Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  I started adding these facts to my list of bad omens. The signs that we were in the wrong city at the wrong time were unignorable. We were surrounded by them. My father’s dream on the airplane, the echoes of the riots, the smell of ash and dirt and anger in the air, the failed celebrities. Within the first two weeks of living in Van Nuys we received an array of bad news: our trunks from Italy had gotten lost and our cat, Mao, died under a car in front of the driveway. Timoteo had fallen off his bicycle on a winding road during a day trip to the Mojave Desert and split open his knee. We had to give the hospital fake names and Social Security numbers because we didn’t have insurance. One day we received a phone call from a company in Palm Springs. The guy on the phone knew my father’s name and kept congratulating him on having won a brand-new car. We got dizzy with excitement. What a country. People just got on the phone with you and gave you things. We drove out to Palm Springs convinced we’d be heading home with a brand-new car but ended up spending the day in a lecture hall with a bunch of gullible families like ours, eating stale muffins, and listening to real estate agents on microphones who tried to sell us vacation condos. If we did our part, they promised they’d do theirs and we’d be eligible to win a car. “Eligible!” my grandmother screamed at my father. “That’s the key word you failed to understand! You didn’t win a car, you were eligible to win one. You and the four hundred idiots in this room.” We all drove home and never talked about it again. The oracles were speaking clearly to us: Go back to your country now. Do not try to figure out how to conquer the golden sun of California, for it is ungraspable. But my father would not budge, blinded as he was by the promise of something better. “And cheaper!” he screamed. “LA is much, much cheaper than Rome. There are department stores where clothes, real clothes, important, brand-name clothes cost a quarter of what they do in Italy.”

  Suddenly we belonged to those canyons with mountain lions yowling in the night; we belonged to Pick ’n Save, the discount store where all our new plates and cutlery came from; we belonged to the 405 freeway that roared incessantly in our ears like a huge hair dryer. We belonged. It was decided.

  —

  Back on the shark-infested Malibu beach, my naked parents and topless grandmother now read out loud from the LA Weekly classified ads.

  “Canoga Park!”

  “No, not the Valley section. Go to the other side,” my father instructed Serena.

  “West Hollywood?” my grandmother proposed.

  “Mmm, what about Bel Air?” Serena replied.

  The neighborhoods were not, as I hoped, options for new places where we could live but addresses of yard sales that might be in good-enough areas to guarantee high-quality secondhand household appliances. My parents’ friend Max, a Cuban producer who was friends with Phil Collins and lived next door to him in Beverly Hills, had instructed them on the art of accumulating goods without spending much. All they needed was a full tank of gas, a map of the city, and an LA Weekly with yard-sale addresses. He was our go-to man for any questions regarding heat, pain, and glory.

  When he took us garage sale-ing, he drove us around Bel Air and pointed out which celebrity each mansion belonged to. We never saw the actual houses from the car. They were protected by brick walls and gates, but I could tell things smelled different in those neighborhoods. The grass was greener—something zesty and hygienic in the air. I imagined kitchen counters filled with fresh limes and oranges. Chlorine-free sprinkler water. “The magic of this city,” Max explained, “is not in the mansions but in the smell of the cedar trees that are planted in front of them. It’s not in the beautifully tiled pools but in the way the sunlight reflects on the water in them. It’s what keeps people here,” he added with an air of mystery. “The luminous unseen.” I stared intently at tree trunks and tried to peek at the swimming pools through the fences, hoping to catch a glimpse of that invisible California life-form Max spoke of, but I couldn’t. The city appeared to me always in the same way, a fatuous leaden expanse.

  “Remember, Eugenia,” Max warned me when he saw me squint, “if you look too hard it disappears.”

  So I stopped looking for the magic and focused on the stuff instead: blenders, canoes, rocking chairs, broken phones, and microwaves. We were furnishing our house with other people’s rejects.

  —

  My brother ran up to my parents and sat beside them to oversee their yard-sale research—a lean, pale body among my family’s overflowing dark, tanned flesh. He hunted for water-bed mattresses, icons of adolescent freedom. For an Italian kid a water bed had the same mystical effect a bottle of Chianti had on an underage American. America was to “cool” what Italy was to “grown-up.”

  From a solitary rock, I looked at the Malibu waves creaming on the sand. I swung my legs into the air and hopped off. On the other side of the beach there were no nudists. A family of Mexicans with four coolers—one for each family member—sculpted mermaids on the sand. An Armenian father sat on a fold-up chair drinking beer out of a brown bag while his girls frolicked in the water. I climbed over the cliff and walked along the freeway back to the skate park we had passed earlier. I leaned against a wall of arid earth, looking at the skaters rolling up and down the ramps in hypnotic loops. There were girls on bleachers in skintight T-shirts. They had pigtails and sucked on lollipops. I felt the cold wind against my skin. Nature in California was hostile and unforgiving, but the skaters—so vigorous, their hair so blond it was almost white—didn’t seem fazed by it. The girls’ legs were strong, legs that surfed and pushed boards against thrusting water. Legs that could keep a violent nature at bay. I looked at my own skinny, pale limbs, bruised and covered with goose bumps, and I closed my eyes.

  Dear Mary, I need your help. Speak to this ocean, these waves, the wind, and the sun. Tell this city to smooth its edges, to show me some kindness, to give me something to hang on to. Dear Mary, appear to me in all your beauty. Make it good or at least better. Amen.

  Since we’d moved, the Virgin Mary had become my role model. Being away from the motherland called for motherly reassurance. I wasn’t getting it from my creator, so who could be better than the mother of all mothers? I asked her daily to perform miracles for me as auspicious signs that would cancel out the bad omens. Sometimes I felt like she listened.

  The wind blew hard. I put my hoodie on and suddenly the heavens opened with a roaring sound. Mary had heard me, I knew it. The sound became stronger. The skaters stopped skating and looked up to the sky.

  She was coming for me.

  She was going to take me away.

  It was the sound of a helicopter, floating above the beach where my parents were reading out yard-sale listings. From the loudspeakers came the voice of God. It said, “Put your bathing suits back on. I repeat, put your bathing suits back on! You are committing a felony. Ma’am, put your top back on.”

  “Dear Mary,” I closed my eyes and kept praying. “Tell me this isn’t happening. Tell me a policeman is not telling my grandmother to put her top back on.”

  The skaters started laughing. One of them rolled his pants down, extracted his big cock, and waved it around toward the helicopter.

  “Want me to put my bathing suit back on too, officer?”

  His friends rode their boards down along the coast to see the nudist outlaws from the top of the cliff. I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t. So I stayed there staring as the helicopter picked up dust and sand and landed on an opening by the beach.

  I imagined my parents getting handcuffed and deported, and me condemned to stay alone on that beach forever. Maybe I would fall in love with a skater and we could hitch a ride to San Francisco. I heard that it was more of a European city. But did I want that? To betray my family so soon after our arrival?

  I ran back to the beach. From the street above, the skaters laughed and screamed at my grandmother.

  “Sexy granny, take it off! Take it off!”

  A police officer was writing out a ticket as my family stood half dressed and bewild
ered before him.

  “What happened?” I asked when I finally reached them.

  “The officer was explaining to us that we cannot be naked here,” my mother whispered in a sultry voice, trying to give herself a distinguished British accent. She thought that by proving her—in her mind superior—European heritage, the cops would be more lenient, but the policeman stared her down and nodded his head.

  “Italians, huh?”

  The British affectation had failed her.

  “You guys like your topless tans. Well, you’re in Los Angeles now, and if you are going to lay naked on a beach, you have to take responsibility for things that might happen.”

  “But what’s the worst thing that can happen, sir? Nudity is only natural,” my father replied with a Gandhian smile.

  It was so like him to try and get a muscle-bound authority figure to level with him in his down-to-earth way. The cop slid his sunglasses down his nose.

  “The worst thing that might happen, sir, is that a maniac could be standing right on top of that cliff looking at you naked people, masturbating, and traumatizing children and civilians.”

  I tried to imagine a pervert jacking off to my grandmother’s formless bosom.

  “I’ve seen it happen,” he confirmed, noticing my doubtful expression.

  My brother looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  “This is a warning. Now don’t let me find you without bathing suits on here again…And ma’am?” he said, turning to my grandmother who, speaking not a word of English, sat on a rock with furrowed brows. “Don’t you know sun is carcinogenic? At your age you should be guarding certain…delicate…private parts.”

  “I don’t understand you and I think you are an ugly asshole,” my grandmother replied in Italian.

  He tilted his head and climbed back up the cliff to the helicopter landing. The pilot revamped the engine. The blades spun and the heavens roared. The officers flew above my now fully clothed parents toward the ocean.

  “If this isn’t another bad omen I don’t know what is!” I screamed at my parents.

  “Ma’am…Put your top back on, ma’am,” my father replied doing a nasal policeman impersonation.

  “It’s not funny, Dad!”

  “Oh come on, get a sense of humor—”

  “I hate you. I hate this beach and I hate this city. I want to go back to Rome!”

  “I want to go back to Rome as well,” my brother interjected.

  My father put his arms around us and started walking. “Let’s get out of here, kids. These people are fascists.”

  —

  We pulled away from the windy coast into a cool, shaded canyon and climbed inside curve by curve, entering a great protective womb—the car like an old steady boat. The ocean wind ceased and the goose bumps on my thighs disappeared. I leaned back on the leather seat, calm. We all stopped speaking. My grandmother took my hand and looked at me with pity. Where the hell are we? her eyes asked. Minutes earlier on the coast I would have been comforted by that droopy, empathic look, but now it was me who had to reassure her. With each curve the forest precipices softened, and what seemed wild and dramatic from one position, transformed into something intimate and natural as we moved farther in. We were inside Topanga Canyon. In the twenties the place had been a weekend getaway for Hollywood stars. The rolling hills and vegetation created hidden alcoves everywhere. The indigenous Tongva people gave that land its name. The word meant “the place above” and I could see why. We were suspended in the air. I leaned back and closed my eyes. We were up high, where nobody could see us.

  2

  Dear Mary, this is the most important day of my life and you have to be part of it. I dipped my rosary into my grandma’s ashes for blessings. I hope that’s okay. I hate milk in the mornings. It makes me sick, but tea is too diuretic and I don’t want to have to look for a bathroom. I’m scared to ask for a bathroom. I’m scared I won’t find one and will look stupid trying to find one. My English is bad. I don’t want to have to ask anyone for anything. Please, make it so I don’t have to go pee. Or worse. Amen.

  On my first day of public high school in America my mother dropped me off in front of the entrance gate and handed me a campus map the principal had given her when they went to enroll me. She kissed me goodbye in the car.

  “Don’t worry. If you worry just pump your shoes.” She winked.

  I wore Reebok Pumps that day. We bought them at Ross Dress for Less, my parents’ new favorite department store. The internal inflation mechanism of the shoes fascinated me, and when I pumped them I felt I had power feet. I could run faster, jump higher, and have quicker reflexes.

  I stepped out of the car and reached the other backpacks swarming through the main gate. When I crossed the entrance I turned on my heels and walked back to the car. I climbed inside.

  “I’m not going in. There’s a fucking metal detector!”

  “I know,” my mother said smiling reassuringly, opening the car door again to let me back out. “That way you’ll be safer, no? No shootings!”

  We picked the high school I would go to based on three elements: The first was the school having no record of firearms being brought in by students—as part of my parents’ “make love not war disposition,” they were conscious of the problem of guns in America. The second was the fact that the principal, Donald Peters, had a name that resembled our own family name, Petri. This was encouraging according to them. And the third was that it was in one of the San Fernando Valley’s rich residential neighborhoods, Woodland Hills.

  “Oh, this place is awesome,” said Mr. Douglas, the man in charge of security who gave us a tour of the campus during orientation. We’d gone in through the side doors at the time, no signs of metal detectors. “Ice Cube came here,” Douglas continued. “He wrote the lyrics to ‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ during his English class right over there. Smart motherfucker he was.” Douglas had been a stunt man for Bruce Willis in Die Hard and worked closely with the LAPD on gang control. He explained it was imperative that I not wear the colors red or blue in school.

  “No C-walking. No gang clothes. No gang moves. Unless you want to get shot.” He winked. “Kidding, just kidding…”

  I tried to smile and looked at my parents who kept walking down the hall, unperturbed. The Bloods and the Crips were the two biggest gangs in Los Angeles. Their gang colors were red for the Bloods and blue for the Crips. The two basic colors were banned from most public schools in the city. This complicated fashion policy made for very original color-scheme solutions. There were a lot of fluorescent pinks and greens around. “C-walking” meant any kind of jittery stutter-step combination of foot pivots and shuffles. The dance move originated with the Crips, which meant that nobody in school was allowed any kind of funky or playful walking style. We were to walk in straight lines and wear bland clothes.

  My brother’s middle school in Van Nuys was worse. It had barbed-wire fences everywhere. The most stimulating class they offered was Hydraulics, which taught the basics of plumbing.

  I stood in the hallway looking at the crowds pouring in, not knowing what to do next. My school in Rome had two hundred students. This one had four thousand. My Reebok Pumps were the wrong choice. Most girls wore heels.

  Somehow I managed to get to my English class. Since I was Italian I had been assigned to a class for people who spoke English as a second language, but when I got there I realized it was more for people who didn’t speak English at all. I tried to put on the most American-sounding accent I could. I felt like a show-off when I approached the teacher and told her I desperately wanted to get out of there. It was true my English was not perfect, but I could read and write it, and put sentences together. The teacher was not interested. ESL was a standard class for anyone who came from another country. I’d just have to sit down and follow her lesson.

  Bells kept ringing. I did not understand what they referred to. I walked to my locker and observed other students flipping their little knobs clockwise and counterclockwise
with rapid hand movements. I tried to do the same but failed, and since I didn’t want anybody to notice, I decided to carry the books in my backpack instead. The slip of paper with my schedule was confusing, the campus map far too complex. I couldn’t decipher how to get to the phantom building D where my math class was, and according to the schedule, it was time for something called “Nutrition” soon. Perhaps I should go and feed myself somewhere, but where? The cafeteria was crowded with rowdy kids throwing grapes and scraps of pancakes at each other. I looked at them wondering if I should get in line, but another bell rang and everyone scuttled away.

  Mr. Douglas and an overweight police officer in Bermuda shorts circled the campus on a golf cart with a megaphone, screaming at everyone to get out of the way and hurry to class. “Let’s go, let’s go! Tardy sweep-up!”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but since I was lost and meandering, I was mistaken for someone who wanted to ditch class. I was loaded, alongside other roaming teenagers, onto Douglas’s golf cart. On board, two Persian kids improvised a rap song, pretending like they were riding a Bentley in a hip-hop video. I looked at them and did not say a word. I preferred my schoolmates to think of me as a thug rather than an idiot who could not figure out how to get to class.