The Madonnas of Echo Park (23 page)

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.

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.

M
y 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.

But God's hands couldn't stop the bulldozers. Families were first told their homes were being torn down to build them brand-new public housing—townhomes with running water, washing machines, lush green lawns and playgrounds, shopping centers, and a “super” market where you could buy Swanson TV dinners and bring them home to cook them in state-of-the-art “Dyna-Warm” ovens, one in every new apartment. Then men in large machines came flying crisp white banners, conquistadors in hard hats bearing royal standards emblazoned with baseballs soaring over a large red treasure map X. The speed with which dozens of houses and trees with deep, ancient roots were pulped into smooth asphalt was extraordinary, something you'd see a child do in a sandbox, wiping a self-contained world clean with the brisk sweep of his hands (not God's this time).

It took more than God's hands to move Aurora Salazar. Four pairs of hands, to be exact, carried Aurora by her wrists and ankles out of her house in front of news reporters and photographers, down a flight of stairs, and onto a swatch of cracked desert floor. Four Mexican officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department with badges
and guns to restrain an unarmed, barefoot woman, clad in a sleeveless white blouse and pants with large appliqué butterflies fluttering up and down her legs, from ever entering her own home again. Four men to contain one woman's fury.

Here my mother, Felicia, smiles (she is telling me this story,
again
—thank God she's not showing me the newspaper clippings) and looks somewhere across a field of flaking lime green sunflowers painted on her kitchen walls, whistling low as if to say,
“Ay, that
was a woman.” She holds out her hands as she speaks and sculpts the land Aurora walked—and was dragged across—with fierce, swift strokes. Mother believes it was the land, those hills, that made Aurora so passionate, those rich, brown, curvaceous mounds and valleys that she'd tell me, stroking her hips, resembled her own body in her youth.

I didn't know those hills; I didn't know that woman. What I knew were tunneled-out highways that unfurled like streamers tossed off a balcony from atop Dodger Stadium and endless days of riding my bicycle through its saucer-tiered parking lots, flat and featureless, my mother said, like that light-skinned, hair-dyed
telenovela güerita
my father left us for. That was when my mother took back her last name, Esperanza, which means “hope.”

Put these two names together. You get me.

My mother owns a house in Echo Park, a neighborhood beneath Dodger Stadium whose boundaries sit on a map of Los Angeles like a busty teenage girl with scoliosis and a hooked nose. Echo Park was once a secluded enclave for Hollywood's silent-film-era movie stars. (Charlie Chaplin lived in a large Victorian mansion that overlooked Echo Park Lake; Tom Mix built the first movie studio in Los Angeles where a public storage facility and a Jack in the Box now sit.) The whites moved away after one war; Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees from another war took their place. Then an influx of young white Westsiders who knew nothing of war trickled in
looking for cheap property. By the time I turned thirty and returned to Los Angeles after a failed engagement to a white college grad named Gerald, and a series of uninspiring rent- and food-paying jobs, they'd realigned Echo Park's nose and straightened her posture with coffee shops, “funky” boutiques that sold
just
purses or
just
cell phone holsters, cafés with outdoor seating and Internet access, and bars that were written up in lifestyle magazines and served imported beer on tap. I was thrilled at first when they ushered those dilapidated
tiendas, lavanderías,
and
taquerías
out of the neighborhood. Without my mother to barter for things we needed with her currency of shared history, overzealous laughter, and hot
chisme,
I was shortchanged and ignored. Now that these
gringo
hipster stores are everywhere, I'm not sure this
is
my old neighborhood anymore. I drive in, visit my mother, then drive out. I haven't explored around here for years for a reason; Echo Park has a hard time letting you go.

My mother watched with guarded cynicism the real estate boom that brought the whites to our front door. For over thirty years she's worked as a cleaning lady, many of those years for white B-list movie stars and studio executives in the Hollywood Hills. When I was younger, I'd beg to go on her cleaning trips, but she'd never let me. You're cleaning their filth while they devour your health, she'd say, and send me back to my schoolbooks.

When I got older and discovered tabloids and
Entertainment Tonight
on television, I'd ask her for secrets, little black books with addresses and phone numbers of other movie stars (with the way these stars dated, I thought they enjoyed
only
each other's company—one big, happy, rich, and famous family), descriptions of drug caches, sex tapes, something we could profit from. She thought this way of thinking was crass, something that was endemic among people my age. When she arrived to clean in the mornings, she said, anything exciting that had been happening had happened and moved on. And if anything
did
happen, she's liable to tell a complete stranger more about it than her own daughter.

My mother's house is halfway up a block of prewar residences, most of which have changed owners in the past few years. Perched atop a tilting hill like an old cat that can do nothing but sleep all day in a sunny window ledge, it was built in the 1920s and has survived five major earthquakes. Out front, a large jacaranda tree with cracked bark spreads its heavy blossoms across the jagged, pitched staircase that leads to the security gates that protect the doorway and the front windows, relics from when the neighborhood used to be rough. For years I tried to convince my mother to move away because it was dangerous. Now I try to convince her to move away to cash in on the gentrification march. Either way, she won't budge.