My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage (review)

254Fourth Genre noise, made by the scraping of their membranes, amplified by the hollow space in the insect's abdomen. They live only long enough to mate and lay eggs. In an afterword to the text, Dr. Kathleen Uno states that Manchurian Legacy is an important narrative, a voice that fills in the blanks ofJapanese history and offers us a "distinctive outlook of repatriates previously unavaüable in EngUsh."And, though I wouldn't disagree, it seems that Manchurian Legacy can affect readers in other, equaUy valuable ways. It is also an admonition to aU those who place too much trust and faith in the power and supremacy oftheir country. Kuramoto s voice wfll be added to those I hear giving me a hard time for waxing sentimental about the nation I have been born into . . . only this time I hear that voice loud and clear. Reviewed by Amy E. Stewart My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage By Barrie Jean Borich Graywolf Press, 1999 308 pages, cloth, $24.95 "Linnea and I have been lovers for aU these years, and I wonder—are we married?" So begins Barrie Jean Borich's memoir My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage, a deeply honest and intimate exploration into her twelve-year relationship and her feelings about marriage and its importance in the understanding of the relationship. Should a lesbian couple be concerned with marriage, with a ritual that by most definitions excludes them? What does it mean to be married, then? "I would like to stop worrying about it." Borich writes, " I would Uke to just Ue here, inside this moment, with Linnea, in our rumpled bed, on the grimy and gardened south side of a Midwestern city where I was not born. I would like to touch Linnea's Ups against my own, and let my lover ffll aU my open spaces."The outside world intrudes, though, and Borich who has never been "the type who can disappear easily into the music ofa moment," needs to map out the geography of her life and love. In the essay "The Laws of the Game" Borich describes a phone caU she receives from her brother Paulie who teUs her he is engaged to his girlfriend Mitsuko. She hears the news on NewYear's Day. The family announcement was on Christmas Eve at her Aunt Cecflia's before the first course. Borich and Linnea had been together for six years, and decided to spend Christmas in their apartment, eating seafood pasta and celebrating Linnea's birthday. Book Reviews255 While Paulie teUs his story, Borich imagines the Christmas scene, Aunt Cecilia's table decor, the family congratulating Paulie and Mitsuko with a toast, and she experiences conflicting emotions. "P>jght then, my family felt like a big smile, and I was smiling, too. But I had missed it, this big event." She wasn't so much troubled by the details of the scene. "AU that feU away when I realized what I should have already known—this wedding business was the core, the center weight." She remembers a previous Christmas Eve that she and Linnea spent at Aunt Cecilia's. No one celebrated their love or viewed Linnea as part of the family Linnea does propose to Borich, an event Borich recounts in the essay "WiUYou?" During their second-year anniversary, Linnea bends on knee to ask Borich to marry her. Borich accepts the ring, although she doesn't yet know what it signifies. RecaUing that night, Borich remembers the love she felt and the questions that arose. "The night she sUpped it on I was distracted . I sweUed in love, yet worried the words would hurt me. Now I have worn her ring for a dozen years. No harm has come to me." Borich's coUection of essays examine the story of two women working out their own definition offamily and marriage. Their marriage is not based on shared property, although they do buy a home after ten years living on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis. Nor is it based on the marriage ceremony, although they do decide during their twelfth year to get married in a Las Vegas chapel surrounded by supportive friends...