Caye Caulker, Belize – At Maria's Laundromat

Photo by Ron S. Doyle

LaFleur blooms abroad. But she’s still not the talkative type. Even on this speck of an island off the coast of Belize, among strangers, she guards her words and remains a cautious voyeur, an instinctive anthropologist observing the locals with minimal interference.

After settling our canoe rental debt with the tanned, tattooed Canadian woman at EZ Boy Tours, we park ourselves at a table in an open air restaurant nearest the pedestrian traffic and order conch fritters and rum drinks. The briny blend of ocean and sweat in our clothes dries in the early evening breeze.

I watch LaFleur watching others and understand perhaps why she feels so comfortable in foreign places. At home, Americans often assume that extroversion automatically accompanies stunning beauty, so they incorrectly register her reticence as an aloof response-but no one judges a tourist for saying too little. I appreciate it; our quiet communications leave ample room for thought, contemplating sights and sounds I would otherwise inadvertently miss.

Nonetheless, I marvel at the sound of my own voice, so I still eagerly speak to receptive ears. In a new place I talk even more, incessantly asking questions, hoping to glean some form of social enlightenment from my encounters. Traveling with LaFleur encourages silence, however, and aside from countless employees of the service industry, I have not engaged in much conversation with the locals.

Instead I have only gabbed with other tourists: The somehow-prim-in-a-bikini Englishwoman working in Australia on holiday who had “never visited America but just knew it must be awful.” The salt-and-peppered physicist from France who employed his wife for translation until we realized that we shared Spanish as a common language. A weary, work-worn Russian couple from Colorado Springs. The obliviously exhibitionist teenaged daughters of the Russian couple returned from some undisclosed beachside bar where they used their feminine charms to procure free alcohol from witless, shirtless twenty-something men. With each interaction, the initial excitement of the international exchange rarely yields the profound philosophical banter for which I hoped. Tourists simply say too little.

3 June 2006 – Caye Caulker – Maria’s Laundromat

LaFleur and I cart a load of dirty clothes to one of only two laundromats on Caye Caulker. Maria’s establishment, as we overheard at the rum & raisin ice cream shop last night, is the clean one. We stoop outside, listening to the hum of washing machines inside, thumbing through glossy pages of an outdated Cosmo.

A small moon-faced girl peeks coyly around the building, flashing brightly timid eyes at LaFleur. If I had known our future then, I would have insisted that LaFleur turn her head and bury it in some article about “33 Ways to Please Her Man.” She wields, however, and unconscious Franciscan reverence for little things-especially children, and especially those who behave as I imagine she did as a small child. The fawn-like girl gingerly approaches LaFleur’s smile and come-hither gestures.

“I like your braids,” the little girl whispers to LaFleur. The fawn cautiously strokes my wife’s hair, then gently rolls a bead between her thumb and forefinger.

“Honey, take a picture!” La Fleur whispers to me. I oblige, focusing my camera on the quaint moment between tourist and local. The act of spotlighted attention twists our gentle fawn into a tyrant.

“Take another!” the little girl shouts. She yanks on a handful of LaFleur’s hair and ties two braids into a knot.

I snap another photo and then she turns her attack to me. I defend, demand identification and she curtly names herself Christina, daughter of Maria.

“What are you reading?” Christina asks. I look down, notice a flash of lingerie, and clap the magazine shut. She orders, “Make me a toy!”

Stunned, I ask for a pair of scissors. She runs into the Laundromat and returns, running with the hinged blades pointed directly at me. I quickly pull a subscription insert from the magazine, fold it, and cut the cardstock into the form of a butterfly. She squeals with joy, takes it from me, and tosses it into the air. It tumbles and falls predictably to the ground.

“Make it fly!” she curses. I tear out a full page and fashion a paper airplane. “Now you are gone play with me. You hide and seek now.”

LaFleur, Christina and I run around the washing machines, hide behind doors, catch each other and begin again. After five minutes, I forget her initial behavior and enjoy myself. After fifteen minutes, I grow tired. After thirty minutes, I curse the damned humidity and pray for the dryer to finish with our clothes. Christina drags three passing young Garifuna girls-one striking and slender, the other two a pair of malnourished mute twins-into her dictatorship. For over an hour, we five hostages somehow succumb to the demands of this tiny stark-raving maniac.

Soon enough a mechanical buzzing savior pulls us away and Maria shoos her daughter into the house. I wonder, as Christina’s sad eyes watch us from behind a screened door, what could create such a bully in this most laid back of locales?

Caye Caulker seems to sway in the ocean, floating far from home.