From the Fire Hills

Labor Days

30 LABOR DAYS I woke to a blizzard and franchise, burned quickly the money earned in a strip mall dress outlet, lugging vacuum into the Versailles of a communal changing room. From my own face, one hundred versions regressed in the netherworld where underwear and slip seem not so much confession as compression, those years I worked, a layered look, simply keeping me warm. Life’s like that, stuttered the register. It was California after all, where snow fell only after baseball on TV—the Dodgers game I watched, stunned by my first taste of store-bought vacation. How eerily the hours crept, imperceptible as the glacial style that governs necklines, drawing deeper into autumn’s cleavage, the high arc of the three-two ball lost in a spotlight blur. Speaking of, years have passed since I wrapped that vacuum’s noose around its neck and stowed it for the last time in the history of Western civilization. 31 But for me, life really takes off in Rome, in the Forum, when I watch a woman stoop to the marble’s face and read herself into history, into that mirrored hallway I see again as the door dinged and women entered, purses slung over their shoulders like recent kills. How many tunnels back exist, as if we chose from catalogs the clothes of our becoming? I must have seemed strange, or worse, watching her skirt-folds drape over marble, revealing more than some unlikely blend, which is how life is, and why, near the Vestal Virgins in the Forum— millennia after the stones were laid, past trees shorn of their spring collections, sinking monuments, and history with its slick capacity for erasure—I saw a dress shop, in California, and the first full whiteout of my life. ...