The Timeshare Comes for Us All
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Very early in my first marriage—I’m talking four or five days—I lay on a lounge chair on the white, powdery sand of an island paradise and took stock of my problems. First off, in that short time I’d already managed to lose both a piece of precious heirloom jewelry that my new mother-in-law had given me and also my new husband’s lucky Mets cap, which I’d left at a bar one island over. He’d taken both of these losses hard, and he’d felt that the missing jewelry had to be reported at once—long-distance and from the front desk—to his parents. The losses and the long-distance phone call were harbingers of the inevitable. But my biggest problem was immediate (aren’t they all?): Cheryl and Don, as I’ll call them.
Cheryl and Don had grown children, were either world-class social drinkers or textbook alcoholics, possessed a font of knowledge on matters such as how to take advantage of a loophole in the island’s customs law so we could each bring home an extra gallon of rum, and had decided that these two honeymooning 25-year-olds (us) needed their company. No matter where we went or what we were doing—limbo-ing, eating dinner, bronzing ourselves under a punishing sun—we’d hear a little Cheryl-pitched shriek of delight and there they were.
But—as in a mystery novel—it was these two apparently minor and eccentric characters who would offer the most important lesson of the honeymoon.
The four of us were lying on lounge chairs under the carcinogenic Caribbean sky when a young man appeared down the beach from us, offering brochures to tourists. This happened all day long: The brochures were for catamaran rides, or buffet dinners, or happy hours. But when Cheryl caught sight of this particular man, she said, “Oh no! No, no, no,” and began to reposition her chair so that she had her back to him.
“Nope,” Don said, and got to work turning his own chair around. It was a circling of the lounge chairs.
What was going on? “Timeshare,” Cheryl said, the way you might say rape or endoscopy.
Apparently, on a previous vacation, they had been suckered into a timeshare presentation (probably on the inducement of free drinks), and something about it had been absolutely horrible. Cheryl and Don were a couple of seen-it-all New Yorkers; you wouldn’t think a salesperson would get the best of them, but whatever had happened had left a mark.
The lucky Mets hat never turned up. Neither did the jewelry. We ended up tapping out on the marriage at five years—the paper anniversary, which was in our case observed with an 8-by-11 decree of divorce—and going our separate ways. But those five minutes on the beach with
