Half of me was excited to meet new people. I was flattered that Bodie thought I’d fit in, since fitting in was something that had eluded me over the past couple of years in Napa. But the other half of me was a nervous wreck. Sunday morning came quickly and started early with a phone call from Bodie.
“Hey, Deb. You’re still in for the beach, right?”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m in.”
“Great! Meet at Macaws at noon, and we’ll take the panga over to the island.”
I didn’t want to sound stupid, but I had no idea what a panga was. More crucial was the fact that I also didn’t know where Macaws was. Bodie rattled off a ten-minute set of directions. As in turn west at (something that sounded like Generalmente Chichomicholambariña Street) and go east at (another unintelligible street name), follow the street ninety degrees around the traffic circle until the (iglesia something) is at two o’clock, and head straight for the (what sounded to me like bathroom in Spanish). I was just grateful I lived on a street I could pronounce and spell.
“Bodie, would you mind giving me the same directions again, only this time in girl talk?”
He laughed and switched to a strained falsetto. “Walk to the big white house, turn left at that adorable pink building with the blue door, and then right again where all those hunky car-wash guys are. When you see the ocean, take your first left, look to your right, and voilà. Macaws.”
“Bodie, just one more thing, do I turn left or right when I walk out my front door?” I could just hear him wondering how a woman who had been all over the world could be so helpless when it came to getting around.
I packed up my beach bag with a dozen strengths of sun block—I seriously doubted they called this the Tropic of Cancer for nothing—tied up my hair in braids under a big floppy hat, and checked myself out in the mirror. Then the terror set in. I swear I stopped breathing for a minute or two. Being introduced to a group of strangers in a dark, smoky room, fully clothed, is one thing, but at a beach, in unforgiving sunlight, half naked? What had I been thinking? I ran to the phone to politely decline Bodie’s invitation, then hung up, dialed, and hung up again, and finally sucked it up and headed to the closet.
Do I wear the big cover-up or the small one? In Afghanistan I had personally embraced the tradition of covering one’s entire body. Those big baggy clothes could hide a multitude of sins. I began to rethink my move to a tropical destination. Maybe Iceland would have been a better choice. My mind was racing. Are these skinny people or fat people? Are they old or young? Shit, this is not the way I want to meet new friends. Have I mentioned I am a fan of the burqini? It’s a wonderful invention. Sort of like a full-length wet suit with a hood, only way looser. Anyway, that day I settled for my most modest bathing suit and my largest cover-up, and off I went feeling naked and exposed, vulnerable in a way that brought back way too many feelings I’d rather not feel.
Bodie was nowhere to be found under the churning ceiling fans in Macaws’ open patio. I turned around, anxious to leave before anyone saw me.
“Debbie? Is that you?”
An ethereal blonde in a flowy blue dress stood and went behind the bar, uncapped a bottle of tequila, and started to pour. She held out her hand.
“I’m Sharon. I’ve heard so much about you!”
I must have looked as mortified as I felt. She smiled a radiant smile and said, “Girlfriend, we all need tequila to go to the beach.” I appreciated the empathy but wasn’t so sure I should be going down that slippery slope so early in the day, especially in a crowd of new faces.
“Better make mine a double,” boomed a hearty Texas twang from the sidewalk. I turned to see a very tanned woman wrapped tightly in a bright blue cover-up. “Bonnie. Pleased to meet you.” She helped herself to a glass from Sharon’s hand. “Cheers, y’all.”
All I will say is that over the next five hours I came to realize why God invented tequila.
There’s something about being an expat that sets a person apart from the rest of society. And I don’t mean geographically apart from their forsaken home, nor do I mean culturally apart from their new neighbors. I saw it when I lived in Afghanistan. They’re just a different breed. Are they born that way? Or does living as a stranger in a strange land make them that way? I think it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Sure, I know all too well that life circumstances are often behind the metamorphosis from pat to expat, and that quite often those circumstances involve money, or lack thereof. In Afghanistan it was all about making a buck; here it was all about stretching one. But still, it takes a different kind of person to not just sit still and let life happen to them. I’m not sure how to define it, but all I know is that they just aren’t normal. And in my book, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But there was a major disconnect between what I had experienced among the expat community in Kabul and what I was finding here. Unlike over there, where personal history and credentials are an expat’s calling card, to these folks yesterday was yesterday, and today is today.
Let me explain.
That Sunday on Stone Island, as I sat at Lety’s surfside restaurant around a long plastic table under a palm frond roof with a dozen mismatched people of all shapes and sizes knocking back buckets of beer, margaritas, rum pulled out of someone’s beach bag, and of course, straight tequila, I learned a lot. Here’s how the conversation went:
Me: How long have you lived down here, Barb?
Barb: Oh, I don’t know. Hey Art, she brayed across the table to her octogenarian husband, how long have we been here? Art just shrugged. Barb turned her attention to a vendor selling baskets table to table. I turned my attention to Art.
Me: Where are you guys from?
Art (taking a sip of his drink): Syracuse. Had a restaurant. I was known there for my dooble entenders.
Me: What?
Art: You know, double meanings. I’m writing a book. Funny stories. I’m a pretty funny guy, right, Bonnie?
Bonnie laughed and helped herself to some chips.
Me: So what’s your story, Bonnie? What are you doing down here?
Bonnie: Me? You don’t want to hear our story.
Me: No, really, I do.
Bonnie: Nah. Not that interesting. Hey, Nancy! She turned to a youngish woman at the end of the table, who could have been the third of a trio of Russian nesting dolls made up of Barb, Bonnie, and herself. You dealing tonight?
Me: Deal? What does she deal?
Bonnie: Poker. She’s a pro. We have a regular game Sunday nights. You play?
Me: She earns a living doing that?
Bonnie: That, and she ties fishing flies. Has quite a business. She turned to the guy on her right. Hey, Eyelashes, you playing tonight?
The Guy (who did indeed possess impossibly long, dark eyelashes, shrugged his shoulders): Not sure, depends on if Fernanda is home to watch Reyna. His British accent was as thick as London fog. An adorable six-year-old was digging trenches in the sand by his side.
Me: Who is he?
Bodie: That’s Simon.
Me: And?
Bodie: And what?
Me: What’s his story?
Bodie: Story? Married. To a Mexican. She’s a psychologist.
Me: But how did he end up here?
Bodie: I’m not sure. Do you know, Lisa?
Lisa: I think he might have had some big job in New York or somewhere. Quit and moved to Mazatlán.
Me (giving up on Lisa and Bodie): Why did you and Sharon come to Mazatlán, Glen?
Glen (shrugging his shoulders): It just sort of happened. All I know is we’d never move back, right, Shar?
Pete: I agree wholeheartedly. And (kissing my hand) please allow me to be the first to officially welcome you to our little paradise.
Me (pointing to a perky little blonde at the far end of the table): Who’s that?
r /> Cheryl: That’s Sonja. As in Sonja and Barry.
Me: When did they come down here?
Nobody responded.
Me (to Donna and Rob): What about you guys?
At this point Art’s chair toppled slowly backward into the sand, bringing the table, the glasses, the guacamole, and Art down with it. I jumped up to help. Everyone else kept drinking.
“Happens all the time,” Barb said as she stood and hiked her strapless elastic top up over her boobs and under her armpits. “Gave up bras when I moved to Mazatlán,” she said with a laugh so loud it momentarily drowned out the clamor of the banda musicians moving up the beach. “Swim, anyone?”
I had never intended to bare my body that day, so I can’t explain what came over me when I decided to fling off my cover-up and join the group bouncing around in that salty blue sea. It wasn’t just the heat, which was turning our cold drinks into sweaty puddles of water seeping across the plastic table. And it wasn’t the booze. It was just that these people seemed so comfortable with themselves, so willing to do whatever they felt like doing regardless of how it might look to anyone else, and so nonjudgmental that you had to wonder if they really concerned themselves with anyone else at all.
Don’t get me wrong. These people could gossip along with the best of them. It was the same in Kabul—for expats even a big city becomes a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. But here the gossip was never mean-spirited, and it usually concerned something the gossipee had put out there herself. Nevertheless, as Glen advised at one point that day with a wink, “It would be wise to never miss a meeting.”
And by no means am I saying that these people were unfriendly. Far from it. By the end of that afternoon I had invitations to the poker game (which I declined), to join Barb at her Friday morning painting class (which I accepted), and to Margarita Wednesdays with Glen and Sharon at Macaws (which made me think of Karen in Michigan, and made me love this place even more). But what I realized was that for all of them, dwelling on or even talking about their pasts was considered a waste of time. It just wasn’t something that was brought up. In fact, they hardly asked me, the new kid on the block, anything about my own life prior to coming to Mazatlán. How great was that? I could be anybody! Not that I wasn’t proud of things in my past, at least some of them, but for once in my life I didn’t feel like I had to explain myself, which at that time I wasn’t sure I even could. I could be anybody—for one sweet afternoon, I felt like I could just be me.
I may not have learned much about my new friends that day, but I did get back on the panga (which, by the way, is the ricketiest, most crowded little deathtrap of a boat you’ve ever seen) knowing this: no matter how different we all seemed to be, it was becoming clear to me that we had one huge, undeniable, and indefinable thing in common—that peculiar something inside that had drawn us to life in this odd little city by the sea.
I love the feeling of falling in love. I could feel myself falling hard for this new country, yet I was afraid. My heart was saying yes, but my head was telling me to take it slow, to protect myself from getting in too deep. Afghanistan had taught me the consequences of that. Yet as we all know, the problem with love is that you just can’t control the who and the when of it. But for now it remained fairly easy to keep my distance from the soul of Mexico, buffered by the English-speaking posse that was graciously starting to usher me into a world of their own making.
Unfortunately, as is inevitable whenever I start a new relationship, I was gaining weight. The taco-tequila-tostada diet was taking its toll, and I was running out of creative solutions for camouflaging the rolls that seemed to multiply overnight and the cellulite that was puckering up my skin in places I didn’t even know could pucker. Why, oh why, couldn’t I wear my weight with the pride of a Mexican woman? They’d squeeze themselves into those same skinny jeans they wore twenty pounds ago without a blink of the eye. How they managed to do that in ninety-degree heat and one hundred percent humidity was a mystery to me. By midmorning I’d be sweating so much that anything I wore would become plastered to my skin like a globby layer of papier-mâché.
Weight issues had plagued me my entire life. To my stick-thin mother, the fact that I took after my father’s side of the family was like a knife in her heart. Her acquired southern belle sensibility was, by the time I was old enough to notice, clearly offended by the mere presence of the large, loud, lumbering man she had married for his promise of a better future. I worshipped my mom but saw plain as day that she did not worship my dad. So I did everything possible to become just like her.
Mom had me on diets from the time I was ten years old, and she even joined Weight Watchers herself more than once when I was a kid, casually inviting me to “have some fun and come with” in her desperate attempts to get me to slim down. It had taken her eleven years to conceive, as she often reminded me, and before I was born she was so looking forward to having a little doll to play dress-up with. After she gave up on me she turned to real dolls, amassing an impressive collection of Madame Alexanders, dozens of perfect little angels with bee-stung lips and poofy skirts and corkscrew curls crowding the shelves of her bedroom, the same bedroom that ended up in ruins after that house fire. Poor dolls.
I tried everything I could to become thin, including a yearlong bout with anorexia. At seventeen years old, five feet five, and eighty-five pounds, I thought I looked great. My mom was so proud of my “dieting” success. She wasn’t aware of my daily doses of Ex-Lax or my self-induced vomiting, and when I stopped getting my period she insisted on a pregnancy test, despite my honest avowal of my virginal status. The doctor told me to gain weight, but I wasn’t about to give up this newfound feeling of control over my life, or the satisfaction of being, for once, smaller than my mom. Even she couldn’t fit into my size-three pants! So I put rocks in my pockets before my next appointment. It wasn’t until my big, beefy boyfriend broke up with me (you’re just too skinny!) that I came to my senses.
The following year I left for a few months in Japan with a Christian organization. It was my first time out of the country and, determined to follow the instructions we had been given during our training sessions, I never once refused even the tiniest grain of rice from my host family. I couldn’t insult them, could I? I ate everything in sight. I will never forget the look on my mom’s face when I got off that plane. The pattern continued in college with my freshman thirty—I couldn’t just stop at fifteen, like everyone else—and into my on-again, off-again marital history. And it obviously still hadn’t been broken.
But now I was turning to the Mexican women for inspiration. Of course, I still wanted to look good, but I was determined not to let skinny be the be-all-end-all anymore. It was time to start feeling good, and time to start feeling good about myself. It was time to join a gym.
So what did I do? I went shopping. I couldn’t set foot in a gym without the proper outfit, could I? Why can’t shopping be an acceptable form of exercise? I whined to myself, adrenaline pumping the way it always did when I’d find myself surrounded by shelves and shelves of bargains. I could stick with this routine, cruising the mall. Why, I’d do it every day! I hated going to the gym, it was so much work. I wandered the aisles until I spotted an adorable pair of purple and black spandex pants, and for one quick second this whole workout thing didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Then I remembered what my friend Karen in Michigan always said: Spandex is a privilege, not a right. I bought a pair of sweats and went back home.
But when the time came to actually get serious about this whole exercise idea, it soon became clear that the real challenge wasn’t going to be finding the right outfit; it was finding a gym that I wasn’t going to suffocate in. Mexicans aren’t too keen on air-conditioning, because not only is it expensive, but they believe that sweating is actually healthy, unless, of course, you are sweating in air-conditioning, in which case you’ll get sick. Go figure. My other two requirements f
or a gym were that it be female-friendly and close to my house.
Gimnasio Roberto’s, a quick bike ride away from Carnaval Street, fit the bill close enough. As I passed under a dubious likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger hanging over the doorway and climbed the long, narrow stairway up from the street, I could feel the wetness spreading from every nook and cranny of my body. I hadn’t even lifted a finger yet and I was drenched, droplets of my sweat leaving dark, round spots on the threadbare gray carpet under my feet.
Let’s get physical . . . physical, Olivia Newton-John screamed from the giant speakers hanging on the wall, the bass turned up so high the floors shook. Back down another set of stairs, one flight below, the dark, cavernous gym was lined with more mirrors than a carnival funhouse, and was teeming with a sea of incredibly beautiful people. The women were all Jennifer Lopez—toned, tanned, huge breasts, awesome booties. Everything matched. Tight pink pants were paired with low-cut pink midriff tops, pink sweatbands for the head, pink wristbands, and a pink towel to wipe the machines down.
The men? Enrique Iglesias clones, from their sweaty six-packs up to their perfectly gelled hair. They were all impossibly beautiful.
I snuck into a corner space and eyed the dumpy chick in the T-shirt and sweats staring back at me from the mirror. The makeup I’d never leave the house without was already streaming down my cheeks. I looked like Gene Simmons after a particularly rowdy KISS concert. From every angle, all I could see were those beautiful people, and I knew that if I was seeing them, they were seeing me. I closed my eyes and started to lift, curling up and down and up and down, willing the flesh that was sagging off the back of my arms to magically turn into muscle bulging from the front. Soon the weights were becoming impossibly heavy, and I was struggling to lower them without letting them crash to the floor. I must have let out some sort of uncontrollable bellow or other cry of distress because, to my mortification, when I raised my eyes everyone had turned to look. And that’s when I saw her. My angel in a push-up sports bra and the tiniest pair of shorts you’ve ever seen, shorts that were barely covering an ass that topped a pair of legs as long as I was tall. She was a Bo Derek ten to my Ugly Betty zero. She effortlessly grabbed my weights and lowered them to the ground, her two-inch-long crystal-studded nails reflecting off the mirrors surrounding us. I opened my mouth to thank her but whatever came out sounded nothing like Spanish.