The New York winter chill disappeared when Jean entered the lobby of Maxine Elliott’s Theater, crowded with women. It was Jean’s fourth matinee since November 20th, when The Children’s Hour premiered.
She hadn’t returned for the play, but for the largely female audience, and more to the heart, for the maddening crush she had on one usherette who seated her in the second balcony.
In the last few years, Jean had scoured through journals on sexuality in the public library. Doctors called her condition inverted, depraved, a mistake of nature. Was it any wonder Martha killed herself at the end of The Children’s Hour?
Jean escaped into books, museums, theaters, and music recitals. For a few hours, the stranglehold of her homosexuality vanished into a novel by Pearl Buck, a painting by Matisse, a musical by Cole Porter, or a recital of Gershwin.…
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The trail was steep.
As Sarah climbed, she pushed from her mind the mangled doe carcass she’d passed on the drive up. Instead, she embraced the growing distance between herself, and the road, and life back home in the city. The woods became quiet. The only sound was her breath and heartbeat, and the crunch of dry leaves underfoot. A gentle wind moved through the tall blue-green pines with the occasional low, slow whoosh. With every step, her mind stilled, the relentless waves of intrusive thoughts calming, so that the flotsam of ideas simply flowed past her.
After this weekend alone in the mountains, she’d find a way to reduce her workload.
She’d read to Theo’s kindergarten class.
Make more time to connect with her husband.…
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“My lips are sealed,” I told Ellie as we sat cross-legged in her closet, the edges of her dresses draping over our heads. We usually laughed at how the fabric framed our faces like a nun’s habit. Nothing was funnier to us then. At almost thirteen, the world was spread out all around us, new and untried. Give that up to shut ourselves away and pray? Hilarious. But that day there was no laughter.
“This isn’t a baby secret like when I had a crush on Andrew West,” Ellie lectured, “This is real. Cross your heart, hope to die—”
“Stick a needle through my eye,” I finished dutifully.
Together we’d weathered the horrid pixie cut Ellie got in fourth grade and the time I tripped and fell on stage during the sixth grade assembly.…
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My lover tells me the story of Laüstic, The Nightingale. In Marie de France’s lai, a noble woman listens to a nightingale on her balcony each evening in the unspoken company of a handsome neighbor for whom she yearns as beautifully and perfectly as the bird sings. Her husband, ignorant of his rival, kills the nightingale and delivers her the bird wrapped in his handkerchief. Now you will have no reason to leave our chamber and stand on the balcony. The corpse is small and warm, the linen damp and stained with blood from the arrow’s wound. She holds it until even her burning hands cannot warm the bones.
My lover is the jealous husband. His wife, who is still in the city where he used live, meets nightly with his best friend.…
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For where there is one of me, always there will be another. Either at the next stanchion or post, or following soon after, while I lay dropped and drooling over my existence, in the dark grip of a dizzying blue gas, or cold-cocked by the weak-jawed clear-browed hero of sensitivity.
For while not always strong, we are the silent type. Born we are for epaulets and chin straps and monochrome jumpers, for frayed tunics and rusty chain mail, for bulky suits bulging with implication and lead-pumping danger, for the ability to rush headlong into an order, carrying it out with feckless determination, knowing well the disposability of our movements, our trigger fingers (ever itchy), the very things we see.
For what we see is always first, and never fully known.…
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The pigeons arrive in the spring. She watches him try to shoo them away—first with the clapping of hands, with the stomping of feet on the wooden deck, then finally with a garden hose. “Stop,” she tells him finally. “Leave them alone.”
She’s grown to like their incessant cooing, their low murmur a lullaby.
The birds roost on the wooden beam just under the roof, side by side, staring into the Spanish fir across the street, like two people sitting side by side at a bar in front of a baseball game.
*
Flying rats, he calls them. Or, rats with wings.
How does a bird get a reputation like that? she wonders. As a pest—when pigeons are really quite beautiful, with the blues and purples feathering their necks, their curious faces, their bobbing heads.…
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It is bedtime. The dishes are in the sink, the alarms are set, the doors are locked. Water drips from my hair onto one of his concert t-shirts. His skin is fresh from the shower. The leftover scents of our conditioners and soaps blend, tropical coconut, ocean breeze, brown sugar, lavender mist. He smooths the hair on top of my head and kisses me there before lying fully back. Pastel blankets and white sheets cover us. My right thigh is secure in his left hand where my leg is draped above his hips. I close my eyes. The streetlight outside the window turns grey as it filters through the blinds. This is our city. The highways we take to our parent’s houses, the streets we walk to work, the markets that sell us produce, the buildings that watch benevolently over us, the trails we run and bike, the restaurants and cafes we frequent.…
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