Dared to Swap

I am the sensible one, and the sensible one does not book a week at an adults-only couples resort on the Riviera Maya on purpose. The driver who met us at Cancún had a cooler behind his seat, and before we were even out of the airport lot he reached back without turning around and handed us each a rolled white towel so cold it smoked a little in the heat, and a bottle of water with the cap already cracked, and then he pulled out onto Highway 307 and did not say another word for an hour and a half, which I decided right away was the most luxurious thing that had happened to me in years. I put the towel over my face. Todd put his on the back of his neck, where he was already going pink from the walk across the parking lot, and leaned his head against the window and watched Mexico go by: the jungle coming right up to the shoulder of the road, low and thick and a green so dense it looked painted, then a gas station, then a billboard for a water park, then jungle again, and every few miles a speed bump that the driver took at exactly the right speed, as if he'd been born knowing where they were.

"You okay?" Todd said, after the third one.

"I'm fine."

He looked at me the way he looks at a roof somebody else has told him is fine. I took the towel off my face.

I want to be clear about how we came to be in that van. My staff call me the sensible one. My mother calls me the sensible one. My younger sister Lindsay has called me the sensible one since she was six and I was eleven and I took the matches away from her, and she has never once meant it as a compliment. I am forty-four years old, Todd is forty-six, and I am the principal of a public high school in Dayton with twenty-one hundred students in it, the youngest principal the district has ever had, and I have spent eighteen years of marriage and most of my life before it being the person who knows where the permission slips are, who has the Tylenol, who remembers that Todd's mother can't have shellfish and that the dishwasher needs the button held down for a count of three. I keep everybody's week running. I am good at it. I was, I want to stress, extremely good at it right up until Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was at Lindsay's in Columbus. There were fourteen of us, and two pies, pumpkin and a pecan her husband had made from a video, and at some point after the second helping everybody started talking about where they were going for spring break, which in my family means where the kids are going, and Lindsay, who had had the better part of a bottle of pinot grigio by herself, pointed her fork at me across the table and said, "You two have never done one interesting thing in your whole lives."

"We went to Louisville," I said.

"For a roofing convention."

"It was a very nice hotel."

She had a coworker, it turned out, whose sister and brother-in-law had been to a place near Tulum, a couples resort, adults only, and she had heard all about it in the break room, and she told the whole table about it in a voice she probably believed was a whisper. Todd's mother was in the kitchen, thank God. Our kids were in the basement with their cousins and a video game. Lindsay leaned over the pumpkin pie and lowered her voice even less and said, "I dare you. Spring break. One week. I dare you to go."

It was a stupid thing to say, and everybody laughed, and I was going to laugh too and say something sensible about the budget, and then Todd, who had said maybe nine words since grace, put down his fork and said, "Okay."

Lindsay stared at him. I stared at him.

"We'll go," he said, and went back to his pie.

So that was that. I am also too proud to lose a dare to my baby sister, which is a thing about me nobody at school knows, and by the time we were driving home on I-70 in the dark I had already decided that we would go and that it would be fine, because nobody makes you do anything, and that we would lie by a pool for seven days and come home with tans and a story, and Lindsay would have to eat her words at Easter. I booked it in December. I told the assistant principals I was going to Mexico with my husband and every one of them said, "Good for you, Allie," in the voice you use for someone who has finally agreed to see a doctor about a mole. Our son is seventeen and our daughter is fourteen, and they are at home with Todd's mother for the week, and they think Casa Paradiso is a regular resort with a regular buffet, and they are not going to think anything else as long as I live.

The van turned off the highway onto a narrow road that ran straight east through the trees, white limestone dust coming up behind us, and the driver slowed for a speed bump that was really just a lump of something under the dust, and Todd's knee bumped mine.

"You keep looking at me," I said.

"You keep sighing."

"I'm not sighing. I'm breathing. It's hot."

He took my hand off my lap and turned it over and pressed his thumb into the middle of my palm, once, which is a thing I do to him and not a thing he usually does to me. It means you okay? I started it at his father's funeral and it stuck. I pressed back, which means yes, and he held onto my hand the rest of the way, his palm rough and dry and big enough to fold mine up entirely, and I looked out my own window at the trees so he wouldn't see my face, because for no reason at all I felt like I might cry.

The road ended at a gate, and the gate opened, and there it was.

I don't know what I'd expected. Something with neon, maybe. Something with a hot tub shaped like a heart. Casa Paradiso was a long, low, white building with a palapa roof, the thatch a soft gray-gold and steep as a church, and pale limestone steps going up to a lobby with no front wall at all, so that you could see straight through it, across the polished floor and under the slow ceiling fans and out the other side, to a strip of water so blue it didn't look like water but like something lit from underneath. Bougainvillea came down one of the white walls in a magenta flood. A young man in a white shirt was waiting at the bottom of the steps to take our bags, and the air when I got out of the van was so warm and so full of salt that I stood on the gravel with my mouth open and breathed it in, and Todd came around the van and stood next to me with his hands on his hips and looked at the roof.

"That's a good roof," he said.

"You are not getting up on that roof."

"I'm just saying. That's a lot of thatch. That's a craft."

The lobby smelled of lime and something smoky and sweet that I later found out was copal, and the reception desk was one long slab of pale wood with nothing on it but a little computer screen, two key cards in a folder, a dish of mints and a glass bowl of rubber wristbands in three colors, the brightest of them the same blue as the strip of sea behind it. The woman behind the desk had silver earrings and a beautiful navy linen dress, and she took our passports and found our reservation and told us that breakfast was served at the Terraza from seven until eleven, and that the welcome mixer was at La Palapa, the beach club, at sunset, and then, in exactly that same pleasant, unexcited voice, as if she were telling us where to find the ice machine, she told us about the bracelets.

White, she said, was for guests who were here to look around and say hello. Coral was for guests who were open to touching. Turquoise was for everything. A couple could take one or not, and could change any time, day or night; the bowl was always out. Then she smiled at us and waited.

I have given speeches to two thousand teenagers about vaping. I have sat across a table from a father who threw a chair. I was not prepared for a pleasant woman in a navy dress to wait for me to choose.

Todd leaned over the bowl. He fished out a white one between his thumb and finger and held it up to the light as if he were checking it for cracks.

"Which one's for people who want to lie in a hammock all week?" he said.

"White is perfect for a hammock," she said, completely seriously, and I started to laugh, and then Todd did, that low surprised laugh of his that almost nobody outside our house gets to hear, and the woman's mouth twitched at the corner.

"White," I said. "Two white, please. We're very new."

"Welcome," she said, and pushed the bowl an inch toward us, and that was all it took. Todd worked mine over my hand and onto my wrist, and I did his, which took some doing, because Todd's wrists are the size of most people's ankles, and we walked off after the young man with our bags wearing matching white rubber bracelets like a couple of people who'd signed up for a charity 5K. Halfway across the lobby I looked down at mine and then at his and laughed again, and he bumped me with his shoulder and said, "Haverkamp, party of two," which is what he says when we're leaving a wedding early, and I bumped him back.

Our suite was in the Jungle wing, down a white stone path that wound back and forth through the trees, past other doors with other terraces behind thick green screens of leaves, and every so often a gap in the plants where you could see the sea flashing at the bottom of the hill. Something was singing in the trees, a bird or a frog, I couldn't tell. The young man let us in, showed Todd the air conditioning and the safe and showed me the terrace, said gracias when Todd tipped him and buenas tardes on his way out, and closed the door so quietly I didn't hear it latch.

It was the most beautiful room I had ever been in. White walls and a dark wood ceiling with a fan going slowly around in it, and a bed so big you could have slept the whole family in it crosswise, and on the far side of it a wall of glass doors standing open onto a terrace with a little plunge pool in the stone, the water clear and pale green over pale stone, and an outdoor shower against a wall of wet limestone with ferns growing out of the cracks, and slung between two posts at the edge of the trees, a hammock, white and deep and moving very slightly in the breeze as if somebody had just gotten out of it.

Todd went straight to the hammock. Of course he did. He stood at the end of it and pushed it with one hand to see how it was hung, and checked the knots on the post with his thumb, and then, satisfied, lowered himself into it sideways, one leg on the ground, with a groan of such deep happiness that I had to turn around and go and unpack before I said something embarrassing.

I unpack. It is what I do. I unpacked his side of the suitcase first, his good linen shirts that I bought him two summers ago and that he has decided, without ever telling me so, that he likes, his navy trunks, his sandals, the paperback he's been reading since Christmas, and I hung up the shirts and put the trunks in the drawer and his shaving kit by the sink, and then I started on my side. The black one-piece. The white wrap dress, for the Thursday party Lindsay's coworker's sister had told her about, the one where everyone wears white. My good sandals. The coral slip I had told myself was a nightgown. A sundress. Another sundress. And then, at the very bottom, folded into a square the size of a paperback and wrapped in a hotel shower cap like a secret, the bikini.

It was emerald green. It was a string bikini, the strings long and thin and the top cut in two small triangles that did not, I will say plainly, cover much of me, because there is a fair amount of me to cover. I have the body I have had since I was twenty-five, with a few miles on it: full in the chest, curving in at the waist, round at the hip and rounder behind, the kind of figure that looked wonderful in the forties and has spent most of my adult life in cardigans. I bought the bikini in a shop in Kettering on a Tuesday in the middle of November, for no reason I could have told you. I had never owned a bikini in my life. I brought it home with the tags still on, buried it under my sweaters, and forgot it until I packed. That was a week before Thanksgiving. A week before Lindsay pointed her fork at me.

I unwrapped the shower cap. The tags were still on, two of them, swinging on little loops of plastic thread. I stood there by the bed holding it in both hands.

The hammock creaked. I hadn't heard him get up. Todd was standing in the open door to the terrace, the light behind him, his shoulders filling the frame, and he was looking at the bikini in my hands.

He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that I felt the heat go up my chest and into my face, which at forty-four I'd hoped I was finished with.

"Huh," he said.

"It's for the pool at home," I said.

We have a pool at home. Todd put it in for the kids in 2017, an above-ground pool with a deck he built himself, and I swim in it in a navy tank suit from Lands' End with a little skirt on it, and it would not be open again until Memorial Day, and he knew that, and I knew he knew that, and he knew when I bought the bikini, because he is the one who gets the mail.

He didn't say any of it. He looked at the bikini and then at me, and the corner of his mouth went up, slow, the way it does, and he didn't say a word.

I put the bikini in the top drawer with the tags still on and shut it.

"Pool at home," he said.

"Yes."

"Okay." He was still smiling. He went back out to the hammock, and I heard it take his weight, and after a minute, from out there in the green light and the bird noise, he said, "It's a good color on you."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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