Follow the Sun

by Sophia Rhodes

  “Actually, that’s why I called you. Do you have any ideas of work I could do under the table?”

  She stared at me incredulously. “Are you serious? What do you know to do?”

  “I can sew,” I offered. “And I learned how to use a sewing machine last year.”

  Seeing her reaction, my face fell. “I thought you knew people…you mentioned that all those queer girls manage one way or another, that they get jobs and find a way to make a living somehow.”

  “Hard jobs, Diana,” she said. “Back-breaking jobs. They do construction, farm work…nothing a girl like you could handle.”

  She fell silent, then continued, “Besides, I thought you wanted to go to college.”

  I shook my head. “I could apply next year and go if I got a scholarship, but this year I’m still a minor and need parental consent.”

  “So you need a place to stay till you turn eighteen. When is that?”

  I frowned. “Next April.”

  “You don’t have any friends you can stay with?”

  “One friend, Debbie, but she’s in Europe until next month.”

  “Do you think she’ll let you stay with her?”

  “I don’t think her parents would take me in. On top of that, I’d have to find a way to get back to Boston. And I have no money, remember.”

  The more I talked about it, the worse the whole scenario sounded. I cradled my face in my hands, feeling increasingly desperate.

  Rosario stared absently at the mini-jukebox on our table. “You’re lucky you got me this morning,” she said. “I was just about to go out of town for a few days.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Back up to Hollister, to a farm I used to work at. It’s three hours’ drive north, in San Benito county. A friend I went to school with is getting married. They want me to play at their wedding.”

  “Can I come along?” I asked. As the words flew out of my mouth, I instantly regretted the question.

  Rosario looked stunned. She opened her mouth to answer, but I put up my hand. “Forget it,” I added, blushing. “It’s crazy to ask. I just thought it would get me out of LA for a few days, and I could make myself scarce while you go to your wedding.”

  I couldn’t believe I was justifying the thought. As I squirmed in my seat, I noticed that Rosario looked as if she was actually contemplating my scheme.

  She spoke slowly, narrowing her eyes. “If – and only if – I agree to take you along, will you consider going back home?”

  There was no way on God’s green earth I would return to that house, but I knew Rosario would not take me in unless I made just such a commitment. I hated having to lie to her, but she left me no choice. “Yes, all right,” I said, swallowing hard.

  “I’m not sure how much I believe you,” she said, taking another sip of her mint shake before she went on to explain that since she wasn’t going up to Hollister until the day after tomorrow, I spend the night at her grandmother’s house in Pacoima.

  “You don’t think she’ll mind?” I asked.

  “She’ll love you,” Rosario replied. “You both like to sew.”

  “I look terrible.”

  “No you don’t. Well, not since you cleaned the soot off your face,” she added.

  I was mortified, and Rosario laughed. “You worry too much, you know that? You look fine.”

  “You sure I won’t get in the way?”

  “Nah. It’s a small place, but you can have my bedroom. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  “I couldn’t – ”

  “Diana, it’s all right, for Christ’s sakes. Quit looking the gift horse in the mouth. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place and it’s not like you know anybody else around here. Besides, I always take the sofa when we have guests. I’m a sound sleeper, I could sleep on the floor.”

  The house in Pacoima was a tidy-looking two-bedroom craftsman bungalow set back from the road and flanked by a chain-link fence that had been painted white. A vibrant patch of green grass covered the front yard. A small red bicycle with adjoined training wheels was parked against the beige stucco wall, a flurry of pink and white ribbons tied to the handlebars.

  “It’s my younger sister’s,” Rosario said when she noticed me looking at it. “I have a little half-sister. Mami babysits her sometimes.”

  I’d heard that Pacoima was a rough patch of the Valley, but this quiet street off Laurel Canyon Boulevard told another story. Clean and sunny, the row of houses seemed to house mostly working-class Mexican-American families. Children’s bikes and tricycles littered front yards all the way down the street. Some homes had clotheslines running from the garage awning to the side of the house, with laundry flapping away in the light breeze.

  As we crossed through the gate and up the narrow walkway, the fragrant aroma of home cooking infused the air. Hints of simmering tomatoes, fried onions and assorted meats made my mouth water.

  “Hola, mami,” Rosario called out as she turned the knob and parted the unlocked front door. “Come meet my friend. She’s staying with us a couple of days.”

  She put my travel bag down in the foyer and gestured for me to come inside.

  The first thing I noticed were the Mediterranean colors. The walls of the dining area were painted a cheerful shade of cerulean blue, while the adjoining living room was the exact tint of a Clementine peel. The warm shades put a smile on my face. It felt like a happy little home, just the kind of place I could see Rosario living in.

  The furniture was simple but decorated in a quirky style – an embroidered tablecloth with multi-hued flowers, a woven throw covering part of an orange sofa. In the windowsill there were a mishmash of colored pottery, crystal candy plates and knitted doilies, a few ripening tomatoes, even a bowl of glass marbles.

  A heavy-set woman with white hair and smiling eyes limped out of the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her blue apron.

  “This is Diana,” Rosario said, introducing me. “Diana, this is my abuelita, Leonora.”

  I clasped her hand and shook it. “Very nice to meet you.”

  Leonora gave me a generous grin, laugh lines crowing the corners of her eyes. “Good to see a friend of Rosario,” she said, then gestured to both of us. “I’ve been up since you left so I thought I’d make pancakes. Please finish them for me.”

  “She loves to cook but never wants to eat anything,” Rosario whispered to me. “Says it’s because of her diabetes but I think it’s a conspiracy to fatten us all up.”

  “Gracias, Mami,” she said to Leonora, who was easing herself onto the sofa to watch a sitcom. “We just ate but we’ll have them later on in the afternoon.” She picked up my bag again. “Come, let me set you up in the bedroom.”

  Rosario’s bedroom was at the back of the house and looked out onto a modest green yard. It didn’t have much furniture save for a small dresser and a double bed covered with a blue spread. Her guitar lay sprawled in the center of the bed.

  I laughed. “Do you sleep with it?”

  She smiled. “Sometimes. Keeps me company.”

  I looked out the window. Resting on the branches of a small lemon tree, a bird flittered its wings and chirped. The sound of running water drifted from the neighbor’s driveway; I could see his profile as he washed his car, rinsing the soap suds with a hose. Above, the sky was flawlessly, irrepressibly blue.

  I asked Rosario if it would be okay if I had a bath. She handed me a towel and showed me to the bathroom. While the tub was filling, I opened the small window but made sure to draw the frilly lace curtain across as I got out of my stale clothing.

  A kitten meowed nearby and his whiny voice made me smile. The nightmare of the previous night faded as I submerged myself in the hot water, and the aches and pains in my ribs began to melt away. Following suit, my nerves too started to unwind. I was safe here. For how long, and what I would do next, were questions I still could not answer.

  But for now, I was safe.

  The three of us watched television al
l evening and had a blast. After making our way through an entire stack of pancakes, a dinner of chorizo and spaghetti, we were as stuffed as Christmas turkeys and content to laugh through two I Love Lucy reruns. Rosario fixed us strawberry daiquiris to celebrate having me as a guest. While I was helping her mash the strawberries in the kitchen, she confessed that Leonora loved daiquiris but refused to indulge unless she had an excuse.

  We sipped them as we watched the first episode, in which Lucy had decided to spice up their love life by turning their apartment into a Cuban hacienda and dressing up like Carmen Miranda. In the second show, Lucy got the mistaken impression that Ricky was trying to murder her and decided to beat him to the punch by shooting him first.

  “Ay, a wife like that would drive anybody crazy,” Leonora said, wiping her eyes.

  “Mami loves watching Lucy,” Rosario said during a commercial for laundry detergent. “It’s her favorite thing – I think she only likes the Carson show nearly this much, isn’t that right?”

  Leonora nodded and leaned in to me conspiratorially, patting my knee. “I only watch that Carson fellow because I know my granddaughter is going to be on that show someday.”

  “Come on, Mami –,” Rosario protested.

  “Hush, it’s true.” Leonora looked serious. “She’s going to be famous one day. She’s going to be somebody, I just feel it,” she said, tapping her breast.

  I watched the two of them argue about Rosario’s imminent fame, feeling a warm glow spread over my cheeks. This is what a home ought to be like. Laughter and joy should be required ingredients.

  After Leonora took her diabetes and blood pressure medicines and went to bed, I walked with Rosario out to the backyard. She lit a cigarette and we sat quietly on a long bench that had been carved by her uncle.

  “You have a lovely home,” I said. “You must be happy here.”

  She nodded, looking ahead of her at an invisible spot in the night sky. “It’s good now. Hasn’t always been like this.”

  “You told me you grew up in migrant camps,” I remembered.

  “Yes,” she said, exhaling slowly.

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  She put out the cigarette, grinding it into the dirt with the heel of her shoe. “Let’s go back inside.”

  Curled up on the sofa, I listened aptly as Rosario told me her story.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rosario’s twenty-two year old mother Silvia had traveled from Fresno to Los Angeles going through labor in the back of a vegetable truck because she wanted her child’s birth certificate to say Hollywood on it. Her older sister Inés held her hand the entire time and prayed to Jesus that the infant would not come out early among the straw and chicken droppings. The angels had smiled upon them that morning, because the healthy baby girl was delivered at LA General Hospital less than two hours after Silvia's arrival.

  It was 1935 and the city was just beginning to blossom into the movie studio capital of the world. Nimble-footed Fred Astaire had just made his film debut in Dancing Lady. It was a new world of song, prosperity and hope. A hundred years after its Wild West gold rush, California was undergoing a new revival. Newly-paved roads and brand new freeways crisscrossed the Valley. Home constructions was on the up and up. The newly-built LA Times building was the tallest structure in the western United States; as though to parallel its extravagance, people came here with grandiose dreams. This was land of opportunities, where deals were made and fortunes were struck in a day.

  Hundreds of poor Mexicans streamed in over the border daily in search of better prospects. Although Rosario’s parents were American going back one generation, they clung to their Chicano heritage and preserved their language, perhaps for no other reason than the fact that by virtue of their race they were forced to scrounge for decent-paying jobs.

  Nobody wanted to hire Mexicans, whether in fact you hailed from Oaxaca or was born right here in the Valley. Only farmers and big factory bosses offered opportunities for work, but at a cost – favoring cheap, disposable labor, they skirted around the pesky issue of unions by employing illegals who could be fired on the spot. No worker’s job was safe, not even if he’d been with a boss for many years.

  Wanting to be his own man, Joseph Vargas had done odd jobs all his life: he could fix a stalled engine in five minutes flat, he could pave a driveway, shingle a roof and even set off explosives on the side of a mountain, as he had learned during the years he worked in the mines northeast of San Diego.

  But after an underground explosion killed several of his friends, nearly blew half his face off and stripped the skin off of his left arm, Joe Vargas hung up his miner’s helmet and decided to try his hand at working in the fruit orchards of San Benito County. Fruit-picking was only going to be a temporary job, he resolved, a seasonal occupation that didn’t demand much more than brawn and resistance to the elements.

  While in his early forties, Joe met Silvia at an orchard farm near Modesto. She was nineteen and had worked the agricultural fields along with her parents all of her young life. Like every other migrant worker, her family moved around from one job to another like leaves in the wind, the circadian clock of the seasons dictating which way they would blow. It was entirely by happenstance, therefore, that Rosario’s future parents crossed paths and fell in love.

  He was attracted to her fresh-faced innocence; he’d always dreamt of marrying the kind of girl they sang about in cowboy movies – soft and obedient, round in all the right places and pleasing to the eye. In turn, Silvia was secretly turned on by Joe’s machismo, his rough-handed, ranchero way of taking charge and holding her by the arm. He reminded her of her Papá. Indeed, her father would agree that it was a fair match for his youngest daughter after he met Joe and was assured by him that she would be well cared for. Joe had squirreled away his pennies for many years and was ready for married life. As a wedding present for his new bride, he cashed in his savings and bought a little home in Pacoima. They now had a fixed address where they could spend time in between harvests and a place for Silvia’s relatives to also call home.

  Hard work did not abate for them, however, and as much as she had planned to be at home during her birth, Rosario’s mother found herself working all the way through her eighth month as a grape-picker in Fresno. She had planned to come back home later that week, but when early labor pangs had started she grabbed her sister Ines and hitched a ride on the first truck headed back to Los Angeles.

  Rosario spent half of her early years on those farms, bouncing from harvest to another. Her family slept in makeshift tents made of coarse canvas held up by poles. Like other families around them, they cooked tortillas on camping stoves and roasted meats on open flames.

  Children were everywhere – babies, toddlers, school-age youngsters running around like feral wild things among the tall grasses of the surrounding valleys. They laughed, played and helped their parents as best they could, carrying little baskets where they gathered fruit that had fallen on the ground.

  This was a communal life, where everybody knew each other’s secrets and there was no expectation of privacy. You bathed in communal buckets, you went to the bathroom in outhouses and sometimes in the open field, you slept five to a bed and you got used to someone smelling like spoiled salami because that’s just how it was.

  When Rosario was seven, her father became ill with diabetes. Complications from the lack of preventative medical care led to severe pains in his leg. No longer able to work, Joe brought his family back to the little house in Pacoima. They lived hand to mouth, Joe’s puny war veteran pension barely covering the taxes and a daily meal. Silvia was forced to hunt for work as a domestic on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, in some of the wealthy mansions that were springing up through the valley. This kind of work was hard to find since she had to compete with so many other desperate women who were willing to settle for far less pay than she would.

  Busily dividing her days between two jobs, working as a maid and part-time waitress, Silvia grew mor
e distant from her husband. Eventually she decided that she could no longer tolerate the life she had. She got a divorce from Joe when Rosario was nine and opted to return to her family in Fresno. Rosario had insisted that she remain with her ill father and her mother didn’t argue, relieved that she could start fresh in a different city without having to worry about what to do with her rebellious young daughter.

  It was Rosario who cared for her father throughout his worsening illness; it was she who administered his medicine and helped dress his wounds after his leg was amputated. And it was she who arranged for her father’s body to be buried in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, as had been his wish.

  Joe died the year Rosario turned twelve. Her mother had since remarried and was pregnant with Rosario’s half-sister. She and her new family were living on a farm near Hollister and working as seasonal laborers. Upon receiving news that she had inherited Joe’s house, Silvia mused over what to do – she wanted to move back to Pacoima, but her new husband’s pride would not allow him to live in another man’s house. They finally decided to sell it and use the profits along with some savings to buy a larger place up the street in San Fernando.

  Faced with the dilemma of what to do with Rosario since that her new husband refused to take in another man’s offspring, Silvia passed her daughter around from relative to relative over the next two years. When she ran out of people she could ask, she dropped Rosario off at a children’s home.

  Rosario stayed at the home for girls until she was fifteen. She may have stayed there longer were it not for the fact that Silvia’s newly-widowed mother Leonora made the decision to relocate south. Without a husband to keep her in Fresno, Leonora offered to make the move to Pacoima to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren. She stayed with Silvia and her family for a few months but the home was cramped and Silvia was pregnant with another child.

  “Let me see if I can find a place of my own around here,” Leonora offered.

  Silvia was aghast. “What will people think of me, allowing my elderly mother to live by herself? You’re staying with us, Mama. You’ve got nobody else to take care of you.”