The Vibe Manager

Chapter 31

Every day, a troupe of housekeepers changed 50,000 beds in the high-rise hotels of the Riviera Maya.... Who were they? Jade wondered — all of the housekeepers pushing their carts from room to room behind the lush hanging vines of a thousand sky-lit atriums?

They appeared to her as pinpoints on distant balconies, dots of uniforms and faces gazing down onto the aqua waves below, the man-made lagoons and round thatched huts. They stopped on the balconies just long enough to empty the ashtrays, toss the clanking dead soldiers into trash bags, sweep the tiles, and shift the lounge chairs back into formation....

Jade worked in tandem with the housekeepers for three days. Putting on her own uniform each morning, she hung the Do Not Disturb sign on her door and gave treatments to her host's friends on the portable massage table in her room.

In the afternoons, when she stepped out to enjoy the sunshine, she passed the housekeepers in the hallway, still working — not even halfway through their day. They smiled at one another and exchanged brief pleasantries in Spanish.

"Need more towels?" one of them asked in English as she passed the housekeeping cart on her final day.

When Jade started to answer in Spanish, the young woman said: "I noticed you've been using a whole bunch of them...."

"Working vacation," Jade said, noting the slight twang of an American southern accent in the woman's voice.

From behind her sunglasses, Jade saw the black crewneck of a rock-concert T-shirt under the housekeeper's uniform. It struck her that, to this woman, she must seem an other — a spoiled, wasteful guest who must be sleeping until 2 p.m. every day, keeping them from getting into the room to do their job, and using more than her fair share of towels — when, really, she was a member of their professional sisterhood....

"I'm a massage therapist, here with this group of women — they've been changing into bathing suits when they're done and leaving the towels in my bathroom...."

The housekeeper nodded blankly and turned back to her clipboard. "At least you're getting out now..."

"Trying to clear my head, yeah." Jade sighed. "Not sure what I'm going to do back home when this ends, actually."

"Where's home?"

"New York City."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

Jade laughed. 

"How long have you been a massage therapist?"

"About six years. Before that I did what you're doing." Jade pulled her sunglasses up to the top of her head. "What about you? How long have you been here?"

The housekeeper smiled warmly, her face covered with freckles and a hard-won suntan. "About two years now? I moved from New Orleans.... Yeah, this is paradise."

Her nametag said Heather. Jade guessed they were no more than four or five years apart in age.

"My boyfriend manages an eco-resort south of the ruins in Tulum," Heather said. "We have a place on the beach built from native wood, clothing optional — it's a good thing this hotel gives me a uniform, right?" She laughed, pulling at the loose uniform top, and Jade could see that her black T-shirt was silkscreened with a picture of children climbing over ruins under an electric orange sky. She'd flipped past the same image often enough in my record crates to know it was the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.

"The part of the coast where we live makes me think of how parts of California must've been back in the '70s," Heather went on. "Small farms and dirt roads... We fish for our dinner, we grow our food. I work here a few days a week and I barter cleaning services for other stuff. It's amazing. I'm never leaving. When do you have to go back?"