After an hour or so, the daughters of the Russian couple return from some undisclosed beachside bar where they used their feminine charms to procure free alcohol from witless, shirtless twenty-something men. They each cocked a hip to one side, indignant to their Russian parent’s questions. These were the type of teenage girls whose oblivious exhibitionism makes adult men harbor guilty, uncontrollable thoughts despite their best efforts to remain calm. Years of teaching in a high school—where the dress code narrowly succeeds to conceal nipples and pubic hair (most of which is waxed and shaven these days anyhow)—have rendered me moderately immune, yet even I cannot ignore the absurdly overt sexuality of these two thoroughly American-born and raised girls. One sheet of my travel journal could easily cover more skin than the four cloth triangles that arrange themselves strategically over those regions of anatomy saved for their date to junior prom. I imagined their Russian Orthodox grandmother, in a long black frock and veil, swooning at their sight. Somewhere, behind a palm tree I could hear the last gasping breaths of Victorian modesty as it collapses into over-stimulated convulsions.
