Breakfast At The Resort
Harold’s kids had chipped in and
bought him a week’s holiday at a resort and spa that marketed exclusively to
the over-55 demographic. It was all laid-back, they’d said, no organised
activities – not at all a gerontophilic meat market. Some couples even went
there. As with most groupings of oldies, however, the women guests did far
outnumber the males. Only his son leered slightly at the impartation of this
information. His daughter was much cooler about it. Being unflappable was part
of her.
He’d arrived there in time for dinner,
which was a more than decent buffet. He decided that loading his plate up with
freshly shucked oysters was a matter of indulging himself with a munching
experience that he really and rarely enjoyed, and had nothing to do with sex,
myth or not. He was, after all, 72 years old and not favourably disposed toward
kidding himself.
Since the resort cleverly avoided
small dinner tables and had too few of them, he accepted company for dinner, a
recently retired Wrightson’s manager named Des with a long, skinny neck and an
apparently monomaniacal obsession with cricket. That was okay with Harold.
Cricket geeks were pleasantly boring in a soothing sort of way, disattached
from the world at large, rather like five-day test matches themselves.
After dinner he enjoyed a bit of a
swim in the not-Olympic-size heated lap pool and then a soak in the spa’s hot
pools. He was pleased with himself that he was able to bare his sagging old
torso in public without feeling shame that his bod was no longer the hot stuff
it’d been for so long. Still, it didn’t make him feel socially confident,
either.
He did feel relieved that he was able
to do this whilst managing to avoid situations that demanded making any new friends,
for want of a better word for it. He’d never felt comfortable with friend-making
in situations involving groups of strangers. He was, however, old enough and
savvy enough to know that eye contact was the thing to avert.
On the way out he made an appointment
for eleven the next morning for a massage by a registered physiotherapist. With
his old body he definitely preferred the real thing to the New Age stuff, as
nice as it feels.
He walked right on by the hotel’s bar
and night club on his way back to his room without stopping off for a drink.
For one thing, the three-musicians-and-a-lounge-singer performing a pop hit
he’d hated forty years earlier failed to draw him in. Then there was his
aversion to friend-making situations involving groups of strangers . . .
Breakfast was buffet also, and he
opted for coffee, a variety of fresh fruit, and some thick-crusted sliced
sourdough, toasted, rather than a Kiwi full hot brekkie. He sat down and
wrapped his laughing gear around a wedge of watermelon.
Harold had always loved watermelon. As
he bit into it he revelled in the just-a-touch-of-resistance crunch, bringing
forth the perfectly mouth-sized flood of sweetly flavourful watery juice,
instantly relieving the dry-mouth by-product of one of his medications and
erasing the morning scratchy throat resulting from sleeping with pollen in the
air.
He closed his eyes. Perfect. It always
was.
A woman’s voice said, ‘Do you mind if
I sit here?’
He opened his eyes. She was
medium-sized, wearing a crisp, off-white linen skirt-and-blouse outfit that
looked pricey, and not so much make-up as to try to hide the lines resulting
from having spent her youth in the sun. Her shortish hair was dyed a pale
amethyst hue that seemed almost metallic. Her lipstick matched it. She had a
big plate of scrambled eggs with some beans on the side.
Harold wondered if she’d be as
agreeable an eating companion as Des had been. He slowly swallowed that first
delightful mouthful of watermelon. ‘I’m only paying for one seat,’ he answered
her. ‘You have as much right to this table’s empty seats as anyone.’ Keeping it
neutral and steering any offhand conversation toward a non-curriculum-vitae
type of topic.
She gave him a look, but sat without
comment.
A waitress arrived with tea for the
woman, glancing at his coffee cup as she set the cutesy teapot down. He shook
his head, said, ‘Thanks, but not yet,’ and reached for another slice of
watermelon wedge. That first one had been too good.
The woman with the eggs snapped, ‘You’re
not going to eat that!’ her voice strident with shock and horror.
He crushed it with his teeth,
releasing the flood of juice into his oral cavity, and slowly masticated it
until the juice was all gone. He turned to smile at the woman. ‘Good thing for
you that you didn’t bet any money on that prediction, eh?’
‘Oh my god!’ She shook her head.
‘Don’t you know that watermelon is one of the twelve foods you should never,
ever eat.’
The indisputable source for this
wisdom, he reckoned, was almost certainly a website at the other end of a facebook
ad he remembered having seen. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ She was solidly certain.
The ad hadn’t specified which foods
were to be avoided. Clickbait. ‘Watermelon?’
‘Watermelon. It’s deadly.’ Her eye
contact was penetrating.
Harold gave it a few counts, as if he
were considering this information seriously, although he had no idea what made
her think that he’d just unquestioningly accept something this extraordinary
from a total stranger. He didn’t even know her name. ‘Huh,’ he said at last,
sadly shaking his head, but only once. ‘I never knew that.’
‘It’s true. It absorbs everything in
the ground water without filtering it.’
He decided on polite vagueness over
confrontation. After all, it was just breakfast, with a whole day ahead. ‘That’s
bad, is it?’
‘It fills you with toxins!’
He waited a beat, then, deciding that
she wasn’t offering to elucidate just then, nodded his head once and repeated, ‘Toxins.’
‘Deadly ones. Take my word for it.’ (Why? he wondered) ‘Heavy metals. They
can accumulate in your liver and pancreas.’
‘Wow.’
‘And boost your susceptibility to
neural inflammation.’
‘Inflammation.’
‘And it’s also loaded with fluoride!’
‘Fluoride.’
‘Poisoning your thyroid and pineal
glands.’
‘That sounds awful.’
She was in full flow. He felt as if he
were in an audience. ‘Watermelon’s also high in fructose, and you know how bad that is for you – raising
your levels of blood sugars and trans fats and elevating your glycaemic index.’
‘This makes you sick?’
‘If you consider a compromised immune
system, loss of energy, cell death, and kidney disease sick.’ She put her hand gently
on his. ‘It’ll kill you!’
He squeezed her hand gently, then
withdrew his hand, looked into her eyes, and said, ‘And here I’ve been
chomping on watermelon like a glutton for more than 70 years and I ain’t dead
yet. Imagine that. Almost never sick, either.’
‘That makes no difference! It’s all
been building up.’
‘Y’know, when I think of all the
pleasure that eating watermelon has given me all my life, if it kills me some
time in the next couple of months I’d still say it’s been worth it. As far as
I’m concerned I’m past the tipping point; there’s no point in me stopping now.
I’m committed to watermelon.’
The woman huffed, then cut herself off
before actually zinging a reply back at him, shook her head sadly, and turned
her attention to her eggs. She still hadn’t told him her name, he noticed, but he
acknowledged that it made no difference. This was not to be a friendship.
Harold ate another slice of watermelon
and, deliberately keeping his eyes off of her, attacked a big scoop of honeydew
melon balls with no interruption. He felt himself relaxing. He thought that
he’d handled that googly just fine, and the mind-warped and nameless woman
spinning it was as good as not there if he didn’t look at her.
He opened the foil flap of a
single-pat margarine packet, thinking about how annoying wasteful packaging can
be, but not daring to say anything about it. The woman could have been
vehemently either pro- or anti-margarine. It’s a topic frequently of interest
to food perverts.
The silence just off his left elbow
continued, so, breathing easily, he spread the yellow grease on a slice of
sourdough toast.
As he lifted it to his lips with eager
anticipation the woman blurted out into his left ear, in an
unable-to-control-herself sort of way, ‘You know of course that that’s nothing
but a big glob of gluten! You know that!’
His last affair, six years earlier,
had been with an otherwise intelligent woman who’d also been a few yards short
of a full driveway, although in a different way, being keen on a small
selection of conspiracy theories, as he’d discovered too late. He just didn’t
have it in him to humour this one, so he picked up his plate and his coffee
cup, stood, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and looked around for another place to sit. Out
of his peripheral vision he could just make out the woman who disapproved of
his breakfast glaring at him.
His eyes swept the room, and several
women Of A Certain Age tried for eye contact with him, but there was old Des,
sitting by himself. Harold decided to ask about Des’s analysis of the nuances
of the current Sri Lanka
test in Hamilton
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