Painting in Cancun

After lunch one day, Ellie wanted to paint figurines. We walked over to the painting area and she quickly picked out a dolphin. I am notorious about taking a long time to choose what I'm going to paint, but this time a candy jar caught my eye almost immediately. On the lid was the outline of a little Mexican boy leaning against a large aloe plant, his knees up, his arms folded over his knees and his head buried into his arms so that all you could see was the large sombrero on top of his head.

It was such a sweet vignette, and as I looked at it, I imagined that the little boy’s name was Paco and he was a migrant worker’s son. He sat next to the aloe plant crying because his father had sent him off into the desert to learn to be a man. Paco was still just a child and he didn’t know how to live up to his father’s expectations, but he knew he must. I'm pretty sure I saw that story on a late-night TV movie of the week, but that didn’t matter. It was the story the lid spoke to me.

So I chose the candy jar, sat myself down at the table in front of numerous jars of paint, and started with the aloe plant. I painted the more obvious colors first—I made the aloe plant green, the sky blue and the sombrero a burnt orange. Then I picked some more whimsical colors for the rocks and the clothes the boy was wearing, and I accented his outfit by making his sandals and the sash around his waist a bright, vibrant purple and yellow. I carried that yellow accent to the outside rim of the lid, where it popped beautifully next to the deep, rich blue of the sky.

It took me a freaking hour to do one coat of the lid. Just the lid. Ellie finished her dolphin in about half the time it took me to do the lid—just the lid—and she asked if she could paint a turtle. I knew the turtle would take her maybe 10 minutes, so I started to panic.

“Make that turtle really colorful,” I told her. “Use at least five colors. Make every section of the shell a different color.”
“Uh… okay.” She answered, and grabbed the blue paint. The extra colors took her more time, but soon enough she was done and bored again.
“Can I help you with yours?” she asked, leaning over the bowl I had finally picked up to start painting.
“No!” I snapped. “This is mine!”
“You don’t have to be mean,” she said, sulking. “You could just use a normal voice.”

I didn’t have a normal voice anymore, so I mumbled something unintelligible and moved my perfectly painted lid further away from her. Ellie looked at the scowl on my face and the slightly shaking paintbrush in my hand and made an informed decision to leave and go find Daddy, and she headed back to the room.

The next hour and a half was a haze of pain, sweat, thirst, lots of swearing, and occasional short conversations with passers by. I remember Ellie and Greg coming back to paint a second coat on her dolphin and turtle, then finishing that coat and going back to the room to get bathing suits. Papa stopped by with a load of clothes for the laundry service, then stopped by again on his way to pick up his finished laundry.

I was starting to hate that little shit, Paco. He was obviously a thief and a liar and I hoped his dad gave him a good spanking before he sent him off to go sit by that aloe plant. He probably wasn’t even crying—he was laughing at gringas like me who waste their afternoon and their sanity trying to paint candy jars that will probably break on the flight home anyway.

A man walked up to the paint table and signaled the attendant. He pulled out his card.
“How much for the frog?” he asked, picking up a beautifully prepainted figurine.
“Fifteen dollars,” the attendant answered.
“I’ll take it,” he said, handing the man his card.
“That’s cheating, you know!” I wanted to yell. “That’s a cute little frog you just bought, sure, but what have you gained from it, huh? In your soul?!”

I tried to turn and say something to this Ugly American, this guy who clearly just doesn’t get it, but my neck seized up from being hunched over for hours and a shock of pain shot through me. By the time my neck recovered, the man had taken his frog and left. That was it. I slapped a single coat of blue on the inside of the bowl and hoisted my sweaty, stiff, addled self off the bench. I stopped myself from hurling the candy jar at the wall and instead placed it carefully into the attendant’s hands and left to jump in the pool.