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.
“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.