Inside Suzi Chapter 6
by Inside Suzi
Chapter 6Vacation and First BoundariesThe Jolly Roger was everything the brochure had promised and nothing like I had expected.I had expected a tourist trap — the kind of excursion that sounds fun in a hotel lobby and delivers something slightly less than that, with warm beer and a DJ playing at the wrong volume and a crowd of people performing vacation rather than having it. What we boarded instead was a tall ship, properly rigged, with dark wood and white sails and the particular authority of something built for the water rather than assembled for a photograph. It moved out of the marina with a low diesel rumble that gave way, once the sails were up, to something much older — the sound of wind in canvas, of water against the hull, of a vessel doing what it was designed to do.I stood at the bow rail in my bikini and my coverup and the anklet and felt the sea air hit my face and thought: yes. This.The sun was already high. The Caribbean had no interest in ambiguity — the sky was a blue so specific and saturated it looked like something chosen rather than naturally occurring, and the water below it was the same color in a slightly different register, turquoise shading to deep navy where the reef dropped away. We were three days into Cancun and I had already begun to understand why people came back to places like this. Not for the resort, not for the food, not for any specific feature of the place — but for what happened to your body when the ordinary pressures of ordinary life were physically removed by distance. The Minnesota suburb existed. It was still there, with its hedges and its cul-de-sacs and its particular geometry of windows and sightlines. But it was also very far away, and the distance did something specific to the air here, made it lighter somehow, made the decisions that had felt weighted back home feel simply like decisions.Marcus was at the bar getting the first rum punch of the day, which the crew was already dispensing with a generosity that suggested the Jolly Roger's business model depended on nobody staying entirely sober. I had declined the first one — too early, I'd said, though I was already revising that estimate as the boat cleared the harbor and the sun found full purchase on my shoulders.The deck was filling with the particular crowd that eighteen-plus excursions produced — couples of various ages, groups of friends in their late twenties and thirties, a handful of people who had clearly been doing this for several days already and wore the specific ease of people who had stopped worrying about sunscreen. Bikinis and board shorts and the occasional linen shirt pushed to its limits against the heat. Nobody was pretending to be anything other than a person on vacation, which was its own specific freedom.I adjusted the coverup on my shoulders and looked out at the water."First time on the Jolly Roger?"The voice came from my left, at the rail, where a man had materialized with the particular ease of someone who had been there a moment and simply hadn't registered yet. Mid-thirties, I placed him, American from the accent — Midwest or Southeast, the flattened vowels that could have been either. Not remarkable in any way that my eyes sought out. Sun-warm skin, the build of someone who moved through the world with some physical confidence, dark sunglasses pushed up into his hair. He was looking at the water rather than at me, which was a small thing I noticed."It is," I said."Third time for me," he said. "It gets better each time. Or the rum punch does. Hard to say which."I