Margarita Wednesdays

  Kids! The kids were the ones who needed the help, who needed someone to show them a way to take control over their futures, before their futures were stolen from their grasp. I knew I couldn’t change hundreds, or more likely thousands, of years of cultural norms, or pull everyone out of the cycle of violence and poverty, but I knew there was something I could do.

  I was lucky to have a mom who once told me I could be a princess. Maybe the girls around here needed someone to tell them they, too, could be a princess . . . or a hairdresser.

  BEFORE I KNEW IT, MY life had become so busy I barely knew if I was coming or going. The word of mouth on Tippy Toes had spread like freshly brewed gossip, thanks to those guinea pigs who had bravely taken one for the team. I’d run back and forth from the salon to Macaws, which I’d turned into my personal office, twenty times a day between appointments and paperwork and checking on my girls. And yes, despite my protestations, I had started doing hair.

  Here’s the deal. Once you decide to do hair, you commit to doing more than just a job. You become The Hairdresser, which comes with a certain level of expectation and responsibility that you just can’t walk away from, and I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to go there, once again. At first I took advantage of the water hookup Sergio and Bodie had insisted on to take care of the handful of friends I had previously been working on in my kitchen. That was fine. It was much more convenient and comfortable for all of us. Then the disasters started to come through the door—blondes with brunette streaks, baby-fine curls brittle with bleach, hair so black it was blue—victims either of communication problems or of local beauticians lacking the proper training. People were begging for help, and I was there to perform triage. I even considered, at one point, marketing myself as The Hair Doctor. For a while that’s all I did. And then, before I could stop it, my appointment book was drowning in ink. I just didn’t know how to say no.

  My days were starting way too early, gulping down a fast cup of coffee at Macaws as I watched the Tippy Toes girls parading down the street to work in their matching hot pink polos, a sight that never failed to make me smile. Noah and Martha would arrive with Derek and the baby, and I’d rush over for a morning cuddle before she’d be driven up to The Hill to her other grandma’s. We’d settle in to work, Noah cranking up the music and switching on the coffeepot, the girls trotting out the mops and buckets and brooms. Soon Denis would arrive with stacks of fresh, clean towels before settling down for a smoke in the Adirondack chair on the sidewalk outside, perfectly positioned to greet the world as it passed him by. It couldn’t help but remind me of my dad after his own retirement, going to work as a greeter at Walmart to keep himself occupied. But for Denis it was just a comfortable perch on a friendly street.

  All of Mazatlán seemed to gather at Tippy Toes. Those plate glass windows were a magnet for passersby. A friend inside getting a pedicure? Perfect excuse to pop in for some chitchat and a cup of coffee. And most people didn’t even need an excuse. The buzz of those early days cost me at least one good Trip Advisor review. As one of my rare disgruntled customers wrote, I went expecting a relaxing two hours . . . it was a constant barrage of well wishers and friends having lots of conversation. Sheesh. I guess we were just a little too Steel Magnolias for that one’s taste.

  For me, it was all good. It felt like home, and the days would go by in a heartbeat, with the setting sun reflecting off the windows across the street before I even had a chance to realize how busy I had been, or how hard I had worked.

  My time off became precious. A long lunch, an afternoon of shopping, curling up with a good book—those were now distant memories. Especially now, with new family added into the mix. You see, around here, a lot of the time it’s all about the children. Among my expat friends, I was the odd woman out on that score, as none of them had family around. At first it took some getting used to, I have to admit. Everything seemed to revolve around kids. There’s even a special holiday for them—Children’s Day—when every mother in town demands the day off to shower her offspring with love, attention, and of course, presents. Me, I thought that’s what birthdays were for. And then there’s Guadalupe Day, the holiest day on the calendar in Mexico. That day, everywhere you turn there’s a pint-sized Indian, as this is the occasion for parents to dress their kids up in traditional Mexican clothing. Even little babies wear wide-brimmed straw hats, and for the girls, long black braids woven with red and green ribbons clipped into their hair. Martha had already started a search to buy a lighter-colored pair, to match Italya’s dirty-blond locks. On Día de la Marina, they all dress up as sailors. On Mexican Army Day, as soldiers. There’s always some street party going on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to squeeze my way around one of those big bouncy trampolines smack in the middle of a blocked-off, music-filled, piñata-strung Carnaval Street.

  One Sunday Denis and I had to excuse ourselves early from our traditional brunch with the gang at Macaws. It was Derek’s birthday, and we had been invited, for the first time, to a party up on The Hill. I have to admit I was a little nervous. “You don’t want to go up there,” Martha had said to me every time I expressed a curiosity about seeing where my grandbaby was spending her days. Even Noah was told not to go up there alone, and never to go up at night, back when he first started seeing Martha. I knew it was dangerous. And I also really, really wanted to see those killer views of the ocean that had to be up there.

  The long way around is the preferred, or to put it more bluntly, safest way to get to Martha’s mother’s house. Since that means parking at the bottom and doing the rest by foot, Denis and I locked the doors of the Mini behind us and started up the wide path, arm in arm. Noah met us at the top of the first staircase.

  “Is it a long way up?” I asked, my heel slipping off the top of my four-and-a-half-inch wedgies as I stumbled on the rubbled cement. I knew it was a stupid choice of shoes, but I wanted to look my best for the occasion.

  “It’s not bad. But you just missed all the excitement. There was another raid.”

  Noah had told me this happens a lot on The Hill. Masked men with big guns storming through the rabbit warren of little houses in search of drugs, weapons, and money. Apparently it’s so common that the folks who live up there barely look up from their breakfasts.

  Gringos aren’t usually seen on The Hill. But by now everyone knew Noah, and knew I was his mom. And Denis? He just stuck close behind. Indeed, as we made our way through the maze of graffitied façades, the purples and greens and lemons and tangerines and aquas all crashing into each other in a crescendo of color, nobody blinked an eye. Not the woman leaning wearily on her elbows on the sill of a cutout window high above the street, a string of potato chip bags for sale behind her head, not the trio of kids banging on an old arcade game crammed against a cinder-block wall, not the two women parked in plastic chairs, the backs pushed up against their facing front doors, their knees so close they could almost touch. Only the dogs seemed on edge, barking wildly from behind locked front gates as we passed by.

  By now we had turned off the main path and were following Noah in a convoluted route that had us weaving smack through people’s front rooms. I kid you not. It was impossible to tell where one home ended and the next one began. You’d pop in and out of slivers of sunlight, one minute with a spectacular cliffside view of the ocean on your right, the next minute nodding politely to some guy watching TV from his sofa.

  “That’s where the lookout sits,” said Noah, pointing to a dirty velour couch perched on a roof.

  “What are they watching for?” I innocently asked.

  Noah rolled his eyes. “Federales, or military, of course.”

  This is where my granddaughter spends her days, I thought to myself, peering down a precipitous garbage-strewn drop that ended practically all the way down at the fancy shoreline homes.

  “Want to meet one of the neighbors?” Noah asked facetiously, as something in the dirt rolled over and moaned.

  “Is he sick?” I asked, w
atching the man wave his arms in the air, his baseball cap falling off to one side.

  “No, he’s just a drunk.”

  A rooster gingerly led his family around the slowly gyrating body, as if it were simply a part of the landscape.

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance!” Denis called out. I punched him in the shoulder.

  “We’re almost there,” Noah assured me. “See, there’s Daniela’s mother’s house, right up there.” I followed his gaze up to a clothesline hung with trousers blowing gently in the breeze, to underneath, where a gnarly-looking mutt was patrolling from the roof. “Martha’s mom lives right next door.”

  I could hear music and laughter floating through the open door. From the look of what was going on inside, the kids must have already consumed liters of Coke and gobs of candy. They were bouncing around like rubber balls, the girls swiveling their little hips in perfect time to the beat, the boys waving invisible lassos above their heads. Even the ones who were just learning to walk had all the moves. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing myself.

  “Where are all the guys?” I asked, after greeting everyone.

  “Guys?” Martha handed the baby over to Noah. “My father is here, in his room. The men, they don’t come to these things.” Denis shrugged and helped himself to a plate of ceviche. Teresa and Daniela shot me a look.

  “What?” I asked, looking around the room.

  “In Mexico, we never let the man get his own food at home or at parties,” Martha explained.

  “Seriously?”

  “It shows they respect us, they know we know what is best.”

  I had to think about that one for a minute. Then I silently vowed to try it out on Denis sometime. I’d serve him my personal favorite—red wine and Pop-Tarts.

  “And it shows other people that you love him.” Martha bent down to listen to a little boy who was tugging at her shirt. He pointed at Denis as he whispered in her ear. “He wants to know if Denis is a real Chinese person.”

  Everything seemed to stop for a moment as Denis’s laughter ricocheted off the walls of the little house. Then Teresa’s son Alex arrived with his boyfriend. Teresa hugged her boy, pushing the clump of fuchsia bangs off his face as they separated. Alex had recently become the latest addition to the Tippy Toes family, and I was beginning to adore him. Being a gay man in Mexico was a tough row to hoe, and Alex had faced his own share of the difficulties that come with the territory. I remember first seeing him when Sergio was working on my house, a sweet boy with hair hanging down over his eyes, who was way too slight to be lifting the four-hundred-pound chimney I was having hauled to my roof. I realize now that what Sergio had been trying to do was man him up. Later I heard more about his situation through Noah. Sergio, unable to reconcile his stepson’s sexual preference with his own machismo mind-set, was becoming increasingly tough on the kid. Teresa loved her son, but she just didn’t want him to be gay. Her concern was his future. Being an “obvio”—an outwardly obvious gay person—would put a lot of jobs out of his reach. A gay police officer in Mazatlán? Probably wouldn’t fly. A construction worker? Not so much. Maybe it might work in Guadalajara or Mexico City, but not around here. Sergio and Teresa agreed on two things: Alex’s “gayness” was a phase that needed to end, and they were the ones who had to make that happen.

  They began withholding privileges, and even material goods. One Christmas he was the only one in the family to receive no gifts. He had refused to cut his hair. No haircut? No Christmas. He sat silently as everyone else at the party opened their gifts, then retreated to his room, cranked up the music, and tried to dance the pain away. There was a soft knock at his door. When he opened it, there stood his grandmother holding out a cardboard box. “It was the ugliest shirt in the world,” he later told Noah. “But it was the most beautiful gift I’ve ever received.”

  But Alex still resisted his parents’ pressure. “This is our house, these are our rules,” they insisted. He rebelled by dropping out of school, and began to hang out on the streets. And the battle continued.

  In a society where gender roles are so highly defined—men are expected to appear dominant and independent, and women are supposed to seem submissive and dependent—any man who doesn’t obviously “act like a man” is considered to have committed a great offense. Of course, this whole notion cracked me up, as I was well aware that most of it was for show. I knew that even up here, on The Hill, it was the women who were the ones in control. But Mexican women know how to be strong, “like a man,” without making their men feel weak. It’s truly an art, and I was beginning to think that maybe I should try tearing a page from their book.

  But for a man in a machismo culture who dares to let his feminine side show, like Alex, there’s very little tolerance. Alex had been taunted, and worse. Some gay men are physically attacked by members of their own family, some are committed to psychiatric clinics, and some are downright rejected. People will do anything and everything to “get the gay out” of you.

  A lot of people down here seem to have a complicated relationship with the notion of being gay. They love their drag queens, but if it’s someone in your family, you just don’t talk about it. You figure they’ll simply grow out of it. In fact, there is a weird code word that’s used—“forty-one.” At first I thought it meant you had until turning forty-one years old to be considered actually gay. But I later found out that it, in fact, goes back to a society scandal that took place in 1901, when the police raided a male-only dance where, out of the forty-one people in attendance, nineteen were dressed as women. But nobody seems to be aware of the origin of the “forty-one phobia,” so some believe that men are at their greatest risk of becoming sexually attracted to men when they reach that age. It’s a big joke among men and boys around here, and it’s apparently a number to be feared and avoided at all costs. Kids will yell out, “Not it!” if the number forty-one falls upon them in a schoolyard count. There is no forty-first division of the Mexican Army.

  Once, when I had complained to Analisa that it hadn’t rained in a long time, she replied, “Too many gays.”

  I shot her a look. “What?” she asked defensively. “That’s what they say down here.”

  Not quite believing her, I tried it out on the car-wash guy. “Why hasn’t it rained in so long?” I asked in an innocent voice.

  “Too many gays,” he answered without a blink. As did the cop who patrolled the area around Tippy Toes, as did the guy repainting my house, as did the man repairing my shoes on the sidewalk at the Plazuela República. Go figure.

  At twenty years old, Alex was a survivor. He had sought refuge in his grandmother’s house, and Noah had been helping him out, paying Alex to watch Italya for a few hours a day while he and Martha were at the salon. I saw firsthand how sweet he was with the baby, so kind and gentle. And I could relate all too well to his pain. Yes, it was Sergio and Teresa’s house, and it was Sergio and Teresa’s rules, but what Sergio and Teresa just didn’t get was how their relentless demands about Alex’s hair, about his clothing, the touch of mascara he sometimes wore, were tearing his soul apart. They may have wanted what they thought was best for him, but to him it felt like a complete rejection of his very identity, a refusal to love him for who he was. My own mom didn’t like me fat. She thought being skinny would be best for me. But that just wasn’t who I was. And Lord, did that hurt.

  There was another reason compelling me to open the door of Tippy Toes to Alex. During my hairdressing days in Michigan, I became acquainted with a sweet nineteen-year-old boy who used to frequently come into the salon for makeup tips and eyebrow waxings. I suspected that his appointments were often just an excuse to talk. In conservative Holland, I was a rare friendly shoulder to lean on. One day, he was my last appointment on the books, and he was late. After half an hour of waiting, I left to go home. Apparently he showed up shortly after, but refused to let anyone else do the job. He only wanted me. That night, he committed suicide.

  I knew Alex well enough to k
now he, in all probability, wasn’t a candidate for suicide, but the memory of the boy from Michigan was one that had haunted me for fifteen years. And the two of them did remind me a bit of each other, with their love of makeup and their flamboyant clothes. And I did worry that Alex might be taken advantage of by the wrong people. So into Tippy Toes he came. He was family, and that’s where he belonged.

  I LEFT DENIS AT THE food table, where he was deliberating over some puffy round things with hot sauce on them, and picked my way through the dancing kids and through the open door into Martha’s mom’s room, where Luz was sitting on the bed, tuning out the ruckus under a large set of earphones.

  “Whatcha drawing?” I asked, gesturing to the pad on her lap. Luz smiled shyly, turned the page around, and held it up for me to see. A swarm of those wide-eyed, mop-headed Japanese comic-book characters stared back at me. “That’s really cool! Muy bueno!” Luz’s smile grew a little bit broader. “You really could be an artist.”

  At Tippy Toes, Luz was finally starting to shine. At first things were iffy, she seemed so afraid, refusing to look the customers in the eyes. I’d ask those I knew to talk to her, engage her, in English or Spanish or whatever, anything to help her connect. But it wasn’t working. Luz just couldn’t seem to get the feel for the job. My head was telling me I had to let her go—my business was too new to jeopardize relationships with the customers. But my heart kept telling me to give her a chance. So I called in the cavalry, and they went into overdrive. Martha would park herself next to Luz, counseling her step by step as she did a pedicure, while Noah would distract the customer with a little chitchat. As Luz tended to get a little heavy-handed with the polish, Teresa would sweep in the minute it was time to open the bottle, and take over the job. Then Selena would push Teresa out of the chair, and paint on a design. They were like runners in a relay, passing the baton. Soon customers were requesting Luz, who by now would grab their feet with the confidence of an old pro. And when I, more than once, caught sight of Luz smiling at something overheard in English, it became clear to me just how quickly, and thoroughly, she was catching on.