True Story

In the tales I used to tell, I was the queen of peril, and my listeners, I knew, hallelujahed my every survival. In one true story, the car slid to a gasping collision and I emerged unscathed, miracle of teenage almost-tragedy. In another, I’m lost in Rome, surrounded by men and motorbikes, and never have I been lovelier than in that one, my city-swept hair, my veneer of bravado. There’s the one wherein I dash without my glasses across a midnight highway, desperate for the sound of the ocean, as any reckless heroine must be. In another, a pickup tails me through dark suburbs. The stories carried me down the long halls of high school, into the cars of new boyfriends, my hair glossed in my words’ dark glow, my crooked smile a puzzle worth solving. Later, much later, I realized the close calls weren’t. I saw how the car crash was only a bumping of bumpers, my Rome terror a punch line two metro stops later, where my friend waited, eating stracciatella. The highway was empty; the pickup drove away. Here is a true story: once, in a Days Inn bathroom in Cullman, Alabama, I held my child as my husband held me as the tornado raged past. After, we drove in silence past half-houses, upturned cars, pine groves as stripped and broken as if an atom bomb had dropped. We looked at each other. We looked at our son. We looked out the windows and said nothing. The silence said caution. It said hallelujah. It said no told story is ever true enough.