She opened her purse and took out his letter. She read from it, the same words she had already memorized—recited them silently to herself like a personal prayer, again, ending, always, with the same words: “I love you with all my heart.” She had restored her breathing. She returned the letter to her purse. She looked out the window, to thrust away her thoughts of death.
A squad car had stopped to question two young Mexican men who had been walking along the street. From the window, they looked harmless to Amalia, like other boys in the neighborhood loitering about on a Saturday morning. Two policemen got out of their car. One was—a woman!—blonde, hefty, her hand already on her gun. Why did women want to be as terrible as men? Amalia wondered. Then she noticed that the other cop was—a Mexicanl She turned away in confusion, because she had also thought: What if those boys just killed someone, what if they’re members of Los Vatos Nuevos? Was anything clear anymore?
“Amalia!”
Oh, my God, it was Mr. and Mrs. Huerta—were they everywhere?—neighbors she constantly ran into, always bragging to her that their son was studying to be a lawyer. Now she wished she had taken a small table, so they couldn’t plop down with her and gnaw her ears with their reports.
“What a pretty flower in your hair.” Mr. Huerta was preparing to invade her table. His hand was on the back of the booth.
Amalia touched the white flower.
Mrs. Huerta, as thin as a brown skeleton, peered at it. “That’s a poisonous weed!” She backed away in shock.
“What!” Amalia believed it instantly, the way she always accepted disaster as inevitable. She tore the flower from her hair, threw it on the floor. I put a poisonous weed in my hair! She stared at the blossom, amid scraps of food not yet swept away from an earlier meal. Depression stabbed at her.
Mr. Huerta was ready to slip into the booth. “You know, our son—”
“I’m waiting for Raynaldo,” Amalia said firmly. “And I see him now across the street.” She pretended to wave out the window.
Alone now—the Huertas had taken a table far from hers—she flirted with the top of her pretty dress. What would Manny have become? she wondered. So smart but with little education. And Juan—?
A man nearby was avidly looking for something in the newspaper he had been reading. Not quite middle-aged, not attractive. Why did so many men—and so many Mexican men—allow themselves to get a fat stomach so early?… Not Angel. He had a slender, flat stomach …
It was true that, last night, she had felt at ease in his rooms when she noticed the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The benign brown face of the Virgin seemed to assure her she had done right, keeping this lonesome man company. The small apartment—a room and a kitchen—would have looked even better if he hadn’t left clothes lying about.
“Because I don’t have a woman,” he interpreted her look. “And, Amalia, a man without a good woman is worthless.”
She had reacted again to his murmury voice, his liquidy eyes. She sat on the chair he cleared for her. Oh, yes, the effect of the extra beer increased even more when he stood near her. Through the open door—he had made no move to close it—she heard the sound of a woman coaxing her child to do … something. It didn’t matter; she merely heard ordinary voices that told her there was nothing wrong with being here.
Angel touched her shoulder, so briefly that it seemed for a moment that she had imagined it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that it looks so soft that I had to touch it, and it feels even softer than it looks.”
He was admiring her the way a young man admires a young woman he is thinking of falling in love with, will romance a decent interval, marry. There was no doubt he had mistaken her for a woman much younger than she was, perhaps his age? It wasn’t that she wanted to look younger; no, it was just that she wanted to recapture—No, you couldn’t recapture what had never existed. It was just that she wanted to think she might experience perhaps only a hint of what she had been denied, what it would have been like to be a young girl loved … and, yes, desired. It was that feeling of a denied beginning, lost before it could be hoped for, that kept her there so that when—
That bastard! In Carl’s Jr. Amalia pushed away the cold, ugly plate of food before her.
“I won!”
The man nearby had found what he had been looking for in the newspaper. “I won,” he said in amazement to the people turning to look at him. “It’s my number. Printed right here. Look. I won the Lotto!”
A girl in shorts rushed over to him to verify the impossible. A young man demanded angrily: “You won two million dollars, man?”
“No,” the elated man said. “I just have four matching numbers.”
“Oh, wow,” groaned the girl disdainfully. “Four numbers, oh, wow.”
The young man informed the man: “Well, that means you’ll get—” he paused to figure it eagerly “—that means you’ll get about … thirty-four bucks.”
“Or less,” the girl predicted, back in her seat.
“So what?” the man said. “I won, you didn’t.”
Others in the restaurant withdrew their interest.
So little, so grateful, Amalia thought. How many dollars’ worth of tickets did he buy every week? Once Raynaldo had bought forty dollars’ worth of tickets he couldn’t afford. Would this man now buy even more? Would he ever win anything again? Amalia drank her Diet Pepsi, mostly melted ice now. Maybe she should check her own number in the newspaper. Being near someone who had won something might increase her chances. No, that didn’t make sense.
Her eyes wandered out the window, onto Western, splashed with bright colors concealing gathering grime. She followed the sweep of palm trees along Sunset. Beyond, the sky was uncommonly blue.
What would constitute a miracle in her life?
That silliness again! She chastised herself for the thought that had seeped into her mind. She searched for a substitute thought, something that would make more sense, something that—
Maria Felix.
The great Mexican movie star entered Amalia’s mind for the second time today. Until this morning she hadn’t thought of her since … She couldn’t even remember when La Maria was always indomitable, always triumphant. Even when she died or was killed, she was redeemed. Amalia remembered her in a variety of roles: an empress in a puffy dress keeping her kingdom together for her subjects; a peasant woman in immaculate white fighting the land-owners for justice; a modern-day millionairess in a wide-shouldered black gown ministering to the poor and needy; a proud, poor woman in a flower-print dress; and—
The Virgin Mary!
Yes, she had played the Holy Mother, played her so marvelously that Teresa had made a sign of the cross when she appeared on the screen. Amalia remembered the movie, El Monje Blanco, yes, The Monk in White, about a handsome young carpenter and his beautiful wife, their Christlike child. Wait—Maria Felix had played the mother of the boy. Yes, because she had knelt before the Blessed Virgin, who had appeared to her in a dazzling radiance of miraculous light; and it was Maria who had asked the Holy Queen: “Why have you deigned to appear to a humble woman like me?”
“Because you—”
Amalia could not remember what the Blessed Queen answered; but, now, it seemed to her that Maria had played the Virgin Mary. Wait! She had played both roles, the wife and the Holy Mother. Had she? Well, she did remember this: In real life—Milagros had read this aloud from a Mexican tabloid to the others at the sewing factory—Maria Felix’s son, a handsome young man who had come to Los Angeles to try to get into American movies, had been arrested, for drugs and—And—
All of this was a sudden jumble to Amalia as she sat at Carl’s Jr. and realized that her meal had been a disaster. Still, she did have the sunglasses.
“Huccome you didn’t eat?” The girl who had delivered her order was already clearing the table.
“Because I didn’t like it,” Amalia said.
“It’s what you asked for.”
That infuriated Amalia. “No, it is not what I asked for.” She walked out. At the door she realized she had left her sunglasses behind. She returned to get them. The girl had pocketed them. “They’re mine,” Amalia said. The girl surrendered them as if she were being held up.
Outside, Amalia tried on the glasses. She stared at her reflection in the window of Carl’s Jr. She looked like a bat with phosphorescent green eyes! She took them off and dumped them in the nearest trash container.
She stood in the large parking lot of Carl’s Jr., Sav-On Drugs, Alpha Beta Groceries, Wherehouse Records, and—Roaming the lot crammed with cars were tribes of ragged people. They were everywhere. Some were sleeping on the concrete now. A few seemed still to be trying to look … clean. They were all shadowy, even in full daylight. Across the street, before M. Zolotow’s All-Week Check Cashing for New Citizens Open Weekends, a line of people waited—to be charged a huge fee from what they had managed to earn somewhere, Amalia knew. In the distance—she saw—a glossy building was going up—another one! If everything was going to collapse in a giant earthquake, why did they keep building those tall things?
Noisy honking! A wedding. Amalia saw a white veil swirling out of an open car window. She felt a brushing sadness. Last night, with Angel, she had thought, Oh, how pretty I must look to him with the gardenia he gave me—
A few feet away three tough-looking Mexican girls sat in an open car … drinking beer! One had a large tattoo on her arm. They were Gloria’s age. Dios mio! Was it possible? Girl gangs? Would Gloria—? No, as Raynaldo had often commented, Gloria was not only beautiful but she had a good head on her shoulders. She would never—
Such strange laughter! Walking toward her, fluttering, was a flurry of young men. Two were blond, bleached blond, another was Mexican, the fourth was black—all wore makeup. Maricones! Amalia thought. Some young men whistled derisively at them from a passing car. The effeminate young men exaggerated the movements of their hips. Amalia turned away from them.
“There he comes!” one of the young men had called excitedly.
“Johnny!” another welcomed.
“He’s more gorgeous every day!”
“Those eyelashes!”
“Who’s looking at his eyelashes? That body—and he never wears a shirt.”
Amalia froze on the hot sidewalk. She saw the young man the effeminate boys were waiting for. He was crossing the lot toward them and he had not yet seen her. It was her son, her Juan. Of course she should have known. Of course she had known—
The shirtless young man joined the eager group.
It was not her son. Of course not. It was another good-looking young man, tanned, not even Mexican, holding his shirt slung over his shoulder. How ridiculous that she had thought even for a second—she hadn’t really—that it was her son, that her son was—
Just what did she suspect her children of?
Nothing! Everything!
A man was rushing at her. She had not even seen him emerge out of the maze of parked and circling cars in the vast lot. Tall, thin, his skin darkened by years of exposure, hair and beard matted, he was a presence so terrifying that everyone nearby dodged away, except Amalia. She could not move. Before her, the man raised his arms, fists ready to strike down on her. Fear coiled about her body. All she could do was wait for the inevitable.
The man’s hands unclasped. Then one hand scratched slowly at the air in a tangled benediction. “It’s all ended, all of it, isn’t it?” he gasped.
Now that she knew she was no longer confronted by violence, Amalia’s challenging anger rose: “How dare—!”
“All ended?” the man pled out of the depths of some private hell.
His eyes were so full of hurt insanity that instead of raging at him, Amalia shook her head. “No,” she told him—and then she moved past him.
8
AMALIA STOOD at the corner of Sunset and Western, out of the parking lot that had turned into a pit of madness. When she looked back at it now, it was again only a crowded lot on a busy Saturday. It had felt like a pit of madness.
What if the Divine Mother sent a sign you misunderstood? Wasn’t the world full of strange occurrences, like the encounter just now with that madman? How could you tell one of those from a divine sign? If you thought about it, it wouldn’t be difficult, would it? The earlier encounter was a sign of only one thing, these terrible times. Divine signs were wondrous: A spring flowed out of a rock, a tree grew in the desert, warm snow fell in summer.
“Amalia, I want a chapel built right here.”
Amalia laughed aloud, caught herself, wondered whether that thought required only a sign of the cross or a prayer; how irreverent had it been? She had imagined that the Blessed Mother had asked her to tell the priests that a chapel must be built on this lot, to replace Carl’s Jr., M. Zolotow’s All-Week Check Cashing, McDonald’s, Tommy’s Famous, El Polio Loco … Hadn’t Father Ysidro told her that Our Lady had once demanded a chapel in a swamp, on quicksand?
“Merciful Mother, you really mean exactly here, in the middle of all this?”
“Yes.”
“But—”
“Amalia! Don’t you understand me? Must I send my messages through someone else?”
Well, now she must say a prayer. Her thoughts had spilled too far. Who would question Our Blessed Lady’s demands?—no matter how impossible they sounded. God and she always had a reason, a good one. Still, Amalia wished she had asked Father Ysidro whether the chapel in the swamp was ever finished and how many people were swallowed into the sand.
“I understand, Blessed Mother. The chapel must be right here, in this shopping center.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell them.”
But try to convince the owners of the businesses!
Amalia tried to take control of her thoughts. But—
“Amalia Gómez has had a visitation, Your Holiness.”
That is what the local priest would finally tell the Pope.
“Are you sure it wasn’t smoke from a sky-writing airplane?”
Well, there were always initial doubts.
AMALIA GÓMEZ OF EL PASO HAS VISITATION!
She revised the tabloid headline. She had to allow for unbelievers.
AMALIA GÓMEZ OF HOLLYWOOD CLAIMS VISITATION BY THE HOLY MOTHER!
A miracle….
Amalia sighed.
When the headline appeared in all the supermarket papers, the women at the sewing sweatshop would say, “Why, she’s my very best friend.” Milagros would claim to have expected it all along. The people whose homes she worked in would wish they had been much more generous to her. And her husbands—and some of the other men she had known—would be terrified. They would say: “God help me!”
Enough! Amalia decided where she would go now: to have her blood pressure checked at the other end of the huge lot. Every two months or so the Red Cross trailer stationed itself there for that purpose. The service was free. She hadn’t been to the county clinic downtown for longer than she liked—for “woman things.” The free clinic wasn’t exactly free. She wasn’t poor enough for that; she paid what they determined she could. She worried because she had overheard some women on the bus say that the governor was going to shut down many of those clinicas. Where would the women go? Thank God she and her children were healthy. Perhaps the Blessed Mother would ask for a clinic instead of a chapel.
Rosario might have said that, but she had gone too far in thinking it. She might have to confess it. The Blessed Mother always asked for a chapel. Who was she to question eternal mysteries?
Instead of crossing the lot full of craziness in order to reach the Red Cross trailer, Amalia decided to walk along Sunset Boulevard.
Suddenly a car painted over with spitting flames zigzagged to intercept another on the street. Other cars swerved, braked. Pedestrians dodged. Amalia pulled away as far as she could on the sidewalk. The two cars halted. Out of them, several young Mexican men rushed at each other. Amalia heard a shouted gang
name: “Los Locos!” Then she saw clubs and—The battle was over in seconds. Both cars screeched away.
She did not look to see whether there was blood on the street. Not those savages in my neighborhood! she thought. And where had those policemen been just now? Two squad cars were racing in the opposite direction. Hadn’t they seen what had occurred?—someone on the sidewalk had been hurt. “They’ll turn away as long as our own are killing each other, corazón,” Rosario’s voice continued to pursue her.
Amalia walked faster along the street. Well, nobody had to tell her that the police were just another uniformed gang. Hadn’t they turned on the people who were enraged by their indifference when a seven-year-old girl was struck by a stray bullet in another brutal gang shooting?—beating her family brutally. And in a poor neighborhood where they hadn’t found the weapons they claimed were there, hadn’t they crushed whole homes with sledgehammers? And hadn’t two dozen of them only watched as four of them—savages—kicked and clubbed a black man more than fifty times while he lay helpless on the dirt? Nobody had to tell her that the jailers of her son were as vicious as the pillaging gangas.
Amalia stopped at an outdoor stand, to get a frothy orange drink. It would cool her in this unbudging heat, and calm her anger.
When she reached the Red Cross trailer, a few people were waiting in line, others milled about, undecided. Inside the van, a man and a woman—“el doctor y su enfermera,” everyone called them, whether or not they were a doctor and his nurse—were earnestly checking an old man’s blood pressure. “Is it high? Is it high?” he kept asking as the two continued to stare at the gauge. In the line there were only two Anglos, a young man and a woman who looked to Amalia suspiciously like born-agains. If they said anything about hell—
“Last time I was here,” a hefty woman was informing everyone in Spanish, “a woman went into labor.” She found that hugely funny. She repeated the story to everyone who joined the line, her laughter increasing each time. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she added suddenly, “that her name was Concepción.”