We drove south and crossed Arizona, heading for Nogales, the border check that we had heard was one of the safest. The entire way, I monitored every baby kick, ache, and headache with a silent prayer: Please do not go into labor before we get into Mexico. I was still two months away from my due date, but my lack of U.S. insurance meant that an emergency before the border could bankrupt us. I felt feverish just before we crossed into Mexico, so we stayed an extra night in Arizona. No, no, no, I thought. But the extra sleep helped. I just couldn’t travel as fast and hard when pregnant, even though I was just sitting. The long days in the car were taking their toll.
The next day we crossed the border. We drove straight through, waved into the country without so much as a word. Drew and I just looked at each other. Huh. There were ten miles of border town, packed with shopping, seedy and dirty. We kept driving. In Sonora we crossed the Mexican side of the border, where we were waved through once again. Beyond that it was just open scrub desert, with cactus and sage bushes, mountains in the background, yellow grass, and green bushes. It was beautiful.
We got lunch at a taco place with an asada restaurant on the side of the highway. It featured a large barbecue grill with wood chips laid over the coals, sending up plumes of fragrant smoke. We paid $1.25 for two large orders of tacos, complete with slices of lime and grilled green onions, and balanced our plates on the dashboard and ate as we drove.
That night we stayed in a cute town called Hermosillo. It reminded me of a smaller Dallas. We rested in an extra-large hotel room, where I collapsed into bed and Drew brought me tortilla soup from the restaurant next door, with fresh avocados—so deliciously ripe and vibrantly green that I almost forgot my sore legs and swollen ankles.
The next morning we had chilaquiles for breakfast, and Drew officially fell in love with Mexico. Chilaquiles are fried strips of tortillas covered in salsa, cheese, and crema, served with a side of scrambled eggs or grilled meat.
“Oh my God,” Drew said, scraping his plate down with his fork. “You’re going to make this for me every day, right?”
“Absolutely. If nothing else, we will eat well in Mexico, that’s for sure.”
The next day we landed in San Blas, after a dreary twelve-hour drive. The scenery was beautiful, and the beach looked ripe for development. Did we find a hidden treasure in Mexico? After we checked out of our hotel room, we walked the beach, carrying our flip-flops in our hands. Within five minutes, I understood why San Blas was a relative ghost town. We were being eaten alive.
I reached down and scratched my ankles. There were a dozen red bite marks.
“Drew, are you getting bitten?”
“Nope.”
He never got bitten. I was always the one being attacked by mosquitoes, sand fleas, or whatever the hell was munching on me now.
“What is that? I can’t see anything. What’s biting me?”
“Let me see,” he said, and bent down to inspect my legs.
“Holy crap, Christine,” he said, rubbing my ankle as if he could erase the damage.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Right.”
We drove the twisting jungle road down the coast until it broke open just north of Puerto Vallarta. There it was, Banderas Bay, the sweeping shoreline of so many postcards. It was Christmas morning. We had made it.
Drew gazed at the gorgeous scenery for a moment. “Okay, so now I’m excited,” he said.
“Good!” I took his hand. “Merry Christmas, honey.”
PART 3
MEXICO
Twenty-one
Mexico is about the size of the lower forty-eight states in the United States, if you chop off the West Coast. Good-bye, California, Oregon, and Washington. The vastness of the country is important to note, because while my mother-in-law was deeply concerned about our travel in Mexico, there is a lot of distance between, say, Tijuana and Mexico City. It was the equivalent of being worried about Texas wildfires when you lived in New Jersey. Yes, it was all the same country, but just like the United States, in a way, it wasn’t. The different regions varied as much in their food, culture, and history as New York City did from Atlanta.
We were staying in the Puerto Vallarta area, a part of Mexico that first crossed into American pop culture with Elizabeth Taylor’s 1964 film The Night of the Iguana, based on the Tennessee Williams play. Richard Burton bought Taylor a home in a part of town known as Gringo Gulch, perched above the bay near the Río Cuale. Burton bought the house across the street for himself, which made sense, since the couple was famous for fighting. They constructed a bridge to communicate the two buildings, allowing them to reach each other’s homes without entering the street and facing the paparazzi. The homes had since been sold, but the bridge was still there, known as the Lover’s Arch. After the film came out, Puerto Vallarta went from small fishing village to solidified tourist zone. It has never been the same since.
We spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the Romantic Zone, the old town, a strange juxtaposition between quaint cobblestone streets, hotels, and shops selling the traditional Jalisco escaramuza dress and obnoxious tequila hawkers who accosted you as you walked the Malecón. The other people in the Romantic Zone were mostly other tourists, holding up their iPads to take pictures and sporting the bright pink sunburns of those who had only recently arrived. We drove around with a real estate agent who pointed out apartments above storefronts and gave us tours of massive condominiums. We ate tacos. So many tacos, from the birria-filled tacos served only in the morning (a hangover cure, we were told) to tacos al pastor (notably the same cooking technique as in Lebanon) to fish tacos breaded and deep-fried to order, while a woman used a heavy wooden press to flatten out masa in the shape of tortillas. We found the tortillería (literally the tortilla shop), which was a small storefront that ground masa and toasted fresh tortillas on a conveyor belt. For $1 you could get a dozen tortillas. There were also butchers; most interesting to us were the ones that butchered whole pigs and deep fried them bit by bit, making carnitas that you could buy by the kilo or chicharrón (fried pig skin) that you could dip in guacamole. We ate and ate, and we looked for a place to live.
Beyond Puerto Vallarta, there was Nuevo Vallarta, the expat haven, and farther from that were Bucerías, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Punta de Mita, Sayulita, and San Francisco (known locally as San Pancho—Pancho is the Spanish nickname for Francisco). The expat scene was strong throughout, but it changed in each place. There were retirees, sailors, hippies, dropouts, and volunteers. Cirque de Soleil cocreator Gilles Ste-Croix started a community and volunteer program in San Pancho that taught local kids everything from English to how to do trapeze. Each place had its own feel.
The biggest challenge was to figure out where we belonged, with a keen eye on picking a place that best supported our aim of learning Spanish. In Puerto Vallarta, despite its charms—and the food—I figured we’d get annoyed with the constant flow of tourists, even if we tucked ourselves far away from the beach. Plus everyone spoke English. One day at lunch, I swore our waiter was American. He had a California accent.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Here,” he said.
“Always? You grew up here?”
“Yup.”
But, I reminded myself, this was not China or Lebanon. We weren’t learning Mandarin or Arabic, difficulty level 5 languages where we’d need 24/7 immersion. This was Spanish, a level 1 language, among the easiest to learn for English speakers. Spanish is phonetic. What you read is what you say. It uses the Roman alphabet. There’s no split between the written and spoken language, and it’s not tonal. After Mandarin and Arabic, I felt a certain calm. I’ve got this. I can do this.
After so many months of studying languages, now it seemed crystal clear what my approach would be: Speak it as much as possible. Hire a tutor. Write in Spanish. Read in Spanish. Spend as much of my time using the language
as possible, because while I had a huge “comprehensible input” curve to overcome at first in Mandarin and Arabic, getting to the point where I could speak some Spanish, have it spoken back to me, and understand it seemed like child’s play.
Nonetheless, we fired our real estate agent, who seemed obsessed with putting us as close to the tourist zone as possible. His English was flawless but—maybe from so many years of filling vacation homes—he couldn’t understand why we’d want to live somewhere more remote, with the locals. The locals didn’t live in the nice areas, he told us as we showed him the door.
One morning, I sat on our hotel bed with my laptop, the early-morning sunlight cutting across the dark room, and refreshed the online listings yet again. Cole slept next to me, his body so long now, his baby fat melting away. He looked more like a toddler than ever. His hair was sticking to his forehead a little; he always sweated when sleeping. Drew was out hunting down breakfast, queso fresco and fresh tortillas. Just then I noticed a new listing, maybe fifteen minutes old, just published, for a three-bedroom house north of Puerto Vallarta in Bucerías. It was so cheap, $425 a month, that I doubted it would be any good, but I clicked the link anyway. The ad was filled with pictures of a teal-colored one-story home, made out of concrete in the traditional Mexican style. It had a gate around the property and a garden that was even bigger than the house.
Drew walked in the door, quietly placing his bags on the table by the door so as to not wake Cole.
“Drew,” I whispered, “come here.”
He looked at the photos on the screen. “Oooh, that looks good.”
“I know.” I wrote the phone number for the listing on a sticky note and handed it to Drew. “Go call him and drive up there now.”
“Right now?” Drew looked longingly at the bags of food.
“Yes! He just posted it. We can’t lose it. Go see it and sign the contract.”
He took the note out of my hand. “Okay!”
Later that day, signed contract and keys in hand, we drove up the coast to Bucerías. The highway that runs through Bucerías divides the town in two. On the left are the ocean and resorts, with cobblestone streets like in the Romantic Zone, but also vacation rentals and souvenir shops. On the right is a neighborhood with dirt roads. We took a right turn into our new neighborhood with a thud as the minivan bottomed out. We inched along, issuing up plumes of dust behind us. It was a ghost town. There were no tourists here, just the homes of locals, all one- or two-story buildings with a large gate around each one. There were tiendas, little backyard bars. A paddock with an ancient-looking horse. We continued driving, navigating over a small bridge that crossed a dry ditch. A school. Signs for an orphanage. More houses.
Finally we arrived at our new home, lined with a redbrick fence and several massive bougainvillea trees pouring fuchsia, white, and yellow flowers over the wall from within the garden. The owner, Pablo, opened the gate and we drove in.
“¡Hola!” he said in a thick American accent.
We learned that his real name was Paul, but since moving to Mexico two decades ago and marrying a Mexican woman, he had adopted the Spanish version of his name.
“Here, let me show you the garden,” he said, and I rubbed my belly while following him. “These are the mango trees. That’s avocado over there. There’s guayaba, I forget what it’s called in English, it’s really good in smoothies, though, and this is jaka—which is—”
“Jackfruit?” I offered, recognizing the brown spiky fruit from Asia. These were bigger than footballs, but I had seen them the size of a large dog when fully grown.
“Yeah, yeah, probably,” said Pablo. He showed us more—there were cherries and limes, hibiscus flowers, and the ever-present bougainvilleas that framed the entire yard. Then, “Come inside!”
The interior was dim. There were no lights on, just slowly spinning fans overhead. The floor was laid with cool tile, and the kitchen had a massive bar for prepping food. There was just one bathroom that was fed warm water from the propane water heater outside. There was a separate house, a little bodega for doing laundry, and a third little house for storage.
“I call the house La Casa de las Ollas de Frijoles,” said Pablo, showing us around. “I built it myself. It was my first house with my wife, but she wanted something bigger, so now we live on the other side of the highway.”
“Why is it called La Casa de las Ollas de Frijoles?” Drew asked.
“Here, let me show you. See those? The bean pots on the corners of the gate? I put those there. It’s the bean pot house. Ollas de Frijoles.”
Pablo eyed my belly. “When are you due?”
“In two months.”
“Oh, I should introduce you to Rosa,” he said. “She can help you with the house.”
Before I could answer, he led us out of the gate and rang the neighbor’s doorbell. “¡Buenos días! ¿Está Rosa aquí?” he shouted into the house, then turned to me, “Rosa doesn’t speak English, but she has been looking after the house while I fixed it up for renting.”
Rosa came downstairs, smiling, and greeted Pablo. She had dark curly hair and was one of those beautiful women who could be anywhere between thirty and fifty years old.
“Er, Rosa, ella necesita ayudar con el jardín and para limpiar la casa,” he said, and then not realizing I knew at least a little Spanish, he translated, “I told her you need help with the cleaning.”
Rosa started talking in rapid Spanish, and I could pick out a few things: “Okay, bueno. ¿Cuántos días a la semana? ¿Cuántas horas? ¿Qué día? No puedo trabajar los viernes.”
Pablo paused. “Er . . .”
Wait, he’s been in Mexico for twenty years and he doesn’t speak Spanish fluently? I thought. He has a Mexican wife!
“Ella va a tener un bebé,” Pablo said. She’s going to have a baby.
He could say Spanish words to Rosa, but he wasn’t understanding what she was saying back. It seemed like every experience I had in Beijing. I could say things but never had a clue what people were saying to me. But this time something else was happening for me: I was suddenly remembering Spanish. I hadn’t studied it in years, but hearing the word viernes and remembering that that meant Friday unlocked some days-of-the-week memory I had stored deep in my brain from high school Spanish, or maybe my time in Guatemala.
I took an uncertain step forward. “¿Lunes, miércoles y jueves?” I asked. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday?
“Sí,” Rosa said, addressing me with relief.
“¿Cuatro horas cada día?” I offered meekly, not sure if I had it right (four hours each day).
“Sí.”
“Y ¿cuánto cuesta?” I said. How much?
“Em . . . tres cientos,” Rosa replied after a moment.
“Okay.”
Pablo looked pleased. We said our good-byes and I tried to quickly calculate how much three hundred pesos would be . . . was that $24 a week? Did I just hire a helper for $2 an hour? It seemed impossible.
We headed back inside and Pablo spent the next three hours showing Drew how everything worked. He didn’t want to say good-bye. This house was his baby. On the front of the house were two doves, hand-painted by Pablo, a gesture to his wife. “They are her favorite.”
Finally he left. Drew and I sank into the couch with glee while Cole played contentedly in the garden. We had done it. A little house on the coast in Mexico, in a neighborhood where our neighbors didn’t speak English and there wasn’t a tourist to be found.
Now we just had to have this baby.
Twenty-two
Dr. Laura wore a white lab coat over her skinny jeans and fitted top. Her high heels clicked on the tile floor as she led us to her office.
We were back in the Romantic Zone, where Dr. Laura’s practice was located. While we picked a house in Bucerías, there was no hospital, so we wanted to give birth at one of the two private h
ospitals in Puerto Vallarta. Dr. Laura had privileges at both. It took us an hour in traffic to drive the palm-tree-lined highway that runs along the coast and past the hotel zone. Once we hit cobblestones, we knew we were close, but it was a bumpy ride and even though we stayed in the area for a week when we arrived, we still got lost. Do we turn on Calle Aguacate (Avocado Road) or Calle Naranja (Orange Tree Road)? The stacked houses with orange tile all started to look the same. Eventually we found the lavandería (laundry shop) that we recognized from our days of apartment hunting, and were able to find our bearings.
Dr. Laura’s practice was behind a single tinted glass door that slid open to the side. It was a small, narrow space, but there was a long hallway that brought you deeper into the building past the offices of the other doctors. I read the doctors’ names and specialties as we passed and noticed she was the only ob-gyn. She stopped and turned effortlessly on the ball of one foot and waved us into a room. There was a desk with a large, sweating iced coffee sitting next to a computer monitor and a few medical charts. Other than the charts, it felt like a home office, lightly decorated with some personal effects. The only truly medical aspect was the brightly lit adjoining room with a paper-covered table and stirrups.
She called across the office to her receptionist in the lobby in Spanish, then crossed the room, took her two cell phones and placed them on her desk, sat down, and pulled out a file.
There was a pause and I briefly panicked. Wait, are we going to do this in Spanish?
But Dr. Laura said in English, “So you are going to have a baby! Congratulations!”
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