“It’s the evil eye, Debbie,” came Martha’s groggy voice from the bed. “When you say something nice about the baby, you have to touch her.”
I held the baby closer. The nurse pointed to Italya, then to me, and back again. “Como abuela.” Everyone smiled and nodded.
“What?” I asked.
“I think they’re saying she looks like you,” Noah suggested.
“Como él también,” added another of Martha’s relatives, pointing at Denis, laughing. A blushing Denis held out his palms and shook his head.
“What?” I asked. “They think she looks like him because her skin is pale?”
Teresa rushed to my side. “El hilo rojo!” She gasped, suddenly pulling a thin red string from her pocket. I didn’t dare move as she began to tie it around Italya’s tiny wrist.
“The evil eye again?” I asked. Martha nodded and closed her eyes. Just then the nurse reappeared and gently took the baby from my arms. “Where’s she going? What’s the matter?” Thinking the worst. She looked healthy to me. Mix-up? Wrong baby?
“Now she must go get her ears pierced.”
Tippy Toes’ birth was a bit more complicated. Starting a business from scratch in a place where you can’t buy anything wholesale, or locate the necessary equipment anywhere within hundreds of miles, is, needless to say, a challenge. I was down to my last five hundred dollars by the time I was ready to open.
Bodie and Sergio were putting the finishing touches on the remodel when they gave me a call. “You do want a water hookup in the back room, right?”
“No, don’t need one back there. What we have is fine.”
“But you’re going to want to do hair, shampoos, right?”
“Tippy Toes, Bodie. Get it? It’s not called Happy Hair.”
“C’mon, Deb. What if you change your mind?”
“Not going to.”
“But let’s just say you do. It will be expensive to bring the water in later. If we do it now, it’ll be a breeze.”
“No more money?” I asked, wincing at the thought of my bank balance.
“Nope.” I could hear Sergio in the background urging him to just do it.
“Okay. And Bodie? Tell Sergio to keep his opinions to himself. He’s done enough damage already.”
But of course it was mostly thanks to Sergio that my staff was in place—Martha and her sister, Teresa, their niece Luz, plus their friend Daniela from up on The Hill, and Selena, a girl I had inherited from a shuttered Golden Zone salon. Training began amid the elaborate paint job I had commissioned for the inside of the salon. I wanted something different, something that said beachy and fun, so an airbrushed wraparound mural with a surfer theme was in progress. My friends, enlisted as guinea pigs, arrived two by two for the free services I offered as incentive. It was important to me that my staff become comfortable working with foreigners, and I hovered over the girls as they followed, step by step, my carefully choreographed manicure and pedicure instructions. I admit to being a taskmaster, but I was determined to make the experience a memorable one for my customers, including the presentation. Most of all, I wanted to ensure consistency, a level of comfort that comes with knowing you’re walking into something familiar, especially in a foreign country. Sort of like going to McDonald’s when you’re in, say, Bulgaria, but better.
I had, by now, decided to branch out a little from just doing nails. So when my scheduled test subjects showed up, either for a morning or afternoon session, they had to take whatever service they were offered. If we were practicing facials, they got their pores steam cleaned. Massages? Lucky stiffs. But Lord help the ones who showed up at waxing time. More than one woman of a certain age turned and ran out the door before we could attempt a Brazilian, much to my girls’ relief. I couldn’t help but think of Kabul, about the time when a young aid worker asked if we could do a Brazilian. Sure, I said. Of course we could. My girls were mortified at the thought, as this just wasn’t the kind of thing that was done there. Maybe it was something your mother or sister might help with, at home, but it certainly wasn’t a procedure done by strangers, in a public place. The aid worker knew this, and was nervous putting herself in the hands of novices. I assured her it would be fine. I’d do the job myself.
It was dark in the salon the afternoon she showed up for her waxing. It was dark there every afternoon, as the windows were cemented up to block us from the street view, and the electricity wasn’t turned on until four o’clock. That day my top student was enlisted to help me get started as soon as the lights came on. The woman’s blond hair would have been tough enough to see in any lighting, but when the power went out halfway through, we were doomed. “Light!” I yelled to the rest of the girls outside the door. “We need light! Hurry!” A minute later they all marched in, with miners’ lamps on their heads and flashlights in their hands. I still don’t know who was more embarrassed, the nervous, spread-eagled customer or my painfully modest girls.
It was proving hard to find volunteers for waxing in a retirement community. At first I had the girls practice on Noah, but when he started resembling a hairless Chihuahua I had to put a stop to that. I managed to find a couple of other guys to come in, but when one asked for a back, crack, and sack wax, Martha almost puked and threatened to quit. Luckily he was just kidding. Another victim came in looking like a gorilla. I felt so sorry for him, with the pain he had to be going through getting all that hair ripped off his back, that I ran to Macaws and got him a double shot of whiskey with a straw, which one of my girls held under his face while Teresa yanked the strips off, one by one.
It was finally showtime. Martha, Teresa, Luz, Daniela, and Selena were all good to go. Five girls, just like I had in Afghanistan. Sometimes, when I’d listen to them giggling about a customer who’d just left, or hear them complaining about a tip, picking up just enough of the language to understand what was going on, I’d almost forget where I was. But there was no mistaking Mazatlán for Kabul when it came to how my girls showed up for work. With their low-slung pants and skintight shirts that ended well above the belly button, all I could see were stretch marks and the crack of an ass when any one of them bent over to do a pedicure. At first I tried to tease them out of their fashion habit by sliding a ten-peso coin into an exposed crevice every time I saw one, or by tickling their bare belly rolls, which those who had had babies wore like a badge of honor. Then I bought aprons to cover their tummies. Eventually I had to take the drastic step of bringing in longer, looser shirts from the States.
Noah took to his role managing the salon like a fish to water. It was in his blood. Both my boys had gained experience in the field over the years—I had sent Noah to beauty school at one point in his life, and Zach had pitched in during his time in Afghanistan by doing pedicures for embassy workers while I did their hair. Of course, now he was on a different track, selling kidnap and ransom insurance, another career choice no doubt inspired by his mother. But Noah had fallen closer to the tree. Sometimes I felt sorry for him, the lone man plopped into a bevy of highly emotional, high-strung, hormonal women, most of them related, which gave them even more of an excuse to fight and cry at the drop of a hat. Especially after they had all worked together long enough for their cycles to become coordinated.
Noah’s home life was only slightly less tumultuous. From that very first day in the hospital, when Teresa and her relatives, including Martha, dug their heels in to insist that Noah could not possibly be the one to stay overnight on the skinny Naugahyde couch—You can’t change her diaper. She’s a girl! You don’t know how to feed her. You’re a man!—he had been struggling to stake his claim as a father, an involved father, in a country where that has traditionally been far from the norm.
“You don’t know how to do any of this,” Martha would tell him.
“I can learn.”
“Well, you’re not going to learn on my baby,” she’d answer.
??
?She’s not your baby, she’s our baby,” he’d reply.
When they were released from the clinic the next day, Martha was planning on taking the baby up to The Hill to her family’s house, so the women could care for Italya while she recovered from her surgery. Noah refused. And when it became clear that he was going to stand his ground (“over my dead body” were his exact words, as I recall) the entire family came down from The Hill to them. Fifteen people, crammed into Noah’s little apartment across from my house, for days on end. At any given time you could find at least seven women sitting on the bed watching telenovelas, passing the baby around like a plate of cookies as Martha tried to sleep.
But Noah wouldn’t budge. When the noise and the cooking smells and the stifling summer heat (you can’t have the baby in air-conditioning!) became too much for him, he’d hoist a cranky Italya over his shoulder and escape to my place. But not before the aunts and cousins and sisters bundled her up like an Eskimo for the seven-yard trek.
“No wonder she’s fussy,” I’d say, as we pulled off the sweaters and mittens and booties to give the poor child some air. I marveled at the way Noah was with his baby, calm and confident, always attentive. He had a knack. And when he’d bend over to kiss her chubby cheeks or smooth her little curls, I swear I could feel something melting inside. It wasn’t long before he became known in the neighborhood as that guy with the baby permanently attached to his chest. And it also wasn’t long before he became the only one who could comfort his fidgety child.
His wife was another matter. He’d begrudgingly replace every one of those layers of clothes on poor Italya before he’d head home, knowing there would be hell to pay should the baby let out even the tiniest of sneezes. I was glad he was learning to pick his battles, as I was sure there would be many more to come.
My own crash course in Mexican culture continued at Tippy Toes. One day, not long after we had opened, Martha arrived at the salon and plopped Italya into my arms as she headed toward the bathroom.
“What’s up with the baby?” A huge red spot had appeared smack in the middle of Italya’s forehead. What kind of terrible Mexican insect had bitten my poor girl?
“She has the hiccups!” Martha yelled from the back of the building.
“No, I mean what’s up with her skin?”
“She has the hiccups!” Martha repeated even louder.
I looked over at Noah, who just shrugged his shoulders. I put on my glasses and held the baby up to the light. On second glance the dot looked man-made, more like a little Indian bindi than a bug bite. I dipped my finger into a manicure bowl and rubbed gently at Italya’s forehead. Martha was suddenly at my side, first frowning at the inky smudge, then scowling at me.
A week later, when I tried to gently point out to Martha that it might be time to cut the baby’s nails, unearthing a pair of infant scissors I had bought months before, she grabbed Italya right out of my arms. It wasn’t until Analisa explained to me later, that you don’t cut a baby’s nails before they’re a year old or they’ll have bad eyesight, that I understood. Sort of.
And there were plenty more things I apparently didn’t know. One day I brought in some fresh orange slices from home and offered them around after lunch. Everyone looked at me as though I were serving up arsenic. “What?” I asked, looking from face to face. Teresa pointed at Daniela, who had been blowing her nose for days. I held out the plate toward her, and she backed away. “Vitamin C!” I insisted.
“No fruit. She is sick!” Martha explained. And there was a lot more I learned about fruit. Pineapples mean good luck. But never eat an avocado when you are mad or fighting, because if you do you’ll wind up with a terrible stomachache. And limes? I actually got a pretty useful tip from Analisa about them. In a pinch, just squeeze the juice under your armpits. It makes an excellent deodorant.
By now I felt that my Spanish language skills were improving, even though I had quit going to my second teacher because she insisted that I speak only Spanish in class. Why would I even be there if I knew how to speak Spanish? Besides, she was mean. I thought that I had picked up quite a bit just from being around the girls, but you wouldn’t know it by their reaction. “Baño no está limpio,” I complained one morning, repeating the exact words they’d taught me just the day before. The bathroom isn’t clean. The girls just looked at me blankly.
“Baño no está limpio,” I repeated, slower.
“No lo entiendo,” Teresa claimed, shrugging her shoulders and turning to the rest of the group for an explanation.
Frustrated, I marched over to Macaws and pulled Analisa back across the street with me.
“El baño no está limpio,” Analisa told them.
“Ah, no está limpio!” they all echoed, standing and heading for the buckets.
I fared a little better with the sign language they shared with me. “Okay” was said with repeated crooks of the index finger. Talking about being boiling mad? Shake both hands over your shoulders, which I had witnessed Analisa doing plenty of times, though I had never known what it meant. And say you want to tease someone who is trying too hard to impress. Just make the shape of an eye with your thumb and index finger and place it over your own eye. It’s sort of like saying, “Oh, look at you!” My favorite was when the girls wanted to let each other know that someone was a cheapskate—they’d simply whack one elbow with a palm of the other hand. For people who relied heavily on tips, this was a handy one, though that gesture was usually reserved for the snowbirds, who have a notorious reputation down here. I guess they aren’t used to living in a culture where everybody—gas station attendants, supermarket baggers, self-appointed traffic cops who, sometimes with disastrous results, take it upon themselves to help you back out of parking places—expect a little something for their trouble. Me, I’ve always been one to be generous with a tip. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the other end of that stick.
We had a fair amount of downtime in those early days, which gave us plenty of opportunity to get to know each other, or rather for me to get to know them. One quiet afternoon, after I’d been wondering if my girls were happy in their new jobs, I started a conversation about what they’d do if they could do anything at all. Martha wanted to be a nutritionist. Selena a nurse. Luz dreamed of being a tattoo artist, Daniela a teacher. Teresa joked that she just wanted a rich old man.
“So what’s keeping you?” I asked, ignoring Teresa’s crack. “You’re all smart, capable women.” This wasn’t like Kabul, where the women were risking their reputations, and sometimes their lives, for the privilege of working for a living. All these women, except for young Luz, had been working for years.
I thought I pretty much knew what the story was for Martha and Teresa. In their crowded household, there was clearly not enough to go around for seven educations. But when Teresa told me she had dropped out of school at age twelve, I was surprised.
“Our dad said all the girls in secondary school got pregnant,” Martha explained. “He made Teresa stop going.”
“Did she want to go to school?” I asked.
“Of course,” Martha said. “Always. But then there was no time, and no money. That’s just the way it is.”
As it was, Teresa was eighteen when she gave birth to the first of her three children. After twelve years with a cheating, abusive man, she finally packed them up and left. She did everything she could to support her kids, eventually following a lead for training as a massage therapist. Then she met Sergio.
“If you could change anything in your life, would you?” I asked, anxious to know what made her tick.
Teresa shook her head at Martha’s translation. “Not now. Now I am happy. It would be nice to have more money, but I know I can take care of myself. Sergio treats me good. My life is good.”
By the time Martha was growing up, their father had relaxed a little. She was the only one in the family to make it through the twelfth grade. After gra
duation, she worked as a receptionist in a dental office by day, and studied English by night. Mazatlán was teeming with tourists back then, and it wasn’t long before Teresa helped her get a better-paying job as a receptionist in the spa where she was working. There Martha was trained to do facials and massage. Then she got pregnant, by a guy who wanted nothing to do with her or the baby. Any dreams she had about continuing her education were gone. Now it was all about having enough money to take care of her child.
Daniela’s story wasn’t much different, pregnant at fifteen, such a young age that her father refused to believe it was possible. Why, she didn’t even have a boyfriend! Or so he insisted. They could use some serious birth control around here, I thought. But who was I to judge? These women all loved being mothers. And they would do anything for their kids.
“What made you want to work here, Luz? Why not a department store, or one of the big resorts?”
Luz pointed to her earlobes, which hung low down her neck, heavy with the huge silver gauges that were creating two holes practically big enough to swallow a couple of grapes. Of course, in most places around here, sweet Luz would be labeled as a rebel. The truth was, despite her badass look, Luz was painfully shy. A dropout by sixteen, she was living on The Hill with her mom and siblings in Martha’s mother’s house along with everyone else, spending most of her time drawing. It was Noah who saw something in her and encouraged me to take a chance on a novice. My first impression was less than stellar. But I trusted Noah, and after Luz complied with my request that she remove some of the lip and eyebrow bling, tuck the nose ring up into her nostril, and pull the straight black hair out of her eyes, we were good to go. I figured if I could train women who had been held captive in their homes for years by war and the Taliban, I could certainly train Luz. If only she’d learn to speak up.
Selena I knew little about, her being the only “outsider” in the place. I was aware that she had a young son, and it was clear she was not much more than a child herself. I learned that her mother had been a beautician and did not want Selena following in her footsteps. Interesting. After a short time in nursing school, courtesy of an aunt with some money, she had to drop out. The money had dried up. Her options were few. Apparently she had never married the father of her child, a guy with more psychological problems than she could have, or should have, tried to handle. Her home life, with her mother, was tumultuous. But her sister watched the boy while she worked, and that was just how life was. Right?