“You have a pair of sunglasses on your head that you haven’t paid for.”
Yes, that was the tactic. Patricia had seen her sister steal glasses before, cheap ones, nerdy reading glasses that she didn’t need, at the drugstore. She’d try them on, pull them up like a headband, and try other pairs. Then she’d walk away wearing her own glasses with the stolen pair still on her head. Why didn’t she notice she had two pairs of glasses on her head? She instantly regretted not being more vigilant of her sister’s schemes.
“I swear it was a mistake,” said Claudia. “I really thought they were my own glasses.”
That argument was crucial, as it released Claudia from culpability and positioned her as just an absent-minded shopper.
Still, both sisters were taken into a back room where a young manager in a suit waited at the desk, his eyebrows carefully shaped.
“You’re lucky the merchandise you were trying to steal is under five hundred dollars. It qualifies as a misdemeanor, but you’ll still have to go to court and pay a thousand-dollar fine.”
“Why are you being so hostile? I’m a longtime Barneys customer and a huge fan!”
“But Barneys is not your fan anymore, I’m afraid. In fact, you won’t be able to come into the store or any other Barneys anywhere in the world ever again. If you do, you’ll be arrested,” said the manager. “All of this will be spelled out to you by our attorneys.”
“With this attitude, you’re going to go out of business!” Claudia warned.
After two hours in the room, where both sisters were searched and frisked by the guards, interrogated by the manager, and kept locked up until the police arrived and filed the report, they were finally let go.
“Listen to me,” exploded Patricia when they were finally back in the car. “I’m never, fucking ever, going out with you if you steal again!”
Sunday, February 28th
Felix kept making up excuses to get out of watching the twins. Patricia was swamped with work. Claudia wasn’t an option. Keila and Oscar, forget it. One babysitter bailed at the last minute: “Sorry, I just dropped my phone in the toilet!” The other one showed up but had to leave as soon as she arrived: “Oh, my God! My tattoo is oozing!” So, weathering another heat-record-reaching ninety degrees in the middle of February, Olivia dressed the twins in their Sunday best, secured them in their car seats, and drove in intolerable Friday-afternoon traffic down the 134 past Universal Studios, Warner Bros. Studios, the L.A. Zoo, Glendale, and Eagle Rock straight to Lola’s house.
“Who in the world are these two sweetie pies?” Lola exclaimed as soon as she opened the door. “Come in! I have some cookies.”
“We’re here to say hello,” said Olivia. “I wanted you to meet Diana and Andrea.”
Lola squatted to see the girls at eye level.
“Are you Andrea?”
“I’m Diana.”
“Ah, so she’s Andrea! Who is older?”
“I am,” both girls chimed in at the same time.
Lola produced some sheets of paper and a box of crayons and sat the girls down at the table to draw. “I always have these around for little visitors. Keeps them out of my cabinet with the porcelain dolls,” she whispered to Olivia.
“I went home very sad the last time I saw you. I really thought I could persuade you to help me with the twins. You didn’t give me a reason.”
“I don’t know if you’ll understand.”
“Try me.”
Lola knew she was better at showing than explaining, so she turned to the twins. “Who wants ice cream?”
The twins yelled in excitement.
“Let’s go to Scoops!” said Lola.
The shop was a few minutes away, but Lola, in the passenger seat of Olivia’s car, took the long way, asking Olivia to meander around the neighborhood as she pointed at newly remodeled houses.
“Do you know how many friends I’ve lost because of people like you? See that house? My friend Elsa lived there for years. She got evicted and now lives in Victorville, where she can afford rent. I haven’t seen her since she left.”
They passed in front of another house, this one with a modern façade. “See that one? That was Rosario’s. She’s way out in Hemet now. And that one on the corner? That was where David lived. An old flame. Gone from my life. It’s hard for me to put that aside and come work for you.”
Olivia was silent all the way, taking in Lola’s point, but after they ordered their ice cream and found a little table to sit at with the twins, she said, “I understand, Lola. I haven’t been paying attention. I see a house where others see a home. I am very sorry.”
Lola adjusted Andrea’s bib and said, “Don’t eat so fast, mi niña.” She sat the girl on her lap, took a tissue out of her purse, and wiped her mouth. Then she reached across the table to roll up Diana’s dress sleeves and to wipe up a spill of ice cream on the table. “Careful, sweetie,” she said. “You don’t want to get your pretty dress all dirty.”
Olivia thought about the innumerable moments when she’d found warmth and safety in Lola’s arms. First came the scraped knees, the bee stings, the lost toys. Then came the girlfriend fights and the boyfriend betrayals, the parental punishments, and the constant bullying that Claudia inflicted on her.
“I will take care of these girls for you,” Lola finally said. “But you need to promise me something.”
“Just ask.”
“You won’t flip anything east of La Cienega.”
March
Thursday, March 3rd
The promise of record-breaking rainfall in Southern California, courtesy of El Niño, had been keeping Oscar awake at night. During the day he’d search on the internet for any news quoting celebrity forecasters from NASA, AccuWeather, and the Weather Channel. They all agreed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that March was still too early to tell how much water the climate phenomenon was bound to deliver by the end of the year, but they were already calling it the Godzilla of El Niños. At night Oscar would shuffle downstairs in his pajamas and slippers and sit on the portico to wait for raindrops; even one would keep him hopeful, but as the dry months went by he’d begun to wonder if the much-anticipated monsoon would ever happen.
In his recurrent nightmares all he could see was smoke, smelly, orange smoke, the sign that the fire was near and it was time to run for your life. On this particular evening, he woke up with a start, overcome by a vision of his house engulfed in flames, his grandson, Daniel, barely escaping collapsing beams, rolling on the dry lawn in a futile attempt to put out the flames scorching his pajamas, his hair. This is what the drought in March meant: fires in September. Every plant and tree was tinder in the making. He tried to calm down, but the anticipatory dread would not go away. He walked to Daniel’s room and the sight of him placidly sleeping helped. What awaited them in the coming fire season? Would their house in Rancho Verde survive another year? Living in the wildland-urban interface, that zone where nature and city cohabited (or collided?), where your surveillance camera could spot a mountain lion roaming in your backyard while you slept, where you needed to keep your pets inside at night or they could become dinner for a pack of coyotes, where the birds nesting in your trees were falcons and owls, where you could discover a deer and her fawn just a few feet away from the eight-lane 405 freeway, was both awesome and terrifying. He could not stop thinking that it was this unashamed human encroachment into nature that was causing so much destruction.
Whenever he succumbed to despair this way, he resorted to his own escape: he tippy-toed to the driveway careful not to wake anyone up, got into his SUV, and drove out of the city. He headed north on Interstate 5 for two and a half hours, got off the freeway, took a side road and then a dirt road, deep into Kern County. Lit only by the headlights, small cloudlike clusters of white flowers hanging on low almond tree branches seemed to welcome him into the darkness. He parked a safe distance away from one of many beehouses he’d seen along the rows of trees and got out. Thos
e bees were brought in every year for pollination just before the bloom started. Winter downtime was over. Soon the almond shells would harden and the kernels would start to form. He knew all this because he owned the land he was standing on. He had bought Happy Crunch Almond Orchard a few years ago on impulse and no one, not even Keila—especially Keila—knew about it. Only Aunt Belinda, his father’s sister, was in on the secret, since she was in charge of the finances of the business, as Oscar’s father would have wanted.
In the eighties Keila found out Oscar had just sold the land in Santa Clara to developers. Why hadn’t he told her about his intentions to sell it? Had he been afraid she would oppose his idea? Or was it because of the prenup that cut her, his lawful wife, out of his trust? In order to inherit, the heirs to the fortune of the great Don Rodrigo Alvarado and Doña Fermina de la Asunción Ortega had to sign an agreement by which their spouses would not be included in the inheritance. To wed a member of the family, a bride- or groom-to-be had to accede to this. No one in the family knew why their ancestors wrote that particular clause. Some speculated that perhaps they had envisioned a future in which most marriages didn’t last long and their fortune would ultimately end up in the hands of ex-spouses. Others didn’t give the issue much thought. But for Keila this requisite had been a thorn from the start. She’d gone from questioning if it was even legal to exclude spouses from the Alvarados’ fortune to acceding to that ridiculous, archaic, never-heard-of-anything-like-it demand as a way to show Oscar that she loved him in spite of being treated as a second-class family member, as proof that she wasn’t marrying him because of his money.
Oscar’s failure to discuss or at least inform Keila of his plan to sell the land only made the distasteful nuptial agreement more odious to Keila. It was the one thing that had made her hesitate when Oscar proposed.
After Keila finally agreed that the sale of the land had been for the benefit of her family and he promised to include her in any future business decision, Oscar spent years searching for an opportunity, but every time he came to her with a proposal to buy this or that piece of property, Keila would turn it down flat.
“We have all the money we need. We could just live off the interest and not even touch the capital. Why go through the risk and trouble of starting a business? You can relax now. Think of yourself as retired.”
Like many entrepreneurs, Oscar had never considered retirement. He had always had visions of himself dying at his desk, a ninety-year-old man who could barely keep his head up or hold a pen in his shaky hand, his reading glasses hanging from the tip of his nose, and his long-nailed, cadaveric toes sticking out of a hole in his worn-out socks. He had imagined he’d be closing his eyes for the last time feeling the satisfaction of having multiplied the value of his inheritance twentyfold. But it wasn’t so much the financial accomplishment. His intent had always been to pay tribute to his ancestors’ heritage, their profound pride and respect for this land of promise and possibilities. Millennia after the first indigenous Californians settled along the coast and inland all the way to the Sierra Nevada, Oscar’s grandfather, Don José, married Doña Peregrina, the daughter of Don Refugio, who had received as grant the rancho next to theirs, Rancho Peñék, named after a legendary cat that had been spotted roaming the area. Both families thrived side by side, raising cattle and sheep and selling hide and candles. Two generations later, Oscar inherited a small fraction of this bountiful land, what he believed was an honor and a fundamental responsibility. He was sure he’d make his ancestors proud, if they could only witness his success.
When the proceeds of the sale of the land in Santa Clara hit the bank, he came to Keila with the idea of buying old houses in Venice and repurposing them into retail space.
“Who would want to shop on Abbot Kinney when there are plenty of nice shops on Wilshire? Furthermore, who would want to lease retail space in Venice, where it’s full of stinky, aging hippies and derelict-sofa-cluttered alleys?” Keila was quick to answer.
Oscar dropped the retail-space idea, but then, while exploring the area even further, he walked along the Venice canals and imagined an exclusive neighborhood with multimillion-dollar homes overlooking a pristine waterfront.
“You must be joking! Why on earth would people want to live on those canals, with bad access, condemned sidewalks, and stagnant water filled with mosquitoes and floating dead rats?”
Another opportunity rejected by Keila was the purchase of industrial buildings in Culver City, to be renovated as workspaces.
“There’s nothing in Culver City, not even a McDonald’s. And the movie studios already have their own buildings.”
Then there was the garment building in downtown Los Angeles, which could be converted into live-in lofts.
“You’re in L.A., you want a nice big house with a backyard and a pool, not a clothing factory pretending to be a living space next to Skid Row. Want that? Go to New York!”
And finally, before he gave up presenting business ideas to Keila, who, after all, was an artist and what did she know about real estate, anyway, came the suggestion of buying homes to renovate and flip in Silver Lake.
“Do you really believe anyone would look out the window at a fenced-in cement reservoir and see a lake, and a silver one, for that matter?”
Now, years later, flanked by rows of trees, Oscar walked in the dark, dragging his slippers in the dust. He suddenly realized that he might not be able to die proud of his work. He regretted having listened to Keila. Over time, his real estate ideas had proven to be not just right, but visionary. Had he invested in all those properties, he’d be a wildly successful landlord; he’d be a true Alvarado. But he wasn’t. Instead, he’d bought a water-guzzling almond orchard right before the worst drought ever recorded in the history of California, and now all he cared about was saving it without telling Keila he owned it.
He broke a twig off a low branch, one with tiny buttons of bloom, and bent it just a bit to check if it was pliable, a sign of life. When it didn’t snap at the pressure of his fingers, he smiled, walked to his car, and returned home with a mix of renewed hope and fear of Keila finding him out.
Monday, March 7th
Armed with hopeful umbrellas after an inconsequential morning drizzle, Olivia, Felix, and Lola drove to the pediatrician’s office at the hospital to get the twins checked. Follow-up visits were not as frequent anymore, and this one would be the last regarding the pool accident after the doctor gave the girls a clean bill of health.
“We’ll go for tacos afterwards,” Olivia promised the twins.
Lola was quickly settling into Olivia and Felix’s home—she got the guest room with a view, flex days when she needed to work at Legal Aid, and time off when she wanted as long as Olivia could cover for her—and while she was happy to see that her little Olie was now a mom in her own right, she found Felix abusive and arrogant, just the type she’d always despised. If it weren’t for her love for Olivia and now the twins (who had instantly populated her heart), she would have left, gone back to Highland Park, and been done with the nanny business.
“We’re running late,” said Felix, irritated, as he trailed a line of cars sluggishly rolling down Vermont Avenue. “And it’s your fault,” he snapped at Olivia. “I can never get you out of the house on time. Why the hell did you have to change the girls’ clothes right before we had to go?”
It was clear to Lola that Felix was itching for a fight. A petty one, again, like the others she’d witnessed since she moved in the previous month. She reached out and quietly pinched Olivia on the arm. Olivia found Lola’s eyes in the rearview mirror and knew not to answer Felix’s question.
“There’s the Children’s Hospital. We’re almost there,” said Lola to diffuse the situation.
As she waited outside the pediatrician’s office while the twins got checked, Lola remembered the promise she made to herself to always stand her ground, to never be like her wimpy, submissive mother always bending to her father’s will. Such a sick macho. Perhap
s that was the reason she never found a suitable husband. And now here she was, saddened to watch Olivia endure this man’s temper and foul mood. Suddenly, she felt a pressing need to defend her.
On the way home, Olivia noticed in the rearview mirror the girls in their car seats talking with Lola, partly in Spanish with a few English words thrown in, and partly in their own toddler language. She had been adamant about educating the girls not just bilingually, but biculturally, with a little dose of Jewishness: pork carnitas tacos from Porkyland, a Jewish-owned Mexican food joint in El Monte, were a favorite meal; she, Oscar, and Lola spoke to them in Spanish, Keila spoke to them in Hebrew or Yiddish; and salsa, merengue, boleros, cumbia, and reggaeton filled the rooms in the afternoons.
When Felix married Olivia he had promised to learn Spanish, but had never gotten around to doing it.
“Make an effort. Spanish is not that different from Portuguese,” she’d say, reminding him how well he spoke it with his mother, back in Lisbon.
“Portuguese is my native language just as Spanish is yours. Why don’t you learn Portuguese?” he finally snapped back one day.
He had a point, Olivia thought. Language had been a delicate issue between them, “delicate issue” being the precursor of “taboo subject” in the context of spousal arguments. And just before it turned into a full-blown battle, Olivia decided to stop insisting, focusing on the twins’ education and ignoring Felix’s.
Wednesday, March 9th
After making her weekly stop at the Zen car wash (Claudia loved going in the meditation room while her car got cleaned), she went for Korean tacos. It was her hope never to eat the cleansing kombucha probiotic amazon elixirs, matcha chia puddings, turmeric-infused kale and supergreens smoothies, massaged avocado and Inca spirulina algae salads, gluten-free baked goods, bland egg-white spinach omelets, God-help-us protein bars, or the vegan whatever-it-was that pretended to be something else, say burger meat or cheese, that was ubiquitous in Santa Monica, Westwood, Culver City, West L.A., Venice, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Silicon Beach, Koreatown, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, Brentwood, well, she might as well just say “everywhere.” As much as those culinary clichés had traction among certain Angelenos (Patricia, for instance), the reality of the city’s gastronomic landscape included ingredients like boar’s ears, quail gizzards, kid goat testicles, octopus smothered in its own ink, corn fungus, ant larvae, toasted grasshoppers, and Palos Verdes rooftop salt. Claudia integrated in her recipes any herb and spice that she found and smelled with pleasure, no matter whether it was part of the Mexican repertoire or not, as she felt guiltlessly free from the weight of authenticity enforced on cooks in other parts of the world. Grains of paradise, asafetida, kaffir lime leaves, hoja santa, pasilla chiles, achiote, chepil, or epazote; she had everything she could imagine. With so many farmers’ markets, smugglers, and specialty suppliers, there was nothing beyond any chef’s reach. Except foie gras, a decadent extravagance. “There are limits to condoning inhumane behavior; no duck or goose deserves such cruelty, just so people can enjoy their grossly fattened liver,” she’d tell other chefs. Thankfully the government had banned its sale (on and off over the years, but, oh well). After all, this was California, and she respected the law (sometimes).
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