Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  “Some leftovers,” she said in a cheeky voice, and washed down one of Bob’s pills with a sip. I took one too.

  We crossed the canyon road and walked along the other side of the street to the local elementary school, leaving behind the howling hippies and the cracked boulder. The gate was ajar. Deva ran toward the playground and climbed over the jungle gym. She hung herself from the tallest bars in the semicircle. It was always like that. I tended to stay in the energy of things that had just happened—the boulder, the laser, her hand in mine—and she was always working up the impetus for something new. The road would be clear the following morning and I knew Deva didn’t want me to leave the canyon with the feeling of having done it all. So she pushed us onward. We had to end those boulder days with something extraordinary, but we had nothing extraordinary in our hands: just children’s rides and rubble in our pockets.

  I lay back on the merry-go-round and pushed against the central wheel with my foot. I tilted my head to the ground below and looked up at the stars, spinning upside down. I felt the warm Vicodin and vodka blur into the distant anxiety that something wasn’t right. Deva appeared upside down in front of me, dangling her limp body over my eyes.

  “I’m so hot. It’s so hot,” she moaned and rolled the top of her princess dress down to her belly. She was bare-chested in front of me. I stopped the wheel to look at her. She climbed next to me on the merry-go-round and began to spin the central wheel. It made a soft, oily sound. She spun faster, laughing at nothing as we turned—anything was good as long as it could lift her from reality and plunge her into the reckless, happy confusion she loved. She tilted her head to the fast-moving ground.

  “Look at the stars. They are so bright.” She sighed.

  But I couldn’t look at the stars. I was looking at her pale body instead. She was marmoreal against the penumbra of the trees. Naked under the dark sky, her thin skin covered in goose bumps, she looked like an abandoned statue.

  “Look! Look at the stars, Eugenia! They are like little sugar cubes.”

  She pushed her foot against the central wheel, making us turn faster. She acted like she never wanted to be still again, like she was trying to spin us into a permanent vortex, but the wheel could only spin so fast. She let go. We slowed down. She stayed folded backward, her hair brushing against the dirt, and began to cry.

  When the ride stopped, I moved closer and rubbed my hand on her naked belly to warm her. When she came back up blood had flowed to her head and her face was red with cracked eyes.

  “I’m sorry if this isn’t fun for you,” she said.

  I kept my hands on her belly. “What are you talking about? It’s so fun.” I tried to console her.

  “I’m sorry you had to be stuck here with me and…I’m sorry about my dad. I know he’s weird.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t care what he does as long as he is not hurting you.”

  Deva didn’t reply.

  I passed my hand over her chin. She pulled back a bit, then spoke, staring at the ground. “He can be a real dick sometimes. He can be ugly and he can seem violent. He’s a little crazy for sure. Sometimes he just gets drunk or uptight. By the morning it’s gone.”

  “I don’t need to have fun as long as you’re okay.”

  Deva started to laugh, releasing tension. “Okay.”

  My fingers moved naturally across her belly, up to her chest.

  “But I do want to keep having fun. I don’t want to get sad now. I’m really fine, you know.” She sniffed snot up into her nose.

  “We’ll keep having fun,” I reassured her.

  “Will we? Because we can, right? Who says we can’t?”

  “Nobody says we can’t have fun!”

  She leaned back again on the merry-go-round and pulled her dress up over her knees. The satin shimmered in the darkness. She took my hand and brought it to her inner thighs and then pressed down. I felt a kick in my legs, something opening up, and things went dark. The next moment I was on top of her. I pulled down her scrunched-up underwear, soggy and loose. She was wet. I pushed away her pubic hair to get to her exposed, unprotected parts, and pressed my lips against her. Her hands reached for my pants. I undid them quickly and in a second her fingers were inside me.

  We pushed against each other, startled, not knowing what we were doing. I pulled her up and pushed her over the seat. I placed her in the same position I saw her in when her father had glanced down her back: leaning forward with elbows resting on the cold metal and her ass in the air. I wanted to own that position. I wanted Deva to know her father was wrong. She could wear any kind of clothes with me. I opened her up from behind and licked her, spreading her apart while I touched myself. I felt her taut skin become tender, then taut again. I didn’t know what it was. A buttery thing, easy like the oiled merry-go-round, like her father’s desk drawers. It moved and found reciprocity. Arms corresponded to arms, toes agreed with each other. A hot piece of leg merged with another. Mouths breathed the same air. Nothing needed to be explained or thought about. We were feeling the same things at the same time and the painkillers did not take that away from us. We both came.

  Deva’s belly rested against the cold rails of the merry-go-round, back still folded over. I could see her beauty outside the confines of vodka and painkillers, and I knew I was done with not feeling things. I was done with my rubber suit. I did not need it anymore and I hated the way it blocked my vision, how it got in the way of the sun and the drops of rain in Deva’s hair—things I wanted to see. I kissed her shoulder and told her I had never felt anything like that with a boy. She hung from my neck and we let the wheel lull us through the last drops of our trailing pleasure.

  19

  My parents and brother picked me up in the Cadillac at the bottom of Deva’s driveway. The sun shone and Topanga felt like the Alps. I’d woken up in Switzerland to a voracious blue sky. There were no traces of the boulder except for some rubble on the side of the road and a bunch of cigarette butts and joint stubs from the drum circle.

  My father was in slippers and flannel pajamas that were covered in paint. He had wild, insomniac eyes. His untamed hair was divided into three sections, a vertical funnel and two side cones ruffled into curls. A new set of hair tufts had started growing out of his ears as well. He looked mad.

  “What’s going on? I thought we were going out for lunch,” I asked.

  “Dad’s been painting. We’re eating at home,” my mother replied.

  My brother shook his head at me and tapped his forehead with his index finger, miming the Italian gesture for “crazy.”

  “I don’t understand why you couldn’t just walk down the canyon the other day. You’ve done it hundreds of times,” Ettore scowled at me from the rearview mirror.

  “It was pouring and I thought it was dangerous.”

  “You were much braver as a child.”

  Serena gave him a look, trying to stop him from speaking further. I wanted them to be quiet also, to take in the golden light over the mountain ranges, listen to the sheep bells in the pastures, and get lost in the blue distances. I wanted them to see Topanga and love that day like I did.

  “We had to hire Henry to work nighttimes. He was going crazy with the costume changes. You left a mess in the changing rooms. It’s full of stuff. Where does it come from?” Ettore protested.

  “I thought I would be back the next day,” I answered.

  “All I’m saying is that in the professional world, you would have had to find a solution. You don’t just call and announce you won’t make it on set.”

  There was that word again, professional.

  Serena turned to me, droopy-eyed. “Never mind. We worked it out. Two more weeks and the film is done. Dad is stressed because he had some bad news.”

  I could still smell Deva on my fingers. I kept them close to my nose and smiled. What happened between us felt like butterflies and sweat and a racing heart and it made me not care about being “professional” or on time or available. I felt light.
Even Arash’s brick was turning into a rubble of lasered powder.

  “I had some bad news!” Ettore shrieked. “This is exactly our family’s problem. When things go well, it’s everyone’s business, but when they turn to shit, it’s my bad news, right? Nobody shares the pains. Only the glories!”

  “Which glories, Dad?” Timoteo asked discreetly.

  “The glories, the glories—”

  “So what happened?” I interrupted as the car coasted past the canyon’s last curve.

  “She won’t think it’s bad news,” my father mumbled to himself, pointing at me with his eyes. His eyebrows pulled up high and bushy when he was angry.

  My brother and mother both turned toward me like I was the culprit.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She’ll be happy finally. After everything I’ve done for her!”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not here. What’s going on?” I screamed.

  The temperature rose the minute we rolled into the Valley. Heat was a different concept there—a constant that one was doomed to suffer. There was no escape.

  Serena gave Ettore one last glance, then looked at my brother for encouragement.

  “Max left,” she finally announced.

  “Why wouldn’t that be good news?” I answered.

  “See!” my father screamed. “All she cares about is having her fucking bedroom back!”

  My brother took my hand and squeezed it. I pulled it away, afraid he’d steal Deva’s scent from me.

  “Gone. Like gone gone,” Timoteo explained.

  I remembered Max on the phone at the Alexandria, his mumbled words in Spanish. I felt guilty because I could have said something then but didn’t. The car screeched to a halt on the side of the road and my father turned around toward me.

  “He left.” He sighed. “The production money we were waiting for from his bank never came. We have no idea where he went. He didn’t even leave a note. He took off with all his stuff.”

  “And some of ours,” Serena added.

  “And some of ours.” Ettore nodded. “Including a credit card, which he has already used apparently.”

  “Stronzo,” Timoteo commented.

  My knees trembled. I became instantly scared of having taken off my rubber suit because now my heart was a bigger, more vulnerable thing and my family appeared to me like a desperate, distant bunch, all of them wailing a song nobody would listen to into the rain.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “I’m finishing this fucking film. No matter what!” Ettore declared.

  The car started moving again. I pulled toward the front seat to look at him up close. New lines had appeared under Ettore’s eyes—pinkish, vulnerable skin. There was a curl to his mouth, a desperate frown. Complication dwelled on his lips.

  I stayed quiet, looking at the paint marks on his flannel pajamas and wool slippers. We drove past my high school. From the street things looked like a postcard of what schools were supposed to look like in America. Something outside us, that didn’t belong to our lives—as if we were taking a road trip into the idea of California. The gates and grates, the empty parking lot, I saw everything with new eyes, pretending to be a tourist.

  “Is our house in Rome still ours?” I finally asked, but nobody answered.

  —

  When we got home, Max’s familiar chaos was still around but none of his stuff. Ashtrays were filled with cigar butts. Empty hangers from the dry cleaner clinked against one another on the wheeled clothes racks in the living room. My bedroom smelled of men’s cologne and cigar ash. A pile of receipts and empty shopping bags from the Sherman Oaks Galleria spilled across the floor. I found a Victoria’s Secret body spray by my bedside table with a little note written on a small scrap of paper: Dear Eugenia, sorry I took up so much space—in your room and in your life. I hope this spray will help you get rid of me as much as it helped me get rid of you. Gracias, Max.

  I didn’t show the note to my parents and helped Serena set up for lunch on the backyard patio. The sun was strong. My father sipped whiskey on the rocks and poured her a double.

  Timoteo moved in circles, shooting a basketball at a hoop over the garage, hitting the rim over and over. I noticed the patio was covered in paint drips. My father had been hate-painting. White canvases covered with abstract, angry tar blobs were propped against the house. He sat on the ground next to his new creations, sipping his drink, pouring more tar on the canvases.

  “Should we call the police?” I asked.

  My father shook his head without looking up from the blobs.

  “We wouldn’t do that to Max,” Serena explained.

  “But you had a contract, right? I mean he can’t just leave us like this. He can’t just disappear if there’s a contract, right?”

  “Yes…we…well…” Serena jiggled the ice in her glass nervously.

  “Tell them,” Ettore insisted without lifting his eyes.

  Serena huffed and lit a cigarette. “Fine. Fine. I! Are you happy now? I didn’t finalize the contract—”

  “Finalize? You didn’t even start!” he insisted.

  “Okay, fine. I didn’t do the paperwork.”

  “What kind of producer doesn’t take care of the paperwork? That’s so unprofessional.” That word again.

  “We never would have thought this of Max. He was like family to us!” my mother said, trying to justify her actions.

  “Wasn’t stealing from family like stealing from yourself?” I repeated my father’s business motto.

  “Not this time, apparently.”

  “You know, it’s not true he wrote that Phil Collins song. I saw the album. He’s not credited.” I sighed.

  “I mean you guys are such idiots!” my brother lashed out, throwing his basketball on the ground. He walked to Ettore and handed him a scrunched-up slip of yellow paper he had taken out of his pocket. His report card. More bad news.

  “I got a D in all my classes. Too many absences. You have to sign it.”

  “Have you been ditching school?” Serena asked, putting on a tired, severe tone because that’s what parents had to do when kids got bad grades.

  My brother rolled his eyes at her. “It’s the film, Mom. You took me out of school for two weeks. It’s your fault. Not mine.”

  “It’s okay. You’re smarter than them anyway,” Ettore sneered. He ripped the slip from my brother’s hands, signed blindly, and returned it to him. “And you?” he asked me.

  I had gone out of my way to make up lost tests and keep up with reading material in school. Mrs. Perks had been clear with me: If I wanted to apply for college the next year I had to stay on track. Sometimes I worked at night to catch up. I had never told anyone about my ideas about applying to a university, neither Deva nor my parents. I just kept the letter in the drawer and read it.

  “I got a letter from USC,” I said. “They liked an essay I wrote and encouraged me to apply to their school because they have a good writing program.”

  Serena took another sip of whiskey and coughed. “Well, that’s good. Will you guys help me set the table so we can finally eat?”

  “Yeah, let’s eat,” Ettore concluded.

  —

  That night the phone rang and rang. It woke me up and I thought it was Max, that he was calling to apologize and say it was all a big mistake and the money was on its way. But it was my grandmother’s cleaning lady in Rome. She had found grandmother in bed in her apartment. When she opened the house she knew right away because of the smell. She’d been dead for three days.

  20

  Serena was the only one who was allowed to go to Rome for my grandmother’s funeral. It was almost Christmas. Tickets were expensive and who knew if they’d let us back into the country a second time, now that we didn’t have Max to help pull strings. Our living budget had been reduced to zero, but Ettore insisted on finishing the film no matter what. He was now editing in an underground dungeon-type studio in North Hollywood, hanging on to Miramax’s interes
t in distributing the film once it was complete. It was a matter of finishing fast and things would pick up.

  “Vi chiedo un ultimo sforzo,” our father pleaded, asking for a final effort on everyone’s part.

  In the meantime we replaced the lightbulbs in the kitchen with fluorescent lights from the 99 Cent store to consume less energy. They often flickered. We ate from the vegetable garden and watered plants with caution, always keeping in mind the miraculous effects of compost. Nothing went to waste. Every domestic action was calculated in order to save energy and money that was to go toward the realization of Ettore’s dream. It was as if he had not noticed that someone had died on the other side of an ocean. Serena called every day to speak to us. When we weren’t home she left long messages on the answering machine, sometimes crying.

  The day of our grandmother’s funeral in Rome, my brother and I huddled on the floor listening to Serena’s recorded account of the ceremony. She described a snowstorm that had paralyzed the city and told us what our uncles had cooked for the funeral party. She said she wished she’d had time to make the tortellini for the consommé herself because Alma’s were scotti—overcooked—and the dough tasted like rubber. We heard about snow and chicken broth, but we were wearing T-shirts and drinking lemonade. Our sweaty naked thighs stuck to the living-room floor as we listened to her voice, trying to remember Rome in the winter, the way families gathered, how the pale blue afternoon light shone through the stained-glass living-room windows at our grandmother’s place. I wondered what Alma and Antonio thought of us not being there. I remembered his sarcastic remarks about Ettore selling out, and imagined my mother siding with him, feeling alone and abandoned.

  Instead of calling our mother back, our father asked us to send faxes to her cousin’s house where she was staying.

  “Letters are nicer anyway, more personal, no?”

  I thought about how our grandmother would have scoffed at everything he said, every way in which he dealt with the situation. One Sunday morning Timoteo and I walked to the Iglesia Bautista Sangre de Cristo on Van Nuys Boulevard and spoke to Pastor Hernán. He agreed to do a small service for our grandmother.