Bon Bini! Dennis and Rona Fischman on Curacao

Day 1: It seems as if when Rona and I are together, people take one look at us and want to tell us their stories.

Our cabbie went on and on, like an old friend who hadn't seen us in years. "Yesterday?" he told us. "Last call of the day. Ten o'clock in the morning." The snow-banked streets flowed into the Expressway as he spoke. "I rent the car, and if you don't call in to cancel, you pay for the day. I forgot to call. So I went in, figured I'd do some paperwork and make a few bucks before the snow got too heavy and I had to park it for the day. I was at the bottom of Sherwood Road, and I couldn't get up the hill. Tried three times. I got out of the car--the rear window defroster didn't work, and I wanted to back up and get a running start. Both legs went out from under me! The pavement came up fast and whacked my knee. When I could move, my cell phone wasn't in my hand any more. I had no way to call for help. I climbed up...slowly...and a snowplow came up behind me. 'Listen,' I said, 'will you call this number and tell them I'm coming back?' I slipped across the road, found my own cell in a mound of snow. I turned around, made it back to the garage, and packed it in."

"I thought I was lucky," he said, shaking his long hair. "It didn't hurt yesterday. Today, it's stiffened up on me. I'm thinking I may be done with New England. You know, I'm the super of an apartment building, and I used to live there for free. It just got sold. I don't think I can get used to $1100 a month. I'm moving. North Carolina, or Florida, maybe. Somewhere warm," he said, as we pulled into the airport. "Somewhere warm."

At Logan Airport, a very pregnant young woman sat waiting for the plane while her husband carried their two-and-a-half-year-old son on his shoulders in a broad orbit around her. They'd been scheduled to fly out that morning at 9:00, but the airlines had offered them $500 each to wait so that the people who'd been stranded overnight by the blizzard could fly out first thing. It was astonishing that after three hours, the little boy was just beginning to get restless. He kicked his heels on his dad's shoulders, climbed down, and began pushing his miniature purple suitcase on wheels around the path his father had been tracing. The woman explained that they had all lived in Singapore for a couple of years, for the husband's job. They'd been in planes a lot. That explained why the boy was used to airports. And with a new baby on the way, they could use the extra money! So there she was, a Buddha in a cotton crewneck shirt, her forehead gleaming, waiting with us to catch the plane to San Juan.

Even the young Puerto Rican woman who sat next to us on the plane struggled with English to tell us about herself. We heard her fretting and saying a quiet prayer. She explained flying frightened her--that she was frightened on takeoff every time. But she had come to Massachusetts to live and work with her sister, while the rest of her family still lived on the island. She was going back to visit them. During the flight, she rubbed her soft, fleshy arms against mine, completely un-self-conscious, and I felt completely at home.

When we touched down in San Juan, there was some confusion about where we should wait for our plane. Rona asked a tall black woman standing at the gate whether she was going to Curacao, and when she said yes, we were reassured. The woman was traveling with her white husband and her two café au lait children, and I wondered if a racial and cultural mélange like Curacao would be the perfect atmosphere for their vacation. The promotional video the tourist bureau sent to Larry and Sara before their recent visit showed several mixed couples dancing at the nightclubs or strolling by the bay. Perhaps they wouldn’t stick out there as families like there still do so often in the U.S. Perhaps I would be the one out of place if I insisted on viewing people through a racial lens. Nearly the first thing I saw in Hato Airport, at the end of the short flight, was a big mural-style ad for a local bank with African-, Latino- and European-looking kinds standing arm in arm in front of the bay. It was like an ice cream sundae: chocolate, mocha, and cherry vanilla. At the very least, they keep their story straight.

The well-dressed woman at the Avis counter who showed us to our car, and nearly every other woman resident under the age of 40 I saw while I was on Curacao, sported a set of long fingernails, real or artificial, painted a bright background color with metallic stripes. They are seeing Latina hands in Massachusetts and raising them!

From the airport to the hotel was a straight shot, although it was quite the novelty to see Rona driving cautiously. Night driving, unfamiliar routes, and a speedometer registering in kilometers per hour made her one of the slower drivers on the road. The Hotel Otrabanda struck me as a Holiday Inn with a waterfront. But we know we’re in the Promised Land when we look out our hotel windows to see brightly painted Dutch houses by day and neon casino lights by night. We are here.