Guests Sweet

Bookings stayed sluggish right through December that year, though we clung to the hope that things would pick up any day.

And eventually they did.

Jane called in early January to say that the big house just up the hill from ours had been rented for the following week by a group of classical musicians from the Boston area.  As it turned out, the party was bigger than expected and they needed two more bedrooms.  Was our house available?

You bet it was.

We learned later that several of the musicians brought along their instruments and gave impromptu concerts by our neighbor’s pool every evening during the cocktail hour.

We tried to imagine the sound of classical music wafting through the palm trees at sunset just above our house.  I must admit the thought made our dark winter days seem a little brighter.

Even better, the merry band of musicians returned to the island the following year and two of them (Carol and Scott) got married on New Year’s Eve.  Our house had become part of a love story yet again.

This just had to generate giant waves of positive karma.

And it did.

Another guest that season had an amazing story to tell, though we didn’t know it until several months after her stay.

All we knew at the time was that she was from North Carolina and that she was bringing her boyfriend and a couple of friends along.  A Google search (yes, I admit that I sometimes “Googled” prospective guests) revealed that she was a veterinarian in Raleigh-Durham.  Nothing more.

But she left behind some clues about herself in our “Comments and Suggestions” book.

Her entry read, “Our week here has left us feeling extraordinarily connected to nature, and at the same time pleasantly isolated from mankind, which was just what we needed.  On a personal note, our week in Vieques has been one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life—right up there with meeting my beloved fiancé, beating leukemia, and getting rescued by helicopter after being stranded in a lifeboat for six days in the Atlantic.”

Huh?

I read it twice.  Michael read it three times.  Then we called Jane.

“Did Erin mention anything about being stranded in a lifeboat in the Atlantic?”

“Who’s Erin?”

“The veterinarian from North Carolina, remember?”

“Sure, I remember.  Great gal, but she didn’t mention any lifeboat…

…”I think that would have stuck in my poor brain, addled as it is.”

“Apparently she was stranded in the Atlantic for six days.”

“How do you know?”

“She mentioned it in our guestbook.”

“I should take a peek at that thing sometime.”

“You might enjoy it.  It’s full of comments about how wonderful you are.”

“Wow, sounds like a classic.”

We did further online research about Erin.  In a nutshell, here’s her story, which (I kid you not) was made into a TV movie in 1993:

In the late ‘80s she was diagnosed with leukemia.  She went through the usual hell of chemo and radiation and three years later was declared a survivor.  Then one day she took her longtime partner aside and told him she was pregnant.  He could hardly believe it.  To add to his general confusion, she told him there was one last thing she absolutely had to do before taking on the responsibility of parenthood—sail up the Atlantic seaboard.

Very reluctantly he agreed, though at the last minute he wasn’t able to join her.  She set out with two male friends in idyllic September weather, only to be clobbered by Hurricane Bob on their third day out.

The boat capsized and they were set adrift in a lifeboat.

After three or four days they were pretty much convinced they were going to die.  One of the men became delusional and threatened the other guy.  Erin, in the throes of morning sickness, mediated, keeping everyone calm and reasonably sane until they were rescued at the end of their sixth day out.

You really couldn’t make something like that up.

Although I was somewhat wary of letting Erin know I’d been researching her past, I couldn’t resist sending her an email to confirm the story.  After all, she had sold her tale to ABC, so it couldn’t be all that much of a secret.

“It’s true,” she responded matter-of-factly.  “I’ve had a blessed life.  I’m healthy, happily married and I have a wonderful sixteen year-old son.  P.S. my son loves the ocean.”

Guest What?

It was official.

At long last, our fully-furnished house—upstairs and downstairs—was ready to hit the rental market.

We changed our web pages to reflect our exalted new status as a three-bedroom instead of a “one,” and sat back to wait for the bookings to pour in.

Not so much.

Whereas the previous October we had received twenty or thirty inquiries, this October we got just six.  We couldn’t understand it.  Was it the economy?

Was it some subtle change in the wording of our web pages that was turning off prospective guests?

We called Jane to ask what we’d done wrong.

“Nothing that I know of,” she said.  “By the way, have you by any chance cut back on your meds?”

She had a subtle way of letting you know when she thought you were going off the rails.

We contacted the handful of other people we knew who owned rental houses on the island and asked if their bookings were down.

“Actually we’re doing better than last year,” replied Veronica, a divorcee from Boston who had bought her house on Vieques with her son and daughter-in-law.  “Of course we’re just a two-bedroom.  I’ve heard the bigger houses are having trouble this year.”

This was disheartening.  Michael went to the “official” Vieques website, Enchanted Isle.com, and checked out three-bedroom rentals.  The previous year there had been thirty-two (the year before that only nineteen).  This year there were fifty-eight.

Had we inadvertently positioned our house in the most competitive rental market on the island?  We discussed offering the place either as a one- or three-bedroom, but after all our hard work we weren’t ready to offer the one-bedroom option yet.  Maybe more inquiries about the three-bedroom would come in soon.

Three weeks before Christmas the New York Times ran an article about Vieques in its Friday travel section.

This will do it, we said, high-fiving each other.  We’re in.

But while the article generated lots more emails from potential renters in New York, Boston and Washington, bookings remained sluggish.

For the first time we found ourselves trying to convince people to rent our house.  Neither of us felt comfortable doing this.  Previously all we’d had to do was respond to email queries about the house; now we actually called people back if they bothered to list a phone number.

Sometimes these calls didn’t go so well.  One man from New York (let’s call him Dan) answered his phone with a growl when I called to respond to his email about renting the house over New Year’s.

“I don’t remember sending you an email,” he barked.  “Where’s your house?”

“Vieques.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico.”

“Oh, Puerto Rico,” he said, his voice upgrading slightly from nasty to unpleasant.  “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I, uh…”

“Look, I’m busy here, what’s the deal?”

If rentals hadn’t been so tough that season I would’ve proposed a very specific deal involving insertion of the phone into the most private cavity of his body, but we needed his business.

Deep breath.  “You sent me an email about renting our house in Vieques over New Year’s.  I’m calling to say that the house is available that week if you’re still interested.”

“Where did you say it is?”

“Vieques Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico.”

“Sounds pretty nice.”

“It is.”

Silence.  “Are you trying to sell me something?”

“No sir, it’s a rental.  The house isn’t for sale.  And you contacted me, not the other way around.”

“Hey buddy, no need to get testy.”

Another very deep breath (I was perilously close to hyperventilating at this point).

“Would you like me to email the web page to you?  Then you can have a look at the house and see what you think.”

“Suit yourself.”

Reluctantly, I sent him the link.  An hour later he called back.  “Your house is fabulous.”

I was taken aback.  How had the lunatic I’d spoken to just a few minutes earlier morphed into this perfectly polite man?   “Oh, thanks.”

“We’ll take it.”

“Uh, okay…”

“Is there a problem?”

“No, not at all, you just seemed so uncertain before.”

“Look kid,” he said in a low voice, as if he were confiding a state secret.  “I’m a decision guy.  I think about something, I make up my mind, just like that.  And I’m very seldom wrong.”

“Sounds good,” I said, experiencing the habitual ditherer’s twinge of envy at such fabulous decisiveness.

“And you’ll make sure I’m not wrong this time, won’t you?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

What had I gotten us in to?  I was pretty sure we’d both be wearing cement shoes at the bottom of the Potomac if this guy’s sheets weren’t perfectly ironed.

But then again we needed the business.

Dan called me every day for the next couple of weeks.  Some days he was nasty, some days he was downright charming.  You never knew which Dan you were going to get when you picked up the phone.

In some ways I preferred Nasty Dan.  At least you knew where you stood with him.  Nice Dan was unsettlingly pleasant, as if he were doing an impersonation of a kind, caring person and— having no actual experience of such a creature—wasn’t quite sure how far to take the performance.

Unfailingly, he overplayed his hand, though hints of Nasty Dan crept in even when he was trying his hardest to be good.

“Thank you so much for letting us stay in your beautiful house,” he said one day.

I almost laughed at his unctuousness.  “You’re welcome, but you haven’t even seen it yet.”

“You mean it’s not beautiful?”

“Well, we think it is.”

“How about other people?  What do they say?”

“We’ve gotten great reviews.”

“Did you write them yourselves?”

“No, Dan, we wouldn’t do that.  Our guests wrote them.  They genuinely liked the house.”

“Of course they did.  It’s beautiful.”

“It certainly is.”

Jane called us the day Dan and his girlfriend arrived.  “He’s mean to his wife.”

“She’s not his wife, just his girlfriend.”

“Good for her.  He’s a jerk.”

“In what way?”

“She asked me what kind of trees mangoes grow on.  He told her she was stupid.”

“Charming.  What do they look like?”  I always asked this when I got the chance.  I simply couldn’t help wanting to know what the people who slept in our bed looked like.

“He’s short and chubby, she’s Asian and pretty, with long fingernails.

“Is he nice to you?”

“Yes, almost annoyingly so.  It’s such a contrast to the way he treats his girlfriend.”

“He’s a little schizoid.”

“You think?  By the way, what do you know about this guy?”

“I think he might be Mafia.”

“Really?” she said, and for the first time since I’d known her I heard something like awe in Jane’s voice.

“I think I’ll take over some extra towels.”

Wild Things

With your permission I’ll ramble on a bit more about the critters of Vieques.

One of the things we love about the island is that nature is “in your face” every day.

It’s never far away.  Even when you’re walking up Isabel’s main street the ocean is right in front of you.

Colorful birds swoop overhead.  Big, irritable-looking iguanas loll in the viaduct nearby.

We once saw a man leading two young goats on leashes down a side street.

One of the most enchanting auditory experiences of Vieques is brought to you compliments of the island’s teeming frog population, most notably “coquis,” which are the national symbol of Puerto Rico.  These tiny frogs enliven the night with their double-noted chirp that sounds, perhaps not coincidentally, like “ko kee.”

Visitors become so enthralled with the call of the coqui that they buy small devices at the San Juan airport reproducing the coqui sound on an endless loop.  I’ve never bought one but it might be just the thing to warm up a snowy night in D.C.

Some local creatures aren’t quite so endearing.  Standing on our balcony at night we can see (and occasionally hear) bats hurtling from tree to tree.  For such a small place, the island is home to lots of different kinds of bats, including highly-specialized types such as “Single leaf” and “Brown flower” varieties.

Surprisingly, bats are the only terrestrial mammals native to Puerto Rico (all other species were introduced by humans, including cats, goats, sheep and mongooses).  Some bats eat fruit.  A few eat fish—yes, fish.  Nearly all of them eat insects, which prevents the island’s human inhabitants from being carried off bodily by mosquitoes.  Oh, and they also pollinate flowers.  They’re hard-working little buggers.

Speaking of insects, the island has zillions of different kinds, some of them fairly intimidating.  We saw a big, hairy tarantula strolling across our driveway one day with a slightly self-conscious air.

You can hardly blame him—you’d have a complex too if everyone who saw you screamed and ran away in terror.  Plus, his fangs looked moist, as if he were drooling.  This isn’t a particularly attractive look for anyone.

Then there are the centipedes, which can grow up to a foot long and are almost invariably grumpy when disturbed.  Their sting can be terrifically painful, even lethal on rare occasions.

I read a blog recently in which a college student described waking up one morning in a B & B in Esperanza to find an enormous centipede crawling up his bare thigh toward his private parts.  His yelp of horror brought the management bolting upstairs, fearing fire, dismemberment or god knows what else.

When they learned the source of their guest’s panic they couldn’t help laughing (though sympathetically, I’m sure) at his predicament.

“I ought to sue those bastards,” he grumbled in his blog.

Might was well sue Mother Nature.

To make things even more exciting, there are scorpions in Vieques.  Although shy by nature, if disturbed they will make their displeasure known in no uncertain terms with a nasty pincer-sting.

We’re constantly being assured that none of these insects (except maybe the centipede) is particularly poisonous.  In the abstract, I find this somewhat comforting.   But if I found a centipede crawling up my leg, as the young blogger did, I’m not sure I would wax quite so philosophical.

Instead, like him, I’d probably emit a blood-curdling scream.  And then I’d expect Michael to remove the offending creature immediately–and bring me an industrial-size martini to steady my nerves.

Plenty to Crow About

Speaking of local fauna.

Each time we browsed through the “Comments and Suggestions” book Jane had advised us to position strategically on our coffee table we noticed that almost every entry mentioned the local roosters.

Yep, roosters.

People seemed to be obsessed with them.

While some were big fans of these strutting, highly vocal fowl (“they add local color and the crowing sound is so relaxing”), others considered them the poultry equivalent of the anti-Christ (“can’t they be stopped?”).  For the latter group, we began leaving disposable earplugs in the medicine cabinet.

Admittedly, the roosters of Vieques take a bit of getting used to.

The first time we visited the island—the time I was deathly ill and fully expected to expire any second—the teeming rooster population worked overtime to make sure I didn’t get a wink of sleep all night long.  Along with the baby goats next door, they succeeded nicely.

I had already encountered a robust, highly-vocal community of roosters when I lived in Key West in the early ‘90s.  There the “rooster problem” was deemed so grave some city commissioners declared war on the island’s roosters.  Naturally, within minutes a Rooster Rescue Team was formed to fight back.  Those wacky Floridians.

In Vieques, no one seems to like (or hate) the roosters except tourists.  The locals barely seem to notice them at all except when they’re participating in cock fights.

But let’s not go there.

Having spent part of my childhood on my grandparents’ farm, I’m not particularly fazed by chickens, even of the feral variety.  Yes, I admit it’s highly annoying when they crow so loud they wake you up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night.  But I’d rather be roused from my slumbers by a rooster than a garbage truck.

Call that provincial if you like.

Michael has a slightly less laissez-faire attitude toward our feathered friends.  For starters, he thoroughly despises trespassers of any sort—don’t set foot on our property unless you’ve been invited.   Even worse, he suspects the roosters of having collaborated with the island’s wild horses to eat our garden.

During our first couple of years in Vieques, Michael’s enmity toward the roosters escalated from mild irritation to a state of guerilla warfare.  He bought a slingshot, which I didn’t consider a particularly inspired idea.

Our neighbors weren’t likely to enjoy the sight of Michael taking potshots at the local fauna.

But he was determined.

Luckily, every time he became agitated enough to strike, he couldn’t find his slingshot.  This suited me fine.  When he began leaving the slingshot on the balcony ledge to make sure he was prepared the next time an opportunity presented itself, I routinely tipped it over the edge into the garden or brought it inside and placed it somewhere he might accidentally have put it himself.

The occasional curse word ensued, but our neighborhood roosters remained safe.

I found myself coping with the situation through home décor.  You’d be surprised how many rooster-themed decorative items there are out there.  I found a handsome rooster poster and hung it in the kitchen.

We stumbled across a carved plaque of a rooster at a flea market in D.C. and bought it for the downstairs kitchenette.

A friend, picking up on the general theme, gave us a set of rooster-themed swizzle sticks.

My motto?  If you can’t destroy your enemy, you can at least make fun of him through home accessories.

Crab Meet

The more time we spent working in our Vieques garden the more we realized just how intertwined land and sea can be on a Caribbean island.

One particularly hot afternoon I was unspooling the hose to water the plants at the far end of the terrace when I spotted an unfamiliar sight—a large shell stuck to the exterior wall of the house.

Who put it there, I wondered, and how did they attach it?  Idly I reached over to pull it off—but it wouldn’t budge.

Then, very slowly, it began to move.

Okay, now I was intrigued.

As I watched its glacial progress up the wall it dawned on me that I was looking at a hermit crab–and that, unbelievable as this might seem, it was actually trying to “flee the scene.”

Its presence on our porch, a couple of miles from the ocean, boggled my mind.  Very cool.

But what to do about it?

I certainly didn’t want to hurt or upset it in any way, but at the same time I didn’t want it crawling through the window and attaching itself to my face, Alien-style, at two in the morning.

So I pried it very carefully from the wall and, after taking an admiring look at its bright red body and the way it had arranged itself so snugly in its stolen home…

…I ambled downstairs and laid it in the thick grass in our side garden, crab-side down.

The fact that it didn’t scuttle away immediately didn’t worry me—as I had already seen, it was incapable of anything remotely resembling “scuttling.”

But when it was still loitering in the same spot an hour later I became moderately concerned.  And when it was still there at dusk I became downright distraught.

Had I committed crabicide?

Racked with guilt all evening, I decided not to tell Michael what I’d done.  I felt sure he’d call the Vieques branch of PETA and have me taken away in cuffs.

I was just glad he didn’t suggest shellfish for dinner.

And when I rushed to the balcony the next morning I was hugely relieved to see that my crab friend had disappeared.  Clearly it had found its bearings and discovered some new surface to cling to.

With a contented sigh, I stumbled back inside to pour my first cup of coffee.  All was right in the crab world.

But after a few sips an even more ominous thought occurred to me: what if a dog had eaten it?

Or an iguana?

And although I couldn’t actually imagine any creature making a meal of such a hard and intractable creature, you never knew.  When you think about it, lobsters don’t look all that enticing at first glance either.

So of course five minutes later I was roaming the sideyard in my flip flops searching for my lost crustacean.  It didn’t help matters that I had begun to think of him as “Mr. Krabs” from Sponge Bob Squarepants.

When Michael wandered out onto the balcony a half-hour later I was still looking in vain for my new pet.

“Okay,” Michael said in his most patient voice, regarding me with something resembling pity.  “I give up.  What the hell are you doing?”

It occurred to me to lie, but what story could I concoct that would be remotely feasible?  “I’m looking for a crab,” I admitted.

Michael lit a cigarette and exhaled in the early morning light.  “You might have better luck at the beach.”

I thought about trying to explain but it was useless.  “Good idea,” I said.  After a while he went inside, no doubt to call my therapist.

A few minutes later I found Mr. Krabs clinging to the far side of our avocado tree.

If I didn’t know better I would have sworn he waved a claw lazily in my general direction.

Whether it was a greeting or an accusation, it’s impossible to say.

Fry Me to the Moon

When we’ve had a particularly exhausting day in Vieques, or when we’re just feeling lazy and can’t bear the thought of cooking or spiffing ourselves up to go out to dinner, we opt for take-out.

Okay, don’t get excited.  While the term “take out” suggests literally hundreds of choices back home in D.C….

…it suggests a grand total of three choices in Vieques:  cheap Chinese or pizza in Isabel–or, drum roll please, fried chicken from Chicken King, a modest eatery across the road from Nales Hardware on Route 201.

Since we don’t eat pizza (yes, I realize that’s grounds for prosecution under the Patriot Act, but there you are),  we can’t offer you any startling insights into “pizza Vieques-style.”   Sorry.

And frankly the less said about the Chinese option the better.  I’m sure the place has its fans, but every dish we’ve ordered from there has been smothered in brown gravy and plopped on a bed of greasy fries.

Chicken King, on the other hand, is a revelation.

We’d driven past the place dozens of times without paying it the slightest bit of attention—until the afternoon Jane mentioned she’d just had lunch there.

“Best fried chicken I’ve ever had,” she remarked.

“Really?” Michael replied, half-jokingly.  “Better than Popeye’s?”

She rolled her eyes.  “That garbage!  Are you kidding?”

This got Michael’s attention.  Although we normally avoid fried food like the plague, every six months or so we skulk up the street to Popeye’s for our biannual greasy chicken fix.

He even suggested we give Chicken King a try the very next night.

We couldn’t wait.

The place is certainly nothing to look at—basically a ranch-style house painted orange with a sign out front reading “Chicken King & Ice Cream.”

The front porch is dusty and starkly furnished with a couple of uninviting picnic tables, and the interior, if anything, is even less appealing—linoleum floors, fluorescent lights, formica tables.

But the chicken that evening smelled heavenly, and the clientele (seemingly all local) gave every indication of having a fine old time.

We studied the menu behind the cash register.  Having determined that the chicken was sold by the piece, Michael placed an order for“seis presas” in his best junior high Spanish.

“No chicken,” he was told by the unsmiling lady behind the counter.

“I’m sorry?” he said, his mind boggling at the notion of “no chicken” in a place named Chicken King (it reminded us of the doctor’s bald announcement that he had “no medicines” at the emergency room several years earlier).

Noting Michael’s expression, the grim-faced lady turned to one of her more pleasant-looking colleagues for assistance.

“You wait for new chicken?” the colleague smilingly asked Michael.  “They cook now.”

“Hmm,” Michael said, turning to me.  I shrugged, feigning nonchalance.  To be honest, it smelled so good I was prepared to pitch a tent and wait all night.

“Okay,” he said.  “Si.”

We grabbed an empty table and studied the crowd around us, which ran the gamut from very young to very old and everything in between.  Some were staring in rapt attention at the TV suspended high up on the wall….

…while others chatted amiably.  All were munching enthusiastically on their food.

Finally our “seis presas” were ready.

With a little flourish the server flung open the glass window that separated the front of the store from the kitchen and reached in with large aluminum tongs to pull out our chicken, which she placed in a brightly colored box and overlaid with enormous fried potato wedges.

“Thank for you patient,” she said politely.

“De nada,” we replied in unison, bolting for the door.

We couldn’t wait to get home and eat.

And was it as good as Jane claimed?

Better.

Not Especially Home on the Range

I’m not much of a cook.

That doesn’t particularly bother me.

What’s much harder for me to accept is that Michael isn’t either.

I often daydream about calmer, more patient versions of ourselves–in other words, guys who have a grand old time laboring over a hot stove, and never get testy when things go slightly awry.

The reality, sadly, is light years from this ideal.

Yes, we slog our way through a limited repertoire of dishes on a semi-regular basis when we’re in D.C.  This includes a stir-fry of chicken and veggies made palatable with the last-minute addition of a Madras curry paste…

…baked chicken coated in honey and Italian breadcrumbs; and a pasta dish involving tuna, mayonnaise and—oh never, mind, you don’t want to know.

Usually we go out to dinner.

Lots of our friends, especially those who don’t own second homes, make a habit of dining at one of the many Best Restaurants around town, the places Michael and I frequent only when we’re trying to make each other feel okay about turning another year older.

I’m always impressed, I always have a lovely time.  After all, there’s something heady about eating a sixty dollar piece of meat.

But deep down I always feel the food is wasted on me.

More often we end up at one of the many admittedly lower-tier but much-loved eateries near our apartment.  One of the nice things about living in a city is that, with any luck, the place where you live is within walking distance of cuisine from practically every corner of the globe.  We’re a prime example of this uniquely urban phenomenon: walk two blocks north from us and you’ve got French; two and half, Tex-Mex; four, Thai; five, Japanese.

Or, if you’re feeling a wee bit weary, just pick up the phone and order Chinese.

This is one of my biggest weaknesses, particularly in cold weather.  Just think about it—for a decent tip (we’re talking five to ten dollars here), a perfectly nice man will bring a cooked meal to your door.  Yes, it’s true, you have to pay for the food, but you’d also have to pay for it if you cooked it yourself–and it wouldn’t be nearly as good.

Let’s face it, Chinese take-out is a modern-day miracle.

Unlike me, Michael occasionally gets tired of Chinese.  “I can’t eat it two nights in a row,” he’ll lament as I’m speed dialing my order for Kung Pao chicken, though he often he gives in at the last minute and shouts “General Tso” just as I’m about to hang up.

In nice weather we occasionally grill chicken breasts or pork chops on our balcony.

Technically we’re not allowed to have a barbeque on our balcony but no one has told us to get rid of it so far, not even the woman on the first floor who gives every indication of disliking us.

Michael is a willing and very capable grill master, partly, I suspect, because this gives him an opportunity to smoke a cigarette or two and contemplate the angular beauty of the cathedral across the street.

In Vieques, our feeding habits are pretty much the same.  We’ve tried every notable and several not-so-notable restaurants on the island at least once.  Of these, we generally rotate between three or four favorites.  If we’re in town for a week, we usually eat at home the first night, then rotate among Veritas, Next Course, Tradewinds, and El Quenepo the other nights.

When we cook at home in Vieques, we keep the fare even simpler than when we cook in D.C., partly because of the heat, but mostly because we just don’t want to spend a lot of time cooking when we’re supposed to be having fun.

Michael usually grills steaks or chicken breasts, and I’ll steam whatever green vegetable I can find (not always an easy task in Vieques).

Sometimes after dinner we drive into Isabel and buy a Dove bar, which we share.

This constitutes a big night on the town.

Cornering the Market

Vieques has more corner stores than it has corners.

Well not quite, but you get my point.

Our favorite, El Encanto, on Route 201 just beyond Nales, is a convenience store and bar rolled into one.

I’ve often tried to imagine walking into our local 7-Eleven in D.C. at 10:00 in the morning and finding a group of middle-aged men and women sitting around drinking beer and gossiping, a jukebox blaring in the background.

Somehow it just doesn’t compute.

And yet that’s what you’ll find at Encanto any day of the week.

The soft drinks and bagged ice are kept in the bar section of the store, and the first few times we ventured in there we didn’t quite know what to expect.  After all, it was crammed full of people drinking, dancing and generally whooping it up at breakfast time.

But they just ignored us.  On one occasion they even invited us to join them.

“Too early!” we cried.

They laughed at our abstemiousness and ordered another round.

Meanwhile, “across town” on Route 997 are two bodegas known to us, respectively, as the Store That Has Everything and the Store That Has Nothing.

It’s hard to imagine how the latter stays in business, since it has almost no stock.  I sat in the car one afternoon while Michael dashed into this particular colmado with a list of six or eight items, all staples—toilet paper, milk, Windex.  In other words, nothing remotely out of the ordinary.

He was back in less than five minutes with a miniscule carton of milk bravely defying its expiration date–and nothing more.

“What happened?” I asked.

“They didn’t have anything on our list except milk,” he said in his matter-of-fact way.

“What do you mean?”

“Their shelves are almost literally bare.”

“But how do they stay in business?”

He gave me one of his famous Looks.  “I didn’t ask.”

The Store That Has Everything is tiny and absolutely stuffed to the gills with inventory.

You can barely get in the door without knocking something over.  You’d think the proprietor of the Store That Has Nothing would drive over and buy a few items just to brighten up his shelves, but not so much.

Unlike El Encanto, there’s no bar in the Everything Store, but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve alcohol.

One day a courtly older man in front of us in line approached the register and spoke a few words in a low voice to the cashier.

Without missing a beat the young woman placed a small glass on the counter, reached for an open bottle of rum at her side and poured the elderly gentleman a double shot.  With a charming flourish, he raised the glass, toasted everyone in his general vicinity, and knocked back the drink in a single gulp.

Price: one dollar.

There’s also the Green Store in Esperanza, which features an outdoor seating area for drinking and general breeze-shooting…

…the store in Isabel we’ve dubbed the Hot Store because it’s always at least 20 degrees hotter in there than it is outside, and the new so-called big box store across from the electric company that sells things in bulk like Sam’s Club, only at a smaller discount and with a wine bar attached to its front.

But the Vieques establishment that takes us roaring back to our childhoods more than any other is the “dime store” on the main drag in downtown Isabel.  This place bears an uncanny resemblance to the Woolworth’s of our youth, circa 1968, right down to the gerbil on the treadmill…

…the chirping parakeets…

…and the pungent, all pervasive odor of plastic and linoleum.

It also closes for an hour at lunch time.

We love this place simply because it’s redolent of a world long past, when a Saturday afternoon visit to the five and dime was something we looked forward to all week.

Now, if the store were trying to be quaint in a time-warpy sort of way (think Colonial Williamsburg or any of the other calcified, self-conscious theme parks that pass for history in modern America), it wouldn’t be.

But it’s not trying to be anything.

It just is.

What’s In Store

Vieques isn’t exactly a shopper’s paradise.

A thorough inspection of all the gift shops in Isabel takes less than half an hour.

You might manage to kill forty-five minutes strolling through the emporia of Esperanza, but only if you dawdle with intent.

And yet the island’s stores are intriguing in their own way.

Take the hardware stores.  When you buy a house on a tropical island and have it gutted and start over from scratch, you inevitably spend a lot of time wandering up and down the aisles of the local hardware stores, searching desperately for things they almost certainly don’t have.

During our first couple of years on the island, there were days when we spent more time in the hardware store than we did at the beach.  As much as I enjoy home projects, this equation seems to violate several laws of nature.

There are three main hardware outlets on the island (and several smaller ones), all locally owned.  Nales, the largest of these, would be considered a modest mom-and-pop store in an urban setting, but in Vieques it’s the place to see and be seen for the home improvement set.

Situated behind a chain link fence near the intersection of Routes 200 and 201, Nales is spacious by local standards, with a large courtyard and an open-front shed to the south of the main building for bulk purchases of stone, gravel and plywood.

Inside there’s a decent, though hardly outstanding, selection of garden supplies, hardware, and household goods.

There’s even a paint shop in the rear.  This is where we had so meticulously registered our color choice the year before only to have it equally meticulously ignored by Daniel when it came time to paint the interior of our house.

Nales is an acquired taste.  The staff isn’t always as friendly or as helpful as they could be, and the item you’re looking for is almost certain to be out of stock.

And yet we like the place.

Maybe it’s because we’re always a little bit happier on Vieques than anywhere else, whatever we happen to be doing to any given time.

Maybe it’s because we love our house and—despite the fact that we may occasionally complain about the effort required to keep it in perfect order—we honestly enjoy every last chore.

Or maybe it’s the intangible things about the place, like the Siamese cat who inhabits every corner of the store, fixing patrons with her defiant crystal blue stare before curling briefly but affectionately around their legs.

Or possibly it’s even O-Lan, the young woman who runs the paint corner with cool efficiency but who blushes charmingly when you ask about her unlikely name (her mother was a Pearl Buck fan).

Then there’s the hardware store in Floridá, located on a residential backstreet less than a mile from Nales, which couldn’t be more different.

Here the pace is slow and friendly.  The staff members, who speak almost no English, go out of their way to be helpful.

Considering the store’s small size, its stock is plentiful if unpredictable.  It was here that we found the blue and white dishes for our kitchen and the strangely hard to find step-stool that has (literally) supported so many of our household projects.

But it was also here that we spent a sweaty quarter-hour looking for a spade for digging in the garden before being told, “We don’t have.”

Then there’s the testosterone-driven hardware store on Route 200 just outside of Isabel.  If Vieques were a high school, this is where the tough boys would hang out.

The staff is almost exclusively male and often abrupt.  The aisles are dark and narrow, and there’s an indefinable air of menace about the whole place.

Hands down, this is my favorite of the three.

Shady Advice

“Let’s pay a visit to Arte Tropicale,” Michael suggested the next morning.

This was our neighborhood nursery, situated in a well-tended compound across the road from Superdescuentos Morales.

“Great,” I chirped, all too happy to have his laser-like attention focused on the most derelict sector of our domain.

The proprietress of Arte Tropicale was seldom “in the yard,” so to speak.  But never fear.

Her neat little cottage was perched on the other side of the nursery grounds, and when you came to her gate you simply rang the bell and before long she would emerge from her house and scuttle between the lush plants to unfasten the latch with a coquettish smile.

“Hola!” she cried that morning.  “You are back!”  Her enthusiasm was particularly admirable when you considered that we had clearly interrupted her telenova, which we could hear blaring all the way across the yard.

“Si,” Michael replied, grinning from ear to ear.  “We make a jardín.”

Her mood visibly escalated from delighted to ecstatic at this news.  She may have loved her soap operas, but at the end of the day she was a merchant with a business to run.  How, after all, could she afford her precious Satellite TV if she didn’t turn a profit?

“You need many plants?” she asked with relish.

Michael looked around the well-maintained nursery.  “Well…a few.  It’s a jardín poquito.”

These were surely unwelcome tidings but she maintained her beatific smile.

“Poquito?” she asked, with perhaps one less teaspoon of sugar in her voice.

“Si,” Michael confirmed.  “One jardín con sol, one jardín sin sol.”  He was really giving his Spanish a trot around the track today.

“Ah,” she said, smiling broadly.  “First, sol.”  She strode outside and, with a sweeping gesture vaguely reminiscent of a game show hostess…

…indicated her selection of “sunny” plants.

“How about these?” I said to Michael, pointing to a bed of tall, lush plants with dramatic Bird-of-Paradise-like flowers.

His eyes swept over them.  “Perfect.”  He bent down to read the label.  “Heliconia…” He paused, fumbling for a piece of paper in his pocket.  “Hey, this is the plant our neighbor told us not to plant in the sun!”

I rolled my eyes.  “Gee, imagine my shock.”

We both glanced at the nursery lady, who was smiling in a distracted manner while surreptitiously consulting her watch.  Maybe a new telenova was about to begin.

“And what about shade plants?” I asked Michael.  We strode over to the covered section of the yard.  Here we found three varieties we liked, including a lovely Calathea…

…which (according to our notes) our neighbor had expressly recommended for full sunlight.

Was it a coincidence that his advice had been exactly backwards?  Or was he just so perma-drunk he didn’t know the difference between sun and shade?

Now we were thoroughly confused.   Meanwhile, Señora was looking distinctly antsy.

“Let’s buy a bunch of both and decide where to put what when we get home,” Michael suggested.

Always a sucker for wishy-washy compromises, I agreed.  “Perfect solution.”

After helping us load up our car the Señora waved us off with a sweet smile tinged with relief.  As we drove away she could be seen positively sprinting toward her house.

Back home, we planted everything according to instructions and gave it all a thorough drink of water.

Perfection.

Or not.

During his stroll around the garden the next morning Michael discovered to his horror that three of our new plants were missing.

Let’s be clear here.  They weren’t dead, they weren’t looking slightly-less-healthy than they had the day before.

They were gone, their absence commemorated by gaping holes in the ground.

We scratched our respective heads.

I wondered out loud if our neighbor had been so offended we hadn’t taken his advice that he’d dug up our fledgling plants, but Michael guffawed at the very idea that he was capable of following through with such a sustained act of, well, anything.  Good point.

Then what could it be?

Neighborhood kids looking for a bit of harmless mischief?  Doubtful.

It was Jane who finally solved the mystery.

Driving by later that day she saw a horse chowing down on our Calathea.  She stopped and shooed him away but not before he’d made mincemeat of half of our horticultural investment.

Now what? we asked.

“Well, personally, I’d go for things horses don’t like.”

“Okay,” I agreed.  “And what would that be?”

“Prickly stuff.”

“Such as?

“Hmm…” she said.  “Not really my department.  Ask the nursery lady.”

Señora Arte Tropicale greeting us warmly, if somewhat distractedly, the next morning.  Sounds of high drama emanated from her living room.

She listened sympathetically to our problem, and was all too delighted to sell us a carload of horse-proof plants.

Our reconstituted garden looked beautiful.  Better still, our neighborhood horses took one look, shook their heads and moved on to more palatable pastures.

Another small victory for our side.