In one day, my life went from flat zero to watching pelicans dive-bomb for their breakfast. Walking along the beach for hours. After what I’d been through, being all alone in my sleeping bag in the back of the square-back was a pleasure: a promising turnaround.
Marta knew all about beaches because her family had been in Watsonville before all those condos were a gleam in the developer’s eye.
The morning I met her, she showed up in her station wagon with a whole brood. I peeked out of the checked curtains I had sewn for some privacy, and there were all these kids, piling out, clown-car style. I knew they couldn’t be hers because there were at least ten of them. Little ones. They were bouncing around like pinballs! This was before they passed the seat belt laws, so it’s not like she was doing anything wrong. It was just how you did it back then. She wanted to take ten kids to the beach, so she squeezed them all together in the Olds.
It was cold out, and early, so the kids had their colorful little jackets and hats on, and they were yelling and goofing off. A couple were crying. Marta was the only one wrangling them and they all started heading up over the dunes. I wanted to see how this was going to pan out, so I followed. One little guy, he started lagging behind, and pretty soon he was running off the path.
There used to be real tall grass in the dunes; it was like a maze in there. You could easily lose a kid that way.
They were small. None of them over five. So I chased after the little guy and scooped him up and got him back on track. I brought him over to the group and Marta smiled at me, but she didn’t seem worried at all. She hadn’t even noticed he was missing. She had the kids all plopped in the sand and playing with their toys and I sat down. She spoke plenty of English and I spoke Spanish pretty well from my abuela, so we chitchatted the way you do: a mishmash. I didn’t tell her my whole situation, but I got the feeling she knew. She could tell I’d been places and seen some things. She told me my eyes reminded her of a turtle, which might not sound like the nicest thing to say, but I could tell she meant something good by it. She said it in Spanish, tortuga. I think she was telling me I was smart, or serious, or something.
I stayed and played with the kids all morning. We dug holes and got sand in everything and she offered me some food from her big paper grocery sack. She had these corn tortillas, wrapped in a cloth and still warm, that she’d roll around hunks of white cheese. A big jug of pineapple juice with Dixie cups. I never wanted kids of my own, but I loved the way these guys were climbing all over me from the get-go. It made me feel purposeful, like I was an animal assisting other animals.
When I helped her pile everyone back into the car, she asked me what I was doing the next morning — if I wanted to help her again, maybe at her house. She showed me on my map and I wrote down her address in the margin and all of a sudden I had a job! Just for the mornings, but it was a start. I didn’t need to have a degree, or a resume, or fill out any paperwork. I could go ahead and call myself a teacher if I wanted.
It’s funny because working at a day care turned out to be a lot closer to sex work than you’d think. You have to be present in your body and not overthink things. You have to trust that your body is being used for good. Also, it helped that my immune system was bulletproof from all those years dancing. I had developed a lot of patience too.
By the end of the week, Marta and I already had this mother/daughter thing going on. Nothing like what I had with my own mom, thank god. The house was warm and comfy, and with all the kids and cousins around, it felt like family real quick. I thought it was a blessing to find her so soon after moving, to be welcomed in like that. It was special. I tried not to talk about my past or that I was still sleeping in my car, but she worried. She packed me meals to bring back and gave me a whistle. When I made a crack about who would hear a whistle all the way out there — she opened her purse and tried to give me her knife.
One day, we were back at the beach with the kids and she said that Ricky might have a lead on a place for me. I think she called Ricky her brother or brother-in-law; but maybe Ricky was another cousin?
Hoo-boy, Ricky was hot. I’m going to be blunt about it because one thing that makes me nuts is when people can’t just call it for what it is. Ricky was a stone fox and no sane person would refute it. He wore these tight black jeans and boots all caked with mud, Western shirts with snaps. Mustache. You get the picture. He fixed stuff around Marta’s house, like the garbage disposal and the toilet, and he had a formality about him that turned me on. He passed me a tub of margarine one time at dinner and my hand touched his, and I thought I was gonna die.
Now this whole time I was assuming Ricky made his money as a fix-it guy and a fisherman. He had poles in his truck, and he was always unloading coolers into the backyard, hosing them out, filling them with fresh ice. There were a lot of fishermen around, selling cod or rockfish out of their coolers by the gas station or near St. Patrick’s.
If you pressed me, I guess I’d say it was illegal. Maybe you had to have a license? People sold a lot of stuff around Watsonville. Tortillas, tamales, churros, blankets, flags. And I’m sure there were drugs, like all places, but I didn’t see them. I was around a different crowd back then, mostly older Catholic people who worked hard and had one eye on la Migra.
Ricky came twice a week — sometimes with kids, sometimes not. He had an “office” that was a converted bathroom where he took the little ones. Marta said he was checking for lice, signs of chicken pox. The kids’ parents were too scared to take them to the public clinic. God, I remember hating my nits getting picked too; I would cry my head off, just like they did.
One morning I got to work — I usually showed up around six thirty and we’d eat and get everything set for the kids to arrive — and Marta hugged me so tight. She told me Ricky had a place I could live for cheap. A place just for me. It was out in Corralitos, where there wasn’t much except for a meat market and a lot of apple orchards. But it was sitting there empty. There had been a huge flood the winter before, the famous one that triggered all the landslides, thousands of them, and the cabin had gotten pretty well dumped on and waterlogged. It was going to be moldy, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t fix. Spring was coming, and we could open everything up and let it dry out.
We laid out the snacks for the kids and then Ricky showed up. He arrived with two little ones I hadn’t seen before, though I don’t think they were his. The number of kids fluctuated daily, I think, because most of the parents worked in the fields, and not all the moms worked every day.
Marta never turned away anyone, even when kids were swinging from the curtain rods and diapers were running low. It was chaos, but it worked somehow. Some of them practically lived there. One set of twins, a boy and girl (named Albino and Blanca — White and White, if you can believe it), had been staying overnight every weekday for months. Their mom was deported after being pulled over for some traffic nonsense and it was impossible for their dad to take care of them and work at the same time. Marta was keeping them until they could fly down to Mexico with another relative to be reunited with their mom.
I thought those kids were lucky. In rich neighborhoods, you couldn’t have a group of more than three children in a home without the California Department of Social Services breathing down your neck, and here were all these babies getting loving care practically for free.