Margarita Wednesdays

by Deborah Rodriguez

  BARB: Oh, I don’t know. Hey Art, she brayed across the table to her octogenarian husband, how long have we been here? Art just shrugged. Barb turned her attention to a vendor selling baskets table to table. I turned my attention to Art.

  ME: Where are you guys from?

  ART (TAKING A SIP OF HIS DRINK): Syracuse. Had a restaurant. I was known there for my dooble entenders.

  ME: What?

  ART: You know, double meanings. I’m writing a book. Funny stories. I’m a pretty funny guy, right, Bonnie?

  Bonnie laughed and helped herself to some chips.

  ME: So what’s your story, Bonnie? What are you doing down here?

  BONNIE: Me? You don’t want to hear our story.

  ME: No, really, I do.

  BONNIE: Nah. Not that interesting. Hey, Nancy! She turned to a youngish woman at the end of the table, who could have been the third of a trio of Russian nesting dolls made up of Barb, Bonnie, and herself. You dealing tonight?

  ME: Deal? What does she deal?

  BONNIE: Poker. She’s a pro. We have a regular game Sunday nights. You play?

  ME: She earns a living doing that?

  BONNIE: That, and she ties fishing flies. Has quite a business. She turned to the guy on her right. Hey, Eyelashes, you playing tonight?

  THE GUY (WHO DID INDEED POSSESS IMPOSSIBLY LONG, DARK EYELASHES, SHRUGGED HIS SHOULDERS): Not sure, depends on if Fernanda is home to watch Reyna. His British accent was as thick as London fog. An adorable six-year-old was digging trenches in the sand by his side.

  ME: Who is he?

  BODIE: That’s Simon.

  ME: And?

  BODIE: And what?

  ME: What’s his story?

  BODIE: Story? Married. To a Mexican. She’s a psychologist.

  ME: But how did he end up here?

  BODIE: I’m not sure. Do you know, Lisa?

  LISA: I think he might have had some big job in New York or somewhere. Quit and moved to Mazatlán.

  ME (GIVING UP ON LISA AND BODIE): Why did you and Sharon come to Mazatlán, Glen?

  GLEN (SHRUGGING HIS SHOULDERS): It just sort of happened. All I know is we’d never move back, right, Shar?

  PETE: I agree wholeheartedly. And (kissing my hand) please allow me to be the first to officially welcome you to our little paradise.

  ME (POINTING TO A PERKY LITTLE BLONDE AT THE FAR END OF THE TABLE): Who’s that?

  CHERYL: That’s Sonja. As in Sonja and Barry.

  ME: When did they come down here?

  Nobody responded.

  ME (TO DONNA AND ROB): What about you guys?

  At this point Art’s chair toppled slowly backward into the sand, bringing the table, the glasses, the guacamole, and Art down with it. I jumped up to help. Everyone else kept drinking.

  “Happens all the time,” Barb said as she stood and hiked her strapless elastic top up over her boobs and under her armpits. “Gave up bras when I moved to Mazatlán,” she said with a laugh so loud it momentarily drowned out the clamor of the banda musicians moving up the beach. “Swim, anyone?”

  I had never intended to bare my body that day, so I can’t explain what came over me when I decided to fling off my cover-up and join the group bouncing around in that salty blue sea. It wasn’t just the heat, which was turning our cold drinks into sweaty puddles of water seeping across the plastic table. And it wasn’t the booze. It was just that these people seemed so comfortable with themselves, so willing to do whatever they felt like doing regardless of how it might look to anyone else, and so nonjudgmental that you had to wonder if they really concerned themselves with anyone else at all.

  Don’t get me wrong. These people could gossip along with the best of them. It was the same in Kabul—for expats even a big city becomes a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. But here the gossip was never mean-spirited, and it usually concerned something the gossipee had put out there herself. Nevertheless, as Glen advised at one point that day with a wink, “It would be wise to never miss a meeting.”

  And by no means am I saying that these people were unfriendly. Far from it. By the end of that afternoon I had invitations to the poker game (which I declined), to join Barb at her Friday morning painting class (which I accepted), and to Margarita Wednesdays with Glen and Sharon at Macaws (which made me think of Karen in Michigan, and made me love this place even more). But what I realized was that for all of them, dwelling on or even talking about their pasts was considered a waste of time. It just wasn’t something that was brought up. In fact, they hardly asked me, the new kid on the block, anything about my own life prior to coming to Mazatlán. How great was that? I could be anybody! Not that I wasn’t proud of things in my past, at least some of them, but for once in my life I didn’t feel like I had to explain myself, which at that time I wasn’t sure I even could. I could be anybody—for one sweet afternoon, I felt like I could just be me.

  I may not have learned much about my new friends that day, but I did get back on the panga (which, by the way, is the ricketiest, most crowded little deathtrap of a boat you’ve ever seen) knowing this: no matter how different we all seemed to be, it was becoming clear to me that we had one huge, undeniable, and indefinable thing in common—that peculiar something inside that had drawn us to life in this odd little city by the sea.

  I LOVE THE FEELING OF falling in love. I could feel myself falling hard for this new country, yet I was afraid. My heart was saying yes, but my head was telling me to take it slow, to protect myself from getting in too deep. Afghanistan had taught me the consequences of that. Yet as we all know, the problem with love is that you just can’t control the who and the when of it. But for now it remained fairly easy to keep my distance from the soul of Mexico, buffered by the English-speaking posse that was graciously starting to usher me into a world of their own making.

  Unfortunately, as is inevitable whenever I start a new relationship, I was gaining weight. The taco-tequila-tostada diet was taking its toll, and I was running out of creative solutions for camouflaging the rolls that seemed to multiply overnight and the cellulite that was puckering up my skin in places I didn’t even know could pucker. Why, oh why, couldn’t I wear my weight with the pride of a Mexican woman? They’d squeeze themselves into those same skinny jeans they wore twenty pounds ago without a blink of the eye. How they managed to do that in ninety-degree heat and one hundred percent humidity was a mystery to me. By midmorning I’d be sweating so much that anything I wore would become plastered to my skin like a globby layer of papier-mâché.

  Weight issues had plagued me my entire life. To my stick-thin mother, the fact that I took after my father’s side of the family was like a knife in her heart. Her acquired southern belle sensibility was, by the time I was old enough to notice, clearly offended by the mere presence of the large, loud, lumbering man she had married for his promise of a better future. I worshipped my mom but saw plain as day that she did not worship my dad. So I did everything possible to become just like her.

  Mom had me on diets from the time I was ten years old, and she even joined Weight Watchers herself more than once when I was a kid, casually inviting me to “have some fun and come with” in her desperate attempts to get me to slim down. It had taken her eleven years to conceive, as she often reminded me, and before I was born she was so looking forward to having a little doll to play dress-up with. After she gave up on me she turned to real dolls, amassing an impressive collection of Madame Alexanders, dozens of perfect little angels with bee-stung lips and poofy skirts and corkscrew curls crowding the shelves of her bedroom, the same bedroom that ended up in ruins after that house fire. Poor dolls.

  I tried everything I could to become thin, including a yearlong bout with anorexia. At seventeen years old, five feet five, and eighty-five pounds, I thought I looked great. My mom was so proud of my “dieting” success. She wasn’t aware of my daily doses of Ex-Lax or my self-induced vomiting, and when I stopped getting my period she insisted on a pregnancy test, d
espite my honest avowal of my virginal status. The doctor told me to gain weight, but I wasn’t about to give up this newfound feeling of control over my life, or the satisfaction of being, for once, smaller than my mom. Even she couldn’t fit into my size-three pants! So I put rocks in my pockets before my next appointment. It wasn’t until my big, beefy boyfriend broke up with me (you’re just too skinny!) that I came to my senses.

  The following year I left for a few months in Japan with a Christian organization. It was my first time out of the country and, determined to follow the instructions we had been given during our training sessions, I never once refused even the tiniest grain of rice from my host family. I couldn’t insult them, could I? I ate everything in sight. I will never forget the look on my mom’s face when I got off that plane. The pattern continued in college with my freshman thirty—I couldn’t just stop at fifteen, like everyone else—and into my on-again, off-again marital history. And it obviously still hadn’t been broken.

  But now I was turning to the Mexican women for inspiration. Of course, I still wanted to look good, but I was determined not to let skinny be the be-all-end-all anymore. It was time to start feeling good, and time to start feeling good about myself. It was time to join a gym.

  So what did I do? I went shopping. I couldn’t set foot in a gym without the proper outfit, could I? Why can’t shopping be an acceptable form of exercise? I whined to myself, adrenaline pumping the way it always did when I’d find myself surrounded by shelves and shelves of bargains. I could stick with this routine, cruising the mall. Why, I’d do it every day! I hated going to the gym, it was so much work. I wandered the aisles until I spotted an adorable pair of purple and black spandex pants, and for one quick second this whole workout thing didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Then I remembered what my friend Karen in Michigan always said: Spandex is a privilege, not a right. I bought a pair of sweats and went back home.

  But when the time came to actually get serious about this whole exercise idea, it soon became clear that the real challenge wasn’t going to be finding the right outfit; it was finding a gym that I wasn’t going to suffocate in. Mexicans aren’t too keen on air-conditioning, because not only is it expensive, but they believe that sweating is actually healthy, unless, of course, you are sweating in air-conditioning, in which case you’ll get sick. Go figure. My other two requirements for a gym were that it be female-friendly and close to my house.

  Gimnasio Roberto’s, a quick bike ride away from Carnaval Street, fit the bill close enough. As I passed under a dubious likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger hanging over the doorway and climbed the long, narrow stairway up from the street, I could feel the wetness spreading from every nook and cranny of my body. I hadn’t even lifted a finger yet and I was drenched, droplets of my sweat leaving dark, round spots on the threadbare gray carpet under my feet.

  Let’s get physical . . . physical, Olivia Newton-John screamed from the giant speakers hanging on the wall, the bass turned up so high the floors shook. Back down another set of stairs, one flight below, the dark, cavernous gym was lined with more mirrors than a carnival funhouse, and was teeming with a sea of incredibly beautiful people. The women were all Jennifer Lopez—toned, tanned, huge breasts, awesome booties. Everything matched. Tight pink pants were paired with low-cut pink midriff tops, pink sweatbands for the head, pink wristbands, and a pink towel to wipe the machines down.

  The men? Enrique Iglesias clones, from their sweaty six-packs up to their perfectly gelled hair. They were all impossibly beautiful.

  I snuck into a corner space and eyed the dumpy chick in the T-shirt and sweats staring back at me from the mirror. The makeup I’d never leave the house without was already streaming down my cheeks. I looked like Gene Simmons after a particularly rowdy KISS concert. From every angle, all I could see were those beautiful people, and I knew that if I was seeing them, they were seeing me. I closed my eyes and started to lift, curling up and down and up and down, willing the flesh that was sagging off the back of my arms to magically turn into muscle bulging from the front. Soon the weights were becoming impossibly heavy, and I was struggling to lower them without letting them crash to the floor. I must have let out some sort of uncontrollable bellow or other cry of distress because, to my mortification, when I raised my eyes everyone had turned to look. And that’s when I saw her. My angel in a push-up sports bra and the tiniest pair of shorts you’ve ever seen, shorts that were barely covering an ass that topped a pair of legs as long as I was tall. She was a Bo Derek ten to my Ugly Betty zero. She effortlessly grabbed my weights and lowered them to the ground, her two-inch-long crystal-studded nails reflecting off the mirrors surrounding us. I opened my mouth to thank her but whatever came out sounded nothing like Spanish.

  “Debbie,” I added quickly, while extending my hand. “Rodriguez.”

  She looked puzzled. Mexicans are always curious about how I could be a Rodriguez yet speak Spanish so poorly, and with such an atrocious accent. I tell them that I kept the name and got rid of the husband. That always brings a smile and keeps me from having to go into my marital history. And my Spanish was terrible. In high school, I could not understand one word in any language that my French-born Spanish teacher spoke, and the Rosetta Stone courses I was now trying to follow only succeeded in putting me to sleep.

  The woman introduced herself as Angelica. Then she pointed to the different women in the gym and shouted out their names above the din of the blaring disco music.

  Angelica and I both arrived at the gym at around noon every day. We shared weights and traded equipment. She showed me how to use the butt-shaping machines and I made her laugh, mostly through goofy faces and pantomime. She persuaded me to ditch the little backpack I toted from machine to machine, and to follow her lead—water bottle in hand, towel around neck, cell phone tucked into one bra cup, change purse with house keys in the other, and a tube of lip gloss handily stowed in the cleavage. Genius.

  Although I thought I could feel myself firming up little by little with each visit, I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t able to have a normal conversation with Angelica or the other women in the gym. Here was a chance to make friends with some local women, and I couldn’t even talk to them. It felt a lot like Kabul in the beginning, when I had to use an interpreter to communicate even the basics to my girls at the school. Note to self, I thought: find a Spanish teacher ASAP.

  “Cuál es tu trabajo?” Angelica asked one day. What do you do for work?

  Nothing, I thought. It felt strange to think that, but so far Mexico had proven to be as affordable as I had hoped it would be, and I was managing to stretch my savings as tight as the skin on a pregnant woman’s belly. In answer to Angelica, all I could do was scribble with an imaginary pen in one hand, and mimic a pair of snipping scissors with the other.

  The next day I handed Angelica the Spanish-language version of Kabul Beauty School, pointing out my picture on the back cover. She rattled off something to the other women in the gym, and they all gathered around to take a look.

  When I returned the following week, the girl at the front desk was reading my book. It seemed they had been passing it around. She held up the cover for me to see, and smiled as I walked past. I smiled back. I’d finally been invited to the cool kids’ table! But as much as they now knew about me, I still hadn’t figured out what these girls were all about.

  One day I arrived at the gym to find myself face-to-face with a stringy-haired man in sandals and socks and a muscle shirt that revealed everything but muscles, who followed my boobs with his bloodshot eyes as I headed to the machines. I thought I recognized him from Mamita’s, but we had never spoken. I averted my eyes as I passed, pretending not to hear whatever it was he was saying to me. Angelica appeared from behind and quickly pulled me away.

  “Pinche pendejo,” she muttered, which I later learned roughly translates to “fucking asshole.” I could now see him on the other side of the room leering at us. “Tu amigo?” Angelica asked.

&n
bsp; “No, no, nada, no friend!” I answered, in a panic.

  She turned to the other girls in the room, rattled off something really fast, and suddenly the room was abuzz. Angelica then said something else, lowered her fabulous fake lashes at me, and said very seriously, “Cuidada. Eso hombre es malo. Careful.”

  That evening I popped into Mamita’s right before sunset. Analisa instinctively reached for the red wine. “Just water for me,” I told her, not without some difficulty. Her perfectly groomed eyebrows lifted toward the ceiling in a question mark. I squeezed my belly in response.

  “Ah, good for you,” said my friend with zero body fat, as she climbed onto the bar to take a bottle from the top shelf. As usual, the room went silent at the sight of Analisa’s perfect ass suspended in midair.

  “Sucks,” I responded, sipping my water as I waited for her to climb down, a feat that always seemed to take her a little longer than necessary. “And I just joined a gym, but they won’t turn on their air. It’s killing me.” Analisa just nodded. This was not the tree to be barking up for sympathy. “I guess I’m just not as tough as you are, Analisa. Can I have a glass of red wine?”

  Analisa placed her hands on her hips and paused, weighing my request.

  “Please?” I put down my water. “Oh shit!”

  “Okay, Deb. I will get you your wine . . . relax!”

  “It’s not that!” Out of the corner of my eye, I had spotted the guy from the gym. “It’s that drunk over there.” I rolled my eyes toward his table and tried to duck out of his line of sight as he downed a shot of tequila.

  “Oh, that cochino.” Analisa wrinkled her nose. “Yesterday he throw five hundred pesos at me and he say, ‘What can I get for that?’ ”

  “Ugh. What did you tell him?”

  Analisa laughed and grabbed her boobs. “I told him he cannot afford this. Then I walk away. What else can I do?” She paused and sighed. “You know, Debbie? Sometime I hate this job.”

  “You should get out of here. Find something else.”