by Don Lee
But then he replied. “So sorry for the long delay! The campus mail people here are not exactly paragons of efficiency. Of course I remember you!”
She was thrilled. It was a three-page letter, typed single-spaced on a computer. He rendered his postmortem on the election: “Unfortunate, yes, but I think the nagging effects of the earthquake had a lot to do with it. Still fifteen hundred people homeless, most from District 1, where Cruz Gomez lost to Milladin in a squeaker. I am not discouraged, however. The people will prevail!”
They exchanged more letters over the winter and spring. He told her about his desire to become a human rights activist after graduation, working for Amnesty International or UNESCO or WHO. She told him about her acceptance—accompanied with a scholarship offer—to the Corcoran School, and he said, “You are going to change the world with that Nikon of yours. And break a few hearts along the way. You’ll be gentle with Étienne’s heart, won’t you?”
She wanted to see him. She was willing to drive up to Berkeley, yet he said, “I’d love it, absolutely love it, but I am so unbelievably busy these days.”
She became frustrated with his evasiveness. He would send her long, impassioned, flirty letters, even call once in a while, but then would go AWOL for weeks. To make extra money, she had been planning to clean rooms at the B&B in town during the summer, but she learned that the San Francisco Chronicle offered thirteen-week paid internships and put in an application. Her chances weren’t good for such a prestigious program. Usually they only took college upperclassmen. She was selected. “Isn’t that wonderful news?” she said in her letter to Étienne. “I’m going to be a photo intern in editorial! We’ll be right across the Bay from each other!”
She waited, and he didn’t answer. She was ready to give up, but then she received a letter from him in early June. “I had a crazy semester! On top of exams, for a month I was in, of all places, Watsonville again. You know after the census was released April 1, they had to redistrict, and I finagled my way into working with Joaquin Avila on redrawing the maps. Anyway, I was going through the whole OCI cycle and was all set on being in New York this summer for my 1L internship, but you know what? I decided to go back to Watsonville and work at a tiny, tiny poverty law center called Central Coast Legal Aid. The city’s still a debacle. They need all the help they can get. I’ve been here a couple of weeks already. So, sorry I’ll miss you in the Bay Area this summer, agh, ships in the night, but I’ll be in Watsonville for the duration. Come for a visit sometime?”
Jeanette contacted the Chronicle and withdrew from the internship program.
“What are you doing?” her mother asked her. “It’s not just because of that boy, is it?”
She would not be deterred. The following week, the day after her graduation ceremony, she drove to Watsonville.
It was appalling, really, the state of the city. Buildings had been razed, but they hadn’t been rebuilt, left as empty lots surrounded by cyclone fences. Many neighborhoods still felt like war zones, houses sagging on their foundations, windows boarded up with plywood, weeds proliferating. Highway 1 over Struve Slough was still closed. The tent cities were gone, but there were still hundreds of people living in temporary shelters and FEMA trailers.
Central Coast Legal Aid was in a strip mall on the outskirts of downtown, beside a discount clothing store. The office was just one open room, outfitted with rickety desks and chairs and yellowing posters on the walls. It was filled with waiting clients, weary-looking but silent, many with children on their laps. Étienne was at a desk in the back, interviewing two men. When he saw Jeanette, he seemed not to recognize her at first, but then he smiled broadly, rose, and ambled over to her in his cocky, marionette saunter. “She comes in through that door, and there’s sunshine in the rain,” he said, handsome and irresistible as ever.
When he could break for lunch, they went across the street to a diner that served all-day breakfast. He ordered coffee and the linguica-and-eggs special. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You just come down for the day?”
“I’m thinking of staying the entire summer,” Jeanette said. “I want to volunteer. I want to help.”
“You have something set up? An internship or a job?”
She didn’t. For the past week, she had been making phone calls, but she had found nothing available thus far.
“Is there anything at Central Coast?” she asked him.
“Did you see the place? No, afraid not.”
“I might have better luck finding something now that I’m here.”
“Well, where you staying?” Étienne asked. “You have a place to stay tonight?”
She didn’t.
“My roommate’s away this weekend,” he said. “You could stay with me.”
They didn’t leave his bed for the next three nights. They fucked, talked, and fucked some more. He confessed that he had been miserably lonely since arriving in Watsonville. “I’m really glad you’re here,” he told Jeanette.
Central Coast Legal Aid was staffed by two attorneys, an office manager, a couple of roving high school girls who sat in as receptionists, and two 1L interns—the other, Mikhail, was Étienne’s roommate in the studio apartment that had been arranged by the clinic. They offered free legal advice and referrals to low-income clients, and also delved into community education and advocacy. The most pressing issue right now, though, was trying to get federal and state assistance for victims of the earthquake. Many of their clients had been sharing houses and apartments or living illegally in makeshift rentals such as converted garages and toolsheds. They couldn’t produce lease agreements or canceled checks proving their residential status for a period longer than thirty days, and thus had been rejected by the Red Cross and FEMA for aid of any kind. The clinic had been filing appeals on their behalf. In the meantime, they were trying to secure temporary housing for them. Sometimes they had to resort to giving them motel vouchers.
Jeanette ended up staying in a motel herself for nearly a week when Étienne’s roommate returned. She applied for every job opening in town. There weren’t many. She settled for a part-time housekeeping job at the Days Inn off Highway 1 (where some of Étienne’s clients had been placed), and lived in a boardinghouse for women, six of them in three bunk beds per room. Her things kept getting stolen. She found out that the manager took in girls who were on the waiting list for the halfway house down the street as they transitioned from treatment centers or prisons or institutions. Jeanette learned to keep her cash and valuables—especially her camera equipment—with her at all times, taking her backpack with her even when she went to pee.
It should have been depressing, her situation that summer, but it wasn’t at all. She was, in fact, enthralled. She was in love. She saw Étienne every moment they had free. They took walks through the city, sat on plaza benches and bleachers of soccer fields, and talked. They ate at La Perla del Pacifico and a superb restaurant called, plainly, Taco Burrito, and watched movies at the Starlight Drive-In and the Pajaro Showplace. They slipped into bars, where classic love songs were on the jukebox, ballads like “La Nave del Olvido” and “El Reloj,” and they would slow-dance, pressing against each other, Étienne whispering lyrics into her ear.
They embarked on long, aimless drives on weekends. Étienne had a red Alfa Romeo Spider convertible, and he loved gunning it down the highway with the top down. It had a five-speed and a burl-wood interior, a three-spoke steering wheel, and gray Italian leather seats with red stitching. Sheepishly, he admitted to Jeanette that he had bought the Spider because he had seen it in the movie The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman zipping up and down the California coast in the car, chasing Katharine Ross. The film was also where he got the idea to attend Berkeley.
They couldn’t go to the boardinghouse or his apartment unless Mikhail, his roommate, was away, so they had sex in his car or hers, on a blanket on the beach, in the woods—which for Jeanette made it all the more romantic and erotic.
“I thought you were too
young for me,” Étienne told her. “That’s why I was dodging you last semester, not writing back. But there’s something right about this, isn’t there? Right about us. I’m really becoming fond of you, Jeanette.”
During the day, while he was at Central Coast Legal Aid, Jeanette cleaned rooms at the Days Inn, two shifts a week, but the work was easy. The families staying there, even with so much of their property stacked in the rooms, were scrupulously neat and unfailingly polite. They always wanted to help her with the cleaning.
The rest of the week, she roamed around town, shooting photos. She had first become interested in photography in junior high—just a hobby then, something to do. Joe had a secondhand Nikon F2A that he never used anymore, and she began taking random shots with it of landscapes, horizons, buildings, and sidewalks. Eventually, though, she became more interested in people’s faces, capturing their expressions and gestures and emotions, as she saw in photography books in the school library—portraits by Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and especially Dorothea Lange, many of whose documentary studies of farmworkers were taken in California.
There were three lenses for the Nikon—35, 50, and 125 mm—and, except with her family, she mostly used the telephoto from a distance, shy about getting too near strangers. Once she switched to the shorter wide-angle lens, however, everything changed. She moved in closer to people and framed her shots level to or below her subjects, and suddenly her photographs had more dimensionality. Swapping Kodachrome for Tri-X black-and-white added further depth to her work. When she had her film developed, she was frequently startled by the photographs, by their intimacy. She didn’t know exactly what she was doing at the time, but it was intoxicating.
The local paper in Watsonville, the Register-Pajaronian, didn’t have an internship program, but the staff photogra pher, Sonny Guzman, agreed to let Jeanette tag along with him on assignment a few times. He was an old pro, fast and efficient. He didn’t believe in flashes or reflectors or strobes, even at night. Photography was all about light, he said. Natural light, interesting light. “Be constantly aware how light is hitting things,” Sonny told Jeanette. “Look at the light during different parts of the day, in different situations. Then you’ll always know the right exposure. Shoot with a high ISO. Don’t worry about the grain. Grain is beautiful, man.”
She listened to him. She paid more attention to the light, and her compositions got stronger, her portraits more alive.
What really energized Jeanette, though, was the cause Étienne found for them. In May, Green Giant had announced that at year’s end they would be laying off 370 of the 520 workers in the frozen-food plant on West Beach Street. The cutters and packers, who processed broccoli and cauliflower, were mostly women, and they had averaged fourteen years at the company. Some of their jobs would be going to Wellston, Ohio, most to Irapuato, Mexico.
Green Giant—which was owned by Grand Metropolitan, a British conglomerate—said they would do everything they could to ease the impact of the job losses on their workers. They were going to offer severance packages between three and four thousand dollars apiece, and they would contribute half a million dollars to a retraining program. The goal was to place eighty percent of the laid-off workers in new careers as auto mechanics, clerks, and technicians.
This was all well and good, yet it was, according to Étienne, merely a public relations gesture. The Green Giant plant had not been losing money. The layoffs were just a way for them to make more money and try to overtake Birds Eye’s position as the industry leader.
“It’s avarice, pure greed,” Étienne said to Jeanette.
He was puzzled that Teamsters Union Local 912, which represented the workers, wasn’t making more of a fuss about the layoffs. He and Jeanette attended a meeting, and Étienne asked Bobby Munoz, Local 912’s president, why they hadn’t been holding protests.
“There’s not a whole lot that can be done,” Munoz told him. “It’s hard to fight a transnational conglomerate half a world away. At least we were able to negotiate the severances and retraining.”
“Is eighty percent placement realistic?” Étienne asked.
“They’re hardworking, skilled employees,” Munoz said. “Places like NorCal/Crosetti and Shaw’s are looking for workers like that.”
Those were other frozen-food companies, which had few openings. The current unemployment rate in Watsonville was thirteen percent.
“Shouldn’t you take a stand against Grand Met?” Étienne said.
“It’s too late,” Munoz said. “They’re not going to change their minds.”
“Maybe not,” Étienne said, “but even a symbolic protest is better than nothing. What about the next plant, the next conglomerate, the next time someone’s deciding whether to move their operations? You want to make it easy for them?”
A woman behind them said, “Cuando nos dan una cachetada, por lo menos tenemos derecho a gritar.”
Jeanette’s Spanish was rudimentary—tourist Spanish. “What’d she say?” she asked Étienne.
The woman translated for herself. “When we get slapped across the face,” she said, “at least we have the right to cry out.”
“Now we’re talking,” Étienne said.
Her name was Yolanda Aguilar. She and her husband, Lauro, had been packers at Green Giant for nearly twenty years.
Yolanda recruited her husband and several women from the plant to form El Comité de Trabajadores Desplazados, the Committee of Displaced Workers. For their first initiative, they put together a flyer detailing what was behind the exporting of their jobs to Mexico, the deplorable conditions in Irapuato. “People in this town need to know it’s purely about profit,” Étienne said.
They handed out the flyers downtown, posted them on bulletin boards in stores, tucked them into mailboxes. Jeanette documented everything with her Nikon. Sonny Guzman allowed her to develop the film in the Register-Pajaronian’s darkroom, and when he examined her contact sheets with his magnifier loupe, he said, “Not bad, not bad. What’d you say this committee’s about?”
He talked to a reporter and the managing editor in the newsroom. They decided to interview Yolanda about El Comité, and ended up featuring one of Jeanette’s photos with the story. After the article appeared, Bobby Munoz and the officers in Local 912 became more supportive, and other Green Giant workers joined El Comité.
“You’re changing the world already, babe,” Étienne said to Jeanette. “Keep going.”
He had his hands full at Central Coast Legal, often working nights at the clinic, and gradually had to curtail the number of hours he could devote to El Comité. Their contributions were largely up to Jeanette now.
Throughout July, she was fully and happily occupied, yet all along, she was thinking about the end of the summer. August was fast approaching. Étienne would be going back to Boalt, and she would have to leave for freshman orientation at the Corcoran. Already she grieved that they would be separated on opposite coasts. She couldn’t stand the idea of being so far apart from him. She couldn’t imagine being more in love with someone.
One night, they were eating dinner at Taco Burrito, and she said to him, “You never talk about the future.”
“I talk about the future endlessly,” Étienne said. “Even I’m tired of hearing me talk about my future.”
“No, I mean our future.”
“Oh.”
“What’s going to happen to us when I go to D.C.?”
He took a bite of his mole enchiladas. “Well,” he said, “we’ll write, we’ll call. We’ll see each other Christmas break. Or maybe—hey, this is a crazy idea, but maybe we could meet up in New York for Thanksgiving. Wouldn’t that be wild?”
“I’m going to miss you so much. I’m going to die.”
“Things will work out,” Étienne said. “We’ll make it work somehow. Trust me. We love each other, don’t we?”
El Comité arrived at a course of action. They would hold five solid days of protests in Watsonville in August. Besides Green Giant,
Grand Metropolitan owned Burger King, Häagen-Dazs, Smirnoff, J&B Scotch, and a slew of other brands. They’d list them on leaflets and picket Albertson’s, Nob Hill Foods, Liquor Barn, and other stores, asking customers not to buy the products. They’d demonstrate in front of the two Burger Kings in town. On the final day of the protests, they’d carry a black coffin with a wreath of broccoli and cauliflower and lead a Jolly Green Giant, plastered with fake twenty-dollar bills, from Callaghan Park, along Ford and Walker, to the plant on West Beach Street. Then they’d return on Main Street to the park and hold speeches, songs, and skits. If the boycott campaign turned out to be successful in Watsonville, it might gain traction elsewhere in the country.
Two weeks before the scheduled protests, Jeanette missed her period. She waited another week, then took a home pregnancy test, then went to a clinic for a blood test.
She asked Étienne to meet her around the corner from Central Coast Legal Aid and told him the results.
“Really?” he said. “But you use a diaphragm.”
“That night we drove out to Elkhorn Slough, we didn’t have it with us.”
“Oh.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Jeanette asked.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think we have much of a choice here, sweetheart.”
“You want me to get an abortion?”
“What else can we do?”
“We could get married,” Jeanette said.
He laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked, and began to cry.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry,” he said. He hugged her. “It’s just that we’ve got our entire lives ahead of us. You especially. You’re eighteen. You haven’t even started college yet. It’d be harebrained for us to get married and have a baby right now. If we end up wanting to do that someday, okay, but this isn’t the time. Don’t you see?”
She knew he was right, but she was hurt by his quick dismissal, his laughter. She made an appointment at Clínica Paloma, a Planned Parenthood branch on Penny Lane, yet didn’t end up going. Arguing with Patsy about abortion once, Jeanette had said that a fetus was no more alive than a frog. She questioned that now. Her breasts tingled. She felt nauseous. She was constipated and plagued by reflux. She realized it was probably too early to have these symptoms, that she might be inventing them, but she felt her body metamorphosing, preparing itself to grow and nurture this child. She wondered if she waited, Étienne might change his mind.