“I didn’t realize you were so attached to her,” was Ettore’s response when we told him about our plan. What was the point of wasting time and money on a funeral here, he asked. Grandma was dead. That would not change.
The service was held on the afternoon of the last Sunday before Christmas. Ettore called my brother and me from the editing studio, saying we should take the Victory bus there because he would be coming from North Hollywood and didn’t have time to pick us up.
A strange thing happens when someone dies far away. The brain does not process the information. The person keeps on living in another place for you, even though the other place is not on earth anymore. It was hard enough understanding that a body was there and then not, but with a country and an ocean in between, the whole thing felt even more abstract. Deva had gone to visit her father’s family in Montana for the holidays. I called her innumerable times, but as always when she was with her father, it was as if he’d sucked her away from the world. That she wouldn’t want to find the time to talk to me on the phone after what had happened between us broke my heart more than anything else. I was ashamed to admit that her absence felt more tangible and important to me than my grandmother’s. I felt guilty for not being able to cry, but then again none of us did. We were all disconnected.
Ettore arrived at the Sangre de Cristo church late. He hugged us and sat in the pew looking up at the rose window, distracted. During mass it was just us and the regular congregation plus the Alitalia representative from Torrance whom my grandmother had befriended during her countless telephone calls to rebook her return ticket to Rome. The woman said my grandmother had given her lifesaving advice on how to alleviate rheumatic lower-back pain and she was very sorry for our loss.
On Christmas Day we went to buy presents on Melrose Avenue. We parked at Noah’s Bagels for a lunch snack and during that time someone broke in to the car and stole our gifts. We stood in shock in front of the popped-open trunk. No more presents. No more Christmas. I burst out crying. We drove back to Melrose Avenue and bought the same presents all over. My father put everything on his soon-to-expire American Express card and signed away. None of us knew how to cook a Christmas meal. The fridge was almost empty except for Hot Pockets and eggs. We cleared the table of the lingering paperwork. I lit a pine-tree-shaped candle from Pick ’n Save, a leftover from the previous Christmas, and placed it in the center. My father made carbonara. We drank wine and my father cracked a few jokes about both of our dead grandmothers and how they’d be together talking shit about him in the heavens now. After dinner he moved to his studio with a whiskey on the rocks to look at the latest film edits. I walked past him before going to bed. My throat knotted up when I saw how clean his desk was compared to the rest of the house. I thought about Deva’s father’s desk and stomped my foot in my father’s direction to shake him up, to show him what the rest of the house looked like without our mother in it.
“Is a lawyer going to deal with the Max thing?” I asked him.
He took off his headphones. “Mom was supposed to take care of the bureaucratic side of things. I’m just an artist trying to finish a film,” he replied. He slipped his headphones back on and started twirling his curls around his index finger, looking at the screen.
I felt my blood boiling. I yanked the headphones off his head. “Just how many things was Mom supposed to do? File paperwork, run errands, assist you, make food for the entire cast and crew, what else? She’s one person. We’re one family.”
“It’s very clear to me now, believe me.” He took a breath and smiled. “Let’s just keep going, though, okay? Finish things up and forget about Max. We don’t need to call the police or lawyers or authorities. They’ll make things worse. They’ll shut down the film.”
Authorities: invisible entities that hovered menacingly around my family’s periphery since as far back as I could remember. The fascist pigs who fined you for going nude on the beach, the greedy doctors we had to lie to in order to get my brother stitched up when he fell off his bicycle in the desert, the SS-like customs officers who treated us like criminals. That’s what authorities did: They made your life worse.
“Nobody serves us,” my father said. “We are Italians. We are less to these people than the Mexican ladies selling spicy mango salads in the Pick ’n Save parking lot.”
I walked out of the house and kept going in the hopes I would get tired and finally feel sad about my grandmother. I tried to remember the last time I hugged her, the smell of her powder, her golden one-piece bathing suit and turquoise hair under the neon lights in the glass house at the Prairie Wind Casino. I told myself it wasn’t strange that she used to ask me to play the tongue-to-tongue game when I was a child. I forced myself to conjure a happy memory of the smell of her saliva on my lips, her tongue licking mine, her smile. But instead I felt anger at my father and relief only at the thought of Deva’s freckled face flashing in front of me.
When I came back home everyone was asleep and I called Deva in Montana, but she was rushed and distant. She spoke with a low drawl like she was high on something potent. She sounded like a different person. “I’ll call you on New Year’s,” she said before hanging up on me. I knew she wouldn’t.
I filled a cup with whiskey and ice and went to the backyard. I raised my drink to Deva and drank it fast. It was the one thing I was sure she was doing. The only way to feel what she was feeling. I drank and drank. The stars and moon were covered by smog. The sky was black. When I couldn’t stand any more, I got on the ground, clutched the grass, and dug a hole. I kept digging as if my insides were jumping out of me, filling my short nails with dirt. I passed out with a clod of earth in my hand.
21
I was expecting drastic things to go down at the arrivals hall when my mother returned from Rome. I imagined her resolutions for 1994 would include anger, resentment, flung suitcases, divorce threats. I thought it would all come up like messy projectile vomit: the unanswered messages on the machine, my father blaming her for the film’s financial downfall, the pain of not having her own family by her side during a death because nothing in the world was more important than finishing a horror film. I even thought Serena might call to say she would never come back. I told myself I would forgive her if that’s how she chose to let her rage out.
But my mother swept across LAX with a disarming, sun-filled smile, straight into my father’s arms. She kissed his lips and abandoned her head on his chest.
“How’s the editing coming?” was the first question she asked.
She kissed my brother and me on the cheeks briskly.
We dropped Ettore and Timoteo at the editing studio in North Hollywood and drove straight to Food 4 Less on Sepulveda. Serena whistled, pushing the extra-large cart down the dairy aisle. I had a grocery list, but when I went to read it, I dropped an eighteen-egg carton on the floor and made a mess. Suddenly I was screaming at my mother in the middle of the aisle. Nothing in nature was supposed to carry eighteen eggs at once, I yelled, and she should have known better than to ask me to pick up a container with so many fragile things inside. She should have known better about a lot of things and gone back to Rome. In Rome you could buy only four, maybe six eggs at a time and they were packaged in crush-resistant cartons, not flimsy Styrofoam. Six eggs! That was the natural order of things, not eighteen. Wouldn’t she rather stay in a place ruled by the natural order of things?
“All we’ve been eating is eggs! Nobody needs so many eggs in their lives!” I insisted.
We didn’t buy the carton. In the car Serena asked me what was wrong. I went off on a tangent about omelets and pancakes and American brunches, but soon I started crying and talking about her messages on the answering machine, Pastor Hernán, and the Iglesia Bautista Sangre de Cristo on Van Nuys Boulevard, our father’s reaction to our grandmother’s death.
“He didn’t even want to have a memorial,” I said, sobbing.
Serena kept driving, squinting her eyes in the sun. Her 99 Cent cat-eye sunglasses h
ad broken in Rome.
“Well, they never really liked each other,” she said. “He felt judged by her.”
—
Deva didn’t show up to school after the holidays. Nobody answered the phone in Topanga or Montana. A few days into the term, I thought I’d lost her. I dragged my feet around campus. Chris’s few friends hadn’t spoken to him since he left either. Nobody had news. Finally the phone rang one afternoon and Deva screamed into the receiver. She sounded happy or manic, over-vivacious. She said she and Chris had been helping their father assemble his new recording studio out in Montana, but she would return to Los Angeles on their birthday in mid-January and she was excited because we could go to the desert party she had been waiting for since September. We’d celebrate on the high Mojave plains. My job was to write down the address of where to go to get the directions to the rave, find us a ride to the desert, and get my parents to cover for us.
“I already told my dad I’m spending the night at your place for my birthday.”
“What about Chris? It’s his birthday too…”
“We each get our own special day. We’ve done that since we were kids. I celebrate one day and Chris takes the following. Only trick is I have to be back in Topanga by morning for our annual birthday brunch and hike,” she said all in one breath. “Pick me up at eight in my driveway on my birthday.”
“I miss you—”
“Remember to buy glitter. Wear bright, soft clothes. They feel amazing when you’re on E.”
“I miss you,” I repeated.
“Oh and buy some pacifiers!” she replied before hanging up.
—
My mother dyed her hair roots back to blond and screened collection calls from credit card companies, while my father updated his armory of business terms with words that had to do with foreclosure and bankruptcy. He bestowed a certain kind of dignity on them, as if that too was part of the professional world of film.
Over breakfast one morning I told them the Zapatista Army of National Liberation had started a war in Chiapas against military incursions into sacred Mexican regions.
“My friends in school have organized a massive peaceful desert gathering in support of the Zapatistas. Deva and I want to go.”
“That’s wonderful,” my father said, lifting his eyes from the Los Angeles Times.
“Deva’s dad doesn’t think we should protest the government.”
“Bullshit!” My father got roiled up. “Question authority. It’s the only way to ensure our brains are working.”
“Exactly, so can you cover for her if her dad calls?”
“When did you become a communist?” my mother asked with a suspicious glare as she stirred sugar in her teacup.
“Actually the EZLN movement has rejected political classification,” I corrected her.
My father closed the newspaper and cleared his throat. “Of course we’ll cover. You know your mother and I did these things all the time when we were younger. We traveled to Peru for a whole year and camped on Machu Picchu for weeks supporting the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.”
I nodded, feigning enthusiasm. I had heard the Machu Picchu story innumerable times, but pretended it was news to my ears.
I retired to my bedroom and blasted “Venceremos,” the Inti-Illimani folk hit from 1970 that had been the anthem of Chile during the period leading up to the coup. Chilean flutes echoed through my thin bedroom walls. They did not smell of Victoria Secret body spray any longer. They smelled of revolution.
—
I showed up at Henry’s store with a bagful of flea-market finds I had been storing for him, hoping they might work as currency for a trade. The electronic store bell buzzed when I opened the door. The batteries were weak and they made a distorted sound. Henry had installed it to know when to put the pot away if someone came in. I looked around. He was hunched over Street Fighter, the usual cigarette burning on the control panel. I hadn’t been to the store in weeks. It looked like a dungeon again and I was instantly annoyed. I didn’t say hello and stormed to the back room. I took out cleaning products and began to dust picture frames.
“I can’t believe you let Diane Keaton get like this,” I scolded him.
Henry shrugged his shoulders. “I told you I needed you around more…motherfucker!” he screamed at T. Hawk, Street Fighter’s exiled Indian warrior.
“Okay, look. I’m going to clean up, but I need your help.”
“You don’t have to clean up. It’s fine. Oh shit!” he screamed again.
His middle and index fingers tapped violently over the control button—an obsessive clicking noise I now associated with his presence.
“I want to. And I also want your help. I need a ride on Saturday.”
“So that’s it, huh? You disappear for weeks and now you want a ride?”
“Yes, to the Mojave Desert,” I mumbled. “And I’m sorry if I was mean but you’d be mean to me too if all of a sudden I turned into your mother’s best friend. Plus my grandma died.”
He stopped playing. “The one that used to make out with you?”
“Yes. Not exactly make out.”
“Tongue to tongue counts as making out. Anyway, I’m sorry.” He gave me an awkward hug. “Why do you need to go to the desert?”
“My friend Deva and I want to go to a rave for her birthday. We need a car. We have to go to Hollywood first and pick up directions.”
Henry smirked. “Secret location? I hate that shit. Why can’t they just give you the fucking directions right away?”
“Because raves are illegal and you have to do things last-minute or you’ll get busted.”
Henry shook his head.
“I totally want you to meet Deva,” I said.
“Okay, first of all, I hate crowds. I hate people in general, but particularly when they are high in open spaces wearing bunny suits and tripping out on glow sticks. Second of all, you disappeared from my life and started practically living in the woods with this girl you’ve never even introduced me to, and now all of a sudden you totally want me to meet her? I’m totally sorry. I feel used,” he said, mocking my Valley girl tone.
“Please?”
Henry let T. Hawk fall to the ground, then turned to me.
“No way in hell I’m driving two and a half hours at night into the fucking desert with a bunch of meth heads. I hate driving and I hate driving at night. Plus I have agoraphobia.”
“Clearly.” I scowled, glaring at the crammed store. I walked to the back of the room and started pulling my clothes from the boxes and transferring them into the new arrivals bin.
I took my shirt off and tried on the softest, most fluorescent top I could find in front of the mirror. It was bright green and cropped just above my belly button. Henry lifted his gaze.
“Dude, what are you doing? You can’t get naked in the middle of the store.”
“I’m not naked. I’m topless. Nobody comes in here anyway.”
“That’s not true. We had seven customers yesterday. They bought your Nekromantic knife by the way. I owe you sixty bucks.”
“Just drive us to the desert and keep the money.”
“I’d rather give you the sixty bucks.”
I sighed and dug out more clothes from the boxes. “Deva said I have to wear soft, bright clothes.”
“I hate raver fashion. Did she tell you to buy pacifiers too?”
“No. What are pacifiers for anyway?” I tried to ask with nonchalance, breezing through a pile of anime-style schoolgirl dresses.
“They satiate the need to grind your teeth when you’re on MDMA…You’ll see, the girls are all going to be sucking on them, dancing like aliens. It’s just so silly.”
“Better than sitting here rotting away!”
I tried on a short bright pink dress over my pants, then pulled them out from underneath. It looked perfect. Henry walked up behind me.
“You have to do the high pigtail buns. It’s the style.” He parted my hair, twirled it into buns, and sn
ickered at my reflection. “You’ll never be a raver, Eugenia. Italians can’t survive in the desert.”
I undid the buns, rolled up my jeans, stuffed them in my bag, and headed out in the pink dress.
“I’m taking it. You owe me sixty bucks.”
I left the store and crossed Ventura Boulevard.
Henry ran after me and screamed from across the street. “You can’t act like a spoiled brat just because I don’t feel like driving you to the freaking desert in the middle of the night!”
I was already on the other side, headed for Sav-On where I would discreetly buy the pacifiers. I turned around.
“You never want to do anything! I’m so bored with you!” I screamed back.
“Does that include wrapping up the costume department on your dad’s movie because you were stupid enough to get stuck in the middle of a canyon?”
“No. That’s not included!”
“No shit!” Henry screamed back.
The cars driving down the boulevard between us honked at our screams. A guy stuck his head out of the window and gave us a peace sign. “Make love, not war, guys!” Henry and I both flipped him off.
It angered me that he knew I was going to buy pacifiers, that he could see through me, that he noticed when I put on an American accent to fit in. He knew how vulnerable I felt with Deva and he knew these things because I had allowed him to live in my space, breathe my air, become part of my world like a second brother.
—
I shut my bedroom door and took my faded tie-dyed address book out. I started leafing through it, in search of someone who might own a car, realizing, on top of everything else, that I had no friends. Some Italian names, a few classmates I had called to get homework assignments, a couple of Latino anarchists I had smoked cigarettes with in the abandoned school field where the outcasts hung out. I didn’t have the guts to call them out of the blue and none of them had cars anyway. Before closing the address book, a small piece of crumpled paper fell out. When I opened it, I saw a scribble in violet pen. I could not make out the name, but I could see it was a California area code. I searched for 805 in the yellow pages: Ventura County. I began to hear drums play inside my head. Peyote, turkey beaks, loss of virginity, and trailer parks. Alo, the whiskey-drinking guy from Wounded Knee, had a car and he liked to drive it. I searched through my dresser and pulled out the leather jacket he’d given me, remembering his sweet gesture. The awkwardly romantic day-after he’d tried to conjure when we drove through the battered buttes. It had been more than a year since our Native American adventure in South Dakota. He’d written me a few letters but I had not replied. I had never called him. I never even bothered to copy his number into my phone book.
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 22
