"OAXAwkward"- a writers residency in Oaxaca

May 2021- A Writers Residency @ Arquetopia in Oaxaca, Mexico -El Primero Día

OAXAwkward

OaxAwkward- El Primero Día Restaurant Bathroom Selfie- Oaxaca, May 2021

May 10, 2021

I fumble with my mask, sanitizer, boarding pass, fogged glasses, and carry-on while trying to understand what the gate security guard is instructing me to do. I’m at Benito Juárez International Airport in Mexico City ready to board a plane to Oaxaca for a 3-week writers residency. Finally. I had applied to Arquetopia in 2019 in order to be challenged, intellectually, culturally, linguistically, and artistically. I need all of that. The competitive international residency checked all of those boxes. Two years before, I had a Skype interview with the directors in Puebla, Mexico. I had proposed that if selected, I would erase all intention from my mind. I’d fight the urge to bring a project with a preconceived concept in order to be open to unknown ideas. I cited my artistic work in Madrid and Dakar as examples of major works that I created without any preconceived ideas before arriving in the place. I was invited to join five international artists in Oaxaca the following May of 2020. I postponed a year due to COVID which, is still alive and well in 2021. During the year delay, I worked on my Spanish. I realize now that I seriously overestimated my linguistic accomplishments. I’m alone.

It takes me a ridiculous amount of time to figure out the COVID questionnaire and the QR code download that will allow me to get through security. A tall sturdy woman with sparkling blue eyes probably in her late twenties asks me, (in English,) if I’m headed to Oaxaca. She’s wearing a headscarf, she’s bald underneath. She carries a rolled yoga mat in her backpack. I nod and smile. She thanks me and scouts ahead. I feel momentarily useful. I pull my mask under my chin just long enough to swill my café con leche which drizzles between the paper cup and the plastic top tab. I replace the mask between sips. Doubling as a bib/napkin, it catches the coffee that winds over my bottom lip and down my chin. The coffee doesn’t even taste right this way. My sense of smell –my favorite sense—only offers me a vague waft of coffee mixed with a strong odor of the hand sanitizer I’m obliged to use at every checkpoint. I head to what I think is my small commuter plane although I’m still not sure. I board and discover the headscarf yoga mat girl is my seatmate. She’s got the window. I laugh. “Hi again.” She doesn’t answer or look at me. Weird. She’s silently crying and stares out the window. It’s counter-intuitive for me to NOT intervene. She doesn’t want intervention. Clearly. Did she just experience a breakup? Is she sick? Is she grieving? Is she dying? I spend the hour-long flight vacillating between trying to avoid eye contact and giving her opportunities to change her mind and make eye contact. She definitely should change her mind. I know I could say something to make her feel better. I write three varying scenarios in my head about her. There’s something of Wyeth’s Christina’s World about her. Is she leaving home or leaving something behind and heading home? My sister and I used to always debate this. The print hung over my parents’ bed when we were young. I always imagined that Christina was rolling away from home. My sister always insisted that she was trying to get home. The plane silently lands and we are in Oaxaca. I turn to collect my carryon from the overhead. I turn back around and she’s gone. Hightails it off the plane.

I forgot to mention context, why I’m calling this story “OAXAwkward.” It’s not Oaxaca’s fault. I mean, I was already feeling pretty awkward before I even set foot in Oaxaca.

I noticed my image earlier that day while on a Facetime call with my kids from the airport. What? I looked weird, not the way I look in my head. In fact, I was pretty far off. I barely recognized the aging woman on my cell phone screen. A lot has changed since the last time I did anything “important” as an artist too (albeit a subjective word,) when I had an excerpt of a play selected as one in a series of ten staged monologues off-Broadway. Yup, really. That Broadway. Okay, only a three-minute monologue excerpted from my play, but I flew up to NYC, met up with my friend, Jane, a decades-long New Yorker, and my adult daughter Chelsea who flew in like a tiny terrific cheerleader. We went to the theatre and attended the staged reading- savoring each of the 180 seconds. Jane exploded with laughter- at each line the actor read of my monologue- inordinately louder than for the other pieces making this most minute success feel like it broke a glass ceiling.

I returned home triumphant, and immediately picked up the ongoing struggle called Amadou, my then 16- year-old son who was having a “rebellious moment” that was in its second year.

My husband too was struggling to work as a teacher while losing weight and strength, trying to figure out what may medically be wrong with him. We were contemplating sending him to his native Madrid where he had a much better chance to find out what without selling our home to pay for it. It was also Yama, my youngest daughter’s senior year and last year at home before going off to college in Chicago. And I was working toward tenure, which seemed as elusive as Broadway runs of my plays.

I hardly had a moment to stop and experience anything through my own personal lens- like the beginning of menopause. I was tricked into compliance with the collective mentality in my household that my menopause was an inconvenience to them. It began with my apologetic need for a fan at night to endure the horrific “night sweats.” I learned these are very different from my “hot flashes,” easily managed in front of my college students with my extensive wardrobe accessories of Spanish fans--gifts from my Spanish mother-in-law--that have always accompanied me to class. But the “night sweats”- my husband, clad in his normal summer attire socks pulled halfway up his calves, pajama bottoms tucked in and at least one long-sleeved t-shirt- and sleeping mask would say, “I cannot ES-sleep with thaht fAHn.” There were the alleged mood swings, according to Yama who I overheard say to her friend, “If you are going to have kids, make sure that you don’t have them at an age that will put you in menopause when they are teenagers.” Who even thinks like that?

Back to 2021- leaving for my residency. My kids are all off in great cities in college and working. I got tenure and have been working from home for almost a year and a half. My husband is recovered and home and back to teaching 5th graders. We live alone in our house for the first time in 15 years together. Even the noblest of family members, our 18-year-old dog, Buddy Zuko has passed on.

We’re new grandparents! ...And I’m post-menopausal. I’m back to me- a “subdued” version of me-- which I am not wearing well. I prefer the fight and fire of living. I mean, I can’t even believe I’m saying it, but someone should have prepared me for this. If someone did, I should have paid attention. It’s weird. And it was sudden. I don’t know if it actually happened suddenly, but I suddenly noticed. All of it. All at once. And it’s awkward.

From the airport in Oaxaca, I get the cab and head to the city cafe where my emailed instructions say a van and a woman named Martha* (*Some of the names of those in Mexico have been changed to protect their privacy) from the residency is supposed to collect me. At the door, I apply the hand sanitizer and step in a tray of liquid to rinse off the soles of my shoes. I order a café con leche, resisting the urge to try to make small talk with the masked man behind the counter. He’s the only person in the place. I sit alone at a table. It’s been about twelve solid hours masked. I pull the mask down under my chin and sip my coffee out of a large ceramic cup that I hold with two hands. I feel like I’m 13 years old again sneaking a choking puff of a cigarette behind the ice-skating rink. Except this, tastes great.

A woman eventually arrives. It’s not Martha, but Kat, a weaving artist in her last week of the residency who’s hitching a ride back to the residency with us. Last week? I’m confused. I thought there were six of us arriving today. Another woman arrives.

“Hola, Martha! Como está usted?”

I always do this weird over-the-top enthusiasm thing when I get nervous. I try to entertain and joke to put people at ease when I’m not. It feels like a responsibility- no matter who the host is. I think I got that from my dad. I hear myself do this and cringe. But this woman is not Martha either, she doesn’t tell me her name but leads me to a van where Martha waits and immediately sprays me and my suitcase down with something that smells like rubbing alcohol before loading it in the van. Martha and the unnamed woman sit in the front chatting incessantly. I understand only some food words. It seems that there is a lot of discussion about food between them. I replay the last six months of intense Spanish class and try to conjugate some verbs in my head. Kat, the outgoing fellow resident busily texts from the back seat. I take some photos to entertain myself. There’s a mountain range in the distance, miles of cactus and agave plants that look too organized to be real, and many campaign billboards. I have a lot of questions but don’t want to be too needy.

We leave the city driving along winding elevated roads. Thirty minutes later we get to a tall wall and rod iron gate with a majestic mane of hot pink Bougainvillea cresting over the top.

Martha calls someone on her cell and the gate opens, I see a short and slightly round-faced young woman, hair shiny and pulled back into a bun. She’s wearing a black and white checked cotton apron with colorful flowers embroidered on it. Martha doesn’t say anything to her they exchange glances only. In my mind, I’m transported back twenty-two years to Dakar when the bonne of my host family, Marie-Therèse, would hear the horn of Monsieur BA’s car and his occasional impatient voice calling, “Marie-Therèse!” From the kitchen, she’d lag through the salon and slowly pull the heavy iron gate open for Monsieur BA. She always would act like it was the hardest task of her day and each time as if it’s the first time she’d ever done it.

This girl doesn’t seem bothered by the task. She’s solemn. Pretty. And gloriously unmasked. It looks promising that I too will soon be able to remove mine. I hope.

Martha expertly backs the van down the dirt driveway, past a capilla, several large residences, to a sprawling home with white pillars and terra cotta tile patio. I get sprayed down again, my temperature taken. I step in a tray on the ground to rinse the soles of my shoes and stomp dry them on a towel. I’m led past empty patio chairs and furniture, an outdoor bamboo walled art studio with looms and tables into the living room of the residency house. The immaculate white interior has high ceilings, contemporary white couch and a lot of afternoon light.

There’s an oblong wooden dining table and highbacked chairs. A large stand with overflowing baskets of mangos, papayas, avocados, apples, and bananas sits in the corner of the dining room. Above it on the wall hangs an ornate collection of wooden spoons in a carved case. I’m struck by the paradoxical warm welcoming house without a trace of any singular person or entity. There is no bulletin board with notices for residents, no photos of any staff or resident artists, no signage with logos Arquetopia, just a clean, tastefully and sparsely decorated open space.

I wonder where the other artists are. I see only four women, those I arrived with and the woman who opened the gate whom I learn later is the cook, Yolanda. Kat goes to her room on the opposite end of the house. Martha hands me a plastic bag and instructs me to take a shower and put my clothes in it. She shows me to my room pointing out the bathroom on the way. There’s a window that overlooks the residency’s bamboo fenced artist’s studio, my double bed is adorned with a handwoven deep purple and orange-red blanket, a dark wood armoire, a small desk, a mosquito net, high glass blocks built into the wall in the shape of a cross high up by the ceiling allowing sunlight to pass through it. For a moment I thought was an electric light one may find outside of an old Florida countryside revival cinderblock church building. There’s a welcome bag with the Arquetopia logo on it. Inside is a large block of handmade soap, a small journal, a pen, and a button. On it are the words “De-center yourself!”

I’m comforted by the savory aromas of chicken, onion, cilantro wafting under my closed door. I realize that it’s the only thing I’ve been able to really smell since arriving masked in Oaxaca.

I’m called to lunch. The lunch of pollo in a large clay pot, mango juice, queso fresco, fresh salsa verde, a clear broth with vermicelli, salad with an abundance of avocado, cucumber, tomato, and radishes awaits on a long buffet. I wait until invited to make up my plate, being careful not to pile too much food on it, or too little. Kat’s family is Mexican her facility with her surroundings and Spanish is pretty irritating. I fumble with small talk, it’s either that or to be awkwardly sitting facing everyone -the only one not engaged in the conversation. No one is asking me questions. There are occasional pauses in their conversation to kind of look my way and smile a little. I’m thinking they should be initiating conversation, right? I’m the visitor. I’m confused and uncertain in my own skin... am I being polite or presumptuous? Arrogant or ignorant? I don’t know. So, I just keep repeating, “¡Que riquisimo!” I know I sound stupid. I feel stupid.

It is seriously delicious though.

I learn that the three women at the residency leave each evening and the directors, with whom I meet each week on my project, are in the Puebla residency hours away. We will meet virtually. I should check my email later they say for instructions about my meetings and the planned excursions, the first of which will be tomorrow. Kat tells me that there aren’t any other residents currently. She thinks someone is arriving next week. She won’t be coming on the excursions as she has an exciting array of outside experiences she’s arranged for her last days,

in fact, she says Friday will be her last night at the rez. After lunch, she leaves for the evening. Martha and the others clean up and prepare to leave. She shows me a little piece of paper on the wall with the name and number of a cab driver that can take me places for a fee that I negotiate as well as the emergency numbers of the director. She shows me the abundance of food in the refrigerator and instructs me to help myself. I struggle in Spanish to ask when the other residents were arriving and where tomorrow’s excursion will be. She answers only, “You can check for an email from Francisca” whose identity I deduce through the process of elimination.

Everyone leaves. I’m alone in the house. I’m uncertain as to where exactly I am or who lives in the other surrounding houses. I realize that I have no key to the house or the gate needed to leave the grounds. Not that I was planning on going out anyway. I wonder if I was not interesting enough to be included in the conversation at the table or invited out with Kat. I wonder if I will in fact be inspired to create something meaningful. It’s only afternoon back at home, my husband isn’t even home from teaching yet. No one has called though.

I stretch out on a lounge chair outside on the patio. I open up one of three books I brought, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, From Ferguson to Palestine by Angela Davis. I begin to reread the foreword for the third time.

The mating calls of the thousands of newly emerged 17-year-old Brood X cicadas drown out my loneliness.

I wonder again about the crying girl next to me on the plane earlier that day. And the process of de-centering myself has begun.