The Madonnas of Echo Park Read Free Page A

Girls both Mexican and Vietnamese burst into squealing chant-cheers, something you’d hear on the playground before a fight, while the boys smacked their hands together like we were trying to smother fires in our palms.
    â€œAurora,” Ms. O’Neill said, “why don’t you pick the first song?”
    She walked across the room in an outfit that matched her record case—a tight red fringe blouse with poet’s sleeves and a tie-string bow across her budding chest along with tapered black jeans that hugged her curved thighs (up to that point, girls had been stick figures, straight lines wrapped in corduroy) and matching black platform sandals. Her face had a thin dusting of powdered-donut-white foundation to cover her chicken pox scars; her eyelashes were etched into her face like fiery black sunsets. I was attracted to her, though I didn’t know what attraction was yet, and because I could think of nothing we shared in common—not one friend on the playground, not a single family acquaintance who shopped or did laundry with an acquaintance of her family’s—I hated this feeling.
    When she approached the record player, the boys fire-drill sprang out of their chairs. The girls, sensing some sort of new, significant moment, skirted the edges of the classroom and formed a rigid semicircle, cutting off any chance of escape. My two coconspirators had sandwiched themselves with about ten other boys into a far corner, leaving nowhere for me to stand but right in front of a firing squad of giggling twelve-year-old girls.
    Aurora slid a 45 out of her case and in one graceful motion popped a plastic yellow “spider” in the center of the record and threaded it onto the turntable’s spindle. When you play a record, there’s that brief anxious moment of silence when the needle crackles but the music hasn’t started. This was the kind of silence you could tear apart by making an obscene noise, setting off a laughing seizure so uproarious that Ms. O’Neill would lose control of the class, or by doing something catastrophic like wetting your pants, but that meant you’d risk being the object of a ritualized humiliation so vicious, moving to the next grade level wouldn’t stop it. The boys waited in anticipation of who would be brave enough to make that fart noise or trickle “fear piss” down his legs.
    Madonna’s “Borderline” began to play. This was a
new
song, Aurora bragged, which, along with her opulent record case, meant that her parents must have been as “rich” as my parents. (There was a real low bar for “rich” in Echo Park.) I recognized the song from MTV. Part of the video for the song had been filmed in the neighborhood, and because of its story line (Mexican break-dancers, Latin boyfriend, Madonna’s girlfriends dressed in retro
chola
girl outfits complete with drape coats, baggy pants, and hairnet caps), I believed Madonna was a Mexican.
    The girls swayed their hips to the soft, synthesized tinkle that opens the song, then nodded their heads an inch to the left, an inch to the right (the way the Muppets dance on TV) to the syncopated beat, before singing along with the chorus. The circle on the girls’ side tightened in anticipation of the first dance. Ms. O’Neill leaned downto Aurora, and after a quick consultation both nodded their heads in agreement. Aurora strode across the circle and placed her hand on my shoulder.
    â€œThis is Madonna,” she said. “Come and dance with me, Brando.”
    There was an audible gasp as her fingers traced a line down my shirtsleeve and clasped my hand. Was it too late for me to make an obscene noise or wet my pants? The girls leered with confidence; Aurora’s boldness had made them aware for the first time how powerful a girl their own age could be. So much change was possible in so short a time. I looked to the boys for some sort of help, an intervention,