YEAR OF THE RAT, TIGER, DRAGON, SNAKE, PIG
Nineteen seventy-two was the Year of the Rat. Miss Burton, Izzy’s sixth-grade English teacher, told them all about the Chinese Zodiac. Izzy liked the idea that years could have animal characteristics, though the Year of the Rat made her nervous because she thought that from certain angles, in certain mirrors, she looked like a cartoon rat, with her stubby nose and jug ears. She kept her ears buried in her hair but there wasn’t much she could do about her nose. Just cover it with her hand when she laughed, or when it seemed like someone was staring. Izzy was guilty of staring, too. She spent a of time looking at the other girls, wishing for their slender noses and delicate ears.
Those girls called her señorita because her father’s family was from Mexico and Izzy had his coloring. A round, brownish face in every class photo, peeking out from within the slim white forest. Easy to overlook a darker patch amid all that light.
Except of course, when it wasn’t, when they didn’t, when the girls focused their attention on her and she didn’t have enough hands to hide behind.
Once Izzy came home crying and told her mother about the nickname. Madeline reared up like a cobra, imperious and deadly, and said that Izzy’s father made more money than most of her friends’ fathers combined. Izzy knew immediately that telling her mother had been a mistake. For one thing, those girls weren’t her friends. She didn’t have many friends, except for Chloe. And the amount of money didn’t matter. Her father owned parking lots. This made him, in the eyes of the girls at school, only a step up from a valet or a guy who worked at a car wash. Her father could strut around town with cash falling from his pockets and it wouldn’t make a difference.
Her parents thought they were respected and admired. Chairman and chairwoman of the board. They were kidding themselves. Izzy saw it in the enraged, defensive flash in her mother’s eyes when Madeline heard the nickname—it was all so fragile under the surface. Cold, deep water beneath thin ice.
She and Chloe had been friends since the year before. Chloe didn’t get along with the other girls either. She thought most of them were spoiled fakes. Chloe was an actress, so she was away from school a lot, shooting parts in movies and TV shows. She was confident and opinionated, which Izzy admired but was a little afraid of, too. Underneath it all, Izzy worried about being a phony, and that someday Chloe would find out.
She had Chloe, and she had Vince. Vince’s father had worked for her parents for years, keeping the grounds, fixing the cars—whatever needed to be done. On afternoons and weekends Vince came to the house to help. He was a year older than Izzy, tall for his age, thin and lanky. He dressed like a cowboy, but it never seemed fake like when girls at school tried on a new look. It was like he really believed he was a cowboy, so Izzy was willing to believe it, too.
Vince was kind of like a brother and kind of like a friend and, she figured, kind of like an employee. It was a weird combination. She never knew quite how to feel about him, one day to the next.
Izzy trailed around while he worked. He was a good listener. He didn’t know anyone she knew, so she felt comfortable telling him things. She shared all her worries and fears and he listened, taking them with him at the end of the day, leaving her fewer of those things to carry around.
She was crossing the hall from Math to English, a late morning in late fall, getting toward the end of the year. Izzy was thinking about a dog, asking for a dog for Christmas. A golden retriever, she thought, a big blond bundle of exuberance. Their house and the surrounding grounds were large, they made Izzy feel small and out of place, and she thought that having a dog might shrink things down, help it all make sense.
And then, suddenly, she was floating in the middle of the hallway. Her feet had left the ground. For a moment she was scared, this was nuts, but then the fear left her, and that emptiness filled with something new. The light from the windows above the lockers rushed in. Her brain popped with what felt like fireworks traveling down the length of her body. Every nerve ignited, a million fuses lit all at once.
She wanted to cry out with joy.
She opened her eyes to whispers, snickers, murmuring. Izzy heard the clack of heels on the tile floor, saw Miss Burton coming into focus, her mouth open, eyes wide. Izzy’s ears were ringing, and the ringing grew louder, splitting through her skull.
Someone said, What’s happening? Why’s she shaking like that?
Someone said, What’s wrong with her?
Miss Burton knelt down beside her, calling out to someone down the hall. The ringing was all Izzy could hear, except for the gasps now, from the girls gathered around, staring, and then shocked and giddy laughter. She couldn’t feel her fingers or hands or feet. All she could feel was the wetness and warmth spreading into her skirt, down her thighs, onto the floor.
Her doctor ran tests and gave her a prescription. The medication worked. She didn’t have another seizure, but she had a new nickname: Señorita Shake. It followed her like that imagined dog. She heard it between lockers, under the pergola during lunch. They would never let her forget. Her father owned parking lots and she was the girl who fell to the floor and lost all control.
She didn’t tell Vince about the seizure. It was the first thing she’d ever withheld from him. She was too afraid to put that picture into his head, of her thrashing in the hallway, wetting herself. No one could forget that, and she didn’t want him to see her that way.
Whenever she thought of the seizure Izzy grew sick with shame, but she also felt a strange ache to return to the moment just before she blacked out, to recapture that sense of golden rising. When she was awake, she couldn’t remember it exactly, but it came to her in dreams, and in dreams it wasn’t cut off by the fall to earth, or by the sound of other girls laughing. In her dreams it continued growing, becoming so bright that the world around her disappeared, clearing the way for something beautiful and new.
She could stop taking her medication. That would do the trick, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t have the guts.
In the locker room she snuck glances at the other girls, sick with jealous desire for their displayed edges: cheekbones, hip bones, the smooth, hard ladder of ribs up a back. Statements of striking grace, beautiful in their strict simplicity.
In front of her bedroom mirror she pushed at the softness of her belly, her round cheeks. She pinched the inch of flesh at her waist in the same way her mother pinched whenever she walked by.
Nineteen seventy-four was the Year of the Tiger.
Once a week her mother visited the shops on Lake Avenue, dragging Izzy along. Like maybe if Izzy spent more time with clothes and jewelry she would start to care about those things. Izzy wandered around the racks while her mother stepped in and out of changing rooms, turning in toward the mirrors, appraising herself from different angles, absorbing compliments from the salesladies.
The salesladies asked Izzy if there was anything she wanted to try on. She smiled and shook her head. She had learned the smile to perfection but rarely used it, storing it away in her back pocket like a card trick, misdirection. These women were lulled by the smile, it was a language they understood, so when they turned away, trusting, Izzy moved something from one place in the store to another. A bracelet, a skirt, a blouse. The shivery clink of hangers along metal rods. Her mother and the salesladies chatted at the counter and Izzy snuck a cocktail dress across racks, feeling in the transgression a little burst, a tiny echo of that moment from before the seizure, her body gathering light.
She ate half as much as usual, then cut even that in half. The Appedrine pills she stole from her mother made her jittery, but at least they kept her awake when she started to crash. She ignored her hunger and felt powerful for conquering something. Hunger was a weakness. It made her angry, and she used that anger not to eat.
Now when she looked in the mirror she saw some of those edges—hollows under her eyes, the solid line of her pelvic bone. She still didn’t think she looked like the other girls, but that no longer mattered. Something else was happening. When she stood too quickly or went a long time without eating she felt a moment of that explosive brightness, like during the seizure. She’d found another way to move toward that light.
She was obsessed with help-wanted ads in the newspaper. She liked to imagine herself in each of the jobs listed. Nanny, secretary, nurse. At the dining room table she watched other versions of herself for what seemed like hours until her mother broke those possibilities, Madeline’s voice cracking through like a slapping hand, telling Izzy she was late for school.
One morning she found an ad for work at a movie theater out on Pasadena’s eastern outskirts. Nineteen seventy-six was the Year of the Dragon. Izzy was fifteen. She ditched Chemistry and took a bus to the theater. She’d never been out that way before, where the city began to disintegrate into the desert. The streets were wider and emptier; the buildings longer and lower. Everything the color of sand. She walked along the sun-exposed sidewalk past little stucco houses, tired-looking strip malls, a savings and loan with a rotating sign in the parking lot showing the time and temperature.
The theater manager interviewed her while leaning against the lobby’s concession counter. He was tall and timid and damp-seeming somehow, like a sponge that hadn’t been squeezed dry. When he spoke he looked only at her chest until she folded her arms and then he looked over the top of her head.
She worked two or three nights a week. She told Chloe and Vince but made them promise not to visit. It was a place where no one knew her. She told her mother that she had joined a study group.
The theater was called the Bijou. Izzy liked to say the name under her breath as she vacuumed the lobby or helped someone find their seat. The sound of the word, the grin and release, like a sneeze, like something you might say to a baby to make her smile.
They showed mostly art and foreign films. Every week a new language filled the auditorium. When Cleo from 5 to 7 opened, Izzy watched it from the back of the theater and then asked for extra shifts that week. She was drawn to Cleo, wandering through a Paris afternoon while she waited anxiously for test results from her doctor. Izzy understood this young woman who seemed so out of place, disappearing for a moment as she passed behind a mirror in a hat shop.
The film had been made by a woman. Izzy had never heard of a female filmmaker. When she asked the manager to name another, he stared at the wall for a moment and then shrugged. Izzy attended every showing she could, surrounded by this woman’s fear and hope and anger glowing in the dark. The feeling was so strong that at times Izzy expected to find Agnès Varda sitting behind her, willing her vision up onto the screen. She was there but not there, like Cleo passing behind that mirror.
“You ever feel like you’re not yourself?” Izzy said. “Or like the self you thought you were is wrong? That maybe there’s another way to be you?”
Vince twisted himself around until his head appeared from underneath her father’s Mercedes. Grease streaked his cheeks, a field of dark stubble shadowed his chin. He looked up at Izzy and squinted, considering maybe, or fighting the sun.
“That’s a dumb question, isn’t it,” Izzy said.
Vince shrugged with his eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s dumb. I just don’t know the answer.”
The engine was running, he was looking for a leak of some kind, and as Izzy stood there she moved her hips into the car’s dark blue flank. As Vince spoke she imagined him there instead of the car, the pressure and vibration, and then that felt wrong and weird so she backed away.
“Is that safe?” she asked, changing the subject. “Crawling under there when it’s on?”
Vince smiled and scooted himself back underneath the car, his voice climbing up through the body.
“Probably not.”
She stopped taking her medication, moving through the following days and weeks scared of what might happen and scared that nothing would. But the weeks turned to months and she didn’t have another seizure. She was relieved and then furious at herself for her cowardice.
Sometimes she still went to the shops on Lake Avenue to move things from one place to another. Walking in on her own now, without her mother, and smiling at the women who asked if they could help. But she felt only a few fireworks popping here and there in her brain, nothing more. She needed to be bolder.
She smiled at the women in the stores and then stopped smiling. The smile made her appear harmless and then the lack of the smile made her invisible. In the dressing rooms she pulled blouses on under her blouse, skirts under her skirt, slipped bracelets into her underpants. Leaving the dressing rooms many-layered. Smiling again to ward off suspicion, then not smiling to disappear.
“You ever meet any guys at the movie theater?”
“Guys?”
“Yeah, you know,” Chloe said. “Guys, men. Don’t men go to the movies?”
“Of course.”
“Do you talk to them? Flirt a little?”
“What do you think?”
“Maybe you find a handsome stranger, sit down beside him—”
“Come on.”
“What, no necking in the dark? A hand job in the back row?”
“Gross.”
“Missed opportunities.”
They were walking across the La Loma bridge, just about dusk, heading over to Bullock’s department store. On Saturday nights, everybody met up in the parking lot. Izzy didn’t really like the ritual, she tended to wander at the margins sipping the same can of beer, but Chloe always wanted to go. Sunny and blond, with an actress’s sexy smile, Chloe could make herself fit in anywhere.
On an impulse, Izzy climbed up onto the bridge’s concrete balustrade. She felt dizzy looking down into the arroyo, seventy or eighty feet of open space dropping through the treetops to the thin concrete vein of the dry river. She lifted her head and started walking. The balustrade was less than shoulder-width wide, so she had to set one foot in front of the other, like on the balance beam in gym class. She always fell off the balance beam. That was no big deal, a foot or two to the mats on the gymnasium floor. Same up here on the balustrade, if she leaned to the left—a couple of feet back down to the bridge’s sidewalk. But if she leaned to the right, she’d fall into that vast open space.
“What are you doing?” Chloe said. “Get down from there. You’re going to fall off and splat. Arroyo pizza.”
Izzy moved along the edge, unsteady, but alive now.
“Sounds like a restaurant,” Chloe said. “We should drive off somewhere and open a nice little place. Arroyo Pizza. You wouldn’t eat it, though. You’re so skinny.”
Izzy was closer to that feeling than she’d been since the seizure. A car whipped past from behind them and the momentum transferred. She swayed left and then right, her head exploding with those fireworks.
“We need to find you a boyfriend,” Chloe said.
But Chloe’s voice had faded to a drone, just part of the buzzing in Izzy’s head as she walked, barely balancing, her body’s weight evaporating.
Suddenly a burst of birds flew from under the bridge, blue backs straight, white wings stretched, gliding in a tight arrowhead. There were eight or ten of them, and Izzy felt like—no she was sure she could step off the balustrade and onto their backs. She could walk lightly from one to the next as the flock shuffled in front of her, rearranging, skating high above the treetops.
She took a step.
Chloe grabbed Izzy’s shirt, pulling her away from the edge.
“For fuck’s sake, Izzy,” Chloe said.
Izzy stepped back onto the balustrade, the birds flying off, the feeling flying off, then that familiar deadened crash back into her body.
“Jesus Christ,” Chloe said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Would you like some help in there?” The saleslady’s voice was close, coming from the other side of the dressing room curtain.
“No,” Izzy said. “I’m fine.”
“Because we have a strict shoplifting policy.”
Izzy stopped, the moment frozen, she could hear the ice cracking. One skirt halfway up her thighs, another bunched around her waist. Two blouses under her sweater. Purse crammed with bracelets.
The saleslady yanked the curtain open, her face buckled in anger and disgust. Izzy might as well have been naked. She felt naked. Up on one foot, balancing, the skirt in midpull. She didn’t know whether to keep lifting the skirt or to lower it back down.
Her mother arrived and negotiated with the saleslady in low tones. Funds were exchanged. Driving home, her mother spoke in fragments, or fragments were all Izzy heard. Mortified. Shopping there for years. None of those clothes even fit you.
“How much?” Izzy asked, looking out the window, watching parking meters, storefronts, clean-limbed oaks roll by.
“Excuse me?”
“How much did you pay her?”
“That’s what you want to know? That’s your concern?”
“What does it cost?”
“What does what cost?”
“Making everything go away.”
Her mother and Chloe had next to nothing in common, but they both had the same question. Izzy had it, too, for that matter.
“What’s wrong with you?” her mother said.
The boy’s name was Bradford, but everyone called him Ford or Fordy. He was a senior at Poly, a basketball player, a forward or guard, Izzy couldn’t remember which. But the sport wasn’t important. What was important was the way he looked at her, like she was someone worth looking at, his eyes curious and a little greedy. No one had ever looked at her that way before.
Ford and a couple of his friends had come to the theater to watch Celine and Julie Go Boating. They needed to see a movie for French class and chose that one without looking into the subject or running time. Two hours in, Ford walked back out into the lobby, bug-eyed with boredom. Izzy laughed, even though she had seen the movie twice so far, hypnotized by its detail and repetition, the magical world it spun. At the concession counter, she and Ford talked about school and movies. She was surprised how easy he was to talk to. She hadn’t even realized another hour had passed until his friends stumbled out at the end of the film, blinking in the bright lobby light.
They ran into each other after school, and at the weekly gatherings in the Bullock’s parking lot. They went to see another movie, a rerelease of Vivre Sa Vie. Ford held her hand and shifted in his seat while Izzy watched Anna Karina watch Joan of Arc in another theater far away.
Then there was the night his parents were in Lake Tahoe, and she and Ford unfolded on his living room couch in the dark, the glow from the TV making small rippling pools on his bare shoulders and arms. You’re so beautiful, he said, his mouth pressed to her neck, his hands moving over her hip, along her ribs, and she chose to believe he meant it.
She turned the corner to find a small group of girls gathered by her locker in an excited buzz, sticking something to the door. Izzy saw that it was a sheet of notebook paper, ragged edged from where it had been pulled from its metal spiral. The girls turned at her approach, eager for Izzy’s reaction. It was a handwritten list in blue and black and green ink, multiple colors from additions over time. She recognized Ford’s handwriting, the cramped printing that looked like it took so much effort. It was a list of girls’ names, or rather their nicknames. Not the girls gathered around the locker, but girls from the edges, like Izzy. The fat girls, the couple of brown girls, the girls with bad skin. The list was numbered one through ten, with a checkmark after each. Number ten was Senoreta Shake. He even spelled it wrong.
“It’s his Pig List,” a girl said. Andrea. She had been Ford’s girlfriend the year before. “Gross, isn’t it? I guess he wanted to see if he could do all ten.”
The bell rang and the girls moved off down the hall. Izzy stared at the paper. She pressed her thumb against her shirt, the hard jut of a rib, pushing until the paper blurred into a white smudge, until she could feel the thin-skinned bruise forming, praying it would spread over her body, ruining it, finally, so it could fall away.
It was junior year, the Year of the Snake. But that was a lie. Izzy knew the truth.
Nineteen seventy-seven was the Year of the Pig.