Children liked Olivia, they always had. And she liked them. For a long while Elaine had assumed she wouldn’t have to worry about her daughter, that Olivia would always spend her weekends and vacations baby-sitting for families in the neighborhood rather than out getting in trouble with kids her own age. She’d been a highly sought-after sitter—her New Year’s Eve sleepovers were the stuff of legend in the Elmwood, the part of Berkeley where they lived. Neighbors and pharmacy customers still reminded Elaine about it—more than one couple remembered those years as the last they’d been able to celebrate the holiday without their children. Of course that had ended when Olivia had discovered boys—or rather, when they discovered her. Even after she’d begun dating, though, Olivia remained in close touch with the neighborhood kids. Almost every weekend morning a child or two would ring the front door, and Olivia would sit on the porch with them, feeding them cookies or popcorn. They would submit, for her inevitable approval, especially well-done homework assignments, rollerblading tricks, and newly acquired puppies. To this day, half the holiday cards that filled Elaine’s mailbox every December were from local families and were addressed to her daughter alone.
Elaine sighed. She peeked out of the front window of the restaurant at her car, a three-year-old Honda Accord parked across the street. Not for the first time, Elaine regretted the color. She had bought it off the lot, and gotten a good deal, but had almost immediately been embarrassed by the obviousness, the ostentation of a cherry-red car. In this neighborhood, it seemed worse than ever. She had followed Olivia’s directions here, growing more and more nervous as she drove out of the parts of Oakland that she recognized. Elaine had never been to Fruitvale. The closest she’d come was reading the exit sign as she whizzed past on her way to the Oakland airport or down to the Peninsula.
Driving along Fruitvale Avenue, Elaine had battled the overwhelming urge to lock her doors. She knew Olivia would think she was being racist, but the groups of young men with slicked-back hair and baggy pants standing on the corners struck her as menacing. She had parked across the street from the restaurant and sat in her car for a moment, wondering if she should snap the anti-theft club in place over her steering wheel. She felt a vague sense of embarrassment; she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone who might be passing. She also knew that the sight of the bright red club would enrage her daughter and prove to Olivia that her mother was, after all, an incurable bourgeois bigot. Finally, Elaine left the club on the floor in the backseat. It wasn’t until she got out of her car and walked to the restaurant that she noticed that all the other cars were clubbed.
After a moment or two, their food arrived and, with relief, Elaine busied herself with her pupusas, dipping them in salsa, blowing on the steaming dough, and tearing off small bites with her meticulously whitened teeth. “These are terrific,” she said. “What a find! They should write about this place in the Oakland Tribune or something. They’re always on the lookout for little out-of-the-way places like this.”
“It’s only out-of-the-way if you don’t live here,” Olivia said.
***
Olivia pulled out of her parking space and stopped at the light. She looked into her rearview mirror and watched Elaine cross the street and get into her car. She had chosen the restaurant especially to oblige her mother to drive to a section of Oakland that she would otherwise never have entered. It was part of the campaign in which Olivia had been engaged since she was a teenager—to shake Elaine out of her myopia, to force her to confront and understand the desperate circumstances in which people lived just a few miles from the stuccoed mansions of the Berkeley Hills and the gracious brown-shingled homes of the Elmwood.
Only once she saw that Elaine was safely in her car did Olivia turn her attention back to the street before her. It was, after all, a lousy neighborhood, and she didn’t want anything to happen to her mother. While she drove home, Olivia thought, not for the first time, that Elaine looked worn, almost old. She used to think her mother pretty, but now she saw only Elaine’s sagging skin, the blue-tinted pouches under her eyes, the false brightness of her colored hair, and they made her impatient. Aging seemed, to Olivia, to be another of her mother’s irritating habits, like the slurping sound she made when she drank her morning cup of Earl Grey, or the fastidious grimace she wore when filing her nails.
Olivia and Jorge lived off Park Boulevard, in a part of Oakland notable only for the ethnic diversity of its inhabitants. Other neighborhoods in the city were segregated with an apartheid-like efficiency that confused Olivia. How did everyone know exactly where to live—exactly on which corner the line of demarcation was drawn? Olivia liked her block’s rainbow-coalition flavor. At least she liked it in theory. In practice, nobody talked much to anybody else, and her attempts at neighborliness had gone ignored, by and large.
As she walked down the long narrow alley that led back to her small apartment tucked behind a three-story building in what had once been a garage, Olivia held her breath. The young black man in one of the front apartments had just brought home a rottweiler puppy, and while Olivia knew she should be grateful to him for cleaning up after his dog, the stench of feces coming from the garbage bins was unbearable. She and Jorge had stopped opening their front window and had taken to burning incense, a smell she found just barely more acceptable than dog shit.
Jorge was lying on the living room couch, his legs stretched out in front of him. One toe poked through the white sock on his left foot. On the television, men kicked a ball back and forth. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that an endless loop of a single futbol game played day and night on Spanish-language television. The teams were indistinguishable from one another, and no one ever scored, but Jorge never grew tired of watching.
“Hey, little mother, give me a kiss,” he said in Spanish. Nine months in the United States had taught Jorge barely enough English to order a cup of coffee—not surprising since he almost never needed to speak the language. He and Olivia spoke only Spanish together, as they always had. The men who hired him gave whatever instructions were necessary in the same language, and the other workers were all, of course, from Mexico or Central America. Olivia supposed she could have been better about introducing him to her Anglo friends, putting them both into situations where he would have been forced to listen to and speak some English, but the few times they’d gotten together with her girlfriends had been more or less disasters. Jorge had nothing at all in common with the young law students and software designers her friends were dating. He sat silently through a number of dinners, smiling politely except when someone directed a question directly at him. Then he looked at Olivia, stricken, and she quickly deflected the conversation away. She had been more relieved than sorry when the invitations stopped coming.
Olivia bent over and planted a kiss on the tip of Jorge’s hooked nose. He grabbed her around the waist and dragged her onto the couch, on top of him. He reached a hand down the seat of her pants and grabbed her butt.
“Mmm,” he said, squeezing her.
Olivia smiled, pleased as always at the obvious pleasure Jorge took in the parts of her that she had used to think of as too fat—ugly even. It was hard not to love a man who frequently commented that no ass that could fit into just two hands was worth grabbing.
“So, how’s Mamá?” Jorge asked.
Olivia burrowed down into the couch. “Same as always. I took her to Paco’s and she was scared out of her mind. Not that she’d ever say.”
“Did she give you the money?”
Olivia shook her head. She had hated asking her mother for money. She hated letting Elaine know that they weren’t getting by, and most of all she hated giving Elaine the opportunity to comment on how she lived and what she did. Olivia couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t resented Elaine’s perennial disapproval. It seemed to her that from the first time she had made an independent decision or formed an opinion of her own, her mother had found it wanting
in some way.
Olivia felt everything passionately, and her mother, she believed, felt nothing with any kind of ardor. Olivia followed the compass of her heart, trusting that what moved her, what inspired her, would point her toward the true North. Elaine carefully considered, thoughtfully evaluated, and most often, to her daughter’s disgust, decided to do nothing at all. This difference in the fundamental nature of their personalities was apparent from the time Olivia was a very little girl. Elaine would take her shopping for shoes, and Olivia would spot a pair of red, sparkly, magic slippers, the perfect shoes to skip down the yellow brick road. Olivia would cling to the ridiculous, lovely shoes as her mother fitted her with brown Oxfords, white sneakers, and plain black Mary Janes. When Elaine finally chose the most sensible, most comfortable, longest-lasting shoe, Olivia invariably wept—never once, in all the years, had she anticipated the denial of the object of her adoration.
When she was grown, and no longer subject to her mother’s prohibitions and demands, Olivia followed her own enthusiasms. What she cared about was something she defined loosely as freedom and equality, and her intent was to work in some way to better the lot of others; she just wasn’t sure how. She was waiting tables while she tried to figure it out. Rejecting the goal of professional achievement that her mother wanted for her meant that Olivia was constantly short of cash, which explained why she’d ended up doing something she found as repellent as asking for money. She didn’t want to rely on Elaine to bail her out, but sometimes it was unavoidable. Nonetheless, the request was always an exercise in humiliation, particularly when it was rebuffed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jorge said.
“Was there anything in the classifieds today?”
He shrugged and focused intently on the television.
Olivia raised herself up on one hand. “Did you even look?”
“What’s the point?” he said, not taking his eyes off the flickering screen. “None of those places are going to hire an illegal who speaks no English. Why should I bother calling, just to have them tell me no?”
“Well, what about the corner?” she asked. “Wasn’t there any day work today?”
Jorge stiffened for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. “No. I got sick of standing out there. I came home.”
She stared at him for a moment, doing her best to restrain her irritation. She reminded herself to be understanding; he was trying, after all. At least she hoped he was. “It’ll be okay. I’m working tonight. It’s Saturday; tips will be good.”
He jerked himself up into a sitting position and said, “It’s not okay. I am the man. I should work.”
Relieved that he had woken from his torpor, Olivia kissed him on his hollow cheek. “What difference does it make? As long as we can pay the rent.”
Jorge shoved Olivia to one side and sat up. His sharp Mayan features were grim, and his face was stone-like. “It makes a difference.”
She hadn’t meant to hurt him. She’d been thoughtless, but that was only because she was so tired and depressed after lunch with her mother. “I know. I know it does.”
“You don’t know what this is like for me. You don’t know. I stand every day on that corner like some…like some goddamn campesino. I went to university for almost two years! I am not just a back for a white son of a bitch to load up. I was a student. A student. Do you know what that means?” He was shouting.
“I know,” she said.
“You!” He waved a dismissive hand at her. “What do you know? You know nothing. You quit university like it was nothing. Like it meant nothing.”
Olivia blushed at Jorge’s disgust. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school and had reveled in his life as a student. When his political activities had gotten him expelled from the university, he had been devastated.
“It’s just different here,” Olivia said.
He looked at her and shook his head. “I know it’s different. Mother of God, I know just how different it is. In Mexico I was something. A leader. Here, I’m nothing. I came here to be with you, because I love you, and I am nothing here. Just another brown man on a corner.”
Olivia stroked Jorge’s face. “Oh, mi vida. I know how hard this is for you. I know that you are doing your best. It’s not your fault,” she murmured.
He shook off her hand, got up, and walked across the floor to the bathroom. He slammed the door behind him, and the flimsy walls of the house shook.
Olivia reached for the remote and turned off the television. She leaned back on the couch and sighed. They had had this fight before. They both knew that there was one simple way to give Jorge the immigration status he needed to get off the street corner and find a legitimate job or go to school. But Olivia couldn’t bring herself to do it.
When Jorge had first shown up on her doorstep, just a few months after she had met him and left him in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she had felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. She was sure that he expected her to marry him. After all, the man had borrowed the entire contents of his parents’ bank account, paid it to a “coyote,” and crawled across the border for her. He had spent three days traversing the Arizona desert without food or water and another two in the back of a truck heading north through California to Oakland, just to be with her.
But Olivia refused to consider marriage, even a civil marriage with the acknowledged goal of getting a green card and nothing more. Perhaps it was because her mother had married her father so casually, almost blithely—they’d met and married in two months. Eight months later, Olivia was born, and by the time she could say the word daddy there was no one around to whom the word applied. When she was about five years old, she had suddenly understood that she was different from other children. She was the only one who didn’t have even a father she saw on alternate weekends. She announced to her mother that when she got married it was going to be forever. She had meant it then, and nothing in her life up until now had convinced her to change her mind.
A marriage of convenience with Jorge was out of the question, and, although she didn’t often admit this to herself and certainly never said as much to him, nothing about their relationship made her think that it was destined to be permanent. Olivia and Jorge’s affair in Mexico had been intense but brief. Although she had wept when she left him at the airport, part of her had boarded that plane eagerly, glad to be going home and returning to her real life. If she imagined any continuation of their romance, it was of intense and longing letters that would gradually grow shorter and less ardent, and finally trail off completely. His would take up residence, with all the other letters and cards she’d saved from the time she was a little girl, in the fragrant cedar box she’d made in woodshop in seventh grade, and she would take them out from time to time and remember with a shiver of nostalgic pleasure the time she’d had a Mexican lover. It had never occurred to her that he would come to Oakland.
Jorge banged around in the bathroom for a few minutes, and then Olivia heard the sound of the shower running. She got up off the couch, stripped off her jeans and sweatshirt and navy blue panties with the little anchor on the side, and walked into the bathroom. She slid open the cracked glass shower door and stepped into the steam.
“Hola,” she said.
Jorge looked at her for a moment and then drew her close. She leaned against the ropy cable of his arm and raised her face, keeping her eyes shut against the spray of the shower. He kissed her softly and she parted her lips, teasing his tongue with hers. He laughed, and bit her gently. She leaned back against the tile wall, and raised one leg onto the side of the tub. He slipped inside her and wrapped his arms around her back.
“Te quiero,” he murmured.
She leaned her head back against the tile and moaned softly, mostly just to tell him that it felt good. Then she said, “Don’t come inside.”
When he was done, she soaped his body gently and rinsed him und
er the cooling stream. As the water poured off the flat plane of Jorge’s hairless belly, Olivia pressed herself against him. For a brief moment, she allowed herself to imagine the possibility of marrying him, of making love with him like this for the rest of her life. The fantasy gave her neither pleasure nor dread, and she found it easy to push it from her mind. She kissed him once and then got out of the shower, leaving him behind in the cooling stream.
***
Olivia had planned on falling in love with Mexico, not in Mexico. Inspired by the poetry of Octavio Paz and the paintings of Rivera and Siqueiros, she had dropped out of UC Santa Cruz and caught a bus for Mexico City. Her plan had not been particularly well thought out.
At school Olivia belonged to organizations with names like Diversity NOW!, Students United for Peace, and Women Take Back the Night. She demonstrated on behalf of bilingual education, affirmative action, and an end to the death penalty. She drove up the coast with a dozen of her friends to link arms around an ancient redwood and protect it from the jagged teeth of the chain saw. It had never occurred to her to wonder if her nearly compulsive compassion for the poor and downtrodden had as its genesis her unfulfilled longing to be mothered herself.
Olivia had imagined that Santa Cruz would be a laboratory for her political activism. She was certain that the university, with its reputation for counterculturalism, would teach her how to harness her inchoate caring and passionate need to help someone, somewhere, and direct it into action that would profoundly change the world. Instead, she found a place where students and faculty talked endlessly about social justice in class and out, where meeting after meeting was held about Latin America’s disappearing rain forest and North America’s deepening racism. But, to Olivia, with her boundless energy and her desperate desire to do something, it all seemed like just so much talk. So, after three semesters, she packed a single small backpack and caught a bus for the border. She intended to travel to Chiapas and offer her services to the indigenous people’s revolution. She had no idea what those services might entail, but she imagined that she would tend to the sick and the hungry, march with the outraged and the angry, and inspire the poor and the tired. Where she would live, what she would eat, even how she would contact the people she so desperately wanted to save were problems Olivia did not stop to contemplate.
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