Free The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson Page B

get everything prepared in time,My Older Sister whipping the potatoes, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, My Younger Sister burning her hand putting the rolls in the oven. I am checking the turkey, realizing too late that I have forgotten to remove the giblets. My First Husband’s parents arrive, with a laundry basket full of presents to set under the tree. Dad arrives last, in a new sweater the same color as his eyes: spring-sky blue, robin’s-egg blue. We’ve learned only days ago that he’s getting married again. Mom has told us how he came to the house and stood on the porch. He knocked on the door and she opened it just a crack, thinking he would ask if he could come back. I’ve met someone. We’re getting married . She slammed the door, hard, in his face. Sitting in My Older Sister’s house, at opposite ends of the couch, my parents have never looked better. He is tanner, thinner. He drives a new car. Her hair is shorter, higher. Her makeup looks perfect. Her crystal jewelry complements her purple raw silk top. The wine is opened. The food is served. For a few hours, nothing has changed. Our parents go the whole day without speaking.

    Two years after the kidnapping, one year after I marry a man I barely know, I am accepted to graduate school and My First Husband and I move from the house we share with My Older Sister to a nearby college town, and we rentan apartment that we have to ourselves. The apartment is on the edge of town, an edge I can reach out and touch: on one side there’s a yard, an apartment, a parking lot; on the other side there’s a sea of churning, rippling green.
    My First Husband has kept his job as a carpenter in the city-that-is-not-a-city and each morning he wakes before sunrise and kisses me on the cheek as he leaves for work. I take my time rising from bed, making breakfast, drinking coffee, choosing my clothes, showering, and pulling my hair into a bun on the top of my head.
    I walk into the room and sit in one of the student desks. The students file in, choosing seats, checking their cell phones for messages. The boys wear t-shirts and baggy jeans and the girls wear tank tops and short athletic shorts. One turns to me and whispers, Have you heard anything about this instructor? And I say, Yes, I hear she’s a real hardass , before standing and walking to the front of the room. You can call me Lacy , I say. Or if calling me by my first name makes you uncomfortable, “Goddess of the Universe” will also suffice . I ask my students about images in poems, or the role of gender in the work of lesser-known American novelists. I ask them about rhetorical purpose, and whether an audience’s context can change a text. When I ask, they answer. I ask and ask and ask. I have this way of always asking that keeps them looking for answers.

    I spend each afternoon in the office I share with two women in the basement of the ugliest building on campus, grading my students’ papers, checking e-mail, reading stacks and stacks of books for the classes I take. In the evenings, my officemates invite me out to dinner, where we talk the whole time about otherness in British discovery literature, or feminist pedagogical approaches to composition and rhetoric. At these dinners, My First Husband starts trying harder and harder to drink himself into oblivion. I apologize for him. I make excuses: It’s the job , I say. It’s the commute. He’s under so much pressure lately . On the weekends, he wakes with a hangover and pops a handful of ibuprofen before flopping on the couch to watch NASCAR .
    Increasingly, I pick fights with him over nothing. Over his shoes on the coffee table, or the dishes he leaves in the sink. We fight about the clothes he leaves on the floor. We fight about the things he says or does not say while we are fighting. He can’t win these arguments. Anything he says, I turn around and use against him. I twist his words until he