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  • Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife
  • Brock Clarke (bio)

On friday my wife, Catrine, kicked me out of the house. On the following Thursday she called me at my room in the Budget Inn and said, "I want you to come with me to the Lizzie Borden House and Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts."

I knew about Lizzie Borden—that long ago she'd made a famous bloody, murderous mess of her parents with an axe and gotten away with it—but before I could ask why Catrine wanted to go to the site of such an awful, violent crime with me, her estranged husband, she said, "You're not allowed to ask me why I want to go there with you." So instead I asked, "Will we stay the night?"

"Plus, take the official two-hour tour," she said, which is how we've ended up, two days later, sitting in the parlor and waiting for the official two-hour tour to begin. There are five other people also staying the night, etc.: a married couple from Ohio the color of cookie dough; a chain-smoking, white-haired woman from Long Island who, in the past ten minutes, has stepped outside to smoke twice and who has already purchased and donned the official Lizzie Borden House pocketed T-shirt, with a drawing of the blood-stained axe on the pocket; and two backward-baseball-hat-wearing fraternity boys down from U. Mass, whose fraternity brothers have told them—as a prank, I'm guessing—that this is the Lezzie Borden House, Lezzie Borden being, it turns out, a lesbian adult film star whose childhood home, I suppose, the frat boys think they're in. There is some confusion over this because the chain smoker has just advanced the theory that the real Lizzie Borden was also a lesbian and would have been much happier had she lived in another time, in another place, with another stepmother and father whom she wouldn't have had to axe murder if she'd been allowed to embrace her true sexual self. This business about axe murdering has thrown the frat boys considerably, and one of them—the thin Hardy to the fatter one's Laurel—keeps rotating his baseball hat back to front to back in disbelief.

"Lezzie Borden killed her mom and dad?" he asks.

"Lizzie Borden," says the woman from Long Island, and from the way she says this through gritted teeth—and from the rainbow cigarette lighter she's fiddling with—I'm guessing she herself is a lesbian. But the boys take no notice of her, and it's easy to imagine them in [End Page 163] their college classes, being corrected by their professors and not paying attention to them, either.

"Lezzie Borden killed her mom and dad with an axe?" the fat one says. "Because she was a lezzie?"

"In real life?" the thin one asks. "Or are we talking about—" He begins to describe the plot of a movie, at the beginning of which Lezzie Bor-den has been imprisoned for some unexplained capital crime, and in which she, with her voluptuous cell mates and prison guards and even a visiting order of reform-minded nuns, is sentenced to spend ninety minutes engaged in some, as the boys put it in unison, "hot hot hot girl-on-girl action." After they've said this, the boys give each other high fives, except that they give the high fives backward, with the backs of their hands instead of their palms, possibly to be consistent with their hats. The chain smoker stands up, and she seems on the verge of backhanding the boys and their backward baseball hats across the room. The boys—who I'm sure have no idea why the chain smoker hates them but who instinctively recognize antagonism and know how to react to it—puff out their chests like fighting cocks. Into the middle of this potential brawl walks the tour guide, a bird-faced, middle-aged woman in a plaid skirt, who takes what is obviously her place in the very center of the room, between the boys and...

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