Libras
Lisa DellaPorta
“Both of us, you see?” She gestured to the space between my chest and hers, the nickel-sized pendant dangling on the silver chain laced around her fingers. Our birthdays, in the same month, were separated by six decades and the Atlantic Ocean. “We are the same.” Scales are our symbol, the interplay of justice and balance, the only mascot in the Zodiac that doesn’t get to live.
“Most important thing,” she used to tell me, on summer afternoons when my parents were off picking paint chips or paying taxes or doing whatever it is that adults do, “is never wear shoes you can’t run in. You can’t run, you’re easier to shoot.” I’ve kept the advice close as I’ve aged into womanhood, even in social situations where it was required of me to balance on the pointed stilts of stilettos, the wedged platform of jute-sided espadrilles. In my bag, always, folded like a wallet, stashed in a pocket with forgotten Kleenex, a pair of flats.
On 9/11, as we all sat in the family room of our rented Jersey beach house, a late last-minute holiday booked when school construction pushed our start date back by two weeks, the newscaster mentioned a shoe salesman who had stood on the street asking women for their size, tossing them boxes of his stock to change into on the choking, dusty pavement. She raised her hand towards the screen triumphantly and shouted “Most important thing!” before breaking into sobs and losing her English.
“It was all girls, in the basement. For weeks, just women. And I don’t tell you . . . the smell. The smell of woman blood. It stays
with you.” Her association between the most human of bodily processes and the terror of war—perhaps that was my motivation, when I stared down at the landing strip of my underpants, the soiled cotton bridge stretched between my thighs, and could not bear to tell her what had started. Instead I’d snuck into the kitchen, calling my mother on the avocado rotary phone. Come and get me, I don’t feel well. The conversation between them, after. The look of disgust on her face as she hung up the receiver, lifted her dress in front of the worn enamel sink, and demanded that I stare at the slack elastic and well-washed satin beneath, in acknowledgement of our sameness, of my beginning and her end.
But from my youngest years, I knew that we were different, however unspoken. Sitting in the swivel chair behind her reception desk at work, a photo of my younger sibling proudly displayed on the countertop between stacks of envelopes, my own picture was nowhere to be found; at eight, I drew my stick-figure self, centered on a torn corner of notebook paper, and wedged it into the frame between metal and glass. One child conceived out of wedlock, one done the Godly way. In our church, kicking the sole of my jelly sandals along the terrazzo floor, finding no comfort in the fire and brimstone of the priest’s homily that she swallowed with her eucharist, I cracked open the hymnal she shoved into my hands and let my eyes wander the room rather than the page. At home, running breathless into the living room and flopping down on the sofa after evening baseball, the way she grimaced and spat “You have no grace,” the former model who walked Paris runways with ankles impossibly slenderized by the starvation diet of national conflict.
I keep the pendant in my smallest jewelry box, pushed to the very back of my dresser. There was a time in college when I wore it larkheaded on a hempen cord tied tightly round my neck, after a years-long illness that had shed pounds, led to enviable skinniness,
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ravaged its own warfare on my body and my psyche. Beautiful, but damaged. Shiny, but cracked at the foundation—the cycling of a pattern, restoring balance to my scales. By that point, we had not spoken in close to a decade.
I didn’t go to her funeral, deep into COVID lockdown, a circumstance that was easier to blame on the climate of safety than the rawness of truth. I can conjure an image of what the church must have been like that day through the murky film that covers a place familiar yet not recently attended: empty, echoing, scented with the thick musk of frankincense and candle wax. In retrospect, I wish I had scored the pendant with hammer and chisel, cracked it in half, and placed one side under her pillow before the casket closed. To leave one above ground and one below, clear in our difference, a final, firm separation.