She was nearing Sunset Boulevard. Before they had moved into this neighborhood, there had been many prostitutes on that strip of the street. Amalia’s face had burned with embarrassment when she and Raynaldo drove past women with skirts so tiny their buttocks showed. Most of the women were black, many Mexican, a few white. Some wore skin-tight flesh-colored pants that made them look naked. Amalia could not conceive of a woman selling her body—imagine!—and so she had looked at the women with disgust. But on another Sunday evening, when she and Raynaldo were caught in tangled traffic, she saw a squad of cops mounted on horses herding the garish women along the street. They corralled them into a mass of painted flesh. Amalia detested the smirks on the faces of the cops. She felt sorry for the women. She remembered the way Immigration patrols had rounded up Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. Under the paint, the women had suddenly looked frightened to her.
Now most of the cheap rooms that had been rented by the hour housed the new aliens from El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua.
The Clive Barnes Liquor Barns Bonanza—it always astonished Amalia that Anglos often attached their names to questionable places in Mexican neighborhoods—displayed a large L, signaling a Lotto station. Amalia walked past it, deciding she would post-pone comparing her number with the winning one. That made her feel good, for now, merely not discovering that, again, she had not won.
With a growl, a motorcycle halted at an intersection. Two women were mounted on it. Both were dressed in leather, wrist bands studded with metallic tips. One had ferociously blonde hair, the other’s was inky black. One wore black leather shorts, the other pants; both wore shiny black boots. Amalia was relieved that they were not Mexicans.
The new sights of the city still accosted her. Hollywood Boulevard, just a block away from here, was the worst, at times like a graveyard for the walking dead, so many of them young, dazed, hollow-eyed—
Look over there! Across the street. That terrible place near the freeway. A giant sign proclaimed proudly: ALLAN WALLACH’S FEMALE WRESTLING EXTRAVAGANZA NIGHTLY … AMATEUR NIGHT ON WEDNESDAYS. Incredible! Who could enjoy wrestling in mud, and who could enjoy watching it? On weekends, lines formed outside the square building.
Thank God the Pussy Cat Theater, farther on, no longer displayed those brazen posters outside. Years earlier it had. Amalia could not believe that a woman or a man would allow being photographed like that, with only those heavy black spots over their private parts. When Raynaldo informed her that those spots were not there in the actual films, Amalia gasped.
Now she stopped to look longingly at one of the many sofas in a “gypsy furniture lot.” On weekends, or at night, sofas were put up for sale on the lots of closed gas stations. Red, blue, green, purple, velvety, satiny! Amalia could see one of these sofas in her living room—and Raynaldo had offered to buy her one soon.
A bus bench nearby had a picture of “la Marilyn.” Near it—incongruously—a group of six young men and women—three were Mexicans—clustered—young, yes, but they seemed to want to look old, dressed in new yet oddly drab clothes. All held—
Bibles. Protestant Bibles!
The group was coming toward her. Amalia could not understand Mexicans who became Protestants. It was unnatural. There was one television evangelist she especially detested, a wrestler at one time. He gathered hundreds of gullible Mexicans, who sat quivering and trembling and hallelujah-ing with raised hands. Once Amalia had watched the Mexican preacher demand that an old man rise from his wheelchair and walk. The man tried—and fell. Amalia had no doubt it was God who had pushed him for being there…. As an intense young woman with glasses and a thick black Bible approached her, Amalia increased her interest in an electric-blue sofa.
“… not only beautiful,” the lot salesman was hawking, “but it’s very durable, feel it—real—and so inexpensive you won’t believe it, and for a small down payment I’ll hold it for weeks—I’m at this location every week, and—”
The girl with glasses held her Bible inches before Amalia’s face. “La palabra de Nuestro Señor!”
“I speak English,” Amalia said. “I am a Mexican-American.” She touched her pretty dress to affirm that.
A young man joined the girl with glasses. He was tall, thin. “Are you born again!” he demanded of Amalia.
A Mexican man and his wife were strolling by. They stopped. “None of your fuckin’ business,” the man asserted to anyone, everyone.
The woman with him shouted: “Why don’t you born-agains go to a real church and pray for forgiveness?”
“God is everywhere!” A girl wearing a gray sweater whirled her Bible in the air.
A teenage boy and two girls ran from across the street, to join. A young man thrust Bible tracts at them.
“Get out of our neighborhood. It’s a Catholic neighborhood!” yelled the teenage boy.
“You’re going to hell if you don’t heed the Word!”
“No, you’re the one who’s going to hell!”
“You are!”
“You are, son of a bitch!”
Amalia sought for something intelligent with which to accost these brash people with their Protestant Bibles. “You don’t even believe in the Holy Mother’s divine intercession.” She had remembered the exact words from her catechism classes with Mother Mercedes, in El Paso. The little nun’s spirit would be smiling on her for that.
“That’s right, we don’t, because God doesn’t like intervention,” another of the young men with Bibles asserted.
A girl poked his chest three times with her finger. “I was born Catholic and I’m gonna die Catholic!”
“Then go on believing in idols and incense—”
“Oh, you are really going to go to hell for that!”
“You’re the one who’s going to hell!”
Amalia could have settled it all right now. Those Protestants had one foot in hell already. Everyone knew that leaving the holy Catholic church was a mortal sin. Of course, Protestants could always return, if they repented, because God, in His infinite love, forgave everything—except blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, Amalia remembered from her holy lessons. But who would want to commit blasphemy against a holy ghost?
“You’re lost, we’re founds “Who’s lost?” “Let go of my hair, bitch!” “You scratched me, shit!” “Satan!”
When the sofa salesman started pushing the debaters from his property, and they pushed back, Amalia hurried away.
She was on Sunset, within the crazy maze of fast-food stands, malls, variety stores: Alpha Beta, Stephen Holden’s Polio Loco, Carl’s Jr., Thrifty’s, Maurice Zolotow’s Pots, McDonald’s Billion Burgers, The Colonel’s Chicken, Denny’s Food, Howard Kissel’s Best Pies, Tommy’s World Famous Burgers of Hollywood, Builders Emporium, Sal Chavez’s Fashions.
Standing there, wondering where to go first, Amalia felt very angry. That Lalo! she thought. He did not see a cross in the sky this morning.
7
JUST MIDMORNING and it was this hot! Amalia heard a brief, nervous rustle of palm fronds. Then again, the air was still. Was this the season of scouring fires in the hills? That’s when hot desert winds invade and palm trees thrust dead branches on the street. The sun becomes red, and it seems as if the city of lost angels is under fierce judgment for its beauty, its ugliness.
Amalia did not think that. She sensed it as she stood on Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. She did not want to add anything to the worries that had followed her all morning.
SUMMER SHADES MEAL DEAL $2.99, Plus Tax.
That enticement of free sunglasses was stretched on a banner across the long window of the Carl’s Jr. fast-food restaurant. Well, she hadn’t planned to spend that much money on breakfast, but perhaps she could talk them into the glasses anyway. That consideration made Amalia decide to go there instead of across the street to McDonald’s, though its pretty lawn with bunches of lavender and white oleanders had beckoned. In its own way, Carl’s Jr. was just as attractive; and at McDonald’s there we
re always boisterous young people with rock music plugged into their ears—where it should stay. She did enjoy some Western music, secretly, when she happened to overhear it; it was not entirely unlike the Mexican ballads she loved.
Lowering the orangy ruffle across her shoulders and with the white flower in her hair, Amalia entered Carl’s Jr.
Jr. Crisp Burritos.
She read the new item on the menu posted over the counter where she waited to order. Crisp burritos! Burritos were soft! What next? She placed her order for breakfast—two eggs with the yolks well cooked, and sausages. “And the free sunglasses.” She smiled at the teenage Mexican girl—in a pert tan uniform—who was taking the orders.
“The glasses come only with the full meal.” The girl pointed toward the lunch menu—all kinds of hamburger combinations.
“But it’s not lunchtime.” Amalia was indignant.
“No,” the girl recited, “but we serve burgers all day and that’s the only way you get the sunglasses.”
Suddenly, getting the glasses was essential to Amalia. She decided to have a very early lunch and then not eat again till dinner. No one could say a pound or two less on her would make her look gaunt, and thank God for that. “I’ll have the Western Burger—very well done—with the bacon and the cheese. And French fries,” she added—to get her through to dinner and to qualify for the sunglasses…. She did enjoy a good hamburger like everyone else.
Some people still thought Mexicans ate only beans and rice. Well, she had eaten her share, who hadn’t?—but she had also come to like fried chicken, now that Gloria and Juan loved it so much, and even a sandwich with mayonnaise—but not too often.
Before she left the ordering counter, she had added a large Diet Pepsi to her lunch. When she paid, she was given a plastic tab with a number, which would identify her order when it was ready, in minutes. “My sunglasses—”
“Shades,” the young man in a tan uniform corrected. He gave her a choice of frames, green or fuchsia.
Green.
Amalia chose a booth that would face the window and at the same time offer her a view of the colorful pictures on the wall to one side—bunches of shiny fruit in one, buildings and their shadows in another. She set her free sunglasses on the table, glancing at them now and then.
“Booths are for more than one. Tables are for people who are alone.” That was said by the girl delivering orders.
Alone! Raynaldo would be back, was probably waiting for her at home—or out looking for her urgently…. Amalia adjusted the sunglasses firmly before her plastic tab, asserting her intention to remain in the booth.
“Just don’t let the manager see you,” the girl warned dourly. “And if he does, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The same girl delivered her order a few minutes later. “This isn’t a hamburger with cheese and bacon,” Amalia said. “It’s one egg!” And the egg looked uncooked, the yolk floated in liquidy whiteness.
The girl checked the plastic number—and yanked the plate back. “This belongs to her.” She pointed an accusing finger at a woman eating hurriedly nearby. “She got your order.”
The woman grasped her plate and ate the elaborate hamburger more quickly. She was Anglo, shabby, but trying to retain some elegance by constantly adjusting a tilted felt hat on which a red-dyed feather quivered.
“That’s not your order!” the girl yelled at her.
“You brought it to me.” The woman gulped the hamburger.
Good! Amalia thought. She ate better than she had intended. “Where’s my order?” she called out to the girl.
The girl stared at both women as if they had conspired against her. “You’re going to have to pay for the hamburger you ate,” she threatened the old woman with the feathered hat.
In a loud raspy voice, off-key and inserting words of her own, the old woman burst into a song:
I’m the yellow rose of Texas—
Only a few in the coffee shop bothered to look at her.
—the yellowest rose of Texas
that ever God made bloom—
God! Texas! And she, too, was from Texas! And there was a rose-bush in her court!—even if it was dead. All this was too much to be a coincidence! It was a sign! … Of what? Amalia questioned herself. A sign of the craziness of Hollywood, that’s what, she answered herself sourly, angered that an old woman who had eaten her hamburger and had sung an awful song about a yellow rose—and in a terrible voice not even the compassionate Holy Mother would tolerate—could have lulled her into the memory of the beautiful silver cross she had not seen this morning.
With rigid dignity, the shabby old woman walked out of Carl’s Jr., tilting her hat as if to a vastly appreciative audience.
Soon the girl was back icily with Amalia’s replaced order. The potatoes were limp. Amalia sipped the tall cold drink. “This isn’t a Diet Pepsi, and the potatoes are limp,” she told the girl.
The girl plucked up a potato and broke it to show how crisp it was. It made no sound. She sniffed the Pepsi.
Amalia poked suspiciously into the hamburger. She recoiled with disgust, the beginning of fear. Blood had flowed in a red streak from the patty. “I said very well done.”
The girl whisked the plate away again and in a few minutes replaced it with another.
Amalia felt dejected. She looked at the sunglasses. She located them at another angle, so they would catch a glint of sun. She ate, trying to savor her very early lunch, not entirely succeeding. She moved the sunglasses a half inch more, studied the green frames.
Nearby, a fat man and an even heftier woman with several chins sat with two plump, colorless children. Grandchildren. Obvious tourists. With red hair. And they were talking about—
Earthquakes! The “Earthquake Extravaganza” that Universal Studios had recently added to its attractions.
Amalia did not want to listen, but the fat woman was talking loudly, interrupting herself with tiny gasps and snorts: “Well, you know, the real earthquake will be much, much worse than what those good folk at Universal Studios simulated, bless them.”
The man continued to eat, as if he had long ago stopped listening to the woman, even looking at her. The fat boy and girl waited for more details of disaster.
“Well, you know,” the woman went on, “everything will blow up and the whole city will burn and everyone will drown in the ocean and landslides—”
Amalia glared at her. She detested that Universal Studios “attraction.” Television clips and giant billboards all over the city proclaimed ominously, over scenes of fire, buildings collapsing, people running, screaming: EARTHQUAKE! SURVIVE IT ONLY AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS! There were stupid people and there were even more stupid, cruel people, and those at Universal Studios were the most stupid, turning something as terrible as an earthquake into entertainment—and making money out of it. What next? A gang killing for tourists?… The roll was soggy on her Western Burger. She ate around it. She took the sunglasses, glanced through them, put them down again.
The tourist woman was embellishing her picture of doom—pointing out to the suddenly frightened children that they would all avoid it because they were leaving Los Angeles “in five days.” “Well,” she regained momentum. “Lord help all those poor folk who live here, crushed, mangled, burned, and drowned.” She addressed everyone at Carls Jr.
Amalia said to the woman: “The earthquake is predicted for today, I heard it on the radio.” The moment she said that, she wished she could draw back her words. She had wanted to frighten the woman and the children, but she had terrified herself. Would her words help to bring the earthquake on? She reminded herself she was not a supersticiosa—but this couldn’t hurt: She crossed herself and said an urgent prayer.
The fat woman laughed, an ugly laugh that grew louder with each tiny gasp she had to take: “Well, were not worried at all. Well, don’t you know, we always avoid disaster. Well, you know, a few years back when we were visiting here we were on the freeway when there was a huge disaster. Wel
l, don’t you know, we weren’t even scratched and everyone around us died.” Wheezing, she gathered her silent husband and her fat grandchildren, and, flesh bouncing, ushered them out of the restaurant.
Amalia felt even more despondent now, more alone. Why had she come here? Of course! To reexperience a happy time—when Raynaldo had brought her and Gloria and Juan here to celebrate Gloria’s fifteenth birthday. But had it really been a joyous time? No—but why not? Certainly not because Raynaldo didn’t try, told them to order whatever they wanted, never mind the price. He’d even brought a surprise cake, which he presented to Gloria. “To the most beautiful girl,” he’d said. No, he had called her “the most beautiful daughter,” yes, and added: “Amalia is the most beautiful mother.” Had Gloria even smiled? Whatever she had done, Juan had absorbed her mood instantly. What had gone wrong? And why was she thinking about that now? Trying to find pretty memories and coming up with—
She turned the sunglasses away from her. A blade of light had flashed in her eyes. She looked out the window. A truck had parked nearby, with fresh fruit. What if she had suggested this morning that she and Juan and Gloria go somewhere by bus, to a park, and have a picnic? She couldn’t even imagine either of her children on a bus. They probably would have stared at her in disbelief. Perhaps not. A picnic, with fruit afterward, with her children.
The entrenching mood—part sadness, part vague anxiety—made her consider going to confession today She liked the feeling of closeness to God, with a priest, in the quiet of a confessional booth. She would always remind God that she was a divorced woman who saw no reason to be separated from His holy church, remind Him that Father Ysidro had spoken about that to Him that day in the church courtyard in El Paso, and—
Manny is dead!
Suddenly, with a rush of sorrow, the fact of her son’s death had assaulted her mind and her whole body with such force that she wanted to scream. How strange! An entire absence would exist the rest of her life. Each time she realized that—and the realization would come at her without warning, over and over—it was as if it were the first time of discovery, that powerful, that strange, the knowledge that she would never again in this life see or touch her son.