Dear Abby

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Authors: Peggy Barnett

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Dear Abby

by
Peggy Barnett

 

 


 

Dear
Abby

Copyright © 2012 Peggy Barnett

Cover Design © 2013
Ruthanne Reid

  

 

 

 

 

All
rights reserved. Reproduction or utilization of this work in any form, by any
means now known or hereinafter invented, including, but not limited to,
xerography, photocopying and recording, and in any known storage and retrieval
system, is forbidden without permission from the copyright holder.

 

 

 

 

This is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as
real.

Any resemblance to
actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABBY DOESN’T BELIEVE IN MUCH OF ANYTHING.

If she was fanciful, if she was one of those
fiction writers who can invent whole worlds out of a single meaningful social
taboo, she might have the imagination to believe in a god.
Any
god.
But she doesn't, so she can't.

All the same, the serving woman is a bit of a
goddess. That's the only way Abby can describe her. Out of everyone and
everything in this overly-clean and pre-packaged little hell-hole, only this
woman has caught Abby's eye. She's not sure why. Abby doesn't sleep with women,
although she can admire a nice pair of breasts, attractive features, beautiful
hair. It doesn't have to mean she wants have sex with the rest of the
collection, though.

Maybe because there's
something oddly authentic about this woman.
But there shouldn't
be, and that's what is making her stand out. She's a resort
worker,
they're all the same, really. They're meant to be visually interchangeable to the
tourists, all dressed in the same brown tailored shirts and cream shorts, all
the women with their hair back in buns, all the men clean shaven. They're meant
to be moving furniture, ignored and paid their pittance and sent off the resort
to live their real lives beyond the too-white walls and too smooth-paths.

Maybe it's the way that the woman's hair is
so black it shines blue. Maybe it's because the smooth, high-cheeked planes of
her face speak of local ancestry, and the rich smoky colour of her skin tells
of a heritage untouched by Spanish conquistadors or Western marriages.

Abby is projecting, she knows this. She's
exotifying
the serving woman and it makes
Abby snort with disgust at
herself
.

And yet…
Abby can't take her
eyes off the woman. If it were possible, if there were such things, then
perhaps the woman might have been a little bit of a goddess. Of course, she
couldn't really be one. Goddesses don't serve daiquiris to fat, sweating
tourists on faux-marble pool patios. At least, Abby didn't think so until now.

And yet… the server has a way of walking that
makes her look like she's not quite touching the ground, and there’s something
almost too-white about the sclera of her eyes.

Shading her eyes from the Riviera sun, Abby
squints down at her notebook. The pages are made too-white by the glare, in
turn hurting her eyes, even
through
her ridiculous
oversized sunglasses. She rubs the warm metal of the spiral binding, flicking
her pen between the fingers of her other hand, around and around in a circle.

She can't take notes out here. It's too
bright, and the warmth is making her drowsy. But her suite was too air
conditioned. She'd turned the air down, but it was still…
fake
smelling.
Too sterile.
Too much like nothing at all. At least
the scent out here is authentic. The air is filled with the soft tang of salt
wafting up from the beach, unwashed sweaty bodies, palm trees and viciously
tended greenery, chlorine, the overpowering artificial coconut reek of sunblock
creams and tanning lotions, the musk of spilt beer baking into concrete, the
burnt grease of the snack hut, the drift of cocoa and banana and melon liquor.

A perfume that Abby
knows well and intimately.
And is beginning to hate
with a passion.

When she'd signed on with the agency magazine
as a travel writer, she'd had visions of temples in Tibet and river rafting in
the Rockies. She'd mentally prepared herself to eat bugs and strange stews, to
sleep in the snow, to get
a sunburn
in the desert.
She'd envisioned a dust-smeared and poorly mended backpack, covered with
patches and snatches of fabric she'd picked up along the way to shore up the
holes and tears that travel would rip into the canvas. She'd researched the
best hiking boots, the best mosquito netting,
the
most
durable miniature laptops with the longest batteries. She'd imagined the
interior of the Central Americas, climbing mountains in Peru and ruins in
Brazil.

She had not, not
once
, envisioned
package tours and all-inclusive resorts, and the agony of the real culture
being just one sheet of glass, one low marble wall, one stretch of impeccably
paved highway away. She never imagined the frustration of being kept outside,
of being patted on the head by the locals and directed back towards the bar; of
the exasperated,
maternalistic
sighs of the cleaning
staff when she tried to strike up a conversation, the way they herded her
towards the group activities on the beach like a curious child being shunted
into a day care play-time to keep her from an attack of the incorrigible
whys
;
the veiled condescension she got from the concierges when she asked which bus
would take her into town, off the resort, into the middle of the
lives
of
the people who worked around her.

"Cute, silly
gringo
," they
all said with their eyes. "She wants to 'discover' our culture. Thinks by
walking around off the resort for a day she'll find out what it really
means.
How insulting."

And it
is
insulting, for everyone
involved. Because Abby has no illusions that she can write the great article
that will finally get her bosses, the tourists, the self-absorbed vacationers
to at least
appreciate
that there was a world beyond the resorts, but
she can at least try to get other people to
care
about it.

She doesn't want to discover anything, she
doesn't want to be another in a long line of people who point to what already
is and lay claim to the glory of it.

She wants to be invited to learn, and then
allowed to explain. She wants to
share
it. She wants to taste the food,
the real food, the meals that everyone prepares for
themselves
.
She wants to listen to the radio, chat in the evenings with the locals. She
wants to learn how to make their clothing, and how to wear it.

She just wants the experience. She just wants
the
chance.

And yeah, maybe that is selfish, Abby can admit
that. Maybe it is more of that White Western Man mentality that she was raised
within and can never seem to totally shake no matter how hard she tries. Maybe
it's her barging around and demanding access somewhere that she has no right to
be, violating the last bastion of privacy and calling it research, calling it a
record for posterity.
Saying that her desire to learn trumps
anyone else’s desire to protect.

But it eats her up inside, every time they
send her to one of these falsely cheerful Caribbean paradises. She hates
watching the employees around her parodying their own culture, their own
traditions, making a mockery of their own lives for the sake of drunken,
ignorant tourists. She wants to break through the stereotypes of the cultures
around her—the sombreros and the tequila—and just cherish what she finds
underneath. Not exploit. Not repackage. Not impose new stereotypes. Just…
cherish
.

And to help her readers do the same.

The problem is that nobody, on either side of
the equation, seems to want it too.

Her bosses don't care about the life of the
world off the five star luxury resorts, and most of the time it seems that the
people who work on them have no desire to share their real lives with Abby. She
can't push, she can't force them to want to share, so all she can do is sit in
the posh restaurants or lounge in the rows of hammocks on the fine-sanded
beaches, and pretend that the dichotomy isn't tearing her apart.

There is nothing Abby can do about any of it.

 


 

 

Going to resorts alone is a bit embarrassing.
The concierge realizes immediately that she's a mystery reviewer, they always
do, and so not only is she alone but they won't leave her
alone.
The
kindness quotient goes through the roof, the solicitations and bonus luxuries
become cloying, and the deference is grating. Abby is thirty-two years old, has
no boyfriend, no husband, no kids, and a job she has grown to hate. She can't
even bring a friend along on these research trips anymore, because then she has
to actually pretend that she is having a good time for ten whole days.

Abby is back on the patio by the pool this
afternoon, deliberately sat in the chairs that the not-goddess is serving,
because she wants a closer look at the woman. There's no story here at the resort.
Abby could write a whole magazine full of praise for the
Riviera
Luxuria
and never have to get up off her arse to
experience any of it. She's done it all, and it's never different. The
snorkeling trips with the so-called authentic local meals on the boat after;
the shopping bus-ride into some tourist-attracting market town; the zip-line
and parasailing adventures; the walking tours of the local ruins; they're all
the same.

All carefully
choreographed so that the tourists see just enough of the “authentic,” but
never too much of
reality
.

 It is a world populated by smiling
cherub children and generous, gracious farmwives, and confident, competent
artisans. And none of it is about what they watch on TV, and how they spend
their Friday nights, and what they do when they meet someone they want to
marry.

Abby could praise this resort to the high
heavens and never have to leave her lounge chair, because it
never changes
.
This pre-packaging of the exotic is disgusting. And it's taken nearly ten
years, but Abby's just disgusted with herself for being part of the machine
that perpetuates it.

She sips the last of a piña colada that is no
better
nor
any worse than any of the thousands she's
drunk before, and taps her pen against her bare knee. Abby hasn't written a
thing about the
Luxuria
in her notebook.

Which, she'll admit,
is new.
Usually she at least
tries
to put in the appearance of effort.

Maybe this really is it. Maybe this is the
last assignment. Maybe she'll go back home with her suntan and her empty notebook
and get called up in front of the boss for failing to deliver an article. Maybe
he'll threaten to fire her and remind her how many other people are lining up
for the chance to take seven all-inclusive vacations per year all around the
world for the sake of a write-up. And maybe this time Abby will say, as she
always longs to say, "Fine! Give it to them, then! I quit!"

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