Lunch Alone. A foreigner in a foreign place.

Two months earlier I was having business lunches in Baltimore.

I stood with my lunch tray, looking around the comedor, the employee cafeteria. Scouring the room for a place to sit. Lots of brown eyes looked up to see that same girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, wondering, where she was going to sit. I looked for an empty table where I could hide, eat my tortillas and escape quickly.

I was 27 years old. I felt all of 7.

Foreign face, foreign culture, foreign language, and I am the foreigner.

My first job, in Mexico, at the first all inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. Seemingly the first American to be part of the resort staff.

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Two months before I had an office in Baltimore. A window, a secretary, business lunches, and business suits. A dive shop owner and cave explorer, Mike Madden called long distance one day and asked me if my boyfriend Gary and I wanted to come work for him in Mexico.

“What does it pay?” Mike told me to fax my resume.

Four pages. Four pages that took me 20 minutes to send since the long distance connection to his fax machine kept dropping. Let’s see there was marketing for Kraft General Foods. New frozen pizza test marketing for Pillsbury, beer promotions with NASCAR, event marketing for Lipton Ice Tea. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7 up and blah blah blah. Yes I was proud of my resume.

A fax came back. “Nice resume.” “$400”. “Dollars”.

“A month.”

I was to run a dive concession at the new Diamond Resort. Sharing a space where two girls who handed out beach towels to guests, as I hustled people to try to Discover Scuba classes in the pool. Ironically it was only a handful of years earlier I was the tourist taking a discover scuba class at a resort myself.

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Yet it was these two cute girls, young women, who handed out towels, Nellie and Gina, who watched me eat alone for a week. One day I saw them across the dining room sitting at a round table. They smiled and waved me over. I was embarrassed at being recognized as the lonely girl. Part of me almost passed at the invitation, because sitting with them meant being face to face with the fact that I was a foreigner who did not speak their language. But I knew how uncomfortable it was to eat alone.

So I walked over to join them.

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A corn tortilla on its own is dry. A little sweet, a little nutty, warm cornmeal smell, not a meal until it is holding something. Up to that point I had been tearing them in half and eating them like bread. Pushing food on my fork. I had little experience eating tortillas aside from roadside taco stands. Gina watched me and laughed. Then she showed me. Slap the tortilla flat across your left hand. Bring the right hand up, slide it across the left. One motion. Roll.

That was how you ate.

We built a vocabulary broken in two languages.

Those first weeks working at the resort I commuted up from Tulum. Living in a palapa on the beach with no electricity or hot water at a place called Gatos. The studio Gary and I planned on renting would not be available until after the Christmas holiday season. A plight around the world of needing a place to live versus tourists who need a place to stay for the holidays. Evenings we listened to the shortwave radio spinning the dial for any signal that sounded like the outside world. And in the middle of the night we listened the the rats rummaging through the care package my parents had given us when we left Baltimore.

The road to the resort was dirt. Playacar was jungle. Where the Xaman-Ha aviary is now, was a garbage dump. A far cry from the booming international destination it is today.

There were good Mexico days. What people do not tell you when you become an expat is that there are bad Mexico days. Day to day life is frustrating. Convenience had not yet made it this far south. The gas station was out of gas. Immigration was a ferry ride to Cozumel. Groceries were a trip to Cancun with a cooler in the back of the truck and a half dozen stops to fill it.

The frustration compounds. Tears follow.

One night I remember getting drunk on Dos Equis, donning my red power business suit and matching shoes. Yes, I brought a couple suits from the States. I thought they might be useful. I went across the street to Mike’s home to use his phone. One of only a few phones in Puerto Aventuras and drunk dialed my mom. Collect. Drunk crying that Coca-cola used to pay to hear what I had to say, and here in Mexico no one cared. She listened, I blubbered. She told me, “you can come home anytime”. To return home was to admit failure. I was not going to fail. She knew I would not come home. She ended the call as she always does, “God bless you and keep you safe.”

A few days later I went down to the marina in Puerto Aventuras and walked into the Cedam Dive Center office where Mike’s secretary Beti worked. Beti was about my size. She dressed for the office. She had a friendly smile and not much English. The two suits I brought from the states, from the life I left behind, draped over my arm, the matching red and white patent leather shoes in hand. I told her in Spanglish that I did not need them here. If she did not want the clothes she could give them to someone who would.

She took them.

The only suit I needed in Mexico was a wet suit.

I have no idea if the shoes fit her.

I never asked.

I think she thought I was a crazy gringo.