The Madonnas of Echo Park (21 page)

“I told my mom I was a lesbian,” I said. “And that seeing my
damas
in those fancy satin dresses would get me hot and excited. ‘
Dios mío
, we can't have that in a church!' she screamed. I went to the movies instead.”

“I should have thought of that!” Duchess said.

“I wonder if Rosa's going to forgive me,” I said.

“Why do you need her?” Duchess laughed. “You know how you
made a bunch of new friends when you went from grade school to junior high? I had this one friend in elementary school, Aurora. We did everything together. Best friends. Then we got to junior high and we'd both changed. We didn't notice it until then. She started getting into that white music, MTV shit from England, made a bunch of white girlfriends. That wasn't me, so we stopped hanging out. It's okay, though, because you need to change your friends once in a while. That's how you become the person you're meant to be.”

There was such a thrill of being drawn into a new friendship that I didn't realize that I'd just had a “friendship ending” moment with Rosa. One day she was there, my best friend, laughing next to me at birthday parties, sharing
paletas de limón
under shady trees, going to each other's houses for backyard plastic wading pool parties, then she was gone, passed through my life to become someone else's best friend.

The alleyway emptied into a barricade of Dumpsters. We turned onto a one-way side street, stopping next to a palm tree that'd been tagged by three different gangs. “I live up this way,” Duchess said. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I have to clean the house. Why?”

“'Cause I'm asking you out, lesbian! I need someone for the party.”

“What party?”

“Party of two, me and you. C'mon. Swear on it.” She held my pinkie's chipped peach polish against her manicure.

“We gotta do something about these nails,” she said.

I could tell you about the things we did the next three months that “bonded” us—drinking forties on my backyard brick wall in our bathing suits and dangling our flip-flips off our toes over a neighbor's tomato patch; smoking joints at the back of a movie theater during the night-vision scenes in
The Silence of the Lambs,
then giggling our heads off as we told everyone we met on the street we were FBI agents and would they mind “answering a few questions”; and so
many beach trips and park picnics they blur into one long, endless memory of riding in a car with the windows down, the radio blaring, and a cool breeze running through my hair—but the moment that pushes your friendship into something deeper, from friend to best friend, can't be seen when it's happening.

Our moment came under a wrinkled jacaranda tree on Portia Street on a balmy June afternoon. This fresh sea-air breeze had somehow fought its way from the beach miles away to caress our bare arms and legs.

“What are we gonna do after summer?” I asked.

“Whatever we want,” she said, distracted. She was sketching an outfit. “We could be Thelma and Louise, steal a car and shoot all the assholes we know around here. But we'd run out of bullets before we left the neighborhood.”

“You want to, right?”

“Want to what?”

“Leave the neighborhood?”

“Sure, maybe,” she said, digging through her pencil case. “There's a blood red in here.”

“I love your drawings. You could go to art school.”

“For what?” Duchess laughed. “To pay someone to teach me what I know? I'll find something to do around here. Aren't you doing the same? Doesn't your mom like your company?”

“She
has
a lot of company,” I said, hoping she'd get the hint.

She did. “He's not your dad, you know. He's some dick that comes and goes when it pleases, like every dick that has a man attached to it. That ain't no life for your mom.”

“That's the life she's choosing. You have to choose your own, too.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said. Duchess's sharp pencil cut across the paper in gentle but deliberate swaths.

“Don't be in such a hurry to leave,” she said. “You're not a man. Or my father.”

“At least you know who your father is,” I said.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the jacaranda tree sigh in the wind. The breeze rattled plump flowers, tiny lavender petticoat slip dresses, off the tree and plopped them on our heads.

“I could stick around,” I lied. “And you?”

A jacaranda blossom landed in her hair, its pulpy white tip sticking out from a wavy curl. She put down her pencil. “I'm your shadow. And you're my sun.”

“Your mom said that, didn't she?”

“Yeah.” Duchess blushed. “But I never said it to anyone else.” She leaned back down to finish her sketch. It was an intricate drawing of a young woman in a dazzling off-the-shoulder red dress.

“It's beautiful. Is it you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think it is. I don't know. It's not finished yet.”

“You going to make the dress?” I asked.

“When I can afford the fabric. This dress needs a special material.”

“You have something in your hair,” I said. My fingers brushed against her scalp, popping the blossom's milky tip in her curls. Duchess crooked her head so that it followed my hand, the way a cat arches up to someone stroking its spine. Our breathing slowed until our rhythms were the same. Tracing a circle on her head, my fingers grew warm enough for me to slide the blossom out without yanking strands of hair with it.

“Did you get it?” Duchess whispered.

There were bits of ripped jacaranda stuck to my fingers. “No. It's tangled in your hair.”

She pulled out her mirror. “They're a part of me now,” she said, looking at my fingertips. “So are you.” With a purple pencil she shaded in a blossom barrette in the girl's hair in the sketch. Then she led my hand over her lap, up to the top of her sketch pad, and using both our hands, ripped the page out and tucked it away in her purse.

*   *   *

It takes a lot more time to realize that a best friend has become a member of your “new” family—“water dripping in a bucket” time, or “learning to play an instrument” time. It's a surprise because, when you're a teenager, you don't realize you have the right or the ability to make a new family. You do it by accident. When you pull away from your parents—easy for me, harder for Duchess—you're creating a hole in your life for someone else to fill, a hole that did not exist before you knew them. It's like a crack that expands each time you see it, yet you never see the crack getting bigger. The more time you spend with someone, the bigger the hole gets. I learned to see things through her eyes, enjoyed her music, her movies, and hanging with gay boys with her tastes, copied her dress and mannerisms, and used her catchphrases. I was saying, “Why chase a bus when another one's right around the corner?” in situations where it made no sense—my English teacher warned me not to raise my hand anymore if I offered this as an answer to why all the major characters in Shakespeare were screwed up. You do this so people can see you the same way they see your friend. Of course they don't—can't—see you in the same way; what they can see is the copy you've turned yourself into, and you ignore that pinprick sensation in your head each time you surrender a piece of who you are to become someone else. You do this because, when you act like your friend, you no longer feel alone.

You also do this to ignore the scary parts of your friend's personality that creep up to the surface when you aren't looking. Remember that fatal flaw I told you about? That keeps people where they are instead of where they could be? A week before graduation, we went to the Glendale Galleria. I was returning something my mother bought a month before from a catalog and couldn't fit into, which was happening to her a lot. Duchess hated shopping malls but agreed to keep me company. What I didn't tell her about was my plan to scout out a summer job. In Glendale, the streets were clean, there were tons of movie theaters and real air-conditioned restaurants (not the ones
with crappy plastic oscillating fans that trap flies), and you could walk around wearing whatever you wanted without getting hassled by every
cholo
on the block. And I was too shy to say it to Duchess, but I'll say it here—the
gabachos,
the white boys, were cute.

Duchess wouldn't sympathize with any of that; she was working at a Bank of America three blocks from my house that had been held up four times in the past two years. She offered to get me a job there, but I kept stalling about when I would come in for the interview.

At the galleria, I made mental notes of the department stores and shoe stores that had the things I liked best, and the food stands that attracted the cutest boys. The plan was to come back another day and pick up the applications; there was no way I was doing it in front of Duchess.

Upstairs on the second level, we wandered into Contempo Casuals. The place was like a fun house; checkerboard tile floor, mirrored ceilings, tilted mirrors, and rows of television sets on the walls. The back of the store seemed to stretch out forever. On the screens, a computerized man in a red chrome suit with a blond skyscraper hairdo was singing in a robotic voice:

“Clothes for hos,” Duchess said. “Can we go?”

“I'm going to take a look around,” I said.

Near the five-dollar scrunchie rack by the cash registers, a salesgirl with short strawberry blond hair started following me around. She wore a zip-up, powder blue hoodie with a drawstring tie, white Vans slip-ons, and ass-tight jean shorts with knee cuffs. Her name was Debbie; she was a wannabe surfer girl with propane eyes whose vacuous stare one could mistake for intensity or Zen. Duchess
was nowhere in the store, so I asked Debbie for an application.

“You'll be sick to death of floor sets when you're through,” she said. “Where you going to school in the fall?”

“L.A.C.C.”

“There's an
L.A.
college? Why aren't you going to Glendale CC? It's a short drive from here.”

“Really?” I asked, not letting on I didn't live near the mall, nor did I have a car. “Lots of cute guys?”

She cocked her head, a crooked grin on her face. “Um, yeah, they have some total babes there. Lots of blonds, you know?” There was an awkward pause. “Let me get you a pen.”

Duchess was waiting for me by the clock tower elevator. She jabbed the Down button.

“What were you doing in there?”

“Filling out a job application,” I said.

“You going to work in that
puta
store?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. I need a summer job.”

“Look at their trampy clothes!” she shouted. “Rayon leggings with fake lace around the ankles. Flimsy baby doll dresses that come apart in the wash. Denim scrunchies you could make for a nickel. Petticoat slip dresses. And size zero jeans? White girl jeans for white girl asses!” she shouted.

“They seemed really nice in there,” I said.

“Who? That
puta blanca
following you around the store like you were a
ladrona
?”

“Following me arou—— How long have you been standing out here?”

“You too good to work at the bank?”

“It's not for me, okay? There's nothing wrong with this place.”

“You think you're better than everyone, huh?” she said. “Because you're lighter than me? Because you want to live someplace nice and clean? No graffiti, no trash everywhere, no thugs hassling you just for walking down the fucking street!” People stared at us. It didn't feel
right to act this way in a white neighborhood. I was worried that we'd be thrown out of the mall, maybe even arrested.

“I'm going home,” I said.

We stormed off together, in silence, sulking from the bus stop bench to our hour-long bus ride back (sitting at opposite ends of the bus) to the gas station on the corner of Glendale Boulevard and Montana Street. She stormed ahead of me, but not before she said, “I'm surprised you still remembered your way home.”

The time between your first major fight with your best friend until you make up is, for a teenage girl, about as long as it took for God to create the universe. First, you make your declarations:
She's being the world's biggest bitch! I'm never speaking to her again!
Next, you console yourself with how unreasonable her actions were:
Why is she being such a bitch? Can't she see I'm totally right and she's totally wrong?
You console yourself with how much you'll make her do when she comes crawling back to you:
I'll speak to that bitch again
only
if she calls me first, admits she was wrong about everything, and begs me to be her friend again
. As the days pass without a word, your mind races with scenarios of how she's spending her time and who she's spending it with:
How could that bitch be living her life without talking to me?
Then you realize there will not be a scene where she crawls on her knees for your forgiveness and you accept that having her back in your life again, no matter who's right or wrong, is enough. It's excellent training for having a boyfriend.

We didn't speak to each other until graduation, held on a muggy June afternoon at an outdoor amphitheater in Hollywood, where several high schools had their graduation ceremonies at consecutive times throughout the day. It had been three weeks since our fight.

She wore a tight orange and purple dress that flared up like a pilot light flickering out of a fissure on the street. It was a homemade dress, not the one from the drawing, and it was stunning. Girls in street
hoochie outfits came to Duchess and ran her material through their fingers as if they were dipping their hands in the springs of Lourdes, hoping by some small miracle their dresses would magically turn into something beautiful. In that outfit, Duchess had the gait and poise of someone who hadn't made a single decision in her life she regretted. I was angry that she was so confident, but there would be no moment of surrender, no gloating or begging forgiveness on either side.