bedroom undisturbed, but at two a.m. the little one cries out from the bunk room and the big one comes and sleeps with me and I lay awake, not in anxiety really, just mentally editing my website and wondering if I should have quoted such a high hourly rate for that consultation gig or if they will think I am too entitled and always vowing to definitely, when the sun rises, learn some kind of visualization for falling back to sleep.

When my oldest nephew, the disposer-of-carrots, was little, he slept hard but spent the whole night violently rotating around the bed. You’d fall asleep gazing at his exquisite face and wake up with his foot in your mouth. My son takes a few hours to wind down every night, but once he’s out, he’s out. He still has the body of a statue in a 17th-century Italian garden, but he is somehow going to kindergarten in two months and he will have to keep his mask on then and he will probably explain cryptocurrency to some kid who still wears diapers at night and another kid will tell him it’s not really a diamond and I think he’s pretty close to perfect.

I lie next to him and remind myself that the coffee here is not as good as you would imagine, given the cost of the rooms, but also that the pool opens at six in the morning and it is almost a holy time to be in the water, and that my daughter’s cold seems to be passing through her nascent system, and tomorrow I will wear my new high-waisted bikini, and I don’t think I will make any more small talk, and if the fog of this headache finally lifts I will order a glass of cold wine in the afternoon to sip by the edge of the pool and sure, it would be nice, for a time, to be a castaway, with no one to bother you.

But for now, this is sweet enough.

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