mexico

when i went to brewbaker primary school in montgomery, my mom was still a stay-at-home-mom. she always wanted to be a teacher but she never had the money or means to go to college when she was younger, so she got involved at brewbaker as much as she could. she was a substitute teacher sometimes (which was really awkward when she was the substitute in my class) and she was really involved with the PTA. there was a tiny little office in a back hallway of the school and a few days a week she would spend the day in that office, doing things for the PTA like making a monthly newsletter, making bulletin boards, and making copies for teachers. sometimes another woman would volunteer to help my mom. she had three daughters and they all looked exactly alike even though they were different ages. they all dressed identically every day and had the biggest, worst, hair-sprayed 90's bangs in the world. the youngest daughter (i can't remember their names) was a few years younger than me. one day after school when we were waiting for our moms to finish doing whatever they were doing, i took the youngest daughter into this closet in the back of the tiny office. it was a pretty big closet with lots of shelves filled with different colored paper and supplies for the bulletin boards my mom made. she'd cut out little shapes from construction paper- teddy bears, hearts, dinosaurs- and had them all organized in little plastic bins. in the back of the closet there was a locked door. i had no idea what the door led to, but looking back i'm sure it either connected to the next room or was just more closet. anyway, i took the youngest of the three girls into the closet and showed her the locked door. i told her that the door led to mexico and if we could find the key, we could open it and go on vacation. i have no idea where i came up with this. i guess a couple years before that my parents went to mexico for a conference with my dad's job and so i thought that was a really cool and exotic place, but i don't know why i decided it was behind the locked door in the closet. at first this whole mexico scheme was just sort of a test to see if the little girl would believe me. but after a few weeks of talking to her about mexico and trying to open the door, i started to believe it myself. we looked all over the place for keys. i found some old keys around the house and brought them to school to try on the door. she found one on the playground. we tried them all and, of course, none of them opened the door. i even asked my mom if she had a key for the door (she didn't). eventually they started using the little PTA office for something else so my mom stopped working in there and the other little girl and i no longer had access to the closet, so we had to stop our search for keys and attempts to open the door. i was about 7 that year and up until the time i was 12 or so, any time anyone mentioned mexico, i would automatically think of that closet because, somehow, i'd convinced myself that mexico was behind that door.