After an hour or so the daughters of Alex and Irene return from some undisclosed beachside bar where they used their feminine charms to procure free alcohol from witless, shirtless twenty-something men. They each cock a hip to one side, indignant to their Russian parent’s questions.
“I don’t fucking know, Dad, one minute the camera was there, the next it was gone,” the youngest daughter yells.
“When did you last use it? Did you leave it here?” her father quietly asks.
The other daughter joins in. “So you’re like, blaming us because you can’t find it? It’s probably buried under your towel in the sand, Dad. Mom, why is Dad blaming us because he lost our camera? Shit, all of my pictures of Jorge are on there. I can’t believe you.” She snorts, mindlessly brushing sand from her breasts and bare stomach.
These are 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 bosom-thrusting attitude and overt sexuality of these two thoroughly American born-and-raised girls. I imagine their Russian Orthodox grandmother, in a long black frock and veil, swooning at their sight.
LaFleur winks at me, gently pinches my earlobe between her thumb and forefinger, and leaves for the ocean. We often communicate this way-with gentle movements, the projected curves of our mouths, the quiet angles of our gaze.
I follow her into the water and we dance, bobbing and twirling in the high tide of early afternoon.
Isla Mujeres lies eleven kilometers of the coast, surrounded by colors of clear cobalt and turquoise glass. I can see the smoggy hullabaloo of Cancún on the horizon, and the island feels suddenly quaint and rustic-truly Caribbean.
After a few hours on North Beach, known to the locals as Cocoteros, LaFleur and I shoulder our backpacks and hunt for a hotel room. The island’s legendary Poc-Na Hostel only has bare cement on the patio available for tents, so we wander around the corner to Hotel Caracol. The faint scent of honeysuckle perfumes the lobby, and a stocky, shovel-faced man named Hugo offers us a large discount on two nights, only $225 MX because he likes my green México jersey. We gossip Copa Mundial a few minutes longer until he tosses our key to LaFleur.
“Enjoy,” he smiles to her, offering his only English word of the exchange.
The room boasts a shower with hot water and a large ceiling fan screaming and shaking cool air at us from overhead. We toss our packs on the floor and test the firmness of the king sized bed. LaFleur and I shower, enjoying the cool water first, only turning the hot knob when goose bumps rise. Within seconds we are doused in the smell of putrid sulfur, the odor of hot and runny rotten eggs covering our skin. We jump from the shower, dripping and stinking, and exchange thick comedic sneers at one another.
“Must be an Argentina fan.” LaFleur grins and pokes me in the stomach.
We don our swimsuits again. We fill our canteen bottles with filtered water pumped from the tank of our toilet-the only untainted water we can find-and head back to Cocoteros.
There, waltzing in the waning surf, we bathe the last minutes of sunset.
