My Lesbian Husband by Barrie Jean Borich

Author:Barrie Jean Borich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press

I couldn’t entirely blame the neighborhood for those thoughts. My sense of danger is linked to other dangers in a connected rumble, as a snake of box cars trundling to a stop across an outer city intersection sends a shudder all the way down the line. Still, the city where I live now did not create me and my fears are nothing new. I’ve always expected the worst, that Linnea will crack up her truck, or her motorcycle will slide off the Lake Street Bridge, or she will spontaneously combust before my eyes. I’ve always had trouble trusting any kind of happiness, suspecting that bliss is a set-up, a trick to get me to relax just before the final big blast. Linnea has never obsessed about these things. Not that she didn’t worry about the guns—she was the one who pulled me to the carpet whenever she heard them, the one to dive first for the phone, the one who hissed at me to get away from the window. But even though she had a new habit of bringing her phone outdoors with her, she was also capable of cleaning her motorcycle, oblivious of me, of the dog, of the problem our neighborhood was having with guns.

Not that we actually saw the guns, most of the time. We just heard them, runs of hard, hollow, heartbeats, their dusty after echo. I used to confuse gunshots with firecrackers, but not anymore. By August, any sort of bang made me stop and listen hard—the hammer of road repair two blocks away, a car door slamming, a man using the heel of his hand to pound on the door of a house with no doorbell. I knew when it was guns. It was the way the sound, familiar now, caused my skin to lift just a bit and bristle with electricity, the way it caused my heart to stop dead then start again, rushing to catch up.

Yet I did love that neighborhood in the summer. The flashing fan blades in the windows of houses without air-conditioning. Stray cats stretched out on front stoops blinking at traffic. The high and low notes of lawn mowers buzzing into the dusk. Dogs who nearly levitated from the force of their own barks when I passed by with Patsy. People walking so slow through the watery air, as if the city itself, a wet dome, a toppled lake, cradled them upright, allowed them to float.

That neighborhood is a mixed-up place, full of old South Minneapolis white lefties with teenage grunge kids and Che Guevara banners in the upstairs windows, next door to African American extended families who barbecue on the front lawn on summer Sundays, next door to lesbian mixed-race collective households who hold their picnics in the back, next door to Mexican immigrants who call out to each other in long breaths of fast Spanish, next door to a brownstone three-plex with a black avant-garde jazz musician living in the attic, a Jewish lesbian novelist living

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