A City with Enormous Wings by Stephanie Renée Payne

A tall, skinny baby of man, fully clothed, stood on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Mariposa in the city of angels and masturbated. I watched from the driver’s seat of my white Prius.  I let myself see him—all of him: his boyish face and fine, black hair that looked like it had once held the shape of a precision cut, but was now a mess of unruly curls that straddled his shoulders and stretched down his back. Persian? Italian? I couldn’t tell. He stood dressed for basketball practice or maybe a jog down that long stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. His dirt-tanned skin and slightly rumpled clothing, and a gaze that was not of this world, the only giveaways to a less than pristine existence, an ugly life in this city of celebrities, fancy cars, and impossibly thin young women reaching for stardom.

Had I not been waiting at that corner, I would have missed it. Missed him. Ten, maybe fifteen seconds and it was over. He simply put his hands into the pockets of his shorts, and as if he were grappling for a lost object shifted his hands back and forth until just the right touch triggered his momentary euphoria. I saw it on his face. By the way he tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and parted his lips. The clouds that had cast a shadow on him that spring morning seemed to lift in that moment. Or perhaps it was the position of his face tilted toward the sun. Or maybe, and this is probably the closest to any truth that I possessed on that day, I simply wanted to see the city where I was born, the city I had abandoned for most of my adult life, as beautiful and with grace. The traffic light changed. I was off. The moment gone.

The call back to Los Angeles after 26 years of being away came with my baby sister Nina’s diagnosis. Breast cancer. Inflammatory. Stage 4. The indelible memory of holding her tiny body in my four-year-old hands made the distance that had grown between us an ache that was quietly present no matter how much time had passed. We were three girls and one single mother. Pam, Nina, and I had named ourselves the Three Musketeers. When the biggest boy in my sixth-grade class tugged at Pam’s sandy- colored curly ponytails, I jumped him. I punched him as hard as I could in his fat pouch of a stomach. I’d punch anyone who messed with my sisters. We held each other like I held Nina as a baby, until Nina let go. Slipped away.

We had not seen or spoken to her in five years. The last conversation I shared with Nina came when she finally decided to leave her husband, who was the only man she had known. After meeting him in high school, she found herself pregnant with their first child during her high school graduation. He was a man who bruised. A man who cheated. A man whose darkness was so tethered to Nina’s dark places, she stayed. They both numbed with alcohol and drugs. They both held secrets that we could only guess. Remember the times Nina refused to go to school when she was in the 7th grade? Remember her 7th grade teacher who was later convicted on child molestation charges? Remember when she got her period in the 7th grade and refused to acknowledge she was bleeding. We blamed it all on the 7th grade.

We had no choice but to guess when Nina fell silent. And then came the call. There was no thinking or planning. Something inside of me knew it was time to go home. But when I returned, nothing was familiar. The life in Nina’s pretty brown face, a face that so mirrored mine, now drained and hallowed. Her gray chemo-bleached skin, the loss of her hair, her dry cracked lips, and the sweet surrender of her spirit that had been closed to us for the past five years opened—just a sliver—but enough to slip into the grace that settled upon my sister as she came to the end of her life.

“I’m so happy to have my big sister here,” she whispered at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica after her surgery. And with those words we were bonded again. Sisters. The five years of silence washed clean away.

With her smile—her teeth like sheets of paper stripped clean of all the calcium from her aggressive rounds of chemo—she opened a little more. She patted her hospital bed beckoning me to lay by her side when I visited. She grabbed my hand and held on, even in her sleep. I often wondered why the calling of Nina’s ugly life held so much sway, but in those moments questions evaporated. The body of my little sister was slipping from beneath her. A mouth that would not close. A head that struggled from its position on a stark white hospital pillow. Eyes that were sunken in their sockets yet wildly alive. There was a keening of her senses. A knowing beyond this life enveloped her and she became wise under some ancient spell. The quiet in that space told me so, as the walls in her hospital room seemed to disappear when we lay together on those evening visits. The air thick with a presence that almost made me dizzy, as if the sky had opened up and all that is heaven and Earth communed with us in those inviolable last days of a life. With her transcendence—not quite alive with legs that no longer worked and a body fed by a tube—came a sense of calm. There was no more resistance. She was letting go of this life.

And then came another call. I was told on a Monday that Nina would leave the hospital for hospice care. I was told that she would be cared for by her grown daughter. I was told when she arrived at her daughter’s apartment with a hospice nurse in tow that I was to come. Now. I battled the Los Angeles traffic, but something in me knew that my efforts were futile. I could feel the wind at Nina’s back. The slipping of her body was now complete. I stepped into a Von’s market, the chain of markets where Nina worked her entire life. She toiled as a teen in the checkout stand, dabbled in management after the first set of babies were born, and then settled as a hiring manager. A natural. I called my living sister, Pam, and told her I would not make it. Her response: Those who were meant to witness this are already here.

After Nina’s death, I longed for the peace I felt in her hospital bed—absorbing the wisdom she held, as her spirit prepared to depart her cancer-poisoned, brown-skinned body. I questioned my place in this city with my sister now gone. Especially in this new L.A., a city that felt mean—a hustler’s paradise, a rich man’s playground. This L.A. was not the city of Overland Avenue Elementary School in the 70s, the post-Civil Rights era when I came of school age. It was not the same place where my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Valenta, championed the brown girl with the curly afro when she called me beautiful in front of the whole class after my mother clipped my thick curls. But as I conjured my time with Nina in those last days, her loving hand in mine, her voice a raspy, almost indiscernible whisper, something opened inside of me when I remembered her words:

“I didn’t know how to come back,” she said. “I moved too far outside of myself.” Those words brought me back from wherever I had strayed. From the bitterness of my divorce, my failures, my inability to see what was right in front me, and then I spotted the boy-man on Wilshire Boulevard.

Months after witnessing him on the street, his image came back to me like a prayer—a reminder. I couldn’t dismiss his need to find his bit of pleasure from God knows what place he couldn’t come back from. A gentle wish for that stranger to be shrouded in safety and for him to feel loved pulsed inside of me when I thought of him in a city that I struggled to embrace. But then I thought of my Mississippi grandmother, Anna Belle Latham, who conjured Los Angeles into existence for her brood when my mother was still in high school. Anna Belle sold her marriage bed, my mother told me, when my grandfather balked at the idea of moving out west with their six children. Anna Belle gave me my name, Stephanie Renée, her first-born California grandbaby in a city where all things were possible. My mother mocked her—a city of angels, imagine that! Anna Belle died before my second birthday. She would never meet my sisters, Pam and Nina.

But this is what I know about Anna Belle from stories told and re-told. This is how she lives inside of me. When she landed in South Central Los Angeles in 1961, she knew all would be well because she trusted a city that plucked its name from the heavens. She trusted that the enormous wings of the angels were expansive enough and resilient enough to fill any pockets of hurt in a place that had the audacity to speak in many tongues.

“She was a modern woman,” my mother often told me. “She dieted to keep her figure when women in the south just didn’t do that—especially black women. She taught you to call me Shirley and your father William, instead of ‘mommy,’ and ‘daddy. She wanted you to be educated and independent.”

I felt my grandmother’s presence around me, especially when I lay with my sister in her last days of living. And when I said goodbye to Nina, I saw Anna Belle’s image of me—strong, independent, thriving. When my little sister went mute for good in this life, I felt the gentle nudge to step into my grandmother’s vision, and to trust a city with wings.

And somehow, like Anna Belle, I began to see angels. Everywhere. I saw an angel in the form of the woman who assisted me at the Department of Motor Vehicles when registering my car—the car that I purchased back east in preparation to return home. The woman behind the DMV counter, whose makeup and hair told me she was deliberate about her beauty, warned me that I would be taxed for my new car in this city, even though I paid taxes back east. She leaned in, as if it were a secret, and told me the taxes here were much higher and I would have to pay the difference—thousands of dollars that I didn’t have.

“You are not sure you want to stay here,” she softly counseled, putting the words into my mouth as she ushered me away. “Perhaps after your car is a year old and no taxes are required, you’ll decide to stay,” she further advised raising a brown-penciled eyebrow to accentuate her point.

This she said after I told her I came to L.A. in haste to be with my dying sister. She patted my hand when I reached for hers in gratitude. I couldn’t help it, I lamented to this stranger that my sister left behind small children, the youngest only five. I realized in that moment that I had not given myself the space to grieve when I felt a wave of heated embarrassment flush into my cheeks and across my face. But the woman behind the DMV counter with the pretty-drawn face just smiled with her eyes in a way that comforted my pain. She called me, Mami, and winked toward the paperwork to assure me that all would be well.

My twenty plus years away from L.A. afforded me the distance to concoct a Los Angeles without fragmentation. Vacations out west to see my family were fun-filled excursions with trips to Disneyland and walks up to the Observatory, just a mile away from my mother’s Hollywood Hills home. Before reemerging as a resident, as an Angeleno, I turned an ignorant eye toward this city. Unable to bear witness to her failures, not fully recognizing her beauty. I morphed into one of those tourists happily searching the gold-plated names of their beloved stars on Hollywood Boulevard when I visited from my east coast home. I brazenly dismissed the series of tents now labeled a “city” and a homeless population living openly in an urban hell.

But still, I trust. As I call the city of angels my home once again. I am comforted by the expanse and rigor of the wings of her many angels. I am comforted by the knowing that in time new possibilities emerge and emerge and emerge. Beginnings. But for now, I bear witness to both the darkness and the light. To both life and death. I remember my sister’s brief time lived in a city that our grandmother held out as a gift to her children, and ultimately her grandchildren. I allow myself to see my sister—all of her—as she unfurled her wings and flew right out of her beautifully ugly life. I bear witness to what aches and moans inside of me, and I let that pain have its say. I bear witness to my city in all of her truths and contradictions. All the while stubbornly clinging to the power of the angels, as I remember the humanity in the boy-man who captured my soul for ten seconds on the corner of Wilshire and Mariposa on a sunny spring L.A. morning.

Stephanie Renée Payne lives and writes in her native Los Angeles. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has appeared in Hunger Mountain, For Harriet, Shadowbox, among others. She is currently faculty in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.