The Love Wife

The Love Wife by Gish Jen Page A

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Authors: Gish Jen
Tags: Fiction, Literary
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She flipped through a menu and ordered marbled cheesecake for dessert.
    — Of course, I said. Of course we can trust Blondie.
    It was the first time I’d called her that:
Blondie.
How odd it felt in my mouth, like a sound from another language.
    I promised I would work out the details on my honeymoon.
    BLONDIE /  My mother’s great-grandmother was a pacifist; she came to America rather than see her sons fight for Bismarck. My mother’s great-uncle was an abolitionist; people said he installed false walls for anyone who wanted them. And my own great-aunt was a suffragette; we grew up hearing how her children had been excluded from birthday parties on account of her views.
    Then there was my mother, an art preservationist/civil rights activist who, before she got sick, went door-to-door down South, registering people to vote.
    Now our generation did soup kitchens. We did clothing drives, food drives, book drives. We sang carols in hospitals. We protested program cuts, development plans, the Gulf War.
    Still we felt ourselves to be votive lights at best, if compared with the original bonfires.
    CARNEGIE /  The elder of Blondie’s brothers, Gregory, made lawn art: big, suggestive sculptures that challenged community norms and ran gleefully afoul of local zoning laws. Her other brother, Peter, practically ran a summer music camp, the nominal director being a sot. This involved confrontations and crises, and hard stands taken for the sake of art.
    Her older sisters, Renata and Ariela, filled the world with beauty. They were not thorny, like her brothers. They cooked and gardened; they made weavings, hangings, rubbings. They saw art retrospectives in previews. They did rubber-band balls, sing-alongs, capture the flag, leapfrog; they even devised their own fruitcakes—including, one might contend, their husbands, who affected a gentility so shabby as to verge on the ostentatious. One was a mapmaker. The other, a water diviner. How their beards blossomed! Their shorts bloomed with ink stains. If you talked to them about the Series, they would cock their heads and look at you attentively, awaiting further information. Neither one of them knew the difference between the American League and the National League.
    Blondie’s father, Doc Bailey, was disgusted with them.
    — Those boys are living inside a balloon, he said. One of these days it is going to go
pop!
The question is, Will they hear it?
    Doc Bailey, an imposing man of intimidating health, liked me. He did not care that I came with a daughter. He thought that I reinfused their family with immigrant vigor; that I looked forward rather than backward, and that in this I was, not to mince words, more like himself than like his late wife, god bless her. Doc Bailey credited me with inspiring Blondie to grapple with life. (He had big hairy hands, and when he said the word ‘grapple’ he seized the air in front of him as if to squeeze out its excess molecules.) He thought this because I had coached Blondie in her move up the ladder from an art stringer to a full-time designer. This was in a high-tech firm doing handwriting recognition.
    — Cutting-edge stuff, she would tell her sibs. — I’m working on the twenty-first century.
    She would report to them about the future of technology.
    — You wait and see, there will be computers in your shoe. There will be computers you can eat.
    BLONDIE /  No longer was I the baby, the afterthought, the least witty of the children. The child with the boring name—which my mother, even before I was born, had somehow thought appropriate. No more would everyone talk of how I had been the smallest at birth, a disaster at charades, in truth a touch shy.
    Janie Runt of the Litter.
    Janie Mommy’s Girl.
    Janie They’re Picking on Me Again.
    A listener, they called me. Agreeing on my strength with faint self-congratulation. How creative of them to have discovered a strong point!
    A good listener.
    Quite by accident I was making a

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