All Over the Map (24 page)

Then Martha brings up the notion of accountability. We are
all at some level accountable for the events that happen in our lives, she says. We play a role and need to acknowledge that role in order to see how our participation affects how things end up. It’s only when we see how our actions have everything to do with the results in our lives that we can start to change them.

Though this makes a certain amount of sense, I can’t help thinking it’s also a kind of thinking that is a luxury for people in the West, who can actually afford to make choices with their lives. When people are struggling to be free of trafficking or slavery, when their families have been murdered, when they are just doing their best to find enough food to survive, all that “you create your own reality” stuff isn’t just wasted breath but a dangerous way to think. You can change your reaction to circumstances, but not always the circumstances themselves.

I pipe up that this line of thinking strikes me as pretty unsympathetic, sort of a “blame the victim” philosophy, but Martha insists that accountability is different from blame. Then she points out that I’m pretty resistant to the whole process and says, “Whatever you resist, persists.” Without being judgmental, she seems to have sized me up, suggesting that I don’t like rules or authority, I like to go off on my own, I’m a lot more sensitive than I seem, I joke to cover up my feelings, I operate out of a great deal of fear, and I’m a perfectionist, sometimes preferring not to do something than to risk failure. “Perfectionists never win,” she says.

I’m wondering if someone has slipped her my astrology chart. Maybe I am just an obvious type. In any case, I decide to set aside my reservations about people in the Third World, and play along with the game, since I am someone who is indeed lucky enough to be able to make choices in her life.

Martha asks us to try an exercise with a partner in which we tell a story where we’ve been victimized. I realize I don’t know where to start: I’m always telling those kinds of stories. Take the tales I recount about bad dates. In each, I am a fun-loving, outdoorsy gal who likes Alice Munro, African dance, organic vegetables,
The Wire
, and anything Italian, who mysteriously ends up being the hapless bystander on a bad date, suffering in the company of one of the many clueless, damaged, shallow, narcissistic single males over forty who populate our major coastal cities. But the Big Story, in which I’m the sorriest victim, is the tale of my divorce, betrayal, heartbreak, and subsequent financial ruin at the hands of my ex-husband.

What if, asks Martha, when we are all finished telling our stories, wiping sorry tears from our eyes, you told that story differently? What if you told it as if you were accountable for what happened? How did you end up in that situation? What was your part?

I’m reluctant, but I try it and mention the choices I made, the red flags I ignored, such as the rattling snake and the fact that I’d brushed aside my ex-husband’s ambivalence because I was determined to get married and have children. I tell the story that way, and surprisingly, it is a relief. Blame does not fall down upon my head.

I see I made mistakes, to be sure. “The great thing about mistakes is that if you recognize them, you don’t have to repeat them,” Martha says.

This is a liberating, reassuring thought: instead of being the unwitting victim in my marriage, apt to be victimized in any subsequent relationships, I simply don’t have to marry that guy
again. It’s in my power to recognize my mistakes. Nor do I have to be afraid of a new relationship, constantly choosing inappropriate men to date so I’ll have an excuse to avoid what has become my greatest fear: being vulnerable, giving my heart, and being hurt. Have I been dating viable partners, Martha asks, or finding yet another character in a story who would prove it was ridiculous for me to be in a relationship? It seems that I am going to have to fundamentally change my stories about men—even if they won’t be so funny to tell my friends—if I want a different, happier ending.

I’m surprised at how happy I feel after retelling my story, a huge weight lifted from me. I’m no longer the victim of a bad marriage, destined to be hurt all over again with any man I am foolish enough to give my trust and heart to. I think of all the other victim-type stories I tell myself: it’s impossible to buy a house as a single freelance writer, my generation of independent and feminist women is out of sync with men and so will inevitably end up single or unfulfilled, I can’t lose weight because my parents put me on a diet at an early age, men my age are only interested in younger, thinner women, I can’t write another book because it won’t sell as well as my last one, I’m middle-aged and stuck, blah, blah, blah. I have to turn all that thinking around if I’m going to be happy here in midlife. All those stories need different endings—which is possible, because it’s my life and I do have the privilege of being able to write the story.

I think about the story I can’t tell out loud to the group, about Samoa. From the start, I blamed myself—I was foolish and drunk. Subsequently, I’ve been afraid to travel alone, though I’ve
managed it a few times, yet always fearful that I will uncontrollably land in a similar situation, unable to trust myself. The damage seems permanent and even embedded in my body: whatever tendon or ligament pulled in my hip has never recovered, despite all manner of acupuncture, physical therapy, doctor’s visits, and yoga. The unease feels permanent, too. But though I can account for my role in what happened—I did get drunk, I did unwisely go walking on the beach with a man I didn’t know—I don’t have to blame myself for what happened next. Blame seems to solidify the sense of permanent damage and powerlessness. I can, however, avoid drinking in a strange situation, and sit with my feelings instead of dulling them with alcohol. (It strikes me, in fact, that I could avoid a lot of uncomfortable situations in my life if I cut way down on drinking alcohol, which turns out to be true.) Next time, instead of getting trashed with some Samoan drag queens, I can rely on my good judgment and go back to my hut and read a book.

If I don’t let myself be a victim in my stories but understand my role as the protagonist of my own life, I can get my power back and trust myself that I can, through my actions or attitude, make things turn out all right.

For the next several months, my colleagues from that seminar are on a tear, getting big book deals and important magazine assignments, falling in love and having babies. I did not expect to find magic in a woman in a corporate suit with a flip chart, but I’m happy she’s waved her wand over us. It seems easier for my colleagues to make big changes, as it was for my fellow Outward Bounders, but maybe my progress is more internal. In any
case, it’s slower and more subtle, but as I write down some weekly goals and stick to them, I begin to feel something shift, something lurching ahead.

N
OT LONG AFTER
, a former diplomat contacts me via an Ivy League Internet site I forgot I signed up with to ask me out. We meet for drinks at one of my favorite restaurants, which turns into dinner, with a beautiful bottle of Pinot Noir and a wide-ranging conversation. This, I think, is exactly the kind of man I’d like to be with. He is tall, thoughtful, well versed in an astounding variety of international issues, and wears shiny shoes with bright blue laces.

At the end of the evening, he drops me off at my place, and I invite him in for a nightcap, since he is a gentleman and we’re having such a good conversation. “Let’s go to Buenos Aires,” he says, finishing his last drink. “B.A. is such a sexy city. I’ve got time off in two weeks.”

Ordinarily, I am the first person to sign up when an attractive, intelligent, Oxford-educated man mentions going to sexy Buenos Aires next week. After I give him a kiss on the cheek good night and wave him off in a cab, I get as far as pulling out my tango shoes and checking flights. Then I realize that as wonderful a man as he seems, one of those high-SAT guys I should’ve snagged in college, his wife left him recently, and he is heartbroken and looking for a quick fix to make it better. Here in middle age, after all that meditation, goal setting, and reflection on accountability, I understand that healing takes time, he is in for a bumpy ride, and it isn’t going to be with me on the way to Argentina.

There would be no satisfying ending to that story, not right now, not for me, and, much as I hate to squelch a good adventure involving travel and romance, there’s some compensation in knowing I’m taking care of myself. When he calls, I tell him how delighted I was to meet him and to have dinner with him, and I hope we can do it again sometime. And then we’ll see how the story goes.

I
n the middle of winter, an editor calls asking me to do a story about women in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, expatriates who have reinvented themselves in that town, pursuing second acts in their careers after forty.

I haven’t been back to San Miguel de Allende, a well-preserved colonial town in the middle of the country—if you were to twirl Mexico on your finger, the tip would be touching San Miguel—since I lived there for a summer when I was ten. In all the years and trips since, I’ve never considered returning, even though I’ve visited several other places in Mexico. I’ve been afraid the town would be as changed as my childhood home in Colorado, surrounded by housing developments that obscure the mountains, and teeming with traffic. I’ve heard the place is full of gringos—bohemians, boomer artists, energy healers, Texas real estate developers, and retirees who realize that all of San Miguel, with its relatively inexpensive maids and medical services, amounts to assisted living, with better food.

I haven’t wanted to mar the memory of the town that so thoroughly
enchanted me thirty-five years ago. That summer stands out in Technicolor among the black-and-white snapshots of my childhood. There’s my oldest sister, Cindy, her toothy smile bright as the armful of sunflowers she bought for only a few pesos at the market. That’s Jan, with her long blond hair, trailed around the central plaza by an amorous
muchacho
in a yellow VW bug. There are Amy and me, skipping over cobblestones in our new leather huaraches, on the way to the blue-doored bakery in the morning to buy pastries in all different shapes that all tasted the same. Here we are in Spanish class with our tiny teacher, whose black braids reached to her knees and doubled back again, pinned behind her ears. Dad’s patting a donkey in that shot. And there’s Mom, sunning her legs in the open courtyard where we lived, her face shaded by the flowering plants that spilled over the wooden balcony.

Yet San Miguel de Allende still tugs at my subconscious. I’ve always been curious about the town, reading about it from afar, hearing reports from friends who have wandered through. I am curious enough to agree to the assignment; in any case, it’s my job.

I
ARRIVE VERY
late in León and take a shuttle van, an hour and a half, to San Miguel de Allende. The high desert is empty of all but scraggly brush, the distant hills barely visible in the night, stars sprinkling the sky like salt. I sink back into my brain and try to come up with enough Spanish to make polite conversation with the driver, the basics about where he lives and how many
kids he has. Younger than me, with five children, he is already a grandfather a few times over.

Because I’m tired and don’t want to try to explain about being single and childless to a man from a culture where that doesn’t make sense, I tell the driver a story when he asks, that I have a son, Antonio, who is studying Spanish for a summer at the University of Guanajuato before he goes to college. I’m in Mexico to visit him and spend a few days in San Miguel with some old friends, I say. My husband—who,
gracias a Dios
, is still as handsome as the day we married, at least I think so—had to stay at home because he is a transplant specialist and has to be on call in case someone dies in an accident and he has to rush to harvest the organs. In my Spanish it comes out sounding more like “he specializes in people’s organ meats and has to be ready to run and cut out the fresh heart and brains.”

“Ah.” The driver nods gravely, ready to switch topics.

As we pass vast expanses of brush, limbs reaching to the desert moon, I ask the driver what I fear most about San Miguel de Allende, that under the stress of time and development, with the influx of artists and Texans, it has been ruined. I want to be prepared. He tells me that there are indeed more and more gringos and more development, and that many Mexicans who grew up there are taking the crazy money they made from selling their little houses in town and moving somewhere bigger, but not necessarily better, farther out.

It’s good and bad, he says.

There’s money and there’s work, but what’s the point if you can’t live where you grew up, where it’s the most beautiful,
lo más
bonito
. He sighs. “You get a little older, and everything always changes,” he says.

“Así es la vida,”
I say. I’m considering turning back around, but it’s one in the morning and we’re nearly there.

“Así es.”