A group stood watching me. It was a family maybe. There was a young girl, twelve maybe and molded quickly from baby fat, and she had a plan. She approached me, followed by the rest.
"Hello," she said, in English. "How are you?"
I told her I was fine.
"Good," she said. "Can I… can I ask you questions?" She had a notebook at her chest. Behind her were five huge smiles. A father, mother, little brother (also a pudgy one), and maybe an aunt and uncle? They were all watching, a few steps back.
I asked her if this was for school. "Para escuela?" I said.
She smiled and nodded. Her brother, who was now right behind her, nodded, too. He looked like a kid I knew when I was little, a tubby tan boy named Carter.
"Is this your first time to Mexico?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
She checked a box in her notebook.
"What is… your name?"
"My full name?"
She wrote something down. She continued.
"Have you ever had Mexican food?"
"Yes. Many times."
She thought my name was My Full Name. I almost laughed. You could see her outy bellybutton through her too-small shirt, hippos dancing across her stomach.
"Have you bought any Mexican… andicraff?" she asked.
"Handicrafts? No, not yet."
She checked a box.
"Do you like Mexico?"
"Yes," I said. "Very much. I love Mexico." I wanted to say so much more. I wanted to say, first and foremost, that I loved her. And that I loved her brother, and only partly because he looked like my first friend. And also I loved her family – what kind of perfect, astounding family would travel, en masse, to the airport to help with their daughter's social studies project? She would never know anything but abundant and unceasing love. I wanted to be part of her family, to move in with them. I would pull my weight.
I was grinning at her and they were grinning at me. "Thank you very much," she said. "Can we take picture now?"
I said sure. I was still sitting as the father came forward with a camera and the brother came to my side. I grabbed the brother's waist, all that chub, with his sister on my right.
"Como te llamas'?" I asked him.
"Gabriel," he said.
"Y tú?" I asked the girl.
"Tiffany," she said.
I said nothing.
"Tiffany María Cervantes," she said.
I laughed. She smiled.
These two would always love each other. Dad took the picture and thanked me. I wanted a hug from the girl but decided it might seem strange. She would do it, give me the hug, but then they'd feel sorry for me and wonder what was wrong, why it was that I needed affection from strangers twelve years old.
It hit me then that her teacher would know she'd messed up the part about my name. I had to correct it on her paper.
"Por favor," I said. "Mi nombre es… no es…"
She looked confused. I thought about just taking her pen and fixing it in her notebook but now the family was watching as if something was wrong.
"Por favor" I said again, then took one of the checks, still soggy on the edges, and held it to her, with my finger underlining my name in the middle. "Mi…" I said.
The implications swirled. My name was my name – was comprehensible and complete – only while watched by the centurian, only on the line upper-center of the check, and I hated this name, hated it there. But Tiffany María understood. She began copying my name into her book, front teeth biting lower lip, determined to get it right. She finished and showed it to me. I smiled.
I patted her on the back. She waved goodbye. Her family, behind her, waved too and she joined them and they walked down the corridor, where light burst through the doors and threw itself across the floor in thick white stripes.
I was writing quickly. First I wrote my name, signed each check on the bottom line, matching my signature again. I signed nine checks, knowing each time I came one step closer to being done with that godawful name of mine. Swik, swoop, swik swoop -- each dotted i a stab at that wretched man. And then I started over, and in the middle of each check wrote her name, with more clarity and flourish each time:
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
Tiffany María Cervantes
And I put the checks back into their wet envelope and was ready to go after her – they were still visible, the whole family, five white doors down – but could they cash these things? Nine hundred dollars made out to a twelve year-old?
I wrote a note of explanation. I took the checks out again – I could still see them; they'd stopped to interview another traveler – and I put my driver's license number on the back of each. I stuffed the checks back in. That would prove it. I was free and I took off after them, running like an idiot, chest puffing, chin leading my way.
They were still chasing me, laughing but confused, when I got on the bus to Cuernevaca. It was pretty great. I had no baggage to throw in that storage compartment underneath so I just leaped on and the bus drove away, pulled away as they came after me, all six of them, Tiffany's dad first, and I waved from my tinted window as we pushed off.
The bus was crowded and smelled of someone's spaghetti lunch. There were TVs above us and a romantic comedy flickered on just as the bus's babies began to wail and just before I fell into a perfect swirling leaden blue-black sleep. For three hours I was out cold, drool pooling on my shoulder, my crown resting on the cool dark window.
My room was in a huge old yellow mansion, where much of the wedding would be held, on the tip-top of a hill, overlooking all of the twisted and unnavigable, plainly beautiful pastel patchwork city, with stables next door and lilies everywhere. I arrived late, after 2 A.M., and everyone was asleep. While they slept I ran through the cool empty halls. I flew down the stairs and into the courtyard. On the grounds, black and wet with dew, there were peacocks – blue peacocks and also three white peacocks, magnificent, so pure they shocked, and with their tails extending four feet behind them, each levitating perfectly and horizontally, like a magician's assistant sleeping and unconcerned. I slept in the biggest bed I'd ever seen, high off the ground and so soft, a bed atop a thousand beds, surrounded by a small close-knit group of books, hovering in mahogany, about the miracles of the saints.
The next day there was a lunch where everyone, really just about almost everyone, maybe a hundred of the wedding's guests, gave a toast, some in both Spanish and English, everyone brilliant and wiping away tears with fingers and palms and it was all so gorgeous, the sun lighting the umbrellas like lanterns – on that green lawn everywhere people wept. The bride and groom mentioned how many children they hoped to have – between six and twelve – and that no matter where they chose to live – and frankly they had no idea just yet – the babies would be born in Mexico, so their systems would be tougher, not so fragile, not like the babies born in America.
And there was a girl there I knew in high school, Frances, now pregnant and married to a huge blond man from Mexico City, who worked on the Sacramento River, taking pictures of white-water rafters as they passed the bend, and I almost cried when I saw her – I never thought I'd see her again! – she was so big, and with cheeks so red, her husband so proud – such a good looking baby that would be – and the ceremony itself, in an ancient church a mile away from the estate, wore moaning music by a bowlegged band of plum-clad mariachis above us and when the bride and groom walked out we threw pink and yellow and white flower petals, all still moist with life, and the neighborhood children scrambled to pick them up and throw them again.