Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Then, though the guidebook had recommended not doing so, they walked down along the empty pier, stopping eventually for drinks at a small café attached to the side of a house. The sign out front claimed that the café was open, but when they followed the arrow around the house to the side door marked “Café,” they found themselves in an empty, poorly lit room with several tables and a dartboard. They sat down anyway because neither woman was ready to face the street again, where they felt conspicuous and vulnerable to all of the dangers that the guidebook had warned of: drive-by shootings, gangs, drugs, purse snatchers, con artists, and ass grabbers, though they were not sure whether the book had actually mentioned the last of these or whether they were simply allowing their imaginations to get the better of them. The room was cloyingly hot and musty, and at one point Sara, who had grown up in Minnesota and was fond of explaining to people that the state actually contained almost one hundred thousand bodies of water, commented that the room reminded her of a lake cabin.

“It’s the smell,” Sarah replied, “the smell and the paneling.”

“No,” Sara said firmly. “That’s not it. There’s just something about it, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s not that obvious.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Sarah told her. “You just think that because I’m from Iowa, I don’t know anything about lake cabins.” She spoke almost sneeringly, and Sara looked startled, for the two of them rarely argued. They were quiet then, and after several more minutes, a door near the back of the room creaked open, and they sensed that they were being watched.

“Yes?” Sarah said sharply, turning toward the door. There was no answer, but they heard a dog growl, and she called out again. “Yes? Are you open?”

Finally, a child’s voice — they could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl — announced: “My mother went to the store. Please wait.” Then the door slammed shut, and they heard several locks fall into place.

Neither woman had an immediate reaction — to go or to stay — and so they stayed, but Sarah, who was the more impatient one, soon stood, walked to the window, and studied her watch. When she returned to the table, she said quietly, “We’ve been here nearly half an hour now,” and Sara understood that this was her way of suggesting that they leave. It occurred to them, however, that the room had become cooler, that, in fact, they were both shivering slightly, which meant that someone, presumably the child, had turned on the air conditioner. It was settled yet again: they could not leave. Instead, they spent the next fifteen minutes looking forward to the rest of their trip, to the moment when they would leave Belize City behind, and eventually they heard the locks being undone and the door from the house opening again.

A small woman carrying a tray approached the table, and as she got closer, they saw that she was Chinese. “High tea?” she asked softly, and because they could see that she had already prepared something, they did not have the heart to say that they just wanted sodas.

“Yes,” they both said and then nodded vigorously. The woman set a small plate in front of each of them, placed a pot of tea in the middle of the table, and set about arranging cups and saucers, cloth napkins, and various pieces of cutlery. When she was done, she gestured gracefully toward the table, an invitation to begin eating, and hurried away. Each plate contained a slice of white bread spread thickly with rancid butter and topped with chocolate sprinkles. To the side were cucumber slices, spilled out like coins.

They ate everything, of course, because they couldn’t bear the thought of the woman staring sadly at their scraps, and Sara, who always carried the money, wedged a dollar bill under her saucer after settling the bill. They both nodded politely at the woman, who was hovering near the dartboard, and left, their eyelids fluttering rapidly against the sudden brightness outside. They had thought they would find a taxi, but there were none, and so they walked quickly back in the direction of the hotel, their fanny packs slung low across their buttocks like shields.

They returned to the hotel to find that their bags had indeed been taken up to their room as promised, though they realized, as the proprietor led them up a rickety, winding set of stairs and down a narrow hallway, that the hotel was, in fact, nothing more than three rooms wedged between the first-floor bar and the third floor, where the proprietor and his family lived. They stopped in front of a particleboard door, and the proprietor handed them a key attached to a plastic coffee mug. “Your room, ladies,” he mumbled and hurried off without showing them the interior.

There were no windows or fans in the room; the only suggestion of circulation came from an open transom above the door, which did nothing to alleviate the heat or the smell of raw sewage that hung in the air, an odor that wafted up from the toilet. They tried flushing it again and again, but the toilet had no lid that could be closed to block the smell, which rose up from the pipes and filled the room. The final insult, for that’s how it seemed to the women at this point, was that the toilet stood shamelessly out in the open, within touching distance of the bed and without even a curtain that could be drawn around it when it was in use; in fact, it was almost as though the room had been designed to showcase the toilet, for it sat atop a platform, which one had to ascend like royalty. Still, and this was always a consolation, the room had been quite cheap.

Sara and Sarah knew how to pass time, an expression that they used often and without self-consciousness, considering it an important skill whether one liked to travel or not. At home, where portability was not a concern, Sarah was teaching herself the art of papermaking, and both women enjoyed gardening; also, while they understood that recycling was technically not a hobby, they liked to devote time to that as well. When they traveled, the two passed time by reading, though they also carried a deck of cards with which to play cribbage. Thus, they spent the early evening hours in Belize City in their hotel room playing round after round of cribbage, keeping score on a pad of paper because they both agreed that a cribbage board was unnecessary. Next, turning their books alternately toward the light from the transom and the weak glow offered by the bedside lamp, they read, Sara from a Belizean novel titled Beka Lamb and Sarah from the guidebook. It was then that the Japanese couple had knocked furtively at their door and asked whether they could possibly change some American currency into Belizean dollars. They didn’t have enough for a bus, the young man explained, and they couldn’t bear the thought of waiting around in the morning until the banks opened. As he said this, the young woman began to sob, and so they had given the couple half of their money, changing it at the bank rate even though they had just purchased it at the higher airport rate that afternoon. After the couple left, bowing slightly and thanking them repeatedly, they returned to their books.

At ten o’clock, they turned off the lamp, though there was nothing they could do about the light coming through the transom or the throbbing music from the bar downstairs. Sarah engaged in a relaxation method that involved focusing on each part of her body and encouraging it to ignore the noise while Sara simply covered her head with the pillow. Eventually, they fell asleep. At some point during the night, however, the music stopped abruptly, and they both awakened to a soft lapping sound inside their room, though neither could be sure afterward which had woken them — the sudden cessation of one sound or the quiet proximity of another. They turned the light on quickly, without even speaking, to discover a mangy, sore-infested street cat crouched on the toilet seat drinking from the bowl. It fixed them with a slow, dazed look, and then it leapt from the toilet seat, clawed its way frantically up the wooden door of their room, and hoisted itself out through the open transom.