On Sunday mornings, Chavela brought us breakfast in bed. Around ten o’clock we would drive to the plaza and park on the street that led to the market. When we opened the car doors there were always a couple of small boys shouting “Le cuido el coche?” Our mother would nod to one of the boys and he would stand guard next to the Coche de Mama. We followed our mother from stall to stall as she priced fruits and vegetables with names like sapote negro or jicama. The section of the market that had fly-covered meat hanging from hooks smelled of blood that dripped onto the ground and mixed with the water that had been used to wash the market’s cement floor in the morning. I hated getting that blood water on my shoes. None of this bothered our mother. She bought a chicken that to me looked slightly blue and insufficiently plucked. When our mother’s straw basket got heavy, she handed it to one of the boys crowding around, all of them asking, “Le ayudo?” (Can I help you?). Now she headed toward the flower stalls and bargained with a fat woman to get a better price for a huge bunch of salmon-pink gladiolas. She used to hate gladiolas—she thought they were commonplace, but since she had seen gladiolas in Diego Rivera’s paintings of Indian women, she now saw them as typically Mexican. We headed back to the Coche de Mama and our mother tipped first the porter and then the car watcher, who, when he saw us coming, made a great show of wiping the Coche de Mama’s front window with a filthy rag.
24 Outings
Cuernavaca was a happy town to live in. I liked Miss Heart’s School, even though I was behind in math and even though I didn’t make any friend to whom I felt close enough to invite home after school. No one invited me either. I was an overweight new girl—maybe that was the reason. Outside of school I did have one friend named Sandy Macpherson, whose widowed father, Cameron Macpherson, was a close friend of my mother’s. The Macphersons lived in a huge house just downhill from the plaza. I loved going there. Sandy had a special girl’s bedroom all done up with pink fabrics and eyelet lace. She even had a dressing table with her matching comb and brush laid out on top. Sandy’s father treated his daughter like a princess. I wondered if that was because she was adopted. She actually looked like a princess, delicate and fragile with white-blonde hair. Both of us were shy. We didn’t talk much, but we were comfortable together. Each of us sensed, without putting words to it, a secret sadness in the other.
Cameron Macpherson (right) beside his son, Christopher. His daughter, Sandy Macpherson, second from left, is flanked by a cousin and an unknown boy, c. 1950
Blair, Cuernavaca, 1950
My mother asked Cam Macpherson, an amateur photographer, to take photographs of me and Blair. For the occasion, I wore my favorite dress, made of pink and gray plaid cotton and with a sash that tied in the back. Blair wore a low-cut dress with blue flowers printed all over it. Its waist was pulled in by rows of elastic thread that gathered up the cloth. For the posing session, Blair had curled her hair. She wasn’t fat anymore. In the photograph she looks beautiful, a lot like our mother.
After Blair was done, I posed lying in the grass in front of a bed of nasturtiums. I tried to look grown up, like a movie star with my head propped on my hand. I had seen photographs of my mother posed this way. I put on a deep and thoughtful expression, which was hard, because the grass was itchy, and I was afraid that there might be a scorpion in the flowerbed. Cam kept putting his hand on my body in order to get me into the right position for the camera. It felt odd, but I did not dare say anything or move away. The photographs he took show a plump nine-year-old doing her best to look seductive.
After a while I began to feel part of the group at Miss Heart’s School. I must have made a few friends because a photograph of my tenth birthday on November 20, 1950, shows me in our Cuernavaca garden with children who appear to be about my age. Four days after my birthday my father wrote Gaga that he had “glowing reports about Mexico from B & H as I gather you have. I miss them and I wish I could get a look at them from time to time.” But he had a new baby to look at. He told his mother that his third daughter had been born five days earlier and they had named her Antonia.
The most confirming moment in terms of feeling part of a group was when, on some kind of national holiday (of which there were many in Mexico) our school joined all the Mexican schools in Cuernavaca in a parade. The band music made our marching seem official and important. I had been told to wear red, white, and blue, and my teacher gave me an American flag. Other foreign children carried the flag of their countries. I was proud to be a flag bearer and proud to be an American, even though most of the time I did my best to look Mexican and even though my mother was always saying that the United States was overrun with gas stations and Howard Johnsonses.
Me, Cuernavaca, 1950
My tenth birthday, me (center) and Blair (top right), in our garden in Cuernavaca, November 1950
My mother organized outings to places within driving distance of Cuernavaca. Her favorite was Las Estacas, where we rented inner tubes and floated down a river of yellowish green water that I got used to even though it smelled like rotten eggs. The place I liked the best was Palo Bolero, a pond fed by a waterfall that fell over the mouth of a deep cave. Water pounded on our heads as we swam into the cave. I never liked caves. Stalactites and stalagmites give me the creeps, so I immediately turned back toward the light shining through the wall of water that came down so fast it bounced when it hit the pond’s surface and made a roar that went right through my skin. For me it was always a relief to swim out under the waterfall and to see our mother standing near the shore in her two-piece red hand-woven cotton bathing suit—she was the only woman there with her midriff showing. Men kept looking at her. She seemed not to mind at all.
My father and my sister Antonia, Orgeval, France, 1950
On the way home we usually stopped for supper at a fancy restaurant in a colonial hacienda. While my mother and Edmundo had their tequilas, Blair and I explored the roof of the partly ruined building. Descending the broad staircase that led to the dining room, I was reminded of movies with beautiful women in clingy evening gowns and white feather boas, stepping gracefully down grand staircases. My full skirt floated upward as I went down, and I pointed my toes outward and stepped quickly like a ballerina.
Our best trip was to Acapulco. Our mother and Edmundo drove there a few days before us to set up camp. Cam Macpherson picked up Blair and me in his open Jeep and we headed to the Pacific coast. The drive through the state of Guerrero was long and hot. Everywhere you looked was nothing but stunted brown cacti. Finally, as we drove down out of the hills, we saw the Pacific Ocean lying flat and shining like steel. On the outskirts of Acapulco, we turned left on a dirt road that led to our mother’s campsite on a beach called the Revolcadero. When we arrived, our mother’s body was wet. She had just come out of the water and, without drying off, she showed us around the camp, which consisted of a tent and huts made of palm fronds built, she said, by two Indians in a couple of hours. Blair and I dropped our bags inside of our hut. Here and there you could see chinks of light coming through the walls and roof, but this was Mexico’s dry season, so we didn’t have to worry about rain. A hose tied over the frond of a palm tree was our shower. Blair and I slept in hammocks. It was hard to sleep because of iguanas rustling in the palm frond roof. I prayed that they would not fall through.
So that we would share her love of Mexico and her feeling of being settled in Cuernavaca, our mother bought us a parrot from a parrot vendor who came knocking at the gate once a week. I spent hours trying in vain to teach the parrot to talk. After about a week I came home from school to find the parrot lying on its back with its talons clutched as if it were trying to hold onto a perch. We tried buying smaller parrots, no bigger than my hand, but they died, too. Our mother suspected that the parrot vendor was selling sick parrots. She promised to try to find a parrot in a reputable pet store. Instead of a parrot she came home with two love birds who lived for at least half a year.
Our mother’s camp being built on the Revolcadero beach, Acapulc
o, 1950
Blair and I took riding lessons. Twice a week a charro, a professional Mexican rider mounted on a huge black horse and all dressed up with a short, black embroidered jacket and a broad black hat, would ring the bell at the gate. To me, he looked like the essence of Mexico, a powerful man who had to be obeyed. He dismounted and helped us to mount the two horses tethered to his saddle. We rode all over the streets of Cuernavaca. After about half an hour of walking and trotting, the charro turned his horse around, came up behind Blair’s and my horses, raised his crop, and whipped them hard on the rump. Our horses lurched into a canter. I just leaned forward, clutched the western saddle’s horn with both hands, and watched with horror as the pavement rushed by beneath my horse’s hooves.
When our mother went to Mexico City to see Edmundo, she often returned with books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. One time she brought home a book about how babies are made, and she insisted on sitting on the terrace and reading it to us. The book had pictures of shapes that I could not imagine being inside of my body, things about which I did not want to know. Blair seemed indifferent. Probably she knew all of this already. I was surprised that our mother did this. She was “doing the right thing,” and that was something that she usually didn’t bother to do.
Occasionally our mother would take us to Mexico City. She rented one of the flower boats (called trajineras) that are paddled like gondolas around the maze of canals in the floating gardens of Xochimilco. Another time, Emundo bought tickets to the water ballet in Chapultepec Park. This was performed at night with different colored lights changing the color of the water in an enormous fountain in and around which the dancers danced. It was the most glamorous thing I had ever seen. Besides wanting to be a rock climber when I grew up, I now wanted to join a water ballet troupe. Or a troupe of flamenco dancers. Our mother bought us rattles and castanets and hired a flamenco teacher, who soon got pregnant and stopped coming.
On the weekends, Edmundo was always in a good mood, and when he smiled his beautiful white teeth shined. He claimed to be pure Indian, but I could tell by the color of his skin that he was partly Spanish. Edmundo was generous. He not only paid our rent, he always brought our mother presents, jewelry mostly, and sometimes he brought candy for Blair and me. He liked to take us to expensive restaurants. A few blocks uphill from our house there was one with peacocks wandering around the garden. After a few margaritas Edmundo would find everything we said hilarious and he would laugh so hard he almost cried.
As the months went by, our mother seemed less euphoric about her life in Cuernavaca. She wasn’t painting. I would find her sitting quietly on the veranda staring out into the garden, her eyes not fixed on any one thing. It was as though her eyes looked backward into her skull instead of out to the flowerbeds and trees. Her chiseled face (she once told us she had perfect bone structure) was blank and rigid. Seeing her this way made my heart plunge. She looked untouchable. I knew that even if I tried to be cheerful and to make her happy, she would not look at me and smile.
One weekend Edmundo flew into a rage because a gold watch he had given to our mother was missing. This was the first time I heard them fight. I do not know why my mother kept picking men who had bursts of anger. My father never lost his temper—anger just made him silent. And my mother’s own father was as mild as a teddy bear. Over the next few weeks, I heard raised voices again and again. Our mother was not a meek person, and her voice became increasingly shrill. She didn’t care about gold watches, she said. Maybe the parrot vendor or the boy who delivered tortillas stole the watch. Certainly, Chavela could not be blamed. Our maid had had many opportunities to steal things and she never did, so our mother would not let Edmundo question her.
After Christmas, Edmundo stopped coming to Cuernavaca. Our mother had left him because he was a kleptomaniac. He would steal a watch or a piece of jewelry from one woman and give it to another woman. A few years later Edmundo married the daughter of my mother’s new husband, Edward Norman. My mother did not approve. Nancy Norman had two children with Edmundo, but he left her and married another wealthy heiress. One day he made his final escape: he moved out of an expensive London hotel and into a cheap one and shot himself.
25 Parque Melchor Ocampo
We’re moving to Mexico City,” our mother announced. She had found an apartment overlooking Parque Melchor Ocampo, a park that was just a flat piece of hard-packed dirt hemmed in by three streets. The rent was cheap and the location, a few blocks from the Paseo de la Reforma and from Chapultepec Park, was convenient. I was sad to leave our garden and our veranda. Our birds had already died, so my mother promised to get me a dog.
Our new apartment was a modern four-story walk-up. The stairs were made of beige terrazzo, and they smelled of detergent mixed with anti-roach liquid. They were not soft and warm like the terra cotta floors in Cuernavaca. They looked like hotel stairs. The living room where our mother slept had a view of the park. Down a hall were three bedrooms and a kitchen. My bedroom looked out onto another building, and Blair’s looked over a side street. After dark Blair and I wrote love letters, folded them into paper airplanes, and, when we saw a man approaching on the street below, we let them fly down to the sidewalk and then watched as the man picked up the letter and read it. Imagine how happy he would be at the thought of being loved.
Our mother took us to register at Greengates, a small English school on Reforma Avenue. Like Miss Heart’s, Greengates had forms instead of grades, and the academic level was higher than in American schools. I was far behind in most subjects, but so were the other American children who had recently entered the school. Algebra was the worst. The Americans in my class had barely learned fractions.
Blair and I walked to and from school on our own. When we reached home, we bought ice cream cones at Chantilly, an ice cream store on the ground floor of our apartment building. In exchange for scoops of ice cream, we gave the two pretty young women behind the counter necklaces that we had strung together out of macaroni we had painted in bright colors. It was a serious transaction. The saleswomen pretended that our necklaces had great value and they made a big to-do about selecting this necklace or that.
Our mother arranged for Blair and me to take ballet lessons. The best thing about ballet class was our new pink cotton ballet costumes whose three-tiered skirts came down just below the bottom of our matching bloomers. I worked hard at all the positions, never being upset by the Russian ballet teacher’s harsh commands as she banged out rhythms on the floor with her stick. I snuck glances of myself in the long mirror on the wall to which the ballet bar was attached. My ballet costume made me look thin, and I liked seeing myself as part of a line of girls all in pink and all holding the bar as they did pliés and then pointed their toes out to the side. The pronounced bulge of my calf muscles was something to be proud of.
My mother thought I was a good dancer, but what she really admired were my drawings. She was certain that I would become a painter like herself, and her admiration puffed me up with pleasure. Most of my drawings were of princesses standing between parted curtains. I also made a lot of abstract drawings—just designs in line and color. Those were what my mother liked best. She bought me good-quality paper and a box of pastels. I preferred cheap paper like the newsprint we had used at Dalton. With cheap paper I was not afraid to make a mess.
During this time in Mexico City our mother painted in the living room. She made big still lifes of Mexican fruits, the arrangements of which looked like still lifes by Cézanne. But my mother’s brushwork was much wilder. To me, the way her brushstrokes streaked across the canvas showed her own agitation. She also read a lot—books about philosophy, psychology, and Eastern religions. Anything spiritual she loved. It must have been a way of searching for peace. She kept on taking us to the Benjamin Franklin Library, and she also bought us paperbacks from the English bookstore, classics printed on off-white paper that felt rough if you ran your fingers over a page. If you put your nose close to the inside spine, the paper
had a wheat-like smell. American books smelled glitzy like new magazines.
At Greengates I met a girl named Johanna Renouf, who became my best friend for the rest of the time that I lived in Mexico. With her long, straight, blonde hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks, Joanna looked like a German girl from the mountains. She lived in the San Ángel section of Mexico City, a district full of grand colonial houses and cobblestone streets. Her father, Edward, was German, an amateur painter and an even more amateur psychoanalyst. He was tall, kindly, and ponderous. Johanna’s American mother, Catherine Whittlesey, was quick-witted and elegant in a bohemian sort of way. Johanna had an older sister, Blair’s friend Hester, who was really smart but had something of a temper like Susan Howe. Johanna once told me that Hester had said that when I grew up, I was going to have sex appeal. The compliment went into my pool of positive things that I could fish out whenever I felt fat and ugly.
Me and Johanna Renouf in the Renouf’s garden, San Ángel, Mexico City, c. 1952
Johanna and I started a show that we called the Hay-Jo Circus. The first thing we did was to go to the pharmacy on San Ángel’s central plaza to buy lipstick, rouge, and cold cream with which we planned to remove our makeup after performances. In Johanna’s kitchen we invented a kind of cookie—really just an overcooked pancake sprinkled with sugar—to serve as treats for our audience. Edward and Catherine Renouf dutifully exclaimed about how delicious they were. The Renoufs’ patio had a swing that we turned into a trapeze upon which we hung upside-down. My circus act was doing cartwheels. Johanna did pirouettes and graceful leaps. Edward and Catherine sat in chairs that we set up and clapped as hard as they could.
Upper Bohemia Page 15
