Last summer, it was me and Eva against everything evil in the world: swimsuits, kale, something that buzzed in our room. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Diana Pinter, some girl at school who went to Paris with her mother. I lay on a bunk scratching mosquito bites and pictured them outside the Eiffel Tower, eating salad in the rain. I flicked through the magazines Mom posted, girls with eyes lost as gazelles. Their hair was molasses, candy-apple shiny, the colour of Twinkies. My stomach growled. It would be dinner soon, something steamed. A postcard and cash fell out of Vogue, Mom’s handwriting like spun silk. Hope you’re having a good time. Be good! We’ll go shopping when you get home. I knew what ‘be good’ meant. I shoved the twenty in my sock and dangled to high-five Eva on the bottom bunk.
This summer would be different. Mom wanted us to take a trip. Dad was working and my brother wouldn’t come. Ed was oddly self-sufficient. He lived in a fort of science books in his room: at nine, he wasn’t interested in sports camp. If there’d been an accountancy camp he’d have jumped in line. A camp where boys learned to give bad financial news and crinkle their brows exactly like their fathers would suit him just fine.
‘What do you think? Just the two of us,’ Mom said. ‘Won’t it be fun?’
I wasn’t sure. Fun and Mom went together as well as she said my shoes matched my blouse. I watched her fiddle with lilies in the vase in the lounge again, fingertips unable to resist trying to improve their elegance.
No camp! I thought. No hikes, kale or treasure hunts (hikes in disguise – except with fruit and a whittled wooden otter, rabbit, any animal that could be described as a ‘critter’, at the end).
‘Where do you wanna go?’ I said.
‘Mexico,’ Mom replied.
Not Paris or Venice, which was weird. Her friends usually took their daughters to glistening cities of tiny espresso cups and art galleries, to cram in a few more ‘sit up straights’ before school pushed them out into the world.
‘Why Mexico?’ I asked.
She let the lilies be, looking down like she did when she told Dad the drapes were a steal.
‘I don’t know. It’s different,’ she said. ‘I read something about the spiritual side.’
I supposed being different was the appeal, and maybe the cost, though she’d never admit it. In the contest of who had the best holiday, I guessed spiritual trumped cultural every time.
‘Suppose it might be cool,’ I said.
Mom smiled, something up her cashmere sleeve. Mexico? Whatever. It couldn’t do any harm. I phoned Eva to break the news.
‘Mexico?’ she said. ‘Well, at least she won’t make you go clothes shopping.’
She was wrong.
I followed my mother past counters like ice cubes. The air-con was on overdrive. My shirt stuck, sweat from the street chilled on my arms – shopping was a fever, hot and cold at the same time. My mother strolled, confident her hands were clean enough to stroke every dress on the rail. I pictured Diana Pinter and her mother swapping clothes in Parisian changing rooms, laughing when a cocktail dress suited Diana, and a pleated skirt and blazer looked inexplicably apt on her mom.
‘How can I help?’
The assistant’s suit was endive pale. She smiled at her commission in the form of a woman with a Chanel purse and hair like a cinnamon bun, coiled at the nape.
‘I’m looking for something for my daughter for a trip,’ Mom said.
The assistant’s smile slipped. She pinned it back in place on her face. I knew the look well. Salesgirls and me have a history. She looked at me now, wondering how to squeeze me into something that would fit my mother’s sense of style.
‘She looks like a very mature young lady,’ she said.
And off we went, following her towards the back of the store. I was far too ‘mature-looking’ for Junior Miss. I wondered what ‘she’s a mature looking young lady’ was in Spanish. My shame would translate.
Mom pushed another dress into the changing room. Some things never changed.
‘How are you getting on? Don’t force the zip. You need another size.’
Her voice peered through the curtain. It reminded me of the bus home from camp. For two minutes a year my mother looked hopeful. When the bus pulled in, I’d see her on tiptoe, watching me walk from the back seat. Moving from window to window to the front of the bus, my head and shoulders were all she could see. Anything was possible.
‘Lovely to have you back!’ she’d say, looking me up and down.
She’d pause, like she had to swallow the words her mouth wanted to say.
‘Is that you? What happened to you? You look…’
We walked past parents using words we didn’t use. Mothers hugged daughters, fathers hugged sons, amazed how little of their arms were needed to fit around.
Outside the changing room, my mother said, ‘Twirl.’
I twirled. She stood back and frowned.
‘Maybe something with a smock waist?’ she said.
The salesgirl flitted away, dresses like failed parachutes in her arms.
If Mom could free me from camp, I could give her the sky on the plane. We switched seats so she could have the window. It was our first trip alone, other than weekends in Cape May – long days of Gramps on the boat, Gran trawling yard sales and Mom looking ashamed. Every night we met in the kitchen, Gran taking an interest in fishing in exchange for Gramps looking at the junk she’d bought, listening to the haggle of getting a dollar off, the drama of beating a neighbouring hand. I thought about their exchanges on the plane. Eating Mom’s leftover chicken, I waited to hear ‘Are you sure you aren’t full?’ It didn’t come. If anything, she smiled a private smile, maybe the same way I sometimes could when she tilted the lilies in the vase. I took her giving me her cookie as a sign. I wanted to believe we could be friends.
The bus wound down the dizzying road to the hotel. Out of the window were pine trees I hadn’t known Mexico had. I didn’t know a lot. I could smell the pine, the orange of the Japanese man behind us, and the perfume of the woman in the seat in front, nursing a kid old enough to chew jerky. My mother had a million pictures of churches in her purse. She looked at them, determined not to look at the woman. Most of the passengers weren’t American.
‘San Cristóbal,’ she’d said. Certain. ‘Says here, it’s popular with Europeans. I found out about something local we have to see. It’s…’ She changed the subject to the hotel.
We got off the bus and took our passports to the desk to check in.
Mom held onto them with white fingers. ‘Do we have to leave our passports?’ she said. ‘I have American Express.’
The clerk shook his sad head. We handed over our passports – two little faces in bad light.
‘We can manage,’ she said. ‘Men can take things the wrong way,’ she whispered, hauling our cases to our room.
The room was peach. Two beds, an iron table on the balcony and chairs with scrolled backs. My mother wiped the rail in the wardrobe before hanging our clothes. Then she laid stuff out on the bed to assemble a survival-kit tote: Spanish phrasebook, guidebook, traveller’s cheques, handkerchiefs, toilet paper, toilet-seat covers, bottled water from home, pepper spray, Sweet’N Low.
‘We have to smile, but not be too friendly,’ she said, reading about women travelling alone.
I smiled, in a not-too-friendly way.
I kept a journal on vacation, though I was never the diary type. I hated the idea of my thoughts all in one place to be used as evidence against me sometime. Dad gave me a journal before we left. It had a bunch of blue and lilac stamps printed on the cover and a quote in typewriter print, A traveller without observation is a bird without wings. Dad had customised the pages inside. Under each day he wrote Stuff I Liked, Stuff We Did, Stuff We Ate. He gave it to me with a smirk, an acknowledgement passing from hand to hand.
Under Stuff I Liked I wrote: The smell of cinnamon, mountain views, jack hares, markets, little tin things, red, bicycles, breakfast, the tile rose on the table, hot chocolate, raffia baskets, a whole family woven from corn on a craft stall, not knowing the language, being aware of my smile because it had to do all the work.
Under Stuff We Did I wrote: Walk, look, photograph old buildings, look in our phrasebook, sneeze, touch milagros, be afraid to haggle, smile, in a not-too-friendly way, say ‘No thank you’, say everything slower, tell taxi drivers we’re on the way to meet Dad, walk away.
Stuff We Ate had two columns, one for Mom, one for me.
Grapefruit Mexican Breakfast
Coffee and cigarette Pozol
Egg-white omelette Mole Chicken
Orange Juice Pozol
Grilled Fish Fish Tacos
Banana & bran Burrito
Coffee and cigarette Pozol
Then, I got bored with Mom and just did my own. Pozol was like sippable chocolate popcorn. I had it at the hotel, in a café in the old square and from carts. On the street, my mother shaved off my milk moustache with her fingertip. I decided to add a new section to my book.
Stuff I Don’t Like: My clothes laid out every morning like instructions of how to match Mom’s purse. Hills. Cobblestones & Mom’s heels. Mom’s fork turning over every bite to spot food poisoning lurking beneath. The dummies in the Museum of Mayan Medicine – a midwife and a spread woman with no mouth. The long walk through unknown streets to get there, Mom’s hand on the zipper of her purse, clutching her bottle of American water like Mace. (It reminded me of Eva and her Coke, a can in her hand all day. It stopped her fidgeting, she said. She missed it so bad at camp she poured water into an empty can, trying to trick herself.)
Most mornings, I took buses with my mother to small villages and lakes surrounding the town.
‘Now this is what I had in mind,’ Mom said.
People with backpacks shuffled off the bus like turtles with ill-fitting shells. Most wore slacks and took sloppy photos. They looked like they were saying, ‘I was here, next to this crumbling church. Ok, I looked sloppy – so what?’ Outside the church in San Juan Chamula was a market crammed with pottery, woven blankets, paper Frida Kahlos and skeletons in red skirts. I touched strange milagros: tin fish and angels, the Virgin Mary, disembodied hearts, silver hands and feet that looked like they’d snap from the weight of a prayer. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I bought a stripy armadillo for Eva (a hard little shell). Mom beelined to a stall of hand-embroidered skirts, peasant blouses and lace shawls.
‘Stand back,’ she said.
I stood under the canopy. Two old women looked on, silently embroidering in wicker chairs behind the stall. My mother draped a shawl over my shoulders, and another on hers. Both were white lace, delicate feathers on our arms.
‘Do you like it?’ she said, combing fringes.
‘I like this better,’ I said.
I reached for a black one, embroidered with white flowers. She stroked the quality and picked up another covered in red roses, a garden on her back. She bought all four shawls, an embroidered and a lace one each. It was the first time she asked what I liked without saying I had no idea what suited me.
Back at the hotel, Mom wrote postcards to Dad and Ed. I started one for Eva at camp – I only needed two sentences, but none were right. What I wanted to send was a river of pozol, tamales like rafts. I wondered if Eva had managed to find a junior counsellor saving for college this year. There was always one, looking both ways, sliding down a zip in the boat shed, a duffle bag of Peanut Butter Cups, Butterfingers, Tootsie Rolls. Eva and I stared at plastic packets glistening like jewels in the half dark. The counsellor smiled the way shop assistants eyed our mothers in stores. ‘This is a customer who knows what she wants. Take your time. Look. Anything else I can get you? No trouble at all.’ Every night, Eva and I sat by the lake talking about our moms, eating chocolate with a mark-up to make them blush, laughing till we could burst a gut.
‘You’re peeling,’ my mother said, rubbing lotion on my shoulders before bed. I thought about Eva peeling sunburn off my back at camp. She would hold up a mirror like a hairdresser showing a lady she was fit to go dancing. Carefully, I’d set about Eva’s back, wishing we could just peel off a layer and reveal, underneath our old skin, the sort of daughters our moms could take on a trip.
It was Thursday when my Mom suggested we wear the white shawls. She got me up early, insisting I wear my best, and least comfortable, dress. I put it on. I still wanted to please her.
‘Hannah, get a move on,’ she said.
Her fingers twitched as if looking for lilies. She tucked my hair behind my ear. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I’d had my fill of ruins, mountains and villages. Tomorrow we were spending the day in San Cristóbal doing last-minute shopping before our flight. Suddenly, my mother looked as eager as the morning of the sale at Bloomingdale’s. This village wasn’t in the guidebook, she said. No tour buses went from the square, all she had was a slip of paper with how to get there. Outside the old cinema, we rammed ourselves into a colectivo – a van full of backpackers and locals. The driver’s music was deafening. The van jerked to a stop outside fields to let people on and off. We got off at a dirt track surrounded by corn.
‘This way,’ my mother said, looking at her map.
‘Where we going?’
‘You’ll see,’ she said.
I think she was smiling. Later, I wanted to remember if she was smiling so bad it hurt. I hoped we weren’t visiting another old church: pretty as they were, they didn’t mean more to me than an hour in the shade. Walking around them, my mother looked sort of bored, revived only when she saw tiles or woodwork that would look great at the summer house she was trying to persuade Dad to buy. I followed her uphill now, stopping to sip water and whine about the bugs picnicking on my arms.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said.
I looked around at cattle sheds, the odd house with a rickety tile roof.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘I think.’
I panted behind her towards a white stone house. A skinny guy stood leaning against the wall, watching us approach. My mother took a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped the dust from our shoes. The man walked towards us, not smiling, just watching our clean shoes.
‘Hello. Is this the right place? We’re here to see, we heard…’
My mother fumbled in her purse, digging for her phrasebook, buried under breath mints and flyers.
The man nodded and held out his hand, palm to the sky.
‘Yes, of course.’
She handed him pesos, I’m not sure how many, and we followed him into the house.
‘Here? Thank you.’
My mother zipped her bag closed over her camera, like she did before we went into churches.
‘What is this? Some cheese-making place or something?’
‘Sshhh,’ she said.
We stepped into a narrow hallway. My mother’s hand rested on my back. Someone, an old woman, was coming out of the door at the end of the dim hall, rubbing her eyes. I squeezed in my stomach to let her pass. She stopped right in front of us and, cupping my cheek with the walnut of her hand, she cried, ‘Señorita gorda encantadora. Señorita gorda encantadora.’ There were tears in her eyes. I stared at her lips, like a drawstring bag, tightened around contents I couldn’t recognise.
‘Bendígale. Bendígale,’ she said.
She rushed past us to cry at the unsmiling man outside. My mother nudged me through the door at the end of the corridor and I lurched into the room. It was bare. A girl lay on an iron bed. In the corner was a woman on a chair. She stood, her hand gesturing us to the bed. She spoke in short bursts.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘my daughter. She not eat since year of too much rain. Crops fail. Only small water touch her tongue for two years. Yet she alive. Is miracle. She a saint, everyone say.’
Her English was as bare as the room. She made a cross with her fingers over her shoulders and head. My mother followed, dabbing on a cross like perfume. I don’t know why, but I did the same. I stared at the girl asleep in the bed, the light from the shutters making gold bars across her pale face. Her eyes were closed, her eyelids dark. I could hear her breathing, I thought. The white sheet, pulled up to the neck, barely moved.
The mother lifted the sheet for us to see stick legs, twig arms poking out of a white nightdress. Through it, I could see ribs, frail as a house of matchsticks it looked like a sigh could blow down.
‘We lost cattle. Corn. My daughter dream about angel. She know she did not have to eat,’ the woman said.
My mother nodded as if she understood. Something about the woman looked proud. My cheeks burned hot and red. I stared at the girl, then the mothers. Why? I wanted to yell, Why are we here? What good does it do? How can this happen? Who let it? Who would it save? I looked up at the shutters and had the urge to throw them back, let sun flood the room, drown us all. I wanted to grab my mother’s purse and drop mints in the girl’s mouth one by one, feed her like a bird. I glared at my mother, opened my mouth and not a word came. I was close to the bed. I couldn’t move. My hand touched the back of the hand of the girl, so cool it washed the heat from my own.
‘Thank you,’ my mother said. ‘Bless you.’
The words were alien, spoken like a child repeating something it didn’t know the meaning of, but wanted to know. The mother of the girl looked at me and patted my mother’s hand. The door opened then, and the skinny man and a boy with crutches came into the room. My mother and I stepped into the slim hall, following the jangle of coins in the man’s pocket outside.
Traipsing down the hill, my mother said we were lucky to see a miracle, a living miracle, in our lives. Even if it wasn’t a miracle, they believed it, she babbled, they really believe.
‘How many people can say that?’ she said, opening her purse to take a picture of a farmer skinning a duck, that little extra bit of local colour rammed into her purse.
I didn’t speak. I walked behind her, sun strapped to my back, our shadows swallowing each other if we got too close.
‘We have to hurry,’ she said, sipping water. She handed me the bottle. I shook my head, refusing the breath mints she offered. I just marched on, downhill towards the colectivo, the village, a little gift shop in town where we found a plastic money box of some saint with pink paint smeared on her lips and a slot in her crown.
‘Your gran would love this!’ Mom said. She combed tangled fringes on my shawl. ‘Is there anything you want?’
I shook my head. No. There was not.