The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  “Are you joking? You’re going out with my best friend.”

  “You two didn’t seem too friendly back there.”

  “Juan, you should go. Please,” I said. “She’s my—”

  “Look, we’re not serious. I’m seeing Duchess to make my mom happy,” he said. “You and I don’t have to date. We can just hang out. No pressure.”

  Debbie’s shiny Nissan sports coupe idled its way up the hill amid a caravan of school buses and cars from the next school to graduate.

  “I can’t decide this now. I’ll think about it. Okay?” He nodded, then leaned down to kiss me on my ear. I felt my arms melt into his shoulders, felt my legs grow weak, felt my flesh jump. Then he was gone.

  Debbie pulled up to the curb, and I climbed in. She pointed at one of the buses.

  “Are those guys from your school?” she asked.

  “No, the one graduating after us.”

  “Check out those babes,” she said and pointed to a blond Adonis in a basketball jersey shaking hands with a black guy in a cap and gown.

  “God, I love jocks,” Debbie said. “I’d so fuck-and-run him. You can go for the black guy.”

  “I like the blond.”

  “But he’s . . . not black.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Debbie rested her head on the steering wheel. “Don’t hate me because I’m stupid,” she said. “You’re going to teach me about this, right, Angie?”

  “Party of two,” I said. “You teach me, I’ll teach you.”

  * * *

  You never realize the final moment when a friendship ends. One friendship fades out, and another one fades in to take its place. Duchess’s stock question “Why chase a bus when another one’s right around the corner?” was replaced with Debbie’s “I’d so fuck-and-run him,” which is what she said meeting Juan for the first time. It took three months of dates, and a night of margaritas at a restaurant that didn’t card, for that to happen. Juan’s after-sex sweat glistened on his skin like the glossy sheen on a street following a sudden rain. He said romantic things—things he liked about my personality, little traits and mannerisms of mine I never noticed—but when he tried to tell me about the moment he knew he’d fallen in love with me, I cut him off. “Juan, this is too soon.” He stopped talking, went to sleep.

  I snuck out before sunrise, into that cold raw darkness where you don’t hear a sound or see another soul. I didn’t return his calls, his gifts and flower bouquets, or respond to his letters asking for some sort of explanation that would make sense. Nothing I could say would make sense to him because it made no sense to me. In my mind, I had a specific plan for how I would fall in love, and getting drunk on margaritas (like two stereotypical Mexicans) wasn’t it. It was easier to pretend nothing had happened between us, a gift I am thankful women excel at with men.

  Debbie counseled me on what happened. You had your first “fuck date,” she said. Fuck dates were like Chinese food—you’re satisfied at the end of the meal but hungry for something substantial four hours later, and I’d better get used to that if I was going to survive in college. I took her advice, and I’d like to think she took some of mine in return. We’d go out for margaritas at Chevys (a chain restaurant that served watered down Mexican food—some education I offered!) and attempt to seduce Valley boys and police officers by flirting in Spanish. Debbie followed my lead, grabbing those thick, sexy Spanish words by the scruffs of their necks and rolling them around in our mouths, gyrating our hips in time with our rolled rs and trilled ts. She in turn educated me—with frequent visits to her mother’s flat, one-story, cul-de-sac house—about how life in suburbia was clean, safe, . . . and super-boring.

  While I was enrolled in Glendale Community College, my mother’s house had become a shrine to dead movie stars. Since being fired from her checker job at Pilgrim’s Supermarket for gaining too much weight, she’d stopped going outside. Mother was now capable of savage blowups followed by startling moments of tenderness, suffering from a kind of selective emotional amnesia, the result of cocktailing speed and Fen Phen to lose weight. Her new routine consisted of scouring magazines in the morning for photos, clipping them out and mounting them in cheap seashell-ridged frames, then spending the rest of the day cleaning the over two hundred framed photos around the house. Movie stars both white and Mexican, from Pedro Infante to Bette Davis, mingled with photos of distant, nameless relatives, sad immigrants with rangy saddlebag faces standing next to each other in corpse suits and neck-to-ankle dresses. You’d think these famous strangers were actual parts of my mother’s life; there were more photos of them than there were of me.

  One afternoon my mother lost her train of thought and stopped cleaning altogether, something I’d never seen her do before. In her hands was a photo of herself standing outside The Option restaurant in Hollywood. My mother had been set on me seeing the place, though I didn’t get what the big deal was. Maybe she dreamt of eating there on many a glamorous Saturday night years ago in a sheer cocktail dress with Jorge Negrete or Cary Grant. When she was able to make a lunch reservation for the both of us, the once exclusive restaurant was a bare carcass of its former self. Its famed wall of caricatures had been removed, and the building was weeks away from being closed and demolished. The service was distracted (our busboy, someone she kept calling for by name, totally ignored us), the interior murky, as if sunlight was being filtered in through fish tanks in the windows, and the “famous” Cobb salads were blistered with mold. My mother said nothing through our lunch, making a few bratty stabs at her meal. She’d brought a camera to photograph the restaurant’s caricature of Rita Hayworth, but the asshole maître d’ asked us to leave. I took her picture by the bus stop instead, snapping the photo midconversation.

  Placing my hands over the photograph, I asked my mother, “What were you saying?”

  “Rita Hayworth,” she said. “She was a Mexican movie star who was discovered at a bus stop. Her skin was so light she could pass for white. How lucky she was.”

  “You’re lucky too, Momma,” I said and caressed her scoured hands.

  She hung the picture back on the wall, undusted. I reached out to clean it and she slapped me. I threw down my towel and didn’t come back home until the police called me to identify my mother’s swollen body, crumpled atop a stack of movie magazines and The Option’s famed caricature of Rita Hayworth. I never found out how she got it. Some things in life you’re just not meant to know, I guess.

  Juan saw the For Sale sign I’d put on the front lawn and left a note in my mailbox inviting me out for coffee. Transferring to UCLA for an English degree had left me $60,000 in debt. Selling the house would be an easy way to pay off my loans. What I needed in the meantime was a temp job nearby.

  It had been six years since Duchess said she was working at the Bank of America on Sunset and Echo Park. I thought there was no chance she’d stay in the same job that long—that kind of commitment seems an eternity when you’re in your twenties—but I spotted her right away. She was wearing a pin-striped jumper dress with sparkler streaks in her hair, sheer stockings, a faux pearl necklace, and espadrilles. Her name tag had glitter and stick-on stars around the word DUCHESS. She was carrying a stack of papers, had gained a lot of weight, and was heavy around the belly the way a new mother is. Her eyes, though, were as fresh as a sunrise, betraying none of the weary sleep lines you’d find in a new mother’s face. “Late-term miscarriages,” or second-trimester abortions, were common around here.

  “Can you help an unemployed college grad out with a job?” I asked, my voice breaking.

  “We’re only hiring summer temps,” she said, acting like we had just spoken earlier in the day. Her eyes watered, but she was not going to give me that satisfaction of her tears, and I was glad for that. “Is that okay?”

  We hugged as if we were made of eggshells, holding with the delicate fierceness of frail abuelitas—pure intent to connect, but not enough strength in our muscles to show it.

  “Le
t me get my purse,” she said. When she returned, her mascara had been reapplied.

  Over burritos at her “regular” lunch spot (the thought of eating at the same place every day sounded like death to me), she covered a long expanse of post–high school time with an incredible economy of words: bank job, community college dropout, abortion, unemployment, bank job. My update was as brief as hers. How was it that we could cover years of day-to-day, second-to-second life—so precious, so fleeting while we were living it, so filled to the brim with the annoyance of everyday occurrences that took up so much space in our heads—in minutes? Perhaps we were both eager to talk about Juan; seeing Duchess stirred up old feelings for both of them. She brought him up first.

  “He misses you,” she said. “You should call him.”

  “He sent me a condolence note. But I couldn’t call. I humiliated him.”

  “Sex helps guys get over humiliation pretty fast.”

  “Do you think you can get me a job at the bank? For a few months?”

  “Maybe. Let me speak to my supervisor. You can apply for her job.”

  “You want me to be your boss?”

  “Sure, why not?” she said. “She’s leaving soon. I’ll be glad to see her go. She’s a real fascist, makes a big deal out of everything. You’d be perfect for her job.”

  “Um . . . thanks?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She laughed. “Need one of these,” she said, brushing her bangs like a tassel from right to left across a nonexistent mortarboard.

  This was the time, I thought. This was the natural pause in our conversation. We’d caught up on each other’s lives and settled our past loves. Now we could talk through our hurt feelings, make amends, maybe set off on the long road back to a different kind of friendship, stronger than before.

  “That’s a cute dress,” I said, and meant it. “I think it’s great.”

  “Thanks, I got it on sale.”

  “You didn’t make it?”

  “Nah, I don’t do that anymore.” Her plastic knife cut through her burrito and sawed into her Styrofoam lunch tray.

  “Why not?”

  “No reason.”

  “You could start up again. Maybe in your free time.”

  She set her knife down and covered it with a napkin. “I just don’t feel that way anymore,” she said.

  We both kind of nodded, cleared our table, and walked back to the bank without saying a word.

  “We should do something,” I said.

  “Yeah, we should,” she said. “And we’ll see each other at work. There’s no rush.”

  “Right,” I said. “Because ‘why chase a bus when another one’s right around the corner?’ You know, what you used to say? Back in high school?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  We hugged good-bye. I’d taken about ten steps when I heard her voice. She was pointing to a Glendale bus on Sunset Boulevard pulling away from the curb.

  “You missed your bus!” she shouted.

  Of course I never went back to the bank. I didn’t have the courage to see Duchess every day, let alone be her boss. I’d rather have worked at McDonald’s, which I did instead for six months, until the house sale closed. The next time I saw Duchess on the street she didn’t mention it. We scheduled another lunch, then canceled. Several more months passed before we saw each other again, friendly waves this time, no conversation. Our days together would keep coming, albeit with greater distances between them, until we reached the point where we both knew how to get in touch with each other but didn’t.

  Selling the house meant I was out of debt, free to go wherever I wanted. I discovered I didn’t want to go anywhere after all, especially once the neighborhood started changing. House prices went up, neighbors cashed out, and there were new bars, new restaurants, fewer cholos. I welcomed these fellow white, affluent (and sometimes openly gay—a shocker for the old-timers) strangers into a land that I’d inhabited for most of my life and that was now a foreign tourist destination. These new shops had so much beautiful, useless . . . stuff—handmade designer handbags; overpriced “folk” art paintings; hand-me-down T-shirts with iron-on decals of cereal boxes, cartoon raccoons smoking joints, and eighties icons like Michael Jackson and Madonna, shirts that my friends growing up had handed down enough times they were being handed back to us at a thousand percent markup. And I loved these stores for this, for their nice . . . things. They made this place feel more like my home.

  I rented an apartment around the corner from Membo’s, where I shared chaste cups of espresso with Juan. He never pushed us into dating (we dated other people), but we remained friends, and it would have stayed that way had not a young chola walked into the Bank of America and gotten into a screaming argument with one of the tellers over an iPod. She was told by the bank manager that if she didn’t leave, the police would be called and she’d be arrested for creating a disturbance. Duchess thought the manager was overreacting and came out from behind the safety partition to mediate the dispute. The chola grabbed a letter opener from the manager’s desk and tried to slice his cheek open. The blade missed and gouged Duchess’s jugular vein. She was killed “instantly,” I was told.

  An event so common before was now a call to immediate action. Police patrols were stepped up, Guardian Angels walked the streets, neighborhood watches popped up overnight. None of that changed how much I hated that word instantly, implying Duchess didn’t suffer any pain. What kind of consolation was that for me? I couldn’t cry my tears instantly, couldn’t heal my heart instantly, couldn’t move on with my life instantly.

  Juan picked me up outside the funeral home where she was cremated. We spread her ashes underneath the jacaranda tree she and I sat under when we were young girls and lived our lives as sisters.

  The next morning, Juan asked me to marry him. I said yes, because I realized some things make more sense after a tragedy. There was enough left from the house sale to buy a small bungalow a few short blocks from the house I was raised in. We married in a simple ceremony at City Hall to the soundtrack of my favorite Gwen Stefani song, “Underneath It All,” two weeks before Juan reported for basic training.

  The phone stops ringing. My Gwen CD finishes then repeats itself back to the first track. Around me on my walls are layers upon layers of Duchess’s drawings that her mother gave to me. I slide the phone off the drawing on the nightstand. A young woman is standing proud in a timelessly stylish red dress with violet blossoms in her hair. This is the drawing Duchess made that day we sat under the jacaranda tree. She wouldn’t let me have it then; here it is now wrinkled and folded over, yet it’s not as I remember it. The face is different. The strong cheekbones, the squat pug nose, the acne scars flecked on the face like buckshot. The face is mine. It wasn’t a drawing of her, like she said. It was a drawing of me.

  Somebody left this drawing for me in a manila envelope outside my front door. On the other side is a letter from my husband, Juan. He is telling me the story of how he knew he’d fallen in love with me, the story I’d never let him finish. It was the moment he first saw me in that hideous Contempo Casual dress. The memory’s as bright as a chemical fire. Any woman who could wear a dress that bad, he said, and look good, was a woman he needed to make his own.

  He is telling me he had that picture of me in his mind—a goofy young girl in a shitty dress—when he fell. He is telling me this is his “last letter”; he has been killed in action.

  Cool kids,

  will you come out to play?

  Cool kids,

  will you come out to play with me?

  It’s almost daylight. The phone’s ringing again. I open my bedroom window to breathe in the warm Los Angeles dawn, and the murderous heat I can tell is coming with it. There’s the sound of the street, the garbage trucks grinding the quiet air, the police helicopters searching for cholos running from their pasts, and if I listen close, above the noise, the heartbeat of a little girl, kicking in my belly, as I dance around the
room to a silly Gwen Stefani song. Her name will be Maria, and she will hate this song when she’s old enough. She will dance to the songs in her own head.

  8

  La Luz y la Tierra

  My first name comes from the last woman evicted from the ground that would become Dodger Stadium. In an effort to lure the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles, the city agreed to construct a new stadium on a large tract of land north of Downtown called Chavez Ravine. Mexicans racially steered from buying houses anywhere else in the city lived here for years in the long shadow cast by the City Hall building, unnoticed and unmolested. Chavez Ravine was immune to time. Dirt trails, along with a paved road or two tossed in like bleached bones, connected backyards where goats and stray dogs roamed free amid houses and shacks with crooked walls, wooden outhouses, and pie-tin roofs that baked your arms and legs throughout the year. Men pushed trolleys and wheelbarrows laden with fresh fruit, ice blocks, and jugs of water from house to house as if Chavez Ravine were still part of old Mexico and not “modern”-era Los Angeles. The land’s serrated mesas and loping glens nestled its residents in a sense of forgottenness, which was fine with them.

  The notorious Herald Examiner (founded by the anti-Mexican racist William Randolph Hearst) branded Chavez Ravine “a shanty-town” where “descendants of blood-lusting Aztecs squatted in piecemeal huts, drawn to these undeveloped dirt mounds the way flies are to horse dung.” Despite the hard, brown earth that stretched for miles up and out of the valley, this was fertile ground. Mexicans were born here, among the smoky bouquets of the toyon shrub, made love on hills of elderberry, honeysuckle, and fistfuls of lilac fiesta flowers, married each other by a ring of deodar cedars, grew old walking the long, open fields of sage scrub and giant wild rye, and died in ancient forests of pine and eucalyptus. Trees older than the Chandlers and the Spaniards, whose last names christened streets and parks throughout Los Angeles, dotted this land, which if you believed the old folk (and who ever believes the old folk?), was a crater made by God’s hands, a special piece of land scooped out for the Mexicans to stay Mexican, to remember who they were before they became Americans, when Mexico ceded California at the end of the Mexican-American War.