Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  I opened my eyes to the smoggy capsule that towered above downtown Los Angeles. The sunlight diluted into a thick polluted haze and I knew home was somewhere behind those freeways, off a green exit sign that looked like the one before and after it. Home was in this place. We were almost there.

  7

  Dear Mary, penetration doesn’t hurt! I can make love whenever I want now. I have a pain-repellent internal rubber suit and no longer want to pass through school like a ghost. I want to be seen and I want to be held. Amen.

  My rubber suit was the perfect accessory for anyone facing fear, change, disorientation. It had a hood that functioned like a helmet. You could bang your head on a wall and feel no pain. It had been consigned to me by Alo on a cold night, and one of its perks was to insulate you from climate conditions. Also you never saw what you were doing because rubber got in the way, protecting and isolating you at the same time. I started going through my day as if it were one of those dreams where you can’t see clearly even though your eyes are open. My peripheral vision was blocked by the suit’s substance, and I filled that unknown space with the presence of sex, as much as I could, as hard as I could. Whatever it took to get noticed.

  I started with Arash because even though he was cocky and spat from classroom windows, he was my secret protector, was occasionally nice to me, and smelled of dryer sheets and flannel. There were traces of talcum powder in his skin that made me think he was sheltered and loved like an overgrown baby. The scent of his clothes spoke of mothers who did laundry and prepared lunch bags—dutiful, reliable mothers who owned machines that washed and dried clothes. We, of course, did not own a dryer. In our lives there was no space for “real thrills,” as my grandmother called them. The dryer—that was the true frontier, and the fact that my father refused to purchase one confirmed what she always thought of him: He was all talk. We were the only ones in our neighborhood with a clothesline in our garden, a reimagined Neapolitan alleyway. My grandmother’s oversize faux-silk underwear from Ross Dress for Less hung over the blow-up pool, firm and heavy like chastity belts. But my father didn’t care. If grandma didn’t like our house she was most welcome to return to Rome. It wasn’t like he was dying to live with her.

  —

  My English teacher realized I didn’t enjoy spitting out the window or making her cry like the other students did. I could read and write and even liked doing it. She gave me a library pass to go and read on my own during class. It was our secret. I’d be one less person to have to worry about and nobody except for Arash was going to notice my absence. During those stretches of time to myself I often spied on the girl with freckles who hopped fences. I examined the natural flow she had in closing and opening portals, climbing walls, disappearing behind staircases. She was agile and fearless and I wanted to be like her. She waited for the tardy bell to ring so the hallways would be empty and, just before the security guards started their rounds, she opened the doors and escaped. That’s how I discovered that the side doors in school did not lock after you shut them.

  I never knew where she disappeared to until the day I followed her. We exchanged glances as she stood on the threshold of the side doors. She smiled warmly when she saw me, then put a finger to her lips to suggest we were to operate quietly.

  “Wanna come with me?” she said in a husky voice. She had a look that said goodbye at the exact moment it was saying hello. I could not turn away from her darting eyes and freckled cheeks. She was hypnotic, like one of those precious stones from a treasure chest in a Walt Disney movie. A big gem that sparkled under any light, so beautiful it hurt.

  She slipped away from me. Before the doors could shut behind her, I stepped out using a foot to prop one of them open. I stood midway between the school hall and the outside world, staring at her, in awe of her moves. The outer school fence had two small holes, just big enough to fit a climbing foot. The girl slid her toes into the first one, then inserted the other foot into the second hole and pushed herself up. When she reached the top of the fence, she looked back at me with dazed green eyes, the wind blowing in her swaying ponytail. She squeezed her thumb and index together and pointed them toward the sun, pinching out a drop of light. She pointed her fingers toward my eyelids.

  “There you are, some light in your eyes. That’s all you need to hop over. Just look at the sun. Think of the other side. Don’t ever think of what’s behind you.”

  Just like that she was free.

  “Don’t tell anyone about the holes, okay? I made them myself.” Then she smiled. In a few moments she was speeding down the sidewalk.

  I stayed there, looking at her like a dumb thing, stuck between two worlds, my foot still propping the door open. When she reached the end of the sidewalk she looked back at me and pointed to the sun again.

  “Just look up and keep moving!”

  I waved at her awkwardly, but she was already gone. I looked at the fence and knew I wouldn’t do it. I cowered back inside the school building and heard the door shut behind me. I didn’t have the courage to take those risks alone. I kept roaming the hall and made my way outside to a hidden cement spot by a fire hydrant where the sun shone. I preferred reading there rather than in the library. Nobody ever came. On the path I passed by Ajane and her friends. I knew when to look away now, how to distance myself from them so words and provocations would not be uttered. In the quad, cheerleaders arranged themselves in diamond-shaped choreographies to the rhythm of a Snap! song. I kept moving until I reached my safe corner. A small hibiscus shrub grew there. I lay on the concrete. The school’s marching band practiced nearby. Proud trumpets echoed in my ear. I felt my legs open on the hot ground. A whiff of ocean made its way across the canyons. If I closed my eyes I could smell salt in the air. I thought about what the ponytail girl said about heading for the sun and not looking back. I saw her fingers pinching light and placing it in my eyes. I pretended I was on a Mediterranean beach and let the rays fill the dark circles around my sockets.

  “Hey Greece,” a voice called to me. “What’s up with not coming to class?”

  There was Arash, alone, in a white T-shirt against the blue sky. And that’s when I chose him.

  Two days later it was the two of us swinging open the school’s side doors. We went to the fence and I showed him where to put his feet to climb up. We threw our backpacks to the other side so they wouldn’t get in the way, and when I reached the top I looked at the sun and told myself everything was easy and safe. I didn’t look back, just like the girl said. We jumped down to the other side and started running. On a residential street we laughed and panted and took each other’s hands. We were alone and the Valley was quiet, almost beautiful. The few green bumps that gave Woodland Hills its name looked like imperial knolls to me now.

  Arash pulled me closer to him.

  “You’re a ballsy chick. How did you know about that fence?”

  “Just don’t tell your friends.”

  After a few turns, we stumbled on an abandoned junior high tucked between two small mountains. A team of Hispanic gardeners in bright orange vests was at work in the hills—the guardian angels of the San Fernando Valley’s natural world. They looked after its ecosystem, contained biological rebelliousness, removed leaves, bark, and moles. We used a faded RESERVED WHEELCHAIR ACCESS sign that was screwed into the parking-lot fence as a foothold and hopped over.

  Tall grass sprouted from the courtyard and through the cracked cement of the basketball courts. The gardeners up in the hills weren’t paid to keep this nature at bay. Nobody noticed or cared about the weeds that grew outside the boarded-up classrooms or the ivy that crept along the rusted fences. A sign in one of the abandoned buildings read PROHIBIDO ENTRAR. Perhaps the people of Woodland Hills thought the only ones interested in trespassing at an abandoned junior high were Latinos. We walked around the ghost school’s echoing hallways. Arash pushed his shoulder against the wooden door of a sealed classroom, but it wouldn’t open. We found a discarded shopping cart and rammed it against
the door a few times until it busted open. Shafts of light illuminated dust particles that shimmered over piled-up desks. A blackboard still hung on the wall. Someone had tagged “NWA” on it.

  We sat on a bed of dry leaves on the classroom floor. Arash leaned back against the wall and lit a cigarette. He spat on the ground beside me, then looked me in the eyes.

  “It’s kind of cozy here,” he said, smiling.

  “Why do you spit so much?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Habit, I guess. Plus I don’t want to have my mouth all full when I kiss you.”

  “When you what?”

  He leaned over and kissed me, bumping my head on the wall. I kissed him back. I didn’t expect it to be good, but it was. His lips were soft and I liked how big and sweet his tongue felt. I kept my eyes closed and undid his jeans, sniffing the aroma of the softener his mother used for his flannel underwear. It smelled better than his lips.

  He had a dark, compact cock—an adult penis, more mature than the person behind it. I wrapped my lips around it and tasted the bittersweet drops at the tip. Arash’s head fell back and hit the wall. His fingers began to tremble on the side of my ears, attempting to caress my temples. I opened my mouth wider and sucked mechanically—rubber suit intact. He rolled his eyes in disbelief.

  “You mean just like that? I don’t even have to work on it or nothin’?”

  I looked up and smiled. “Just like that.”

  I pulled him closer to me from his hips. He was breathing hard, more from stupefaction than from pleasure. I felt liquid moving up and so I pushed him farther down my throat. I let him come inside my mouth and swallowed because I was embarrassed to spit and didn’t want to add to his pile on the floor.

  Afterward we sat hugging each other on the dusty floor, listening to the hypnotic hum of chain saws in the hills, a distant bark, birds twittering. The gardeners did their job, vacuuming gravel and chopping trees, doing what they did in their orange vests. They were the only ones who knew how fast the grass grew, how far elm branches reached. They were paid—very little—to bind and limit the explosiveness of the city’s macrocosm, to get rid of the beautiful trees with loose, flimsy leaves that lined the hillcrests. They had to intervene when white people planted weeping willows where they weren’t supposed to—their deep roots digging for moisture, breaking pipes and clogging water systems. As I lay there I imagined the men in orange vests shaking their heads, speaking to trees and plants, apologizing for all the times they had to cut them down for stupid reasons.

  I rested my head on Arash’s shoulders.

  “Want me to go down on you?” he asked politely.

  “No, I’m fine. Thanks for coming here with me.”

  He shifted in his seat and held me closer.

  “All you Persian guys in class call each other kuni all the time, but then you’re always grinding each other and grabbing each other’s dicks…Don’t you think there’s something homoerotic between all of you or something?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. Probably. What do you mean homoerotic?”

  “Gay.”

  “Fuck that. I’m not fucking gay. Did I seem gay to you when I busted a nut in your mouth just now?” he snapped defensively.

  “No. I don’t know. Never mind.”

  “Hey, Greece, you think too much. Give me a kiss.”

  He leaned over and kissed me again.

  “I’m fucking Italian, you idiot.”

  I was happy to be with him.

  “You taste like jizz,” he said.

  —

  I had my library pass and Arash made it a habit to skip English class so we could go to the abandoned junior high. It was always the same thing when we went. I made him come, but never came myself. I never took my own clothes off. I let him kiss me and touch my breasts while I stayed focused on our actions so I wouldn’t start to feel things. In school he pretended not to know me. He didn’t want his friends to know. I wasn’t allowed to say hello when he was with them, but I didn’t care. I took my outcast status out on Simon, the school’s reigning nerd: tall, bookish, and already hunchbacked at sixteen, with wide teeth and thick gums. I had observed him during my library hours. He spent time there, reading and practicing for Speech and Debate. He was the captain of the team and of any other school team that didn’t involve having to move your body. He was a year ahead of me and always carried around a huge book that looked like a brown brick. I asked him if I could look at it one day. It had thin pages. There was a painting of a beautiful woman in colorful clothes on the cover. It was an anthology of American literature. Simon spoke to me about his Advanced English class. That was the place to be if you wanted to go to a good college. He had done so well on his tests that he had applied to college early and had already been accepted to Harvard. I leafed through the pages of his book and fell in love with it. Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe. I loved Thoreau and the way he wrote about nature. I cried reading Harriet Jacobs, became obsessed with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and wrote down every Gertrude Stein title I could find so I could get all her books. Simon talked about what life at a university would be like and made it sound nothing like the Valley. He used a language I had never heard anyone my age use. His nose was thin and long, his eyes focused. Soon I started noticing other kids in school walking around with that same anthology. They were like a nerd cult, but I felt I had something in common with them. They were calmer, almost invisible, a kind of substrata. I wanted that book. I wanted to be where that book was, but I was not willing to take my suit off yet. So I kept it on and followed my usual procedure. I invited myself over to Simon’s house, asking him to tutor me. I told him I wanted to move up from my regular window-spitting English class and join the league of Advanced English students like himself. He had no friends and neither did I. Plus he wore Birkenstock sandals with white socks. Nobody in socks and sandals could reject me.

  I showed up at his house with a short, glittering dress and no underwear. His parents were at work. Their cocker spaniel, Leonard, minded his own business. Simon tried to explain to me how to answer the analogy questions on SAT tests, but I just looked him straight in the eyes until he blushed and turned away. His big toes wriggled inside the spongy white socks. I slid his hand under my dress and opened my legs, staring at his feet. Why would anyone wear socks with sandals? I kept thinking. It looked so bad that I promised myself I would never tell anyone about us. I’d just close my eyes and pretend like it never happened. A hard-on poked through his matted sweatpants. I got up, lifted my dress, and sat on his lap, letting the ugly polyester rub against my naked skin. Simon turned red. Leonard barked. Simon kicked him under the table while I pulled down his pants. He turned me around and kissed me with an uncertain jolt. We groped each other toward his bed and fell over. Then we were both naked and soon even he wasn’t a virgin anymore.

  We had tutoring and sex sessions twice a week after school. We did everything together. I was unashamed and felt fine bossing him around. I warned him not to tell anyone about us, just like Arash warned me. On his birthday I put his penis on my ass and slid it inside. It felt too deep and I got scared because for a moment my rubber suit had come off and I felt my legs trembling. I breathed my way back into numbness and then went to the bathroom to shower off. The suit functioned within certain boundaries. It was important not to overstep them. My writing improved and so did my English. Finally Simon introduced me to Mrs. Perks, the Advanced English teacher. She asked me to give her some writing samples and said she’d consider me for the future.

  During school I hooked up with Arash, after school I hooked up with Simon, and at home I started making out with Robert the Goth screenwriter. I finally got to him. He slipped notes inside my backpack and doodled in my schoolbooks. I lured him into the bathroom one day, kissed him hard against the shower curtain, and asked him to tell me about the crazy things he did and the drugs he had to take for his mental problems. I hoped showing interest in his dark side would make me intriguing in his eyes.

&nbs
p; When I went out with him I told my parents I was going bowling in the Valley with friends from school. They were too happy to hear the word friends to not let me go.

  Robert and I drove an hour to get to an animation festival in Pomona. On our way I asked him if I could smoke a cigarette and he said he hated smokers.

  “You guys always open a crack in the window like it’s going to make the car less smoky. That’s bullshit. Cracks don’t help. Just smoke, okay? But leave the window closed.”

  The theater was filled with drunk college students.

  Robert offered me the Valium his doctors prescribed for his mood swings. I washed the pill down with vodka from his flask. When the lights went down I began to feel heavy. It was one of those festivals where audience participation was required and everybody screamed at the screen. A bird molested a cat on top of a tree. Robert, elated, launched his flask at him and yelled, “Fuck you.”

  The rest of the audience joined him and started throwing random objects at the screen. Tomatoes were involved. When it was over, Robert burped and said he didn’t really know any other date-y type places. I was on my first American date, it occurred to me—the kind where you wore cardigans and drove to lookout spots. A date where I was supposed to wear a bra he could clumsily undo, but I knew it was too late to have romantic expectations about this city. My weeks with Arash and Simon said things would not happen that way for me.

  I asked Robert to take me to his favorite place and he drove me to an old sewer tunnel beneath the Pomona freeway where a small gathering of homeless people slept on blankets on the ground. I stumbled over one of them, but he was too drunk to notice. There were murals and graffiti on the walls, remnants of the LA riots: “Riots Not Diets!” “Crips, Bloods, Mexicans Together. Fuck LAPD.” The sound of water trickling through the tunnel made it hard to tell if there was anything to be scared of. Robert and I walked into darkness and sat in a dry area at the end of the path. He finally kissed me and rolled down my tights and underwear. I was so cold I barely recognized his small tongue coming at me, insidious and ineffective. All I could feel was the freezing air scratching my naked thighs. I turned over and tried to give him a blow job. He was so cold that his penis had shriveled into a stub, and though I breathed my inner vapors onto it, it stayed flaccid. Robert mumbled something about how cold it was and how the Valium did something. We decided to just make out. He gave me a hickey and laughed.