by Donna Gold
Horns, drums, tuba—and something else, too, some lilting melody like a strain from a distant dream. Ahead, huge puppets and laughing children. Another dream? But no, she was awake, she was here. Here in Oaxaca! After twenty-six years, she, Lena Mendel, had returned to the city that for one extraordinary high school year she called home. She wanted to dance, join this procession of horns and drums and puppets, and yet, and yet—as much as she longed to follow, she wanted to linger on this cobblestoned street, press her palms onto walls of peach and jade, feel the contours of the sage-green stone, as if these colors, this city, its trees brilliant with blossoms of yellow and lavender, could enter her body, run through her veins—and she’d again be the girl breathing in every ounce of Oaxaca. But the giant puppets were disappearing, bending to pass beneath a stone archway. Roughing her hand one last time, Lena followed, arriving inside the churchyard as a final blast of horns and clash of cymbals brought her face-to-pink-skirt with the ten-foot-high papier-mâché woman twirled by someone whose eyes peeked from two holes beneath pointed breasts. Gabe would love this! But her son was blocks away at the Casa, the compound that had been their school years before, choosing to hang with Marta and Carmen, their traveling companions and her old classmates, women he’d known since birth.
. . . Twenty-seven years since she’d arrived in Oaxaca; twenty-six since she left. Twenty-seven was the age she’d been when Gabe annulled her claim to absolute independence. Still, Oaxaca’s lichen-toned walls, its knots of overhead wire and teacher protests were as familiar to her as her hand. And there, beneath clouds nearly purple in their weight, stood her very own mountain, whose crest, valley, and steep climb to a second peak had been her touchstone as a girl, echoing the very curve of her chest, the nestling of heart between lungs. This mountain was her own Zapotec god, the one she’d called Brooding with Storm Clouds.
