Status Updates From The Not Wives

“…Marissa watched the bank take her parents’ [home], the house she grew up in. Mel’s cabin, underwater, in more ways than one. Sasha + I out of our apartment soon…What I loved most about Occupy was that it was a provisional home; a public dream made manifest by determination, planning, + a refusal to move out of the way…Maybe we’ve reached the end of all homes…Domesticity, as we knew it, is dead”

“…And why is she calling herself your girlfriend?”

“Because you’re my wife,” Jenny said as if it were all so clear.

“Yeah, and I haggle with the bill collectors and clean up dog shit…Wives go to couples therapy and call banks to try to save cabins from foreclosure. If this is my wifedom, I don’t want it to be legal. Wives don’t get to do anything fun.”

“I felt like Arturo’s groupie. Maybe everyone felt this way around him. I knew about the complicated history of political affiliation and sexual desire…Jean Genet admitting his homoerotic love for the Black Panthers. Women doing the secretarial work [for the SDS], and then falling in love with the more visible male leaders…Did I want to be like those powerful women or next to the power? Maybe both.”

“Back upstairs behind the bar as she cut limes and lemons…she toggled back and forth between two images—one hot and one guilty. Chef’s tongue in her mouth as he pressed against her in that cold hallway and Jenny dutifully at home with the dogs, wrapping a dinner plate in saran wrap for Mel so that she could have something healthy to eat when she got home at 5 a.m.”

It’s eerily realistic at this point

This far in and I’m still not sure how I feel about it at all