The Madonnas of Echo Park (10 page)

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? Did 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.

Cleaning lady? A hell of a term. There's nothing ladylike about it. To be a good cleaning lady, you must learn to act like a man.

On my last cleaning day, I arrived to find a note from Mrs. Calhoun on the dining room table. I couldn't read it because blinds had been installed on the sliding glass doors and the house was coated in blackness. Opening the blinds for sunlight, I squinted to read the faint handwriting.

“Take the day off,” it said. “You deserve it.”

On the opposite side, “For Felicia,” and a list of her personal items, including the corduroy couch. Confused, I wanted to ask Mrs. Calhoun to explain, but the house was quiet, save for what sounded like rain pelting the sliding glass doors,
drop drop drop
. Through the blinds, I saw the jacaranda tree raining crisp, dazzling violet blossoms from its branches atop a floating body in a lavender bathrobe, its legs together, its arms outstretched as if reaching for something.

I plunged into the cold water, wading through the thick swamp of jacaranda until I reached Mrs. Calhoun's feet. The flowers pounded our bodies,
drop drop drop,
with a sudden violence that blanketed us. Mrs. Calhoun's bathrobe was heavy and her body rigid. My head bobbed for air as I struggled to stay afloat; I was drowning. All around me was the loud roar of water, a sound that still wakes me up in the middle of the night, screaming. I could not carry us both back to the rim of the pool. When I surrendered her body, it floated out to the center of the pool and slid under the thick carpet of fallen flowers.

Beneath a raining jacaranda tree, the blossoms shuddered and fell.

I
sn't a miracle something we see every day but ignore? Then I, too, am a miracle, but I want to be seen, and be heard. The telling is the most dangerous part of my story. And though we've just met, I can tell you have time to listen. I can tell we are going to be friends.

Evil is everywhere. The Devil is looking for lost angels; on the streets you wander, in your neighbors' hearts, which you peek into when gossip chirps in your ears, even under the bed you lie on. Do you know about the Devil's Toe? If you feet dangle over the bottom edge of the mattress, the Devil reaches up from Hell, touches your big toe, and controls what direction you walk in when you wake, steering you into bad luck, pain, misery, and death. I was nine when I overheard my mother scold my father Ruben's younger brother, Archie, for falling asleep in a bed too small for his body.

God sees where the Devil leads you, she said, and nodded at the room where my two sisters and I slept.

Mother could pretend unpleasant events weren't happening, but
she would store away memories of them from which some future argument could be heated up and served without any advance notice necessary—call them emotional leftovers. Archie laughed and told her as long as we lived in his house she had better things to do than to worry over his soul. Had Ruben heard this, he'd have beaten Archie's soul right out of him.

Archie was a sniveling cur, but Ruben strutted like a man who crosses the street against the light, a defiant sneer in his canter, daring a car to strike him. You feared more for the chrome on those wide bumpers than for his legs. In the Zoot Suit Riots of '43, he tackled five sailors armed with baseball bats who were beating a poor spade they'd stripped of his drapes. Ruben fought them off as if that colored man was one of his own. My father believed in fairness for everyone. Well, except for women; he left my mother for a whore fresh off the
coyotes'
teats, a fifteen-year-old girl from Nayarit named Blanca. She bore him a bastard son, Jesús, who trains pit bulls for dogfighting in a brush-strewn lot somewhere around here.
En el Viejo Echo Park,
he could live across the street or cross my daily path and I'd never know who he was.

With Ruben gone, Archie's Devil's Toe stumbled him into my sisters' tiny beds, his thick, jaundice-yellow toenails, curved like horseshoes, poking out from under the delicate handmade quilts our
abuelita
made when Mother was pregnant. She listened to my mother's belly in a twilit den to see whether a boy or girl was coming, then sewed a quilt she felt best suited what that baby's personality would be. My eldest sister, Aracely, had roses dipped in a pool of fire on hers, Patricia a pink ribbon swirled in a bow around a cloud. Mine was a pale black wolf howling at a turquoise sunset, made for the son who didn't come. I cringed under that bedspread at night, chewing the top of it until it was damp, terrified the Devil that possessed my uncle's toes, along with every body part below his waist, would steer him into my bed next. My grandmother would come to the
side of my bed wearing her favorite turquoise handmade puebla dress embroidered with pink lotus flowers and try to rub away the chilled goose bumps on my arms.

“Who haunted you,
nieta
?” she'd say.

“Abuelita,
why didn't you make me a new
manta
when you saw I was a girl?”

“Thirty-seven years I've been listening to women's bellies. Thirty-seven years I've never been wrong. I thought you were a boy but you came out a girl. That means you have the soul of a man somewhere inside you. You're a fighter, you're my baby
lobo,
” she'd say. “You're strong,
fuerte,
a wolf.”

“I don't want to be a wolf,” I'd pout.

“The wolf is the strongest of all animals. Nobody can hurt him except himself. Do you know what happens when a wolf gets caught in a fence?”

“No,” I'd lie. Her wrinkles would crease into smiles, and I would hear her tell my favorite story once more.

“If he goes under, he loses his back paws and will have to drag himself everywhere he goes, lame and of no use to anyone. If he goes back, he loses his front paws and his courage to try to return. If he doesn't move, he will die from thirst and starvation. There is no easy way forward, no easy way back, and no easy way to sit still.”

“What does he do,
Abuelita
?”

“Why, he stands up. He stands up and walks around the fence.”

“Wolves can't stand up!”

“Si no lo crees, m'hija,”
she'd say,
“no lo puedes hacer.”
If you don't believe it, you can't do it.

Then my night with Archie came. This would be a fight between good and evil, between God's ears and the Devil's Toes. My sisters had fought with tears and cries out to God to stop. Did they not stand up tall enough for God to hear them? Perhaps a woman asking God for help needed a stronger voice. But how could I stand up lying on my back?

If I learned anything from my grandma's story, it was that pain brings clarity. I closed my eyes, loosened my grip across the top of my blanket, and let him slide into bed next to me, his toenails scratching the tops of my feet as my uncle's hardness crept up my thighs and brushed against the mousetrap I'd set under my legs.

His castrato shrieking was fit for the choir at St. Vibiana's Cathedral. His Devil's Toes hopped him out the front door and into the street. This was the confirmation I needed that God hears the screams of a man better than those of a woman. From that day, God kept my uncle out of our beds, but he also stripped us of a place to live. Archie threw us out of the house. My mother and sisters blamed me, and I was sent to a convent, where I tried to fend off the
monjas'
beatings and bed hoppings with my prayers and my fists. Prayers were weaker than mousetraps; my fists got God's attention.