One day in 2001, I went to my Aunt Mary’s house to show her what I’d collected from months of researching her family, its immediate and distant history. We went from lists and dates to stories that had no connection to scraps I’d brought. We looked together at the death-certificate for her uncle, Joe Rositani, and marveled that he’d only been forty when he died. I told her I’d grown up thinking he died an older man. It was a tragedy, I said, how he died on the highway - in the middle of the night – into the morning and waiting to be found.
She said the car’s driver had been drinking. We talked about how Joe had never learned to drive. Oh, but he could drink, Mary added. I was twenty-five, she said. I tried to think what twenty-five meant. She’d been married six years and had two small kids. She’d just bought a house in Buena Park in a new tract where the fog came in so thick she could hear but not see the cows that had broken free across Knott Avenue and wandered toward the tract.
Just before the funeral - that part - that was hard. Then she remembered her own mother and grandmother – Joe’s older sister and his mother. Walking in the Church was the worst. She faced the two women who both collapsed with a refusal to go inside. Fallen there, they must have felt that the Church doors had a truth that, with their own weight, they could not bear. One of them falls and then there goes the other one to the ground. I took one by the arm and pulled her up to her feet. I bent down and grabbed the other and stood her up, too. Locked arms, with me between, we walked in that Church. She told this story in her kitchen and my Aunt Mary walked, her arms bent as if she were walking two women-ghosts up a church-aisle. She walked toward me like she bore the weight again. I don’t know if it happened just this way, but this was how she told that story: how a car crash and death transformed her into something superhuman.
Later that afternoon, she showed me some of her collections. There, a drawer full of cigarette cases, each old, some beaded. And there, another drawer filled with compacts, snapped shut with mirrors. We didn’t have to open them.
