Lesbian Chainsaw Massacre

Girlfriend broke her chainsaw. It’s not broke really, but the chain came off the thingy. When she told me she needed to get if fixed, the whole story came rushing back. You know how one thing causes another? Well, often several things combined lead to another thing. At least that’s how it was with the chain saw.

For example, I suppose getting along with the neighbors wouldn’t be so important to me if I hadn’t been run out of one neighborhood because I didn’t fit in. Girlfriend and I have lived at our current address for eleven years. And the guy to the east of us has been a total jerk for all of that time. The first time I spoke to him, he threatened me. My son had come in late one night from work and the kid that gave him a ride tossed a cigarette out of the car near the neighbor’s van. The guy walked up to me the next day and told me that if anything happened to that van I’d have to deal with him—whatever that means. For several years after both my kids moved out on their own, I held my tongue. That’s very hard for me sometimes—okay, often, but I did it because I know what it’s like to have neighbors worse than this rat bastard.

This guy is a piece of work. He sits in his recliner and lets his wife, who Girlfriend and I get along quite well with, do the hard work. Last summer after this guy’s wife had two knee replacements, and when their dog got loose, she was outside trying to chase it down, even though she could barely walk. Girlfriend went out and helped her, while her rat bastard husband sat in the recliner and watched. Then one day I let our dogs out into our back yard and the neighbor guy was out there doing something in his back yard. Our dogs didn’t know him because he was rarely outside doing anything. So the dogs ran up to the fence and started barking at him. Before I could call them back, I heard him over there at the top of his lungs hollering, "Shut-up!" Only he dragged the word out, like "Sh-a-a-a-d-up!" After about the third time he hollered, I yelled back telling him to shut-up, and things spiraled out of control from there. It was like I stepped out of my body and watched from the roof of our garage as a crazy woman screamed every cuss word she’d ever heard at this rat bastard. He tried to get in the last word, and I tried to stop cussing, and neither of us was successful. Boy that felt good.

Fast forward a couple of years and Girlfriend has decided that the bushes that sit on the property line are looking ratty and she wants to cut them down. I, on the other hand, feel those bushes are a line in the sand. They are a boundary between me and the rat bastard next door. We discuss this at great length, and she finally drops it.

Then some time later, Girlfriend and I were arguing about something, and I was sure I was right. I’m always in trouble when I know I’m right because sometimes it just doesn’t matter. Plus, when I know I’m right, I can’t let it go of it. I don’t even remember what it was about, but eventually I realized that I had it wrong.

This has happened to Girlfriend too—thinking she is right and later realizing she is wrong, I mean. In fact, just last night we got in an argument about the good scissors. The hair around the dog’s butt needed trimmed, and she picked up my good scissors and insisted they were hers. The "good" scissors business goes all the way back to my childhood. My Grandma did alterations for a living, and she had "good" scissors for material and thread and regular scissors that my sisters and I used to cut Betsy McCall paper-dolls out of her McCall’s Magazine. So there I was arguing with Girlfriend over something that, for me, went back 40 or 50 years.

I told Girlfriend that the scissors were mine and I had the receipt to prove it (I didn’t really, but I thought it would take the wind out of her sails), but she said, "If these are yours, then where are mine?" This was a loaded question. Girlfriend never puts ANYTHING away, so how the heck should I know where her scissors are? Plus, whose job is it to keep track of her scissors? This is why she always uses my stuff. My stuff is always in the same place—even if I have to hunt her down to get it back. This is not because I am a neat freak. My memory is terrible, and I learned that if things are where they belong, I spend less time looking for them. Anyway, I finally got tired of arguing (it was my dog’s butt, after all). Plus she was starting to convince me that maybe they were her scissors. So told her I’d buy some new scissors and she could have those. Later that evening, she came to me and said she found her scissors. They were in the place that she’d hidden them so I wouldn’t use them but forgot about. She apologized. So, you see, I know all the little details of the times that she is wrong, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember what the chainsaw time was about.

Anyway, when I realized I had been mistaken, I decided to get her a little something to make up. In the same situation most people would get their wife a card or a flower. I got her a chainsaw. Nothing says loving like a power tool, right? And she loved it. But I should have seen it coming. One evening she asked me to sit down. She said we needed to talk. Then she started in about the bushes again. I made my case again. I stayed calm and used my best argument skills (rat bastard, line in the sand, etc.), but she wouldn’t budge. For some reason I stood up and just happened to look out the front window. The bushes were lying in the driveway. I was so mad that I was seeing red as I went into the garage, picked up her chain saw and put it in the trunk of my car. I told her that she wasn’t responsible enough to have a chainsaw. I actually drove around like that for a couple of weeks. Then I started to feel silly. It took several months for those bushes to grow back, but they did and we put the incident behind us.

Then last weekend she came in the house and told me she broke the saw. I asked how, and she said she accidentally hit the chain link fence with it. I said, "Isn’t the stuff along the fence a job for the weed whacker?" But I already had an image of the neighbor guy watching her trim the weeds along our side of the fence with a chainsaw, and I was secretly pleased. It occurs to me as I write this, that she probably couldn’t even find the weed whacker. But I hope she can get the chain saw fixed soon. I like the idea of that rat bastard knowing that we have a chain saw and he doesn’t. --Martha Miller