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