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by Kristin Ito

“Thespians!” he shouts at us from the front of the crowded restaurant.

Katie and I had been talking to the man ten minutes earlier at the bar. In his fifties or sixties, he wore Buddy Holly glasses and a wide Cheshire Cat smile.

He’d ordered a couple of drinks, and while he waited we made small talk: he asking if we were locals, and we asking how someone from New Zealand—obvious from his accent—had ended up in this small college town. He was here for his daughter’s graduation.

 

I had taken a sip of my gimlet and smiled happily, nuzzling into Katie’s curls.

“Oh!” the man yelped. “You’re lesbians! How wonderful.”

There was no irony in his voice, just genuine surprise and pleasure. Then: “I have a story for you about my daughter.”

“Okay,” I said, motioning for him to go on.

“One day she was pitching a fit and acting so dramatic.” The man mimicked her, arms akimbo. “So I said to her, ‘You’re quite the thespian.’ And you know what she says?”

We shook our heads no.

“‘What’s that? A lesbian with a lisp?’”

He guffawed, almost spilling his drink, and we all laughed. The joke didn’t seem mean-spirited—more just clever word play from this wild, gregarious Kiwi. We talked with him for a few more minutes, and then he went back to the front of the restaurant where his wife was waiting.

 

But now:
“Thespians!” the man is hollering down the bar. “Come sit with us!” He’s smiling, waving his arms above his head like an airplane marshal.

One of the bartenders looks up, concerned.

“Are you two all right?”

“Yes, we were just—“

“Is that man harassing you?”

“No, no,” I say, trying to explain.

“I can kick him out,” another one says, wiping his hands on a towel and glaring at the man.

“He was just, um. He’s fine.” We scramble over to the man and his wife, now seated at a booth. They ask us to join them for dinner, and we thank them for the offer, but decline.

 

When the place has quieted down, the staff huddles around us. We’re regulars and have gotten to know the restaurant owner’s son, Antonio Jr. His boyfriend comes around sometimes, a good-looking blonde with a tan who sometimes helps seat customers. I wonder how Antonio Senior feels about his son being gay. I wonder if the Italian machismo made it worse, and then I think how so many cultures have a sense of machismo, only sometimes there isn’t such a tidy word for it. 

A young bartender with a goatee brings us a round of drinks. He tells us his sister is a lesbian.

“I almost lost my shit,” he tells us. “I thought that man was yelling, ‘LESBIANS!’” We laugh for a while at this ridiculous misunderstanding. But then we’re all a little quiet because I suppose he kind of was, though.

***

Katie and I walk into the warm summer night. Eucalyptus trees tall as buildings sway in the wind, long dry leaves crackling in the breeze. We live in a town near the coast, one that on weekends is flooded with farm bros from the Central Valley. Having grown up in LA, I’d never seen anyone wearing a cowboy hat that wasn’t a part of a Halloween costume, but here it’s common to see them, almost always accompanied by a pair of Wranglers.

There isn’t a gay bar in town, no rainbow flags in storefront windows. No businesses owned by gay or lesbian couples, at least not that we know of. But next month, there will be a pride party in the plaza, where young parents will bring their children for the afternoon and let them run around with face paint and glitter.

Still, it’s 2016 in California and we feel comfortable enough holding hands on the street. Some people hardly give us a second glance, but other times we get slight nods of the head, as if to say, You go, girls. I’m surprised that it’s often middle-aged women who give us these shy smiles of encouragement. Once when we were in the definitely-flirting-but-still-just-friends stage of things, a couple of women in mom jeans eyed us from the table next to us. “You two are so cute!” they squealed. We blushed and told them we weren’t together, which was true, though not for long.

But of course, as two women in a relationship, we’re often sexualized by men—straight white men, to be more exact. Once while we’re at the new brewpub in town, eating dinner at the bar, an older man slinks up behind us. Salt and pepper hair slicked back, barking out his drink order. He’s visiting his daughter at college, he tells us, standing too close. His drink arrives, but he lingers, ogling our intimacy. He chuckles to himself and we know that something foul is going to come out of his mouth.

“We all have something in common,” he says. “We all love vaginas.”

And there it is, just out there like the smell of a harsh cologne. A complete stranger talking about our genitals while we’re trying to enjoy our flatbread pizza. And now he’s saying something about how he’d recently divorced and has been dating a ton and how much he loves all the different lips, the pink lips and the brown ones, and I’m not even listening; I’m just looking wide-eyed at Katie and at the people around us: Are you hearing this?

“My daughter likes to ride horses, and I built her this beautiful stable,” he’s saying. How had he switched from vaginas to his daughter’s hobbies?

That’s when a young girl who looks about sixteen, who’d been standing a few feet away with her boyfriend this whole time, approaches. She rolls her eyes so hard I can see the whites and nothing else. She says nothing to us, but tugs on her father’s sleeve until he finally raises his glass and follows.

***

I see a post on Twitter the other day about a twenty-five-year-old who just came out as non-binary to their ninety-year-old grandmother. Expecting her to have the same negative reaction their parents had, they’re surprised when Grandma takes it in stride, saying, “I get it. You’re somewhere in between.”

Then there are Katie’s friends from water aerobics class, most of them in their seventies. Nancy, seventy-five years old, uses the word “partner” for her husband because she wants to use a non-gendered term, plus she’s never really much felt like a “wife.” Alice, sixty-eight years old, accidentally asks about Katie’s husband, but then immediately corrects herself—“partner, I mean.” There’s Gene, seventy years old, happily married and off to Mexico for the winters with his husband and Sheryl, who lost her wife of thirty years not too long ago.

So when I catch myself or others using “It’s a generational thing” as an excuse for homophobia, I think of the white-haired water-loving, people-loving septuagenarians at Evergreen Wellness, who remind me to expect more of people, no matter their age.

One time when Katie and I are on vacation in Portland, a Lyft driver picks us up in a minivan. It’s summer, and the driver, a man in his late sixties, has the windows rolled down to let the breeze in. He has a Jerry Garcia vibe, with a mustache and tan arms, his left one three shades darker than his right. We chat for a few minutes, and upon realizing we are girlfriend and girlfriend, the man opens up and tells us his story.

“My daughter’s best friend growing up came out to his parents in high school,” he starts, leaning back into his seat. “They kicked him out.”

“Oh no,” we murmur in the back seat. Heavy, hot air billows in through the windows, but it feels good on my skin, chilled from an afternoon of hopping around air-conditioned coffee shops.

The man continues: his daughter’s friend came to live with them and eventually, the man and his wife adopted him.

“That’s wonderful,” we say.

“And now Michael is married and transitioning.” It takes Katie and I a moment to realize that this whole time, the man has been using Michael’s preferred pronouns. The realization makes my heart swell and feels like the opposite of everything that’s been going on in the world.

“Everybody says we’re so tolerant,” he tells us, making a wide turn. “Tolerance is fine, but in Portland, we embrace.”

Katie and I smile at each other through teary eyes. The van gently bounces over a speed bump, and I’ve never felt lighter before.

 

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Author Bio: Kristin Ito is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her essay “The Quiet” was nominated by Hypertext Magazine for The Best American Essays, and her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, WhiskeyPaper, and other publications.

Website: kristinito.com
Twitter: @kristin_kimie

 

 

by Oona Robertson

They say the uterus is the thing that holds a woman inside of herself. Blood-wetted. Always emptying or filling. A tide on the open ocean. Entangled. Drumming heartbeats. Blankets of blood thickness. Umbilical cord wrapping around and around and into us. This piece we hold internally, forking toward the tiny livers and the tiny hearts, it grows us, feeds into what will be closed and is now our open mouth, our open nose, our open wound. I wonder what happens to that six inches of circuitry that tethered us, hearts to bellies, once we have been cut into our own bodies.

I look for the answer in a book written in 1971 by a white man with an eye patch. He blames women for their own pain. He doesn’t have the answer.

I look for the answer in my friend training to be a midwife. She pulls a pelvis and a doll out of her purse. Dances it through bone, the head only fitting one way, the baby working its way out like a thing that multiplies. She says her favorite part of a birth is the few seconds where the mother has two heads. I want to ask her what the sound is like. Which head is screaming. Instead I ask her to have my baby. I ask her umbilical questions. She doesn’t know the answer but will get back to me.

Have you ever seen a time-lapse picture of a birth? How flesh you thought you understood will unfold and unfold again, its purpose clear, the head crowning monstrously and pulling the halves of the pelvis open. Because really the head doesn’t fit, and what you thought was one bone might be two, stretching open, and in the picture the head is more woman than the skin around it that is tearing. It doesn’t look like it, but they are working together to move apart.

I find the answer on Wikipedia but don’t trust what the internet is saying. That it just dissolves into fibers. Was once vital and is now umbilical trash, wedged in the corners of our cavities, bothering organs or becoming a part of them, slowly sifting its way out of our container. I want it to integrate, become the hot core of us, the thing that tells where our depths end and turn into liquid. I want the real answer. I want to hear it from the open lips of a mother or a beautiful dentist or the belly of my sister.

I become fascinated by the placenta. The thick meat of it. The grey and yellow and blue of it. Mother’s resources going in, baby’s waste going out, vein filled, arterial. How the blood circulates but doesn’t mix, conversing from arm’s distance. How it connects them, so helpfully, until it falls into the hands of the mother or the midwife in that last push and is useless. My mother’s gynecologist keeps a polaroid of our placenta in her desk drawer and every year for a decade while my mom is lying face up in paper clothing, she takes us into her office and makes us look at it. The biggest one she has ever seen. We are famous for what was built in the space between us, our needs gigantic, our mother tiny and beach-balled by our unfurling.

There is another picture of the same placenta in a book we have to read every birthday. Spread flat on a hospital table, part steak and part brain, knotted tendrils. The story is it got put in the freezer until they figured out what to do with it and then the fridge died and it was moved to a cooler on the back deck, maybe a heat wave, and after that nobody remembers.

My mother writes letters at the kitchen table and four blocks away her mother writes letters at the kitchen table. The thing that connects them is old and beginning to harden. She sends the letters out towards us haunted by her ghosts by our tethers. Missed calls, early morning messages, I can feel her tugging.

I can feel the stem in me, the belly button ending and the knot of muscles and deeper than that, a forking or a fracturing. It touches organs, wraps around the stomach and up the throat, speaks for me without language, urges me to find strangers to touch, whispers up at me in the milky darkness: do you miss me, it says. Then the mother’s voice, face to the ocean, calls: come back to me. I need to try again to make you whole and clean and uncomplaining. The placenta flexes in the night. We drop back into the ocean like we’ve always wanted.

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Author Bio: Oona Robertson is a writer and furniture maker based in Western Massachusetts.

Instagram: @newspine

by Oona Robertson

Family dinner.
Suddenly, at the dinner table, she stops eating. First a bend at the neck, then head, a leadening. The body always follows. Her fork skids into the depths of bare feet, her torso long and stretching sideways. It is almost imperceptible, the slow fall and then she is dangled, her head a few inches off the ground. The solid weight of her hips still seated. The fingers curved like a dead animal. One hand pressed watch-face to combed carpet. It beeps once, marking the end of an hour. Then silence. All eyes pointing forward except the mom, who blinks once, sliding them up and then back into place before opening. Clack of knife hitting the butter dish. Throat sounds. A napkin dropped and not recovered. The table is dark wood, room of ominous paintings. A few chairs unfilled. A coldness like occupation. Thick draft of collective breath, smell of under-cooked meat and distance. Her hair brushes the floor to the rhythm of her cerebral spinal fluid. The mother asks to be excused from the table.

 

Dollhouse.
She shook the doll with an old vengeance. Listening was no longer enough. The doll would sit slumped against various furniture and she would cry and point and rave. It was nice to have a place to put her anger. The doll didn’t mind, or did nothing to stop it. Its face was beautiful and satisfying to prey on. Often she would get so angry a hardness would rear up in her and she’d want to throw the doll off the roof of their house or squish its beautiful fucking face under the heal of her Mary Janes, the nose breaking off like porcelain. She hated what she could see about herself in the other dolls’ forced-open eyes. The nose stayed in one piece like the lost part of some old statue. She thought of the people who owned them patching it back on with the soft tip of a brush dipped in superglue, and her anger mounted. She stomped around the house slamming cabinets in the fake kitchen and the door of the cast iron oven so fucking lifelike you could light a fire with broken-in-half matches and cook if you could find an egg small enough. When her anger got so big the people noticed, they would pull her up to their scary mouths by the buckle of her overalls and yell in some garbled language, shaking her from tip to top. This made her extremely nauseous, and to punish them she would walk past the pretend toilet and kneel on the living room rug, heaving stale air from her hollow body.

 

Breakfast.
The egg is put down in front of her. The table is farmhouse. Her palms are wide and white. She cracks the shell like her mama taught, with the edge of her spoon and the tink of good intentions. The inside is still embryonic, goo of wet turned coagulate. She has to eat it. Each time she sets down her spoon she is given another, slightly bigger, until they don’t fit in the cup and she has to hold them in the palm of her hand. She was not hungry to begin with. The shells start to resemble cracked skulls. The yolk is an eye or a uterus. The white part is blinding and she can feel something sticky crawling down her fingers, same as her tongue is coated. The pile of shells on the table grows and she can smell newborns and the field outside. The one window gets greener and then starts to oscillate and the eggs clack around in her head which is now also an egg and she no longer sees the problem.

 

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Author Bio: Oona Robertson is a writer and furniture maker based in Western Massachusetts.

Instagram: @newspine