Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  “It’s a fairy-princess dress,” I replied, defensively.

  “A fairy what?”

  “Fairy-princess dress.”

  “More like a grandma’s baby doll.”

  “It’s Deva’s.”

  “Who is that?”

  He rolled the chair over to Street Fighter. He had carved out a pathway between the cash register and the video game so he would never have to get up from the chair.

  I knocked him off his seat.

  “Put double player on.”

  T. Hawk, the exiled Indian warrior, versus E. Honda, the sumo wrestler.

  “So, who’s this girl?” he asked again.

  “Oh my God, Henry. She’s amazing. You would love her. She’s, like, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

  “Oh yeah? Does she like handicapped men?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What? Some women are kinky like that.”

  “You are not handicapped!”

  “Dude, I’m missing an ear.”

  “Could be worse. You could be missing a leg.”

  “Not like I use these much. I’m always in this shitty store. Oh, you fucking cunt!” he screamed at the screen while my wrestler unleashed his hundred violent sumo hands move.

  “I kicked your ass. And I haven’t even played in two days! It’s not like I practice constantly like you.”

  —

  Since I’d been back from Italy I’d started to spend my afternoons at Henry’s store playing Street Fighter on an arcade video game he had stolen from a doughnut store, smoking pot, and redecorating the shop. I was obsessed with Bargain Barn, a warehouse in Anaheim where furniture and clothes were sold by the pound. Bel Air sold rich people’s leftovers while Anaheim collected the dreams of society’s dropouts: desks from offices of failed businesses, corporate couches, synthetic orange armchairs from the seventies, and, since Disneyland was in the neighborhood, plenty of dated cartoon memorabilia. Once in a while a gem popped up: a Louis Vuitton handbag, a Chanel purse, or a velvet Valentino jacket.

  I fixed up a set of glass cases for Henry’s store. I baptized them with the switchblade knife from Nekromantik that Robert had given me on our first and last date. I also got a set of matching rust-colored velvet chairs and an antique two-tier paper cutter. I spent close to nothing to refurbish the store. It happened naturally. I started off bringing him pieces I thought might look good, then I began to stick around in the afternoons, unpacking boxes of vintage clothes, dividing garments into different categories and labeling them by color and style. “We have customers,” Henry cheered one day after I sold a stack of moldy DeFranco Family records. And since that day they kept coming back. I reorganized stashes of old portfolio pictures that Henry had never even leafed through and pulled out the ones of actresses who had made it. The real prizes were the portfolio images of stars before they were famous. We called them PFCs—pre-fame celebrities—and sold them for twenty dollars apiece. Familiar faces: Julia Roberts at seventeen, Meg Ryan at twenty, an awkward post-teen image of Diane Keaton—my favorite. She presided over the store, hanging above the counter like an Italian patron saint. I put a constellation of anonymous angels from the seventies and eighties around her: Nina Sanchez, Elodie Verve, Tania Beloved—the incredible names of those who never made it. I wanted them to have a shot too, if not in a film, at least in a store.

  —

  Henry paused the game and looked at me with pinched brows.

  “So how did you meet this Deva girl? Weird fucking name anyway. Are her parents hippies or something?”

  “Maybe. The house looks kind of hippie. Her dad is a rock musician with a biker beard, but he’s super strict. Her mom lives in Utah and has a Christian coffee shop.”

  Henry moaned, “Gross.”

  “Have you ever been to Topanga?” I asked him. It was difficult to imagine Henry anywhere outside that store. “It’s another world from the Valley. I want to live there.”

  “I don’t know. It reminds me of Twin Peaks.”

  Henry lit himself another cigarette. I emptied the overflowing ashtray that was sitting on the dashboard and went back to play.

  T. Hawk had floored me with his kicks.

  “You asshole! I was dumping your disgusting ashtray!”

  Henry butted me off the chair so he could go back to playing alone.

  “Anyway, Topanga is, like, so not like Twin Peaks,” I squealed.

  Henry gave me a complacent smirk. “Did you just say two likes in the same sentence? You’re starting to sound like a Valley girl, you know that?”

  I blushed. I knew he was right.

  “You’re worse, an Italian Valley girl. You’ve invented a new LA subculture.”

  —

  “Want some weed? It might make you feel better.”

  Cinderella looked at us with a glimmer of hope. Her tiara was off and her hair was down.

  “I’d love to get stoned, man.”

  She scratched her scalp, relieved. The Disney goo on her face was coming apart.

  We were in the smoking section at Disneyland and Cinderella had been crying and screaming at her boyfriend over the pay phone, telling him he was a motherfucker and she wished that he would die slowly.

  Henry had agreed to take me to the Anaheim market with the promise that we could get stoned at Disneyland. I never imagined I’d end up getting high with Cinderella as well.

  We took hits from Henry’s metal pipe.

  Cinderella held the smoke in, then exhaled with a cough.

  “I’m so pissed.” She sighed, drying tears from her eyes. “He fucked my best friend.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Some children walked by our designated area and got excited about seeing Cinderella. She got up with a grunt and walked toward them to pose for a photo.

  She tried to smile benevolently—in character. The little girls looked up at her in awe, but the older ones could tell something was off. As soon as they moved on, her face returned to sullen and Cinderella sat back down next to us. She scratched her pale ankles aggressively. They were covered in blood and scratch marks.

  “Fucking mosquitoes around here. I hate this place.”

  “So what are you originally? An actress?” Henry asked, sneaking another hit off his pipe.

  She raised her eyebrow at him. “Yeah…”

  “Look, it’s not like I thought I’d end up working in a thrift shop. But there’s hope, right? We’re still young.”

  Someone spoke back from the Dumbo-themed mini-golf course behind us.

  “Not for you there ain’t…”

  A squeaky voice joined our conversation. It was Mickey Mouse. Or rather an undercover cop dressed as the Walt Disney character. He approached Henry and me with a badge and asked us to follow him. Marijuana was illegal and this was a family-oriented park.

  We looked at Cinderella, hoping she would intervene, but she betrayed us.

  “I’m sorry, Mickey. I didn’t realize they were smoking or I would have tried to stop them myself.”

  “She fucking smoked too!” Henry pulled away from Mickey’s grasp.

  “Sure she did. Now please stop resisting or I’ll have to handcuff you,” said the mouse.

  Henry turned to Cinderella and growled. He spat on the floor by her plastic glass slipper and told her he hoped all her boyfriends for the rest of her life would fuck her best friends for the rest of their lives.

  We were guided through a series of underground corridors to Disneyland’s detox rooms, also known as the Mickey jails. We were to sit in silence until the effects of the drugs wore off. The rooms were mostly populated by teenagers on hallucinogenic drugs. Henry and I both got tickets and were not allowed to drive back home. On top of that I was a minor and needed someone to sign for me. It couldn’t be my parents. There was no way they would pick me up in Anaheim. I could already hear the deportation monologue on my father’s lips, how I should have been more careful, how his film was on the line. When he talked about
his work now he put on a serious tone and threw around big terms: the business, majors, above-the-line expenses. He had accumulated an armory of new expressions we were required to respect. When we didn’t, he lost his temper or sulked, reiterating that if we wanted things to work we had to be in them together as a family. And I wanted things to work.

  —

  Henry’s mother, Phoebe, pulled in to the Disneyland parking lot in a boxy white Buick. It made a rattling sound and bounced from left to right on its tires. I knew she was big, but I always thought Henry was exaggerating when he said she was obese. He wasn’t. He helped her out of the car. She wore a pink see-through tank top and her hair, what there was of it, was up in a ruffled bun held together by a faded gold scrunchie. Below the tank top she wore a pair of silk trousers that created a floppy mount above her pubic area and Spanish-style espadrilles. Somewhere underneath the folds of her arms were the traces of a woman of style. She had been beautiful. I knew it from looking at her and from the photos I saw at the store. But her entire persona was afflicted with years of drugging, drinking, and bingeing. Her thin, meatless lips were painted with coral-orange lipstick that squished outside their contour, making her look a bit like a demented bag lady.

  I expected a reproach. I waited for a snarky comment, but the moment she stepped out of the car, she smiled to invisible crowds, paid my fine, and shook the Mickey policeman’s hand.

  “Thank you for your work,” she said agreeably, avoiding any reference to the reasons we had been kicked out in the first place. It was a simple procedure, a bureaucratic trifle that need not be judged.

  We left Henry’s car in the Disneyland parking lot and got in the back of Phoebe’s Buick.

  She came inside and released a fatigued sound when her butt hit the seat. She turned to me.

  “So you must be Eugenia, the girl Henry’s been telling me about.”

  “I am. Thank you for picking us…me…up. I know it’s a very long drive and I’m so sorry about—”

  She cut me off with a wave of her hand.

  “And you’re from Italy. I love Italy!”

  “Oh, you’ve been?”

  I looked at Henry to see his reaction. He had never mentioned any travel in his life. He had never told of his mother doing anything except for shooting up drugs, eating, and hoarding.

  “Oh yes. Arivedershi Roma! Do people still dance in the streets?”

  I told her yes that they did, even though I had never seen anyone dance in the streets because what happened in the streets was mostly honking and cursing. On our ride back she talked about a man named Aldo who was “just so Italian” and lived in via del Moro in Trastevere. He’d given her a taste of the real dolce vita. She told us about a tavern where she drank and sang and danced on tables, about how all the men loved her because Italian women were good for cooking and raising children but not for dancing on tables. Only American women did that because they were freer.

  “I was the only woman in Rome dancing on tables,” Phoebe declared, and Henry grumbled because that was just another piece of information about his mother’s youth he never knew, another corner of her life that had not included him.

  “Hey Mom, where did you put the cigarettes?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

  Inside the car we were worlds away from any dolce vita: trash bags filled with junk, soggy fries, half-open packets of ketchup, and empty extra-large soda cups.

  “Do they still make saltimbocca? Is that what that dish is called?”

  “Yes, of course…It’s a traditional Roman dish.”

  “Why would you care, all you eat is burgers and fries,” Henry said.

  “Oh Henry, will you just shut up?” Phoebe snapped. She opened her vowels wide when she called her son’s name, making it sound like a complaint. “Oh, I love those. What’s in those? Is it beef?”

  “Veal. With prosciutto and sage.”

  “That’s right, sage. La salvia. Oh my god how I loved those saltimbocca. Do you know how to make them?”

  “Every Roman does. You could”—I looked at Henry to check if I was crossing a line, but he refused to participate in the conversation—“you could come over and I could make some for you if you’d like.” I offered this as a way to thank her for the ride.

  “That would make me so happy.” She sighed nostalgically.

  Henry tapped his finger on the window nervously. “Where are my cigarettes, Mom?”

  Phoebe ignored him. She started to hum an Italian song she vaguely remembered.

  “Fuck, Mom. Where did you put my smokes? It’s gross in here,” he whined abrasively. “Pull over, won’t you?”

  Phoebe groaned. She slowed down and pulled over onto the shoulder like she knew what was coming. Henry darted out and around to the back door. He took out a McDonald’s paper bag and started filling it with the scattered litter on the floor by my feet. The wind blowing on the freeway flipped his long hair, uncovering his missing ear as he scoured the car for garbage. He packed the bag with trash and food debris and threw everything over the emergency lane and got back in the car.

  “This car is disgusting. Let’s go.”

  Phoebe took off with no mention of the litter left behind. That’s when I got it. I understood that getting Phoebe out of her den was a big deal—not only for her but for Henry as well. He wasn’t proud of his mother. He wasn’t happy when he spoke to her or saw her. She shot up drugs, drank, and smoked heavily throughout her pregnancy and that was the reason Henry’s ear was missing, why sarcasm always coated his words. He had fought one big battle as a child and that was the one to keep his ear. The battle was lost and there was no use fighting other, less important battles after it. He had been through hospitals, surgery, infections, and years of antibiotics. Treating microtia required the coordinated efforts of a plastic surgeon and an ear surgeon. His mother’s insurance would not cover all that because her addictions were considered preexisting conditions. So medical procedures were interrupted midway, doctors changed according to policies, and what should have been a normal ear disorder ended up evolving into a case severe enough to require partial amputation.

  “In America it’s easier to cut things off when they don’t work,” Henry had told me one day.

  Homeless people on methamphetamines chewed their hands to the bones. When they got infected, they went to hospitals and doctors cut them off. Nurses put them in plastic bags, then tossed them out. Nothing was done to reconstruct the faces and limbs of those who could not afford it. You had to find a way to live without your missing body parts, limping through life, trying to reduce pain with chemicals and home remedies. Broken people learned not to ask for help. They lived with their digitless hands and busted knees and missing ears and certainly didn’t call their parents during emergencies. They did not ask the very people who took their ears away to come and make things better.

  But Henry did that day, and for that I was grateful.

  We stayed quiet for the rest of the ride. When they dropped me off in front of my house, I gave Phoebe a hug through the driver’s window and made a date for our saltimbocca dinner. I promised.

  15

  The yellow bus that drove across Topanga Canyon to the Pacific Coast Highway was almost empty. I felt a weight lift off my chest as we started climbing into the mountain. The Valley clouds cleared, pierced by oblique strands of sunlight that illuminated grasslands where sheep grazed. Deva put her feet up in front of her and looked out the window, biting her fingernails. They were painted black, but the polish had scraped off. She had a small cast around her elbow. She told me she fell in the woods. At her feet was a duffel bag filled with the clothes her father had thrown out—washed, ironed, and folded in neat stacks.

  “You didn’t lose them,” I told her when I handed them over during lunch that day. I’d waited two weeks to see her again. She hadn’t been in school. I rehearsed the line at home and imagined a series of responses, but Deva smiled as soon as she saw me. From the expression on her face I could have
sworn she was also counting the days before seeing me again. She hugged me and invited me to Topanga in the afternoon. Her bones were thin like a chicken’s. I was afraid they would snap. When I hugged her back I looked at the school grounds behind her—the courtyard and cafeteria, the corner with the small magnolia tree where I sunbathed, the cheerleader squad practicing for the pep rally on the football field. Everything seemed suddenly distant and shapeless. Students were dark figurines moving on the horizon. Harmless.

  We stepped off the bus in front of the canyon’s country store. It had rained. The weather system was different in Topanga. I filled my lungs with the cool, clean air. On the store’s corkboard, local announcements and psychedelic-themed flyers promoting energy healings and crystal clearings flapped in the wind. A surfer dude bought us a six-pack of Mickey’s malt liquor. We didn’t have a plan, but we had a whole afternoon ahead of us. The canyon’s oaks, walnut trees, and callistemons muffled the traffic noise that rose from the bottom of the mountain. They trapped it inside invisible sacs and distributed it across the hills. They were the guardians of that stillness. Things were kept safe in this remote cocoon—secrets, sounds, people. The outside world would not trickle in.

  I followed Deva down a winding country road lined with crumbling cottages. We crossed an ascending dirt path through a patch of oak trees. The sun penetrated openings in the woods. It wasn’t the usual Los Angeles sun, that overbearing pinnacle of light and heat that took everything in. It was different. It seemed to originate from the earth and moved up tree branches like scattered paint. We were part of a new ecosystem with its own rules.

  The road dried out as we moved past the forested area. The earth beneath our feet turned golden red. Deva kept walking ahead of me and did not say a word. I followed diligently, going back and forth in my mind about whether I would seem cooler if I spoke or remained quiet. I chose silence. Deva did not appear to be thinking at all. She moved up the hill with an unfocused gaze. She probably didn’t even realize we were quiet, that it might be awkward, that if we were to try and become friends, there were rules. We were supposed to talk about bands and experiences, boys, families, parties, other friends. But none of those things came to her mind and I held back from bringing in my own stories. I focused on her lips, trying to gauge if they were on the verge of emitting sound, but she used them only to taste a piece of pine pitch she’d scraped off a tree. She sucked on it, then handed me some.