Lineage
I come from a long line of women with short legs who have had to straddle two places at once. My mother’s mother had angry Sicilian parents who spoke one language but lived another. They were like holy statues from the church hiding mafiosos inside.
My grandmother was a young prude who had to get married because she got pregnant. A woman who cared about her looks and sewing and all the other era-appropriate traits expected from females, but she was mean not docile. She wouldn’t let her husband fart in the house. She drove a car without ever obtaining a license. She didn’t know how to drive. How hard could it be? She was afraid of mice but swore like a longshoreman. She knew how to fool the neighbors.
My mother wore tight, paint-stained capris and climbed a ladder in the window of our downtown department store when other women wouldn’t wear pants to go downtown shopping. It was frowned upon. Other things were forbidden like women having their own bank accounts or owning property. It was a time of change but change came slowly to our mafia-run, steel mill town. Three catholic churches saw to that. Where you were from dictated where you went to mass. Were you from the island or the boot or that country everyone kept invading? You knew who you were. The nuns were different from each other. You could tell which were which. The Italian ones looked as if they were from Milan. They were as mean as all the others though.
I married the first man who asked me. I thought no one would ever love me. My mother made sure of that. She passed on the judgmental poison from her own mother and her mother’s mother. My husband turned out to be a women trapped in a man’s body. He found herself years later. A happy ending. I found myself too. It took several tries at love. I was put on pedestals. I married my mother in male form. I got with a man that I swear was the reincarnation of the man my grandmother threw out of her house.
I’m here now. Happy. Content. Wiser. A little fleshier. I have more patience and much better boundaries. No electronic ID on my border walls. I insist on looking through that little window that shows me the knocker’s soul. I can read those these days. I didn’t have a daughter. I have a son. It’s a different way to break the cycle. I taught him to be a good man. So did my own father, but that’s a story for another day.
Cinse Bonino
2023
