‘I Get So Tired of the Dark’ : Garage Is Home to Mother, 5 Children
Like other mothers, Maria Torres rushes her children off to school, sets the toddlers to play and does her housework. In the afternoon the kids search the refrigerator for snacks and do their homework before dinner.
It’s harder for Torres than for most women, however. The comforts of home are in short supply.
“At least it is a roof and four walls,” Torres said of the $200-a-month garage on Telfair Street in Pacoima that she shares with her five children. “I’ve tried my best to make it comfortable.”
She has stuffed crumpled sheets of plastic around the edges of the overhead door. They block the night drafts and keep water from coming under the door when the lawn sprinklers are on.
The garage does not have a bathroom, so she made a toilet from a wooden box. It opens to a seat and bucket.
Exposed posts and beams provide shelves for canned foods, a radio and a clock. What once was a workbench is the kitchen counter. There is cold running water and a basin.
The garage, in a neighborhood of aging and run-down tract houses, is the best Torres can afford on the sporadic income she earns cleaning houses and sewing.
In a good month she earns about $480. For four months last year she earned nothing. After paying the rent, Torres said, “I barely have money for food.”
The family lives surrounded by the garage’s tar-paper walls, an oil-stained cement floor and rafters overhead.
Through church donations, Torres has acquired three beat-up dressers, a double bed she shares with her 3-year-old, two twin beds--one for the two girls and one for her boy--and a crib for the baby.
Family activity is centered on a small steel table covered with a bright hand-embroidered cloth. A bare bulb provides the only light.
In the winter, when temperatures in the San Fernando Valley can dip to freezing, it gets so cold that “we can make smoke when we breathe,” 9-year-old Maria Torres said.
The family’s space heater broke down last winter. Torres said she can’t afford a new one.
To lure her children out of bed in the morning, Torres has jackets and shoes ready. The girls, Maria and Guadalupe, 12, run into the house to use the bathroom and dress. Felix, 10, dresses in the garage.
The children leave without eating. The school provides breakfast and lunch.
One chilly morning several weeks ago, Torres dressed the smallest boys in pants, two sweaters apiece and knit caps with earflaps.
Isidro, 3, cried with a deep mucus-laden cough as Torres pulled on his cap. She said he was cranky because of a lingering case of bronchitis.
Francisco, 2, had a runny nose but was eager to play. He crawled on the concrete pushing a plastic truck. His hands, stained with dirt, were cold to the touch.
Torres picked him up and rubbed his hands between hers. The children used to have a carpet to play on, she said, but it was ruined when water seeped under the garage door.
She fed each boy a banana and a cup of milk for breakfast, and through the morning they nibbled on pan dulce --sweet bread.
As the toddlers played, Torres opened the side door to let sunlight into the windowless structure.
“I get so tired of the dark,” she said, pulling on a windbreaker. “I wait until the children leave and then open up. As long as the little ones are bundled up, the cold doesn’t bother them.”
In the summer, she said, the sun beats down on the uninsulated garage and the heat is so intense that “there is no relief, not even from a fan.”
She said she is “very lucky to be living here,” in her sister’s garage.
“My family has been kind to us,” she said. “We can use the facilities in the house. They help me with food.”
Her family is from Jalisco, Mexico. She, her two sisters and a brother came to Los Angeles in 1978. Their father had died, and the young women felt they could find better jobs in the United States.
Maria left behind her three children and worked at several minimum-wage jobs at an electronics factory, a cosmetics firm and recently as a seamstress. She rented a room in a house and sent most of her money home. In 1981 she sent for her children.
In the meantime her sisters and brother married and purchased the Telfair Street home, where all three families live.
Maria married and bore two more children but continued to rent a room in a house shared with two other families. Her husband supported the family with day labor.
“The room was so small there wasn’t enough space for beds,” Maria said. Her husband and older children slept on the floor. Noise kept them awake, and it was too crowded for the children to play or do homework.
They searched for a small apartment but found they could not afford one. At last she turned to her family. They could offer only the garage.
“We thought it would be better to have our own space,” Torres said. “In here we have more room. It is quieter. The children can sleep in a bed.”
The rent includes electricity and water and the use of the kitchen and bathroom in the house.
Since her husband left her a year ago, she has little hope of saving up the money to move. “I think we are going to have to live here for a long time,” she said.
She said her parents’ home in Jalisco was more comfortable than the garage. But in the United States, she said, “life is better for the children. They go to school. They are learning English.”
Torres is planning to apply for amnesty under the new federal immigration law, hoping that legal status will mean better employment opportunities. “Maybe then we won’t have to live in a garage,” she said.
When the children got home from school they reached into a bag of oranges. There were only three left. Isidro cried at being left empty-handed. Little Maria gave him hers.
Then Maria bent over a workbook, figuring out how to tell time. Guadalupe, 12, colored a series of pictures.
As the sun dipped in the late afternoon, Torres closed the door to the cold and flicked on the light. The bulb cast harsh shadows as the girls huddled over their books. Guadalupe used a blue crayon to color the grass.
After a while the girls put on their jackets.
Felix played a game he called “spider.” He pretended to be a hunter, preying on the spiders that make webs between the exposed studs.
“There are a lot of spiders over here,” Felix said, jumping on his bed and pointing. “I’m not afraid of anything. I kill them all because my sisters don’t like them.”
In the evening the children rummaged through plastic canisters looking for snacks. Guadalupe stood in front of the refrigerator staring at the only thing inside, a carton of milk.
As they do when there is no food, the children went into the house one by one for supper with their aunts and cousins.
Afterward, they returned to the garage and pulled the kitchen chairs around a 13-inch black-and-white television to watch a police show on the fuzzy screen. At 9 p.m., they went to bed.
Before she goes to sleep, Torres said, she always lights a candle and puts it in the middle of the kitchen table, in case the children wake up during the night.
