by John Rechy
That was the first time Amalia had seen her friend perspire. She put her arm about Rosario, to still her trembling. “Today near the border la migra shot and killed a fourteen-year-old boy they said threw a rock at them,” the older woman said softly, “and when the people gathered to protest with the boy’s parents, the desgraciados turned up their loudspeakers to laugh and insult them.”
Amalia avoided passing Emilio’s garage. She did not want to risk seeing his wife. She resolved that if the opportunity presented itself again—and who was to say it wouldn’t?—she would be much more careful in choosing a boyfriend.
Rosario came to work laughing furiously. She had read an account in an American newspaper that claimed that maids were in such demand in Beverly Hills that they were being courted with huge salaries and presents. “‘Cars, jewels,’” she translated from the article. “‘Even so, there aren’t enough maids to go around,’” she finished reading. “Desgraciado she addressed the writer of the article. “Then why are so many poor women looking for work every day, and working for less than a dollar an hour?”
Milagros said, “Well, I think we should all take a bus right out there now and get one of those jobs so we can get presents and be rich.”
The women burst into laughter with her.
“I’d ask for a dishwasher, but I don’t have any dishes,” a woman said.
“I’ll demand a refrigerator, maybe one that works,” said another.
“You have to have food to put in it, mujer” another reminded.
“A green card so I could become legal—and a color television,” another called out.
“A good husband,” Amalia joined the laughter.
Even Rosario was laughing with them now.
The laughter stopped abruptly.
The rest of the day there was a rare silence among the women. It would be broken occasionally by one or another of them announcing without laughter what she would ask for.
In the next days Amalia would have left the sewing factory, except that Mr. Lewis took her aside and told her he was going to give her a raise because she was such a good worker, might become a supervisor—“if you play your cards right.”
“And Rosario?” Amalia knew that Rosario worked harder than any of the others, as if to stop herself from thinking.
“Who? Oh, her. Why, yes. Damn good worker, that Rosie, damn good.”
Amalia did leave soon after when Lewis offered her a “much larger raise” if she’d work “overtime” that night. He emphasized his meaning by brushing her arm.
“I am not a puta.” Although she was infuriated, Amalia only managed those words because now he was holding her hand tightly and she felt the beginning of the numbing fear she dreaded. But a few women were still gathering their belongings before leaving for the day, and Lewis walked back into his office.
Amalia returned to doing housework by the day, welcoming the certain freedom it gave her at the same wages. She made sure to make Sundays special for her children, if only by taking them for a walk. She was proud that that never embarrassed Manny, growing so fast. She did not mind if on those outings she encountered an attractive man to flirt with. She avoided a mural that had startled her recently: A tall, plumed Aztec held a bleeding, dying city boy in his arms. Amalia had clutched Manny’s hand.
The people she did housework for had very little reality for Amalia, only outlines; a newly divorced woman, a single man, a married couple with children in school. She was no longer surprised at how often the women gave her dresses they had no more use for—and that she wouldn’t be found dead in, thank you; nor at how often some berated her with their problems—as if she didn’t have any, none. With some of her employers, she pretended to know only enough English to get by, and so to limit any conversation with them, conversation which was always about them. Their pretty houses were much more real to her than they were. Eventually—she was a good worker, recommended to others—she retained only jobs where the inhabitants would be home briefly, if at all, while she was there.
She learned not to work after certain hours in exclusive areas. From others on the buses she rode, she had heard that Mexicans and black people were routinely stopped and questioned by Beverly Hills police. When that happened to her—a fat motorcycle cop asked her what she was doing as she stood admiring a garden—it humiliated her deeply; he kept referring to her as a “pretty muchacha”—a girl! From then on, she always carried another blouse, sweater, or coat folded neatly to wear fresh as she traveled to the bus on her way home. As soon as she was on the bus, she would remove the sweater or coat and flounce up a ruffle on her blouse.
To keep afloat—and as the children grew it became more difficult—she occasionally took in piecework to do at home. Her children would help. Gloria would adjust the expensive labels, Juan would glue them on the garments, and Amalia would sew them. When Manny was home, he would fold the items with exact care, sometimes making them all laugh by creating a grotesque face out of one of the garments.
At every available opportunity, Amalia would go back to the “sewing sweatshop” to visit Rosario.
“I’m sad, Amalia,” Rosario told her as they sat during a break in the hallway of the factory. “Very, very sad.”
“I know,” Amalia said.
“Those women—”
Amalia thought she understood. “But what can they do?” She was careful not to say “we.”
“Nothing,” Rosario said. “That’s what makes me so sad.”
Manny had started running around with three older boys. He was fifteen, they were seventeen. He would still sit looking intently at Amalia, as if something puzzled him. He adored his half brother and sister. He startled Amalia one afternoon. He walked in with long, deliberate strides, an exaggerated gait. He hunched his shoulders.
Juan laughed, delighted.
“Soy muy chingónr Manny boasted. “Real tough,” he interpreted the language of street gangs. “Every vato looks up to me!”
Sad, angry, bewildered, Amalia could only stare at him.
He was growing lean and sinewy, though not tall. His hair was black and wavy; he had liquidy brown eyes. To Amalia he looked even more like an angel. When he kissed her now, it was always with the promise to buy her extravagant presents, do wonders for her. Amalia was sure her love would keep him out of trouble.
She discovered—from the sister of one of the older boys who visited a girl in the courts—that her son was one of the toughest vatos in “East Ellay”—a “vato loco” a gang member of extreme daring. He boasted that his father was in prison. In an initiation for membership in the ganga, he had not only lasted the required thirty seconds of pummeling by those who were already members—to test his courage—but he had demanded they extend the count thirty more seconds, then thirty more—until he was aiming his fists at nothing because the other boys were only circling about him now and staring.
Her son! Her Manny! No. He would have had to become someone else. Amalia said to the girl who had reported all that with admiration: “How can you know so much? You just carry rumors, that’s all.”
“Mijo, what—?” she started to question Manny that day.
“I want you to be proud of me, ‘Amita,” he interrupted her. “If I’m the toughest, I’ll be able to protect you against everyone. Nobody will ever hit you or yell at you again.” He pressed his head against her chest.
She clasped him, and she hated Salvador and loved her son, and hated … and loved …
He came home drunk and Amalia refused to talk to him for two days.
At the sewing factory, Milagros surprised them all one day when Amalia had gone to see Rosario. After a recitation of what was occurring in the tumultuous lives of the characters in her serials, Milagros announced bluntly—she looked down and her voice grew tense—“My son is in a gang, he’s doing bad things, a man from the county says I should have him committed to the court, to a detention home as an incorrigible. He’s doing terrible things!”
“Do whate
ver you have to do before he’s killed or kills someone,” Rosario urged her.
Bruised from a terrible beating by her husband, Teresa arrived from El Paso unannounced and with her grieving statue: “I’m staying with you a few days,” she said. Amalia bought a cot for her, and the old woman slept in the bedroom with her, wheezing in a way Amalia did not remember.
Juan was ten, Gloria almost eight—both happy children, Amalia was certain. They went to school; and so she did not have to worry about leaving them with Teresa, whom they all merely looked at and avoided. God knows, the old woman was capable of filling them with all her recriminations against her own daughter.
When Manny came home drunk again, Amalia told him she was going to court to have him declared an incorrigible unless he changed his ways. She did not look at him, and he did not answer.
“What do you intend to do to your own son?” Teresa demanded in the morning.
“I only wanted to warn him.”
“Threatening your own flesh with incarceration. God help us when a mother turns against the flesh of her womb.”
Amalia knew she would never be able to turn her son in for incarceration. But there was no way to thwart Teresa’s judgments.
Only a few days later, a neighbor called out excitedly to Amalia, “Your son’s going to be on television! They announced it on the news, my son says it’s about Manny!”
Amalia watched the newsclip while Teresa stood rigidly behind her. With the child’s face he never lost, Manny leaned against a car on Whittier Boulevard, his arms crossed before him. Two other boys stood uncertainly with him. About them, traffic had halted. Policemen rushed toward the three.
Juan and Gloria peered excitedly at their brother on television, encouraging him not to move.
Amalia stayed up to watch the newsclip of her son again. She was fascinated, terrified to see this defiant little stranger. Where was he now? The two other boys with him had been arrested, but he had avoided the police, the announcer said.
Manny managed to run home, sweating so much he had taken off his shirt, so that Amalia saw, in shock, that he was no longer a boy, was a young man.
“‘Amá!”
“M’ijo!”
Amalia screamed at the cops who came with guns to the door, “Leave him alone, he’s scared, he’s a child, can’t you see?”
Manny was sent to juvenile home for hot-wiring a car, driving it with the two other boys into the midst of the busy street to display it to the gangs that paraded there. He had remained, challenging anyone to make him move.
Dressed now only in black, Teresa stared accusingly at Amalia.
“I did not turn him in,” Amalia said to the somber presence.
Clutching her black-beaded rosary, Teresa answered only by praying aloud: “… blessed is the fruit of your womb …” She stopped and said to Amalia: “You killed your own firstborn child before he had a life.”
From the rape you knew happened! Amalia wanted to shout but couldn’t form the words.
Then Teresa returned to El Paso—“to my husband, who needs me.”
“God will remember,” she said to Amalia and Juan and Gloria, “that I never divorced my husband.”
Strange, to receive a letter from her son, Amalia thought the first time Manny wrote her from the juvenile home. It was a letter full of expressions of regret for causing her pain, and even more expressions of his love for his “’amita.” What a beautiful letter—and what beautiful handwriting! Of course she was not surprised by how smart her Manny was because he was her son.
And Salvador’s. She remembered that more and more now.
Emilio reentered Amalia’s life. The “Mexican gypsy”—he still wore a bandanna handkerchief about his forehead although he was not at his garage—waited for her at the bus stop when she returned from work. His wife was gone—and what a mistake that had always been, but he had learned from his experience. “I’ve missed you very much, Amalia. I’ll be good to you,” he promised. “I’m sorry I was so stupid. I’ll prove to you I love you.” He sighed.
Why did she think of Gabriel? Because Emilio was returning to her the way her second husband had? Or because he had sighed, that way, that long? Like Gabriel. Yes. She remembered that, how often Gabriel had sighed. And Salvador … Yes. No, never! But her father …? She pushed away those odd thoughts. “Emilio,” she said aloud because she wanted to confirm something—and did. Hearing the name this time, she was sure there was a saint with that name. That helped her decide—that, and the sad way he was looking at her—that she could believe him, and she did, at a time, remember, when she was lonely, missed her son constantly, more each day, week, month.
She was with Emilio, the first times, only in his room. He held her with more tenderness than she remembered. He wanted to move in with her, as they had first planned, and, God knows, it would help during a most difficult time of making ends meet.
He came over, on a very cold California morning when he knew her children were in school and she was staying home to do some piecework she was behind on. To warm the house, she had left the stove burners on in the kitchen.
He kissed her, so gently.
She was in the bedroom—afterward—dozing, with his head on her breasts, when she heard the front door open. In her slip, she rushed out of the room.
She faced Manny.
“‘Amá …”
“M’ijo!” Quickly, she shut the bedroom door. She wanted to rush to her son, hug him, kiss him, tell him how much she’d missed him. But he looked … different… Had he run away?
“No,” he told her, “I got out early because I was good.” He spoke very, very softly, slowly. He opened his eyes, wide, as if he were trapped in a dream he was trying to wake from.
“You’re on drugs.” She knew it from hated memories of Salvador. “You just came out and already you’re on drugs.” She moved into the kitchen, away from the shut bedroom, into a warmth she needed desperately now.
He followed her. “No, ‘Ami” He tried to open his sad eyes wider, to show he was alert. “See?” He held out his hand as proof.
She backed away. “What’s that on your hand?”
“A tattoo, a burning cross,” he said.
She felt terrified and angry. She was aware of how sheer her slip was. She felt her nipples pressing against it. She saw her son’s hand held out toward her. Furious, she grabbed it, the hand with Salvador’s tattoo, the tattoo she had come to despise almost as much as she had despised him. Manny wrenched away, against the lit stove. She still clasped his hand when he tried to yank it away.
He screamed.
Then she smelled singed flesh and saw her son’s hand over the flames of the burner. She pulled him back and began to sob.
“‘Amá, ‘Amita, don’t cry, it was my fault, please don’t cry. When you cry—”
She licked the burn, to soothe it. She held it to her breasts, the way she had when she was nursing him and he fell asleep. His head burrowed there now. Then he looked up, toward the kitchen door.
Emilio stood there naked.
Manny’s dreamy eyes searched Amalia’s.
Emilio leaned against the door, his arms outstretched, hands propped on the frame, three heavy, dark patches of hair on his body. That’s how Amalia saw him—shocked—through Manny’s eyes. “I was with him only because I wanted to have a father for you when you came out!” she cried out to Manny.
She was still nursing her son’s hand when—minutes later—she heard the front door close and knew that Emilio was gone.
After that, Manny became an intimate stranger to her. He would watch her even more closely, at times he didn’t even seem to hear her talk to him, just watched her. She did not want to think about the fact that Manny had never seen Salvador’s tattoo—Teresa would have told him only that his father was in prison; Amalia did not want to think of that tattoo as an inheritance. She avoided looking at the whitish scar the burn had left.
She began to notice her other children more and mo
re. Why, Juan was such a happy boy, laughed a lot, so different from Manny Well, they didn’t have the same father, after all, and Gabriel had laughed a lot, like that; so what her two sons had in common would come from her. But she wasn’t sure what that was. She knew only that when she tried, she had a difficult time remembering when Manny had laughed like Juan, actually laughed, laughed happily. Of course, he had, she knew that, he must have, every child laughs and is happy. It was just that she couldn’t remember a specific time. That was only because he gave the impression always of being … so pensive, even as a little child. What was he always thinking about?
She began to notice Gloria was prettier than a girl her age should be. Well, there was no question about where she got her looks, was there?… When Amalia was delighting most in Gloria and Juan that way, into her mind would flow a memory of Manny—perhaps, often, in the angel’s costume she had sewed for him for the Posadas; when he covered her chest after the Immigration check into California; when he retrieved the flower she had thrown on the floor when Gabriel was leaving her … And then, all the joy she might have been feeling for her two younger children would vanish, and there would be only a sadness that ached emptily.
When, on her way to work, she saw Emilio with another woman—and nobody could say he didn’t like women with impressive breasts!—she did not care, did not care at all.
With increased credentials for toughness now that he had been incarcerated, Manny became the leader of one of the toughest gangs in East Los Angeles—that’s what the girl who reported to the women in the court about the activities of gangas said. When Amalia confronted him, he promised—“with all my heart, ‘Amita”—to be “good.”
He was in trouble again—stealing; back in detention.
When he returned this time, he got a series of menial jobs after school—which he attended only off and on; he worked stacking boxes in a store, worked in a car-repair shop. He would give Amalia whatever he earned, but he didn’t keep a job long and his wages were not nearly enough to help her support a full family. Amalia knew she would have to do something very soon.
