Ticket to Paradise

“Do you speak Spanish?”

The question was straightforward enough, but I could feel my heart start to pound in my chest as I fiddled with the button at the end of my sleeve. God, was it always so hot in Mexico? I felt like my skin was melting off, all the drops gathering into a huge puddle of Teri-sweat under my chair. For a second, I felt sorry for whoever had to clean it up, and then I remembered that I was in a job interview, and she had asked me if I spoke Spanish, and I was taking so long of a pause that it almost seemed possible I didn’t speak any language at all.

I swallowed down my nervousness and racing thoughts (which always came with my nervousness) and answered, “Sí, claro.” Which, truthfully, were two of the ten words I knew in Spanish, despite my family being full-blooded Mexican on both sides. My parents had just decided that I was supposed to be American, and in order to help me fit in with my paler peers, they kept the language far, far away from me.

Which made the rare family gatherings kind of awkward, but what could I do?

“Fabuloso.” She grinned at me, and I hadn’t noticed until then that her front tooth turned inward a little bit, marring her otherwise beautiful smile. “You start Monday.”



“Are you insane?” Carmen scolded loudly, her hazel eyes blazing. “You can’t just lie to an employer like that! God, Teri, have you lost your goddamned mind?”

“Lying is bad,” I acknowledged coolly, thankful that it was so easy for me to keep my temper in check. I couldn’t imagine how explosive my friendship with Carmen would be if I lost my head as easily as she did. We’d forever be throwing each other out windows. “But, since lying is something I typically try to avoid, I’m going to try to learn Spanish this weekend.” I held up the Spanish how-to book that I’d picked up at the small convenience store/pharmacy that was located around the block from the resort to show her the proof.

She kind of relaxed, her shoulders slumping forward, as her anger was overtaken by confusion. “I hate to ruin your fantasy, but you can’t learn an entire language in two days. No one could do that. Einstein couldn’t do that.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember saying anything about the whole language.” My tone was starting to take a smug turn, so I cleared my throat before I continued. “I’ll just hit the basics. Like hello, goodbye, how are you, would you like some tequila. That kind of stuff.”

“And what’s going to happen if the employees come up to you and start talking in Spanish? That’s how they communicate, you know. To keep the tourists from knowing what they’re saying.”

“I’ll do the same thing I do when I either don’t hear or don’t care what someone’s said in English: smile and laugh. I’ll get through it.”

“That is a bad plan.”

“It’s a fine plan! You’re just not channeling your positive energy, Carmen. Please try to support me in my time of need.”

She glared at me, and I wanted to tell her that what she was radiating was the opposite of positive energy, but she looked angry enough to keep me quiet. Getting punched in the face was low on my list of goals for the day. “This whole thing was your stupid idea. If you hadn’t run after the first job offer you saw in the paper, which I even had to translate for you…”

“Might I remind you that you were the one who told me to get a job?”

I thought I’d brought up a good point, but no such luck. “I thought you’d get a job as a store room stocker or something! Do you realize how many people you’ll have to work with per day if you’re a waitress at a vacation resort? How much you’ll have to talk to people, many of whom speak only Spanish?”

I coughed. A store room stocker had not occurred to me, but perhaps Carmen was right. Not that it mattered, since I’d already accepted the job at the resort, but she should have felt proud of herself for coming up with that. “Oh. I see what you mean.”

There was a short silence, so I took that time to nudge the useless book away from me, eyeing it every couple of seconds like it could possibly explode.

“It’s too late,” Carmen stated plainly, propping herself on the edge of my bed. “So there’s only one thing I can do now.”

“Which would be…?”

“Teach you as much Spanish as I can in two days without wanting to kill you or myself.”

“We might not get far.”

She made a twisted face, the kind of expression she always got when she was trying not to laugh at my sarcastic humor, before nodding toward the generic bedside table that seemed to be standard in every hotel room ever. “Hand me the notebook you put in there, and we’ll get started.”



I learned two things rather quickly: I was not picking up the new language very quickly, but I was very good at faking a Mexican accent. Granted, that was probably because my parents had fairly strong accents, no matter how hard they tried to suppress them, but at least their failure had come in handy for me.

“That’s not going to get you through everything, though,” Carmen reminded me in a huffy voice when I complimented myself on my impeccable pronunciation. “If you speak English with a Mexican accent, the native Mexicans still won’t understand what you’re saying.”

“If I speak faster, then?” I was trying to lighten the mood a little bit, since Carmen was starting to get that crease that always appeared in her forehead when she felt frustrated, but she didn’t look like she was getting too amused.

“Look, this is for you, okay?” She reached up and massaged the back of her neck for a second, which was probably starting to get a knot from her intense stress. “I don’t have to do this for you. I’m just concerned that you’re going to screw up and get fired. So if you don’t want to get fired, then it would probably be ideal to listen to me. Okay?”

“Okay.” I folded my legs and pulled them up to my chest as I brought my eyes back to the notebook Carmen had in front of her. I’d offered to run out and buy her a whiteboard, just so she looked more professional as a teacher, but she’d waved me off and told me there was no time.

“Cuarto is room,” Carmen instructed, pointing to the word she’d written in her loopy, elegant script. “And habitación, dormitorio, recámara, and alcoba mean bedroom. But I’m not sure which word they’d use for their hotel room, since I'm not native.”

I stared at her with my mouth open and my eyes blank. “Why do they have five words to say the same thing? Why can’t they just have one word?”

“How many words do you have to say ‘angry’ in the English language?” Carmen fired back, raising her eyebrows.

I tried to think about that, and I came up with more than five in about two seconds. So there was a checkmate on that front. “I see what you mean,” I said for the second time that afternoon. God, Carmen was on a roll.

“Good. Now repeat the words after me.”

I did as I was told without much complaint. But after another hour of lessons, my stomach was starting to make its presence known, calling out for sustenance with noises that pretty greatly resembled a dying whale. “Can we take a lunch break?” I pleaded, making my dark eyes as wide as possible. “And please don’t say that we don’t have time.”

“We can squeeze in a cheese quesadilla,” Carmen allowed, reaching for the phone to call for room service. “But that’s it. No ice cream.”

I let out a short, quiet sigh to show my discontent, but she silenced me by putting up her index finger. “Yes, this is Room 302 calling.”