‘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.