The Mexican Year

“Shit!”

The word is a primal groan. I almost jump out of my skin, then glance wildly across the cab at Nick. He slumps over the steering wheel as if he’s been shot — except he hasn’t, thank god. My boyfriend straightens up, his face a mask of frustration. Then he slumps over the steering wheel again, smacking his forehead into the hard plastic with an audible thump. I watch the ritual uncomprehendingly. Thump thump thump.

We’re idled at a traffic signal, waiting for the horizontal bar of lights to turn green and usher us deeper into the urban canyons of Mexico City. Sunbeams drown in the afternoon smog, so thick I can barely see five blocks. Electric-powered buses sizzle and spark beneath a canopy of overhead wires. A streetkid darts between the paused vehicles, trying to sell copies of La Jornada that he scavenged from coffee shops and park benches. Sexy two-dimensional giantesses float in Fendi and Banamex and Range Rover billboards, staring down at sidewalks carpeted with beggars. The stereo is playing a bootleg copy of an Kaiser Chiefs disc, filling the Explorer with a hoarse refrain:

Oh my god, I can’t believe it
I’ve never been this far away from home
And oh my god, I can’t believe it
I’ve never been this far away from home

My gaze is drawn to the movement of an oncoming figure. Whoever he is, he’s larger than the streetkids. And wearing a bushy mustache. And…uniformed? The cop is jogging toward us, one palm raised in an imperious HALT gesture, a whistle shrieking in his mouth.

“Nick!” I hiss through clenched teeth, trying to act casual. “There’s a cop — ”

“I know,” he sighs. “Hoy no circula.”

“Hoy no circula? Today we can’t drive?”

“Today is Monday, which means nobody with a 5 or 6 as the last digit of their license plate can be on the roads.” Nick points at a sign dangling from the traffic signal, which explains a cruel transportation math:

Lunes - 5 y 6
Martes - 7 y 8
Miercoles - 3 y 4
Jueves - 1 y 2
Viernes - 9 y 0

“Doesn’t matter if you’re a foreigner or not. My license plate number still ends in 9,” he shrugs in resignation. “Squeeze in.”

I unbelt myself — my tummy, really, considering it pokes through the triangle formed by the shoulder and lap belts — and slide against Nick’s hip. The cop climbs in next to me, just like that. His eyebrows are hairy caterpillars above the much bigger hairy caterpillar of his mustache. We make awkward eye contact and decide it’s better to stare straight ahead.

Spanish sloshes from one side of the cab to the other. Nick’s tone is contrite but amateurish. His perfect Spanish is nowhere to be heard. He’s playing the American farmboy adrift in the Mexican bright lights, big city. The cop sounds irritated. He points dramatically using his HALT hand, which was made for emphatic gestures. See that sign right there? The sacrosanct traffic laws of Mexico City have been broken.

The light finally turns green. More Spanish sloshes around. Nick yanks the steering wheel to the right, banging into my elbow. The windshield fills with sidewalk vendors, straggly boulevard trees, graffiti-defaced political posters, entryways to apartment buildings. Then he hangs another right, and another, and finally another…until we’ve completed a circumnavigation of Inez’s block. The parking spot we just abandoned is still there, a gap of curb between a dilapidated pickup and a shiny midnight-black Lexus.

“It’s an innocent mistake. You’re Americans,” the cop is saying in Spanish, turning benevolent. Forgiving.

Nick doesn’t miss the cue. “Now that I understand the law, I don’t want to trouble you with any paperwork. The citizens of Mexico City, they need you back on duty. Right?”

A modest shrug jostles my shoulder. “I live to serve the people.”

“Then please, accept this as a token of my appreciation.” Nick’s arm juts in front of me, flaunting a $20 bill.

“Yes, yes,” the cop is nodding. The money disappears as quickly as it appeared. The Explorer rocks one way, then the other, and the car door slams. The cop hustles down the sidewalk, back to the intersection and his next bribe. We’re alone again. The Kaiser Chiefs are singing you and me, we’re made…

My voice is a nervous exhalation. “I didn’t think you’d get rid of him for only twenty bucks.”

“At least we’ve got the money,” Nick points out. A couple days ago we didn’t. But there isn’t any triumph in his profile, just a wan distance.

“You’re a million miles away,” I say gently, letting the closeness between us linger, squeezing the contour of his thigh.

His nuzzling is the forced kind, a brief indulgence to keep the pregnant girlfriend happy. Then the far-away look comes back. His icy blue eyes are focused on something impossibly distant. Like the future, maybe. Our future.

My heart flutters into despair. “You don’t really like Afshar for a boy’s name, do you?”

Arctic oceans blink at me.

“You know. Afshar?”

Suddenly Nick is chuckling. “Nah, that’s not it. I love the name Afshar.” He pats the slope of my tummy absentmindedly. “Let’s walk over to Chinatown.”

The segue loses me. I slide out after him, squeezing past the wheel — the closest I’ll ever come to driving his truck, probably — and follow his broad shoulders down the sidewalk. “Chinatown? Mexico City has a Chinatown?”

“Yeah. A small one. The barrio chino.” He slows his pace, letting me fall into stride beside him. “There were widespread pogroms against the Chinese a century ago. Not many Chinese left to make a Chinatown.” A hand loops around my waist, the palm rocking on my hip. “Some of the Chinese were merchants, but most were coolies imported by the American railroads during the Porfiriato. The Mexicans, they murdered them by the hundreds.”

“God.” The word sounds lame when I murmur it, incredibly insufficient. But I don’t know what else to say.

The barrio chino is far enough away to make my feet hurt, even in my powerwalking Nikes. Finally we’re wandering through a plethora of gaudy signs in Chinese and the occasional bank in Chinese architectural style — timber framework, bright primary colors, multi-storied pagoda roofs with flaring upturned corners. The Spanish I overhear is sprinkled with sing-song Chinese. I feel like an utter giraffe on the cracked and heaving sidewalks, crowded by people even shorter than most Mexicans.

I pull Nick into a touristy shop crammed with odd merchandise. Giant painted-wood buddhas. Strange posters for Hong Kong movies I’ve never heard of. A hundred different kinds of chopsticks. Chinese wedding blessing scrolls. Silk kimonos with elaborate brocaded designs. Suddenly I feel the impulse to buy everyone a gift — Mom and Dad, Nasrin and her hubby and my niece and nephew, even Saman and my in-laws — but as quickly as I feel it, the impulse falls and breaks on the floor. There’s only Nick now. Nick and the baby boy we made.

Back on the sidewalk he discovers a hole-in-the-wall bar. It’s the kind of place that would’ve been invisible if the door wasn’t wide open, revealing a thatched canopy over the bar and Chinese calendars on the wall, the kind with traditionally-attired models posing with Western products. There are only two people inside — the bartender, a loud shock-haired Chinese who greets us in horrid Spanish, and a lone patron who resembles Mao if Mao had ever worn a t-shirt that said KISS ME I’M IRISH. They’re a little surprised to see a pair of towering gringos wander in and duck beneath the thatched canopy, but then Nick orders baijiu and a Tsingtao chaser and they aren’t so surprised anymore.

I’m tempted by the Tsingtao — I haven’t had a beer in several weeks — but my What to Expect When You’re Expecting book is militantly anti-alcohol. Never mind the fact that pregnant Mexican women drink all the time, and this isn’t a nation of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome citizens. I sigh and ask in Spanish, “What do you have for non-alcoholic beverages?”

The bartender hovers at the rail, staring at me expectantly. It’s as if I haven’t said anything at all.

“Something without alcohol? Alcohol-free?” I try again.

More expectant staring.

“Um, Coca Cola?”

Those two words are a universal language. He bustles into motion.

Nick and I nurse our drinks through a bizarre conversation. The bartender turns out to be a former Communist Party cadre who left China and the Party for reasons I don’t really understand. He launches into a rambling tirade about China and Hong Kong and Taiwan and even Tibet — almost yelling at us, he talks so loud — and his best Spanish phrase is a perfect “like, fuck this shit!” which he uses liberally to describe pro-capitalist policies and the Tiananmen Square protesters and Fulan Gong and god only knows what else. I can’t tell whether he hates those things, or hates the Party for hating those things. Meanwhile the Mao lookalike interjects seemingly random things in Chinese, causing the bartender to nod vociferously and exclaim “just like that!” as if they’re somehow talking about the same thing, which I’m convinced they aren’t.

The bartender wants us to stay for another round, since no one else has showed up. Nick is game, but also drinking on an empty stomach. He keeps leaning into me for abrupt kisses, acting warm and tipsy — too warm and tipsy, really. So I leave a generous tip for the bartender and wave goodbye to Mao and drag my boyfriend outside.

We stand outside on the corner for a while, watching the sky swirl with pollution. Pagoda lamps bleed into the murk. Past the rooftops of the barrio chino is a forest of hulking shadowy skyscrapers. Then a hostess shilling for business presses a paper menu into Nick’s hand, urging us to visit her restaurant. Only then do I realize that I’m starving.

I’m clueless how you choose a good restaurant in Chinatown if you don’t have a recommendation or guidebook. Do you go with the tiny dimly-lit place where a few Asians are bent over their tables? Or the big brightly-lit place that’s packed with Asians and some non-Asians too? The latter, we decide, hoping all those people can’t be wrong. Nick orders the special, some kind of cold squid-and-pasta entree. I wind up with salty deep-fried frog legs, which are delicious although still on the bone. We share a metal decanter of green tea.

I find his knee under the table. It’s pistoning relentlessly. “Hey,” I say, calming the motion with my palm. “Just tell me what’s on your mind, okay?”

The sharp angles of his face keep changing. He doesn’t know how to feel. Suddenly he leans across the table at me, banging plates aside. He pauses to wipe off his elbow. “I’ve been thinking about quitting grad school.”

“Wh-what?” I manage to gasp.

“I’ve met all the requirements for an M.A. So it’s not like I’d quit empty-handed. I’d get something out of it.”

“But you’re almost done with your Ph.D.!”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one with two more flaming hoops of bullshit to jump through.” Nick counts on fingers aimed sideways. “First, my dissertation isn’t done until my committee says it’s done. Second, I still have to defend it.”

“So? ”

“So that could take another year or more, for chrissake. And…” He stirs uncomfortably, his forearms flexing on silverware. “The baby will be here before then.”

“Just because we’re having a baby doesn’t mean you have to quit. Think of all the grad students you know. A lot of them have kids, right? They’re still pursuing their Ph.Ds. They make it work.” I feel myself glowing with hopeful enthusiasm. “We can make it work too. Haven’t we figured out how to make it work in Mexico?”

“But…” His voice tails off.

“This is what you’ve always wanted to do. You’ve dedicated what, four years of your life to studying Mexico? UCLA gave you a full ride, and you have me as a research assistant. You can’t throw this away, Nick. I won’t let you.”

Nick flinches when I say “research assistant.” But that’s his only reaction to my hopeful pleading. Otherwise he remains silent, hiding beneath his Kangol hat.

“What?” I finally say.

He sighs. “You’re such a Nooshball.”

“Now you’re patronizing me.”

“Christ. Can’t we just let this drop? I’m not in the mood. I’m really not.” He leans back and shovels a forkful of squid into his mouth.

Something breaks inside me like a dam bursting. Tears stream down my cheeks. I hide behind a napkin, trying to staunch my misery.

“Hey. Come on. Stop crying.”

That only makes me cry harder. “You’re treating me…like Saman did. Shutting…me out,” I say around sobs.

His voice becomes cold. “I’m not shutting you out, goddamnit. I’m being honest with you – I don’t feel like talking about this right now. Maybe tomorrow, alright?”

I’m trying to compose myself. It doesn’t work very well. The entire restaurant is stealing glances at us when I return the napkin to my lap. I play with my bangs, arranging them into a protective curtain. Only a sliver of my face is exposed. The left side, over my good eye.

Nick is confronting me across the table, hands balled into fists, his expression almost tortured. “You know how hard I’ve struggled to survive on my funding? Really fucking hard, Nooshin. And that’s when there was only me. Now there’s you and the baby. The economics don’t work.” He waves off my rising protest. “Shut up and just listen, would you? You wanted me to talk, so I’m talking. You’ve only got a high school education. So realistically, you’re going to be taking care of the kids. Any income you brought in wouldn’t offset the cost of daycare. That means I need get a job, a real job, to support you and the kids, and…why are you looking at me like that?”

“You keep saying ‘kids’,” I say in a daze.

All the frustrated anxiety drains out of Nick. He thinks about it, then laughs. And blushes a little. “Well, yeah. I mean…I’ve always figured we’d have two. A boy and a girl, you know? Afshar will need a little sister.”

I try to snuggle into his embrace across the table, but my swollen tummy catches on the edge. The surface tilts, clattering things. He pulls his chair around the cluttered surface, coming closer. He drapes me in a muscular arm, polishing the ribbed contours of my back with an open palm. A stupidly passionate noise boils up my throat. I already want to make another baby with Nick, and I haven’t even delivered our first yet.

Mexico City, omigod, it’s so…so super-incredibly overwhelming, there’s just no other word. I can’t cram this place through my senses and fit it all into my head. The visual overload of 25 million different faces coming at me in an endless crush — street vendors with plaster Venus de Milo statuettes and handwoven sarapes and chiclets, scruffy hustlers with desperate standoffish eyes that crawl all over you, businessmen in pinstriped suits trailed by bodyguards with earjacks whispering secrets, Indian beggars plucking at passersby with sore-weltered hands, school groups of adorable rioting kids in uniform, muchachitas like anime fashion plates in their un-clothing and teeter-totter heels, cops slouched in a mind-boggling variety of disinterested postures, camera-toting tourists as slack-jawed as me. Past the faces are broad avenues of slow honking traffic bleeding around traffic circles, kaleidoscope billboards blinking SEGUROS COMERCIAL AMERICA and TELEFONICA MOVILES and BANAMEX, winged statuary taller than buildings, slums stretching forever in a grim parade of wastage. Overhead jets are screaming across an invisible highway, everybody shout-talking, mariachi music and alternativa death metal and earsplitting operatic arias. Inhalations are a sickening invasion of exhaust fumes, reeking garbage spilled everywhere, body odor and cologne and hairspray, too-sweet baked goods on sidewalk carts. I’ve never been jostled this much in my life.

And now I’m being washed away in the torrent of students pouring out of UNAM — the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico — and across the campus plaza. I’m buffeted by elbows and shoulders and backpacks. “Nick!” I cry desperately, my hand outstretched in his, losing my grip –

His Kangol hat turns my direction. He’s standing like an oak in a flood, the crowd breaking around his unyielding profile. “What are you doing, Nooshball?” he laughs, as if I’m goofing around or something. “Get over here!” With a muscular effort he yanks me back alongside.

I shelter in his lee, arms locked around his waist, my pregnant tummy pressed into the small of his back. Our shapes fit together like puzzle pieces. Then I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the overwhelming stimuli, retreating into happy thoughts, yeah, that’s it, happy happy happy, floating on an inflatable seashell raft in the middle of a sun-spangled ocean…

Suddenly the jostling stops and we’re standing alone. Mostly. A few students trickle past carrying placards that read Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico — Mexican Green Ecological Party. Somewhere an amplified voice is booming. Looking over my shoulder, I see a street demonstration swirling. At the vortex is a mohawked student with a megaphone, shaking an upraised fist. He’s urging the milling crowd of protesters into motion, toward a ragged line of riot police. The cops are strung across the street in wait, helmets unbuckled, leaning on their plexiglass shields. Students approach with banners and green bandanas and Diet Cokes. The cops respond by buckling their chinstraps and hefting their shields. I assume both sides are yelling at each other across the 10-yard divide, but I can’t tell for sure. Angry drivers trapped on either side of the impromptu gridlock are blaring their horns in a hellish symphony.

“Wow,” is all I can think to say. In a couple minutes the street we walked became a conflict zone, just like that.

“I don’t know much about the PVEM,” Nick shrugs blithely, as if we’re watching TV instead of real life. “I think they’re a bunch of Green anarchists, but I could be wrong.”

I’m trying to decipher the slogans spray-painted on banners in big dripping letters. “What are they protesting?”

“Who the hell cares?” He’s already lost interest. No Mexican civics lesson for me. He tugs me in the opposite direction, bouncing his icy blue eyes around. “Inez has got to be around here somewhere.”

I clatter along in my strappy sandals, gazing up at the Aztec-style motifs that seem to cover the buildings like skin. I saw similar murals growing up in East LA, but nothing of this size and complexity. A giant fanged snake writhes out of a lake of fire. Ears of corn explode in vibrant symmetry. Naked dark-skinned men with melting limbs struggle toward a ghostly two-faced sun. Overhead the real sun is a dim bulb swimming through the smog.

“Nick!” a woman calls in Spanish, inflecting his name into Neeeeek!

“Inez!”

They rush together in a collision of hugs and cheek-kissing. The woman is tall for a mexicana but barely up to my collarbones. Her mop of aluminum-dyed hair is styled into a jagged bob, the kind of haircut that looks self-administered. She’s wearing a black t-shirt that says “I (skull-and-crossbones) YOU” and too-long jeans turned halfway up her shins and black Converse hightops. A camo backpack dangles from a shoulder.

Nick steps aside with a polite wave of his arm. “Inez, this is my girlfriend Nooshin. Nooshin, Inez.”

She swarms me in another bout of hugging and cheek-kissing. At close range her stink of cigarette smoke almost makes me gag. When she breaks away, her muddy eyes triangulate between my belly and Nick and me. “You guys are…pregnant?” My proud blush is all the confirmation she needs. “Ay ay ay! Pregnant!” She throws her arms around his neck in a violent hug, then repeats the embrace more gently with me. “Congratulations, Nooshin! When are you due?”

“October 22,” I beam. It’s already my favorite day of the year. “We’re having a boy.”

Nick loops an arm around my waist, pulling my hipbone toward him in a brief squeeze. A seam in the side of my sundress rips audibly. Argh. Maternity clothes. I need to buy my first maternity clothes.

He’s oblivious, focused on Inez again — and the way she’s radiating sadness at us in an emotional doppler shift. His voice is a half-octave lower than usual. “Sorry we went to Julio’s place last night. I didn’t know you guys broke up.”

“Yeah. About three, four months ago.” She flutters a hand dismissively. “He was cheating on me. I suppose he didn’t tell you that.”

“Actually, he said you were cheating on him.” I want to elbow Nick in the ribs for saying it, but too late.

“That was revenge,” Inez laughs. But the sound is hollow and aching. To cover it, she quickly adds, “I’m living with my mom now. She’s got an apartment in Coyoacan. You guys are welcome to stay with us, if you want. Neither of us have a double bed, but there’s an inflatable mattress big enough for two.”

“Awesome!” The word is an item crossed off his to-do list — talk Inez into letting us stay with her tonight.

“You and your mother are too kind,” I say in an apologetic tone, becoming irritated with Nick’s single-minded focus. What is he, emotionally tone-deaf?

But he’s already working the rest of his list. He makes a show of considering the Anthropology Building looming over us, where Inez is a graduate student. “Hey, can you smuggle me into a professor’s office? I need to make some phone calls back to the States.”

“Nick — ” she begins to say warningly. Knuckles whiten around her backpack straps.

His megawatt smile is blinding. “Come on, Inez. UNAM will never notice.” He boxes her gently in the shoulder. “Please? We’re trying to save money for the baby.”

“Ay ay ay!” the mexicana snaps, but angrily this time. For a long dragging moment her muddy eyes seem to be congealing into solid rock…but then she spins on a Chuck Taylor and starts marching toward the louvered doors. Her backpack’s zipper fob is a noosed Barbie doll.

My mouth is halfway open in reproach when Nick shoots me a shut-up-and-sit-down look. I fall into clattering stride next to his almost-silent hiking boots. I’m trying to stay quiet, but his treatment of Inez is still raw and right there in front of me. Finally I turn to him again and start to — but I get another look. The same one, only harsher. Shut-the-bleep-up-and-sit-the-bleep-down.

She leads us into a lobby that’s part hospital waiting room, part ethnographic pawn shop. Cold linoleum tile and formica countertops are offset by colorful huipiles tacked to the walls, hand-fired pots on display stands, a carved wooden mask in a picture frame. If it was up to me, I’d put everything on Ebay and hope for the best. A crowd is waiting at the single elevator door, so she darts into the stairwell. We circle upward through landings pressed into service as closets, squeezing past cardboard boxes and dusty unused furniture and obsolescent dead-screened computers. Eventually we exit onto the 4th floor, a warren of narrow cinderblock hallways studded with metal doors. She uses a key from her backpack to unlock one of the doors.

“Your advisor, huh?” Nick guesses.

“Yeah. My advisor’s office. He’s in Nicaragua right now.” Inez flings the door open, revealing a scarred wooden desk crowded by metal bookshelves. Yellowing papers and dog-eared books are piled everywhere. The window shines weakly behind a drawn shade. “Just don’t fuck with anything, got it?”

“Got it.” Nick keeps his face perfectly serious. But I can already picture him chatting on the phone, hiking boots kicked up on a stack of papers, idly picking through desk drawers to amuse himself.

The claustrophobic office isn’t big enough for all three of us, so Inez and I retreat to the end of the hallway, a glassed-in observation overhang — also tiny. We have to take turns standing in it. First she points out a noteworthy campus landmark, then we squeeze past each other and I try to spot where she was pointing. My Spanish is the functional kind, not well-suited to conversations about the identifying characteristics of buildings and parks, so the exercise is frustrating for both of us.

I get tired of it before she does. Kicking off my wedgie sandals, I brace my back against the cinderblocks, planting a bare foot on the opposite wall and stretching my leg — and riiiiiiiiiip, the half-torn seam of my sundress is now fully-torn. God I’m so stupid! Feeling totally humiliated, I grope for a conversational distraction. “Nick told me you’re a DJ?”

Inez studies me for a while, compounding my misery. I feel like a puzzling and slightly gross bug under her microscope. Finally she shrugs. “Yeah, I dj every couple weeks. But I’m not so into the music part of it anymore. Now I mostly play fundraisers for orphanages and stuff. I want to feel like I’m doing something with my mixing.”

There’s another uncomfortable silence — broken by Nick’s laughter, amplified by the echo chamber of the hallway. He’s laying it on thick for somebody, don’t ask me who.

“Is he going to marry you?”

My gaze flashes to her. Muddy eyes are blinking at me lizard-style. Her t-shirt logo rises and falls placidly. I decide she’d look cuter with a different hair color, something more natural than tin-can silver.

“Well?” Inez prods.

There’s a meanness to the word, because she already knows the answer. She already knows Nick, longer and maybe better than I do. She just wants to hear me prove I’m an idiot, my voice hopeful and fluting, a girl deluding herself. That, or I admit the truth — marriage is a word that frightens other words off, or even makes them stop entirely.

I refuse to give Inez the satisfaction either way. Instead I slip back into my sandals, rising even higher and farther away from her, and clatter down the hallway into the unisex bathroom. I lock the door behind me and kneel over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I can’t discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sit on the tile and hold my face in my hands. I utter a soft animal moan. Eventually there’s an insistent knocking, and with it Nick’s voice, strident and concerned. “It’s alright,” I call through the door, through my splayed fingers, through my misery. “I’m okay…”

Another bright oven-hot day in Mexico, the kind we survive with sunglasses and the Explorer’s windows rolled down. Empty plastic water bottles are piled up to my ankles because I refuse to toss them out the window, the common Mexican practice that fills ditches with litter. We’re somewhere on the outskirts of Puebla, a heavily-industrialized colonial city that sprawls across the altiplano in a grimy smear. On either side of the highway are factories peeling away in huge complexes topped with smokestacks and water towers. The corporate logos are a litany of jobs lost in America and gained here — 3M, Alcoa, IBM, Whirlpool, DuPont. Dominating all of the factory complexes is the humongous Volkswagen plant, which produces every last Jetta in the world. Nick chortles as we parallel its chainlink fringe. The Volkswagen parking lot is filled bumper-to-bumper with Fords, mostly.

For a while it seems like the factories will never end…until suddenly they do, and we plunge into suburbia. I feel like I’m back home in Tijuana. The blocks are dusty and crammed with cement-block homes. Store windows advertise all the same merchandise you can buy at an American mall, only with prices in pesos. Schoolyards and parks are the occasional oasis, almost lost in the traffic and earth tones, a verdant fantasy in my peripheral vision.

When a police car tailgates us with lightbar flashing, Nick pulls over in a storm of curses. Time for another mordida — literally “little bite” — which is the polite way of saying bribe. He prepares to pay from our dwindling handful of cash, but the cop just checks our tourist visas. For once the smudged papers are a ward against corruption. Afterward we crest a hilly road with a view of the horizon, lumpy with volcanoes like Popocatepetl, smoldering into the cyanide-blue sky.

A Gigante sign towers over the rooftops. With unusual patience Nick waits for a healthy gap in the traffic, left blinker click-click-clicking. We pull into a black ocean of asphalt gridded with parking spaces. Only half a dozen cars are actually parked at the supermarket, all of them right by the entrance.

“Let’s go over there,” I say, pointing to an isolated spot in the middle, 100 yards from the nearest car. Nick turns the wheel obediently, grinning like a fiend. It’s a pickup line and he knows it. The truck is barely in park before I’m straddling him, my sundress hiked up and hiphuggers pulled aside, the steering wheel rubbing into my back. Puebla? Just a place we had a quickie.

He’s tortured, panting, hostile with his hips — but not on the brink of release. I grind even harder into his choppy thrusts, my arms wrapped around his neck, talking dirty in my abandon the way he likes. Suddenly my vision is exploding into stars, his sloppy kisses smothering me until I can’t breathe, and I was never so happy to drown…

When I open my eyes again, Nick is wearing an uncomfortable look. “What’s the matter?” I ask in a small panic, wondering if we’ve been spotted.

He glances down at my swelling belly, which sits like a lump between us. “I keep thinking…” A bead of sweat trickles down from his bald spot and disappears behind an ear. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“What?” I can feel him softening inside me. “What is it?”

Nick’s icy blue gaze is roaming the empty parking lot around us. He laughs desperately. “I keep thinking…the baby can see us.”

An overwhelming feeling of tenderness floods through me. “You know what the book says,” I say gently, citing our Qu’ran — What To Expect When You’re Expecting. “The baby just feels it like a gentle rocking — ”

“I know what the book says.” His shoulders bunch, lifting me off him and back into the passenger seat with barely a grimace of exertion. “But I still keep thinking it.”

“Do you, um, want me to…” Descending from orgasm I’m back to being shy again. I bite my lip and murmur, “Do you want a…blowjob? Would that be better?”

Nick’s answer — he tugs his jeans back over his hips, buttons them, and zips the fly.

Now it’s my turn to contemplate my swelling belly, not very big yet, but already popping the seams on my sundress. A sigh lifts my still-flat chest. Maternity clothes. I need to buy my first maternity clothes. “It’s only going to get worse,” I think aloud, picturing him coupled with a big pregnant beachball.

He pauses halfway out his door. Past him the Gigante supermercado is countless empty rows and several lightpoles away. “You craving anything?”

“Not anymore,” I grin shyly, still tingling with afterglow.

A brusque smile. “Besides that.”

“Green peppers!” I blurt, surprising myself. Where did that come from? But suddenly I want them more than anything in the world. “Green bell peppers. Just…raw. I just, you know…”

Nick is already receding across the parking lot, a tall silhouette with an abbreviated grocery list in his head. Heatwaves boil up around his long strides. I watch the glassy doors snap open and snap shut, swallowing him into air-conditioning and colorful shelves of food. Then I take out my dog-eared notebook and favorite swirly purple pen and scribble this poem:

THERE’S NO TURNING BACK NOWDon’t ask how I got pregnant
in a third world country
with condom foils littering the floor
23 years and 0 college degrees
and not even divorced yet.

Nick stepped out of an Old Navy ad
and into my life
the chatty gringo at home
on Avenida Revolucion
and almost taller than me.
Hard to believe — that was only
last November.

Love at first sight? Maybe…
on a day in a marriage where love
was an afterthought.
If Grandfather was alive he would say
Nick and I
did not meet by accident.

I don’t pretend to understand him
a baffling gender in microcosm
– and worse, American –
slaving for perfectibility and mere things.
But he says we’re not going to leave each other
not in forever
and I like the sound of that.

Now my belly is rounding
with our baby boy
and Nick’s favorite bumps, well…
they’re still just bumps
with aspirations.
I may never buy a maternity bra.

Whenever he goes away
he takes the sun in his eyes
and leaves me in longing darkness
a heart in this passenger seat
beating for him.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a magnet for unwanted attention. At first it was just my crooked wandering eye, which seemed like a curse from God. Then a double curse — in grade school I sprouted like a weed, until I towered freakishly over my classmates, girls and boys. And finally a triple curse of utter booblessness and almost no hips and a flat boybutt, when all the other girls were blooming into women. So I’m used to the sidelong glances, even outright staring. I’m used to the fervent whispering and pointed fingers and muffled giggling. I’m used to the people who blurt out questions — “What’s wrong with your eye?” — and the teasing, the cruel jokes. I’m even getting used to the superstitious Mexicans who think I have el mal ojo — the Evil Eye — and hurriedly cross themselves.

But this is a different kind of attention. A kinder, gentler scrutiny. Now gazes don’t linger on my height or my lazy eye. Instead they focus on my tummy, swelling noticeably beneath my tight wardrobe of tanktops and t-shirts and sundresses. I’m pregnant and showing for all the world to see. And the world seems to like me better this way. People beam at me. Senoras with kids in tow approach to make smalltalk, asking me how far along I am and offering advice from their own pregnancies, blurs of Spanish that leave me nodding my head in uncomprehending gratitude. Gruff campesinos with calloused hands and stinking breath offer up their bus seats. Mexican yuppies armed with briefcases and cellphones give me their cabs and wait for the next one.

I didn’t expect to be self-conscious about the pregnancy attention, but I am. My swelling tummy might as well be a gigantic blinking neon sign — I HAVE SEX. The unmarried and unprotected kind, as you can tell by glancing at my ringless ring finger. Whoever dreamed up the Spanish word for pregnant — embarazada — knew exactly how I feel. It sounds just like “embarrassed” even though it’s a false cognate, I think.

Right now I’m trying to extricate myself from an awkward bout of belly-rubbing. An ancient mexicana dressed like a nun is running her gnarled hands all over my tummy. She doesn’t have a tooth left in her mouth and her Spanish, pronounced in a strange gummy lisp, is basically unintelligible. Maybe she’s blessing me in the name of her Catholic version of God. I hope so, anyway.

Impeccable timing — Nick screeches to a halt against the curb, tapping the Explorer’s horn lightly. Through the windshield he’s giving me a complicated look, part I’m-glad-to-see-you and part what-the-hell-is-that-hag-doing-to-you? Then he leans over and throws open the passenger door. I say “Muchas gracias!” to the nun and escape into the strains of Rage Against the Machine, pouring out of the cab in a thumping blast.

My welcome is an open-mouthed kiss, and I melt into it happily. Nick tastes like huevos rancheros and coffee. “Hey,” he says with a lopsided grin, breaking away. “I like your hair that way.”

“Really?” I raise my hands tentatively, feeling the pigtails tied up into loops. It’s a hairstyle I noticed on the cover of a bootleg Puffy Amiyumi disc the other day. “I couldn’t tell if it looks cool on me or not. I kind of feel like an anime character.”

“Trust me, it looks cool. Way cool.” Nick punches the gas and we snap back into our seats, hurtling down the broad sun-drenched avenue. I watch the speedometer jump from zero to terrifying in a couple eyeblinks. Oh well. At least the horrible clanking noise is gone.

“Sounds like they replaced the engine,” I say, as white-painted palm trunks fly past my window.

“What?”

I hold down a button on the stereo and make the music dwindle. “I said, it sounds like they replaced the engine.”

“Well, yeah. Of course they did. Hang on!” He yanks the steering wheel sharply, careening around a corner. “The dealership had a used engine with 60,000 miles on it sitting around. That’s almost 80,000 less miles than the old one, you know. Now this truck is going to last us another five years.”

The pronoun “us” is a surging happiness inside me, the kind I immediately disavow. I must’ve heard him wrong. He didn’t really say that. I don’t want to get my hopes up. But it’s still there when I replay his words in my mind. Now this truck is going to last us another five years. Us! He said US reflexively! Behind that rico suave facade he really is thinking of me and him as a we! As a family, even.

After a while I ask, “How much did it cost?”

“I think it’s better if only one of us has to cope with that number.”

Yikes. That wasn’t the answer I expected. My imagination is a calculator spinning out of control. “How much, Nick?” I ask, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

His Kangol hat turns my direction. “You sure you want to know?”

“Yeah,” I say. Fearfully.

“1,000.”

“1,000…pesos?”

“Dollars.”

My heart stops beating. “That’s everything we have left!”

“Pretty much,” he nods.

“But…but…!” I sputter, my hands writhing like snakes in my lap.

He reaches over and quiets my hands. “We just need to make it to payday next month. Then everything’s going to be fine.” Typical Nick. His glass is always half-full, even when it’s empty.

The Rage Against the Machine disc finishes playing. Instead of another CD he switches to the radio, picking a bouncy mariachi station — on purpose. The bright rhythm is infectious. I find myself tap-tap-tapping my tummy to the beat. I wonder if the baby will grow up to like Mexican music as much as I do. Outside the windows traffic is lingering around us, giving me time to read license plates and bumper stickers. Nick is driving sedately now. That’s when I realize his crazy driving was just to test the Explorer’s replacement engine. It’s a strange inversion, the way his once-usual driving habits — frantic speed, tailgating, running red lights, suicidal passes — have now become unusual.

Suddenly the flat sunny blocks rise into a shaded hilltop enclave. The Explorer is still rattling over cobblestone streets, but lined with huge ginkgo trees instead of palms. We revolve lazily around a traffic circle with a statue of Marco Polo in the middle, mossy with age and wreathed in bird poop. The passing shop windows are full of pastries and exotic low-slung furniture and mannequins draped in expensive-looking clothes. In a local park I see kids — some tanned, some sunburned — racing through clay tennis courts on bikes and scooters. Further on is an Episcopalian church on low stilts and a gingerbread concert hall that belongs in Moulin Rouge.

“This is Las Palmas, the old foreign district,” Nick is saying. “When Mexico won its independence from Spain that was also the end of the Spanish trading monopoly. Other European nations poured in to get some of the action — England, France, Germany, you name it. Veracruz was swampland back then, so they built on this hill to get away from the mosquitoes.”

“Why do they call it Las Palmas when there are hardly any palm trees?” I ask, glancing up at the verdant canopy of ginkgo foliage. “They should call it Las Ginkgos instead.”

“Ha! I never thought of that before.”

He pulls over in front of a demure office duplex with smoked glass windows and etched-brass nameplates. Lizards scamper through the elephant-ear ivy that’s climbing the brick walls. The edges of the lot are marked with sections of wrought-iron fence, as if the neighboring mansions need to be held at bay.

I follow Nick onto the sidewalk, which is carpeted in rusting ginkgo leaves. He pauses for a moment, pointing at a Lexus sedan with a weird license plate, some numbers and a Finnish flag. “Still a lot of consular families living here, judging by all the diplomatic license plates.” Then he glances around at the mansions. “I bet foreign corporations also own some of these homes and give their senior managers free room and board. Like, a perk-type thing to get them to serve abroad.” He briefly encircles my shoulders with an arm, then lets it drop into a butt-squeeze. “Imagine trading Amsterdam or London or Rome for this place.”

Standing in the shaded glen of the duplex’s entrance, one nameplate says WILLIAM CARROLL, ESQ. and the other says CLINICA DUMITRESCU. We’re here for my four-month prenatal checkup, so we pick door #2. Inside the clinic is decorated in a restful blue water theme — cobalt walls, marine-patterned carpeting, almost-black teardrop couches. A young Mexican receptionist in a pinstriped dress waits behind a table instead of a desk, showing off well-toned legs as she stares into her computer screen. I don’t envy her, trying to keep legs crossed while seated patients wait for the doctor.

Within a couple minutes I’m filling out paperwork and Nick is paying the receptionist. In my peripheral vision I can see his reluctant fingers hover over his wallet, counting out the few bills that remain. We’re going broke just the way Hemingway said — slowly, then quickly. And our quickly is today. $1,000 to get the truck fixed, and now $35 for my prenatal visit. UCLA’s next payday is an eternity away.

Suddenly a royal blue door bangs open and a fashion plate struts out. Dr. Dumitrescu is wearing his hair stylishly mussed and zip-up dress boots and what’s obviously a tailored lab coat with his name embroidered above the heart. The dress shirt underneath is silk and open at the collar, revealing a thick platinum chain that complements his Rolex. He smiles in perfect bright welcome, showing off expensive dentistry. “You are the Americans, no?” he says in English thick as cookie dough.

“That’s us,” Nick sighs, jamming his wallet into his cargo pants. “I’m Nick Roberts, and this is my girlfriend Nooshin.”

“Nick, so good to meet you,” the doctor says, shaking his hand. Then he repeats the ritual with me. “Nooshin, so good to meet you.” The receptionist trots over with my paperwork and a look passes between them — they’ve paid. Then he leads the way into an examining room. “Nooshin…” he begins to say, and mangles my last name. “That is Iranian, no?”

“Yeah!” I say brightly. “How’d you know?”

“I get patients from all over world. This, one of things I love about Veracruz.” Dr. Dumitrescu waves me onto a digital scale and frowns. “You not weigh much yet.” He scribbles furiously on his clipboard in a language I can’t read.

Nick is leaning against the wall with arms folded, studying him with feigned disinterest. “How long have you been in Mexico, doctor?”

“10 years.”

“You came here from Romania, huh?”

“Yes.” A vague dreamy look sweeps over him. “I graduated from top school in Romania year early, I was…how do you say? Achiever? Good achiever? But…” The look shatters. “Life is hard there now. So hard, people not have so many babies any more. Maternity wards are old with old equipment, and pay…” He holds up his hand, the thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Pay was this small. I came here for good pay, for better life.”

“Why here? Because you knew somebody at the Romanian Consulate?”

Dr. Dumitrescu’s eyes twitch a little, narrowing. Somewhere in their hazel depths is a reason to change the topic. Turning back to me, he says, “Please sit on table, Nooshin.”

Obediently I perch on the edge of the examining table. The doctor hovers over me in a bustle of movements — taking my temperature and blood pressure, checking my glands and lymph nodes, listening to my lungs and heart, feeling my distended stomach. His touch is soft and warm, but sterile-smelling from antiseptic soap. Meanwhile he keeps up a running interrogation. Is this my first pregnancy? Does my family have any history of miscarriages or stillbirths? And so on.

As soon as I can get in a question of my own, I ask, “Do you think it’s bad that my breasts aren’t getting bigger?” A stricken note creeps into my voice. “I still can’t fill a training bra, let alone a maternity bra.”

Dr. Dumitrescu’s reassuring smile is just what I need. “Your breasts will be size they need to be. And they will get bigger.”

His gaze flickers over at Nick, as if expecting him to shout “Hot fucking damn!” or something. Instead Nick just gives me a lopsided grin. I blush tenderly at the man who loves my bumps just the way they are.

“Time to meet baby,” the doctor says, flattening me onto the table and hiking up the hem of my t-shirt. Then he pulls over an ultrasound machine from the corner. He squeezes a dollop of cool gel onto my belly and dips the receiver into it, smoothing it around. An image flickers on the ultrasound.

“That’s…the baby?” I gape in wonderment. Oh. My. God. I have a tiny little person inside me…

“Looks like an alien,” Nick says. And not in a joking tone of voice.

Dr. Dumitrescu is taking screenshots and measuring distances on them. “Let me get different angle.” He digs at me with the receiver. “There. See baby’s face? And there, hands. Feet there. And…” Suddenly he laughs, a warm rumble.

I’m almost too dazed to react. “What? What is it?”

“There, his penis. See? That, right there. Congratulations! You are having boy.”

Nick rises from his chair for a closer look. “Wow,” he mutters, contemplating the screen. After a while he straightens up, blinking rapidly into space. “We’re going to have a boy. A boy.” Then he whirls on me and I realize he’s blinking away tears, maintaining his composure but just barely. “Nooshin, we’re going to have a boy!”

I’m already blubbering. Big sobs of shock and joy and love are shuddering through me and spilling down my cheeks. Looking into my own heart I see the future from the wrong end of a telescope, blurry close-ups of a delivery room. My face is a sweaty mask of pain and concentration. A bloody head is crowning between my thighs. Nick’s hand is locked in mine. Then the vision dilates, encompassing the whole amazing wonderful terrifying scene, and dilates even more — a Tijuana nursery with no gifts or visitors, two homes in California where I no longer exist, an Iowa farmstead that compelled Nick to leave and never look back, farflung relatives and in-laws in a country I don’t even remember fleeing…

But none of that matters right now. The ultrasound is spitting out a picture of the screen. Our baby. Our baby boy.

Veracruz is like nowhere I’ve been in Mexico, a Caribbean port city of broad streets and even broader sidewalks. The whitewashed buildings seem stranded on their spacious blocks, like ships of colonial architecture — arched porticoes, wrought-iron balconies, crenelated rooflines — adrift in lawn and flowerbeds. Everywhere I look there are palm trees with white-painted trunks. Just a few blocks down are the docks, where towering gantry cranes clank and grind in endless labor, and giant container ships with strange flags bleed rust from their portholes. Overshadowed next to them is a weathered stone fortress that sprawls into the gulf, guarding the harbor with empty gunpits, immaculately landscaped with flowering shrubs and a tourist bridge that soars across a reflecting moat. Past another set of docks I can see the beach, a pearly lip dotted with straw-roofed pavilions.

Next to me Nick is striding briskly despite the atrocious heat. Sweatstains are spreading from his armpits down the logo of his powder blue UCLA t-shirt. His cellphone is pinned to an ear, the upraised elbow dripping a rivulet of sweat. He’s chatting amiably with a telephone representative of the Mexican national healthcare system, finding out how much it would cost for me to get health insurance. Can’t have a baby without it…

He briefly tilts the phone away from his mouth. “I’m on hold,” he whispers, even though dock equipment is pounding in the background. “Veracruz was the first Spanish settlement on the North American landmass, way back in 1519. Hernan Cortes called it La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, ‘The Rich Town of the True Cross’. There’s the future of the Spanish empire for you, predicted in a name. Gold and God — in that order, baby!”

I nod miserably beneath a swamp of damp hair. You can see every contour of my weird pregnancy — stubbornly nonexistent boobs, swelling tummy — through my sweat-plastered sundress. My oversized runner’s watch is a black heatsink scorching my wrist. Even my strappy sandals feel mushy, as if the wedge heels are melting.

Nick’s icy blue eyes are the only cool relief in sight. “Keep drinking water,” he encourages me, gesturing at my fourth — fifth? — bottle of Agua Pura, and goes back to his conversation.

Dutifully I take another gulp. All this water and I still haven’t had to pee, it just keeps leaking out my pores. At the end of the street is the Gulf of Mexico, warm as blood. I find myself glancing over my shoulder, wondering how far we’ve walked. My heart puddles when I realize it’s only been a couple blocks. I can still see the shiny colorful lot of the Ford dealership, where we dropped off the Explorer hoping they can replace the engine. Nick claims the dealership is one of the oldest in Mexico, and I believe him. There’s a vintage Model T in the showroom and framed black-and-white pictures of mustachioed bandidos on the walls.

Nick’s voice is suddenly incredulous, then hectoring, then resigned. He snaps the cellphone shut. “Well THAT fucking sucks.”

“What?” I ask.

“You could get on the Mexican national healthcare plan no problem, only a couple hundred bucks a year, but get this — they don’t cover pregnancy until your third year of enrollment.”

I can’t think very well when I feel like a frying egg. “But…but…the baby will be born by then!” I finally realize.

“Yeah. Exactly.” Nick wrings out his Kogal hat with violent strangling motions, then slaps it back onto his balding head. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

“Well, medical care is really cheap here. We only paid $20 for my exam back in Guanajuato, remember? How much do you think it costs to have a baby?”

“$2,000 at one of the private hospitals in Tijuana. I already checked.”

“$2,000? Holy crap!” I stumble, more from panic than my awkwardly high heels, and grab onto his slick arm. “Nick! $2,000!”

He pauses to help me regain my balance. “It’s cheaper at a public hospital, but they have year-long waiting lists. Hey, no crying. You know me, right? I’ll think of something. I always think of something.” The handsome angles of his face don’t know how to align. They keep shifting between confidence and uncertainty.

Distraught, I wander into the shade of a courtyard, where a bronze sculpture of leaping dolphins is surrounded by fragrant bougainvillea and a single wooden bench. It’s probably someone’s front yard, but I don’t care. I collapse onto the bench and bury my face in my hands.

“Hey. Nooshin.” Nick touches my bare shoulder, a gesture that almost scalds in this heat. “Hey.”

I peek through my fingers at those muscular calves, at those well-worn hiking boots. His leg hair is matted with trickles of sweat. “What?” I almost shriek.

“Relax, would you? It’s going to be okay.”

“Okay? It’s going to be okay?” I stare up at him in disbelief, my heart thumping in terror. “I’m going to have this baby in our house in Tijuana, and YOU’RE going to deliver it!”

Nick retreats hastily. “Well, we could get a midwife. That’s how most Mexican babies are born, at home with a midwife.” He seems to turn inward, considering it.

“Most Mexican babies are born at home with a midwife because this is a developing country! Everyone would go to a hospital if they could afford it!”

“But — ”

“I’m having my baby in a hospital with an obstetrician and a maternity ward and an epidural and EVERYTHING I NEED!” I want to yell at him some more, just so he’s super duper clear on that point, but I’m too breathless and panting.

He sits down heavily on the bench beside me. “Maybe we can save up the money. A couple hundred out of my funding each month, a couple hundred out of your paycheck. We could get to $2,000 by October.”

“How? By not getting your truck fixed? By not eating? We don’t make enough money. Seriously, we just don’t.” Salty tears are stinging my eyes. I lean over and wipe them away with the sleeve of Nick’s t-shirt. “Do you think I could get a job back in Tijuana? Or maybe in San Diego and commute across the border? A job with health insurance?”

His profile is grim. “Even if you could find a job with health insurance, they wouldn’t have to cover the pregnancy. No American insurer would.”

“What? How could they get away with that? My pregnancy is a preexisting condition, right? I thought there’s a federal law about preexisting conditions, a law that, that…” My voice trails off. I don’t know enough to keep talking.

“There is a law. It’s called HIPPO or HIPPA or something like that. But it’s fucking swiss cheese. Full of loopholes for the insurance industry. Like, they don’t have to cover your preexisting condition if you were previously uninsured.” Nick shrugs miserably. “UCLA always warns us about it — don’t let your insurance lapse, because preexisting conditions won’t be covered when you re-enroll.”

We’re stranded in a dreary silence that pours over us like the heat. Overhead a window squeaks open and a voice bellows down at us. I’m too distracted to translate the Spanish. I just crane my neck backwards, until I’m tilting back at an upside-down face. The man is surly and big-looking, with features set like oases in his wide cheeks and broad forehead — pinprick eyes, a tiny yelling mouth. Suddenly the yelling stops. Noticing my crooked wandering eye, the Evil Eye to superstitious Mexicans, he hurriedly crosses himself and retreats back inside, leaving us alone in his front yard.