Pastries (24)

On my way outside I decide to do some attitude adjustment. Although this trip is not exactly the kind of trip I would have planned, and my travel mates are not the kind of people I would have chosen to travel with (apart from Rita, who in a moment of weakness got me into it), it is no use feeling sorry for myself or making excuses to justify why I don’t dare to leave. I should be grateful that I can travel in comfort and learn something new every day without having to pay exorbitant fees or worry about getting lost due to GPS malfunctions. It’s the journey that counts, as they say. Portugal is a big unknown waiting to be discovered and who knows, maybe I will discover something new about myself, too, during this sorry misadventure.

Or maybe this journey will just reinforce what I already know about myself. For example, sometimes I choose to keep my mouth shut even when I know that I should say something, because the pastries that Rita bought are still sitting in the middle of the table, calling for the café owner’s attention. Rita is chewing on one of the pastries while scrolling on her phone, giggling as always, her colorful leggings-clad legs resting on a chair she pulled from another table. Vera is staring at the ocean, absorbed in the view, I assume, and Anna is consorting with her muse, in front of some flowering bushes that grow among the rocks on the edge of the hill, taking close-up photos.

Rita raises her head from the phone as soon as she hears me approach the table and pushes the pastry box toward me. “Take one. It’s really good.”

“Maybe later,” I say.

“Come on, take one, they’re good, I bought too many,” Rita insists, as she always does.

“She said she didn’t want any,” Vera intervenes impatiently. I am not sure if she’s doing it on my behalf or because she’s annoyed by her daughter’s voice. Sometimes I can’t decipher the way Vera thinks. She becomes impatient at the most unexpected moments.

Rita shrugs without raising her eyes from the phone and takes another bite from her pastry. “Whatever.”   

I watch her for about a second chewing slowly, methodically, unperturbed by the people around her. She is so content in her little world, surrounded by food and silly videos her Israeli friends post on Facebook, I want to punch her if only to wake her up to reality. “You should put away the pastries,” I finally break my silence despite myself. “When the woman brings the coffee, she’s going to say something.” 

Rita does not react. Either she doesn’t understand why I say that or she is pretending that she doesn’t know the rules. At last, she looks up from her phone. “She’s not going to say anything.”

As soon as she says it, the woman comes out with four coffees with milk on a tray. She puts the glasses in a circle around the pastry box. 

“Can we have sugar?” Rita asks the woman. 

“You can’t bring food from outside,” the woman responds in perfect English as if she didn’t hear Rita’s question.

Rita looks at the woman, lifts both sides of her mouth in a forced smile, closes the box, and moves it from the table to the chair that her feet were resting on until that moment. She hates to play by the rules, but today she doesn’t want to make a scene, and I am grateful. I really don’t want to watch her argue with that nice Portuguese woman who taught me how to order coffee. 

“Thank you,” the woman says. 

As she turns away from us, Rita calls after her, “Sugar please?”

I want to strangle her for being such a bitch. I also want to say “I told you so,” but I know I don’t have to rub it in. Anna, who was not privy to the completely predictable scene, returns from her short expedition and joins us at the table.

“You ordered me coffee? Thank you,” she says to Rita.

Rita pulls the box from under the table. “Want a pastry?”

This woman is incorrigible. If I had known that she was going to cause trouble with that stupid box of pastries, I would have told her not to buy it, but telling Rita not to buy something usually gets the opposite result. She would just buy two of whatever it is, as those jacuzzis in her backyard attest.

“No thanks,” Anna says and takes a sip from the coffee. “It’s good,” she says.

Rita puts the box back on the chair. I reach for my coffee and take a sip. It tastes great and I owe it to this nice woman I did not protect from Rita’s antics. It only needs a little sugar, but that’s not a problem. I can drink coffee without sugar if I have to, but I don’t because the woman comes out with a few paper packets of sugar and puts them on the table. “Do you want to order something to eat?” She asks no one in particular.

“Thank you, we are fine,” Anna volunteers. Rita keeps her eyes on her phone. Vera says nothing. She does not speak to strangers as far as I’ve noticed, even though she speaks four languages. “Obrigada,” I contribute my small part, hoping to make our little group look less inconsiderate after the pastry box incident.

With the hot coffee warming my hands, I lean into my chair and watch the giant waves enter the bay below us. I don’t think I have ever sat so close to such large waves without getting wet or scared. I grew up swimming in the Mediterranean Sea and spent most of my life a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, where surfers ride the tallest waves, but these waves here are nothing like the waves I’ve seen in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. They don’t break near the café. They rush into the bay and break in front of a sandy beach bordered by grass-covered dunes and recently plowed fields. In the distance, I finally see the surfers. They cross the beach with their surfboards and enter the sea. A second later, they disappear behind the mountains of water rolling into the bay, and the beach is empty again. 

I wonder if I could live in a place like this, where they drink coffee in glasses and charge you to use the bathroom. This town, whose name I already forgot, is not as spectacular as Lisbon or as quaint as Óbidos, but the weather is nice and the people don’t look mean. Plus, it is not very big so it’s possible to walk everywhere, including to the beach, which from a distance looks clean and undisturbed. I cannot see trash floating in the water, either, which is promising. In some countries, you cannot swim in the sea because there is so much crap floating around that it can make you sick. My daughter spent a summer semester in South Korea a few years ago and told me she became fascinated with Korea’s ocean conservation program after swimming in the trash-filled waters off Jeju Island, not far from women in their seventies who were diving to harvest sea creatures for a living. In Israel, swarms of stinging jellies scare bathers off the beaches in hot summers, and in Monterey, once in a while, large blooms of toxic algae kill seabirds and intimidate the few human swimmers who brave the year-round frigid waters. I wonder what it would be like to swim here when the surf is not so high. But it’s too early to tell. I don’t know enough about this town or any other place in Portugal to be able to decide if I want to live here. I’m sure, though, that real estate prices here are much more affordable than in Lisbon, and I have yet to see a hill or a tourist.

“Are we ready to go?” Vera, the dedicated traveler, breaks the pleasant silence that allows me to drift away for a few moments. “It’s starting to rain,” she clarifies as she rises from her chair.

She’s right. A few drops land on the table, signaling that soon we will need to look for shelter. I collect my pretty cork handbag and leave a few euros by my coffee glass as a tip, hoping it would somehow improve the poor impression we undoubtedly made on the woman who served us. My long history as a waitress always comes to the fore when I witness bad behavior toward food servers or any person who belongs to the less fortunate proletariat. It’s part of who I am. It hasn’t made me a huge tipper, I confess, but it has made me a close observer of people, especially the self-entitled, obnoxious ones.

“Where are we going now?” Vera asks Rita on the way to the car.

“Nazaré,” she says.   

“How far is it?” Vera asks again. I wonder if she’s asking these questions to make conversation because when people talk it makes her feel that they are getting along fabulously, or if she’s really curious about the itinerary. Until now, she hasn’t given me the impression that she is super interested in where we are going.   

“About an hour,” Rita says, pressing the remote key to unlock the car doors for us. Before I reach the car, Vera grabs the back door handle. 

“You sit in the front,” she says to me. All I can think is, I don’t think so. This is a test and I am not going to fail. The last thing I need is to give Rita fresh ammunition to argue later that I was inconsiderate to her mother and blah blah blah. Really. I am not that stupid. The moment she invited her mother to the trip, I accepted my fate that I was going to be relegated to the back seat for the entirety of this trip and nothing can convince me that letting a seventy-eight-year-old woman sit in the back would not come back to haunt me for the rest of my days. 

“It’s OK, Vera, I am fine in the back,” I lie to her.

“No, no, no, you sit in the front. I sat in the front all day yesterday. I’m fine sitting in the back seat,” she insists. 

I don’t know how to make this woman shut up and I don’t want to continue this embarrassing argument. “We’ll switch tomorrow,” I say, trying to kick the can down the road. 

“Anna, do you want to sit in the front?” She tries her luck again. What a relief. At least this exercise in generosity is not directed only at me. 

Anna shakes her head and mumbles something as she opens the back door and climbs in. Through the window, I can see her rummaging through her backpack for something. Maybe she is looking for a carrot or an apple.

“Mom, get in the car already, they don’t want to sit in the front, OK?” Rita loses her patience and interrupts this futile exchange.

Vera shrugs in protest and drops into the front seat. Before she slams the door shut, she turns to me and says, “I really don’t mind sitting in the back.”