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 had 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.
—