In the taxi from the airport, Noodles gave the kids some ground rules for Mexico. Number one: Don’t try to pat stray dogs.
“Oh, I would never do that,” said Scout.
I turned to look at her. “You’re thinking about petting a dog right now, aren’t you.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
There were a lot of roving dogs in Sayulita, which is a beach town north of Puerto Vallarta. The dogs rode on motorbikes and perched on golf carts, splashing along the dirt roads with their mouths open and tongues out. We were drinking margaritas on the beach on the first evening when a string of horses was led out the drainage point and down to the waves. The horses paused at the crest of the high tideline to lift their tails and dump a pile of shit then continued on into the sunset. A dog ran over and gobbled up the shit. Somehow it worked.
We were three families with four kids between us and the goal was to celebrate Thanksgiving together, or I guess to avoid celebrating it in the U.S. in the usual way. Noodles and I and our friends P + J rented a place that looked a bit like Casa Madrigal from Encanto. (Noodles: “isn’t Encanto set in Columbia?”) The third couple were H and Love Lady (so named by her daughter), who told us on getting there that they had separated. We’d meet on the beach for sunset, if not before, and be set upon by people selling blankets, bracelets, balloon animals, hats. “Can I interest you in something you don’t need?” said one hawker, and I was so charmed I almost bought something on principle.
Up and down the beach were massage tents with curtains that reared up in the breeze to reveal the top of someone’s buttocks for a half-second. You could just walk up, no appointment. It was 500 pesos for an hour massage, or about 25 bucks. I got four. My Spanish is very bad–solo poquito–so I would just ask for a “relaxing.” Other than showing the entire beach your tits during the rollover, it felt low-risk. For $25, maybe they would do something in the hour that felt good. Of course, you don’t get to pick your person. I got a middle-aged man for one of my massages. He squirted me with oil like a dead body he was trying to dissolve with bleach. His hands were very good at thigh massaging, but ineffectual with the face and head stuff. He put a towel over my face and shook it as if he was mopping up shaving cream at a barber shop. A missed opportunity. Maybe it’s my high-feminine soul, but you could trace lines on my face for an hour and charge me 1,000 pesos. That would be worth it to me. He also had another move he did when I was on my stomach that I called the rattlesnake: he bent my leg back at the knee and shook my foot. No clue what this was supposed to do. At the end, trying to get the boobs back inside their triangle tents, I told him “muy bueno.” You felt like you had to put your clothes on from the plastic bucket really fast, and fetch a tip. Gracias, gracias, I said a bunch. Also grazi, forgetting where I was.
For the most part, the kids did great being in a weird new place. The golf cart helped, since who can be mad when instead of walking to the beach you can climb on a cart and bump there over cobblestones with no seatbelts? Japhs insisted on buying some “Oakleys” from a street merchant (200 pesos, or about $10?), which gave him even more of a presence on the cart. “This cart has the JUICE,” he said after the first one broke down and we got new wheels. One morning, though, the Lucky Charms ran out before he could have his bowl, and he flew into a blind rage. Fine, I said, fine, we will go look for Lucky Charms. So I took him on the golf cart, a harried parent careening us up and down streets without car doors, unsure where a shop might be, preparing to ask “Cuánto?” but then not know what any of the numbers were. We drove out of town and could only find Fruit Loops (“exceso calorías”), which he eventually consented to. It was I suppose poor parenting to cave so easily, but the kids’ wild ups and downs through the days reminded me how hard it can feel to be a person. Watching the adults on Thanksgiving, I felt for everyone—Noodles tending the rooftop “grill” that was roof tiles and an old grate, burning his hands and serving dinner (some barbecued prawns and an industrial vat of mashed potatoes) three hours late; H and his insane middle-aged Crossfit body, the deep pelvic V muscle symptomatic of significant time and energy investments; the friends-of-friends who were new enough as a couple that when I asked where they live I got a very sharp “well he lives in __ but I live in __.”
Not that it was less awkward for the couples with more time under their belts, either. “Do you want to play with my hair?” I asked Noodles on the couch. “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to do,” he replied lol. We are 17 years in. Noodles had spent time back in the day living in Costa Rica and doing migrant farmworker outreach in La Junta, Colorado, but he was reluctant to use his Spanish, which has atrophied somewhat. On the beach, he offered to buy a round of margaritas, and asked if everyone wanted “red stuff” on the rim. “It’s Tajín, not ‘the red stuff,’” said H, who had been basically living in Sayulita, his kid enrolled temporarily in a jungle Montessori. I walked up to the beach bar with Noodles and watched him order drinks from the Australian bartender (how did she get there?).
“Four margaritas with the red stuff,” he said.
“It’s ta-HEEN?” said the Aussie in flawless Queenslander, holding up the Tajín bottle.
Everywhere, communication was riven by these sinkholes. “Dónde estás?” a masseuse asked me. “New York … Nuevo York?” I said, mortified, also wondering if I should try and tack on “y Ow-strah-lia.” It’s not easy to sound like this much of an idiot in multiple languages. The kids ran from 4 years old to 9, and had to find ways to play together. They played Splendor with rules that let you collect as many crystals and cards as you wanted. Scout—escout, I kept hearing it—wanted to discuss her deepest emotional thoughts, and who did she choose to share them with? H, who speaks Spanish with his daughter in an accent I can only describe as “dad.” Above the V lines of an Abercrombie model, a big heart.
The day after Thanksgiving, Love Lady, P and I traded shifts with the boys for massages. The men watched the kids while we strolled to the beach. Love Lady was assigned a table, then P, and then me—realizing I had the man again. Did he think I came back to get rubbed by him again on purpose? Despite the dampener of an SSRI, I was alive to all the feelings, and thinking about how he was somebody’s son, invested with all the hopes and love of some mom somewhere, then growing up to have to work on my sorry slab of meat. It was the most intimate thing you could do with a stranger in public, I thought: Here is my body; touch it. He had to start by swatting the sand off my dirty feet with a towel. While I lay on the table, I thought about what it would feel like to tell everyone that I love them, to just say it to anyone who qualified.
Afterward, I asked P and Love Lady what they think the maximum number of hours a rich person has ever been massaged in a day. LL thought you could easily get to four hours with a facial, a wrap, and a massage. Then there was the mythical four-handed massage, like being drawn and quartered, but nirvana, floating into pieces from the scalp on down. We drifted back to the casa, and H announced, “alright, time for three dongs to get a massage.”
On the final night, the boys came back from a surf trip—five hours, one wave—and we all trundled into town on the carts for tacos and churros. The children ran through the plaza, where local kids were setting off fireworks. I saw H put an arm around Love Lady. Somehow, it all worked.
Goodies
For Lithub, I wrote about the art in Nightbitch, and the way it reconstructs the lost memories of childhood and recognizes what mothers know.
(the eggs!)In McSweeney’s, “Finally, I Can Quit the Workforce to Devote Myself to Mothering and Fighting Dust Storms”
Patricia Lockwood on Scully (and Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy):
Scully must disappear because Gillian Anderson is pregnant. Sometimes a punk from Grand Rapids who everyone thinks is English has just gotta have a baby at the age of 24. They hid it for a while with camera angles and increasingly square taupe blazers, but beyond a certain point the secret would be out. They discussed replacing her but saw at once that it was impossible: her upper lip, for one, and the light in her eyes. So then the show becomes about something else, something deep and dark as water, it is carried rapidly past all other unsolved mysteries to ask: what if a woman were irreplaceable?
The show must become about her body: what has been done to her? What has she experienced? And all of us are breathing with the soft rising of her belly, in the room where she is being tested by the others.
There is a massage place I go to where they sometimes stick their fingers in your ear holes and god help me, I like it
I save your writing like little treats and it always satisfies.