“Debbie,” I added quickly, while extending my hand. “Rodriguez.”
She looked puzzled. Mexicans are always curious about how I could be a Rodriguez yet speak Spanish so poorly, and with such an atrocious accent. I tell them that I kept the name and got rid of the husband. That always brings a smile and keeps me from having to go into my marital history. And my Spanish was terrible. In high school, I could not understand one word in any language that my French-born Spanish teacher spoke, and the Rosetta Stone courses I was now trying to follow only succeeded in putting me to sleep.
The woman introduced herself as Angelica. Then she pointed to the different women in the gym and shouted out their names above the din of the blaring disco music.
Angelica and I both arrived at the gym at around noon every day. We shared weights and traded equipment. She showed me how to use the butt-shaping machines and I made her laugh, mostly through goofy faces and pantomime. She persuaded me to ditch the little backpack I toted from machine to machine, and to follow her lead—water bottle in hand, towel around neck, cell phone tucked into one bra cup, change purse with house keys in the other, and a tube of lip gloss handily stowed in the cleavage. Genius.
Although I thought I could feel myself firming up little by little with each visit, I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t able to have a normal conversation with Angelica or the other women in the gym. Here was a chance to make friends with some local women, and I couldn’t even talk to them. It felt a lot like Kabul in the beginning, when I had to use an interpreter to communicate even the basics to my girls at the school. Note to self, I thought: find a Spanish teacher ASAP.
“Cuál es tu trabajo?” Angelica asked one day. What do you do for work?
Nothing, I thought. It felt strange to think that, but so far Mexico had proven to be as affordable as I had hoped it would be, and I was managing to stretch my savings as tight as the skin on a pregnant woman’s belly. In answer to Angelica, all I could do was scribble with an imaginary pen in one hand, and mimic a pair of snipping scissors with the other.
The next day I handed Angelica the Spanish-language version of The Kabul Beauty School, pointing out my picture on the back cover. She rattled off something to the other women in the gym, and they all gathered around to take a look.
When I returned the following week, the girl at the front desk was reading my book. It seemed they had been passing it around. She held up the cover for me to see, and smiled as I walked past. I smiled back. I’d finally been invited to the cool kids’ table! But as much as they now knew about me, I still hadn’t figured out what these girls were all about.
One day I arrived at the gym to find myself face-to-face with a stringy-haired man in sandals and socks and a muscle shirt that revealed everything but muscles, who followed my boobs with his bloodshot eyes as I headed to the machines. I thought I recognized him from Mamita’s, but we had never spoken. I averted my eyes as I passed, pretending not to hear whatever it was he was saying to me. Angelica appeared from behind and quickly pulled me away.
“Pinche pendejo,” she muttered, which I later learned roughly translates to “fucking asshole.” I could now see him on the other side of the room leering at us. “Tu amigo?” Angelica asked.
“No, no, nada, no friend!” I answered, in a panic.
She turned to the other girls in the room, rattled off something really fast, and suddenly the room was abuzz. Angelica then said something else, lowered her fabulous fake lashes at me, and said very seriously, “Cuidada. Eso hombre es malo. Careful.”
That evening I popped into Mamita’s right before sunset. Analisa instinctively reached for the red wine. “Just water for me,” I told her, not without some difficulty. Her perfectly groomed eyebrows lifted toward the ceiling in a question mark. I squeezed my belly in response.
“Ah, good for you,” said my friend with zero body fat, as she climbed onto the bar to take a bottle from the top shelf. As usual, the room went silent at the sight of Analisa’s perfect ass suspended in midair.
“Sucks,” I responded, sipping my water as I waited for her to climb down, a feat that always seemed to take her a little longer than necessary. “And I just joined a gym, but they won’t turn on their air. It’s killing me.” Analisa just nodded. This was not the tree to be barking up for sympathy. “I guess I’m just not as tough as you are, Analisa. Can I have a glass of red wine?”
Analisa placed her hands on her hips and paused, weighing my request.
“Please?” I put down my water. “Oh shit!”
“Okay, Deb. I will get you your wine . . . relax!”
“It’s not that!” Out of the corner of my eye, I had spotted the guy from the gym. “It’s that drunk over there.” I rolled my eyes toward his table and tried to duck out of his line of sight as he downed a shot of tequila.
“Oh, that cochino.” Analisa wrinkled her nose. “Yesterday he throw five hundred pesos at me and he say, ‘What can I get for that?’ ”
“Ugh. What did you tell him?”
Analisa laughed and grabbed her boobs. “I told him he cannot afford this. Then I walk away. What else can I do?” She paused and sighed. “You know, Debbie? Sometime I hate this job.”
“You should get out of here. Find something else.”
“It is not easy, you know.” She turned to pour a beer from the tap.
“Hey, Red!” came a yell from across the room. Everyone stopped to look but me. I hated being called Red. I hated being called anything by this creep. “I see you’ve been hanging out with Angelica! Now that’s one chica I’d like to tap!” he yelled as he thrust his hips.
Analisa looked at him, and then at me. “What is he saying?”
“He’s such an asshole,” I said, without looking up. I lowered my voice. “He stalks the girls at the gym.”
“What gym did you join, Debbie?” Analisa asked.
“The one near my house,” I said. “You know, on Reforma Street.”
Again Analisa just shook her head.
Now the guy stood up and began to rub his crotch against a cement pole in the middle of the room. “Has she taught you to use the pole yet? You can show us what you’ve got later tonight at Velvets! Hey, guys!” he called out to the room. “Red’s working at Velvets tonight!”
I could feel the heat rising from my chest to my hairline as I pushed myself up from the stool and cleared my throat. But before I could make a move, Analisa grabbed me by the arm and sat me back down. “Tranquilo, Debbie.”
“What is his problem? Jeez. I really don’t know how you stand working here.” I pointed to the wine bottle on the bar.
Analisa poured. “I need the money, Debbie. Nobody takes care of me. I am the one who takes care of me and my son.”
“Well,” I said, sipping my wine, “I still think there must be better places to work. Places where you don’t have to wiggle your butt in people’s faces to earn a living.”
Analisa pretended not to hear. “Why you go to that gym with those dirty girls? This is not good, Debbie. People will think you are like them.”
“What do you mean, like them?”
“You know those girls at that gym are all dancers, don’t you?”
“What do you mean, dancers?”
“You know, what is the word? Naked dancers.”
“Strippers? No way!”
“Most of them work at Velvets, or the other clubs. And a man, he can get anything he wants at those places. What time you go to the gym? Not early like me, right?”
I knew that regardless of how late Analisa worked, or how hard she partied, she had a 6 A.M. date with the gym, every single day. I shook my head. “No, I go late.”
“Right. And why do you think those girls all look like that?”
“I think they look good!” I protested. “And they’re so nice! Are they from Mazatlán?”
&nbs
p; “Lots of girls come here to work, some by choice, some no. You know prostitution is legal here, right?”
I had no idea. “But this is a beach town! I never see working girls hanging around.”
“That’s because you go to bed at eight,” Analisa said, laughing. “Anyway, they don’t hang around.” I just shook my head.
“It’s a job. Money.” She grabbed a tip off the bar and stuffed it into her tight pocket. “There are not a lot of ways for a woman with not much education to make money here, Debbie.”
I should have understood better. Though the women here certainly had more freedom than those I had met in Afghanistan, for those without resources the options still seemed to be few. I’d see them working the hotels, the bars, cleaning houses, selling shoes, at the receptionist desk at the dental office or at the phone company, but that seemed to be about as far as most careers went. Higher education was a luxury many could not afford. And besides, most of them seemed to have babies before they were even old enough to know what sex was.
Even the jobs that were available to women were hard to come by. Hell, work for everyone down here was becoming harder and harder to find, with news reports of kidnappings and shoot-outs and bodies left hanging from bridges, scaring boatloads of tourists away from the country. Yes, things happened, but as I knew all too well, things happened everywhere. Mexico seemed pretty peaceful to me, so far.
I had hired Bodie to oversee some renovation on the house. Now I was woken up every morning by his crew of four tiptoeing past my door on their way to the roof, the only option for some much-needed expansion to accommodate friends and family I hoped would someday visit. But as soon as the guys would make their way up my killer spiral staircase (which, if my ass got any bigger, I’d never be able to negotiate), all bets were off. On went the radio, full blast, and in came the music straight through the two-by-two-foot open cube between my bedroom and my roof, which was the house’s very traditional, very old, and semifunctional “air movement” system (that is, at least when the air was moving, which in the summer was, like, never). And boy did these guys love their music. It was as though they were auditioning for American Idol, their voices crowing through the still morning air, reminding me of the muezzins’ call to prayer that was my predawn alarm clock in Afghanistan. After the suffocating silence of all those mornings on top of that hill in California, I was delighted to wake once again to the sweet sound of life around me.
Coffee with Bodie became a morning ritual. I think we could have solved most of the world’s problems over all that coffee. As the others toiled away on his roof—his one-eyed plumber, his tattooed fresh-out-of-prison gangbanger from Los Angeles, his paper boy/electrician who would show up covered with sweat after his morning deliveries, and my sweet waiter Sergio, who apparently moonlit by day as Bodie’s translator and carpenter—Bodie would entertain me with tales of Mazatlán. Spanish conquistadors and pirates, galleons teeming with gold, and silver, starry-eyed prospectors flocking across the land on their way to promised riches during the 1849 gold rush, revolutionaries who escaped through the limestone tunnels snaking out from Devil’s Cave, practically right around the corner from Carnaval Street. I learned about the Chinese workers who came down through California and started families with local women. Later, reacting to a Depression-era backlash, a whole slew of them abandoned their homes and businesses and returned to China. Then World War II broke out, and the Mexican government sent ships to rescue the Mexican women and their children, leaving the men behind. Today you can see a trace of what’s left of their Chinese husbands in a trail of offspring who provide Mazatlán with much of its legal and medical expertise. You’ve got to love a doctor named Pablo Wong or an insurance agent named Juan Chong. That, and the food. Like my favorites—the side-by-side Mandarin restaurants, Jade and Original Jade, owned by two ancient feuding sisters who split their deceased father’s establishment right down the middle, and who to this day refuse to give in to each other.
The French, the British, the Germans—it seems as though everyone wanted a piece of Mazatlán at one time or another. I finally understood the eclectic architecture in Centro, as well as the startling green eyes on some of those kids I’d seen along the Malecón. It had never occurred to me that it was the Germans who had started the famous Pacífico brewery in town, or that they were the ones to blame for all that earsplitting banda music everywhere you turn.
With Bodie’s encouragement, I began to drop in at Macaws, which I would do when I knew he’d likely be around. But no matter who was there, I would always be invited to join in. Being among this lively group, with their never-ending conversation and bottomless pit of stories, made the afternoons feel like one giant slumber party, without the pillow fights. As the summer rainstorms would come barreling through we’d pull our chairs in tighter, stranded happily together in the haven that was Macaws. The streets around us would become rushing rivers in an instant. Now I understood why all the curbs were so high that a girl in a tight skirt never stood a chance. Sometimes, along with the flash floods, a horrible, reeking stew of sewage would bubble up from below. It was disgusting. There was shit in the street!
And then, one Saturday morning, there was shit in my closet.
From the day I started to have work done on the house, the question of putting in my own sewer came up constantly. I didn’t get it. I had no idea how it all worked, but everything seemed to work just fine, and besides, putting in a new sewer would mean ripping up my beautiful old tile floors, and that was going to happen over my dead body. I should have taken the signs I saw in every public restroom in Centro, that outline of a toilet paper roll with a big X through it, as a warning. That, and the fly-covered buckets that people actually used instead as the alternative for waste disposal. But no, I thought I just must be one of the lucky ones. Until one morning when I flushed and heard the gurgling coming from my shower.
That can’t be good, I thought, reaching for the plunger. Job done, I put a load of laundry in the washer and settled in on the couch with a book. Thirty pages later, I was interrupted by a strange odor creeping into the living room. That really can’t be good, I thought, reluctantly getting up to investigate. To my horror, back in the bathroom a cloudy brown sludge was flowing over the shower lip and spreading across the floor. Shit everywhere. I frantically dialed Bodie’s number, and within fifteen minutes he was at my door with Sergio, plungers and Drano in hand. We poured bottles and bottles of Drano down the toilet and into the shower drain. By now the shit was coming out of every orifice in my house, and the odor was seeping out through the gate into the street. So we ran to Josi’s for more plungers, thinking that if we could block off the air, we might be able to literally force this crap out. The three of us plunged and plunged and plunged until our fingers blistered and our arms ached. After more than an hour, when we finally seemed to have everything but the odor under control, I thanked the guys and off they went, smelling like shit. Exhausted, I headed to the bedroom to flop down on the bed. But no. Because there, seeping out from under the tiles in my closet and into the room, was more shit.
I again called Bodie, who quickly found Sergio, who called the one-eyed plumber, who needed to confer with the original contractor who had helped fix up the house, who called sewer truck guys to blow the lines out, who warned me (via sign language) that blowing the lines out could result in shit all over my walls. Not an option. Now what?
By now the entire neighborhood had gathered around, curious to watch as the gringa got the shit sucked out of her house, only to be disappointed to hear, along with me, that the sewer line, which was tied into the one next door, had somehow, by someone, been completely cemented up. Closed. No access. No outlet. Nowhere for the shit to go. The solution? Drill a hole through the bathroom wall that I apparently shared with my neighbor.
Off we went, Bodie, Sergio, the one-eyed plumber, the contractor, the sewer truck guys, and me, to knock on my neighbor’s door. Or r
ather, as they do here, yell through his gate.
“Hello! Anybody home?” My voice bounced right through the spotless living room and back out into the street. “Hello?” We waited. And waited. Finally, a very, very old man in a sleeveless white undershirt and pants jacked up to his armpits shuffled toward us, his little white poodle scampering behind. “Debbie. Your neighbor,” I said, extending one arm and pointing toward my house with the other.
He held up one finger and shuffled away.
“El viejo. Adónde va?” The one-eyed plumber was getting restless, and wanted to know where the old guy was going.
“Hello?” I tried again.
Back he came, all buttoned up now in a crisp white shirt. “Pepe,” he said, opening the gate and taking my hand with a little bow. “Bienvenido.” He invited us in with a sweep of the arm.
The plumber and contractor began to explain the problem. Pepe just smiled and nodded his head, then reached down to retrieve a glass dish off a side table. “Dulces?” One by one, my entourage followed my lead in accepting his offer, obediently popping the sickly sweet candies into our mouths, while images of a tsunami of shit rushing down Carnaval Street played in my mind.
Suddenly a huge grin spread across Pepe’s face. A woman had arrived at the gate, apparently the owner of the house, who had been alerted to the commotion by Josi the storekeeper, and who, after first denying that she had done anything to the wall in the bathroom, agreed to the hole in the wall, only after our promise to her that we’d leave her bathroom in better shape than we found it, much better shape. Pepe walked us to the door to see us out, pressing a little wrapped cookie into each of our hands as we shook good-bye.