The Madonnas of Echo Park (22 page)

“That's a pretty dress. I'm so happy to see you in something you made,” I lied.

“Thanks,” she said. I'd worn a sheer, royal blue and scarlet red Hawaiian floral print dress Debbie helped me pick from Contempo. It was stylish and sexy in the store, with those slanted mirrors, checkerboard floors, and loud music disorienting me, but here, out in the bright sun, around actual people, it was hideous, part grandma muumuu and part exterminators' tent. The material was cheap, flimsy; the spaghetti straps were fettuccini size. You know those outfits you see people wear from twenty or thirty years ago in those faded photos and you say, “Damn, that was
ugly
!”
This
was that outfit. It was the kind of dress you pray strikes everyone around you with blindness
and
amnesia.

“Yours is nice, too,” she lied back.

“What're you doing now?” I asked.

“Family's going to Sizzler. You?”

“Mother couldn't get the day off at the supermarket. I have to go to work, too. Big sale this weekend, and we have to do a ton of floor sets.”

“Floor sets?” Duchess asked. “Sounds . . . important.”

“No, they're what we call the displays in the store.”

“Why don't you call them displays, then?” Duchess asked.

“I . . . I don't know.” I shrugged. “That's what they're called.” It was tough pretending our fight hadn't affected me, hadn't sent me to sleep crying every night. She was acting so cold, so . . . hard. Why wouldn't she meet me halfway?

“We're gonna get going. My boyfriend's here,” Duchess said. She'd never even mentioned a boy she was crushing on. Now she had a boyfriend?

A tall, light-skinned Mexican walked over, standing next to her at an awkward angle. Duchess slung an arm around his waist, which made him blush.

“Hi, I'm Juan,” he said, holding out his hand. I shook it, and as I stood staring into his eyes, a sudden rush ran up and down my body. I could feel the heat rising to my face, embarrassed that I was smiling. Duchess wrapped her arm around his waist tighter. He broke free and leaned in closer.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Both of you going to celebrate the big day together?”

“Angie has work,” Duchess said. “And we were going to leave.”

“Is that true, Angie?” Juan asked with those deep eyes of his, as chocolaty brown as a teddy bear's. “You have to work on your graduation day?”

“Um, yeah, I do,” I said, looking at Duchess. “I have a crazy schedule.”

“Where do you work?” he asked.

“Out in the Valley,” Duchess chipped in.

“At the galleria?” Juan asked.

“She likes it out there,” Duchess said. “It's clean.”

“I have to get going,” I said. “I have a friend from work picking me up. It was nice meeting you.” I ran down a dirt hill in my best shoes to wait for Debbie at the driveway into the parking lot. Then I heard his voice.

“You sure you don't need a lift?” Juan asked.

“Duchess is going to be furious you're here,” I said.

“Why, because I'm talking to you?”

“Aren't you her boyfriend?”

“Did Maria tell you that?”

“That's her real name?” I asked.

“Yeah, Duchess was her mother's old gang nickname. She told me on our first date. Said she doesn't like to keep secrets. So can I see you sometime?”

“Are you joking? You're going out with my best friend.”

“You two didn't seem too friendly back there.”

“Juan, you should go. Please,” I said. “She's my—”

“Look, we're not serious. I'm seeing Duchess to make my mom happy,” he said. “You and I don't have to date. We can just hang out. No pressure.”

Debbie's shiny Nissan sports coupe idled its way up the hill amid a caravan of school buses and cars from the next school to graduate.

“I can't decide this now. I'll think about it. Okay?” He nodded, then leaned down to kiss me on my ear. I felt my arms melt into his shoulders, felt my legs grow weak, felt my flesh jump. Then he was gone.

Debbie pulled up to the curb, and I climbed in. She pointed at one of the buses.

“Are those guys from your school?” she asked.

“No, the one graduating after us.”

“Check out those babes,” she said and pointed to a blond Adonis in a basketball jersey shaking hands with a black guy in a cap and gown.

“God, I love jocks,” Debbie said. “I'd
so
fuck-and-run him. You can go for the black guy.”

“I like the blond.”

“But he's . . . not black.”

“Neither am I.”

Debbie rested her head on the steering wheel. “Don't hate me because I'm stupid,” she said. “You're going to teach me about this, right, Angie?”

“Party of two,” I said. “You teach me, I'll teach you.”

*   *   *

You never realize the final moment when a friendship ends. One friendship fades out, and another one fades in to take its place. Duchess's stock question “Why chase a bus when another one's right around the corner?” was replaced with Debbie's “I'd
so
fuck-and-run him,” which is what she said meeting Juan for the first time. It took three months of dates, and a night of margaritas at a restaurant that didn't card, for that to happen. Juan's after-sex sweat glistened on his skin like the glossy sheen on a street following a sudden rain. He said romantic things—things he liked about my personality, little traits and mannerisms of mine I never noticed—but when he tried to tell me about the moment he knew he'd fallen in love with me, I cut him off. “Juan, this is too soon.” He stopped talking, went to sleep.

I snuck out before sunrise, into that cold raw darkness where you don't hear a sound or see another soul. I didn't return his calls, his gifts and flower bouquets, or respond to his letters asking for some sort of explanation that would make sense. Nothing I could say would make sense to him because it made no sense to me. In my mind, I had a specific plan for how I would fall in love, and getting drunk on margaritas (like two stereotypical Mexicans) wasn't it. It was easier to pretend nothing had happened between us, a gift I am thankful women excel at with men.

Debbie counseled me on what happened. You had your first “fuck date,” she said. Fuck dates were like Chinese food—you're satisfied at the end of the meal but hungry for something substantial four hours later, and I'd better get used to that if I was going to survive in college. I took her advice, and I'd like to think she took some of mine in return. We'd go out for margaritas at Chevys (a chain restaurant that served watered down Mexican food—some education I offered!) and attempt to seduce Valley boys and police officers by flirting in Spanish. Debbie followed my lead, grabbing those thick, sexy Spanish words by the scruffs of their necks and rolling them around in our
mouths, gyrating our hips in time with our rolled
r
s and trilled
t
s. She in turn educated me—with frequent visits to her mother's flat, one-story, cul-de-sac house—about how life in suburbia was clean, safe, . . . and super-boring.

While I was enrolled in Glendale Community College, my mother's house had become a shrine to dead movie stars. Since being fired from her checker job at Pilgrim's Supermarket for gaining too much weight, she'd stopped going outside. Mother was now capable of savage blowups followed by startling moments of tenderness, suffering from a kind of selective emotional amnesia, the result of cocktailing speed and Fen Phen to lose weight. Her new routine consisted of scouring magazines in the morning for photos, clipping them out and mounting them in cheap seashell-ridged frames, then spending the rest of the day cleaning the over two hundred framed photos around the house. Movie stars both white and Mexican, from Pedro Infante to Bette Davis, mingled with photos of distant, nameless relatives, sad immigrants with rangy saddlebag faces standing next to each other in corpse suits and neck-to-ankle dresses. You'd think these famous strangers were actual parts of my mother's life; there were more photos of them than there were of me.

One afternoon my mother lost her train of thought and stopped cleaning altogether, something I'd never seen her do before. In her hands was a photo of herself standing outside The Option restaurant in Hollywood. My mother had been set on me seeing the place, though I didn't get what the big deal was. Maybe she dreamt of eating there on many a glamorous Saturday night years ago in a sheer cocktail dress with Jorge Negrete or Cary Grant. When she was able to make a lunch reservation for the both of us, the once exclusive restaurant was a bare carcass of its former self. Its famed wall of caricatures had been removed, and the building was weeks away from being closed and demolished. The service was distracted (our busboy, someone she kept calling for by name, totally ignored
us), the interior murky, as if sunlight was being filtered in through fish tanks in the windows, and the “famous” Cobb salads were blistered with mold. My mother said nothing through our lunch, making a few bratty stabs at her meal. She'd brought a camera to photograph the restaurant's caricature of Rita Hayworth, but the asshole maître d' asked us to leave. I took her picture by the bus stop instead, snapping the photo midconversation.

Placing my hands over the photograph, I asked my mother, “What were you saying?”

“Rita Hayworth,” she said. “She was a Mexican movie star who was discovered at a bus stop. Her skin was so light she could pass for white. How lucky she was.”

“You're lucky too, Momma,” I said and caressed her scoured hands.

She hung the picture back on the wall, undusted. I reached out to clean it and she slapped me. I threw down my towel and didn't come back home until the police called me to identify my mother's swollen body, crumpled atop a stack of movie magazines and The Option's famed caricature of Rita Hayworth. I never found out how she got it. Some things in life you're just not meant to know, I guess.

Juan saw the For Sale sign I'd put on the front lawn and left a note in my mailbox inviting me out for coffee. Transferring to UCLA for an English degree had left me $60,000 in debt. Selling the house would be an easy way to pay off my loans. What I needed in the meantime was a temp job nearby.

It had been six years since Duchess said she was working at the Bank of America on Sunset and Echo Park. I thought there was no chance she'd stay in the same job that long—that kind of commitment seems an eternity when you're in your twenties—but I spotted her right away. She was wearing a pin-striped jumper dress with sparkler streaks in her
hair, sheer stockings, a faux pearl necklace, and espadrilles. Her name tag had glitter and stick-on stars around the word
DUCHESS
. She was carrying a stack of papers, had gained a lot of weight, and was heavy around the belly the way a new mother is. Her eyes, though, were as fresh as a sunrise, betraying none of the weary sleep lines you'd find in a new mother's face. “Late-term miscarriages,” or second-trimester abortions, were common around here.

“Can you help an unemployed college grad out with a job?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“We're only hiring summer temps,” she said, acting like we had just spoken earlier in the day. Her eyes watered, but she was not going to give me that satisfaction of her tears, and I was glad for that. “Is that okay?”

We hugged as if we were made of eggshells, holding with the delicate fierceness of frail
abuelitas
—pure intent to connect, but not enough strength in our muscles to show it.

“Let me get my purse,” she said. When she returned, her mascara had been reapplied.

Over burritos at her “regular” lunch spot (the thought of eating at the same place every day sounded like death to me), she covered a long expanse of post–high school time with an incredible economy of words: bank job, community college dropout, abortion, unemployment, bank job. My update was as brief as hers. How was it that we could cover years of day-to-day, second-to-second life—so precious, so fleeting while we were living it, so filled to the brim with the annoyance of everyday occurrences that took up so much space in our heads—in minutes? Perhaps we were both eager to talk about Juan; seeing Duchess stirred up old feelings for both of them. She brought him up first.

“He misses you,” she said. “You should call him.”

“He sent me a condolence note. But I couldn't call. I humiliated him.”

“Sex helps guys get over humiliation pretty fast.”

“Do you think you can get me a job at the bank? For a few months?”

“Maybe. Let me speak to my supervisor. You can apply for her job.”

“You want me to be your boss?”

“Sure, why not?” she said. “She's leaving soon. I'll be glad to see her go. She's a real fascist, makes a big deal out of everything. You'd be perfect for her job.”

“Um . . . thanks?”

“That's not what I meant.” She laughed. “Need one of these,” she said, brushing her bangs like a tassel from right to left across a nonexistent mortarboard.

This was the time, I thought. This was the natural pause in our conversation. We'd caught up on each other's lives and settled our past loves. Now we could talk through our hurt feelings, make amends, maybe set off on the long road back to a different kind of friendship, stronger than before.

“That's a cute dress,” I said, and meant it. “I think it's great.”

“Thanks, I got it on sale.”

“You didn't make it?”

“Nah, I don't do that anymore.” Her plastic knife cut through her burrito and sawed into her Styrofoam lunch tray.

“Why not?”

“No reason.”

“You could start up again. Maybe in your free time.”

She set her knife down and covered it with a napkin. “I just don't feel that way anymore,” she said.