What do you do when you’re out of practice with your daily writing?
You write, whether you feel like it or not. .
My goal is to write every day during the month of May. So far so good, even if it’s not getting posted.
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When I think of summers in Mexico, the memories are all wrapped together in a tangle of senses. I remember the whir of the fan, the air licking gently at sweat-soaked skin. You don’t know hot until you’ve done 110 degrees in 80 or 90 percent humidity. Even the showers, short as they were, were never cooler than lukewarm. By the time you dried off you were already damp with sweat again.
The trick to sleeping in heat like that without any air conditioning is definitely the shower before you go to bed. You take a lukewarm shower, making sure you save any of the drips off the showerhead in the bucket for watering the plants, because Lord knows water is precious. You dry off just enough you don’t stick to the sheets, and leave damp skin above the sheets to tingle pleasantly when the rotating fan finally hit your corner of the room.
Of course, even that was a dilemma, the Sophie’s Choice of sleep. Anything beneath the sheets was covered by sweat, but anything I left above the sheets would be chewed on by mosquitoes. There’s something about my blood that mosquitoes and other bugs have always loved. It’s the same with my mom, and as the months go by, it appears I’ve also passed it on to my daughter.
Ah, well. A family that itches together stays together?
It always took me a long time to fall asleep the first few nights we were there, no matter how tired I was. Despite the fact that the rooms were so familiar, with none of the furniture rearranged between my yearly visits, everything felt different. The smell – I think I remember that the strongest. It’s been almost 11 year since I last set foot in Mexico, “thanks” to the drug war, but every now and again some strange combination of smells – almost too-ripe fruit, wet concrete, growing green things, diesel, hot tortillas and lime- and bam. I’m back there, lying on my back, room bathed golden by the street lamp.
I remember the night watchman, the way he bicycled slowly up and down the different streets, blowing his whistle in a soothing cadence that pierced the city silence.
It seemed counterproductive to me, even as a little kid. Why hire a night watchman if he was going to announce to the bad guys when he was approaching, giving them plenty of time to hide?
Still, he was a staple, one of the things you could count on. Tiò would eat small green pea-like chiles with stems for every meal, the tortillas were bought fresh in a brown bag- recien hechas, and nightwatchman would start making bicycle rounds around 9pm.
Sometimes I look in the mirror- at my pinkish white skin, my McDonald’s hips, my very Beckyness, and it seems so incongruous to me that these childhood memories are my own.
The first few nights the sound of the night watchman would wake me up. The slow, unhurried Too-weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet rise and fade of his whistle would jolt me from a sound sleep every time. I hated him, but only at first.
By the time it was time to return home there was something oddly relaxing about it. I think, now, that he was paid to bring the feeling of security rather than actually fight off crime. Whenever I returned home after a visit with my family the tidy, quiet streets of my Orange County home seemed empty without him.
Houses in Mexico are built completely different from the United States. In my memory every house looks the same from the outside – square, whitewashed walls, with bits of sea green coke bottle shards glued to the top, to discourage people from climbing over.
Once you were in the inside they varied wildly, but the outsides were always the same: Long, flat, stretches of boring white wall, riches and hints of any prosperity all tucked safely away. It made the peaks, angles, and giant windows of Southern California seem almost garish in comparison, a deliberate flaunting of wealth.
If the outside walls were all the same, there was one more thing that was also the same: the tile floors. Cool, dry, and pleasant beneath my bare feet, it felt so different from the 80s brown carpet of my drywalled California home. With the summer heat and being situated so close to potential hurricanes, you can’t beat a Mexican gulf house for sturdiness – everything is made of stone, concrete, or tile. Cool in the summer, freezing in the winter, the walls always felt immovable beneath my palm. The stairs were silent when I went running up them, and the second story floors were completely quiet. There were no creaking floors, no thumping foot beats, no matter how I ran around.
It was oddly disconcerting, and rather than encouraging me to be wilder, or louder, it felt almost wrong to make too much noise. I found myself creeping, sticking close to walls and running hands around corners as I tiptoed here and there.
It’s the floors I remember most of all – those brownish tile floors. They were never dirty, despite the fact that my Tià B had five boys. I always stayed at my Tiá B’s house. It’s not that I wasn’t welcome at my other Tiá’s house, but what was one more kid when added to that noise?
Tiá B was a beauty – is a beauty – a woman forgotten by time. It’s almost disconcerting – she looks the same in photos from her 20s as she did in her 40s, and her 40s aren’t virtually the same as her 60s. She’s perpetually slim, olive skin glowing, dark hair shining.
I remember the quick, practiced way she swept the floor, running the broom with brisk strokes, feet taking shortened steps, toes pointed slightly out. She cleaned the floors in some way or another every day, broom whisking along the walls and down the stairs, the scent of Fabuloso rising up as she mopped, humming.
It wasn’t even a chore to her, just a way of life. You sleep at night. You put on shoes to go outside. You sweep and/or mop on a daily basis.
Sometimes I look around my own wood floor at home, the way it creaks beneath my feet as I walk, the way dog hair and children and dust stack up along the walls in happy piles, and I am ashamed. I know that if my Tiá B lived there, those floors would gleam.
Then again, Tiá B wouldn’t have an 80 pound dog living in her house, a cat with a hairball problem roaming in and out, 3 horses and a bunch of chickens scratching up in the acreage, so I can’t really compare the two of us. It’s a different life.
No matter how I try, I don’t remember much about the days during my summers in Mexico. Frankly, I think it’s because they were just too hot. A few memories surface, when I start digging. I remember the thirst, the way I needed water constantly. I remember steady sweating and the way the icy cold glass bottles of Coke could be rubbed against my forehead. I’ve never been a fan of Coke here in the States, mostly because it doesn’t taste like the Mexican Coke of my childhood. When I was younger I used to think it was the memory of it I missed – the feel of grabbing one out of the fridge, the sound of my cousins, the smell of carne asada and orange trees and diesel and tortillas and men’s cologne all rising up like a musk around me.
Now that I’m older I realize it’s a real taste preference: Coke in Mexico is made with real sugar. Coke in the US is not.
Evenings are more firmly stamped in my memory, my brain gaining the ability to retain memories as the sun sets and the summer heat went from unlivable to something slightly more manageable. Mexican frugality and the late 80s/early 90s peso being what it was, air conditioning was a resource to be hoarded, carefully sealed off rooms of crisp cold that felt almost sinfully good.
My Tiá B taught English in the downstairs spare room, a classroom filled with actual desks and a chalkboard covering the near wall. Evenings would find it filled with quiet, well-dressed strangers, the scratch of chalk against the wall, repetition of verbs and phrases. In the corner of the room there was a small TV on a stand, a VHS tape I could never see with cartoon voices spluttering out in English, starting and stopping.
“Donald Duck is happy. But look – someone took it away. Now he is angry,” my Tiá would say slowly in English. “What is he? He is angry. What is he?”
“He ees an-gree,” chorused the voices.
Angry. Sad. Happy. Lonely. Running. Walking. Sleeping. Short, simple English words floating out, repeated in thickly accented voices. It seemed to me that they never got any better, but now that I’m older I realize it’s because I usually only listened in on the beginner class, since that was the class with the cartoon. The repetition of the same material was confusing to me. English was so easy. It was so much harder than trying to learn how to speak Spanish, with its strange collection of sounds, and the backwards way of ordering sentences, with nouns first. The Coca cold. The food delicious. The gringa sweaty. The family beautiful.
I smelled Mexico the other day – Grocery Outlet was selling some ripe mangoes, rain threatened on the distance, and suddenly I was there. Eight years old and feeling the spongy grass of the backyard beneath my feet as I pestered one of my ubiquitous older cousins. Listening to the hum of a language I almost understood. Surrounded by love and a place that felt almost-but-not-quite like home.
“Smell this,” I said, holding the mango beneath the noses of my four very white children, who all sniffed and shrugged. To them it was a fruit, nothing more. They’ve never been to Mexico, and there’s a small part of me that withers a little every time I think of that. To them it’s just a place, not anything real. They can point it out on a map, but they have no idea beyond that.
I think, sometimes, of throwing caution to the wind and going there anyways. I mean , there’s a drug war, but heck, there are school shootings here. Sometimes it just feels like six of one half dozen of another, you know? I’d like them to meet their cousins, to know their familia, to perk up when they hear the rare Spanish being spoken here in Oregon and eavesdrop with an odd wave of homesickness.
I’d like them to be able to walk through the store, and smell something, and have the memories of love come flooding back.
I miss my family. I’d settle for some gorditas from Dona Tota’s.
