“Well, you’re not going to learn on my baby,” she’d answer.
“She’s not your baby, she’s our baby,” he’d reply.
When they were released from the clinic the next day, Martha was planning on taking the baby up to The Hill to her family’s house, so the women could care for Italya while she recovered from her surgery. Noah refused. And when it became clear that he was going to stand his ground (“over my dead body” were his exact words, as I recall) the entire family came down from The Hill to them. Fifteen people, crammed into Noah’s little apartment across from my house, for days on end. At any given time you could find at least seven women sitting on the bed watching telenovelas, passing the baby around like a plate of cookies as Martha tried to sleep.
But Noah wouldn’t budge. When the noise and the cooking smells and the stifling summer heat (you can’t have the baby in air-conditioning!) became too much for him, he’d hoist a cranky Italya over his shoulder and escape to my place. But not before the aunts and cousins and sisters bundled her up like an Eskimo for the seven-yard trek.
“No wonder she’s fussy,” I’d say, as we pulled off the sweaters and mittens and booties to give the poor child some air. I marveled at the way Noah was with his baby, calm and confident, always attentive. He had a knack. And when he’d bend over to kiss her chubby cheeks or smooth her little curls, I swear I could feel something melting inside. It wasn’t long before he became known in the neighborhood as that guy with the baby permanently attached to his chest. And it also wasn’t long before he became the only one who could comfort his fidgety child.
His wife was another matter. He’d begrudgingly replace every one of those layers of clothes on poor Italya before he’d head home, knowing there would be hell to pay should the baby let out even the tiniest of sneezes. I was glad he was learning to pick his battles, as I was sure there would be many more to come.
My own crash course in Mexican culture continued at Tippy Toes. One day, not long after we had opened, Martha arrived at the salon and plopped Italya into my arms as she headed toward the bathroom.
“What’s up with the baby?” A huge red spot had appeared smack in the middle of Italya’s forehead. What kind of terrible Mexican insect had bitten my poor girl?
“She has the hiccups!” Martha yelled from the back of the building.
“No, I mean what’s up with her skin?”
“She has the hiccups!” Martha repeated even louder.
I looked over at Noah, who just shrugged his shoulders. I put on my glasses and held the baby up to the light. On second glance the dot looked man-made, more like a little Indian bindi than a bug bite. I dipped my finger into a manicure bowl and rubbed gently at Italya’s forehead. Martha was suddenly at my side, first frowning at the inky smudge, then scowling at me.
A week later, when I tried to gently point out to Martha that it might be time to cut the baby’s nails, unearthing a pair of infant scissors I had bought months before, she grabbed Italya right out of my arms. It wasn’t until Analisa explained to me later, that you don’t cut a baby’s nails before they’re a year old or they’ll have bad eyesight, that I understood. Sort of.
And there were plenty more things I apparently didn’t know. One day I brought in some fresh orange slices from home and offered them around after lunch. Everyone looked at me as though I were serving up arsenic. “What?” I asked, looking from face to face. Teresa pointed at Daniela, who had been blowing her nose for days. I held out the plate toward her, and she backed away. “Vitamin C!” I insisted.
“No fruit. She is sick!” Martha explained. And there was a lot more I learned about fruit. Pineapples mean good luck. But never eat an avocado when you are mad or fighting, because if you do you’ll wind up with a terrible stomachache. And limes? I actually got a pretty useful tip from Analisa about them. In a pinch, just squeeze the juice under your armpits. It makes an excellent deodorant.
By now I felt that my Spanish language skills were improving, even though I had quit going to my second teacher because she insisted that I speak only Spanish in class. Why would I even be there if I knew how to speak Spanish? Besides, she was mean. I thought that I had picked up quite a bit just from being around the girls, but you wouldn’t know it by their reaction. “Baño no está limpio,” I complained one morning, repeating the exact words they’d taught me just the day before. The bathroom isn’t clean. The girls just looked at me blankly.
“Baño no está limpio,” I repeated, slower.
“No lo entiendo,” Teresa claimed, shrugging her shoulders and turning to the rest of the group for an explanation.
Frustrated, I marched over to Macaws and pulled Analisa back across the street with me.
“El baño no está limpio,” Analisa told them.
“Ah, no está limpio!” they all echoed, standing and heading for the buckets.
I fared a little better with the sign language they shared with me. “Okay” was said with repeated crooks of the index finger. Talking about being boiling mad? Shake both hands over your shoulders, which I had witnessed Analisa doing plenty of times, though I had never known what it meant. And say you want to tease someone who is trying too hard to impress. Just make the shape of an eye with your thumb and index finger and place it over your own eye. It’s sort of like saying, “Oh, look at you!” My favorite was when the girls wanted to let each other know that someone was a cheapskate—they’d simply whack one elbow with a palm of the other hand. For people who relied heavily on tips, this was a handy one, though that gesture was usually reserved for the snowbirds, who have a notorious reputation down here. I guess they aren’t used to living in a culture where everybody—gas station attendants, supermarket baggers, self-appointed traffic cops who, sometimes with disastrous results, take it upon themselves to help you back out of parking places—expect a little something for their trouble. Me, I’ve always been one to be generous with a tip. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the other end of that stick.
We had a fair amount of downtime in those early days, which gave us plenty of opportunity to get to know each other, or rather for me to get to know them. One quiet afternoon, after I’d been wondering if my girls were happy in their new jobs, I started a conversation about what they’d do if they could do anything at all. Martha wanted to be a nutritionist. Selena a nurse. Luz dreamed of being a tattoo artist, Daniela a teacher. Teresa joked that she just wanted a rich old man.
“So what’s keeping you?” I asked, ignoring Teresa’s crack. “You’re all smart, capable women.” This wasn’t like Kabul, where the women were risking their reputations, and sometimes their lives, for the privilege of working for a living. All these women, except for young Luz, had been working for years.
I thought I pretty much knew what the story was for Martha and Teresa. In their crowded household, there was clearly not enough to go around for seven educations. But when Teresa told me she had dropped out of school at age twelve, I was surprised.
“Our dad said all the girls in secondary school got pregnant,” Martha explained. “He made Teresa stop going.”
“Did she want to go to school?” I asked.
“Of course,” Martha said. “Always. But then there was no time, and no money. That’s just the way it is.”
As it was, Teresa was eighteen when she gave birth to the first of her three children. After twelve years with a cheating, abusive man, she finally packed them up and left. She did everything she could to support her kids, eventually following a lead for training as a massage therapist. Then she met Sergio.
“If you could change anything in your life, would you?” I asked, anxious to know what made her tick.
Teresa shook her head at Martha’s translation. “Not now. Now I am happy. It would be nice to have more money, but I know I can take care of myself. Sergio treats me good. My life is good.”
By the time Martha was growing up, their father had relaxed a little. She was the only one in the family to make it through the twelfth g
rade. After graduation, she worked as a receptionist in a dental office by day, and studied English by night. Mazatlán was teeming with tourists back then, and it wasn’t long before Teresa helped her get a better-paying job as a receptionist in the spa where she was working. There Martha was trained to do facials and massage. Then she got pregnant, by a guy who wanted nothing to do with her or the baby. Any dreams she had about continuing her education were gone. Now it was all about having enough money to take care of her child.
Daniela’s story wasn’t much different, pregnant at fifteen, such a young age that her father refused to believe it was possible. Why, she didn’t even have a boyfriend! Or so he insisted. They could use some serious birth control around here, I thought. But who was I to judge? These women all loved being mothers. And they would do anything for their kids.
“What made you want to work here, Luz? Why not a department store, or one of the big resorts?”
Luz pointed to her earlobes, which hung low down her neck, heavy with the huge silver gauges that were creating two holes practically big enough to swallow a couple of grapes. Of course, in most places around here, sweet Luz would be labeled as a rebel. The truth was, despite her badass look, Luz was painfully shy. A dropout by sixteen, she was living on The Hill with her mom and siblings in Martha’s mother’s house along with everyone else, spending most of her time drawing. It was Noah who saw something in her and encouraged me to take a chance on a novice. My first impression was less than stellar. But I trusted Noah, and after Luz complied with my request that she remove some of the lip and eyebrow bling, tuck the nose ring up into her nostril, and pull the straight black hair out of her eyes, we were good to go. I figured if I could train women who had been held captive in their homes for years by war and the Taliban, I could certainly train Luz. If only she’d learn to speak up.
Selena I knew little about, her being the only “outsider” in the place. I was aware that she had a young son, and it was clear she was not much more than a child herself. I learned that her mother had been a beautician and did not want Selena following in her footsteps. Interesting. After a short time in nursing school, courtesy of an aunt with some money, she had to drop out. The money had dried up. Her options were few. Apparently she had never married the father of her child, a guy with more psychological problems than she could have, or should have, tried to handle. Her home life, with her mother, was tumultuous. But her sister watched the boy while she worked, and that was just how life was. Right?
For many women in Mazatlán, their dreams remain just that—dreams. Money is tight, especially since the cruise ships stopped coming. And that’s why some, my girls told me, turn to the one profession you need no experience to enter.
“You know Samantha, yes?” asked Martha. I couldn’t recall anyone by that name.
“She’s the one you’ve seen hanging around Martha’s family,” Noah explained. “The one with the really, really short skirts? They say she’s a prostitute.”
“Are you kidding me? A hooker? She looks like a kid!” I remembered noticing her when she dropped by Noah’s to pick up an old stereo he no longer wanted—she was a scrawny-looking thing with braces on her teeth.
Just then Analisa came through the door and settled in for her weekly manicure.
“Who is a hooker?”
“You mean a hooker-hooker? Or just someone who sleeps around a lot to get her phone bill paid?” I asked the girls. Analisa repeated the question in Spanish.
The girls nodded rather nonchalantly. “Sí, es una profesional,” said Teresa as she started removing Analisa’s polish.
“Why would she do that?” I asked. Teresa rattled off an answer.
“She had to take care of her family,” Analisa translated. “She was twelve and her mother left for the States, her father had no job, and she had younger sisters.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, bouncing a wiggly Italya gently in my arms.
Teresa continued telling her story to Analisa, who repeated it to me. “When she started she was a teenager, and only had one client, a narco who paid for everything, including her boobs. Then he was killed.”
“So what happened then?”
“She wanted to go back to school, but she could not make enough money in a regular job.” Analisa turned to me. “You know, Debbie, there are lots of girls who do this here. Girls who also work in normal jobs. So many jobs only pay you fifteen hundred pesos every two weeks. They have a secret life. It is too hard to take care of your family on so little pay, especially when your husband leaves, or when your family does not help.”
I did some quick calculations in my head. That was only about fifty-nine dollars a week. Granted, the cost of living was lower down here, but it would still be impossible for a woman to live on her own on those wages in Mazatlán. I had struggled with the question of what to pay my girls. It was important to me that they earn a decent living, but I felt I had to be careful not to overpay, as I had seen firsthand the effects of overinflation. It happened all too often in Kabul, where, say, a doorkeeper who might overnight go from making a hundred and fifty dollars a month to an unheard-of salary of thousand dollars, thanks to the arrival of a foreign company. Six months later, that company leaves town, and leaves the doorkeeper with the burden of a whole new lifestyle he can no longer afford.
The girls went on to explain the hierarchy that exists in the profession. The Velvets girls, and those like them who were working at the nightclubs where you could get absolutely anything you wanted for a price, make the most money. They said most of those girls, or “dancers,” are from Colombia or Brazil, or sometimes Russia. Then there are the ones who work parties or in brothels, and on the street, who have “agents” managing their careers. At the lowest rung on the ladder are the cantina girls, with their painted, upside-down V-shaped eyebrows and their shirts even tighter than the ones my girls preferred. Not all girls serving at cantinas are prostitutes, but the ones who do turn tricks don’t get much in return.
“Ask Teresa if Samantha’s family knows what she does,” I urged Analisa.
“She says of course not. They would kill her if they find out. She has a boyfriend who doesn’t know, too.”
What was going to happen to her in five or ten years? What if she wanted to, or needed to, get out? Could she? Did she have a backup plan? Things could turn bad, and turn bad fast. I knew. Then I thought about the little flower girl, and all the other young girls I saw wandering the streets hawking their wares. How many years away might they be from having to make a decision like this?
“There is a woman on my street,” Analisa continued, “she had to go to Tijuana and work for a company when her husband left her.”
“What did she do? What kind of company?” I asked, knowing that there was money to be made closer to the border.
“You know, a company that hires girls.”
“You mean she was a stripper?”
“No. She does the same as Samantha. She had to feed her babies.”
“So her husband left her with nothing?”
“There was no law, Debbie. Now Mexico is getting the laws for the fathers to pay for the children. But Mexican women are strong. We fight for everything we have.”
There was no arguing with that. But still, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to do something. What really got to me were the stories my girls told me about abusive husbands and fathers who would smack their daughters at the drop of a hat. I had witnessed it right on Carnaval Street. One evening, from my roof patio, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a domestic battle. “You are nothing but a cockroach! Get out of my house or I’m going to kill you!” At least that’s how I interpreted the words. The man continued to rant, his intensity rising by the minute. The woman was silent. “I’m going to beat you until you are dead!” he screamed. My heart racing, I peered over my balcony to see if my neighbors were reacting to the commotion, to see if anyone was doing anything. But they were just going about their business, with one ear cocked toward
the shouting. I had to call the police before this poor woman was murdered! I grabbed the phone, suddenly realizing that there was no way I had the vocabulary to handle this in Spanish, so I dialed Martha for help.
“Oh no, Debbie. We don’t do that in Mexico. That is a family thing. That’s just the way it is.” Martha warned me that it might not be safe for me to intervene. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.
I kept my eye out for the woman over the next few days but never caught sight of her. I was used to catching a glimpse of her every day or, if not, hearing her sing as she washed and cleaned. A few days later, a terrible stench began to fill my house, like old garbage . . . or decaying limbs. I began to picture the poor woman’s body in a plastic bag, dumped in the empty lot out back. As the days got hotter and hotter, the smell got worse and worse. I was just about to ignore Martha’s advice finally to call the police when María arrived to clean the house. She wrinkled her nose, pulled me into the bathroom, and pointed to the drain. “Rata.”
OKAY, SO MAYBE WE DODGED a bullet, so to speak, with that one, but if I had to hear that’s just the way it is one more time, I thought I’d scream. Even though violence against Mexican women was an issue that was routinely swept under the carpet, or worse, deliberately kept from public awareness, anyone with half a brain knew it existed, big time. How could it not in a machismo culture where women were so overtly considered inferior citizens, where education was often not an option for girls? I had heard somewhere that close to seventy percent of Mexican women have experienced some form of violence, most of it in their own homes. I thought about all that my Tippy Toes girls had told me about their own lives, and all those stories about the women they knew. And most of them were the lucky ones, relatively speaking. I thought about some of those street vending girls I had seen acting way too familiar with foreign men while their mothers intentionally looked the other way. I also thought about my brief conversation with Connie under the angel tree at Sharon’s Christmas party.
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