Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  We got dropped off in front of the “tardy hall,” a storage room for students who were late for class. A twenty-year-old New Age teacher in tie-dye sweatpants watched over students and gave them speeches about how to avoid gang confrontations. There were about fifteen of us—mostly African American, Persian, and Hispanic students. The tardy hall was also known as the “gang prevention room,” but the correlation between being late to class and wanting to shoot people eluded me.

  “You start off tardy and you end up dead on a sidewalk,” the teacher explained right away. The new post-riot theory was that teenagers who resisted getting to class on time were more likely to drop out of high school and fall into violent patterns. If you were “swept” more than three times in a year, you were profiled and eventually suspended or expelled.

  The teacher gave us a handout of gang signs we should know and never imitate.

  Another laugh. Nobody needed an instruction manual about these gestures. The Persian guys from the golf cart gathered in the back of the room. They hugged each other and laughed, looking at photos of their summers, commenting on the girls they’d been with.

  One of them with a baseball cap and deep brown eyes sat next to me.

  “Where you from?”

  “West side,” I replied, referencing the gang handout.

  “You smoke weed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s your accent from? You Mexican?”

  The Hispanic girls in class huffed at me and shook their heads.

  “She ain’t no freaking Latina. Look at what she’s wearing.”

  “You Persian?” he asked.

  “I’m Italian.”

  “I’m Arash.” He shook my hand, looking confused. “Italian? For real?”

  “No, that bitch is Sicilian!” a girl named Ajane screamed from the back of the class.

  “Duh,” said the first Latina girl. “Why you think she’s wearing Reebok Pumps? They are way behind with fashion there. They got that dictator there, what’s his name? The bald guy who got rid of all the Jews along with the German hater?”

  “Mussolini?” I asked.

  “Yeah. If I had that fool for president I wouldn’t be thinking about what shoes to wear, I’d just be thinking of getting the fuck out of that country…”

  Everyone started laughing.

  I stayed in my seat listening to Tupac Shakur airing from an eighties boom box on the teacher’s desk. The deal was that she’d play music as long as we let her lecture us about its lyrical contents.

  “When Tupac says ‘I bail and spray with my AK,’ what he really is trying to say is: The fact that you are racist really hurts my feelings and now I want to hurt your feelings back.”

  She had a degree in teen psychology with a focus on decoding gang semiotics, but it didn’t seem to help much.

  “Tupac speaks out of fear,” she explained expertly. “Does anybody have any examples of when we act out of fear?”

  “I know I ain’t afraid of that Sicilian bitch!” Ajane snickered, pointing at me. Everybody laughed.

  Arash raised his hand to interrupt the laughter.

  “Yeah, miss, sometimes people think we’re haters ’cause we’re Persian and have Persian pride. They think it’s a gang, while actually we just love our people—”

  “Hairy wannabe rappers with big egos and small dicks!” Ajane sneered, causing another stir.

  “Shut the fuck up,” one of Arash’s friends intervened.

  “Gold-chain-wearing cheap asses driving old-ass beamers, trying to distract everybody from your nasty monobrows,” Ajane’s neighbor pitched in, laughing.

  A chorus of “ooohs” and giggles rose from the desks.

  “What did you say, bitch?” Arash and his friends got up from their seats and moved to the other side of the room where the girls were. “You wish we drove old-ass BMWs. Our shit is brand-new. And it’s ours. You just ride a bus!”

  A rumble of desks and chairs. Ajane and her friends met the Persians halfway. Ajane elbowed me and swiped my books from the desk to the floor.

  “Hey!” I complained.

  She turned to me. “What, you want to get your ass kicked too?”

  The New Age teacher in sweatpants tried to intervene, but Ajane resisted her. She leaned over and stared at me, bobbing her head.

  “You wanna fight? I got my sneakers in my bag, you wanna fight?”

  “Not really.” I looked down at my own shoes. How ugly they seemed to me now.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Arash’s Iranian friends began to cheer.

  Arash glanced at me. If I got into a fight, I kept thinking, I would have to update my list of bad omens. The teacher tried again to keep everyone on their own side of the room, but the groups spilled over, waiting to combust, and I was stuck in the middle. That’s when I saw Arash suddenly retreat. He lifted his hands as a sign of truce.

  “Leave it alone, y’all.”

  His friends started teasing him. They screamed, “Kuni! Kuni!”—the Farsi word for “faggot”—at him for backing off.

  I shrank in my desk and kept looking ahead, avoiding eye contact with anyone. Alone in the front row of the room a beautiful girl with auburn hair was putting lipstick on in front of a compact mirror, deliberately not participating in anything. She was full of freckles that made a striking contrast with her bright green eyes. She was the only thing I could look at—a haven to rest my eyes on as my breathing went back to normal. She giggled to herself listening to everyone’s bragging and when the teacher wasn’t looking, she packed her backpack in haste, got up from her seat, and snuck out of the classroom. The door swung shut behind her. From the small glass window I saw her ponytail bounce down the hallway, then she disappeared.

  The bell rang. I was headed to Health Class, my paper said, but I didn’t know what that meant and I wondered if I’d learn about prescription medications. I was bound to get lost again in the crowded hallways so I turned instinctively to the one person who seemed less threatening: Arash.

  “Do you know how I can get to building H?” I asked in a rush, terrified of getting swept up again.

  His friends clustered around him throwing up signs. They created Ps with their hands facing each other. “Persian pride!”

  Arash looked at me with sweet eyes and pointed in the direction of a military-looking barrack at the edge of a barren baseball field. I thanked him and started walking.

  “Hey Sicily!” he called after me.

  I turned. He was smiling.

  “I was fucking with you. H building is in the other direction.”

  I turned and started walking in the opposite direction, passing in front of his friends who all laughed. As soon as they were gone, he caught up with me.

  “I’ll walk you to class, man.”

  “Thanks. You don’t have to.”

  But I was too desperate to refuse his help.

  “So is Sicily close to Greece? I was there one year with my family…We visited the Pantheon.”

  “The Parthenon?”

  “Yeah, whatever. The big old white building with all the columns.”

  “Great. Look. Just for future reference, Sicily is not a country. It’s a region that is part of Italy. Kind of like a state here.”

  “That’s tight.” He winked at me and dropped me off in front of a yellow door. “I always get those two confused. See you around, Greek goddess.” He spat on the floor and walked away.

  —

  “Rome, Georgia?” Mrs. Anders, my health teacher with fake breasts asked in front of my new class members.

  “No. Rome, Italy.”

  “Wow, that’s neat.”

  We sang the American national anthem with hands on our hearts. I did not know the words but opened my mouth in wide oval shapes. Mrs. Anders passed a picture of an overweight Hispanic teenager looking down at a newborn child.

  “Does anyone know what the best prevention for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is?” Mrs. Anders asked.

 
The word condom was muttered by students, but of course it was a trick question. Mrs. Anders looked at us with a grave expression. Below the photo was a handwritten paragraph:

  Hello, I’m Marcia Espandola. I’m 16 years old. One year ago I thought it would be a good idea to use a fake ID to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with my boyfriend. We got drunk, partied, and had unprotected sex. A month later I discovered I was pregnant with Julia. My boyfriend left me and now I’m a single teen mother. I had dreams of attending my Junior Prom. That’s not going to happen. I can’t afford to pay for a babysitter.

  “The number-one prevention against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is abstinence. Write this down in your notebooks. It’s going to be on your quiz next week.”

  I looked around. It was obvious none of the girls in my class were virgins.

  Mrs. Anders handed us a “self-esteem contract.” We were to write a goal we wanted to pursue in the course of the following ten weeks. Each day we would fill in an empty column with the steps we were taking toward our goal. The goal had to reflect something that would boost our self-esteem and steer us away from drinking, sex, and drugs. Alcohol was conducive to unforeseen acts of libidinous lasciviousness that had catastrophic consequences. We needed to steer away from turning into Marcia Espandola.

  I wrote down my goal: “In ten weeks I want to be back in Rome.”

  When class was done I felt a surge of loneliness. I glanced at Mrs. Anders with her full melon breasts. I needed empathy. I put on a deep guttural voice like the ones from the soap operas my grandmother watched at home. America was five hundred episodes ahead on The Bold and the Beautiful. Key characters had already died and been resurrected here, twin sisters had popped up out of nowhere, new actors had taken over main roles. I watched and translated every episode for my grandmother so that on Sundays she could ring her friends in Rome and report back. My favorite character was Brooke Logan, the troubled wife of Ridge Forrester, the alien-faced foppish son of the fashion tycoon Eric Forrester. I liked her pink lip gloss and stern, dramatic tone, always on the verge of a desperate revelation.

  “Mrs. Anders.” I looked at her, channeling my inner Brooke. “Where I come from, students are forced to take over their high schools and do sit-ins because teachers are fascists. My family moved to America to escape constant political oppression and I thought I should be honest with you and tell you these things about me. I understand American teachers to be more democratic than Italian ones.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. Families from all parts of the world flee persecution and find safety and opportunity in America. Our school welcomes all refugees. We are happy to help you rebuild your life here.”

  She thought I was a refugee from war. I did not tell her World War II had ended. Did not explain that we used “fascist” to describe any teacher who disagreed with us on anything, particularly on granting students the right to have sit-ins at their high schools in order to smoke hash and have sleep-ins in the gym.

  I shook her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Anders. It feels good to know I can count on someone here.”

  I walked out of the classroom and made a mental note to change my self-esteem contract. Returning to a war-infested country in ten weeks was an unlikely objective. Under “self-esteem goal” I would write: “Rebuilding my life in the United States.”

  3

  From the shade of the lemon tree my brother and I spied on my father in his studio. He had signed with a minor agency and was working with Robert, his new writing partner—a CalArts film student with two pierced eyebrows who wore black lipstick and talked to himself like he was in on a plan nobody else knew about. Robert bit his nails while my father twisted his curls with his index finger and looked at the computer screen. They never spoke when they worked.

  “Do you think he’ll give you the Terminator face today?” my brother asked as he coughed up smoke from the cigarette I was teaching him to inhale.

  “I hope not.” I sighed.

  Like the Terminator, Robert was expressionless and never removed his black boxy sunglasses. This made us all self-conscious when we saw him around the house. It was hard to say if he had emotions. It was hard to say if he saw anything.

  Ettore met the kid through Max, who thought they were a perfect match. Robert had a fascination with World War II and was uninterested in most things except for Hitler’s biography and horror films, but this, according to Max, was his virtue. “He’s hyper-focused and completely ignorant. Like a street kid from a Pasolini film, but living in Los Angeles thirty years later.”

  Our father devotedly listened to anything Max had to say. He was a big reason why we had moved to LA. We were in awe of his friendship with Phil Collins. He had written the lyrics to the semi-recent hit “Another Day in Paradise.” We felt proud to say we’d known him before he was famous. In the eighties he had produced horror films, including an American cult movie about android chameleons that was shot in the studios of Cinecittà in Rome. He and Ettore met on set in Rome and became close friends, carousing around town in search of remnants of La Dolce Vita. Every year since Max left Rome, he sent us Christmas cards and tried to lure my parents to Hollywood. He told us about working with the studios, writing for Phil Collins, and life in Beverly Hills. When we left for Los Angeles nobody knew whether Ettore and Max would be compatible. His last film, Devourandia, was a cannibalism tale about old Texas farmers in a small border town who discovered that the blood of drug addicts had the power to prolong lives. My father usually fainted at the sight of blood, but he was willing to take a chance because Max knew musicians, actors, and producers. He was the only person who seemed to know about the underground jazz club in the back of a Long Beach soul food restaurant. And one of the few who was allowed in. I always had a hard time finding a connection between producing horror movies about cannibals and writing humanitarian hit songs about homelessness like “Another Day in Paradise,” but we were all fascinated by his eclecticism.

  —

  “We don’t even have a pool. Everyone in LA has a pool.” My brother sighed, looking at our mother at the other end of the yard as she bathed in a pink inflatable pool from Pick ’n Save. It was half tilted on its side and water leaked out. We were allowed to refill it only once every three days. Our father said Los Angeles was a desert, and water in deserts cost more than gold. Right now the water was lukewarm and filled with insects and rancid lemons, but Serena did not care. She glistened topless in a layer of Johnson’s Baby Oil, squirting it on her eyes and breasts, ignoring the side effects the unfiltered California sun would have on her skin. Her new cat-eye sunglasses from the 99 Cent store slipped down her shiny nose. She pushed them up each time she turned the page of her book—her fourth Sitting Bull biography. The grass around the pool area was cluttered with newspaper clippings, cutouts, and books about Native Americans. If you asked her what she was doing, she glared at you and said she was working.

  Her passions emerged in serial fashion. Each one entailed reclining on a bed or in a pool or tub, surrounded by piles of clippings and books. In Rome she went through a Gypsy phase. She read about Eastern Europe’s nomadic culture for months, forced my brother and me to watch documentaries about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and organized playdates with a group of children living in a Romany camp on the city outskirts. She had been lured by a Gypsy woman she met at a traffic light, whom she recognized as a sister from a past life. They hung out and became friends, then the woman hypnotized our mother. Ettore found her wandering the Piazza del Popolo in the center of Rome with no purse, no jewelry, and no car. We got picked up from the nomad camp and never saw our Gypsy friends again.

  My brother put out his half-smoked cigarette and went rollerblading with Creedence, one of eight Mormon brothers who lived with their parents in the long shotgun house down the street. Creedence was his first and only friend. Not having a friend was worse than not having a pool, I thought. Three months had passed and I felt invisible. In school I was alone. A
t home I was alone. Robert was a breath of fresh air—or dead air since he looked like a corpse. But it didn’t matter. It was something. I pulled out my copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, hoping he might notice me through the window and be attracted by my intellectually committed reading. It didn’t work. Like my mother, I took off all my clothes except for a bathing-suit bottom and sat on a towel reading in the burning sun, eyeing him from under the lemon tree. It was hard to tell whether he could see me through the Terminator glasses, but he faced my general direction a few times. My eyebrows thickened and my cheeks swelled with the heat as I tried to delve into existentialist feminism. I fell asleep in the sun.

  When I woke up an hour later, I was dripping with sweat. Serena was no longer in the pool. My grandmother ironed clothes on the fold-out board on the patio while humming Claudio Villa songs to herself. She also owned cat-eye sunglasses now. After helping us move, and disdaining Van Nuys and everything about America she could think of, she had decided to stick around a little longer. The California heat was good for her arthritis, she said, and Rome was already rainy and cold. She called Alitalia and befriended an airline representative from Torrance who changed her return ticket without charge in exchange for health tips.

  I stumbled to the plastic pool and collapsed in the warm, oily water Serena had left behind. Inside, the house was empty. A television was turned on. I could hear it from the yard. I splashed around, did some lazy sit-ups, and came out. In the living room I found Robert sitting in darkness, sunglasses still on, staring at the screen.

  “Your parents went to buy groceries. They invited me to lunch,” he said without looking at me.

  I was wrapped in a white towel. The bottom of the bathing suit dripped dirty pool water on the hardwood floors.

  “I don’t usually eat anything so I think it’ll be weird, but whatever. Your mom doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Do you want a snack?” I asked him.

  “A snack?” he asked with a vampire smirk.