The Mexican Year

It’s raining again. Every kind of rain imaginable. At hardest, a violent lashing that slants almost horizontal, driving under the eaves and into wall-cracks. At softest, a foggy mist that hangs in the air, waterlogging your lungs when you breathe. But always raining, raining and raining and raining, until the desert beyond the maquiladora zone is drowning, until streets resemble the Rio Tijuana and entire hillsides turn into cataclysmic slides of mud, until the roof is leaking from everywhere and animals are invading to find someplace dry.

I rise from the makeshift couch — Nick’s new queen-sized bed, which we pile with pillows — and glide through this cramped house on bare feet. It only takes a couple strides in any direction to visit every room. The bedroom, where I sleep. The tiny bathroom with a new shower curtain and an old reflective tile above the sink. The kitchen with its door and barred window onto the alley. And then back to the living room, where the bed leaves only a narrow periphery for movement.

Mostly I’m checking the buckets and pots and Tupperware containers that dot the cement floor, plop-plop-plopping with drips. I don’t want them to overflow. Some of the leaks are so bad the containers fill up fast! But I’m also trying to make sure no creepy crawlies — scorpions, in particular — are sneaking inside to avoid the rain. I’ve already killed one scorpion the way Nick showed me, by stabbing it through the carapace with a long-handled barbecue fork.

No excitement this time. Not even a container that needs emptying. But I keep the fork with me, just in case.

My side of the couch is neatly made and stacked with a backrest of pillows. Nick’s side of the couch is a disaster area of kicked-off sheets and pillows strewn about and him in the middle of it, lying on his back with the covers tangled around his legs, his eyes pinched shut in twitchy sleep. The temperature is 60 degrees and he’s only wearing a pair of plain white boxer shorts. Fever is burning him up. Whatever I had yesterday was contagious after all.

I slide gently onto the bed, careful not to wake him. His limbs shiver, then still. Perspiration beads his forehead. I reach over to the muscular curve of his shoulder, hovering my palm above the bare skin, feeling heat rise off him in waves.

Holding my breath, I hover my palm further across his body, tracing the well-built chest that puts mine to shame, wondering what it would be like to touch him, to feel his heart beating.

I’ve never seen a man’s body like this before, so naked and unmoving. I’m fascinated by his skin tone, a chalky white that pinkens in some places and is almost translucent in others. Growing up Nasrin always thought white boys were yucky because they were “Crisco-colored”. That just made them even more intriguing to me.

My eyes slide farther down Nick’s body, toward the flat taper of his waist, where a hairy loveline leads from the whorl of his navel into his boxer shorts. I’m gripped by an insane temptation, my hand beginning to glide down to — yikes, what am I doing? I return my hand to the swell of his left pectoral, hovering oh-so-close to the burning skin, feeling him radiate up my arm and into my body.

I’m waving my hand back and forth over Nick’s chest, pretending that I’m stroking its taut curves and feeling the little pink nipples. Warily I glance up at his face, which is softer in sleep. Almost delicate. His jawline isn’t such a hard clenched angle, his pointy nose and chin seem blunted. Then I blush and look away, because he’s too pretty to stare at for long.

Sometimes at night I masturbate slowly thinking of him. Never about the act itself, or anything sexual at all. Instead I just fantasize that he’s talking with me, touching my hand lightly, telling me I’m beautiful and I make him happy. I never rub myself hard or fast enough to climax, in fact I try to avoid it. All I want is to drift beneath the covers in secret waves of contentment.

“Nooshin…” His eyelids flutter.

Omigod! I swallow a shriek of surprise and roll back onto my side of the bed, groping blindly for the remote, I’m just watching TV here, that’s all.

Oh crap. My groping hand closed around the wrong hard shape. I’m pointing the scorpion-stabbing fork at the TV, not the remote control! Hurriedly I lay the fork aside and fumble around for the remote. My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure he can hear it.

“Can you…get me…some water?” Nick pants. His voice is whisper-soft with exhaustion.

“Sure!” I almost scream. “Be right back!”

And then I flee the living room, tripping over a pothandle and sloshing water everywhere, and the leaks in the kitchen have gotten so bad it’s almost raining indoors, and I think I see a malevolent shadow retreat under the refrigerator, and now I wish I was holding that stupid fork instead of the remote, and that’s when it hits me — I should probably be overwhelmed and crying, on the verge of suicide or going back to my husband or something, but instead I just feel alive, really spectacularly alive.

After a while the sound of retching dies away and the toilet flushes. Then I hear the gurgle of a water bottle, spitting noises, liquid trickling down the sink drain. Finally there’s a single defeated sigh — the sound of Nooshin contemplating herself in the reflective tile that serves as our bathroom mirror. Pobrecita — poor thing — I think to myself, the same way I’ve been thinking it since her first trip to the bathroom early this morning. I know she dislikes having to look at herself.

She emerges at a miserable gait, managing to seem disheveled even though her octopus-ink hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her face is freshly-scrubbed. She’s a loser at both ends, vomiting from the sangria she drank and shitting diarrhea from the fish tacos she ate. Welcome to Mexico. Enjoy your stay. Come again soon.

“I didn’t think you could get this hung over from sangria,” Nooshin mumbles, a hand held delicately to her forehead.

“Not a few sips of it, anyway. You going back to bed?”

“Nah, I think I’ll try staying up. Is it okay if I watch some TV?”

“Yeah, that’s cool,” I say, putting aside a sheaf of research notes that are begging to be put aside. “Just promise you won’t yack on the couch.”

Nooshin comes over to join me on the “couch” — actually just my brand spanking new queen-sized bed with pillows propping us up. She’s wearing her new sleepshirt, a hot pink v-neck number emblazoned with a Marie Antoinette crown and the words REAL SECRETO — royal secret. I prefer her old sleepshirt, which had faded into semi-sheerness from years of washings. It turned translucent whenever she walked in front of a window or light, and pulled tight against her body I could see right through it.

She flips aimlessly through the channels, all eight of them. Five English-language channels from San Diego, three Spanish-language channels from Tijuana. This house didn’t come with a satellite dish. “So? You see anything interesting?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Me neither.” The bed rocks underneath me as she adjusts position. “You feel like watching a movie instead?”

I’m staring at her slim legs, which seem to go on forever when she stretches them out, from the mid-thigh hem of her sleepshirt to those cute unpainted toenails.

“Um…Nick?”

“What?”

“You want to watch a movie instead?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. One of the ones you rented?” I raise my hand in the universal STOP command when she sits up in slow motion, wincing at the discomfort. “You just relax. I’ll get the movie.”

I slide down to the foot of the bed, which is only a short reach across the bare concrete floor to the TV and DVD player. There are three DVD containers to pick from, all dirty white and stamped with the logo of the local pseudo-Blockbuster. I pry them open and peek inside, one after another, discovering…

“Uh, Nooshin? These are all Bollywood movies. Old ones, from the copyright dates.”

“I know. I thought the titles sounded cool.”

“Say what?” I turn around to look at her and — goddamnit, eyes straight ahead Nick! This is the wrong time to peek up the tempting junction of her sleepshirt and thighs. “You can’t actually read these titles, can you? They’re in Hindi, I think.”

“I said they sounded cool. Like, the way I imagined the words should be pronounced. I didn’t say I could read them.” Nooshin blanches a moment, as if an invisible wave of nausea is cresting through her. “Just pick one and let’s see what it’s like.”

That’s how we find ourselves watching a cheesy black-and-white musical featuring a cast of hundreds of bejeweled midriff-baring Indian women. The sets are fantastical simplicities of endless steps and ramps to nowhere and towering deity-statues. At the end of musical numbers dry ice fog billows up to swallow the performers. There is no dialog whatsoever, only songs in what I presume is Hindi, and zilch dubbing or subtitles.

Nooshin abandons the “couch” periodically for bathroom breaks, always begging me to pause the DVD. “I don’t want to miss anything!” she complains when I make threatening noises about letting the DVD play. I’m clueless how she’s getting anything out of the viewing, except maybe an appreciation for Bollywood stagecraft. But then I hear her humming tunelessly on the toilet, and I realize she’s probably just enjoying the unique musical numbers.

The movie is over faster than I expect, even with long vomiting-and-shitting pauses. Afterward we linger like a couple of strung-out dope fiends, watching a blank screen as we sink deeper into the cheap denim bedspread, her in that hot pink sleepshirt, me fully dressed.

“How come didn’t you get Montezuma’s revenge?” Nooshin asks after a while. “You ate the same fish tacos I did.”

“Hell if I know. I’m probably more used to the microbes down here than you are.”

“I can’t wait to get to know them better. Like you do.” She manages a faint giggle.

I lean my cheek into the pillow, looking over at her profile. Smiling despite my concern. “You’re such a goofball.”

Nooshin turns her face toward me, not stopping until her crooked wandering eye is buried in the pillow. “Goofball?”

“Renting movies that way, just because you like how the titles sound? Goofball.”

“I’m the goofball, you’re the buddy.” She’s laughing now.

I start cracking up too. Hopefully her laughter is the only thing that’s contagious. “Nooshball,” I find myself saying, then exclaiming. “Nooshball! You’re the Nooshball!” And for some utterly inexplicable reason that word scores a direct hit on our funnybones, until we’re laughing so hard we’re almost choking with mirth, which can’t be a good thing for her gastro-intestinal tract — and isn’t, when she suddenly dives off the bed and sprints into the bathroom, a girl-shaped blur moving fast.

But not fast enough. A new sound to file away in my memory — the wet splat of vomit on concrete.

I’m stumbling through a dream of foggy reaching hands and doors that won’t open and shadows on clouds when I hear the barking. Torrents of it. Sudden and intense and approaching. I sit bolt upright in the unfamiliar darkness, clutching the sheets to my chin, feeling my heart flutter against ribs. The barking intensifies. I glance around wildly. Glowing green digits tell me it’s an insanely small hour of the night.

Tijuana. I’m in a tiny cinderblock house in Tijuana. With Nick. He’s a snore droning through the thin door.

I have to reach down toward the alarm clock shining on the bare concrete floor, since I don’t have a nightstand yet. My hand knocks over books and an empty Aquafina bottle, until it finally closes around the flashlight. Then I slide from my new twin bed and stand at the window, aiming the beam through the interior blinds and exterior bars. The racket is almost deafening, as if wild dogs are swarming our front yard, but I can’t see anything. The cone of light plays across the Explorer and empty pavers.

Then silence. Or as much silence as you ever get living this close to the border fence. Helicopters are whupping back and forth overhead, Humvees are revving around.

The local dogs were probably chasing some of the wetbacks who muster in the neighborhood for a midnight crossing. Or so I guess, clicking off the flashlight and returning to bed.

Sleep is a warm black tar sucking me in. I don’t stir again until hands are clapping, insistent and close. “Wake up. Hey. Nooshin. Wake up.” Nick is standing in the doorway, watching me with eyes like frozen propane fires. He’s fully dressed in jeans and an untucked oxford with the shirtsleeves rolled up. “You gotta come see this.”

I trail him out of the claustrophobic bedroom, pausing only to shrug into my new robe, rubbing sleepdust from my eyes. His broad shoulders squeeze into the false dawn and follow the periphery of the house. Behind him I’m tiptoeing carefully, barefoot, dodging rocks and broken glass.

He stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Our first visitor,” he announces, pointing at a motionless furry shape in the trash-littered yard.

A dead cat.

I haven’t seen any cats in Tijuana. Plenty of dogs, feral and roaming the streets, but no cats. Maybe this is why.

Nick moves forward with a shovel in one hand.

“What are you doing?” I ask plaintively, trying not to look at the dead cat. Its milky eyes. The ugly spilling gash in its side, where things had feasted. All the rusty stains around its muzzle from life leaking out.

“I need to get this thing into the trash,” he says.

I stop him with an extended fist and palm. “Rock scissors paper.”

“What?”

“Rock scissors paper. For whoever has to clean this up. It’s only fair.”

Nick waves me off. “You’re already the boss of everything indoors. This is my responsibility.”

“I’m the boss of everything indoors? What gives you that idea?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” He starts to slide the shovel under the cat, causing a slimy gray coil to ooze out.

My vision turns watery with tears, but I jab at him with my fist and palm. “Rock scissors paper.”

“Fine. Have it your way.” Nick sighs heavily and plants the shovel blade-edge into the ground. “Rock scissors paper.” Then he makes a fist and palm and thrusts it at me.

We smack our fists into our palms in counting gestures. One…two…three…

I make my hand flat. Paper.

Nick’s hand is in the shape of a — rock? I could’ve sworn it was scissors. “Go back inside, Nooshin. Get some sleep.” He plucks up the shovel and turns to our first visitor, but not before I glimpse him smirking in triumph.

That’s how I find myself at the kitchen window, huddled in my new robe, crying a little. I’m watching a man shovel a dead cat into the garbage can. A man who cheats at rock-scissors-paper in secretive compassion, and put me in charge of digitizing an archive, and offered shelter when I had nowhere else to go. A man I didn’t even know two months ago, when I fled my husband for the first time. And in this moment, as dawn spills over the neighborhood like pink lemonade, I have to force myself to stop thinking about Nick — stop feeling these emotions, stop fantasizing — and go back to bed.

Nick
The list with almost everything on it
Thursday
December 28, 2006

To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting with Nooshin the roommate. Okay, I’ll be more honest — I was fucking clueless. Last roomie I had was freshman year at Iowa State and he was an inveterate slob. Bryce, his name was. Thanks to him I used to find skidmarked tighty whities on the floor, crushed beer cans in the dirty laundry, and used condoms everywhere. No wonder a neat freak like me has avoided entanglements ever since, even if they’re just of the mundane domestic variety. But Nooshin got under my skin, into my head, through my ribcage. I figured I could make something work with her, find an equitable division of labor, even if she was a slob too.

What I didn’t foresee is that she’d just take over the household. First she arranged the kitchen and tried to clean the uncleanable bathroom. Then she progressed to the laundry and everything associated with meals — food prep and cooking and washing the dirty dishes. Now she’s wearing a rut in the road between here and Wal-Mart, surprising me with a list of our domestic needs and the cost breakdown required to pay for them.

I stand in the unfinished doorway between living room and kitchen, staring at the neat columns running down the page. Meanwhile Nooshin sits at the kitchen table, her ad hoc office for digitizing the Korea Textile maquiladora archive. She’s tap-tap-tapping away on her laptop with the orange PROPERTY OF UCLA sticker. “I’ve been setting up house every year for five years,” she smiles breezily, as if that explains everything. And maybe it does.

The very first item on the list — beds, twin (2).

“Beds,” I say.

“Beds,” she echoes.

“Okay. I agree with you there.” And so does my back. Our sleeping bag lifestyle is killing my spinal column. There’s a helluva difference between sleeping on dirt in a tent and sleeping on concrete in a house. “But I can’t get a twin. I need a double. I’m so used to that goddamn futon.” I permit myself a sigh of mourning for my stolen futon, a hand-me-down from my sister Wendy. Almost a family heirloom.

“Double-sized for you, then. I’m cool with a twin.” Nooshin laughs into her lap, a wistful sound. “It’s probably going to be a long time before I sleep in a double bed again.”

I’m not touching that one. Instead I ask, “Boxsprings or no boxsprings?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“What?”

“Nick, we are not sleeping on just plain mattresses.” To emphasize her resistance, she brushes back the veil of her bangs, pinning them behind her ears. Her eyes remind me of twin cups of cappucino, dark and steaming, until the right orb ruins the effect by drifting toward the sink. “Is that your idea of an upgrade? Moving up from a sleeping bag to a mattress on the floor?”

“Look, I’m just throwing it out there. We’d save — ”

“You know what? Go ahead, save yourself 50 bucks or whatever. I’m getting a boxspring.” Nooshin nods sharply, snapping her bangs back into place, and resumes typing.

I look back down at the list, where my gaze snags on the next item. “Tupperware? I brought a bunch of tupperware.”

“The ones you brought are just the little kind, for leftovers. We need the bigger kinds that can hold packages and even boxes. Like, for cereal and pasta and sugar and…” She glances around at the kitchen cabinets, voice trailing off, overwhelmed. “Well, for everything, really.”

“Tupperware containers for everything? Why do we need tupperware containers for everything?”

“Duh. Because there isn’t enough room in the fridge to protect everything from the mice.”

I’m a farmboy with zero tolerance for rodents. “Forget the tupperware. Mousetraps and rat poison, that’s what we need.”

Nooshin pushes back from the table and walks over to a cabinet, producing a box of graham crackers shredded open at the bottom. Crumbs dribble out of the box when she holds it up. “See? If stuff like this was in a tupperware container the mice couldn’t even smell it, let alone chew through to it.”

A compelling demonstration, but I only give her the satisfaction of a shrug. A little ways down the list I stop again. “Water purifier?”

“Just for our drinking water. It must be cheaper than bottled water.”

For a while there’s nothing but the sound of her fingernails on the laptop keys.

“Throw rugs?” I ask in dismay. “Posters?”

“Now you’re in the non-essential part of the list. See the heading? I think we should decorate a little. Make this place feel more like a home. Don’t you?”

My response is a derisive snort. Then — “Hey! You put a wine rack on here.”

Nooshin’s tone is becoming increasingly defensive. “I know, I know. We don’t really need one. We can just leave the bottles on the floor.” The wine bottles look like dusty artillery shells lined up against the kitchen floorboards — or where the floorboards would be, if this house had any. “I just thought it would be nice to — ”

“No, I like it. I think a wine rack is a great idea.” I tack on a reassuring grin to emphasize that I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of guy who has a wine rack.

She notices that I’m folding my arms across my chest, the list dangling from a hand. Her face turns hopeful and hopeless at the same time. “So? What do you think? I know the list is kinda long, but…” She tries to lighten the mood, forcing a grin. “Anything I missed?”

“Actually, yeah. No mirrors.” I’m watching her thoughtfully, focused on the way she always wears her hair down, an inky wall against the world — hiding that crooked wandering eye, but also her steep cheekbones, sharp tapering jawline, lips fuller than the rest of her. Hiding her beauty.

Nooshin breaks my scrutiny by looking away. Downward, really. Toward the bare concrete floor. “I don’t need a mirror. I already know what I look like,” she says in a voice that makes something crack and heave inside me, because she doesn’t really know. She doesn’t know at all.

The morning has turned on that invisible pivot between dawn and noon. Last thing I remember was Nick calling out “See you later!” and the squeaky brakes of his truck backing into the street. Then I fell asleep again. Now I can hear the periodic rumble of jets scraping the roof, traffic humming on the asphalt roads and shuddering on the gravel ones, dogs barking in the dirt and dust. I blow out a deep breath and watch flies buzz overhead.

Another day that begins like this, with me sleeping in late. My body is still healing from Saman’s punches and my fencing-climbing fall. I roll out of my sleeping bag and glance around a bedroom lit with ambient daylight. The only decor is my makeshift bed and a few things — backpack lying open, several bags with new clothes inside, the Tijuana newspaper I was reading to practice my Spanish but rolled up into a flyswatter.

I pad across the bare cement into the bathroom, where I force myself to stare into the so-called mirror, just a small reflective tile above the sink. A scrawny girl with matted hair stares back at me, eyes flat as oilstains in her tired face. Her tanktop is soaked with sweat. The “I (heart) MANGA” graphic across the front is barely distorted by the bumps of her chest. The girl looks as if she forgot how to smile.

Then I realize I’m only seeing the girl in the mirror because the bathroom light turned on. Electricity, yaayyy! My counterpart in the mirrored tile is flickering out of stoic exhaustion, her face brightening as if Nick just cracked a joke. She didn’t forget how to smile after all.

It’s amazing how much happiness you can fit into a little thing, like pulling a light cord — and having the bulb arc to life. I run around the house, plugging in the television and the DVD player hooked to it. Recharging the batteries we’ve gone through. And omigod, using the stove’s burners and oven.

But I’m already late for today’s agenda — exploring the neighborhood on my own. Yesterday Nick gave me a tour of Colonia Aviacion and showed me how to find my way back to the house. Now it’s my turn to prove that I’m no longer the Nooshin who hid inside her fears and insecurities during those five years with Saman. I’m going to show Nick that I’m girlpower personified. I’ll even draw my own conclusions about Colonia Aviacion thankyouverymuch, and decide which locals are worth befriending or avoiding all by myself.

The only thing that scares me about outside is the dogs. Mangy feral things that scrounge through garbage and chase cars and snarl at people. The only dog I knew growing up was a slavering mastiff in Long Beach, which may explain why perros scare the poop out of me. Luckily I have pepper spray on my keychain. I don’t know if anyone has ever maced an attacking canine before, or if pepper spray even works on dogs, but carrying it around makes me feel better.

I emerge into a warm overcast noon, old Polaroid camera in one hand, mace keychain in the other. I stand in the patchy sunshine for a while, just soaking up the freedom. For the first time I’m not seeing the mishmash of housing, handbuilt shacks next to palatial stucco homes next to fenced-in junky lots where the cardboard boxes may be inhabited instead of discarded. I’m seeing a place where I can go in any direction I want.

First I walk north to the border fence, a strangely pathetic sheaf of corrugated aluminum that peels back in places, revealing the sliced chainlink fencing underneath. No wonder impoverished Mexicans trickle down this road and gather here at sunset, all their worldly possessions on their backs. It’s easy to get through, if not across.

Then I turn around and retrace my steps toward the main drag, slowly realizing that my casual use of “blocks” to describe the distance along this street isn’t correct. The houses just kind of spill into each other, and what I thought were side streets are actually the occasional driveway or deadend alley, as I discover when I explore one.

Backtracking to the street, I have my first encounter with the local dogs. A couple of them trot past with tongues hanging out, kicking up little plumes of dust with their paws, not even turning my direction. I breath a sigh of relief so huge it almost hurts.

That’s when it hits me — the neighborhood is utterly deserted. Those dogs are the only sign of life. I haven’t seen a single person, not a single vehicle in motion. Everyone is somewhere else — or just terrified of the ungodly tall girl with the evil eye. In their absence the neighborhood has become an oasis of peace and quiet. Except for the stupid planes thundering overhead.

The main drag is just a bigger and broader variation on the same old gravel road. Its expanse is almost funereal. I pause to watch a towering dust plume draw closer and closer, until it resolves into a dump truck. The driver stares at me through his dirty windshield, mouth hanging open a little. Apparently he’s wondering how a solitary gringa managed to wander this far from the tourist district.

Feeling more confident now, I head for the corner store, an unmistakable landmark because of its exterior — bright yellow cinderblocks fading to the color of pee. A couple plastic patio tables and chairs sit outside the front door, unoccupied in the blotchy sun. Inside is a claustrophobic melange of shelves crowded with colorful boxes, glass-fronted refrigerator cabinets placed weirdly, barrels of fresh fruits and vegetables, pinatas dangling from the ceiling so low I have to duck. I can barely turn around in the aisles, they’re so narrow. Beneath my Nikes is a floor of perilous linoleum, heaving and cracked.

I don’t buy anything because I didn’t bring money to buy anything. I exit practicing a checkout conversation in my head, prepping for the time when I’ll actually make a purchase using Mexican pesos. The shopkeeper is a graying spindle of a woman watching a telenovela — soap opera — on a tiny black-and-white TV. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, doesn’t even reply when I say “Buenas tardes!”

On my way home I find a half-dead dog flopped against an alley wall. A plastic bag of snack crackers is tucked beneath her snout. She looks self-reliant and pathetic at the same time. Bending over her, I realize she’s just a puppy, really. She doesn’t even have the strength to open her eyes when I pet her, smoothing the garbage out of her coat. I want to bundle her into my arms and carry her home, oh god I want to…

But I don’t. Nick wouldn’t stand for it. He’d point out all the other starving mangy dogs that need befriending. He’d ask me where I was going to get the bucks for dogchow and veterinarian care and blah blah blah. He’d launch into his cruelly pragmatic speech about how Mexico is a developing country, a Darwinian crucible, and you sink or swim. Talking about the puppy, all the feral dogs in general, but maybe me too.