Free Suitable Precautions by Laura Boudreau Page B

them. They didn’t come for these unseasonably cool temperatures and an ocean that washed dead fish and bottles onto the beach.

    It’s colder than it should be for the time of year, José said every morning to the pale tourists in their windbreakers. I’m sorry.
    Mairin had brought only one sweater with her, a three-quarter sleeve black cardigan with iridescent buttons. You won’t need more than this, her mother had said, folding it gently into the American Tourister suitcase. You just throw it on over a sundress and no problem! Mairin, wearing the sweater over her new blue and green bikini, shivered. She leaned back onto the deck chair and let the plastic webbing gently bite the fleshiness of her thighs. She put on her sunglasses to stare at the overcast sky, unobserved.
    Mairin had spent a lot of time at the pool over the past ten days, long enough to make a habit of having a drink when José started his shift at ten each morning, and to find out that he had a wife and two little girls. Oh, Mairin had said, yes, she would like to see a picture, and José had taken the creased paper out of his breast pocket and smoothed it out on the bar with careful fingers.
    â€œMaria,” he had said, pointing to the smaller girl whose face was mostly covered by a thumb-sucking fist. “And Pené-lope,” he pointed again, the girl frowning, her face slightly turned away from the camera as though someone had unexpectedly called her name.
    â€œThey’re beautiful,” Mairin said.
    â€œLike their mother.” José refolded the photo and put it into his pocket. “Isabella. And you?”
    â€œNo,” Mairin said. “No kids.”
    By the early afternoon she often found herself drunk and sleepy, teetering back to her room, fingers brushing against the rough bark of palm trees. Every day the maids gave her
new towels that smelled of bleach. They folded them into swans. Two swans, kissing, with flowers in their towel-beaks. If Mairin was very drunk, she put the flowers in her hair and smoothed the towels over herself, dreaming of clean, white, disinfected beaches. She made a point of showering and dressing for dinner, even though she dreaded the American-style pulled pork she endured sitting beside the fat German who was perpetually sunburned despite the weather, who chewed with his mouth open and said, tiny pieces of pork flying towards her, Mairin, you are very beautiful. After dinner she escaped to the beach, walking through the rain with her sandals in her hand, dehydrated, smelling of meat, make-up washing from her skin. Later she fell asleep under the towels on her bed thinking, The End, as though she were a character in a tremendously boring film noir. There was already some comfort in the routine.
    But right now the beach chair was biting harder, the webbing probably leaving red marks on her skin. Her cue for another drink. Don’t be sloppy, Mairin told herself as she strolled towards the bar. Sloppiness, her mother said, is the sure sign of a tart, and a real lady acts like a cupcake, not a tart.
    â€œRum and Coke, please, José,” Mairin said as sweetly as possible. And suddenly there was the glass in her hand. Easy.
    If only it were sunny. Her mother had told her to get a tan.
    â€œMen don’t like pasty-faced girls, Mair,” she had said at the airport. “You need to relax in the sun, get some colour. You look tired.” She hooked a thumb in the direction of a kissing couple at the taxi stand. “Maybe if you didn’t look so tired, you wouldn’t need your mother to see you off.”

    â€œI don’t need you to,” Mairin had said.
    â€œOh, come on now.” She pushed some hair behind Mairin’s ear. “You look just like Mary Tyler Moore, only with better hair. Don’t worry, you’ll find someone.”
    The airport hummed with the sounds of families snaking their way to check-in desks, trying to sweep their