Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger by Kelly J. Cogswell

Author:Kelly J. Cogswell [Cogswell, Kelly J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Feminism, Lesbans, Lesbian Author
ISBN: 9780816691166
Amazon: 0816691169
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-02-21T06:00:00+00:00

I stayed with Nana all morning, drinking decaf, eating leftover breakfast from the patients. Kim came in the afternoon and we went to Taco Bell, where the colors were too bright and there was sauce on the counter. The server had a big accent, like Ana, and Kim twanged, “I don’t know why they cain’t speak English right. If they’re going to come here . . .” She sounded just like my mom who locked the car door with her elbow when she saw a black person, not at all like the older sister I’d admired, tried to be, stealing her T-shirts. I think that was just after Kim had created a family scandal by marrying a black man, then divorcing him when he tried to kill her. She’d already been married once, had a kid and a dog that she locked in the bathroom with her, while her new husband screamed outside with a knife. I wonder what kind of blonde, blue-eyed devil he imagined cowering behind the door. I wonder what she thought when she married him, what he meant to her. Was he himself, or just a little bomb she wanted to set off among the hicks?

I hung around a day or two, visiting my grandmother, holding her hand, smiling at the relations. My mother’s anyway. My dad’s parents, the ones who paid to have my tumor removed, sent the message through my mother that I was absolutely not to visit or call. When I asked why, she smiled smugly, “They hated those pictures you sent. Said you looked like a refugee. What’s the point? You being what you are.” I probably ignored my dad, even if he lived in town with his second wife and young daughter, still humiliated that I had competed with his dog—and lost.

God, I was happy to take the bus back home. That’s what New York was. My mother, as much as I sickened her, recoiled when she heard it, “Home. I’m going home.” And when I got to that filthy chaotic terminal at Port Authority after almost a night and day, I nearly bent down and kissed the dirty linoleum. Though it didn’t quite end there. I’d been infected, you see, by her eyes. And when I stopped by my own room on Avenue B it suddenly seemed shabby. And my clothes were ugly. And I stank. And the people I knew had no direction. And there was no music to their voices. I was wasting my life. Even Ana’s accent seemed briefly obscene. The Irish girls had each other. There were Cubans everywhere I looked. But girls from Kentucky? None. Nowhere. I was adrift, unmoored, again. At the loft, Amy tried to console me, but when she got out her banjo, I had to leave.

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