Excuse Me? Do You Speak Spanish? (Part 1)

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“Wake up, baby.”

I blink away a dream of hard blacks and whites, and the Pacific sun dances on my face and bells’ bright noise bounce through the room.

“Listen, it’s that church,” The Boy says. I look out the window, and over hotels crumbling into the blue air, I see a green hillside tiled with soft white homes, setting off the rusting iron crown of a church tower.

“Very charming,” I say. Then I sit up, listening more carefully. “That’s my iPhone’s alarm.” I turn it off.

“Oh,” The Boy says, and his voice is an echo of mine from last night, when we taxied into seaside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and passed my personal North Star, Starbucks. “La estrellas bucks!” I cooed. “So we’re still in civilization.”

Then we drove away from the main drag, four lanes lined with hotel plazas, each their own whitewashed, resort village. We jiggled gentle in the American car on Mexican cobbled streets, making soft turns until we stopped in an alley that ended facing a blur of ocean. The Boy paid the cab driver in wrinkled dollars, and we stepped out in front of a condo building. “This is it,” he said. “Right on the beach! You planned well.”

“If you had known this earlier, would you have laid me during our layover?” I asked. We elevatored to our top-floor rental, a comfortable cube of space shaped with plaster. “This is smaller than your pool house,” I said. “But cozy.” A plastic parrot hanging from the ceiling watched us unpack and rush back out the door. The Boy and I surveyed the scene outside our building. “Cute, right?” I stared at a patio restaurant nestled into the structure’s side. “And look, how exotic — there are so many white Americans!” The Boy took my hand and we walked on the sidewalk lining the shore. The Pacific slushed against piles of pebbles, making mild music. We paused at carts dusted with trinkets that blinked in soft midnight lights. I fingered a silver ring.

“Authentic Mexico, made in China,” said The Boy.

The bells start clanging again, and shake me from my memory. “Are those real this time?” I stretch like a cat under the Mexican blanket, its pattern filtered through a clean American aesthetic. I slip on my vintage wooden wedges, and one of two dresses I brought. Three coats of mascara, two minutes of black eye shadow, a layer of SPF 45 lotion later and we’re walking through a seaside town still gray with morning.

We stroll away from the beach through crooked streets, weaving in and out of slow-moving locals. The Boy nudges me, and I turn to see Mexican men stare. “You’re making the city’s productivity drop 10%,” The Boy says. He pauses to let me pass first, as we hit a part of the sidewalk crowded with construction workers. “After you.”

“Always the gentleman,” I say. I tug the high hem of my skirt, a drop-waist T-shirt tunic I decided was a dress. “I thought everyone would be sexy and half naked here,” I explain to no one. A little brown-skinned boy passes us, lifting his eyebrows at me in suggestion, smirking.

And then, despite years of globalization dancing ’round the world, spreading broken English and Western capitalism, despite growing up in an international beach town whose native tongue is Spanglish, I have a completely foreign experience:

I wish I’d worn a bra and jeans, and maybe even a pair of flats.

» READ PART TWO…

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