As long as you lie.
“Hello? ¿Es usted ciudadano?”
Everything I have earned in this life by lying, I have lost. By lying.
“Sir, I’m not going to ask you again. ¿Es usted ciudadano?”
The cop took down the story, asked me to sign a written statement, then turned me over to central processing, where the facts of my illegal status were noted on a long sheet of ruled paper. I had no birth certificate, no proof my daughters were citizens, no legal paperwork, no official state ID cards, no passports, no check stubs or electric bills—nothing to establish that I’d been in this country for years. I had lived in that invisible space where people like me live, the place between darkness and blindness where you try to make a life and everything is paid for in cash and sweat.
A public defender tried to attach me as a material witness in an ongoing murder investigation to halt my deportation, but Tenant, Adam, and Diego’s body couldn’t be located, and aside from the bloody sledgehammer, my statement was the single piece of evidence they had. The case was declared inactive, and I could be deported to Mexico right away.
“Don’t worry,” my public defender said. “You can be back in Los Angeles by tomorrow night. We’ll get you home.” But where was home?
Before sunrise we were corralled, our wrists cuffed in plastic twist ties like the necks of garbage bags, and shuffled onto a long, olive green bus with iron mesh on its windows and a steel partition between us and the driver. The bus drove through Downtown, an abandoned area with plenty of room, until it reached a steep freeway overpass, which we had to speed up on to get to driving speed. It was the way an airplane must feel taking off—speed, force, and elevation—and I got that twisted knot in my stomach again, that feeling I had when, over the ledge, I saw Diego’s body.
Laid out in front of the dawn like a rug made of jigsaw pieces was Los Angeles. Through the wire-mesh window screens, endless fly strips of houses, homes, and the skeletons of those yet to be built; naked mounds of land that would soon be smothered by new homes, built with the hands, and on the bones, of the old landlords, homes in such a starry multitude that I was confident there was one for me, and in that home there’d be enough space for my small life, and the hopes I’d bring back with me.
2
The Blossoms of Los Feliz
Spring is here and it makes my joints ache. All those jacaranda blossoms on the walk outside to sweep up. Jacaranda trees thrive in Los Angeles, like blondes and Mexicans. There’s no getting away from them, not even in my dreams. They’ve haunted me from childhood, when I believed a jacaranda tree would save me. Can you imagine such a thing, a tree saving a life? A silly girl thought so once.
I’d been sent to my grandmother’s home in Chavez Ravine by a mother whose face I didn’t remember and whose cruelty Abuelita wouldn’t let me forget. The dirt road outside my abuelita’s house led to an outdoor mercado and was covered with an amethyst sea of pulpy jacaranda that felt like old skin and calico under your bare feet. I’d collect sprays of young jacaranda, then run down the road with them, petals raining from my arms.
When the white men came to build a baseball stadium for playing their games, they smoothed the land out like a sheet of paper to bring in their trucks and bulldozers that would destroy our homes. But there was a problem. The land was uncooperative and petty, swallowing contractors’ flatbed trucks and, I prayed, the workers
themselves into sinkholes and collapsing earth atop surveyors’ flags. The jacaranda trees gave them the most trouble. They felled the mightiest bulldozers, which couldn’t tear them down without themselves being damaged. I thought that if I grew a jacaranda tree in my room, it would anchor our home to the land and we wouldn’t have to leave.
I found a thin branch with several young sprays and set it in an old wooden batea. We had no running water, and the rainstorms that fled across the ravine didn’t give the dry, cracked ground a chance to soak up what poured out of the sky, so at night I’d slip out of my window barefoot to steal water from a neighbor’s well.
I planted the batea in our swept-smooth dirt floor and waited for the spray to bear seeds whose roots would burrow deep into our ground. Two of the buds matured, plopping atop the water’s surface before they could open, but the rest weren’t growing fast enough and the sounds of the bulldozers kept getting closer and closer. I poured heavy gulps of water into the batea to get the other buds to bloom. I didn’t want to hurt them. I wanted to give them more of what I thought they needed.
That night, a bad dream crept to my bed like a relative with filthy thoughts. I was a jacaranda blossom struggling to stay alive but whose violet color was dripping off my petals into a standing pool of water. But I was also me, laughing as I held the dying blossom by its bud under the water. I reached up with as much strength as I pushed my body down, drowning both my selves. There was the drop drop drop of running water, then a hard patter, then a shrieking roar, a scream pouring out of my mouth as I awoke coughing strands of spit on the side of the bed I shared with my abuelita. It was a vivid nightmare, one that revisits me, a persistent yet incurable sickness.
Fumbling to the batea through the rough darkness, I saw that the other buds had shriveled up. Two jacaranda flowers were submerged underwater. I cradled them out of the vase to dry them, but their milk and seeds popped out as the flowers tore apart in my hands. My abuelita heard me crying and without asking where the water had come from told me that a drowning flower moves toward the water, not away from it. Its stem may be strong enough to stand on its own, but when its petals grow wet and heavy, they drag the flower back into the water and that causes it to die.
Aurora Salazar, the last woman evicted from Chavez Ravine, learned this lesson when she was dragged by her wrists and ankles like a shackled butterfly off her land. And I would learn that lesson many years later working for Mrs. Calhoun. This is what women do, when they have an ocean of dreams but no water to put them in.
Mrs. Calhoun lived in a large house on Avalon Street in Los Feliz with her husband, Rick, who had followed a story in the newspapers and on television about a drive-by shooting. In 1984, during my twelve-year-old daughter Aurora’s spring break, she and I had been standing for a group photo (which all the papers published) on a street corner when a car opened fire near the crowd. Neither of us had been in any actual danger, but because of the attention, I lost my job cleaning the offices of a law firm where I’d worked for four years as a “temp.”
Before Rick found me, I was looking for work on a street corner, 5th and San Pedro, near the Midnight Mission. Back then, my English was terrible and Skid Row was where, if you were a woman, needed work, and didn’t speak English, you’d gather in a group for the gabachos to come and hire you. We all had our own corners on Skid Row back then. 6th and Los Angeles, by the Greyhound station, was for junkies. 5th and San Julian was the park where whores would sell their time: twenty dollars for twenty minutes in a flophouse, or ten dollars for ten minutes in a Porta Potti the city put out for the homeless. And 5th and Pedro was where you went to hire day laborers and cleaning ladies.
The women came from everywhere south, some as far away as Uruguay, each with her own Spanish dialect. The men had their own corner, across the street from ours. They weren’t there to defend us when we were harassed (or sometimes raped) by the bums who swarmed the area but to keep an eye on us while they drank, laughed, and wolf-whistled the gazelles, beanstalky white women in suits and sneakers who parked their cars in the cheap garages nearby. They turned those pendejos’ heads like compass needles, as if those girls’ tits and asses were magnetized. We had the dignity to wait in silence, yawning in the flat gray sharpness of dawn under a mist of milky amber streetlight. Standing in a straight line, arms folded across our chests like stop signs, we prepared ourselves for a long day of aching, mindless work by sharing a religious, rigorous, devotional quiet.
When men want relief they hire a whore. When women want relief they hire a cleaning lady. And they did it
the same way—first they examined our bodies. Could we reach the high shelves with the lead crystal without a stepladder? Were we able to fit into a crawl space and fish out their children’s toys? Were our culos big enough to cushion an accidental fall? They never looked us in the eye because they could see us performing those disgusting chores no decent woman would dream of asking another woman to do. Then they tried to negotiate the stingiest hourly rate, or tossed out a flat fee that always seemed too good to be true, and was; at their houses, you were asked in a polite but insistent voice to do “just one more” messy, humiliating job (digging through moist, rotten garbage for a missing earring they “thought” might have fallen in, or fishing a tampon out of a clogged toilet) before you earned your day’s freedom. The men were more direct, pulling up in large white windowless vans and snapping their fingers—“I need two plump, stocky ones and two that can squeeze into tight corners!”—like buying live chickens.
I wasn’t the only American-born woman on this corner who never learned English. In Los Angeles, you could rent an apartment, buy groceries, cash checks, and socialize, all in Spanish. I tried going to the movies to learn English; at the theaters Downtown, Mexicans could come only on certain days and were “restricted” to the balcony. I snuck in whenever I could because I wanted to be more “American,” and I thought these movies—“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!”—had the answer. Yet whatever English I pieced together dissolved when I walked into the harsh sunlight outside.
When something really stumped me—paying taxes, for example—I asked for help. More Mexicans speak English than you imagine and understand it better than they let on. That’s how I met Hector, in church; he could already speak English but never had time to teach me. (I should have known a man who could speak two languages could live two different lives with two different women.) How could I find time to learn English, when I left my house at dusk like a vampire, working in empty, haunted offices all night? And some vampire I was, frightened by all those ghostly sounds in an office, like copy machines that powered on for no reason or phones that rang endlessly. Before sunrise, I scurried out the service entrance with a horseshoe back, clenched shoulders, callused feet, and skin reeking of ammonia.
That’s why Rick’s letter arriving when it did gave me faith we were not destined to live our lives as victims. The papers painted Aurora and me as tragic near-martyrs, symbols of a community the city had forgotten. Aurora couldn’t face her classmates because of this and some incident at school that she started telling me about, then stopped when she told me I’d gotten the details wrong (someone called her “a dirty Mexican”). After the shooting, she stopped telling me anything, became a sour and sullen stranger in my home. She changed schools and talked to me even less, but she was still my translator and my negotiator when I went to meet Rick. Cards and letters flooded our mailbox, but Rick had written on the most handsome stationery that he was looking for a cleaning lady (or better yet, a houseboy), and if I wasn’t interested, would I inquire in the neighborhood in exchange for a “finder’s fee”?
We rode the bus a half hour to Los Feliz and met Rick on his front drive under a gang of aging palm trees. He led us around the grounds, which included a shady grotto and swimming pool carved out of a hillside shielded beneath a canopied jacaranda tree that had thin green sprouts and young, tender, but still unripe ivory buds peeking out from its branches.
“You have a swimming pool!” Aurora said.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Rick asked her.
“Maybe.” Aurora smiled a confident, gap-toothed grin that meant she was lying.
“You can have a pool party with your boyfriend anytime. If he has an older brother, he can come and bring his friends, too,” he said.
When I asked her how much the job paid, she began a back-and-forth conversation until I agreed on a schedule of three times a week, six hours each day. Aurora negotiated thirty dollars per cleaning day, with Rick providing the cleaning supplies.
“My wife will keep everything fully stocked,” Rick said. “She’s inside.”
In a living room that could fit my entire childhood Chavez Ravine home, Rick’s wife sat curled on a fancy corduroy couch (a couch I’d come to know very well), her head draped over a glossy magazine. I couldn’t tell whether she was asleep or awake. There was a booming, echoed silence, what you’d hear in a cathedral.
Aurora dove onto the couch. Startled, his wife jerked up, and Rick motioned stiffly for her to shake my hand.
“Hello, Mrs. Calhoun,” I said.
She dragged her legs off the couch, adjusted her silk blouse, then pinched the waist of her trim, creased slacks. “This is Felicia, the woman from the newspaper,” Rick said.
“Hello, Felicia,” she said, standing the same height as me in stocking feet. “Hola. Buenos días and hola, Felicia.” She hugged me at an angle, like she was using tongs.
“My wife was the one who spotted that photo in the paper,” Rick said. She looked surprised to hear this.
“Oh, the photo. The one with your friends. Amigos. Amigas? I’m sorry my Spanish isn’t better,” she said.
I understood this, and said, in English, “It’s okay. My English should be better. It’s America, your country.”
“Oh, I thought you were born here,” she said.
“I was. But it’s your country.”
She showed Aurora and me out, saying she was running late for a medical appointment. We descended the sharp incline back to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. There were no benches—only Mexicans rode the bus around here—so Aurora and I squatted on the curb, massaging our calves and keeping our feet at what we hoped was a safe distance from the sports cars and new “minivans” speeding down the boulevard. We waited under the shadows of manicured wall hedges and palm treetops whose dry, spiny fronds crackled in the breeze like a brushfire.
“I want a house like his,” Aurora said. “I want to live here.”
“It’s very expensive,” I said. “You need to stay in school.”
“You don’t need to go to school to be rich anymore. I want to have a pool party here,” Aurora said.
“My job is to work here,” I said. “Your job is to go to school.”
“Rick said I could come and swim,” she said. “You can’t decide for both of us.”
“That wasn’t an invite to swim,” I said. “Era una invitación a trabajar.”
Cleaners must arrive early, before their bosses have had their morning coffee, newspaper, and can mess up their houses any further. To get to work on time, I walked to the bus stop when the moon was still out. No one was around except the borrachos swaggering back home to their wives’ cold beds when the bars closed, or the crazy bag lady who wore winter coats year-round, prayed at my bus stop bench as if it were a pew, and talked about her “friend,” the Virgin Mary, as if Our Lady of Guadalupe was going to show up on the Line 200 bus at five in the morning. I hated rising early then, so I learned the driver’s name and acted friendly; in a few weeks, he’d wait an extra minute or two for me at my stop if I was running late, though I had to listen to his endless bragging about how he kept to his schedule and always followed the rules. Don’t know what page of the rule book chatting up women passengers was on, but I knew what his game was. Women can see through a man in a way men will never realize. That’s because men never change—they’ll slow time down trying to get under your dress, then speed it up once they’ve done it. I was still recovering from Hector, my one attempt at true love. He turned out to be a yo-yo lover, a man who stings you more coming back than going away.
There were many cleaning ladies and maids riding that bus every morning, fanning out across Los Feliz. Working on traffic islands or mountainous front lawns were armies of gardeners who came in their own pickup trucks, their turtle-shell backs inching across unruly grass they sharpened into crisp right angles.
You could hear us coming by the sound of our plastic buckets, knocking what we carried inside them aroun
d: spray bottles with homemade cleaning solutions, collapsible mop handles and scouring pads, dried out sponges and boxes of rubber gloves (many owners of these houses, mine included, didn’t supply their own cleaning supplies as promised; we’d eat the cost along with our complaints), and a symphony of jangling house keys. If you weren’t trusted with keys, you’d better get used to the curb.
It took me a while during those first weeks to learn a different rhythm of doing my job. At the law firm, I had to let others know I was there. Figuring out the best ways to be heard but not seen is a crucial skill for a cleaning lady so I wouldn’t surprise anyone staying late, or walk in on lawyers having sex or touching themselves. Turning on the vacuum cleaner when I didn’t need to or making a lot of noise arranging my cleaning supplies were the best ways. One lawyer’s hands dipped below his waist whenever I cleaned his office, so one night I whipped the vacuum cord at his crotch like a lion tamer. He kept his hands on his papers after that.
In Los Feliz, I needed to be invisible and inaudible. Mrs. Calhoun and I managed to communicate without ever saying a word to each other’s face. The massive double front doors made a loud, drawbridge sound when I unlocked them, letting her know I’d arrived. I’d shout “Good morning” in English until Mrs. Calhoun responded with an echoed “Good morning,” often from one of the bathrooms. That was my sign to start at the opposite side of the house. When I finished a room, Mrs. Calhoun stepped inside and read a magazine until I finished the next room. Like the arms on a clock, we moved together through six bathrooms, five bedrooms, the split kitchen, two “recreation” rooms (a name that confused me; I didn’t have a room to create things in, let alone “re”-create them), and a living room as big as Aurora’s school cafeteria. We could spend the day inches apart and never see each other.
Many cleaning ladies would be thrilled not to have someone’s eyes raking your spine, correcting your every move, but I felt it was bad luck to spend a day in the same house with someone you never saw or talked to. Sometimes I’d ask Mrs. Calhoun a question but would get no reply. Later, I’d find a note on a large glass table by a pair of sliding doors overlooking the grotto, a place Mrs. Calhoun stared out at most of the day. With the help of an English-Spanish dictionary Rick gave me on my first day, I learned how to translate her replies. “Don’t clean the green back bedroom today” meant she’d be shut in there, curtains drawn, for the six hours I was cleaning. “Please clean the oven” meant the charred remains of some grisly attempt at a meal would be lying in wait for me. “Out this afternoon” meant Rick would come in right before I left smelling of chewing gum and alcohol, bobbing and weaving across the freshly waxed floors.
The Madonnas of Echo Park Page 5