A Mother-Daughter Spring Break
When Emma, a freshman in college, asked me to take her somewhere warm over spring break, I seized the chance to spend time together. We wanted Miami without spring break debauchery and South Beach without fashionista chic. And I knew better than to suggest Canyon Ranch. Once, when I told Emma that the apartment seemed empty without her, she replied, “Are you saying I’m fat?” (She’s not.) In short, we needed a resort with real food, no beer-guzzling college hooligans or European runway models.
A friend mentioned the Fisher Island Hotel and Resort, on a small, highly exclusive private island two miles from South Beach, the kind of place where oligarchs and Oprah Winfrey buy and sell $15 million condos. I was alarmed by the prices but seduced by the descriptions of the 45-room hotel — a seaside Italian villa begun in 1926 by a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt that has peacocks roaming the property.
I imagined sunrise walks on the beach, giggly mother-daughter spa treatments and intimate candlelit meals during which Emma would lean in and at long last tell me what college was like besides “fine.”
I failed to anticipate that exam-rattled 18-year-olds sleep long past noon and then stay up all night (I get up around 6 and am asleep easily before 10). Nor had I known that embedded in the ethos of this particular private island is a class system that places short-term guests below the salt.
The mother-daughter idyll beneath the palm trees was peaceful, luxurious and almost as though Emma had never left campus in Ohio. In the end it turned into a love-hate relationship that oddly enough mirrored my love-hate relationship with the resort. I loved everything about it, but it didn’t love me back, and that, I hated. It turned out it wasn’t personal.
It’s a long story, so I’ll begin at the bar.
There wasn’t one.
Fisher Island boasts 18 tennis courts, two of them grass, a nine-hole golf course designed by P. B. Dye, 3 swimming pools, 2 deepwater boat marinas, 6 restaurants, a fancy food and wine store, pillow menus, a tropical bird aviary and even a miniature observatory. But when I was there midweek in March there was no place to sit and have a glass of wine.
It goes without saying that any mother traveling with a teenage daughter is at some point going to need a drink. Even a good-enough mother will at least try not to drink too much in front of a college-age child; I needed a bar where I could enjoy a soothing cocktail fast and discreetly.
I tried the beach club first, but lashing winds from the sea battered the outdoor bar and kept away hotel guests and, more important, the bartender. The two restaurants that are attached to the hotel didn’t have separate bar areas, and something advertised as the Sunset Bar, close to the beach and facing the skyline of Miami, was closed the entire time we were there.
I considered driving our golf cart off the villa grounds to the Golf Grill, overlooking the nine-hole course, but that, Emma said primly, would set a bad example of maternal drinking and driving.
The entrance to the Vanderbilt Mansion opens onto a charming, outdoor stone-paved courtyard with large white sofas and armchairs underneath umbrellas that circle a giant banyan tree, imported by the Vanderbilts from India. It’s beautiful, and at dusk the perfect place to have a drink. I sat there many times for long stretches, and no waiter ever came and asked if I wanted anything. I saw no other guests sitting there, let alone over drinks, and I was forced to conclude that it was just a courtyard, one that felt like the world’s loveliest and loneliest bus terminal waiting room
