By Marianne Rogoff
Gold Solas Award-winner in the Women’s Travel category
Lexy arrives with three salt-encrusted shot glasses and a bagful of weed and edibles.
“You took that across the border?” Andrea says. (She does not do ganja anymore, it gives her panic attacks.)
Lexy claims Google said it’s legal. “Not a risk I would take,” I tell her.
The plan for our girlfriend week in Mexico is “strictly fun.” Besides bouquets of giant calla lilies and Catrina market bags, I offer top-shelf tequila and spicy guacamole. Andrea has brought us matching floral robes in sizes small, medium, and large and we put them on, talk on each other’s beds for hours. Then it’s time to dress up, clink glasses, and head into town. For the first few days, the three of us match each other shot for shot and keep up a good fun pace.
I’ve been here before, many times, so my friends feel no need to pay attention to maps or addresses as they marvel at spirited parades of devils and demons, made large and visible in elaborate costumes and scary masks. Touching retablos of death and crucifixions in the artisan markets, despite the signs that say No Toca (Don’t Touch), Andrea says, “Spooky stuff,” and ponders putting faith in milagros (miracles), small silver symbols of arms, legs, and hearts, good-luck charms to ward off pain in those parts of the body.
Turning corners, I keep pointing out landmarks and street names and they keep ignoring me. I suggest, “You at least need to know where our street is, in case we become separated.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” they declare.
Margaritas in hand at a corner cantina, they raise a toast, “Best Friends Forever.”
A large piece of decorative art hangs over the couch where we’re staying, a white canvas with thick, hand-painted black letters: Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again too few to mention…. and so on, the lyrics to the entire song. Is this what prompts the disturbing dinner conversation at Berlin Bar halfway through the week?
Regrets.
Lexy decides to point out what mine are, or should be, according to her.“You should have been in the hospital.”
I scan the room’s flouncy cabaret murals and gaudy chandeliers, stunned that this would be brought to the table now, served up with bratwurst and sauerkraut and the smell of beer.
“What is it you want me to know?” I manage to ask.
Lexy shrugs. “You might have had a better outcome.”
Andrea attempts to smooth. “Good idea at the time?”
At the time I was young, strong, low risk, had read all the books, found the best doctor and midwife around, and believed in my heart that a homebirth would be the safest way to deliver my firstborn. Radical choice? Swallowing my surprise that Lexy must have felt this way for years, I muster, “We should have been in the hospital because nothing ever goes wrong there?”
Lexy’s current job is Director of Risk Management at a big city hospital. She leads committees on bioethics, knows the statistics. One of her roles is to determine the financial cost of chancy decisions, figure out who’s to blame, and negotiate the payout following lawsuits. Why is she holding me accountable now, at a touristy German restaurant in the middle of Mexico? That part alone is disorienting, surrounded as we are by large, glaring devil portraits, darker red and more fanged than the Mexican versions we’ve been living with since arriving.
I say, “Isn’t everything risky? Walking, tripping, driving, crashing, flying, falling out of the sky?”
Andrea orders another bottle of wine and tries changing the subject. I put my hand over my glass, “No mas,” as Lexy tries backpedaling but she’s hit a nerve. I hear myself shouting, “If we’d been in the hospital, none of that would have happened? You think it’s my fault the baby died? What the fuck?”
The hour grows late as the dialogue rages on, until ours is the last table in the place, only a few patrons left at the bar. Lexy starts crying, she didn’t mean anything by it. “It was a stupid thing to say.”
Andrea aims to return us to fun and laughter. “See, she didn’t mean anything. Haven’t you ever said something stupid?”
I get up from the table, clear about the one thing I know for certain. “No one can know what-if. And even if you’re right, I already paid, big time.”
Andrea downs the last of the malbec, Lexy settles the bill, then they make their way to the ladies room but I’ve already headed out into the streets, shaken, assuming they’d follow and find me. I wait on my favorite bench in the jardin, mariachis crooning soulful tunes into the darkness in front of the cathedral, couples kissing in the shadows, starlight, beautiful night. Meanwhile, Lexy and Andrea step out of the bar and go right instead of left because they have no idea where they are. Rats scurry across the stones of the plaza. Of course there are rats here, normally invisible, along with all the other dangers: walking alone late at night, losing a watch or keys, paying too much, falling off a cobblestone curb; indeed, there’s a joke that it’s the “City of Fallen Women” as so many ankles get turned and broken here.
I stay a long time, shivering with the dredged-up memory of my daughter’s birth, decisions that were made before, during, and after our frantic trip to the neonatal intensive care unit. We should have been in the hospital? Maybe! I can name everything that followed the birth as a disaster because she did not live long, though it was months longer than the one or two days the doctors predicted. The baby lived, never able to eat, cry, or grow, but we fell in love with her, just as she was. Of course, we expected a healthy child and I was desperate to place blame, but where? The midwife, doctor, God, Fate, her, me? We tried all that. There was no point.
Back on the streets, Lexy and Andrea eventually notice that they’re completely lost, and drunk, and offer to pay a taxi driver very well if he is willing to help them find their way to a place they only vaguely know how to find. I’m sitting on the couch in my pjs under the “My Way” canvas when they get there, all three of us sort of exhilarated by how unexpectedly awful things can be. They ask if I want them to leave and I tell them No, though they seem to be hoping I’ll set them free not to stay, which will likely mean more hard conversations. Why leave? They’re lifelong friends. I love them. Do I want to lose them, over this?
We make our way to the rooftop terrace and sit outside in the dark till the roosters crow, that night and every one after that, talking it through, that story and many others. Nothing gets resolved. Andrea is quiet, Lexy does not change her mind, and I have to accept that this is what she believes and she is not the only one who thinks this way. It must be forgivable that they cannot possibly understand what I know to be true, how I’ve come around to feeling that everything important that I know, I learned from those days and months with that baby girl: have no expectations, be present with what is, nothing is guaranteed, death can be peaceful.
Here, Death is a ten-foot-tall walking puppet-on-stilts, skeletons ride bicycles, borrachos are everywhere, hand-carved and real. Many tourists come specifically to confront demons, find their way back from regrets, illness, heartbreak. The quality of sunlight, the vibrant colors of painted facades, hidden courtyards full of flowers, the food, the music, all of it, balm for every sort of guilt and sorrow. I’ve been reviving myself in this town for years, checking in with my broken heart as I walk the cobblestones, smooth and round under the soles of my feet, a kind of reflexology.
There are said to be underground caverns of giant healing crystals along with a miles-long hot springs river that’s been cultivated into pools and my favorite hot-water cave to soak in. The altitude is high at 6400 feet and it always takes a few days to adapt my breathing. It is easy to get dehydrated. The tequila is very good. When old friends get together who haven’t seen each other in a while, old stories are bound to emerge, to be revisited and revised, or left alone, our own versions to serve our different needs.
Over the next four days, we sink into hot springs, walk up hills and down, get lost, and come to know our way around town and each other. By the end of the trip, Andrea has bought a Catrina market bag’s worth of embroidered dresses and skeleton toys for her offspring and Lexy’s only conclusion is that she’d been drunk. “Why else would I bring up such an old painful story?”
“Sometimes, things happen for no reason?” I say.
I believe this about many things in life, like how the church bells will start to clang at odd hours, for no reason that I can figure out. I used to lie awake and count but they didn’t ring to tell the time.
~ ~ ~
Marianne Rogoff is the author of the memoir Silvie’s Life and the story collection Love Is Blind in One Eye, with six of those stories nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her travel stories have appeared in The Best Travel Writing, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, ROAM: Representations of Home, My Paper Ghosts, SOL: English Writing in Mexico, and Living Loving Longing Lisbon Volume 1 and Volume 2. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Dominican University, and leads Trips for Writers to inspiring locales.