I don’t recall when I first became mischievous. But I know it happened early, and that I was intensely circumspect around my dad. Still, this did not deter me from misbehaving when he was not around. As an acolyte to a carefully scrutinized Hollywood emperor, my chances to be naughty were too temptingly rare. During my adolescence in Newport Beach in the early ’70s, my rebellions would grow bolder with the recklessness of the times. Unknown to the press or my dad, I experimented with diet pills, marijuana, and getting arrested. As a child in Encino, I settled for terrorizing our maids.
Aside from my father’s exalted celebrity, his financial need and mental compulsion to work hard and often, he and my mother back then were still very social creatures. There were charity events, dinner parties, movie openings, Republican fundraisers. To attend to the housework and aid with my supervision, my mother hired two Peruvian maids. Consuela and Angela Saldana were dark-haired sisters, brought from Latin America to Southern California while both were in their twenties. They were part of the fabric of my childhood, and I did horrible things to each of them.
Consuela was younger and more credulous; for the first few years I could always fool her. I performed evil acts when she wasn’t looking, then, when confronted, I resumed being the Good Aissa, and sweetly naïve Consuela believed my paper-thin lies. Even after I began tormenting her openly, Consuela did not have it in her to inform on me to my parents. One evening my parents entertained friends for late dinner, and I disobeyed Consuela when she told me it was bedtime. Feeling I had a better idea, I ran from my upstairs bedroom into my parents’, jumping up and down on their enormous bed. Consuela followed, leaning toward me and gently explaining why a young girl needed her rest. I stopped leaping and startled both of us, reaching out and grabbing Consuela’s midnight-black hair.
“I am not going to bed!” I hissed. Fixated on my own balled fist, I unpried my fingers.
Rubbing her scalp as she moved for the door, Consuela said softly, “This time, I am telling your father.”
That wouldn’t do.
My father had never seen the other Aissa, the Bad Aissa. Part of me wanted to know: Could he see this unpleasant side of me and still love me? Fearful the answer might be no, I scrambled off my parents’ bed and into the hallway.
Watching Consuela wind calmly down our spiral staircase, still maintaining her dignity, prompted me to entirely surrender mine. Inexplicably furious, I leaned over the railing and spit. For a moment Consuela stood still as a picture, then she turned back upstairs with a near imperceptible glance at the saliva on her blue cotton blouse. Avoiding my eyes, she looked not incensed but profoundly unhappy. Considering an excuse, I bolted instead for my room and started whimpering. How cruel she was for making me do what I did.
Consuela never snitched. Though from time to time I still abused her, something had altered between us, and I found myself drifting to her older sister. Slightly built and completely self-contained, Angela Saldana never wore lipstick or makeup. Her one arresting feature—her scuplted cheekbones—were made to look severe by her paper-fine cropped-off black hair. Having hired Angela first, and then Consuela in the wake of her older sister’s excellence, my parents trusted Angela unconditionally, and gave her permission to treat me as she saw fit. Back in Encino, in some ways it was Angela who raised me. At that point in my life, my parents were still like fairy tale characters to me: grand, beautiful characters whom I loved, but characters living refracted lives, which I had to share with many others. Mornings, it was Angela who dressed me and bathed me. At night, Angela stood guard while I brushed my teeth, then ensured that I flick off my flashlight and stop sneak-reading books under my covers. Unlike Consuela, there was no duping the older sister. From the beginning, Angela Saldana saw right through me. That she knew who I was and still seemed approving made me love her madly.
Still, my affection for our maid earned me no slack. In Angela’s sturdy presence every transgression had a consequence. She never spanked me in front of my father, since then I gave her no reason, but when we were alone she spanked me frequently, wholeheartedly, grabbing me on the run as I tried to escape. Acting in place of my parents when they were away, Angela felt it her duty to enforce discipline. In the absence of my parents—and other children to play with—I felt it my duty to drive her insane.
Once I was angry at her for demanding I shed my clothes “this minute” and climb into my bath. First assuring Angela I would, I went instead, fully clothed, to our laundry chute. Its door was built into our second-floor wall, outside the bedrooms. Our dirty clothes dropped down to the first floor, in a pantry bin adjacent to our kitchen. Aware that Angela was down there cleaning, I took knee socks from my drawer and stuffed them with other clothes until they bulged. I jammed the feet end of the socks into a pair of my ballet slippers. Hanging the slippers and fake human legs down the chute, shutting the metal door to wedge them in place, I banged on the door and screamed bloody murder. Then I abruptly stopped. I wanted Angela to spy the dangling legs, think I had fallen in and had ceased yelling because I’d blacked out. And then died.
Perfection. First I heard Angela shouting “AISSA!” Then came her clicking shoes on our staircase. When she burst into my room I sat on the edge of my bed, chuckling. Her dark face swelling with incoming blood, Angela cursed me in Spanish. Already speaking my mother’s first language fluently, I recognized some words and caught the jist of the rest. Then Angela took her familiar hand to my bottom.
Having never returned to her native Peru, today Angela still lives in Los Angeles, in a cozy home my father bought for her when my family left the huge Encino estate for a much smaller house in Newport Beach. Thirty-five years after we met, Angela and I still speak on the. phone, still deeply missing the man from whom we kept secrets.