Where I'm From
An Essay and Conversation with Alyson Shelton
Circe partner Gina Frangello recently had the pleasure of joining former Circe client
as part of Alyson's "Where I'm From" series.You can find Gina's essay below and their video discussion here.
I am from basil leaves simmering in chicken cacciatore, from Stella D’oro cookies dunked in Taster’s Choice, from thinly sliced and salted eggplant stacked on paper towels while sand drained from an hourglass like The Days of Our Lives. I am from rice medley boiled in airtight bags, from frozen Salisbury steaks and guilty mounds of Peterson’s ice cream by low TV light, from “blowjobs taste like crackers and milk” and twelve-year-old girls nodding in real or feigned understanding.
I am from the closet under the stairs, from cubby holes lined with foam glass, from “If I Can’t Have You, I Don’t Want Nobody Baby” morning to night until Tommy and Jenny divorced and moved out. I am from musical beds as my father slept sentry on the living room couch, a stack of locks on the front door warding off imaginary intruders, intent on stealing our Nothing—from the back bedroom where my mother spent days with cold compresses on her migraines and nights alone in a half-cold bed.
I am from “front rooms” and “youse guys” and “Alice, do Protestants believe in God?” I am from my father’s promise that tree roots would invade our sewage systems, from ripped up green-bud bushes and fresh concrete yards smoothed dry and hosed down until it glistened like a bone, our block switching off technicolor to gray, The Wizard of Oz in reverse.
I’m from charades on Christmas Eve and uncles dead by murder, a ruptured esophagus, thirteen heart attacks, and murder again. From faith healers and shepherds and basement-brewed gin, from traveling salesmen and hobos, from factory workers, sober bartenders, secretaries, and sorters of mail to Oslo. I am from Virgin Mary visitations heralding the death of another son, from “death knocks three times” and leaves no footprints in the snow.
I’m from my mother’s footsteps echoing through the hospital corridor after she signed the papers to amputate her father’s leg, the same leg he used to wedge her into locked closets, to part her knees in the bushes when he shoved his hand down on “dates” after my Nana’s before-it-was-fashionable divorce. I’m from my mother’s bottomless hunger born of welfare apples riddled with worms and free milk delivered to her classroom to put some meat on her bones. I am from the ways mothers try to keep their children safe and accidentally open trap doors to other dangers.
I’m from trap doors to unfinished basements, from “clubhouses” in the mildewy dank below the stairs. I’m from Dixie cups of powdery Country Time lemonade, from cutting the streetlights so the neighborhood ladies in their housedresses stopped shelling lupini beans and screamed for their kids—“Michael, Maria!”—to hurry inside before the gang fight. I am from honorary street signs bearing names of the under-eighteen dead, from shots catapulting through male bodies to kill fifteen-year-old girlfriends and unborn children, from fireworks that boom all summer and ears honed to differentiate gunfire, from open fire hydrants as car washes and the Italian flag painted on the pavement for the fourth of July, from a hole blown through the wall of the chicken factory to feed hundreds at the block party’s communal grill, from a Jesus who would have multiplied fish and loaves by the miracle of their “falling off a truck.”
I’m from life-sized crucifixes with bright red blood, from “blood is thicker than water,” from “if you kids don’t quiet down, you’re all going to Hell.”
I am from the Mayflower, Calabria, Chicago, and the small village of Race Street, from my mother’s DAR stint, only to find she blended no better than in our Italian neighborhood, from below a poverty line we didn’t know existed, from talking about the “white people” on TV without knowing they were us and we were them. I am from a Black boy riding his bike from Hubbard Street beaten with bricks until the ladies on the front porches said he became a vegetable, from gang rapes and coat hanger weapons and girl bodies hurled down flights of stairs, from old women who used to be girls providing alibis, from “he should have known better than to come north of Grand Avenue” and “she was a slut, she had it coming.”
I am from grandfathers dead before my birth and grandmothers who lived upstairs alone, one after the other, twenty-year-widows. From whispers about my father’s “nervous breakdown,” from my mother being known as “the Hillbilly” because if you aren’t Italian or Puerto Rican or Jewish or Black, what else could you possibly be? I am from children’s screams too loud to be stifled by painted-closed windows being “a family matter,” and my father’s resignation when my cousin was shot the second time and died, He never had a chance.
I am from lying on my back in the playground after the streetlights went on, staring at pollution stars with Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry out Loud” blasting on my cousin’s boombox, from swallowing that song into my body until it became a mantra, from tears that turned to ink then Times New Roman font. I am from “she thinks she’s too good,” from the betrayal of Leaving, from taking tears and ink with me, from standing so many years later with my children in a museum where lyrics from a musical—I wrote my way out—shone in neon, from Yes, god, yes, from if you learn to cry aloud you might not learn to stop. I am from shooting like the stars I tried to catch across the sky, bright and doomed and headed for anywhere else but here. I am from entire families stricken dead with early cancer, from Was it something in the water or was it our lifestyles, from survivor’s guilt the moment I boarded a Van Galder bus.
Does it make this story neater if I do not include being from my sharp chin bone on my mother’s shoulder while we snuggled in the white chair, her “feeding” me pictures of cherries in a counting book, or the way she bought rolls of brown butcherblock paper when I was ten because it was cheaper and my ink devoured paper like her mouth had once devoured apples de-wormed? Does the story make more sense if I am not also from dancing on my father’s shoes, being tossed into the air by his once-strong arms, from nightly “Trick or Fight” games and whispering into his whisker-close ear, “Do you want to hear a cigarette?” Am I less from everything else if I am also from a father cleaning up my vomit and remarking to my mother, “It’s gold,” or a mother singing in the front seat of our blue Chevy on excursions to Cherry Valley for apple pie or Lake Forest because my father was “knocked out” by the heavy, dark wood ceiling beams at the Deer Path Inn, where my parents wandered the lobby in reverence—me in boredom—then left quickly because we couldn’t afford to stay and eat? But I am from seeing my eyes reflected in the car window in the dark and mistaking them for God’s, watching over our unit of three—from falling asleep on a hundred drives home to their voices that called me “Little Face” and “Little Flower,” my two-sided soundtrack of safety and Home.
I am from the public library that saved my life (as perhaps one saved yours), forged by Stan Getz and Kenny Rankin albums, chamomile tea, Norman Lear laugh tracks and Van Johnson red socks, and no one could have blamed me if I stayed in that cocooned from forever. But I was Arundhati Roy’s “not that kind of animal,” and nothing could hold me, even my father’s tears when he said to my mother with wistful hope, “Maybe she’ll fail out.” So, I am from driving by the two-flat in which my father was born, in which I was raised, my five-year-old quipping a quarter century later, “This place looks like zombies attacked it.” I am from the zombie apocalypse of you can’t go home again and “there is no fact checking for nostalgia.” I am from the beautiful violence of love.