Prose from the 2022 Issue #50

La Bionda
by Edvige Giunta 

La Bionda sat on a rickety chair outside the open door of her house, a child between her knees, her fingers deep into the child’s hair. People called her La Bionda because her hair was the color of straw. In her faded housedress, she looked large and imposing. I didn’t know her age. Was she the children’s mother? Their grandmother?  

From our second-floor balcony, I noticed the precision with which she handled those little infested heads. Her head bent into the hair and her hands parted it. Her fingers moved meticulously through the strands. She lifted her right hand and stared at something between thumb and index finger. Her face scrunched up. She flicked her finger, then returned to the search.

I scratched my head furiously although I couldn’t see the nits. I was familiar with il pettine stretto, the fine-tooth comb my mother ran through our hair every few months. She had told me of a girl she knew during the war, when she, too, was a girl. This girl had very long hair that looked gray so infested it was with lice. The image of the gray-haired girl haunted me.

La Bionda lived near us, but I never thought of her as our neighbor because I lived in a new apartment building that overlooked Il Corso, the main street of our Sicilian town, and she lived in an old house on a back street. The entrance to my building was on the same back street. Whenever I walked down that street, I’d peek inside the open doors of habitations similar to La Bionda’s. Thick, overpowering smells came from those cavernous homes. My curious nostrils opened as I peeked into the darkness. I could only see the silhouettes of bodies. I’d hear a donkey bray, a goat bleat. Their sounds mingled with human voices.

The children sat through the search, then became restless and tried to escape La Bionda’s hands. I didn’t know these children. They were street kids and I was the daughter of teachers. I was only allowed to play in the stairway or on the rooftop terrace of our building. Yet my mother trusted me, when I was as young as five, to walk to and from school alone and to run errands at the nearby grocer and baker. I stood in front of the tall counter until the store owner saw me. In my fist, a few coins and a scrap of paper where my mother had scribbled a few items: half a kilo of bread, 100 grams of bread crumbs, 100 grams of grated caciocavallo, 100 grams of Naples salami—“tell him tagliato fine,” thinly sliced, she’d remind me.

I walked home on the sidewalk, clutching the paper bag. The Corso was loud with the honking of cars and the shouts of street vendors. People walked in and out of stores or bought fruit and vegetables from wooden crates vendors displayed right on the sidewalk or in the back of lape, three-wheeled vans that were often decorated like the traditional Sicilian carts they had replaced. I climbed the steps that separated the Corso from its anarchic back streets, where centuries-old houses were inhabited by families that carried on old customs. Yet those back streets had changed since they had been invaded by new constructions, like the three-floor, six-apartment building where my family lived. These new buildings had given the town a modern anonymous appearance.

Buying groceries, going to school—those were acceptable outdoor activities. My younger brother was allowed to play on the back streets. There he spoke Sicilian dialect with the street kids, though he was not allowed to speak it at home. I understood Sicilian because my parents spoke it between themselves and to us, but my sister and I were forbidden to speak it anywhere, even to them—yet another rule in the book of initiation into 1960s Italian girlhood. A century after Sicily became part of Italy, my island remained the country’s lesser child, and our language a marker of uncivilized people.

Class was both obvious and subtle. Many of my playmates were working-class kids, but they were as immersed in a process of domestication that favored upward-class mobility as we were. They were not street kids. I intuited that something separated my family’s world from La Bionda’s and those kids’. Their houses, their clothes, their thick dialect, and their customs were evidence of our places in our society. Yet there was something self-assured, imperious about La Bionda that drew me to her—the way she sat outside and, without concern for the opinion of others, conducted an activity that my family regarded as private, shameful, and relegated to the bathroom.

La Bionda was a woman steeped in customs that I knew viscerally. These customs were indifferent to the rule of modernity that had created apartment buildings like the one where I lived and the borders and rules through which my parents shaped me and my siblings. She was made of ancient Sicily.

I never spoke to La Bionda, never entered her house, never knew her actual name. When I watched this Sicilian matriarch from my balcony or passed by her house, I felt our worlds collide—poor and middle class, adult and child, old and new. As they collided, the distance between us dissolved. I knew then that she was the queen of our street.

Jersey Girl Shore Stop Slide Bounce
by William Harry Harding

Born and bred in South Jersey, like her grandfather (who has rooted for the Phillies his whole life), she heads to the Jersey Shore but first makes a Jersey Slide across three lanes to grab some Jersey Fries for the trip at a diner so old her grandfather claims he ordered “eggs on the Jersey side” there as a teenager—a story she has heard too many times to believe, about musicians leaving clubs in Harlem after gigs to breakfast at New Jersey diners, the only places open at 2 a.m., except for the joints near the docks in lower Manhattan, where Blacks in the 1940s got rough receptions from Longshoremen, so a drive across the George Washington Bridge was safer.

 She doubts this explanation because she’s seen her grandfather cook the dish: eggs sunny-side-up, fried in hot oil from the slice of Taylor Ham on the same griddle, crisping the egg whites, and the only other person she has ever heard use the phrase in an actual sentence is Cab Calloway in his song Hep-Hep, also known as Jumpin’ Jive, and she’s watched him perform it in a YouTube clip from the movie Stormy Weather, featuring the Nicholas Brothers, flying into their splits, stealing the show. 

After pulling a rolling Jersey Stop at the side street leading her back onto Route 38, she curses when she burns her fingers on the mozzarella covering the fries. The roof of her mouth burns, too, a sliver of the upper palate singed and hanging like a cobweb, which she yanks free and eats along with more fries and cheese, then dabs her fingers on the paper napkin that will hopefully stop the tomato sauce from staining her jeans, and feeds her grandfather's CD  into the slot, hears  The Jersey Bounce—not the Benny Goodman cut that was number 1 and his biggest hit of the ’40s, but the Jimmy Dorsey version that only made it to #9—slower, a true foxtrot, the way it would have been played live at a dance hall back in those too-short nights after Pearl Harbor when the battleship USS New Jersey and its 12 and 8-inch guns went to sea, guns so powerful that their blast jolted the ship sideways, bouncing it across the white caps.

She can see him smiling about that in his living room—hers now, because he’s in hospice, a frail man who weighs less than his age (101), not the strapping kid who enlisted, fought in the Pacific, came home, married, bought a house and a car, both of which he still has, raised a family and never caved to a desire to head west to join his Navy buddies building airliners near the beach,  where a good-paying job was his if he wanted it—and he did want it, but the price was too high, it meant leaving the place he had fought so hard and been so lucky to get back to, a place where he could cry at the cemetery because nobody recognized him anymore, though almost everybody remembered his dad—“You’re Larry’s boy?"—and everyone knew his mother—“Thank God she didn’t have to see you go off to war. It would’ve killed her.”  

The CD pops out. Another wad of fries, still hot, but not steaming. She thinks about listening to Springsteen on her i-Phone, but his Jersey Girl would tear her up: this will probably be her last drive to the Jersey Shore, her last walk on the boards, her final glimpse of the Atlantic. She only stayed this long to take care of the old man. She went in to see him every day at first, then every other day, now twice a week. Her visits buoy him, and also wear him out.  The nurses worry it's too much for him, making her feel guilty being at his side. With their eyes and tone of voice, they tell her she's killing him faster. At best, he has a week left. She wants to tell him, one more time, what his ocean looks and smells like.

And he still has so much to tell her: “I should’ve gone out to Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. Your grandma would've given in eventually. And you’d have grown up at the beach instead of driving  three hours to get to it.” He has forgotten that the roads are better now—it’s about an hour and 10 minutes these days.  “Don’t stay in that house alone, Lou.” he keeps telling her. “Join your boys in California.” 

He means Colorado, but can’t get his own life out of the way long enough to realize that. And she knows he’s right. He’s always right—about the boyfriends, the husbands, that stupid job. A quick overnight at LBI, where a grammar-school friend has taken a rental for the month, with a free bed for her, then a day at Seaside Heights, then home, then the hospice, then waiting—he holds on: for what?—then no home, just packing and yard sales.  Part of her wants to be there the moment death takes him. Most of her can't stomach that reality.

She knows she will finally give in to that classic car collector from Florida, desperate for the 1950 Mercury coupe, her grandfather's first car bought new, up on blocks and unstarted for at least three decades, dust-speckled in the little garage, a shed really, not big enough for cars today, and filled with spiders, memories, and that maroon two-door, its sheen dulled, like her hair the last few years. Old Louie—what they all call him, never Lou, the version of his name he reserves for her, or Louis or Mister, only his little boy name—he doesn’t have to know about his car.

She promised she'd drive it one more time. It would break his heart to know that it, too, will disappear, existing only in photos, and she knows about broken hearts. She's a Jersey Girl, after all, squinting now through the glare of the sun, just high enough so it’s no longer a problem—something he taught her, the way to make the sun your ally, whether heading to the Shore or cross-country or even, God forbid, to North Jersey, where chemical plants have outnumbered cows for more than a generation, and that’s the trouble with outliving everybody else—no one's left to argue with about important things, like why Old Route 9 was definitely better than Route 1, or which dairies made the best summer ice cream, selling cones to quarts straight out of their barns.

 Stuck in his time warp most of her life, Louise fears that only she and that dying ex-Navy gunner know the answers, worries there may not be enough time to tell her sons and granddaughters the stories, give them enough of him, of her, of yesterdays in a New Jersey they must see as an alien planet to allow them to discover themselves.

 She drives faster.