Chapter 9
When the plane’s wheels landed on Puerto Rican soil my stomach swished in waves. I wasn’t sure if it was from the rocky landing or the impending situation, but at that exact moment, I almost had to pull out the barf bag from the seat pocket in front of me.
I closed my eyes and breathed slowly.
“Dude, we’re here,” Vince cheered, grabbing my biceps with a shake—the absolute last thing I needed. He jumped up from his seat, long before the fasten seat belt sign was turned off, and was hit with an evil eye from a nearby flight attendant. To appease her, he slightly squatted in the vicinity of his seat, ready to pounce the minute the plane pulled into the gate.
I, however, was planted in my seat fending off ripples of nausea when the pilot finally triggered the overhead light. I waited until the passengers around me had retrieved their bags before tugging my pink duffle bag from the compartment above—it was embroidered with my initials MLR (my middle name’s “Louise,” after a great grandmother I never knew). It must have weighed at least thirty pounds and of course I had no help with it since my brother was already halfway up the aisle headed for the door. I threw my black laptop bag onto my other shoulder and followed the mad rush of passengers.
As soon as I stepped into the brightly lit Luis Muñoz Marin international airport, I was smacked with a spectacle of tan strangers rushing and pushing in every direction. The chaos reminded me of a Discovery Channel special I saw on killer bees, and an instinctive part of me felt the urge to cover my head and run.
“Vince. Vince!” I yelled to my brother who was darting ahead of the crowd like he actually had a clue where he was going.
He stopped, adjusted his black Foo Fighters T shirt under the strap of his duffle bag and turned around. “What?”
“I need to use the bathroom,” I half whispered, half yelled.
“Mariana!” he whined. “We just got here. Couldn’t you have gone on the plane?”
“Well, it’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?”
I turned to assess the faces of the travelers surrounding us. None of them caught my eye, and they all seemed to be in quite a hurry.
“Excuse me. Excuse me,” I said to a twentysomething woman passing by. She mumbled something in Spanish and kept walking, never breaking her stride.
“Excuse me, sir,” I tried again, touching the shoulder of white-haired man sifting through a carry-on bag.
“No hablo inglés,” he muttered, not looking up.
“Oh, okay. Um. I can do this. Uh,” I said under my breath. “¿Dónde. Está. El. Baño?” I asked so slowly that I must have sounded mentally retarded to any native speaker within earshot.
The old man looked up at me with confusion. Clearly he did assume I was retarded, and pointed down the terminal. “Allí,” he stated.
I thought back to the Spanish lesson we had on “Aquí, allí, allá.” I was pretty sure “allí” meant “there.” So I took a wild guess that the bathrooms were down the terminal over “there” somewhere. I walked toward my brother, who was standing with his arms crossed and his gray sneaker tapping impatiently.
“Look, I need to find the bathroom,” I said, as I walked in the direction the man had pointed. “Just look for the ‘baño.’ It’s gotta be around here somewhere.”
We walked several paces. The thick crowd of travelers engulfing us made it hard to absorb our surroundings, and the duffle bag on my shoulder felt like it weighed more than I did. My bladder was about two seconds from exploding.
“Hey, look!” Vince pointed to a sign a few feet above him. It said “Toilets” in English.
“Okay, now I feel like an idiot,” I muttered.
There was a line of at least three women in front of me, and all of them were rattling off in Spanish. After five years of language classes at one of the best public schools in the nation—classes I received no less than a “B” in—I realized I could not understand one word they were saying. They might as well have been speaking Japanese.
The reality of the situation began to sink in. I was the annoying tourist—one of those foreign strangers who take up the entire sidewalk in Philadelphia mumbling in some ridiculous language with guidebooks and cameras in their hands, begging for directions in some indecipherable accent. I made a mental note to be nicer to tourists when I got home.