The Madonnas of Echo Park (5 page)

That's what happened with Felicia; I saw it in her eyes easier than she must have seen the lies in mine. I gave Felicia a list of the ways I'd change, and waited for her answer. And then the days without her answer kept coming, like leaves falling off a tree, too many to count in the strong breeze of our busy lives.

A gust of wind blows my marking sheet from my clipboard, across the skeleton of the foundation and over to the site's edge. I retrieve it and hand it to Tenant, who instructs me to finish the fence. The dog stench, which I smell everywhere, and an empty stomach leave me light-headed, but I grab my mallet and hammer in the final support posts. The light-headedness sways me back to a sense of satisfaction at a task completed and a day's wages earned. No matter how bad your job is, there is one brief moment when you are content—a joke someone makes at the site before the most grueling routine sets in; the way sunshine streaks across your face at a particular time of day; the satisfaction of unloading the last of a batch of heavy boxes; and for the young men here, the cleverness at finding out how little they can do and still avoid being scolded. We are at our best when we are at work.

I'm installing the fittings and tension bands on the final two fence posts at the far edge of the site when I hear a loud, gurgling hiccup. No one's around. I think it's a dog that's broken its legs falling into
one of the excavation pits, a common sight. A mount juts out over the cliff a few yards from where I'm working. I peer over the edge, and there's a sound like someone punching a wad of dough. Heights make me sick, but I step out onto the mount to see what's making the sound.

My vision's hazy from the view and not eating lunch, but I think I see Adam swinging a bright-yellow-handled sledgehammer down on a hairy pumpkin lodged behind a mound of dirt. There's nobody else on the cliff. I edge out a couple inches farther, loosening some rain-dampened dirt clods under my feet. There is a man on the ground, the receiving end of Adam's sledgehammer. Next to him is a black Dodgers cap. The ground, a blood-orange clay, shifts and swallows the head, which makes a trilling, gasping sound, as if it's being deflated. Where is Diego? When I step back, several large clumps of dirt give way, rolling down the hill. Adam sees me before I run back to the fence.

The chain-link mesh is loose in several places and curls up, leaving a large hole someone could crawl or slide through. I struggle to attach the tension bands, but they fall from my shivering fingers. Behind me, heavy footsteps attack the hill and climb up over the ledge. Another pair of footsteps runs over to greet them. Somebody's fleshy face gets slapped, again and again. Work across the site stops in a rolling wave as everyone except me watches the exchange. Tenant shouts in an exasperated voice, “We've had an accident. The ground's too soft. I'm gonna let you go home a couple hours early, but you're gettin' paid for a full day. Thank the Virgin Mary for me tonight before you go to bed.”

The men cheer and line up in front of Tenant to receive handfuls of twenty-dollar bills. I drop my tools, leaving the fence unfinished, and try to mingle with the last of the workers clearing off the job site. I decide to skip out on my money—a hundred dollars I need to pay off
last
month's rent, with still no idea how to pay
this
month's rent.

“Hang on a sec, Hector,” Tenant says. “Let me buy you supper.”

He offers me Adam's seat in the cab up front while Adam, who's holding a shovel, stays behind at the site to “clean up.” It's dusk by the time we're loaded and ready to go. Tenant's uncomfortable as he drives, and I can tell he's distracted, sweating and muttering to himself, taking turns too fast, not looking in his mirrors as he changes lanes. Not paying attention to the traffic, Tenant runs a red light and almost collides with a fast-moving MTA bus that has to swerve out of our way. We both sigh with relief when we reach Taix on Sunset, a French restaurant that's been in Echo Park since the sixties. It's seen the whites leave, the Mexicans come, the Mexicans go, and now the whites come back.

There are no windows in the restaurant, no way to keep track of the time passing outside. The light in here is thick and dark like rye bread. We're seated at a booth and given oversize menus with gold tassels and the prices written in pen.

“Want a drink?” Tenant asks.

“No thank you, sir.”

“Service can be a little slow in here,” he says and walks to the bar. It's a short distance between our booth and the front door. If I were twenty years younger, I could run. I
would
run. Felicia said I'd made a pretty good life by running away. I could try my luck at a different parking lot, or another town, and leave this life behind. But where would I go? How would I get there? What else can I do?

A pair of brown hands sets a large basket of cold sourdough slices on the table, making me jump. I'm amazed because I didn't see the man approach, and because of how dark it is, I don't see him leave.

These are my hands, asking a guest with a simple gesture whether he is done with his meal. These hands stack the silverware and the bread plate atop the congealed demi-glace and uneaten vegetables on her dish, whisking them away with the swift, unobtrusive movements learned through years of steady repetition. These hands have bused
tables of famous actors and actresses, producers and directors, mayors and councilmen, diplomats, and a former President of the United States. These hands collect fat wineglasses, red plastic drink stirrers, cocktail napkins with the restaurant's logo emblazoned in gold type, and produce a silver bread-crumb comb that with no more than four broad sweeps across a laundered tablecloth collects any remaining food—in under thirty seconds (these hands have been timed with a stopwatch). Then these hands disappear, leaving time for coffee, dessert, liqueur, or a relaxed after-dinner conversation, creating an illusion that the table was bused on its own by a set of unseen hands, invisible hands that mother a city of infants.

The Option was one of Hollywood's oldest and most prestigious eateries. I brought Aurora there on the bus every Christmas Day when she was a child. She hated that my hands smelled like offal and wasn't impressed with the grand, oak-and-glass-paneled front entrance where pen-and-ink caricatures of famous celebrities (my favorite was Rita Hayworth's) looked down at customers from either side of a long, haunted corridor that appeared to expand as you walked along it.

How I wished I could have eaten at a fancy American restaurant when I was a boy! The upholstered booths were as big as a Cadillac's backseat. The prime seating tables had thousand-dollar centerpieces, some of which, when their bloom and scent faded, I'd set outside Felicia's apartment, then, as the years passed and our separation grew longer and longer, on the front porch of the small house she bought with money she made as a cleaning lady. And the meal itself: big American-size portions of steak, potatoes, creamed spinach, and the house specialty, macaroni and cheese, an “off the menu” dish made one late evening a hundred seasons ago for a famished Humphrey Bogart and available to those “in the know” enough to ask for it (except those “in the know” had stopped coming years ago).

Did my daughter imagine that
every
staff member was granted special privileges? How could she know that the holiday dinner
(which took place in two separate dining rooms—one near the bar for aging celebrities, friends, and relatives of the head staff, and a second for the Mexican junior staff in a musty storage area) was a perk for those management considered important men, men with responsibilities who were valued and appreciated, and whose input was sought and respected?

Aurora learned her lack of enthusiasm for my work from her mother. We had separated, but I'd hoped my dedication to a single job instead of a string of temporary, trashy new ones would impress her (“Your penis could learn a thing or two from your work ethic,” Felicia said). I wanted Felicia to marvel at how my peers in the restaurant respected and admired me, yet she cared nothing for my job, thought nothing of me clearing drinks from the mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley's table, where he'd enjoyed the house's signature martini (“A real Mexican would have spit in it,” she said). She had not one word of praise when I was promoted to head busboy because Aurora told her busboys are addressed by their first names, while waiters and senior staff are addressed with an honorific
Mr.
Aurora, who was tending to her own simmering cauldron of anger, didn't understand busboy was one step away from waiter, though The Option had never hired (and with its closing, never would) a Mexican waiter. How could I explain to someone who never worked in a restaurant that this fixed hierarchy was not a symptom of prejudice? From how I described my workday, Aurora found a hundred perceived slights a week I didn't have the pride to correct.

Rarer still were Felicia's visits to the restaurant. I made sure the busboys who reported to me were on their toes and showed me respect. She felt I mistook their obedience for loyalty, their briskness for a sense of purpose or direction (“I see where you get that from,” she said). These men and my bosses, she said, were conspiring against me, ridiculing my imperceptible accent, shortchanging my fair share of tips, and loading my sommelier's tests (one could not become a
waiter without passing one) with obscure European wines the restaurant didn't serve, relegating me to the restaurant's bottom caste. Of course she'd never
heard
anything terrible; neither had I. Whispers were extinguished whenever I turned a corner into the kitchen. But she believed the taste of some offensive conversation lingered in the air, dangling on the edge of a testy comment I recounted about the junior staff not “understanding clear instructions” or how any requests to amend a work schedule had to be made “in writing and in English.” Her life, in which she had always believed in the transcendence of fury, set an example for her daughter to turn against her father, excommunicating me to a nether region of the living dead, a place where the deceased form new families, creating and inventing new histories and biographies, while the ones left behind announce their demise with the ripping of mailbox labels and pictures in two.

Then the building craze came and The Option lost its lease. The land was to be razed for a multimillion-dollar apartment complex and parking garage that was never built after the craze found its senses. Aurora, now a beautiful, angry young girl of nineteen, accepted my invite to our closing night party. My special job was to help garnish slices of a five-tier cake with caviar, costing seventeen thousand dollars. Our self-anointed sous chef (he received neither the title nor the money), Felix, had brought from home a boom box and set it in the kitchen. A wiry Central Valley–born Mexican, he turned it to a Spanish station for the Mexican junior staff, who weren't invited into the main dining room for the restaurant's senior-staff finale celebration.

The head sommelier came to supervise while I bent over the cake like a sinner doing penance. He asked the waiter and sous chef to lean close so he could share something with them. I couldn't make out most of their conversation, save the ending, where the sommelier said aloud, “Guess what
his
nickname is?” The group exploded in laughter, repeating that odd punch line as if they were speaking their
own language in a room of foreigners. I was unperturbed, my hands placing spoonfuls of caviar in gentle dollops along the cake's ridges.

“They're talking about you,” Aurora said. She was standing against a wall, arms folded, looking severe and disappointed—an identical image of her mother.

“I didn't hear anything,” I said.

“You never do. Excuse me,” she asked, “what is his nickname?”

The three men either ignored her or couldn't hear her over the radio, so she repeated her question.

“What are you asking?” the sommelier said.

“His nickname,” she said. “My father. What
is
his nickname?”

“Oh, we weren't talking about him,” the sommelier said.

“It was a restaurant joke,
chica,
” Felix said. “You wouldn't understand.”

“What is his nickname?” she asked again, louder.

“We don't have time for this,” the waiter said. “They're waiting for the cake.”

“Aurora,” I said. “Don't.”

“What
is his nickname
!” she demanded.

My hand felt the slap on her face before my brain did. The waiter rushed to wheel the cake out of the kitchen, followed by the sommelier, his head bent down in shame. Felix turned back to his station.

Aurora said nothing. She picked up the radio and carried it out of the kitchen. I watched her walk away, mesmerized, the boisterous
ranchera
music echoing through the tight corridors that led to the dining room.

Atop an unused busing station, amid a maze of tables garnished with fine silver and crystal, the rows of extravagant buffet trays and carving stations, the hundreds of guests (many of whose youthful and now almost unrecognizable caricatures graced the front entrance) talking, laughing, and reminiscing in various states of drunkenness, sat the boom box, playing
ranchera
music at top volume. Aurora was
cutting through the crowd to the front door, the curls of her long black hair cascading down her back like steam. That was the last time I saw her.

Felix raced to turn off the music, yet the crush of revelers made a short trip across the room a series of complicated dips, elbowings, and double-backs. The Mexican staff filed out to watch him juggle his limbs through the dining room. Some of them laughed, craning their necks, but continued working in the kitchen. Others were bolder, wading out into the room as if they were entering the deep end of a pool.

I straddled some invisible line between the two. I debated whether to rush in and tackle the boom box or retreat into the kitchen, humiliated, and leave out the back door before I could be scolded and denied a reference for another restaurant. A decision had to be made. I stood fixed in my spot, paralyzed, and clasped my coarse hands together, wondering if they were strong enough for outdoor work. I hadn't noticed one of the busboys tapping me on the shoulder, asking,
“¿Porqué estas orando?”
(Why are you praying?)