The Madonnas of Echo Park (26 page)

“He'll lead you to me,” she says. “Trust him.”

Then she leaves me and marches over to Vince, pointing her fingers at his chest and speaking in a raised voice, saying either cruel or loving things she will deny saying later. Her pain rolls in and out like the tide, sometimes a patter on damp sand, other times a torrent that could knock grown men off their feet. It makes her forget who she is, but it never forgets
where
she is.

Vince pulls her close and folds her hair behind her ears. They embrace like two people trying to untangle themselves from a collision, something I can see only from a distance, as I'm walking away.

It's 10:00
A.M
. on Sunset Boulevard. I can hear the neighborhood waking up, a phlegmatic reveille played on collapsing metal bars and security shutters, with a gathering army of grandmothers pulling wheezy basket carts to the supermarket for their Sunday shopping trips and their old husbands shuffling behind them and spitting on
the sidewalks, their expectorations horns heralding the arrival of some urban, impoverished sun king.

This much is familiar to me. Except for the Sergeant Sunshine billboard, though, the physical reference points from my youth appear skewed or rearranged. The vacant lots I played hide-and-seek in; the ninety-nine-cent stores where my mother and I shopped for wispy matching sundresses that, if we were lucky, lasted three or four washes; Pilgrim's supermarket, where I used to go after school and stare at my father's light-skinned mistress, seething over her flirtatious behavior yet in total admiration of her makeup and hairdo: these places are gone, replaced with unfamiliar stores and people I don't recognize, walking through the ghosts of memories I alone can see. Bizarre “gentrified” color schemes—pastel salmons and electric tangerines—coat the outlines of buildings whose shapes are recognizable but whose occupants and appearances are not. I caress the fresh coats of paint and stucco on these buildings, looking for the cracks and bullet holes I ran my fingers along on my way to school, but smooth, patched surfaces betray none of these former imperfections.

I'd driven this stretch of boulevard hundreds of times, including this morning when I went to my mother's house. Why do things appear so different out of my car? Where are the battered houses and dilapidated stores with Spanglishized names? Where are
los borrachos
and the wandering covens of Watchtower
señoras,
holding their flimsy magazines against their breasts like medieval shields and searching for fresh souls to convert? It is as if an antimatter explosion had detonated high above Echo Park, reconstructing decay into a glittering faux affluence, a Willy Wonka neutron bomb coating the landscape in radioactive smiley face yellows and Wellbutrin blues.

Lorenzo's Furniture Store staggers between two renovated storefronts, a hobo being helped to his feet by two well-dressed businessmen. Its fifteen-foot, street-to-roof windows are coated in that same healthy layer of dust I remember, displaying what could be the same
exact eighties-style recliners and dinette sets that were for sale when I was in grade school. Inside, the light is from a late winter afternoon, settling its shadows on plastic sofa cushions and a maze of dressers, shelves, and entertainment centers. When I was in elementary school and my mother worked late nights cleaning offices in Universal City, I came here and played house.

Lorenzo set up my own model “room” near the back of the store, including a four-poster bed whose upper canopy panel he covered with rolls of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. “It's just like the stars outside,” he said, “but you can't see them cause the lights here are too bright. Maybe one day you'll go somewhere where you can see them for real. Remember this star,” he said, pointing to Sirius, the Dog Star. “It's the brightest in the sky. So even when you're in the dark you can find your way home. Just follow the dog,” he said, and we howled like mutts until one of his workers caught us and he shouted at them to get back to work.

Mother put the bed on layaway, but there was a dispute over the price, and Lorenzo was excommunicated from her circle of friends. Both items were sold (a worn-out mattress and a used dresser covered with stickers—on discount—are an excellent deal to a family stretching its money), and I went back to waiting for my mother at home eating Hot Pockets on my flimsy twin bed. When it came time to buy my own furniture, instead of offering Lorenzo an olive branch, I bought cheap particleboard bookcases that required an unwieldy Allen wrench and an instruction sheet in Swedish for assembly.

There's raucous laughter coming from a side doorway. Four men are sitting around a mirrored dining table playing poker. Lorenzo's black, curly hair is now a greasy dishwater white, his broad shoulders pinched together like a clothespin. He peers over a set of thick bifocals when he sees me.

“We're closed, miss. Come back in an hour.”

“Vince asked me to drop off some car keys.”

“Oh, you see Vince?” Lorenzo asks. The other guys perk up, speaking Spanish in quick, poking thrusts as their eyes drift from their tightly clutched spreads of cards to my breasts and hips. Vince's name on the lips of a woman is some sort of seal of approval for these men, and I can't decide what appalls me more, the fact these men are leering at my body in front of a man who was a kind of paternal figure, or Vince's name being synonymous with attractive women who may or may not include my mother. I fold my arms across my breasts, ready to drop Lorenzo's keys in the middle of their pot of cigarettes and dollar bills and leave.

“I don't see him,” I say. At school, I used to introduce Vince as my father, then my stepfather, then my mother's boyfriend, each downgrading based on my evolving feelings. “We're friends,” I say.

Lorenzo stands up from the table. “How do you know him?”

“He hangs out with my mother sometimes,” I say, surprised how vapid and adolescent that sounds, and hand Lorenzo the keys. The tips of my lacquered black nails graze his palm's love line, and I see that flicker of recognition, followed by a fervent expression of disbelief on his face reserved for courtrooms or church. He
knows
me, and while there is a part of me that wants him to cut across these many years with a simple gesture, a sweet, graceful movement, perhaps brushing a stray hair from my face, or clenching my hand, he lacks the faith to act on these feelings and will instead ask another question to confirm his suspicions, keep his distance, and refrain from slipping back into a late afternoon years ago when he was a man who believed that finding joy and beauty in life were as simple as watching a child jumping on a bed.

“He must trust you. He never lets anyone handle his keys,” Lorenzo says. He sets his cards faceup on the table.
“Se acabó el juego!”
he shouts.
“Dejad de mirar y empezad a trabajar.”
The three men strap hernia belts around their waists, hitch the connected suspenders up over their shoulders, and move the table and chairs back out on the showroom floor.

“Vince needs someone he can count on,” and this comes out as a dig at my mother, though it's not meant to.

“I'm glad you said that. That means I can give you the chair.”

“The chair?” I ask.

Lorenzo leads me back through the maze of bookshelves and dressers to a waist-high oak chair with intricate grapevine spirals etched into its legs and arms, a green cashmere seat cushion with a sunrise stitched into it, and an inlaid brass back spread with a pair of golden lions encircling a silver
E.
It is the sort of chair you'd expect to find in the smoking room of a movie palace, and there is something beautiful, almost haunting, about this kind of attention to detail.

“Vince did some work on a classic car for Father Alemencio. He caught up with Father checking in with this crazy old woman who lives up in the Heights,” Lorenzo says, “and while Vince was there she asked him to drop off this chair to be refurbished. Vince can never say no to a lady.”

“He's capable,” I say.

“I've fixed up the chair,” Lorenzo continues, “and Father paid for the bill, but she's never come to collect. Vince said he'd drop it off, but he never got around to it. He told me when he dropped off these keys, he'd take the chair. You dropped them off; now you can take it.”

“No, I can't. Not today.”

“Why not?” Lorenzo asks. “You said you were Vince's friend, right? You said he could count on you, right?”

“I don't have time for this. I've lost my mother's dog and I have to find it. And my car's parked, like, four blocks away from here.” I can't believe how spoiled that sounds.

“It's not far if you know your way around here,” Lorenzo says. “Go past the lake, up a couple blocks, then straight ahead until you hit Kensington, where the old Victorian houses are.”

“No, no, no,” I stammer. “I have to be out of here by noon. I have things to do. I have my day planned out,” I lie.

“You could call Vince,” Lorenzo says, and the thought of interrupting him and my mother having sex makes me shudder.

“No, I can't do that, either,” I say.

“Or you can take it yourself,” he says. “If it doesn't get done today, I have to charge him for keeping this here.”

“Why did Vince offer to deliver this chair?” I ask. “Why don't
you
deliver it?”

“Because the Coat Queen's crazy.”

“The Coat Queen?” I ask. The mere idea of learning there's someone who lives around here called the Coat Queen, and knowing that I'm being sent on an errand to meet her while looking for my mother's dog, explodes that pristine image I had earlier of an unspoiled, unhurried day. How did such a simple day get so complicated so fast?

“You should know this in advance,” Lorenzo says, tearing a sheet of protective plastic from a large roll to wrap the chair in. “Lady's always got these old coats on, and always wears more than one. Hot, cold, don't matter. She has thousands of 'em.”

“And an old woman who's always cold scares you,” I say, then mutter, “Hope your wife never turns fifty.”

Lorenzo ties down the plastic with twine. He stands back, checks that the fit is snug. “I don't like confrontations,” he says.

Was this the reason he and my mother never reconciled? Was this his way of making me do penance for my mother's grudge? I am afraid to ask, but more afraid to refuse.

“Give me the address,” I sigh.

Lorenzo disappears in the back and returns with a crude line map. Then he offers his hand and we shake. He's waiting for me to offer my name, which I don't. He knows who I am. Why say anything? Isn't it better this way? That wonderful feeling of seeing someone after a long time has for me always been replaced by a sinking, uncomfortable dread, a silence that says there isn't one way to reestablish that connection we once shared and will never share again.

“I wish I had cash on hand to pay you for helping out,” he says. “Why don't you take these?”

He pulls a crusty roll of star stickers from his pocket. “They don't stick too well. You could tape 'em up, though.” The stickers are moist in his hand. One peels off the roll and sticks to my palm.

“Okay, well, thanks,” I say, more dismissive than I need to be. I mean,
really
—stickers? Didn't time move at all in this neighborhood? The chair is an awkward weight, so before long I set it down to re-adjust my grip. The sticker is still affixed to my hand.

It was Sirius, the Dog Star. In a rush I'm misty-eyed. How many nights did I fall asleep in that cheap four-poster bed staring up at and trying to reach my brilliant glow-in-the-dark sky, dreaming of a life that was elsewhere, then woke up in my old, darkened bedroom? How many times had I left Echo Park only to end up back here? What was I searching for? My hope? My faith? The light to find my way home?

A blast of air from a passing bus, carrying one man sitting in the back, lifts the star off my hand. Follow me, the star seems to say, as it corkscrew whips in the air, fluttering like a phosphorescent butterfly down the street until it plops into the waters of Echo Park Lake.

If Chavez Ravine is where God's hands touched the ground, Echo Park Lake is where God stood while doing so. It's an enormous half-mile-long footprint in the center of Echo Park, sandwiched between Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway, those twin arteries of Los Angeles's bloodstream. The lake itself has evaded progress for over one hundred years as the land around it metamorphosed from rolling dirt trails into interlocking sections of houses, apartment buildings, and condos. It's survived an oil spill in which it was set ablaze, been dragged hundreds of times for missing children or heartbroken lovers, fished in for city-water catfish, dredged to its floor and converted for a short time into an unofficial neighborhood garbage pit, been
home to numerous movie and video shoots (my favorites are Jack Nicholson floating on a boat as he spies on a couple having a secret tryst in
Chinatown,
and the Bangles dancing around the lake in a video for “Manic Monday”), been skimmed across by a multitude of paddleboat rentals, played host to frequent ghost sighting, including the Lady of the Lake, a woman in a blue dress who has appeared hundreds of times walking across the water and whom my mother tried to convince me for years was my great-grandmother, and is home this weekend to the Lotus Festival, which happens every July.

Its name comes from the hundreds of cucumber green lotus pads that sprout large, starry pink and white fronds this time of year. A cornucopia of food stands selling barbecued meats prepared in methods and styles from around the world are set up around the lake, along with arts and crafts booths, palm-reading tables, inflatable bounce houses, collapsible carnival rides, a miniature Ferris wheel. Later there will be dragon boat races across the lake's murky toilet green water and a large fireworks display at the end of the night, launched from a platform attached to three large permanent fountains that shoot continuous jets of water fifty feet into the air throughout the year.