All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  I’m reluctant, but I try it and mention the choices I made, the red flags I ignored, such as the rattling snake and the fact that I’d brushed aside my ex-husband’s ambivalence because I was determined to get married and have children. I tell the story that way, and surprisingly, it is a relief. Blame does not fall down upon my head.

  I see I made mistakes, to be sure. “The great thing about mistakes is that if you recognize them, you don’t have to repeat them,” Martha says.

  This is a liberating, reassuring thought: instead of being the unwitting victim in my marriage, apt to be victimized in any subsequent relationships, I simply don’t have to marry that guy again. It’s in my power to recognize my mistakes. Nor do I have to be afraid of a new relationship, constantly choosing inappropriate men to date so I’ll have an excuse to avoid what has become my greatest fear: being vulnerable, giving my heart, and being hurt. Have I been dating viable partners, Martha asks, or finding yet another character in a story who would prove it was ridiculous for me to be in a relationship? It seems that I am going to have to fundamentally change my stories about men—even if they won’t be so funny to tell my friends—if I want a different, happier ending.

  I’m surprised at how happy I feel after retelling my story, a huge weight lifted from me. I’m no longer the victim of a bad marriage, destined to be hurt all over again with any man I am foolish enough to give my trust and heart to. I think of all the other victim-type stories I tell myself: it’s impossible to buy a house as a single freelance writer, my generation of independent and feminist women is out of sync with men and so will inevitably end up single or unfulfilled, I can’t lose weight because my parents put me on a diet at an early age, men my age are only interested in younger, thinner women, I can’t write another book because it won’t sell as well as my last one, I’m middle-aged and stuck, blah, blah, blah. I have to turn all that thinking around if I’m going to be happy here in midlife. All those stories need different endings—which is possible, because it’s my life and I do have the privilege of being able to write the story.

  I think about the story I can’t tell out loud to the group, about Samoa. From the start, I blamed myself—I was foolish and drunk. Subsequently, I’ve been afraid to travel alone, though I’ve managed it a few times, yet always fearful that I will uncontrollably land in a similar situation, unable to trust myself. The damage seems permanent and even embedded in my body: whatever tendon or ligament pulled in my hip has never recovered, despite all manner of acupuncture, physical therapy, doctor’s visits, and yoga. The unease feels permanent, too. But though I can account for my role in what happened—I did get drunk, I did unwisely go walking on the beach with a man I didn’t know—I don’t have to blame myself for what happened next. Blame seems to solidify the sense of permanent damage and powerlessness. I can, however, avoid drinking in a strange situation, and sit with my feelings instead of dulling them with alcohol. (It strikes me, in fact, that I could avoid a lot of uncomfortable situations in my life if I cut way down on drinking alcohol, which turns out to be true.) Next time, instead of getting trashed with some Samoan drag queens, I can rely on my good judgment and go back to my hut and read a book.

  If I don’t let myself be a victim in my stories but understand my role as the protagonist of my own life, I can get my power back and trust myself that I can, through my actions or attitude, make things turn out all right.

  For the next several months, my colleagues from that seminar are on a tear, getting big book deals and important magazine assignments, falling in love and having babies. I did not expect to find magic in a woman in a corporate suit with a flip chart, but I’m happy she’s waved her wand over us. It seems easier for my colleagues to make big changes, as it was for my fellow Outward Bounders, but maybe my progress is more internal. In any case, it’s slower and more subtle, but as I write down some weekly goals and stick to them, I begin to feel something shift, something lurching ahead.

  NOT LONG AFTER, a former diplomat contacts me via an Ivy League Internet site I forgot I signed up with to ask me out. We meet for drinks at one of my favorite restaurants, which turns into dinner, with a beautiful bottle of Pinot Noir and a wide-ranging conversation. This, I think, is exactly the kind of man I’d like to be with. He is tall, thoughtful, well versed in an astounding variety of international issues, and wears shiny shoes with bright blue laces.

  At the end of the evening, he drops me off at my place, and I invite him in for a nightcap, since he is a gentleman and we’re having such a good conversation. “Let’s go to Buenos Aires,” he says, finishing his last drink. “B.A. is such a sexy city. I’ve got time off in two weeks.”

  Ordinarily, I am the first person to sign up when an attractive, intelligent, Oxford-educated man mentions going to sexy Buenos Aires next week. After I give him a kiss on the cheek good night and wave him off in a cab, I get as far as pulling out my tango shoes and checking flights. Then I realize that as wonderful a man as he seems, one of those high-SAT guys I should’ve snagged in college, his wife left him recently, and he is heartbroken and looking for a quick fix to make it better. Here in middle age, after all that meditation, goal setting, and reflection on accountability, I understand that healing takes time, he is in for a bumpy ride, and it isn’t going to be with me on the way to Argentina.

  There would be no satisfying ending to that story, not right now, not for me, and, much as I hate to squelch a good adventure involving travel and romance, there’s some compensation in knowing I’m taking care of myself. When he calls, I tell him how delighted I was to meet him and to have dinner with him, and I hope we can do it again sometime. And then we’ll see how the story goes.

  In the middle of winter, an editor calls asking me to do a story about women in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, expatriates who have reinvented themselves in that town, pursuing second acts in their careers after forty.

  I haven’t been back to San Miguel de Allende, a well-preserved colonial town in the middle of the country—if you were to twirl Mexico on your finger, the tip would be touching San Miguel—since I lived there for a summer when I was ten. In all the years and trips since, I’ve never considered returning, even though I’ve visited several other places in Mexico. I’ve been afraid the town would be as changed as my childhood home in Colorado, surrounded by housing developments that obscure the mountains, and teeming with traffic. I’ve heard the place is full of gringos—bohemians, boomer artists, energy healers, Texas real estate developers, and retirees who realize that all of San Miguel, with its relatively inexpensive maids and medical services, amounts to assisted living, with better food.

  I haven’t wanted to mar the memory of the town that so thoroughly enchanted me thirty-five years ago. That summer stands out in Technicolor among the black-and-white snapshots of my childhood. There’s my oldest sister, Cindy, her toothy smile bright as the armful of sunflowers she bought for only a few pesos at the market. That’s Jan, with her long blond hair, trailed around the central plaza by an amorous muchacho in a yellow VW bug. There are Amy and me, skipping over cobblestones in our new leather huaraches, on the way to the blue-doored bakery in the morning to buy pastries in all different shapes that all tasted the same. Here we are in Spanish class with our tiny teacher, whose black braids reached to her knees and doubled back again, pinned behind her ears. Dad’s patting a donkey in that shot. And there’s Mom, sunning her legs in the open courtyard where we lived, her face shaded by the flowering plants that spilled over the wooden balcony.

  Yet San Miguel de Allende still tugs at my subconscious. I’ve always been curious about the town, reading about it from afar, hearing reports from friends who have wandered through. I am curious enough to agree to the assignment; in any case, it’s my job.

  I ARRIVE VERY late in León and take a shuttle van, an hour and a half, to San Miguel de Allende. The high desert is empty of all but scraggly brush, the distant hills barely visible in the night, stars sprinkling the sky like salt. I sink back in
to my brain and try to come up with enough Spanish to make polite conversation with the driver, the basics about where he lives and how many kids he has. Younger than me, with five children, he is already a grandfather a few times over.

  Because I’m tired and don’t want to try to explain about being single and childless to a man from a culture where that doesn’t make sense, I tell the driver a story when he asks, that I have a son, Antonio, who is studying Spanish for a summer at the University of Guanajuato before he goes to college. I’m in Mexico to visit him and spend a few days in San Miguel with some old friends, I say. My husband—who, gracias a Dios, is still as handsome as the day we married, at least I think so—had to stay at home because he is a transplant specialist and has to be on call in case someone dies in an accident and he has to rush to harvest the organs. In my Spanish it comes out sounding more like “he specializes in people’s organ meats and has to be ready to run and cut out the fresh heart and brains.”

  “Ah.” The driver nods gravely, ready to switch topics.

  As we pass vast expanses of brush, limbs reaching to the desert moon, I ask the driver what I fear most about San Miguel de Allende, that under the stress of time and development, with the influx of artists and Texans, it has been ruined. I want to be prepared. He tells me that there are indeed more and more gringos and more development, and that many Mexicans who grew up there are taking the crazy money they made from selling their little houses in town and moving somewhere bigger, but not necessarily better, farther out.

  It’s good and bad, he says.

  There’s money and there’s work, but what’s the point if you can’t live where you grew up, where it’s the most beautiful, lo más bonito. He sighs. “You get a little older, and everything always changes,” he says.

  “Así es la vida,” I say. I’m considering turning back around, but it’s one in the morning and we’re nearly there.

  “Así es.”

  A little later, coming into view of the reservoir outside of town, the driver asks if I’ve been to San Miguel de Allende before, and I say I lived here for a while, as a child. I can tell that gives me a little credibility; I haven’t just read about the place in Sunset magazine and decided to come down to build a big dream house. “Fue muy mágico,” I tell him.

  It had indeed been magical. In 1971, Mom got the idea to take us four daughters to Mexico for the summer. This was before her Outward Bound trip, but she was already on her adventure streak. She wanted us to see something of the world outside Littleton, a suburb where most dads worked for aerospace companies and almost everyone voted Republican.

  But Mom could venture only so far outside Littleton. Since we weren’t going to move out of the suburbs—Dad, a pediatrician, had an established practice in town, and they both enjoyed the sprawling lawn and proximity to the mountains—she brought other cultures into our home. Or, as we kids saw it, she brought home strays. Every few months, new people would take up residence in the guest room: Navajo children, a Cuban family, Swiss exchange students, visiting Greeks. During the Vietnam War, she opened the door to several antiwar students who were participating in a program called “ATSIV,” which is “VISTA” spelled backward, in which instead of going into poor neighborhoods to work, postcollege kids went into wealthier homes to “raise the consciousness” of the suburbs and to have a nice free place to stay and meals to eat between demonstrations. June, my favorite of these ATSIV students, splashed around naked in a fountain in downtown Denver just to see what would happen (she got arrested, then eventually went on to drive a cab, join a cult, adopt a guru-bestowed name, and settle in a communal house in northern California with both her boyfriend and her ex-husband, practicing visualization and taking esoteric workshops in self-improvement).

  My father wasn’t exactly thrilled with this parade of visitors, though he’d go along with the invasions cheerfully enough as long as he could occasionally shut the door to his den, light a pipe, and read in peace. Dad sometimes lost his affable composure when a hippie student crashed his motorcycle trying to put it in reverse or played Frank Zappa really loud when he came home from seeing wailing babies and fretting mothers all day long, and then he’d decide his consciousness had been raised quite enough. He was more interested in the foreign students than the political ones and eager to inflict his Spanish, French, or German on whomever was passing through. Now and then he went off to work on a reservation with the Native American public health services and is proud to say he’s the only white guy you’ll ever meet who can do a complete physical in Navajo.

  When Mom brought up the idea of moving to Mexico for the summer, Dad was initially reluctant. It’s not as if you could trust the hippie students to mow the lawn in perfectly even stripes, the way he does. But as with most things—voting Democrat, getting a toy poodle, hosting radical prison activists for cocktails—he eventually went along with Mom’s idea. She’d heard about San Miguel de Allende from her friend Janet MacKenzie, another of the dozen Democrats in Littleton, whose artistic and worldly tastes far transcended the avocado green, shag-rug ambience of the neighborhood. Jan MacKenzie had recently returned from several weeks in San Miguel de Allende, tanned and resplendent in colorful woven shawls and oversized pieces of silver jewelry, her four children effortlessly chattering in Spanish. The MacKenzies had studied at an art school, the Instituto Allende, and stayed at a boardinghouse in the center of town.

  Mom started planning our trip.

  The art scene is what made San Miguel de Allende a magnet for the Jan MacKenzies of the world. An American-accredited fine arts school, the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes, opened in 1938, and by 1948, several former World War II soldiers on the G.I. Bill discovered that they could attend school and live very well in San Miguel on their modest grants. That year, Life magazine ran a three-page spread on the place: “GI Paradise: Veterans Go to Mexico to Study Art, Live Cheaply and Have a Good Time,” reporting that apartments were $10 a month, full-time maids another $8, and rum 65 cents a quart. The resulting influx of would-be painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, and rummies spurred the opening of another accredited art school, the Instituto Allende, in 1950. By the 1960s, San Miguel de Allende was a counterculture destination for U.S. truth seekers and acidheads, including Ken Kesey; they came down off their high in 1968 when the notorious beatnik Neal Cassady, woozy on barbiturates after a wedding in San Miguel, wandered back along the train tracks to Celaya, apparently to count them, wearing only a T-shirt and jeans on a cold and rainy night, and was found in a coma the next day, dying in a nearby hospital just short of his forty-second birthday. Still, many of the artists and expats stayed on, forever painting the pink facade of the Gothic La Parroquia church in the main square, seeking spiritual enlightenment, and creating a community that welcomed other like-minded bohemians. They opened galleries and coffee shops, an English library, and, inevitably, real estate offices. By the 1970s, it had calmed down enough to become a popular place for artsy and progressive parents to bring their kids for a summer to safely introduce them to another culture.

  And so we set off for Mexico by bus from El Paso. This was our second time in that country: we’d gone to Baja a few years before, but all I remember, besides the vast novelty of the ocean, was how mortified my nearly teenaged sisters were when I rolled down the window and yelled “¿CÓMO ESTÁ USTED?” as loudly as I could to the first Mexican I saw, who politely waved back.

  The bus was cramped and dusty, but I was too interested in how everything changed, once in Mexico, to care. The guy at the border checks your passports, waves you through, and, just like that, people speak a different language, dress in clothes that don’t match, and sell seeds you crack and scatter the shells of on the floor of the bus. You had to pay to use the bathroom at the stops, and it was someone’s job to sit there, collect the pesos, and hand you three squares of something that was closer to wrapping paper than tissue. The arid landscape was the same as in Texas, as were the cowboy hats and pickup trucks, but other tha
n that, everything in Mexico was instantly different.

  When we reached Mexico City we had wilted, and it may be that some of us were whining. We waited and waited for another bus that didn’t come as scheduled, and when it finally arrived, the bus to San Miguel de Allende made the one from El Paso seem outrageously luxurious. It had school bus–style bench seats, springs sproinging out of thin green vinyl, people sitting precariously on laps and standing in the aisles, and crates of live chickens aboard. With no shocks, the bus jolted us out of sleepiness with every winding, lurching turn. Outside Mexico City we saw miles of slums, poverty that television only hinted at on the news—a long way from Littleton.

  Then the desert landscape was the same for hours, slowly rising, and we were almost managing sleep when we rounded a corner and came upon a Mexican Oz: a city of sunset-colored houses sloping down to a central pink spire.

  The bus let us out in the center of town, near another church and a square. We suddenly felt very gringo, surrounded by our suitcases, probably more stuff than the people around us owned. We ate steaming tacos with our hands and drank orange sodas. Then we were able to take in the town—the trees dripping with flowers, the old cheek-to-cheek buildings that would have been plain-faced but for their marvelous colors: pink, crab apple, marigold, Fanta orange. The streets weren’t paved, exactly, but covered in flat, irregular stones, like an old, smooth riverbed. After the dreary bus ride, suddenly everything seemed calm and colorful, infused with waning shades of sunlight. We piled ourselves into a couple of taxis that threaded through narrow, one-way streets on the way to our new, temporary home.

  We passed donkeys, indignant under their heavy loads. We drove by houses where the tops of the walls were embedded with glass shards to keep burglars out (though a cat was delicately making its path across the broken bottles, undisturbed). Finally we pulled up to a stucco house with a heavy carved wooden door. The place seemed stark and forbidding, with no wide screen doors, lawns, sprinklers, or anything else we associated with summer. We girls glanced at one another nervously: we were going to spend our precious summer here?