I live on fremont ave. that's the small duplex, you can even see it from the train. right there: with the green door and that's my blue honda civic parked out front. the man next door is gay. his name is harry and he teaches classes at the community college and high school but no one really knows he is gay.
He lives alone also, although I didn't always live alone. I lived with a man named James and he was handsome and we'd watch law and order together and make pancakes on the weekends but we don't do that anymore because one day he woke up and said that I wasn't what he always wanted out of life and he ended up going back to Pennsylvania in the spring and I looked into the mirror day after day reciting poetry I'd memorized a long time ago. I looked older but I still lived in the duplex.
I spent several evenings with a bottle of wine in my hands, consulting a good friend here or there over drunk conversations on a cellular telephone. The next morning I'd realize I was really going to be fine, and wrote down grocery lists in a little red notebook that would fit into the back pocket of paper denim jeans, sliding slightly off my hips now that I'd lost a little weight.
The sun would creep up later over the buildings and the shadows would make us colder than normal, but it was always alright on Fremont.
Staring at a baby: you don't have to stare back to them if you don't want. No one will know if you don't look that baby back into its eyes. It won't tell anyone, cuz it's a baby, I thought and then went weak in the knees, thinking of James and staring out that window instead of a baby.
And there's my duplex. Here's the stop, sorry, man, I've got to go, but call me later, okay Sara? OF COURSE, she replies, coughing into her coat and pretending.
She always pretends.
And I found out today that my gay neighbor Harry; his sister died. His mother was at his side of our house weeping, but I don't know Harry well enough to console either of them until she takes me into her arms. I make them dinner and she says,
"Lucy was a good girl, she was with a horrible slut of a man, but she was a good girl," and I've got to frown a little bit. I'm making them spaghetti and Harry is in the other room flipping channels, and I forgive him for not weeping over his sister, he is coping, I tell myself.
I pet his mother on the head, wipe her tears off a little bit and tell her something nice, something about love that I won't believe for a long time,
but that's how it is on
Fremont.