The neighborhoods were not, as I hoped, options for new places where we could live but addresses of yard sales that might be in good-enough areas to guarantee high-quality secondhand household appliances. My parents’ friend Max, a Cuban producer who was friends with Phil Collins and lived next door to him in Beverly Hills, had instructed them on the art of accumulating goods without spending much. All they needed was a full tank of gas, a map of the city, and an LA Weekly with yard-sale addresses. He was our go-to man for any questions regarding heat, pain, and glory.
When he took us garage sale-ing, he drove us around Bel Air and pointed out which celebrity each mansion belonged to. We never saw the actual houses from the car. They were protected by brick walls and gates, but I could tell things smelled different in those neighborhoods. The grass was greener—something zesty and hygienic in the air. I imagined kitchen counters filled with fresh limes and oranges. Chlorine-free sprinkler water. “The magic of this city,” Max explained, “is not in the mansions but in the smell of the cedar trees that are planted in front of them. It’s not in the beautifully tiled pools but in the way the sunlight reflects on the water in them. It’s what keeps people here,” he added with an air of mystery. “The luminous unseen.” I stared intently at tree trunks and tried to peek at the swimming pools through the fences, hoping to catch a glimpse of that invisible California life-form Max spoke of, but I couldn’t. The city appeared to me always in the same way, a fatuous leaden expanse.
“Remember, Eugenia,” Max warned me when he saw me squint, “if you look too hard it disappears.”
So I stopped looking for the magic and focused on the stuff instead: blenders, canoes, rocking chairs, broken phones, and microwaves. We were furnishing our house with other people’s rejects.
—
My brother ran up to my parents and sat beside them to oversee their yard-sale research—a lean, pale body among my family’s overflowing dark, tanned flesh. He hunted for water-bed mattresses, icons of adolescent freedom. For an Italian kid a water bed had the same mystical effect a bottle of Chianti had on an underage American. America was to “cool” what Italy was to “grown-up.”
From a solitary rock, I looked at the Malibu waves creaming on the sand. I swung my legs into the air and hopped off. On the other side of the beach there were no nudists. A family of Mexicans with four coolers—one for each family member—sculpted mermaids on the sand. An Armenian father sat on a fold-up chair drinking beer out of a brown bag while his girls frolicked in the water. I climbed over the cliff and walked along the freeway back to the skate park we had passed earlier. I leaned against a wall of arid earth, looking at the skaters rolling up and down the ramps in hypnotic loops. There were girls on bleachers in skintight T-shirts. They had pigtails and sucked on lollipops. I felt the cold wind against my skin. Nature in California was hostile and unforgiving, but the skaters—so vigorous, their hair so blond it was almost white—didn’t seem fazed by it. The girls’ legs were strong, legs that surfed and pushed boards against thrusting water. Legs that could keep a violent nature at bay. I looked at my own skinny, pale limbs, bruised and covered with goose bumps, and I closed my eyes.
Dear Mary, I need your help. Speak to this ocean, these waves, the wind, and the sun. Tell this city to smooth its edges, to show me some kindness, to give me something to hang on to. Dear Mary, appear to me in all your beauty. Make it good or at least better. Amen.
Since we’d moved, the Virgin Mary had become my role model. Being away from the motherland called for motherly reassurance. I wasn’t getting it from my creator, so who could be better than the mother of all mothers? I asked her daily to perform miracles for me as auspicious signs that would cancel out the bad omens. Sometimes I felt like she listened.
The wind blew hard. I put my hoodie on and suddenly the heavens opened with a roaring sound. Mary had heard me, I knew it. The sound became stronger. The skaters stopped skating and looked up to the sky.
She was coming for me.
She was going to take me away.
It was the sound of a helicopter, floating above the beach where my parents were reading out yard-sale listings. From the loudspeakers came the voice of God. It said, “Put your bathing suits back on. I repeat, put your bathing suits back on! You are committing a felony. Ma’am, put your top back on.”
“Dear Mary,” I closed my eyes and kept praying. “Tell me this isn’t happening. Tell me a policeman is not telling my grandmother to put her top back on.”
The skaters started laughing. One of them rolled his pants down, extracted his big cock, and waved it around toward the helicopter.
“Want me to put my bathing suit back on too, officer?”
His friends rode their boards down along the coast to see the nudist outlaws from the top of the cliff. I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t. So I stayed there staring as the helicopter picked up dust and sand and landed on an opening by the beach.
I imagined my parents getting handcuffed and deported, and me condemned to stay alone on that beach forever. Maybe I would fall in love with a skater and we could hitch a ride to San Francisco. I heard that it was more of a European city. But did I want that? To betray my family so soon after our arrival?
I ran back to the beach. From the street above, the skaters laughed and screamed at my grandmother.
“Sexy granny, take it off! Take it off!”
A police officer was writing out a ticket as my family stood half dressed and bewildered before him.
“What happened?” I asked when I finally reached them.
“The officer was explaining to us that we cannot be naked here,” my mother whispered in a sultry voice, trying to give herself a distinguished British accent. She thought that by proving her—in her mind superior—European heritage, the cops would be more lenient, but the policeman stared her down and nodded his head.
“Italians, huh?”
The British affectation had failed her.
“You guys like your topless tans. Well, you’re in Los Angeles now, and if you are going to lay naked on a beach, you have to take responsibility for things that might happen.”
“But what’s the worst thing that can happen, sir? Nudity is only natural,” my father replied with a Gandhian smile.
It was so like him to try and get a muscle-bound authority figure to level with him in his down-to-earth way. The cop slid his sunglasses down his nose.
“The worst thing that might happen, sir, is that a maniac could be standing right on top of that cliff looking at you naked people, masturbating, and traumatizing children and civilians.”
I tried to imagine a pervert jacking off to my grandmother’s formless bosom.
“I’ve seen it happen,” he confirmed, noticing my doubtful expression.
My brother looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“This is a warning. Now don’t let me find you without bathing suits on here again…And ma’am?” he said, turning to my grandmother who, speaking not a word of English, sat on a rock with furrowed brows. “Don’t you know sun is carcinogenic? At your age you should be guarding certain…delicate…private parts.”
“I don’t understand you and I think you are an ugly asshole,” my grandmother replied in Italian.