The road’s endlessness was unnerving, especially the time when my mother thought we might run out of gas. Luckily, she had a canteen full of water, so if we broke down, we would not die of thirst. Still, I dreaded being stuck on the side of the road. No cars went by. We could be stranded for hours and hours, even days, and we had no food. A truck might come along and give us a lift to the nearest town, but a truck in Texas was bound to have some kind of beer-glugging gunslinger at the wheel. We did not run out of gas. A black rectangle appeared on the horizon. It was not a mirage; it was a filling station. We stopped, filled the tank, and bought some cold drinks, a loaf of bread, and jars of peanut butter and jelly for a picnic.
We had driven halfway through Texas when our mother suddenly pulled off the road. The Coche de Mama was boiling over. She raised the hood to let the engine cool before opening the radiator cap to pour water in it. Then she announced, “I’m hungry, aren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “This looks like a perfect place for a picnic.” I did not see anything perfect about it. Everything in Texas was dust-colored, and there were no shade trees, just dry scrub. Our mother led us down a narrow path that she was convinced would lead to a river. To me it looked like the kind of path that might lead to an open area littered with toilet paper. She forged ahead carrying a bag of food. Blair and I followed, walking slowly to demonstrate our reluctance. My feet kicked up clouds of dust that settled between my toes because I was wearing sandals.
About fifteen feet ahead of us our mother stopped. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There is a baby rattlesnake right in the path!” Her voice sounded more intrigued than alarmed. A second later we watched her step over the snake. Blair and I stayed where we were scanning the bushes to see if there were any more snakes. “It’s just a baby rattlesnake. It’s quite sweet, all curled up. Come see.” We took a few steps toward our mother. Baby or not, I knew the snake could kill us. My mother’s attitude annoyed me. She was fearless, so I had to be afraid for her. Finally, the snake slithered into the bushes and Blair and I caught up with our mother. We sat in the scratchy grass while our mother spread peanut butter and jelly on Tip Top bread—all that had been available at the filling station’s convenience store. “Disgusting!” she said. “Americans do not know how to make bread.” I didn’t tell her that soft white sliced bread was my favorite.
After sundown, our mother checked into a seedy-looking motel, and we had skinny gray hamburgers in a nearby diner. That night, the night after the snake picnic, I couldn’t sleep. People in the motel parking lot kept getting into and out of cars. There were loud voices and slamming doors. I was afraid someone might come near and see us lying in the car under a sheet. Even with the Coche de Mama’s windows open, it was hot. I had to keep turning my pillow around to find a place that wasn’t wet from perspiration. Another problem was that Blair and I argued over where the middle of the mattress was; Blair always trespassed on my side. Now that she was a teenager, she thought she had special rights.
The following morning our mother checked out of the motel room early and started driving while Blair and I were still half asleep in the back of the car. After about an hour we woke up and the Coche de Mama was moving through the middle of a town. “Keep your eyes peeled for a good breakfast place,” our mother said. I scanned the right side of the street and Blair scanned the left. A few minutes later we saw smoke billowing out of the Coche de Mama’s hood. It smelled acrid. Our mother stopped the car and told us to get out. I could tell she was trying to keep her voice calm, but she sounded angry. We did not want to get out because we were still in our pajamas and there were people on the sidewalk. My pajamas were so old that you could see my body through the thin cloth. When our mother warned us that the car might explode, we climbed out and stood on the hot sidewalk in our bare feet. People gathered around but they didn’t pay attention to Blair and me. Their eyes were focused on the burning engine. Our mother acted as if this were just another adventure.
Someone came and put some liquid on the fire and the smoke stopped. By the time a fire engine arrived the fire was out. Our mother was given the name of a mechanic who could put in a new engine or fix the old one. Blair and I got dressed in the back of the car, and a tow truck dragged the Coche de Mama to a garage. While the mechanic inspected the car’s engine, Blair and I sat on a pile of tires and played double solitaire. It was boiling hot. When water splashed on the tar, the puddle evaporated in five seconds. We had breakfast in that town and lunch, too. To kill time while waiting for the Coche de Mama to be repaired, we went to the five and ten cent store and bought a carrot peeler and a can opener for my mother and art supplies for Blair and me. After that, our mother dropped us at a movie house where we saw The Black Rose, with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles. When the engine was fixed, our mother had barely enough money to pay for it. We would have to be extra careful about money until we got to Mexico City, she said.
Our mother had planned to cross the border at Laredo, but at the last minute she headed to Brownsville instead. Because of the fire we arrived at the border after dark and the border control office was closed. When she saw the darkened glass-enclosed customs office on the American side of the bridge over the Rio Grande, she said, “I’m going through.” At the very top of the bridge she stopped. Blair and I got out of the car and put one foot in the United States and the other in Mexico. It was like being two people at once. As we passed the shuttered customs office on the Mexican side of the bridge and drove down into Mexico, I looked back to see if any police cars were following us. Policemen scared me. They always look at you as if you have done something wrong. Maybe our father thought we had been kidnapped and had told the border police not to let us into Mexico. Our mother was quiet. When I asked her questions, she just answered yes, no, or mmm. Her eyes never left the road. I wanted to chat with her since we were now outlaws. If something bad happened to us in Mexico, no one would ever know. Our father would never find us. We might never see our pond again. Our mother must have had misgivings, too, because after about forty-five minutes she made a U-turn and headed back to the Rio Grande.
We crossed the bridge to the American side of the border and spent the night in a cheap hotel. Because we were in a town, Blair and I were allowed to sleep on cots in our mother’s room instead of in the back of the Coche de Mama. The room was dirty, the kind of dirt you cannot see, but you know it is ground into the bedspread and carpet so that you wish you had slippers to wear to get to the bathroom.
The next morning, we had pancakes. “Our last American breakfast,” our mother observed. At the border control office, I was afraid that they would somehow know that we had sped out of our country the night before. But the men in uniforms on both sides of the bridge treated us as ordinary sightseers on our way to Mexico. They stamped our tourist cards and waved us on. “We’ll see you in six months,” said a young officer. Tourist cards were good for only half a year. “Yes, until then,” my mother said.
21 Mexico
On the Mexican side of the Rio Grande everything changed. The houses were low and painted in pastel colors. Windows were dark openings. Old men sat in doorways. Women carried heavy bundles. Younger men stood around leaning against the wall outside of a bar—a cantina, my mother called it. Women were not welcome in there. The dogs in Mexico were skinny and wore no collars because they didn’t belong to anyone. The side streets were unpaved, and the main street was full of holes. It was lined with food vendors, women with dark cotton shawls over their heads kept fires going in low, square tin stoves. Small children squatted near their mothers. Their clothes were worn and skimpy. One small boy was dressed in only a dirty undershirt. When my mother stopped the car near one of the food vendors, a group of children about my age and younger gathered at the window crying “Chicles! Chicles!” They held up boxes containing Chiclets. To my astonishment, I heard my mother talking to them in Spanish. She had learned it during her two years in Mexico. Even though she thought gum chewing was vulgar, to be nice, she bou
ght four Chiclets, two in little red boxes, two in yellow. The boy who sold them to us turned away as soon as she gave him his money.
What our mother really wanted was Mexican food. She found a woman selling tamales. I was wary—the food might be full of germs. My mother said that the charcoal fire burned all the germs away. Some tamales were sweet, she said, and some were hot. I asked for a sweet one. You can tell which are the sweet tamales because the corn husks in which they are wrapped have a pink stain on them. Hot tamales usually have a spot of reddish brown. She showed us how to partly unwrap our tamales and to use the corn husk to hold the warm grainy patty inside. The tamale was my first taste of Mexican food. To my relief, it was like cream of wheat, but more succulent.
For the next two days we drove south through mountains. When I wanted to stop and find a bush behind which to pee, my mother told me that in this part of Mexico it was dangerous to stop just anywhere. Bandits wielding machetes could descend from the hills. They would be happy to kill us in order to steal the Coche de Mama. I looked up and pictured bands of men brandishing knives racing down the steep slope.
Much to my annoyance, my mother carried on about the beauty of the mountains and valleys, the jacaranda trees with lavender blossoms and no leaves, the majestic ahuehuetes (also called Montezuma bald cypress), the cacti, and especially the Indians. In a narrow valley on the right side of the road she spotted men following mules pulling a plow. The field-workers—she called them campesinos—wore simple white pants and shirts made out of a heavy cotton called manta. “These people have been doing the same work the same way for centuries,” she observed. “It is so much more beautiful than the way farmers work in the United States with their ugly machines. Here people and the earth follow the same rhythm.” Our mother pointed out that the field-workers’ postures were exactly like the postures of Indians tilling the soil in Diego Rivera’s murals. She had met Rivera at a party and found him amusing. His wife, Frida Kahlo, she saw as a little overblown. “I will take you to see Rivera’s murals in the Cortez Palace in Cuernavaca. Cuernavaca is a beautiful town an hour south of Mexico City. That’s where I hope to find a house.”
My mother extolled all things handmade. She despised machines. She admired the mud brick houses with tin roofs held down by rocks. Some of them had metal Pepsi-Cola signs stuck on their front walls, but that didn’t mean that you could buy Pepsi there. She loved Mexican open-air markets where the women selling food sit on the ground. To her a market was a visual splendor. In one of the cities that we drove through, probably Morelia, she took Blair and me to a market and bought odd-looking fruits as well as regular-looking bananas. There were also some miniature bananas that she insisted we taste. They had a stronger perfume than standard American bananas. After that they were my fruit of choice. A banana peel is a good thing—no germs can get at the part you eat. In the craft section of the market she bought us woolen ribbons in bright colors. “Now that you are in Mexico you can braid these into your hair.”
Just as we were making our way back to the car, an old man selling puppets approached us. At first my mother shook her head and said, “No, gracias.” The man gently jiggled a wooden structure from which about fifteen puppets dangled. Their heads were made of papier-mâché and each one had differently painted features. Even though my mother kept saying no, the man demonstrated how he could make a puppet dance. “Cantinflas!” he said. My mother explained that the puppet looked like a cartoon of Mexico’s famous comic movie actor. I wanted a puppet, but I didn’t ask. Blair was braver: “Let’s get two and we can make up plays with them.” Our mother relented. I chose a girl puppet wearing a China Poblana costume, and Blair chose a male puppet with a little straw hat and a brown poncho folded over one shoulder. For the rest of the afternoon, sitting on the mattress in the back of the Coche de Mama, Blair and I invented dialogues for our puppets. The strings of my puppet kept getting tangled. I tried not to cry. Failure made me furious. After saying, “Fix it yourself” for a long while, Blair helped me untangle the mess.
As we entered the Valley of Mexico, the fields became fewer and the houses closer and closer together. The outskirts of Mexico City, like the outskirts of New York City, looked forlorn. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in such a place. What if both my parents died and I landed on the edge of a city where I didn’t know anyone—how would I survive? After a while the houses became like one big house. Their front walls were all attached to one another. The way you could tell the houses apart was when they switched from blue, to ochre, or to a dark rusty pink. As the sun went down, the walls lost their brightness. My mother turned right onto a tree-lined avenue that took us to a big plaza with a bandstand in the middle. “This part of Mexico City is called Coyoacán,” she said. “And this is Coyoacán’s central plaza. See, the church over there? It’s one of the oldest in Mexico.”
Our mother told us that we were going to Pepita’s house. “It’s just a couple of blocks from here.” Pepita was Edmundo’s mother, she said. Actually, she was his aunt. Edmundo was an orphan, and Pepita had looked after him, but our mother did not tell us this until later. We turned down a side street, and dust billowed up all around the Coche de Mama. I watched dust particles turning somersaults in the halo of light around a streetlamp.
22 Coyoacán
The Coche de Mama stopped in front of a tall, white wall with a green metal gate. My mother got out and pulled on a loop of wire that came through a hole in the wall to the right of the gate. A bell rang somewhere inside. After what seemed a very long wait, an old woman not even as tall as me and dressed all in black opened the gate. My mother gave her a hug and told us to get out of the car and to come and meet Pepita. “What you say is ‘Mucho gusto!’ ” my mother advised. Pepita patted Blair and me on the shoulder and said something in Spanish. “She says you are welcome to her house,” my mother said.
Pepita’s house was just one room leading to another with no hallway. Each room had a door leading out to a paved patio. The rooms had high ceilings and almost no windows. The room farthest from the entrance was the kitchen, and here we sat at a heavy wooden table while Pepita served us corn soup and hot tortillas with salt and butter. “Mexicans don’t usually use butter,” my mother said. “Pepita is giving you butter because she knows that American girls like it. Usually you just put a little salt on a tortilla and roll it up.”
After supper we followed Pepita and our mother back through the string of rooms to a room that was to be Blair’s and my bedroom. It was stark with just two beds, a huge dark wooden armoire for a closet, and a tall bureau whose top was covered with a lace doily. Hanging over one bed was a crucifix, over the other a small print of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Our mother sat with us while we changed into pajamas. Then she leaned over our beds and kissed us good night. She told us that Pepita was going to take care of us for a little while. Blair and I begged her not to go. Pepita would be lots of fun, our mother said, and she was a good cook. She could make wonderful Mexican desserts. And Pepita could teach us Spanish. I hated it when my mother sounded fake jolly. When she was like that I could never get her to change her mind. We knew our mother was going off to see Edmundo, and she wanted to be with Edmundo alone. She would be back soon, in just a few days, she promised. “Buenas noches,” she said as she went out the door. I heard the Coche de Mama’s engine starting up and I pictured my mother at the wheel, driving through the city to see her lover. I was sad: she wanted to be with him, not us. She loved him more. Well, she was in love. Still, I felt dumped.
Our bedroom had no bedside tables, so there were no bedside lamps to read by. Either Blair or I had to get out of bed to turn off the light—a single bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling. The light switch was by the door and closest to my bed, so Blair said it was my job to turn off the light. I hated scrambling back to bed in the dark. “Tomorrow night it’s your turn,” I said. I had Buttoneyes, my musical brown bear next to me. He was the only one of my fuzzy animals that I had been allowed
to keep when we left New York for boarding school two years earlier. I wound his music box up over and over until I felt sleepy. When you stop winding, the music gets slower and slower as if the bear were falling asleep, too.
Early the following morning I woke up to a rooster’s crow. At first, I didn’t know where I was, but then I saw Buttoneyes on the floor with his brass music box winder sticking out of his back. And there on a chair were the clothes I took off before I put on my pajamas. Yes, I was at Pepita’s house. She was the brown-skinned old lady who didn’t speak English and who gave us soup. I looked at the bedroom’s high, white ceiling and remembered the lights of the Coche de Mama, zigzagging across our walls, widening into a triangle, then narrowing to a thin straight beam that dashed across the ceiling and was gone.
Blair was lying on her back reading. She didn’t notice that I was awake, so I just closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing. “I know you’re awake,” Blair said. “I can tell from your breathing. Come on, let’s get up and have breakfast.” Neither of us knew where Pepita’s bedroom was, so we retraced our steps from the night before and found our way back to the kitchen. Here we discovered steps that led down to a yard. Beneath a gigantic black walnut tree there were about ten chickens plus a rooster scratching in the dry earth. I gathered a bunch of fallen walnuts, but I could not figure out how to get the nut out of its prickly casing.
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