meet maria; or, contents under pressure; or, probably the longest post of 2008; or, ¡feliz año nuevo!
Sunday 6 January 2008 | someone left a cookie
This is Maria.
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Part One.
Maria came from a vendor’s stand in Acapulco sometime in 1969. I was still a baby when my aunt got married and went there for her honeymoon (but not the ensuing divorce). She got a crippling case of turista and she also got me this papier-mâche-and-sawdust-stuffed souvenir doll, who originally had a straw sombrero and some rather amazing real leather huaraches, which have since been lost. [And as an aside, Maria’s apparently not worth much on eBay, though she’s worth a lot to me; but my searches turned up this listing for the scariest doll in the world, whose horrifying photograph I can’t even bring myself to put on the blog. You have to scroll down to get the full effect. If this doll doesn’t say “speaks flawless backward medieval Latin” I don’t know what does. Now where was I.]
When I grew up enough to start playing with dolls in a serious, deliberate, programmatic way, naming them and assigning them personalities and roles, I slowly became aware of the Mexican one. I disliked her and her brawny red-earth arms and earnest expression, her flat hard-working feet, her non-brushable hair. I associated her with diarrhea, and with my aunt, who was pretty and had green eyes but was mean to me.
My best friend was Mary Lou Enriquez, who lived across the street with her seven brothers. Mary Lou was always two years older than me and in the same grade. This was partly because I’d been harriedly stashed in the second grade when I was five, partly because Mary Lou was a year or two back from where she ought to have been. Were they immigrants? I don’t know. Mary Lou definitely had an accent, and even when we were little she liked to raise her fist in the air and crow, “Chicana power!” She was taller than me, had a funkier bike (with banana seat and wide handlebars), and her jeans were always pastel yellow or pink. She taught me to carry a plastic comb in swirly psychedelic colors in my back pocket and to comb my hair with it between classes (something I never got the hang of, judging by school photos in which I always have one barrette hanging loose and a wild-eyed expression, looking, per Grandma, as if I’d been drug through a bush backwards).
I think “Enriquez” had an accent somewhere in it but I was never sure and was too something (ashamed? indifferent?) to ask.
My mom didn’t like me to play with Mary Lou, who may have been only 9 or 10 but was somehow already vaguely slutty, with her tilted black eyes and flirty ways. One time I remember asking Mom, “How do boys like for girls to dress?” I must have been in the throes of my years-long crush on Greg Miller, a short freckled kid who liked football and had feathered black hair and buckteeth. (Not that I could have changed the way I dressed anyway. I liked hot pink and purple but my mom always sewed me stuff in maroon and brown—”earth tones” were popular then. I envied her makeup, her jewel-toned eye shadows of exotic shimmering turquoise or smudgy green. When would I get to be grown-up and pretty like my mom?) Mom thought for a long time and finally told me that she knew boys liked girls who were modest and decent, and who wore ladylike clothes, like long skirts and dresses. I went away and pondered these things in my heart.
After a few days I asked Mary Lou the same question. Without hesitation she answered, tossing her hair back, “Well, I know a lot about this, chica, cause of my bros, you know.” Mary Lou often referenced her bros as sources of adult knowledge, from ten-speed bicycles to music to whether there were really drugs at the middle school we were supposed to attend next year. “Boys like tight jeans! that show your butt, like this.” She threw her hip to the side and smacked its pastel curve, barely beginning to fill out. “And tight t-shirts! To show off your chest, you know?” I was too embarrassed to look at the bumps gracing her own t-shirt, pink with glittery script on it, saying something like “HOT BABE” or “CUTIE PIE.” This would have been about 1977. Most of the time we played outside, roller-skating in the driveway, wishing we had real satin jackets and colored pompoms for our skates, humming the disco/pop music we heard in our heads. “Freak Out” by Le Chic. “Love Is Like Oxygen.”
At sunset our moms would call us in for dinner. Mary Lou’s mom always stood shadowed in the screen doorway, looking tired, hesitant, overworked. I imagined her as trapped in the dark brown, unkempt house all day, making weird Mexican food for her family of ten. Our house was white clapboard, with an organic garden and my treehouse in the backyard, where Mary Lou and I spent hours. My mom said Mary Lou’s mom couldn’t speak English. I never tried to talk to her, nor she to me. In the five years that we lived there and Mary Lou and I were best friends, with her coming over to my house every day, I never set foot inside the Enriquez home. Her mom’s name was Maria.
So I named my doll Maria. And I made her the servant of my doll family, made her wait on Malibu Barbie and Skipper and the Donny Osmond doll and the Jaime Sommers/Bionic Woman doll (my favorite, because her feet were flat and she wore tennis shoes). Maria was their cook and nanny, their maid and assistant, the kindly old retainer to whom they went for consolation when they were being blonde and snippy-nosed and horrid to each other. She was always patient, always generous with her time, always warm.
Eventually, over about 15 years, she became my favorite doll.
Here are the remains of the others—I pulled them out the other night, blowing off moth dust, while I was seeking Maria’s missing huaraches for her upcoming visit to Mexico. I should sell them on eBay. I’ll be 39 in March; I’m probably not ever going to have a child; and if I did, wouldn’t s/he be more interested in rock climbing and scorpions than these plastic improbabilities?
I couldn’t find the huaraches, so Maria came to Baja with us barefoot. She didn’t seem to mind, gazing at the familiar, or perhaps alien, terrain from the dashboard of the Honda, where she lay jumbled cosily among shells and coral and rocks and seed pods.
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Part Two.
So we had 13 days of freezing our skinny white asses off by the Pacific and the Cortez, slowly warming and shedding layers in the daytime down to shorts and t-shirts, wandering beaches, wandering deserts, climbing impossible screes and scrambles of rock to hunt cacti and scorpions and views, sitting in the car laughing and shivering and eating almond butter and graham crackers for dinner by flashlight, building campfires and baking potatoes and burning tortillas, falling asleep to the crash of waves and the tiny wink of battery-powered Christmas lights (given to me two years ago, during my vile break-up winter, also a Bing Crosby CD and a tin of sugar cookies, by the ever-thoughtful Ms. Librarian, of whom more later—nightmares, every night, of Librarians and of Zen women, unremittingly).
We saw pelicans and seagulls, sandpipers and osprey, jackrabbits, feral cattle and horses, no snakes, no javelinas, and five scorpions if you count the dead one in the hotel room at San Ignacio (dusty and crisp, but still manfully flourescing green) (the others: a stunning nighttime Vaejovis and Centruroides exillicaudis at Playa el Coyote in Concepcíon, and two more daytime Centruroides under rocks on “Succulent Hill,” one trying to hide and the other, tipped in bright red, furiously attacking my poking stick). Tropical weird precious little San Ignacio, where we had empanadas datíl on Christmas Eve and the Brujo bought me the present I’ve bizarrely long wanted, a turquoise-and-blue spackleware pot.
We also saw wondrous sea creatures this time—dolphins, several different kinds of starfish and spiny stars (one so tiny it fit on the Brujo’s fingernail), anemones and barnacles, two weird-as-all-get-out squidgy spurting phallic things which must have been sea cucumbers, many many sponges in freaky shades of blue and red and green (also flourescent under black light!) and most magically of all to me a GIANT purple squid, flipping and floating around in the clear water at La Gringa one morning. “What’s that?” said the hawkeyed Brujo, and headed immediately toward it. “Just kelp,” I said pessimistically, until it flapped up a tentacle into the sun and spun to swim the other way, easily four feet long and a rich magenta, surrounded by warily floating seagulls.
We saw mountains and mountains of basura, because in all of Baja there is no such thing as a contained landfill, only dumps/basurero from which the trash blows merrily everywhere. We saw Americans and British Columbians in their RVs and on their ATVs and we kept a respectful, hostile distance. We saw rainbows in horses’-mane seaspray at Playa Saldamando and we saw starlight on still water from Sirius at Bahía de Los Angeles—our favorite place, where we went back to spend our last three days and wound up staying in an abandoned, totally isolated stone palapa for free, even though it had “8 dlls” painted on the side. We read hilarious Angrish señales, went for a memorable week without showers other than the freezing slapdash salty kind, found the place where we want our ashes scattered someday. And saw roughly eighteen squillion cardón/círios/copálquin and cacti cacti cacti, most of which the Brujo meticulously photographed (and from many of which he smuggled seed. The border crossing was nerve-wracking and we swore to get botanical permits before we ever do that again).
You can see pictures of all this craziness here, though be warned most of them are of cacti. If I look carsick in my pictures, that’s because I am. The scopolamine patch works to some extent, but isn’t the magic bullet for which I’d hoped. In beloved Tecate we tried vainly to obtain “jinjembre” but somehow wound up with digestive charcoal instead (which does seem to be helpful for Fiona’s flatulence); and eventually we gave up and I drove the car, sipping Pepsi and stopping often and swallowing what seemed like gallons of saliva and trying to smile and say I felt fine. And I did feel fine. I felt better than fine. I felt like someone who wasn’t in the US and that is, if you know the feeling, a mighty fine sensation indeed, Barack and Iowa and all that aside.
The saddest thing was that Marinela has apparently stopped making Morsas. We found Pingüinos and Submarinos wherever we went (and the mesmerizingly pink ¡Sponch! which never decays, as we know because we once found some impaled on the spines of a saguaro), but all along the peninsula, no hay Morsas. 
The patch did work well enough so that I could eat, and the Brujo and I feasted our way through the Recommended Daily Allowance of fish tacos, including one memorable meal where we polished off ten between us, both pescado y camarones, and finished with wedges of hallucinatory “chess pay” (cheesecake), crumbly with dark brown sugar and eggy goodness.
Of course, we might not have felt so expansive had we known about all the various disturbing criminal activities taking place all around us, but we’re pretty low-profile as gringo tourists go, with the beat-up car and no electronic equipment and no fancy camping stuff. Though maybe it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, that of saving up so we can buy a $25,000 house without water or electricity in Bahía de LA and move there when I finish at the State School in 2010. And live on what, cactus fruits and true love?
Which brings us to the contents-under-pressure bit.
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Part Three.
Everyone knows that being back after a vacation is always unfun; returning last year to Santa Fe’s foot-and-a-half of snow nearly gave us both heart attacks. But driving through Yuma into Phoenix and pulling up outside our own wee corner of suburban insanity felt, to me, also deeply and profoundly wrong. Somehow I still haven’t come home.
I’ve more or less gamely tried to pick up where I more or less left off. We arrived late Wednesday night and crashed; Thursday the Brujo went back to teaching algebra to fucked-up arts magnet students (talk about unfun…) and I unpacked and shook sand out of everything and sorted laundry and did shopping; Friday I tackled of the 18,000 things that kept getting postponed all of last semester (wrangle with banks/credit card companies/publishers; polish shoes; clean out the refrigerator; pick up trash from the yard). And dealing with the euphemistically named palmetto-bug population, which has disturbingly decided to flourish in our absence, so that we now daily see uncute little pinhead-sized nymphs poking around our offices (thank GOD the fake-environmentalist hippie exterminators come Tuesday morning, for a mere $75.) Then yesterday the Brujo succumbed to a head cold/virus while I went completely premenstrual and domestic, taking over the kitchen to make fresh salsa, cream of squash soup, persimmon fudge (with four overripe fuyus from before the vacation) and handmade corn tortillas (trial and error, still wrestling with the masa and the metal press but inspired by Kimba’s junior-year-abroad memories of warm tortillas for breakfast with butter and honey—frustrating problems with sticking and thickness). And studying up on flan recipes. We’re all about la cocina here, suddenly, fiercely, in great avoidance of the idea that I start teaching again in about a week.
And not contacting anyone. As Mandarin knows, who’s left concerned messages and delicately inquisitive emails; and my parents probably know, who still haven’t been called and told we’re home safely; and dear oleoptene, who’s probably reading this and shaking her head and smiling and about to comment and tell me I don’t owe her anything.
[post in progress]
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Damn, how’d you know?
I like un-owing-ness, un-owningness, and the blessedness of connecting unencumbered by such.
I like minor synchronicity of having reflected on favored dolls and toys and play in the last twenty-four hours and then getting to meet Maria.
I like seeing you radiant in your photos. Thanks for sharing them.
Hope it’s a wonderful year. Sending you love.