I turned. He was smiling.
“I was fucking with you. H building is in the other direction.”
I turned and started walking in the opposite direction, passing in front of his friends who all laughed. As soon as they were gone, he caught up with me.
“I’ll walk you to class, man.”
“Thanks. You don’t have to.”
But I was too desperate to refuse his help.
“So is Sicily close to Greece? I was there one year with my family…We visited the Pantheon.”
“The Parthenon?”
“Yeah, whatever. The big old white building with all the columns.”
“Great. Look. Just for future reference, Sicily is not a country. It’s a region that is part of Italy. Kind of like a state here.”
“That’s tight.” He winked at me and dropped me off in front of a yellow door. “I always get those two confused. See you around, Greek goddess.” He spat on the floor and walked away.
—
“Rome, Georgia?” Mrs. Anders, my health teacher with fake breasts asked in front of my new class members.
“No. Rome, Italy.”
“Wow, that’s neat.”
We sang the American national anthem with hands on our hearts. I did not know the words but opened my mouth in wide oval shapes. Mrs. Anders passed a picture of an overweight Hispanic teenager looking down at a newborn child.
“Does anyone know what the best prevention for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is?” Mrs. Anders asked.
The word condom was muttered by students, but of course it was a trick question. Mrs. Anders looked at us with a grave expression. Below the photo was a handwritten paragraph:
Hello, I’m Marcia Espandola. I’m 16 years old. One year ago I thought it would be a good idea to use a fake ID to buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with my boyfriend. We got drunk, partied, and had unprotected sex. A month later I discovered I was pregnant with Julia. My boyfriend left me and now I’m a single teen mother. I had dreams of attending my Junior Prom. That’s not going to happen. I can’t afford to pay for a babysitter.
“The number-one prevention against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases is abstinence. Write this down in your notebooks. It’s going to be on your quiz next week.”
I looked around. It was obvious none of the girls in my class were virgins.
Mrs. Anders handed us a “self-esteem contract.” We were to write a goal we wanted to pursue in the course of the following ten weeks. Each day we would fill in an empty column with the steps we were taking toward our goal. The goal had to reflect something that would boost our self-esteem and steer us away from drinking, sex, and drugs. Alcohol was conducive to unforeseen acts of libidinous lasciviousness that had catastrophic consequences. We needed to steer away from turning into Marcia Espandola.
I wrote down my goal: “In ten weeks I want to be back in Rome.”
When class was done I felt a surge of loneliness. I glanced at Mrs. Anders with her full melon breasts. I needed empathy. I put on a deep guttural voice like the ones from the soap operas my grandmother watched at home. America was five hundred episodes ahead on The Bold and the Beautiful. Key characters had already died and been resurrected here, twin sisters had popped up out of nowhere, new actors had taken over main roles. I watched and translated every episode for my grandmother so that on Sundays she could ring her friends in Rome and report back. My favorite character was Brooke Logan, the troubled wife of Ridge Forrester, the alien-faced foppish son of the fashion tycoon Eric Forrester. I liked her pink lip gloss and stern, dramatic tone, always on the verge of a desperate revelation.
“Mrs. Anders.” I looked at her, channeling my inner Brooke. “Where I come from, students are forced to take over their high schools and do sit-ins because teachers are fascists. My family moved to America to escape constant political oppression and I thought I should be honest with you and tell you these things about me. I understand American teachers to be more democratic than Italian ones.”
Her eyes lit up. “Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. Families from all parts of the world flee persecution and find safety and opportunity in America. Our school welcomes all refugees. We are happy to help you rebuild your life here.”
She thought I was a refugee from war. I did not tell her World War II had ended. Did not explain that we used “fascist” to describe any teacher who disagreed with us on anything, particularly on granting students the right to have sit-ins at their high schools in order to smoke hash and have sleep-ins in the gym.
I shook her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Anders. It feels good to know I can count on someone here.”
I walked out of the classroom and made a mental note to change my self-esteem contract. Returning to a war-infested country in ten weeks was an unlikely objective. Under “self-esteem goal” I would write: “Rebuilding my life in the United States.”
3
From the shade of the lemon tree my brother and I spied on my father in his studio. He had signed with a minor agency and was working with Robert, his new writing partner—a CalArts film student with two pierced eyebrows who wore black lipstick and talked to himself like he was in on a plan nobody else knew about. Robert bit his nails while my father twisted his curls with his index finger and looked at the computer screen. They never spoke when they worked.
“Do you think he’ll give you the Terminator face today?” my brother asked as he coughed up smoke from the cigarette I was teaching him to inhale.
“I hope not.” I sighed.
Like the Terminator, Robert was expressionless and never removed his black boxy sunglasses. This made us all self-conscious when we saw him around the house. It was hard to say if he had emotions. It was hard to say if he saw anything.