The other Italian passengers from the flight walked by our cured-meat and cheese exposition.
“Oh my God,” a perky Louis Vuitton–covered woman I had spotted in business class exclaimed, covering her nose. “What are you, Sicilian immigrants from the 1800s? We’re in LA and it’s the twentieth century. International food markets exist, you know.”
We were removed from the baggage claim area into a private security room surrounded with one-way mirrors. We sat there on the other side of the mirror, the side where they kept the bad people.
A Pakistani guy next to us cried, saying his family was in the arrivals hall and they wouldn’t let him see them. He had to go back to Pakistan. The last time he’d seen his daughter was three years ago. When I tried to console him he looked at me hopefully and asked if I had kids. For some reason I replied yes, that I did.
My brother furrowed his brow. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked in Italian.
“Shut up,” I replied and turned back to the Pakistani guy. “My daughter is here…with my husband.”
The guy shook his head. It made him feel better.
A British man came in arguing with an officer. He was a writer and performance artist who wasn’t being allowed to tour the United States on account of his “moral turpitude.”
“I’ve been questioned for eight hours in the other room. I’m not going to tell you anything I haven’t said before. It’s all in the book. My whole life. You can read about it. It’s a best seller in England…that’s why I’m on tour here, you know.”
He was tall and handsome with glazed brown eyes and full lips. He looked more like a rock star than a writer. I had heard about the book. It was a hit in Europe.
“Travelers who have been convicted of crimes such as controlled-substance violations are not admissible to our country.”
“So why don’t you kick out all your crack fiends? Just dump them in the ocean! I hear we’re close to South Central. There’s a lot of them there.”
The writer turned to me. “I can’t believe I even removed my bloody nail polish for them.”
I shook my head to show support, but I was too tired to feel properly sorry for him.
The writer was escorted out the door to be put on a plane back to England.
The Pakistani guy looked at us and tapped his left temple with his index finger to suggest everyone in the room was crazy.
After hours in the interrogation room, surrounded by waves of strangers, screaming with papers in hand, I realized it wasn’t the officers I was afraid of, nor their SS interrogation tactics, as my father called them. What I was really afraid of was being sent back. A year earlier I would have made any false statements in order to have a free pass back to Italy, but after that summer, I wasn’t sure.
—
“Why the hell did you tell them you were on vacation?” my parents both screamed at us before saying hello, when we finally stepped into the arrivals hall.
“I don’t know! You told me if all else failed to play the vacation card.”
“Yes, but not when you mention my work here first!”
“I told you it was a bad idea,” my brother interjected.
They grabbed our luggage and rushed us out. Neither of them hugged us. It was late afternoon. We’d been gone for two months.
My mother looked younger after a summer without us. She wore a fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots. Her tan was deep brown and golden, her hair short and spiky and platinum blond. She looked somehow Australian and also a bit like a python.
“Do you like it?” she asked, combing her fingers across her new chunky locks. “It’s a Meg Ryan haircut. Very trendy right now.”
I nodded absently, noticing her ivory-colored French manicured fingernails and that she was clasping a Starbucks iced tea. She shook the ice in the cup impatiently as if she didn’t have time to listen to my answer.
“What happened?” I asked. “How did you get us out of there?”
“Let’s go, quickly, before they change their minds.”
We sped down the hall, out the sliding doors toward the parking lot.
Los Angeles. We were back to the leaden sun. The familiar distant haze engulfed us. A feeling similar to the mirrored room we left behind, another no-man’s-land.
Max was waiting for us inside our old Cadillac.
“Ooh la la, here’s our little girl with the big mouth!” He hugged me, shaking his head in mock disapproval.
My parents rolled their eyes and got in. Over the summer they had installed a car phone, but it didn’t work. Ettore now owned a lot of leather binders from Office Depot. They rested on the dashboard with credit card receipts sticking out.
On the ride home, the lapping sounds of the Mediterranean were zapped out of our ears, absorbed into a funnel that pulled out silence and poured in airplanes and choppers flying over Compton.
This was one of those times when the ambiguous nature of Italy’s post-communist government-owned regimes came in handy. RAI, Italy’s public-broadcasting company, had originally sponsored my father’s visa. In typically Italian style, RAI was an everything medium: a national radio network, a television network, a cable channel, and a film production company. If you worked under its broad wings—I understood then why Italians called it Mamma RAI—you could be anything from a big-time film producer to a news anchor to a talk-show host. Max figured this ambiguity would be our way out, or rather our way back in. He showed up at the airport disguised as my father’s lawyer—he had passed the bar exam and had been a practicing lawyer before venturing into film—and argued with the officer that the film my father was preparing was in fact a documentary for RAI, and therefore perfectly within the boundaries of his visa permit.
“So you’re not working illegally?” I asked, relaxing into the rubbery backseat.
“Of course we are,” my father answered.
—
Ettore’s film production had taken over the house. Two fax machines beeped incessantly. Piles of papers and Post-its were stacked next to one another. The kitchen was littered with fast-food bags, leftovers, wrapped straws, and binders full of documents and photos. Max prepared a pitcher of sangria, blasting Phil Collins’s “One More Night” from a new multidisc CD player, ignoring the chaos. He whistled to the rhythm of the cheesy song. Over the summer he had befriended Johnny Depp’s agent, who invited my parents to the Viper Room regularly. They had gone to parties with Brad Pitt and met a group of actors from the movie Dazed and Confused, which was about to be released. Things were happening, they said.
“So Johnny Depp is going to be in your film?” I asked, excited.
Max poured me a glass of wine and fruit. “We’re working on it, chica.”
My father put his hand on my shoulder. “Do you know that we are growing vegetables in the yard now?” He opened the fridge, pointing to bowls filled with fresh vegetables and fruits. “We have amazing tomatoes and zucchini. And you know why they grow so well?” He picked out an overgrown zucchini and held it between us like a powerful scepter.