“Mrs. Calhoun,” I said. “I would like to have a talk with you.”
“Your English has improved,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“No,” I said. “I try to listen more than I talk, but thank you.”
“Do you know what day it is today, Felicia?” she asked.
“Wednesday, Mrs. Calhoun.”
“It’s the last day of spring.”
“Yes, I see. But I would like to have a talk with you.”
“I know what the reason is,” she said. “My husband promised your daughter a pool party.” She stared out the window again. “You can’t start summer without a pool party.”
“I would like to talk about another thing.”
“We’ll have it this weekend. Have Aurora invite all her friends. My husband will be there to make sure everyone has fun.” Where would Mrs. Calhoun be, I wondered, since I’d never seen her leave the house once.
“Mrs. Calhoun,” I said, “no, you don’t understand me.”
“We can talk at the party,” she said and lay down on a pillow.
“No,” I said, and again, the English words failed me. In Spanish, I could make a man tremble, force a woman to bite her tongue. But not in English. ¡Inglés Ahora! didn’t have those kinds of exercises. “No,” I said, “no, give me one minute, please.”
“I want quiet right now,” she said.
“No,” I whispered, because she said she wanted quiet. And I left in silence because silence was what I thought she needed.
* * *
Aurora invited an even mix of boy and girl friends to take the bus with her on a warm Saturday up to Los Feliz, spoiling them with the promise of pizza and bus fare to and from the party. I was furious and insisted she had to use her piggy bank money to get everyone there. The driver who flirted with me was working that Saturday, and I asked if he could give Aurora a deal on the bus fare for twelve kids. He said they could ride for free if I went out on a date with him. Aurora overheard me refuse and called me a bitch as she dumped her piggy bank into the fare box.
When we arrived, Rick shook my hand, patted Aurora on the head, and after asking if any older boys were coming, pointed the children to a pool house for them to change. Aurora huddled with her best friend, Duchess, who wasn’t swimming and didn’t seem to enjoy the surroundings, while the other children took turns diving into the pool. Water splashed on the jacaranda tree’s green fronds overhead, dampening the bright violet blossoms that peeked out from its branches.
Mrs. Calhoun watched the party from behind the sliding glass doors. “Come outside,” I said through the glass. “Beautiful day.” She smiled and waved her hands no, as if swatting away a fly.
“Can’t overprotect her,” Rick said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Nobody can make her live a life.”
“You are her husband,” I said. “You can help her find a different life.”
“I thought I did that when I married her.” Rick laughed. “Listen, I want to ask you. I’m getting into the club business and need men who want to work. Where can I find some young, strong Mexican men?”
“You are asking me?” I snorted. “When you find one, let me know. I have a daughter that needs raising.”
Around lunchtime, a young Mexican arrived hefting six “real” pizzas (not flour tortilla size) wrapped in a plastic tie strap atop his shoulders as though he was a pack mule. Rick led him over by the pool, instructing him to drop the boxes amid a ring of deck chairs. I thought I saw Mrs. Calhoun say something, but the sliding doors were closed and there was no one inside for her to talk to.
Fat drops of sweat plopped on the pizza boxes while the delivery boy set up paper plate and napkin place settings. Rick shadowed him, touching his forearms while he leaned over a table to grab a stack of napkins, whispering in his ear before he went back to the van for the rest of the food. When he returned, the delivery boy pointed at his watch.
“This guy needs to get going, Felicia,” Rick said. “I think I left my wallet in my swim trunks. Finish setting the food out, will you?”
The delivery boy dumped a stack of Styrofoam boxes in front of me on the table and was walking with Rick to the pool house when the sliding glass doors opened.
“No!” Mrs. Calhoun shouted.
The kids stopped laughing and playing. She took two small steps outside.
“Don’t touch a thing, Felicia. He,” she said, pointing at either Rick or the delivery boy, who were standing side by side, “is to finish what he started.”
She went back inside and slammed the glass door shut, disappearing into the house. Rick ran to the pool house for his wallet while the delivery boy sulked by the table. He counted up Rick’s money and stormed off to his van with that arrogant postargument strut my husband used whenever he knew he was wrong. I called the kids over to eat and brought two slices to Mrs. Calhoun’s room.
Outside her window, the blossoms fell, a steady rain into the pool. Mrs. Calhoun was lying in a curled ball on her bed with her shoes on.
“Good morning,” I said and walked over to her nightstand, where I placed the pizza.
“Good morning,” I said and took off her shoes.
“Good morning,” I said and knelt by her side.
Mrs. Calhoun smiled. “Good morning,” she said.
“Would you have lunch with me?” I asked.
“Yes, I will,” Mrs. Calhoun said. We ate together as the sounds of a dozen children and my daughter’s laughter, something I hadn’t heard since the shooting, echoed through the house.
Alma Guerrero was a three-year-old girl who lived with her mother in a rough part of Echo Park, on East Edgeware Road. It was in the heart of a patchwork of hills blistered with junkyards and tin shacks made from leftover metal sheared off from the remains of disassembled World War II aircraft. This area belonged, at any one moment, to the street gangs White Fence, 18th Street, 13th Street, Diamond Street, Echo Park Locos, and perhaps the most terrifying gang in East Los Angeles, the Department of Urban Reclamation for the City of Los Angeles, which had marked off the land for a multimillion-dollar super high school/shopping mall/condominium complex that took years to construct and, a month after its inauguration, was condemned for being built atop a toxic stew of cancerous sludge that had steeped underground for years.
Alma used to dance with her mother outside El Guanaco, a mercado near Angelino Heights that sold rock-hard Twinkies, Colt 45s, and homemade tacos and burritos in the back. She and a half dozen other girls and their mothers gathered there on the corner spontaneously, then every Friday afternoon, when I recognized El Guanaco in Madonna’s music video for “Borderline.” In the video, Madonna, dressed as a classic “Low Rider” chola in a forties-style hair bonnet, white wife-beater, long drape coat, and baggy pants that came up past her waist, had been kicked out of her gringo photographer boyfriend’s fancy loft for spray-painting a streak on his sports car. Out on “her” streets again, Madonna walks past El Guanaco and is welcomed into the arms of her cholas hanging outside, who realize she has not abandoned her chicas or her ’hood. They walk into the mercado, and after a selection at the jukebox, Madonna dances into the arms of her former boyfriend, a young Mexican guy who has pined for her throughout the video and represents the Mexican roots, the Mexican life she cannot turn her back on.
It started when I invited Ana Gomez from church to a tienda descuenta that had MTV inside to attract business, to try on new two-dollar dresses. When the video came on, I saw El Guanaco and pointed it out to Ana. It was visible on-screen for a few seconds, but she was as delighted as I was to see a place we walked by every day on television. There was something magical about it, a place in our neighborhood worthy of being on TV, and not because someone had been shot or killed. We agreed it would be fun to bring our daughters there, like a free tourist attraction we didn’t have to travel hours on the bus to see. Aurora wouldn’t come, but Ana’s daughter did. Two mothers became three, then four. One sweltering Friday afternoon in April, seven mothers�
��the biggest gathering yet—met on the street corner outside El Guanaco with their daughters. I dragged Aurora there that day; being the oldest, she towered over the other girls dressed in their own Madonna-style outfits. Mothers and girls chatted together on a street corner in what was considered a dangerous part of town day or night, in loud, sassy conversations, both groups wearing acid-washed skirts, see-through mesh tank tops, traffic cone orange spandex tights, aquamarine ankle-high socks,
tangerine pumps, shiny silver crucifixes, lace gloves, and black rubber bangle bracelets that were called “promise bracelets” because of the way the bangles were made to crisscross in the shape of a heart across the wrist.
A portable cassette deck was balanced atop a mailbox, playing songs taped off the radio. Beer bottle shards were kicked into the street by unsteady pairs of high heels, and the girls made a runway out of the curb, jumping, singing, and dancing around a streetlight as if it was a maypole. Their mothers stood around them in a circle on the sidewalk and on the street, clapping their hands to the beat and encouraging each girl to outdance the others Soul Train style. Alma wore an adult-size white T-shirt with Madonna’s face on it and a pair of hot-pink tights. Her mother had wrapped a black leather belt with a silver hoop buckle around Alma’s waist, turning the bottom half of the shirt into a skirt. Alma waved her arms and jumped in place on platform heels until her mother picked her up and swung her around the streetlight in short, ballerina-style arcs.
Over the hills, the smog above East Los Angeles reduced across the sky like skin on a boiling pot of milk. It was sunset, and the mothers decided it was time to go home. I wanted a picture—who would come to a tourist spot without one?—so I unwrapped a cheap Kodak Instamatic camera from its foil wrapper, lined everyone up against El Guanaco’s graffitied walls, then dragged over a flirty old abuelito in a straw hat who had been sitting on his front porch stoop to take the picture. It’d only take a minute, I promised.
A chorus line of Mexican Madonna daughters knelt in front of their mothers wearing fierce, take-no-shit smiles, except Aurora, who resented being there and resented kneeling in front of me. The idea to come to the corner was mine, to get her out of her room on her spring break and stop her sulking about something that had happened at school, something about a young boy calling her a dirty Mexican and refusing to dance with her at a party.
Come with me, I said. I’ll dance with you. There’s this place where all the girls dance like Madonna, I said.
Dance on a street corner, Aurora scoffed. Oh, Momma, you don’t understand, she said.
On the corner, I asked Aurora, “Siéntate delante de tu madre, por favor,” right next to Alma, so she would be the same height as the rest of the girls. Even in her flat sneakers, Aurora would have blocked me out.
“I don’t want to,” she said in English. “I’m too old to kneel with the little kids. I can stand with the women.”
“No eres tan viejo para ser una mujer,” I said.
“I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said.
There was a “hot and cold” argument between us. I shouted en español, Aurora snapped back in English. The mothers grew impatient and demanded the abuelito snap the photo.
A short distance away we heard the sounds of sirens and gunfire. In the choppy, rolling valleys of Echo Park, noise boomerangs in many directions. An ambulance siren sounding like it was on the next block could really be half a mile away, or a gunfight could be sending stray bullets right through your front screen door while your ears told you it was somewhere up in the hills. (You could die around here making these mistakes.) While the abuelito fumbled with the shutter button, two pairs of headlights approached over the horizon, as if the setting sun had broken into large marbles. Five loud gunshots in quick succession, not firecrackers or popping corn but deep hammer thrusts, cut the fleshy air. The mothers screamed, their voices angry, then terrified as they dragged their girls’ baby high heels across the sidewalk to hide. Broken glass splashed across the street like ocean spray.
The mothers threw themselves everywhere, curled up into tight armadillo balls. I tried to throw myself on Aurora, but she squirmed out from under me. Madonna played on the undisturbed tape deck as we rose off the ground. The sound of her voice outdoors, in the wake of the gasp-for-air silence that follows gunfire, and the music box with a synthesized dance beat melody—it was like hearing a beautiful, off-key hymn sung by a child in an empty church.
As we rose off the ground, one mother joked her husband must be starving for dinner to resort to a drive-by shooting to get her to come home. We laughed while plucking flakes of glass off our bodies. No drive-by shooting was going to ruin our day out.
Alma was lying on the ground. We all thought she’d fallen and scraped her knee, or was playing dead the way little children do all the time in the barrio. When her mother turned her on her side, blood poured out a small hole in the front of her neck, collecting on the Madonna T-shirt draped across her limp body. She knelt beside her daughter and tried to revive her by breathing into her mouth. Bubbles fizzled out of the wound. Alma’s mother ripped off the bottom half of Alma’s shirt with Madonna’s face and wrapped it around her neck to stop the bleeding.
Crowds gathered on the porches and stoops of the surrounding houses, watching and pointing fingers, their words blending into a long, animated parade of shouts, exclamations, and laughter. Kids ran around in circles and danced to the sound of Madonna’s “Borderline” on patches of dirt and weeds that made up their front lawns, oblivious to the dying girl on the sidewalk across the street.
“She doesn’t move,” Alma’s mother said. “The music plays but she doesn’t move.”
The next day, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner ran a front-page picture of Alma in a torn Madonna T-shirt that covered her like a bloody shroud with the banner headline BABY MADONNA MURDERED BY HEARTLESS THUGS. This corner was the place, the story said, where “little Mexican Madonna-wannabes gathered and danced with carefree hearts,” and “if there was a more vicious crime perpetrated in Los Angeles this year,” the Herald couldn’t think of it. Police sweeps followed, netting dozens of suspects, though never the actual killer; not one of the fifteen witnesses “saw” a thing, and none of their stories matched anyway. Little girls made pilgrimages to the corner where Baby Madonna was shot. They left candles, rosaries, pictures of the Virgin Mary, little bangle bracelets, and as the story spread and girls who lived in big houses from neighborhoods near the ocean came to pay their respects, big pink teddy bears and Madonna albums and posters—things a baby Madonna fan would want in heaven. While these gifts were stripped by covetous mothers at night, picking up the choicest relics for their own daughters—who in turn thought that their offerings had been taken up to heaven with Alma—for a period of several days the shrine was, according to Mayor Tom Bradley, “a spontaneous outpouring of generosity from the City of Angels.”
Over two thousand parishioners stood in line to pay their final respects at La Placita, the oldest Catholic church in Los Angeles. A prominent mariachi group donated their services for the procession to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, and rumor had it that Madonna herself had donated Alma’s hot pink with rhinestone trim coffin, along with the plot of land she would be buried in. Baby Madonna was a celebrity whose fame grew after her death, and as a testament to her memory, a mural was commissioned on the side of a building facing the Hollywood Freeway. A girl in a midriff-baring tank top rose out of a barrio in flames, carried aloft on a golden musical staff that snaked across the wall until it reached the gates of a pastel pink heaven with smiling clouds and characters from My Little Pony and Care Bears scampering about on a clean and spacious playground with angel wings attached to their backs.
The police report later verified that a stray bullet had ricocheted off a streetlight and severed Alma’s spinal cord. The argument between Aurora and me was recalled by many of the other mothers at the scene, and the question was asked: Would the bullet have struck Aurora instead of Alma? D
id Aurora kneel before the picture was taken, or was she trying to stand? One angry mother who wanted to cash in on the notoriety the story had built in the press suggested la limpiadora (she wouldn’t call me by name) threw her girl in the bullet’s path in an attempt to save herself. The accusation, if true, could have resulted in child endangerment charges. Aurora and I were called in as witnesses to Parker Center, but our versions of what transpired were so different, our statements were deemed unusable and the case was thrown out. Still the damage was done.
When the abuelito’s picture was developed, it was examined by several officers connected with the case. Because the camera was jerked at the time of the exposure, the image was jumpy, and no two investigators could agree on what they saw. Aurora was either being pulled down by me to kneel or pulling away from me to stand up.
What those policemen couldn’t find, though, was something I could already see—a mother and daughter in a strangled embrace, looking for the space our faith had left next to each other to fill.
I’d never get the chance to quit; Rick gave me my two weeks’ notice after the pool party. The young Mexican boy who delivered the pizza would do my job for less money. Mrs. Calhoun asked her husband to pass along to me a list of his friends and associates who were looking for housecleaners, and in no time I had work lined up every day of the week. There were many bosses to practice my English on, and while I’d never command the language the way my daughter would, I could speak it as well as a man making a promise—that is, with equal doses of earnestness and desperation, along with enough wiggle room to escape out of a commitment by feigning a misunderstanding (“Three days a week? I’m sorry; I thought you said three hours a week. We will need to renegotiate my fee”).
Cleaning other people’s houses—their cherished possessions in both good and bad taste, the chipped dishes they eat off of, the ratty sofas they make love on, the unlevel, puckering floors they shed curly hairs on—is the most intimate relationship you can have with them. Yet every boss I’ve worked for wants that relationship to be unobtrusive to the point of being invisible. I have done my best to live my life in between those two places, intimacy and invisibility. Over the years I’ve absolved the remains of a thousand indiscretions without judgment, and have learned not to ask questions. Men staying over, friends moving in, children moving out; none of this is my concern. If my job is done right, what you find when you get home is a comforting antiseptic, fresh Band-Aid smell, spotless floors, and no evidence another human being, a cleaning lady, was ever there.
The Madonnas of Echo Park Page 7