Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea (14 page)

But when the time came to actually get serious about this whole exercise idea, it soon became clear that the real challenge wasn’t going to be finding the right outfit; it was finding a gym that I wasn’t going to suffocate in. Mexicans aren’t too keen on air-conditioning, because not only is it expensive, but they believe that sweating is actually healthy, unless, of course, you are sweating
in air-conditioning, in which case you’ll get sick. Go figure. My other two requirements for a gym were that it be female-friendly and close to my house.

Gimnasio Roberto’s, a quick bike ride away from Carnaval Street, fit the bill close enough. As I passed under a dubious likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger hanging over the doorway and climbed the long, narrow stairway up from the street, I could feel the wetness spreading from every nook and cranny of my body. I hadn’t even lifted a finger yet and I was drenched, droplets of my sweat leaving dark, round spots on the threadbare gray carpet under my feet.

Let’s get physical . . . physical,
Olivia Newton-John screamed from the giant speakers hanging on the wall, the bass turned up so high the floors shook. Back down another set of stairs, one flight below, the dark, cavernous gym was lined with more mirrors than a carnival funhouse, and was teeming with a sea of incredibly beautiful people. The women were all Jennifer Lopez—toned, tanned, huge breasts, awesome booties. Everything matched. Tight pink pants were paired with low-cut pink midriff tops, pink sweatbands for the head, pink wristbands, and a pink towel to wipe the machines down.

The men? Enrique Iglesias clones, from their sweaty six-packs up to their perfectly gelled hair. They were all impossibly beautiful.

I snuck into a corner space and eyed the dumpy chick in the T-shirt and sweats staring back at me from the mirror. The makeup I’d never leave the house without was already streaming down my cheeks. I looked like Gene Simmons after a particularly rowdy KISS concert. From every angle, all I could see were those beautiful people, and I knew that if I was seeing them, they were seeing me. I closed my eyes and started to lift, curling up and down and up and down, willing the flesh that was sagging off the back of my arms to magically turn into muscle bulging from the front. Soon the weights were becoming impossibly heavy, and I was struggling to lower them without letting them crash to the floor. I must have let out some sort of uncontrollable bellow or other cry of distress because, to my mortification, when I raised my eyes everyone had turned to look. And that’s when I
saw her. My angel in a push-up sports bra and the tiniest pair of shorts you’ve ever seen, shorts that were barely covering an ass that topped a pair of legs as long as I was tall. She was a Bo Derek ten to my Ugly Betty zero. She effortlessly grabbed my weights and lowered them to the ground, her two-inch-long crystal-studded nails reflecting off the mirrors surrounding us. I opened my mouth to thank her but whatever came out sounded nothing like Spanish.

“Debbie,” I added quickly, while extending my hand. “Rodriguez.”

She looked puzzled. Mexicans are always curious about how I could be a Rodriguez yet speak Spanish so poorly, and with such an atrocious accent. I tell them that I kept the name and got rid of the husband. That always brings a smile and keeps me from having to go into my marital history. And my Spanish
was
terrible. In high school, I could not understand one word in any language that my French-born Spanish teacher spoke, and the Rosetta Stone courses I was now trying to follow only succeeded in putting me to sleep.

The woman introduced herself as Angelica. Then she pointed to the different women in the gym and shouted out their names above the din of the blaring disco music.

Angelica and I both arrived at the gym at around noon every day. We shared weights and traded equipment. She showed me how to use the butt-shaping machines and I made her laugh, mostly through goofy faces and pantomime. She persuaded me to ditch the little backpack I toted from machine to machine, and to follow her lead—water bottle in hand, towel around neck, cell phone tucked into one bra cup, change purse with house keys in the other, and a tube of lip gloss handily stowed in the cleavage. Genius.

Although I thought I could feel myself firming up little by little with each visit, I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t able to have a normal conversation with Angelica or the other women in the gym. Here was a chance to make friends with some local women, and I couldn’t even talk to them. It felt a lot like Kabul in the beginning, when I had to use an interpreter to communicate even the basics to
my girls at the school. Note to self, I thought: find a Spanish teacher ASAP.

“Cuál es tu trabajo?” Angelica asked one day. What do you do for work?

Nothing, I thought. It felt strange to think that, but so far Mexico had proven to be as affordable as I had hoped it would be, and I was managing to stretch my savings as tight as the skin on a pregnant woman’s belly. In answer to Angelica, all I could do was scribble with an imaginary pen in one hand, and mimic a pair of snipping scissors with the other.

The next day I handed Angelica the Spanish-language version of
Kabul Beauty School,
pointing out my picture on the back cover. She rattled off something to the other women in the gym, and they all gathered around to take a look.

When I returned the following week, the girl at the front desk was reading my book. It seemed they had been passing it around. She held up the cover for me to see, and smiled as I walked past. I smiled back. I’d finally been invited to the cool kids’ table! But as much as they now knew about me, I still hadn’t figured out what these girls were all about.

One day I arrived at the gym to find myself face-to-face with a stringy-haired man in sandals and socks and a muscle shirt that revealed everything but muscles, who followed my boobs with his bloodshot eyes as I headed to the machines. I thought I recognized him from Mamita’s, but we had never spoken. I averted my eyes as I passed, pretending not to hear whatever it was he was saying to me. Angelica appeared from behind and quickly pulled me away.

“Pinche pendejo,” she muttered, which I later learned roughly translates to “fucking asshole.” I could now see him on the other side of the room leering at us. “Tu amigo?” Angelica asked.

“No, no, nada, no friend!” I answered, in a panic.

She turned to the other girls in the room, rattled off something really fast, and suddenly the room was abuzz. Angelica then said
something else, lowered her fabulous fake lashes at me, and said very seriously, “Cuidada. Eso hombre es malo. Careful.”

That evening I popped into Mamita’s right before sunset. Analisa instinctively reached for the red wine. “Just water for me,” I told her, not without some difficulty. Her perfectly groomed eyebrows lifted toward the ceiling in a question mark. I squeezed my belly in response.

“Ah, good for you,” said my friend with zero body fat, as she climbed onto the bar to take a bottle from the top shelf. As usual, the room went silent at the sight of Analisa’s perfect ass suspended in midair.

“Sucks,” I responded, sipping my water as I waited for her to climb down, a feat that always seemed to take her a little longer than necessary. “And I just joined a gym, but they won’t turn on their air. It’s killing me.” Analisa just nodded. This was not the tree to be barking up for sympathy. “I guess I’m just not as tough as you are, Analisa. Can I have a glass of red wine?”

Analisa placed her hands on her hips and paused, weighing my request.

“Please?”
I put down my water. “Oh shit!”

“Okay, Deb. I will get you your wine . . . relax!”

“It’s not that!” Out of the corner of my eye, I had spotted the guy from the gym. “It’s that drunk over there.” I rolled my eyes toward his table and tried to duck out of his line of sight as he downed a shot of tequila.

“Oh, that cochino.” Analisa wrinkled her nose. “Yesterday he throw five hundred pesos at me and he say, ‘What can I get for that?’ ”

“Ugh. What did you tell him?”

Analisa laughed and grabbed her boobs. “I told him he cannot afford this. Then I walk away. What else can I do?” She paused and sighed. “You know, Debbie? Sometime I hate this job.”

“You should get out of here. Find something else.”

“It is not easy, you know.” She turned to pour a beer from the tap.

“Hey, Red!” came a yell from across the room. Everyone stopped to look but me. I hated being called Red. I hated being called
anything by this creep. “I see you’ve been hanging out with Angelica! Now that’s one chica I’d like to tap!” he yelled as he thrust his hips.

Analisa looked at him, and then at me. “What is he saying?”

“He’s such an asshole,” I said, without looking up. I lowered my voice. “He stalks the girls at the gym.”

“What gym did you join, Debbie?” Analisa asked.

“The one near my house,” I said. “You know, on Reforma Street.”

Again Analisa just shook her head.

Now the guy stood up and began to rub his crotch against a cement pole in the middle of the room. “Has she taught you to use the pole yet? You can show us what you’ve got later tonight at Velvets! Hey, guys!” he called out to the room. “Red’s working at Velvets tonight!”

I could feel the heat rising from my chest to my hairline as I pushed myself up from the stool and cleared my throat. But before I could make a move, Analisa grabbed me by the arm and sat me back down. “Tranquilo, Debbie.”

“What is his problem? Jeez. I
reall
y don’t know how you stand working here.” I pointed to the wine bottle on the bar.

Analisa poured. “I need the money, Debbie. Nobody takes care of me. I am the one who takes care of me and my son.”

“Well,” I said, sipping my wine, “I still think there must be better places to work. Places where you don’t have to wiggle your butt in people’s faces to earn a living.”

Analisa pretended not to hear. “Why you go to that gym with those dirty girls? This is not good, Debbie. People will think you are like them.”

“What do you mean, like them?”

“You know those girls at that gym are all dancers, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, dancers?”

“You know, what is the word? Naked dancers.”

“Strippers? No way!”

“Most of them work at Velvets, or the other clubs. And a man, he can get anything he wants at those places. What time you go to the gym? Not early like me, right?”

I knew that regardless of how late Analisa worked, or how hard she partied, she had a 6
A.M
. date with the gym, every single day. I shook my head. “No, I go late.”

“Right. And why do you think those girls all look like that?”

“I think they look good!” I protested. “And they’re so nice! Are they from Mazatlán?”

“Lots of girls come here to work, some by choice, some no. You know prostitution is legal here, right?”

I had no idea. “But this is a beach town! I never see working girls hanging around.”

“That’s because you go to bed at eight,” Analisa said, laughing. “Anyway, they don’t hang around.” I just shook my head.

“It’s a job. Money.” She grabbed a tip off the bar and stuffed it into her tight pocket. “There are not a lot of ways for a woman with not much education to make money here, Debbie.”

I should have understood better. Though the women here certainly had more freedom than those I had met in Afghanistan, for those without resources the options still seemed to be few. I’d see them working the hotels, the bars, cleaning houses, selling shoes, at the receptionist desk at the dental office or at the phone company, but that seemed to be about as far as most careers went. Higher education was a luxury many could not afford. And besides, most of them seemed to have babies before they were even old enough to know what sex was.

Even the jobs that were available to women were hard to come by. Hell, work for everyone down here was becoming harder and harder to find, with news reports of kidnappings and shoot-outs and bodies left hanging from bridges, scaring boatloads of tourists away from the country. Yes, things happened, but as I knew all too well, things happened everywhere. Mexico seemed pretty peaceful to me, so far.

I
HAD HIRED
B
ODIE TO
oversee some renovation on the house. Now I was woken up every morning by his crew of four tiptoeing past my door on their way to the roof, the only option for some much-needed expansion to accommodate friends and family I hoped would someday visit. But as soon as the guys would make their way up my killer spiral staircase (which, if my ass got any bigger, I’d never be able to negotiate), all bets were off. On went the radio, full blast, and in came the music straight through the two-by-two-foot open cube between my bedroom and my roof, which was the house’s very traditional, very old, and semifunctional “air movement” system (that is, at least when the air was moving, which in the summer was, like, never). And boy did these guys love their music. It was as though they were auditioning for
American Idol,
their voices crowing through the still morning air, reminding me of the muezzins’ call to prayer that was my predawn alarm clock in Afghanistan. After the suffocating silence of all those mornings on top of that hill in California, I was delighted to wake once again to the sweet sound of life around me.