Mexico
“It’s over,” he says. “But we sure had some good times.” He takes one more sip of tea and gets up from her kitchen table. “Like our trip to the Yucatan before it became the Mayan Riviera. Was that fun or what?”
She frowns and shakes her head. “Imagine what it looks like now.”
“Corporate colonies,” he says, putting on his trench coat. “Monoculture. No stopping it.”
We didn’t stay in Cancun,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “We knew better. Even then.”
“Yeah, those funky hotels on the Caribbean, ten bucks a night,” he says, putting on his safari hat. “Who cared if the swimming pools were empty and cracked? We swam in the lagoons till we were hungry, then had a great lunch for six bucks, then walked a quarter mile inland and swam in the cenotes.”
She puts her hands on the table. “Don’t glorify the past. You shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Swim out and sun on the raft,” he says, swaying as he stands in his coat and hat in her kitchen. “We made love on one, remember?”
“Please don’t,” she says.
“Drink beer under the palapa. Have a great dinner for six more bucks.”
“Please go.”
“Pet the pet coatimundi.”
She points at the door. “Go!”
He tips his hat. She doesn’t smile.
“Go now,” she says quietly, looking down at the table. “Just go.”
He turns and opens the door. “Bye, and good luck,” he tells her, and walks out and doesn’t look back. He pulls out of her driveway and drives out of her life.
It’s rainy and cool in late August as he heads north on the interstate, recalling the Berkshires five summers ago. While she was touring Europe with her mother and sister, he stayed at a bed and breakfast and climbed a different mountain each morning, building an appetite for lunch. How could anyone skip lunch? He can’t remember the names of the mountains, but halfway up the steepest near Great Barrington, a younger man with a baby on his back passed him and said Hawthorne and Melville had talked shop on the peak.
He would climb mountains and not think of her and their trip to Mexico, when she first said she loved him as they strolled the beach at sunset the day he’d nearly drowned.
She sits in her kitchen, holding her head in her hands over her lukewarm tea, and thinks of those two weeks that March when they drove around the Yucatan in a rental, and camped in a tent on a beach for a dollar a day. Playa del something. It meant, “The Most Beautiful Beach in the World.” She snorkeled in the shallows, watching the bright fish, and loved it there, till the second afternoon when he swam out too far and fought the undertow to get back.
She thought he’d drowned and left her stranded in a dangerous non-English-speaking country. How relieved she was when he staggered out of the water with bloody hands and knees and collapsed on the sand. He would have drowned, he said, if he hadn’t smacked up on a coral formation he could cling to till he could swim on.
She drinks the last of her tea and remembers how her fear of being abandoned had somehow spurred her daring for the rest of the trip, and how she went alone into stores and bought things and asked directions in what Spanish she’d learned from her two-week crash course before the vacation, which climaxed when she climbed the high pyramid in Palenque and took in the view of the jungle and plains.
She will never go back to Mexico. That trip was enough for a lifetime. She will try to fill the hole he’s left in her life with online dating and fitness resolutions. She will wallpaper the living room, retile the bath, see family and friends. She reaches for her phone, then stops, and takes a breath and stands.
She clears the table and washes the dishes in the sink. She dries them and puts them away. She makes another cup of tea and sits and drinks it, hardly blinking as the tears dry on her face and her body grows still in her chair in the kitchen of her quiet house. Now, for the first time in her life, she isn’t afraid of being alone.
