The Madonnas of Echo Park (24 page)

I come here each month to help my mother, who lives alone, clean her house. I knock on the security gate because I don't have my own set of keys. Through the open front door I hear a transistor radio playing loud
ranchera
music in the kitchen over the sound of church bells up in the hills tolling the start of Sunday service.

“You're just in time to help,” my mother says from the kitchen, something she tells me no matter what time I show up. “The gate's open. Lock it behind you so I can let Blackjack out. The towels are next to the storage room.”

The storage room used to be my old bedroom, though my mother hasn't called it my bedroom since the day I left for college. I set my purse—a large, unfashionable taupe sack with worn straps—down in the living room on a ratty couch with reversible pleather/corduroy cushions that one of her bosses handed down to her years ago and start to clean.

The sticky-sweet smell of fresh varnish and lemon ammonia is overpowering. I unlatch a series of French-door-style windows that open onto the front porch to breathe in the smoggy air outdoors. It's early, and the sky's coated with a wispy molasses glaze. Strong puffs of wind swirl dust devils around my feet. Cleaning the mantel above the fake fireplace, I find a row of family pictures of me, my mother, and bits and pieces of my father, Hector. She cut and excised most of him away in
these photos, leaving behind a stray hand on my cradle or a phantom arm caught midwave. In Hector's place are portraits and magazine clippings of Morrissey, an English rock star from the eighties.

That jagged space where my father used to be never looked right. When I was in high school, I overlaid Morrissey's image from glossy magazines into shots where my mother was holding on to a headless neck or kissing a crisp rip in front of a tree that had been sliced in half. I pasted in Morrissey's picture because he was the kind of man who would never leave my mother, or abandon a child. His songs contain stories of endless devotion and his incapability of being loved by anyone. Why not give him, then, to someone who no longer had anyone to give her love to? Judging from these photos, Morrissey was a better father than my own was.

If second-generation Mexicans could canonize a living saint in Los Angeles, it'd be Morrissey. Like most of the Mexican girls and gay boys I knew, I went through a vicious, life-consuming Morrissey phase in high school, one that for a period of time made me hate the queen of England and Margaret Thatcher more than I hated the Los Angeles Police Department. White girls who could tell what kind of music I listened to by the way I dressed would come up to me and say, “You like Morrissey, too? Why? He's not Mexican.” I'd say, Then why do you love Prince? Or hip-hop? I never understood why when a white person likes a musician who's not white, they're cool, but if a person who isn't white likes a musician who is, they're a freak or, worse, a sellout.

I couldn't explain to you why Morrissey meant so much to me, or still means so much to me that one of my life's ambitions remains seeing him in person. Not at a concert but in an actual Los Angeles
place
—eating dinner at Astro's Coffee Shop or shopping for organic tofu at Trader Joe's. While it sounds far-fetched, he does live in L.A., somewhere in Beverly Hills I've read, driving himself around in a silver mist Porsche that has on occasion been spotted on my side of town. It's a fanciful yet unrealistic possibility; I've calculated the odds
and thought about ways to improve my chances of an “accidental” encounter, but I place no faith in an actual meeting. Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular, and I will be the first to point out the irony of a woman whose last name means “hope” placing no stock in faith. Hope is my mother's name, and faith my mother's cause, not mine.

Not that she's given up on converting me. Her idea of faith has nothing to do with God, at least not anymore. She was a religious young woman who could quote Bible passages, but with the passing of her years and the aging of her muscles, she's come to equate faith with hard work and hard work with having a successful, happy life. Forget faith is a word, she'd say. Pretend it's a color. What color is your faith,
m'hija
? Faith has colors, she says; otherwise those stained-glass windows in cathedrals would be as see-through as a horny man's promises. Was my faith a red-hot incandescence, fizzy as neon light that burned as bright but half as long? Or was it an ice cool ocean sunset blue, determined, immovable, but indifferent to compassion or suffering? I told her I couldn't see what she was talking about, so I guess my faith has no color. It's see-through, like glass.

What else can I tell you about Morrissey? He was born in Davyhulme, England, but raised in Hulme, Manchester, is a strict vegan who fires any of his roadies if they eat meat, and sings his “love never lost 'cause it was never found” lyrics as if his words were speeding along a treacherous mountain pass, curving and undulating his syllables into trills and yodels until they sound almost Spanish. When the albums I listened to came from England, and Manchester meant more to me than East Los Angeles, the images his words conjured up in my head were, and are, Californian. His dreary, wet Manchester sky above pelted my red-tiled and tar paper L.A. rooftops below, falling on a girl with a jet-black, slicked-back bob haircut, black eyeliner, pushup bra, denim jean shorts, fishnet tights, and ass-kicking Doc Martens. You can't help who, or what, you love.

There's a small, wet chill on my knee. Blackjack nuzzles this spot again with his nose, and I reach down to rub him behind his ears, careful not to leave my hand too close to his mouth. He looks appreciative and happy, but he is also my mother's dog, which means that he can be feisty and cruel, snapping at you when you are at your most comfortable and relaxed. This may be due to his breed, a border collie mix, born with the impulse to chase, bite, and corral sheep. A better explanation is my mother walking him on an irregular timetable that can span several weeks, leaving a four-year-old dog with an enormous amount of pent-up energy that has nowhere to go. Whenever she walks him, he rockets out the front door, strains at his leash, pulls my mother down the sidewalk, lunges at other dogs, bounds into the street at passing cars, and nips at kids who try to pet him because they find his distinctive Oreo-and-cream markings irresistible. This leads to fewer walks, which leads to more bad behavior. I offer to walk Blackjack whenever I stop by, but my mother says the dog and I don't understand each other, which some days feels truer than others.

I rub his neck and walk him back into the kitchen, where my mother is cleaning the floor. Her hunched back bobs and weaves like a boxer, her arms gliding a square-head mop in taut N-shaped strokes across the floor before dipping the worn head in a yellow pail of soapy black water. She motions with a quick wave for me to lead the dog to the opposite side of the kitchen, where a knee-high white plastic doggy fence is installed in the doorway to the laundry room. Blackjack walks across the wet floor and, catching the scent on his paws, stops moving. I nudge him by his collar and then give him a few taps on his backside. He won't budge.

“Lead him,” she says. “Don't let him lead you.”

“You can't see what I'm doing,” I say, realizing that's a feeble comeback. My mother is the world's leading expert on knowing what I'm doing at any moment without being able to see me. “The dog does what he wants.”

“He's never going to follow you if he doesn't believe you know
where you're going,” she says, dipping the mop head in the bucket.

“I don't need him to follow me,” I say, pulling at his collar. Blackjack whimpers while I try to slide him across a floor my mother will have to wax again. “He's your dog. He should do what
you
want him to do.”

“You're my daughter,” she says. “Do you do what
I
want you to do?”

“I don't know,” I say. “You never told me what that was.”

My mother stands the mop handle next to the refrigerator and walks over to the doggy gate. She motions with a firm gesture that says “come,” and a jab of her right hand. Blackjack trots over in an obedient path, his paws not leaving a single track on the waxed floor, and hops the fence onto his bed in one fluid movement. Mother picks up the mop and cleans over the streaked areas I'd dragged him across.

“I'm finished in the living room,” I say.

“Kitchen's done,” she says, cocking the mop handle in a corner. “Rest of the house, too.”

“You cleaned the house by yourself?” I ask.

“Yeah, wouldn't be the first time. And I couldn't sleep again. I had the nightmares.”

“You could talk to someone about them.”

“Why? I talk about it to the dog, and he says, get up and feed me, or get up and walk me. I feed him, walk him, and I'm fine.”

“Not sleeping's unhealthy. You'd have to have been up since five to clean everything.”

“Four-thirty,” she says. My mother doesn't enjoy when I get things right, even if it's by accident. If five is the exact time she woke up (and I think it is), she'd still have said “four-thirty.”

“I don't mind rising early. I get the moon all to myself,” she says. Picking up the water bucket, she empties it out in the kitchen sink, the sludgy water trickling down a rusty drain.

“So everything's done,” I say, trying not to conceal my excitement.

“Yeah, everything's finished,” she says, and my day opens before me like a blossoming African flower or a clear stretch of Highway 1: beautiful, precious, uncomplicated, a million miles away from here. And in this early morning moment of utter simplicity, with no blame or regret exchanged between us, through a window over my mother's shoulder I see a pure, aurulent glow, a light that fills me with such a sense of peace, love, and acceptance that I could forswear sex, alcohol, and music if I had the slightest faith this feeling would return. But how could it? This was a moment that bends like palm trees in a strong Santa Ana, an elastic piece of time that, without warning, breaks and snaps back out the window, leaving me again in my mother's old kitchen, her words piercing the soft yellow glow.

“Blackjack needs a walk,” she says.

“Mom, the dog doesn't like me.”

“Mi luz,”
my mother says, granting me this term of endearment half the time when she wants something, then taking it back the other half, when I disappoint her, “I've been up since before dawn. My feet are blistered. It's so hard for me to get down the stairs. One quick walk around the block and you're done.”

“The blocks are long here,” I say. “That could take half an hour.”

“You don't have half an hour for your mother?”

“For you, yes. That dog, no way. He doesn't stay when I tell him to stay. If he slipped out of his leash, he could run into traffic and be killed. Or get me killed. It's embarrassing,” I drawl, my subdued Mexican accent lapping on my tongue, those last two syllables,
ass
and
ing,
hanging in the air like lazy curlicues of marijuana smoke.

Mother catches it. “You talking like you
live
here,” she says, tugging on her own words like stale toffee. Once, this would have been an admonishment for turning my back on
mi barrio, mi casita.
But this 'hood, where my mother's derived her credibility for toughness and hard living, has become too expensive for me to buy a home in. You can walk by apartment buildings in Echo Park now and actually
hear
through the open windows the sound of forks and spoons scraping leftovers from china plates and bowls into plastic-bag-lined trash cans. The dogs never had it so good around here.

“Too rich for me, Mom. Your old clients bought their summer homes here so they don't have to fly to Acapulco.”

She laughs, unaccustomed to me teasing her, and takes out a can of premium dog food, the kind she used to take two buses to buy but is now sold in a pet boutique around the corner. Popping the tab, she shakes the wet slabs of dog food into a monogrammed silver supper dish behind Blackjack's doggy gate. He gives it a round of suspicious sniffs.

“You always have a room here,” my mother says. This is a comment that I call a “let,” as in “let it lie there, let it go.” I don't really have a room here, but why raise a fuss? I've had a great morning with my mother. Chores have been handled, and I've experienced some sort of vision that's left a blissful, unexplained feeling coursing through my body, the result no doubt of looking outside and seeing that one of those glorious, breathtaking Los Angeles days is waiting for me!—as soon as I walk the dog. I watch Blackjack ignore his pricey dog food, feel that flush of anger at how much attention my mother lavishes on him, and hear the words tripping out of my mouth so fast, there's no time to catch them before they fall.

“Isn't my bedroom where you store things you don't use but can't bring yourself to throw away?”

Mother's shoulders tense up. “You weren't here, and I needed the space,” she says, busying herself rearranging dog food on a shelf for no reason except to occupy her hands. Blackjack looks at me with a quizzical head shake—I'm convinced the dog is using me as a ventriloquist's dummy to speak the words he knows will get me in the most trouble—hops over the fence, his food untouched, and trots past me. He has heard this argument one too many times before, too.

“Mom, you have the house to yourself,” I say, feeling pulled into this maelstrom without any hope of pulling out of it.

“I have friends,” Mother says. “I don't need to make anybody stay here.”

“Mom, that's not what I meant,” I say, and that euphoric feeling I had moments before is cooling in my veins, hardening into bitterness and resentment.