The Madonnas of Echo Park (7 page)

Mrs. Calhoun lived in a large house on Avalon Street in Los Feliz with her husband, Rick, who had followed a story in the newspapers and on television about a drive-by shooting. In 1984, during my twelve-year-old daughter Aurora's spring break, she and I had been standing for a group photo (which all the papers published) on a street corner when a car opened fire near the crowd. Neither of us had been in any actual danger, but because of the attention, I lost my job cleaning the offices of a law firm where I'd worked for four years as a “temp.”

Before Rick found me, I was looking for work on a street corner, 5th and San Pedro, near the Midnight Mission. Back then, my English was terrible and Skid Row was where, if you were a woman, needed work, and didn't speak English, you'd gather in a group for the
gabachos
to come and hire you. We all had our own corners on Skid Row back then. 6th and Los Angeles, by the Greyhound station, was for junkies. 5th and San Julian was the park where whores would sell their time: twenty dollars for twenty minutes in a flophouse, or ten dollars for ten minutes in a Porta Potti the city put out for the homeless. And 5th and Pedro was where you went to hire day laborers and cleaning ladies.

The women came from everywhere south, some as far away as
Uruguay, each with her own Spanish dialect. The men had their own corner, across the street from ours. They weren't there to defend us when we were harassed (or sometimes raped) by the bums who swarmed the area but to keep an eye on us while they drank, laughed, and wolf-whistled the gazelles, beanstalky white women in suits and sneakers who parked their cars in the cheap garages nearby. They turned those
pendejos'
heads like compass needles, as if those girls' tits and asses were magnetized. We had the dignity to wait in silence, yawning in the flat gray sharpness of dawn under a mist of milky amber streetlight. Standing in a straight line, arms folded across our chests like stop signs, we prepared ourselves for a long day of aching, mindless work by sharing a religious, rigorous, devotional quiet.

When men want relief they hire a whore. When women want relief they hire a cleaning lady. And they did it the same way—first they examined our bodies. Could we reach the high shelves with the lead crystal without a stepladder? Were we able to fit into a crawl space and fish out their children's toys? Were our
culos
big enough to cushion an accidental fall? They never looked us in the eye because they could see us performing those disgusting chores no decent woman would dream of asking another woman to do. Then they tried to negotiate the stingiest hourly rate, or tossed out a flat fee that always seemed too good to be true, and was; at their houses, you were asked in a polite but insistent voice to do “just one more” messy, humiliating job (digging through moist, rotten garbage for a missing earring they “thought” might have fallen in, or fishing a tampon out of a clogged toilet) before you earned your day's freedom. The men were more direct, pulling up in large white windowless vans and snapping their fingers—“I need two plump, stocky ones and two that can squeeze into tight corners!”—like buying live chickens.

I wasn't the only American-born woman on this corner who never learned English. In Los Angeles, you could rent an apartment, buy groceries, cash checks, and socialize, all in Spanish. I tried going to the movies to learn English; at the theaters Downtown, Mexicans
could come only on certain days and were “restricted” to the balcony. I snuck in whenever I could because I wanted to be more “American,” and I thought these movies—“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!”—had the answer. Yet whatever English I pieced together dissolved when I walked into the harsh sunlight outside.

When something really stumped me—paying taxes, for example—I asked for help. More Mexicans speak English than you imagine and understand it better than they let on. That's how I met Hector, in church; he could already speak English but never had time to teach me. (I should have known a man who could speak two languages could live two different lives with two different women.) How could I find time to learn English, when I left my house at dusk like a vampire, working in empty, haunted offices all night? And some vampire I was, frightened by all those ghostly sounds in an office, like copy machines that powered on for no reason or phones that rang endlessly. Before sunrise, I scurried out the service entrance with a horseshoe back, clenched shoulders, callused feet, and skin reeking of ammonia.

That's why Rick's letter arriving when it did gave me faith we were not destined to live our lives as victims. The papers painted Aurora and me as tragic near-martyrs, symbols of a community the city had forgotten. Aurora couldn't face her classmates because of this and some incident at school that she started telling me about, then stopped when she told me I'd gotten the details wrong (someone called her “a dirty Mexican”). After the shooting, she stopped telling me anything, became a sour and sullen stranger in my home. She changed schools and talked to me even less, but she was still my translator and my negotiator when I went to meet Rick. Cards and letters flooded our mailbox, but Rick had written on the most handsome stationery that he was looking for a cleaning lady (or better yet, a houseboy), and if I wasn't interested, would I inquire in the neighborhood in exchange for a “finder's fee”?

We rode the bus a half hour to Los Feliz and met Rick on his front
drive under a gang of aging palm trees. He led us around the grounds, which included a shady grotto and swimming pool carved out of a hillside shielded beneath a canopied jacaranda tree that had thin green sprouts and young, tender, but still unripe ivory buds peeking out from its branches.

“You have a swimming pool!” Aurora said.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Rick asked her.

“Maybe.” Aurora smiled a confident, gap-toothed grin that meant she was lying.

“You can have a pool party with your boyfriend anytime. If he has an older brother, he can come and bring his friends, too,” he said.

When I asked her how much the job paid, she began a back-and-forth conversation until I agreed on a schedule of three times a week, six hours each day. Aurora negotiated thirty dollars per cleaning day, with Rick providing the cleaning supplies.

“My wife will keep everything fully stocked,” Rick said. “She's inside.”

In a living room that could fit my entire childhood Chavez Ravine home, Rick's wife sat curled on a fancy corduroy couch (a couch I'd come to know very well), her head draped over a glossy magazine. I couldn't tell whether she was asleep or awake. There was a booming, echoed silence, what you'd hear in a cathedral.

Aurora dove onto the couch. Startled, his wife jerked up, and Rick motioned stiffly for her to shake my hand.

“Hello, Mrs. Calhoun,” I said.

She dragged her legs off the couch, adjusted her silk blouse, then pinched the waist of her trim, creased slacks. “This is Felicia, the woman from the newspaper,” Rick said.

“Hello, Felicia,” she said, standing the same height as me in stocking feet.
“Hola. Buenos días
and
hola,
Felicia.” She hugged me at an angle, like she was using tongs.

“My wife was the one who spotted that photo in the paper,” Rick said. She looked surprised to hear this.

“Oh, the photo. The one with your friends.
Amigos. Amigas?
I'm sorry my Spanish isn't better,” she said.

I understood this, and said, in English, “It's okay. My English should be better. It's America, your country.”

“Oh, I thought you were born here,” she said.

“I was. But it's your country.”

She showed Aurora and me out, saying she was running late for a medical appointment. We descended the sharp incline back to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. There were no benches—only Mexicans rode the bus around here—so Aurora and I squatted on the curb, massaging our calves and keeping our feet at what we hoped was a safe distance from the sports cars and new “minivans” speeding down the boulevard. We waited under the shadows of manicured wall hedges and palm treetops whose dry, spiny fronds crackled in the breeze like a brushfire.

“I want a house like his,” Aurora said. “I want to live here.”

“It's very expensive,” I said. “You need to stay in school.”

“You don't need to go to school to be rich anymore. I want to have a pool party here,” Aurora said.

“My job is to work here,” I said. “Your job is to go to school.”

“Rick said I could come and swim,” she said. “You can't decide for both of us.”

“That wasn't an invite to swim,” I said.
“Era una invitación a trabajar.”

Cleaners must arrive early, before their bosses have had their morning coffee, newspaper, and can mess up their houses any further. To get to work on time, I walked to the bus stop when the moon was still out. No one was around except the
borrachos
swaggering back home to their wives' cold beds when the bars closed, or the crazy bag lady who wore winter coats year-round, prayed at my bus stop bench as if it were a pew, and talked about her “friend,” the Virgin Mary, as
if Our Lady of Guadalupe was going to show up on the Line 200 bus at five in the morning. I hated rising early then, so I learned the driver's name and acted friendly; in a few weeks, he'd wait an extra minute or two for me at my stop if I was running late, though I had to listen to his endless bragging about how he kept to his schedule and always followed the rules. Don't know what page of the rule book chatting up women passengers was on, but I knew what his game was. Women can see through a man in a way men will never realize. That's because men never change—they'll slow time down trying to get under your dress, then speed it up once they've done it. I was still recovering from Hector, my one attempt at true love. He turned out to be a yo-yo lover, a man who stings you more coming back than going away.

There were many cleaning ladies and maids riding that bus every morning, fanning out across Los Feliz. Working on traffic islands or mountainous front lawns were armies of gardeners who came in their own pickup trucks, their turtle-shell backs inching across unruly grass they sharpened into crisp right angles.

You could hear us coming by the sound of our plastic buckets, knocking what we carried inside them around: spray bottles with homemade cleaning solutions, collapsible mop handles and scouring pads, dried out sponges and boxes of rubber gloves (many owners of these houses, mine included, didn't supply their own cleaning supplies as promised; we'd eat the cost along with our complaints), and a symphony of jangling house keys. If you weren't trusted with keys, you'd better get used to the curb.

It took me a while during those first weeks to learn a different rhythm of doing my job. At the law firm, I had to let others know I was there. Figuring out the best ways to be heard but not seen is a crucial skill for a cleaning lady so I wouldn't surprise anyone staying late, or walk in on lawyers having sex or touching themselves. Turning on the vacuum cleaner when I didn't need to or making a lot of noise arranging my cleaning supplies were the best ways. One lawyer's
hands dipped below his waist whenever I cleaned his office, so one night I whipped the vacuum cord at his crotch like a lion tamer. He kept his hands on his papers after that.

In Los Feliz, I needed to be invisible and inaudible. Mrs. Calhoun and I managed to communicate without ever saying a word to each other's face. The massive double front doors made a loud, drawbridge sound when I unlocked them, letting her know I'd arrived. I'd shout “Good morning” in English until Mrs. Calhoun responded with an echoed “Good morning,” often from one of the bathrooms. That was my sign to start at the opposite side of the house. When I finished a room, Mrs. Calhoun stepped inside and read a magazine until I finished the next room. Like the arms on a clock, we moved together through six bathrooms, five bedrooms, the split kitchen, two “recreation” rooms (a name that confused me; I didn't have a room to create things in, let alone “re”-create them), and a living room as big as Aurora's school cafeteria. We could spend the day inches apart and never see each other.

Many cleaning ladies would be thrilled not to have someone's eyes raking your spine, correcting your every move, but I felt it was bad luck to spend a day in the same house with someone you never saw or talked to. Sometimes I'd ask Mrs. Calhoun a question but would get no reply. Later, I'd find a note on a large glass table by a pair of sliding doors overlooking the grotto, a place Mrs. Calhoun stared out at most of the day. With the help of an English-Spanish dictionary Rick gave me on my first day, I learned how to translate her replies. “Don't clean the green back bedroom today” meant she'd be shut in there, curtains drawn, for the six hours I was cleaning. “Please clean the oven” meant the charred remains of some grisly attempt at a meal would be lying in wait for me. “Out this afternoon” meant Rick would come in right before I left smelling of chewing gum and alcohol, bobbing and weaving across the freshly waxed floors.

If a dozen people lived there, all coming and going, six hours
wouldn't have been enough time to clean the whole house. But these two people didn't really need a cleaning lady, which led me to wonder why they hired me to begin with. I dusted the tables, made the (his and hers) beds, wrestled with the impossible-to-clean reversible pleather/corduroy cushions on their couch, and packed away Styrofoam to-go cartons and pizza boxes into large garbage bags. In the kitchen, foil take-out pans and doggie bags were arranged like an eager student's piles of books in a library. Some stacks were scattered across a cutting block; others were crammed into a refrigerator the size of a bank vault until they went bad. Again, we communicated by note. Food boxes were color-coded with tiny “sticky” notes, telling me what to pack away and what to dispose of, uneaten, untouched. Unused dishes, glasses, copper pans, and silverware were cleaned and polished twice a week. Three of the five beds were never slept in, but I stripped and remade every one of them. The six bathrooms were the most trouble. Each had dried stalactites of vomit and blood around the rims and on the bases of the toilets. To get these clean you need to scrub and scratch with your fingertips while the rest of your body's crouched in a runner's starting hunch, motionless above.