“Jackie Onassis changes her sheets every single day,” Ophelia said. “Now that is sick, you ask me.”
“Sick,” I agreed.
I let the man put his clothes in a basket and go to the dryers before I took mine out. Some people were grinning but I just ignored them. I filled my cart with soggy sheets and towels. It was almost too heavy to push and, wet, not everything fit. I slung the hot-pink curtains over my shoulder. Across the room the man started to say something, then looked away.
It took a long time to get home. Even longer to hang everything, although I did find a rope. Fog was rolling in.
I poured some coffee and sat on the back steps. I was happy. I felt calm, unhurried. Next time I am on BART, I won’t even think about getting off until the train stops. When it does, I’ll make it out just in time.
Toda Luna, Todo Año
Toda luna, todo año
Todo día, todo viento
Camina, y pasa también.
También, toda sangre llega
Al lugar de su quietud.
Automatically, Eloise Gore began to translate the poem in her head. Each moon, each year. No. Every moon, every year gets the fricative sound. Camina? Walks. Shame that doesn’t work in English. Clocks walk in Spanish, don’t run. Goes along, and passes away.
She snapped the book shut. You don’t read at a resort. She sipped her margarita, made herself take in the view from the restaurant terrace. The dappled coral clouds had turned a fluorescent pewter, crests of waves shattered silver on the gray-white beach below. All down the beach, from the town of Zihuatanejo, was a faint dazzle and dance of tiny green light. Fireflies, neon lime-green. Village girls placed them in their hair when they walked at dusk, strolling in groups of twos or threes. Some of the girls scattered the insects through their hair, others arranged them into emerald tiaras.
This was her first night here and she was alone in the dining room. Waiters in white coats stood near the steps to the pool and bar where most of the guests still danced and drank. Mambo! Que rico el Mambo! Ice cubes and maracas. Busboys lit flickering candles. There was no moon; it seemed the stars gave the metallic sheen to the sea.
Sunburned wildly dressed people began to come into the dining room. Texans or Californians she thought, looser, breezier than anyone from Colorado. They called across the tables to each other: “Go for it, Willy!” “Far fuckin’ out!”
What am I doing here? This was her first trip anywhere since her husband’s death three years before. Both Spanish teachers, they had traveled every summer in Mexico and Latin America. After he died she had not wanted to go anywhere without him, had signed up each June to teach summer school. This year she had been too tired to teach. In the travel office they had asked her when she needed to return. She had paused, chilled. She didn’t need to return, didn’t need to teach at all anymore. There was no place she had to be, no one to account to.
She ate her ceviche now, feeling painfully conspicuous. Her gray seersucker suit, appropriate in class, in Mexico City … it was dowdy, ludicrously the wrong thing. Stockings were tacky, and hot. There would probably even be a wet spot when she stood up.
She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a tí. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.
It was dark on the beach and fireflies played in the misty green swirls, on their own now. Out in the bay were red flares for luring fish.
“Pues, cómo estuvo?” the waiter asked.
“Esquisito, gracias.”
The hotel boutique was still open. She found two simple hand-woven dresses, one white and one rose. The dresses were soft and loose, unlike anything she had ever worn. She bought a straw bag and several combs with jade fireflies on them, for prizes for her students.
A nightcap? the manager suggested as she crossed the lobby. Well, why not? she thought and entered the now empty bar by the pool. She ordered Madero brandy with Kahlua, Mel’s favorite drink. She missed him acutely, wanted his hand on her hair. She closed her eyes to the sound of palms rippling, ice shaking in the mixer, the creak of oars.
In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives / at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre.
She missed her own firm bed, the efficient lull of cars on the distant freeway. What I really miss is my morning crossword puzzle. Oh, Mel, what am I going to do? Quit teaching? Travel? Get a doctorate? Commit suicide? Where did that thought come from? But teaching is my whole life. And that’s pitiful. Miss Gore is a Bore. Every year a new student invented that, gleeful. Eloise was a good teacher, dry, dispassionate, the kind that years later the students liked.
Cuando calienta el sol, aquí en la playa. At any lull in the music sounds from nearby rooms came through the shutters. Laughter, lovemaking.
“Mr. World Traveler! Mr. Know-it-all! World Traveler!”
“Honey, I do! (ah dew),” the Texan drawled. A crash then and a silence. He must have fallen, passed out. The woman laughed throatily. “Praise the Lord!”
Eloise wished she had a mystery book. She got up and went to the bathroom, cockroaches and land crabs clattering out of her way. She showered with coconut soap, dried with damp towels. She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.
The band stopped playing at two thirty. Footsteps and whispers, a glass shattering. Say you dig it, baby, say it! A moan. Snores.
Eloise woke at six, as usual. She opened the shutters, watched the sky turn from milky silver to lavender gray. Palm branches slipped in the breeze like shuffled cards. She put on her bathing suit and her new rose dress. No one was up, not even in the kitchen. Roosters crowed and zopilotes flapped around the garbage. Four pigs. In the back of the garden Indian busboys and gardeners slept, uncovered, curled on the bricks.
She stayed on the jungle path away from the beach. Dark dripping silence. Orchids. A flock of green parrots. An iguana arched on a rock, waiting for her to pass. Branches slapped sticky warm into her face.
The sun had risen when she climbed a hill, down then to a rise above a white beach. From where she stood she could see onto the calm cove of Las Gatas. Underwater was a stone wall built by Terascans to protect the cove from sharks. A school of sardines swirled through the transparent water, disappeared like a tornado out to sea. Clusters of palapa huts stretched down the beach. Smoke drifted from the farthest one but there was no one to be seen. A sign said BERNARDO’S SCUBA DIVING.
She dropped her dress and bag on the sand, swam with a sure crawl far out to the stone wall. Back then, floating and swimming. She treaded water and laughed out loud, finally lay in the water near the shore rocking in the waves and silence, her eyes open to the startling blue sky.