Part One: Marquette and 2nd

Half-Moon Scar

Introduction

An Interview with the Author

Excerpts:

Excerpt One: "Victoria and Main"

Excerpt Two: "Victoria and Main"

Excerpt Three: "Berwyn Street"

Excerpt Four: "Marquette and 2nd"

Half-Moon Scar Excerpt Four: "Marquette and 2nd "

By Allison Green
From Half-Moon Scar

The Rainbow took two storefronts on a downtown street. I could imagine the street during the day being full of people in suits and high heels and ties, but now the sandwich counters had their closed signs in the windows and the lights were off in the pharmacy, a rack of postcards moved in front of the door. I found a parking spot for my mother’s car. Inside the Rainbow, women were parked in every seat. If I’d stayed in Willow Bay, these were the women I would have known, and kissed, and moved in with. It was an odd feeling to know I might see myself at the bar, living a parallel life.

In one room was a pool table, and a woman with gray spiked hair traded shots with a college student, breasts looses under a University of Wisconsin T-shirt. In the other room was the bar and half a dozen tables. Behind the bar was Gina.

I’d seen Gina at home in her T-shirts and shorts, sweating over the lawn mower or drinking iced tea at the kitchen table. But now here she was in a white button-down shirt and black jeans, spotlit behind the bar. He hair was brushed back from her forehead and her mouth curled in a half-smile for someone telling her a story. As I walked toward her, I felt my shoulders move in my sleeves, my breasts move against the fabric of my shirt. I made myself breathe. But I could feel that cool handprint on my skin at the amusement park fifteen years ago.

Gina raised her chin in greeting. I rubbed my palms against my jeans – still tender – and sat at the bar. "You found me," she said, setting out a coaster. Behind her was a mirror and above the mirror were T-shirts with the bar’s name, white with rainbow lettering.

"Nice in here," I said. "Cozy."

"And you thought this town was too small for a lesbian bar." The muscles in her forearm jumped as she wiped the counter.

"There wasn’t one fifteen years ago, when we needed it."

"Actually there was. A gay bar. But it was mostly men."

"I didn’t know."

"No," she said, "you probably didn’t know. What would you like?" Her belt buckle glinted in the spotlight. Freckles showed at the neck of her shirt.

"House red." I kept my hands between my knees.

Gina uncorked a bottle and filled a glass. "Gavin’s been sleeping since you left yesterday. At least he hasn’t come down from his room."

I couldn’t see my face in the mirror, only one shoulder and my hand when it lifted the wine glass. "Maybe I did the wrong thing. Did I do the wrong thing?"

"Make him face up to what he really looks like? I don’t think that’s wrong."

"He thinks he looks fat, when he looks like he’s been in a famine."

"He has."

"I hope he doesn’t just lie in bed now and refuse to come down at all."

"There’s more than one way to commit suicide." She shrugged and went down the bar to take an order.

I refused to think that. The wine was a warm thread down my throat, and I felt better here than I usually did in Willow Bay. Usually in Willow Bay the lesbian part of me dried up, turned to powder. I went around town playing daughter, sister, aunt, but not dyke. And now here I was in my hometown feeling that dry part of me dissolve. I wasn’t going to think about Gavin tonight.

I scanned the faces in the mirror. If I’d stayed, I might have fallen in love with that one – reddish hair shaved up the back and curling on the top. She wore gold earrings big as fish lures and laughed a lot. Robin laughed a lot. For me the laughing went with an easiness in the body, a smoothness of skin.

Or maybe her – a fountain of brown braids and a tiny diamond set into the skin above her mouth. Even if I’d stayed – the wine tasted warmer with every swallow – and if, at seventeen, Gina and I had been able to speak what we wanted, we wouldn’t have stayed together. A parallel life with Gina in it made no sense. Gina would have been my first, that's all, and we would have been over each other by now.

"So tell me about your girlfriend." Gina was in front of me again, drawing beers from the tap.

The wine did a guilty slosh in my stomach. "Robin?"

"How long you been seeing her?"

"Three years in November."

"And you haven’t moved in together yet? That’s a lesbian record." She seemed looser, easier here than she was at home. Maybe it was the bar that ran between us.

I said, "It was Robin’s idea at first. She’d just broken up with someone before we met and wasn’t in a hurry. Now she’s ready but I don’t know. If things are working now, why change?"

"Have you ever brought Robin here? Meet the folks?"

"Too hard." Robin and my parents in the same room? No. "What about you? Seeing anybody?"

"Not recently."

"You out to your mom?"

She shook her head. "She’s old. It’s hardly worth it."

"How about your brother? Mom said there was something about his promotion in the paper."

"My brother is willing to see me as long as his kids don’t see me."

"Oh."

"So I don’t see my brother."

The woman with the diamond above her mouth had put money in the jukebox, and it starting playing a song about leaving town in a fast car. Gina and I watched her take the hand of the woman in the University of Wisconsin T-shirt and dance with her in the small space by the jukebox. Gina went to pour another drink, and I got out my wallet and looked at the picture of Robin. Gavin in my arms the day before was a lot smaller than Robin in my arms. Robin in my arms was a woman who loved to eat, who smiled big, who held on tight. Robin liked to put lotion all over her body and I liked to watch how she touched each part of her body and didn’t seem to be thinking about pins or fingernails, needles or blades. I liked to watch, but I also didn’t like to watch because I didn’t understand. Before I left Seattle it had been getting harder to watch.

Gina came back to refill my glass. She leaned over the bar to see the picture of Robin. "This her?"

Robin had taken the picture in a photo booth in San Francisco with a mural of the Golden Gate Bridge behind her head. Her smile said a photo booth in San Francisco was a great place to be.

"She looks happy," Gina said.

"She generally is."

"Lucky her. And lucky you."