Colette Labouff Atkinson

Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on Manchester past Lincoln Boulevard. Inseparable, we planned winter and Easter vacations. In the stairwell, I tried to talk. She cut me off. Her echo was loud when she said you can’t see yourself. We went to see Purple Rain. That fall, I had dinner with a boy. Susan was angry and told me I was wrong. I felt it was true. Was it that boy? That he had once dated someone Susan knew? We stopped talking. We were eighteen. A decade later, I turned a corner coming out of a bookstore and heard Susan laugh.I know that, I thought, remembering how she’d saved me from saying who I was. I circled back. She answered as she had before we fell out. She answered with shame.Do you remember how things ended, she asked , because of boys?

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said,okay, but, if you let this one go, I’m really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away.You were never sweet, my mother says. *** In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy’s crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard.He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent.The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there's his mother, surrounded by her children.She was tough, he says.Tough. When Chicago’s Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather—then five—and took him to deliver the money.That's all you'll ever get, she said,and don’t touch my kids or I’ll kill you. *** My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don’t have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I’m three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won’t tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he’d send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn’t pretty.She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Each morning, downward, Maria Stella Maris Church glows out the passenger-side window. Further, the corner where the Salvation Army stood and Hart Crane spent the night. At a shore-edge bar, where they'd finally met up, they shared bottles, walked out toward being together, a hotel, and then got rolled. Crane spent the night in the shelter. E., bruised, shipped out the next morning. The hungover poet took the train back toward Altadena. From my car, not much has changed; I see young stevedores shrug off last night's drunk. Past New Dock Street, a cigarette splits, balloons into orange under my wheels. Hot ash. My unkindness is thrown over and over. Door to door, a ride is for what I've squirreled away, not riches but a pile: the ways no thing mattered, how a kiss didn't count, how a friendship could be severed by a coyote walking between us or a dream. My windshield is a tracery. Long ago, down Gaffey, we raced in my hairdresser's sports car. She drove with her knees. Her perfume, the want, filled the heated car. We drove once to her husband's parking lot, switched cars—he'd shipped out for days—and toured in his jeep. But in this home I've chosen, there's a church on every corner and mourners in between. Boys pair up and nothing happens. Girls hold hands. We get rolled. They ship out. Liquor is drained. The train returns to Altadena. Mary, star of the sea, watches over the gem of a filthy port like the hawk, diamond-shaped ahead. She lets me pass five days a week. On my way uphill there are ovals of golden light, then no one home. Shoeless child, chimes, and stevedore off work. Burnt lawn. Hellhole. Haven. Next stop, my house.