Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea (7 page)

So, finally, I did what I should have done much, much earlier. I gave myself permission to leave. I hadn’t been planning on making Mexico my new home, but the little house on the sea seemed to be all I had left. The day after the annulment, I crammed everything I owned into my red Mini Cooper, and Polly the cat and I headed south for Mexico.

T
HIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE
scene in my life movie where I’m tooling down the coast, hair flying in the breeze, belting out a song of girly liberation, pumping my fist out the rolled-down window. If only. The stretch from Napa to Palm Springs, California, is, for the most part, hot, boring, and long. And I was a mess. The car was littered with crumpled tissues, empty soda cans, and sticky candy wrappers. The air was stale with Marlboro Menthols, and the only sounds to be heard were Polly’s mews and my own curses at anyone who dared to pass a little too quickly, swerve a little too close, or even just look at me sideways.

All I wanted was to be in my house, and it was all I could do to stay focused on that goal. You’ll be fine, I tried to tell myself over and over. Just trust the GPS lady, do what she says, and you’ll be fine. You can figure everything else out after you get there. It will be fine. “We’ll be fine, right, Pol?”

Riiiiggghhhttt
, answered Inner Debbie, my worst critic, her nasally voice dripping with sarcasm.

“I wasn’t talking to you! And who invited you, anyway?” I answered out loud.

What, you thought I wasn’t coming along?

Apparently I had expected too much when I hoped to leave my doubts behind, back in Napa. Instead those doubts seem to have multiplied, weighing me down with even more baggage than I had arrived there with.

You’ve got more baggage than Paris Hilton on a three-week luxury cruise.

I couldn’t argue.
My life sometimes seemed like a series of one-act plays starring the same character, a gutsy heroine who over and over seems destined to triumph, yet somehow never quite does. Oh, I was great at survival. That skill set kicked in long ago, after my first husband, whom I had met in college, fathered not one but
two
children with women who were not me, including one who was (until then) my best friend. I am not kidding. I was only twenty-five, with two little boys, when things finally fell apart. We were married too young, and our union had already been a rocky one, with both of us to blame. And to complicate things even further, my soon-to-be-ex-husband was working alongside me at my mom’s salon, and had built up a clientele bigger than my own, which wasn’t hard considering my double duty as a mother. So when, in the heat of the moment, I presented Mom with a “he goes or I go” ultimatum, and she chose her cheating son-in-law over her own daughter, I had to force myself to bottle up that triple betrayal deep down inside somewhere, put on a smile, and figure out a Plan B. But not before slashing his tires in a fit of rage.

Wow. You go, girl! But what about that Plan B? Did you actually believe that escaping your mom’s salon to work in a prison was a wise career choice? What kind of woman thinks that conducting mess hall pat-downs on a bunch of thieves and murderers would be better than doing perms?

Inner Debbie knew way too much about me. But she wasn’t telling the whole story. Yes, I did move on to work, briefly, as a prison
guard. But when I took that job, I was a single mom who needed to feed her kids, and a steady salary, health insurance, and a 401(k) were luxuries I had never before enjoyed. You do what you have to do. Unfortunately, they stuck me on the second shift, which meant I never, ever got to see my boys, and I was likely facing a sentence of nine more years on that same schedule. What kind of a life was that? No amount of money or security could make that okay. I think I knew it was time to leave when Zachary told his first-grade teacher that Mommy couldn’t make it to the parent-teacher conference because she was in jail.

The day I quit, after a year on the job, I had been working the yard. My long blond hair extensions were gathered up into an
I Dream of Jeannie
ponytail on top of my head, the only practical solution to guard against the brutal wind whipping off Lake Michigan. The captain called me into his office.

“Anything wrong, sir?” I asked, knowing there wasn’t. I was doing a good job. Nobody had escaped, and no one had been killed on my watch. I had already complied with the captain’s request that I trade in what he called my “disco pants,” which were actually quite nice and baggy, for the regulation skintight, black standard-issue ones that elicited catcalls and whistles from the sex-starved inmates. He motioned for me to sit.

“Your hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s your hair. You can’t wear it like that.”

I had to laugh. “It’s just a ponytail, you know, because of the wind?”

“Just take it down from on top of your head.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, just pull it down an inch, so it looks more normal.”

“I can’t. You see, this part . . .” I held out my extensions for him to take a look. “This part isn’t mine. And when I pull on it too much, it gives me a headache. I can’t work with a headache, can I? And anyway, what exactly does ‘more normal’ mean?”

I could see by the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot that he was losing patience with me. “Just move the damn thing down an inch. Nobody is going to take you seriously with hair like that.”

“Well, nobody is going to take
you
seriously with those three measly twelve-inch-long strands combed over your bald head. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

I swear I could see the steam coming out of his ears. “An inch! That’s all I’m asking.”

I knew I was right, and I wasn’t about to back down. I easily got more respect from the inmates than I got out of the men who worked in this prison. Within the system, there had been way too many dropped hints about the exchange of “favors” for a promotion. And I was sick of it.

“You know, if you want my ponytail moved, move it yourself. On second thought, no.” I unhooked the wad of keys from my belt and flung them on his desk. “I’m outta here.”

After the prison stint I tried to go back to my old standby, hairdressing, but at that point, with no customer base and no insurance and almost no money, it all seemed so hopeless. An opportunity (and yes, a man) dropped into my lap, one that just seemed too good to pass up. Bobbie was a Bahamian who lived in Chicago. There was a lot of money to be made down in the Bahamas, he told me, diving for lobsters and crayfish. We were moving to the islands, where we would build a house on the water. I was truly intrigued by the idea of showing my kids the world beyond Holland, Michigan. It would be an adventure!

So I sold my house, bought a pop-up tent, packed up the boys, and moved to Mangrove Cay. My vision of living on an island, spending long, sun-kissed days combing the sand with my sons, sounded way better than raising a couple of latchkey kids I never saw. Nothing was worth missing the opportunity of seeing them grow up. And I did make it work, for a while. We began construction on the house. Earning a living from diving was proving to be difficult, so for extra
money I’d fly to Nassau once a month and buy Twinkies, Juicy Juice, and Doritos in bulk, then sell them out of the back of my battered old car to hungry schoolkids on lunch break and families at sports events and festivals. In our temporary home, we had no water, we had no electricity, but for the first time in my kids’ lives I was there to greet them at home every day after school, even if it was just from the flap of a tent. It was the packs of flesh-eating sand fleas that, after six months, drove me away from the Bahamas, back to Michigan, and into my next marriage.

Who did you think you were, Elizabeth Taylor or something?

It was clear that the loudmouth inside wasn’t about to let up on me. On the contrary, I was no Elizabeth Taylor. One thing I never understood about myself was the fact that although there were always plenty of prettier and thinner and smarter women around, I never seemed to be able to date a man for long before he’d ask me to marry him. And though I knew that “no” was an option, and at times may have been the wiser choice, I just couldn’t seem to get myself to say it out loud.

With Mr. Right, I at least forced myself to try. I told him maybe. We met at the mall, where, with my last five hundred dollars plus a two-thousand-dollar loan, I had set up a holiday kiosk to sell plaster gargoyles. I had come across them during a trip to Chicago and couldn’t get over how cool they were. So I found the factory that made them and was soon in possession of a boatload of gargoyles—two-inch gargoyles, six-hundred-pound gargoyles, and everything in between. My dad had always told me I could sell ice to an Eskimo, but here I was, trying to persuade conservative midwestern Dutchmen that a scary cement sculpture was something they just couldn’t live without.

One day Mr. Right came by to check out my gargoyles, with three kids just as adorable as he was in tow. Soon he was dropping by every day, bringing me coffee or cocoa or tea. We talked about our families, his amateur acting career, my love of travel. I learned he even went to the same church that I had recently visited a few times. I was
smitten. I left the mall seven weeks later with enough money for a down payment on a home, and a new boyfriend.

Then he asked me to marry him. Though things had been going extremely well, I was determined not to make another mistake. So I suggested we date for a year and then revisit the question.

Our dates always involved seven people—with his two sons and daughter, and my two boys—all of them between the ages of eight and thirteen. We traveled around with our own little Brady Bunch, which to me seemed like a good way to keep things from moving too fast. Mr. Right, who sang at church and played Jesus in the Easter pageant, encouraged me to play my trumpet at every service. It was so much fun to pick up the instrument again after nine years. I loved the powerful feeling that came from blasting out those sweet notes all the way to the back pews. And after a nearly perfect year, one that felt almost too good to be real, I said yes.

It was a fairy-tale wedding. All the kids stood up for us, and each and every member of the new family added a ring to the third finger of his or her left hand. After a romantic Italian honeymoon (for two), we all settled into a farmhouse big enough for the whole gang. And though we worked different shifts, Mr. Right managed to keep the weekday passion alive through hidden notes and frequent phone calls.

It was only six weeks after the marriage that I sensed a change. He had begun to distance himself from me. No more phone calls, no more notes. And when we were together, he seemed to have no patience for me. I suspected depression. He claimed the depression was mine. Then one day it simply stopped. He suddenly seemed to hate everything about me—my body, my hair, my smile, my kids. It was as though just the smell of me when I entered a room would make him sick. I had no idea what I had done.

By now he was making sure we were never alone. His weekends were spent being Super Dad, a role I still admired him for. Then one Sunday, on a weekend when my kids were at their dad’s, I headed out to the car with my trumpet, anxious to get to church early to warm up
before the crowd arrived. There, in the driveway, was Mr. Right hurrying all his kids into the van.

“Why so early?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I never saw Mr. Right and his kids again. Soon we were divorced. I later heard he had moved to Florida and come out as gay.

For once Inner Debbie didn’t seem to have much to say. And I really didn’t need her to remind me about the next disastrous relationship, the one that sent me packing to Afghanistan. I had married a preacher—a jealous, hot-blooded, hotheaded Latin preacher. At least something good came out of that union, even if it did come from a place of dark desperation. But honestly, when you leave during a screaming match with your husband, swearing that you’d rather die in Afghanistan than live one more day in Michigan with him, you know it’s time to go.

The truth was, I had already started making an attempt to head down a different path well before that confrontation with my preacher husband. I’d always yearned to be more than just a hairdresser. To me, hairdressing was what those girls did who got pregnant in high school, or who weren’t smart enough or rich enough to go to college. I didn’t look at my trade as something to be proud of. It was just something I had settled for. What I really wanted to do was help people, and to the younger me that meant either cop, firefighter, or military. But back then, at least where I lived, girls just didn’t do that. I considered becoming a missionary, but the thought of cramming religion down people’s throats just didn’t fly with me. That, and I hated the outfits.

But times had changed, and now that my kids were nearly grown, I was determined to turn my energy toward something that mattered. By that time I was too old to be accepted by the police academy or the military, and I wasn’t even close to being in good enough shape to battle a raging inferno. So when I came across a Christian organization in Chicago that was offering disaster relief training, I jumped at the chance.