She opened the door and we went inside. It was cool in there and I wondered if she was the only person in Pie de la Cuesta with air-conditioning. Her apartment was above the office, and we walked up the stairs. It looked like no one lived there—there were no plants or pictures or glasses of water, just a couch and a wooden chair in the living room, and a square table and two more chairs in the kitchen. In the bedroom she put my suitcase down. There was a bed with no frame and another chair. But the bed had her same white sheets on it, these sheets that cost a million dollars and feel like clouds and smell like clouds.
My mom got into the bed and I got in with her. She traced the spot on my forehead where she said I had a swirl of hair as a baby. Every muscle in my body relaxed. She stroked my head and then I was ten years old and we were lying in the cloud sheets in Los Angeles and I was crying because we had to put our dog Maria von Trapp to sleep. That night my mom had stroked my head until I fell asleep. I don’t know where my dad was—he was there when we put Maria to sleep but then not there later.
After a while my mom said, “Are you hungry, baby?” and it brought me back to the present and being twenty and I felt embarrassed to be in bed with my mom. I wanted to sit up but I was too weak. I tried to open my eyes and my mom laughed at me.
“I’m starving,” I said.
She went to the kitchen and made me an egg sandwich, which is one of my favorite things, with Oaxacan cheese, which is another one of my favorite things. She cut up a papaya and two bananas and she ate the fruit while I ate the sandwich.
After breakfast I asked my mom if I could make a phone call.
“Of course, baby, who do you want to call?”
“I want to tell Dad I got in safe.”
“Oh,” she said. She said that the phone in the office didn’t make long distance calls, but she gave me a phone card and told me there was a pay phone to the left of the hotel.
When I got to the phone I dialed Dana’s number. I had told her I would call her every day but now that I was here I didn’t really feel like it.
“Hey it’s me,” I said when she picked up.
“Hi!” she said. “I was so worried about you.”
“Why?” I said. “I told you I would call you when I got here.”
“I know, but I was worried. How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine. How are you?”
“I’m really great. I haven’t eaten or used an animal product in forty-two days.”
“Oh right,” I said. “That’s good.”
“Did you come out to your mom yet?”
“No. I’ve only been here for like an hour.”
“I can’t wait for you to tell her. I’m so proud of you.”
I told her I would call her the next day and then I hung up by accident.
Then I called my dad and made the mistake of telling him about the buses.
“You got in in the middle of the night,” he said, “and your mother couldn’t pick you up?”
“It’s safer to take the buses at night,” I said.
“This is not what we agreed,” he said. “I’m going to call her.”
“Dad. Please don’t call her. I’m fine. I want to have a good time.”
He said he would wait until I was back to call her, and I said okay and hoped he would forget by then. He told me to call Dana because she had called the house twice. He made me promise to wear sunscreen and to not go swimming. He said he was reading about Pie de la Cuesta on the internet and the undertow was deadly.
• • •
When I got back to the apartment my mom said, “Ready to go to the beach?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you have the underwear?” she said.
“Yeah.” I opened my suitcase and took out the underwear and my bathing suit.
“Did you get the bags?” said my mom.
I was supposed to get fifty striped bags to go with the fifty pairs of underwear.
“They would only give me ten,” I said and gave them to her.
“Okay,” said my mom. “I can give them to the girls who buy a lot.”
I went into the bathroom and took off my shorts and T-shirt. My mom came in behind me and snapped my underwear band and said, “You should get yourself some new underwear.”
I imagined myself wearing the pair I had bought that said “Boys Boys Boys” a thousand times in black letters. My mom had said to get as many pairs with English words on them as possible. Another pair said “See you tonight,” and I thought those were really funny, because if someone else was seeing them, wasn’t it already tonight? Unless it was a reminder to yourself, like, see you tonight when I take my pants off again.
“I like my underwear,” I said.
“They’re kind of sturdy,” said my mom. They were gray and boy-style but for girls, and I wondered if she thought they were butch. I wanted her to think so, so that I wouldn’t have to tell her.
“I’m going to put my suit on, okay?” I said.
“Oh, okay,” she said and left the bathroom.
When I was done I went back out to the living room. My mom came out of the bedroom wearing a terry cloth dress. “Do you want to borrow a beach dress?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“We have to sell ourselves if we want to sell the underwear,” she said.
“I don’t want to sell myself,” I said.
“Okay, don’t sell yourself,” said my mom, “sell the American dream.”
“Really?” I said. “This underwear is going to fly people to the U.S. and get them green cards and jobs at hotels and then they’re going to win the lottery?”
“Ha,” said my mom. “Come on, let’s go. I have to be back for checkout at noon.”
“And then they’ll buy forty cars and go bankrupt and have to come back to Mexico?”
“Ha ha. Are you ready?” She had the underwear sorted by size in three of the bags.
“We’re selling the underwear now?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s Saturday, a lot of kids are going to be at the beach.”
It was starting to get really hot outside. We walked through the row of palm trees that separated the hotels from the beach. On the other side was sand and water, and some sets of tables and chairs under a thatched roof. The sky was almost clear except for thin stripes of clouds. As we made our way to the water I saw that there were already people weaving in and out of the sunbathers and selling things—women with buckets of something, a woman carrying a bottle and calling “Masajes, masajes,” and a man leading a pony and offering rides. I wondered what my mom’s plan was. She was ahead of me at the water.
“Put your feet in,” she said. “It’s nice.”
I went in up to my knees and it was nice. The rest of my body was getting hot and I wanted to go in all the way. There were kids swimming and I wondered if my dad was wrong.
“I can go swimming, right?” I said.
“I wouldn’t, baby, the current is so strong.”
“Those kids are swimming.”
“They’re