Mimi's shoes

Ah Jamaica, the only place an adult male can carry a sky blue tote covered in pink hibiscuses and get away with it.

I have survived my first night at this all-inclusive resort. I do not come easily to these kinds of places. They attract individuals who flock to noisy class reunions or join bowling leagues and wear matching shirts or god forbid, sign up for bus trips to St. Louis, all distasteful to me on so many levels. My nature is heavy on the introvert side and I just want to sit in my room overlooking the ocean and suck my thumb.

Due to my extreme discomfort about this situation I drank too much lick-coour last night and I'm not sure what I did on the dance floor but people are congratulating me for it today. "She looked so meek and mild when she first got on stage," I hear a gent from Minnesota tell my husband and husband is beaming, jeesh, whose side is he on. They are unaware I am sitting under a towel behind very large sunglasses a short distance away feeding leftover toast to the starlings. "Where did she learn to dance like that?" he asks. I want to shout out, "convent schools, you cretin!" but why do that and risk revealing my hiding spot and more uncomfortable questions.

I am at the pool bar waiting for my margarita and the woman next to me strikes up a conversation and she is French.  Mimi, of Mimi and Pierre and she has children ten years younger than mine, three of them and last week these parents and children spent a week at another Jamaican resort. "Those kids wanted to do notheeng but sit on the deck and dreenk and I was worreed they would fall off and go splat," she said in fairly good English. Now M&P are here minus children and Mimi's neck is covered in oriental tattoos, ouch that had to hurt and they translate into facts about her own personal self.  She has volumes of dyed curls cascading down her back and very tight vulgar clothing and who can blame those three drunk children.