Zenobia July

by Lisa Bunker

  Aunt Lucy said, “And anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it. I am her legal guardian now. It’s done. It’s official. You can give me as many of your looks as you like, but—”

  Aunt Phil’s voice cut in. “Ms. Jarecky, are you sure I can’t supply you with some refreshment? While we wait for the young one to appear? Should be any minute now.”

  “Oh, all right, if you insist. A glass of ice water.” Zen heard Aunt Phil stand and walk across the floor. A cupboard opened and shut. The loose floorboard in front of the fridge creaked. The freezer opened. A hand scrabbled among half-moons in their tray. Ice clinked musically into a glass. Grandma’s voice said, “I will say that I do like what you’ve done with this place. Seems real cozy.”

  “Thank you,” said Aunt Lucy in a cold voice.

  “And the dresses and such . . . is he still persisting in that?” Zen had been expecting the male pronoun, but it still hurt when it came. She clenched her teeth and concentrated on breathing soundlessly.

  There was a heavy silence. Then Aunt Lucy said even more frostily, “She is enjoying herself, as far as we can tell, dressing in new clothes that were acquired for her for school.”

  “What sort of clothes?”

  “Natural clothes such as any girl would wear.”

  Grandma Gail made a scornful sound. Aunt Phil cut in again. “Will you be staying for dinner, Ms. Jarecky?”

  “No, I have plans. I actually have a friend in this city, believe it or not. Or in Boston, anyway. She’s driving up. I’m not a total rube who’s never been out of her little patch of Arizona, you know.”

  Aunt Phil said soothingly, “No, of course not.”

  Zen risked discovery every moment she remained in the hallway, and she had heard enough. She tiptoed back to the front door, eased it open, slipped through, and closed it softly behind her.

  On the porch she drew a shaky breath and blew it out again. Some acting required now. But she saw the way it would go. Another breath, in, out. Then, hand on the doorknob. Not too much now, just enough. She rattled as she turned, let the door bang against its stop. “Hey!” she called down the hall. She had done this before, other days. All in the bounds of normal. “I’m home!” Realizing she was barefoot, she hastily acted out pushing off her shoes.

  “Tweetie-bird!” called Aunt Phil from the kitchen.

  “Whose car is in the driveway?” Zen called back.

  Aunt Lucy came into view, stopping where Zen had stood seconds before. Her face was tight and angry. “Zenobia, come into the kitchen,” she said. “We have a visitor.”

  Zen put on her best expectant/curious face and followed her aunt’s beckoning hand. Rounding the corner, she did an artfully natural double take. Then, “Grandma!” Mostly surprise, plus a hint of happiness to see her. Genuine happiness. After all, she was a good grandma in her way. Just set in her mind about some things. The meanings, for instance, of the words “boy” and “girl.”

  “Hmph,” said Grandma Gail, staring, and Zen’s face went hot. She looked down at her dress, smoothed it. Then she made her eyes come back up to meet the grandmaternal laser beams. “Well,” Grandma Gail said, and then she said Zen’s old boy name. “Still at it, I see.”

  Zen trembled on the edge of looking down again, but kept herself from doing it. Her face got hotter. Her heart tocked in her ears. “My name,” she said, “is not that, what you said, anymore.”

  “The name your parents gave you.”

  “My name is Zen now. Zenobia. Zenobia July.”

  Grandma Gail’s already sharp tone got even sharper. “You don’t even intend to keep your family name?”

  Aunt Lucy cut in. “In point of fact,” she growled, “it’s already done. We started the name-change process shortly after Zen moved in, and it went through mid-summer.” Zapping tension between Aunt Lucy and Grandma Gail now. Possible explosion building.

  “That’s the reason for ‘July,’” said Aunt Phil, in her mild pixie-smiling way. “Same initial, and the month it went through.”

  Zen nodded. “That’s right.” Grandma Gail turned the laser beams back on her, but Zen, checking the Aunties’ faces and seeing little nods, lifted her chin and looked steadily back. “Plus, I just like it.”

  Zen moved around to Aunt Phil and leaned against her. A protective and comforting arm curled around. Aunt Lucy stepped over too and put a hand on Zen’s shoulder. All three together they faced their matriarch.

  Grandma Gail’s mouth worked. But, slowly, her glinting gaze dimmed, then wobbled away. The silence stretched. Over her head, Zen saw the Aunties exchange a look. What was happening?

  At last Grandma Gail looked up again. Her face had changed. She was a woman, they all three knew, hardened by a hard life, and unused to opposition to her will. Also, usually, immune to self-doubt. That emotion, though, was now written plainly on her face.

  Her voice when she spoke was softer, a touch wavery. “God knows it’s a strange world, isn’t it?” she said. “And sometimes it’s good to remember that to assume that you know everything about anything risks the sin of pride.” She looked Zen in the face again, a searching look. “D— I mean, uh, child, uh, Zen . . .” She paused and whispered to herself, “Zen. Zen. Zenobia.” Then, “So, this is truly what you want?”

  Zen was nodding vehemently, and her answer burst out over the end of the question: “Oh yes, so much. I really am just a girl. I mean, I know, the body I was born with is a boy body. But this just feels so good, so right. So . . .” She waved her hands in the air, unable to find the word. “It’s just . . . me. This is me. I’m me!” Aunt Phil squeezed her at the same time that Aunt Lucy pressed her shoulder. Zen kept her face up, and watched her grandmother work.

  At last Grandma Gail said, “Well, I don’t pretend to understand. I do think that it is contrary to God’s law.” Her eyes shifted to Aunt Lucy. “But there you are, still my child. In spite of your lifestyle.”

  Aunt Lucy twitched at the word lifestyle, but said, with new gentleness, “Yes, here I am. Still your child.”

  Grandma Gail looked back at Zen. “And there you are, still my grandchild. And you seem happy.”

  A long silence. Aunt Phil broke it by saying, “Are you sure you won’t stay? Even for a little while?”

  Grandma Gail shook her head and pushed herself to standing. Zen was startled to see that her grandmother looked more bent than just a few months ago. The old woman began to shuffle toward the front door. Close to Zen she stopped and stared at her one more time. Zen broke from the Aunties’ grasps and hugged her. “I love you, Grandma,” she said.

  “Hmph.” But a grandmotherly hand patted twice on Zen’s back. “Now, I am going.”

  At the door, Grandma Gail submitted stiffly to a dutiful kiss on the cheek from Aunt Lucy. The last thing she said was to Zen: “I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. You actually look pretty, child.” And she was gone, leaving her granddaughter breathless and glowing in the doorway.

  THIRTY-NINE

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, just as they sat down to dinner, the doorbell rang. Looks went around the table, and Zen saw that the two adults were thinking the same thing she was: that Grandma Gail had changed her mind and had come back to say so. Aunt Lucy frowned and went down the hall to the front door. Zen followed, chewing her lip. Aunt Lucy pressed the intercom button. “Hello?”

  “Darling!” cried a voice, and Zen closed her eyes and said a silent thanks. It was Uncle Sprink.

  He had come to deliver signs. The Aunties and their friends did a lot of marching and waving signs and gathering to hear each other give speeches. Aunt Lucy liked to mention the number of times she had been arrested: five. To Zen it seemed an absurd thing to be proud of. In the first weeks living in the house she had politely but firmly declined several invitations to march and wave signs with them, and then had pushed back against some actual pr
essure, until they had finally gotten the message. So not interested.

  Uncle Sprink declined to join them for dinner, saying he had more signs to deliver, but he did linger for a little while to talk. Munching her stir-fry, working around the tofu cubes, Zen studied his face. There was something unusual about it. It took a minute, but then she saw it: his eyebrows were thin. Since Natalie’s comment, Zen had been noticing eyebrows. All the men she had looked at had thick, bushy ones. Mr. Walker, for instance. But Uncle Sprink’s were two high, thin arcs, no more than a few hairs wide.

  Their guest noticed that she was staring and gave her a smile. Zen forced herself to speak. “Uncle Sprink, may I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, um . . . there was a thing at school . . . someone said something . . . and now, some kids, they’re doing this finger-waggling thing when they see me . . . um, do you think my eyebrows are too thick?”

  “Your eyebrows are beautiful just the way they are,” said Aunt Lucy firmly, but she wasn’t even looking. Uncle Sprink was. Zen made herself return his gaze.

  “Of course they’re gorgeous just the way they are,” he said. “But, if, say, for instance, a girl wanted her eyes to, you know, pop a little bit more, she could use tweezers to pull a few hairs here and there and, you know, do a little shaping.”

  The thought made Zen cringe. Hair plucking definitely came under the no-body-mod squidginess umbrella. She rubbed her finger over her eyebrows. The hairs crunched slightly.

  “And a girl doing such a thing, she would probably do well to start working her way up from the bottom, rather than down from the top. The more space around your eyes, the more lovely they appear. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, thank you.” And then he was saying good-bye.

  Later, on a Cyberlandium break, Zen found herself crunching her eyebrows again. She picked up her phone and checked her reflection. Too dim to see. Her mouth grinched tight, and she got up and slipped out the door. Aunt Lucy was typing intently on a laptop at the kitchen table and did not notice her. Aunt Phil was at work.

  Down the short hall to the bathroom. Light on. Push through the mirror squirm. She studied her eyebrows in the glass.

  They were grotesque, she saw now. Huge, bristly, hideous black caterpillars of hair.

  So, tweezers. That was what Uncle Sprink had said.

  She stared herself in the eyes a bit more, working up nerve. Most people, she supposed, would have no problem with a simple thing like plucking hairs. But she wasn’t most people. Still, she had to try.

  She fetched the tweezers from the medicine cabinet, then leaned close to the mirror, angling to get good light from above. She zeroed in on the lower edge of her right eyebrow. There was one hair there that drooped down out of line with the others. Her hand trembling slightly, she pinched the tweezer-jaws closed around it. The hair felt tough and fibrous through the metal. She tugged. The skin pulled up in a little chocolate-kiss shape, but the hair remained fixed. “Ow!” she said. The pain was pointed and tickly at the same time. She scrubbed at the place to make the tickle go away.

  Take two. Teeth clenched, she clamped again, took a breath, held it, and yanked. The hair plocked free. It hurt a lot for a single hair. Zen made a grinding noise in her throat.

  She examined the place the hair had come from. Tiny red dot. She scrubbed again to erase the tickle. She examined the hair, still death-gripped in the tweezers. It had a little bulby bit on the end with what looked like a tiny drop of milky liquid surrounding it. Suddenly she felt repulsed. She gagged, wrapped the hair in a square of toilet paper, flushed it, dropped the tweezers back in the cabinet, and scurried to her room.

  * * *

  ~

  So, yeah, God.

  I am so Goddamnittohell tired. And, yeah, name in vain. I did it on purpose.

  I’m just so weary. I am weary of life.

  And I just totally heard Grandma Gail in my head say, You’re only a child. You are too young to be weary of life.

  To which I answer her, answer everyone, answer you: Don’t ever tell me what I’m too young to be.

  What Melissa’s mom said. “Gender confused.” That really got to me.

  I am not confused.

  When I put that dress on, Mom’s dress: I felt something I had never felt before. I felt like for the first time in my life someone had put their arms around me and was telling me I was going to be okay. You know, the words moms say.

  It’s okay, baby.

  I’m here.

  I’ve got you.

  Shhh, honey, it’s going to be all right.

  I love you just the way you are, and I always will.

  Damn it, I’ve already cried so much. I’m sick of crying.

  What I wouldn’t give to hear my mother saying those words to me now. Because she was a good mom.

  She used to sing to me. She loved those old-time songs. The hymns, but also the silly nursery rhyme songs. Like,

  Down in the meadow

  In a sly little den

  Lived an old mother spider

  And her little spiders ten

  “Spin!” said the mother

  “We spin!” said the ten

  And they spun and were glad

  In their sly little den.

  And once we were playing one of those little kid board games, Snakes and Ladders, and I almost won, but then I hit the big snake just a few squares from the win box and I had to slide all the way back down to the first row, and I cried, and if Dad had been there he would have told me to be a man about it, but Mom didn’t say that. She just held me and said those words moms say.

  She let me cry.

  She let me feel my feels, and didn’t make me feel bad about them.

  It’s like she almost saw me.

  Not really. But, a little.

  And, I guess? I guess . . .

  I guess that’s all I ever get.

  INTERLUDE: SEEING ZEN

  Grandma Gail

  His mother was a godly woman. It was sad when she died so young. Some particularly nasty tumor. She was gone in six months.

  The boy took his mother’s death real hard. Devastated, not too strong a word. And it went on and on. The crying and the moping, and then stomping fits of rage, and then more crying. His father kept telling him to be a man, and he just kept crying.

  There always was something off about that boy. A little wisp of a kid, and so clingy, always just wanting to hang out with his mother. And, oh my God, what a soft heart. I remember once I was driving him, coming home from something after dark, and I hit a rabbit in the road—no chance to swerve, it was there and then bumpity-bump, just like that—and he asked what the sound was, and when I told him, well, he just started to bawl. “Poor little bunny,” he kept saying. “Poor little bunny.” And him maybe, what, eight years old by then? Two, three years after his mother’s death. Pathetic, is what it was. No toughness to him. Not a proper boy at all.

  And then the thing with the clothes. I still don’t know what to make of that. Finding him like that, all dressed up and dancing. And that wasn’t the first time. We put it down to childish play before, when he was little. We thought he was just messing around with his mother’s things. But I guess it was there, whatever it is, all along. He’s living as a girl now, out there with Lucille. Seems unnatural to me. But I thought about it, and I decided to leave well enough alone. When I was younger, I might have gone in there and thrown my weight around, but now . . . well, the kid seems happy. Or at least, if not happy, more . . . natural. Something like that. And who am I to judge?

  FORTY

  NOT NEARLY ENOUGH sleep. So hard to break through the membrane and face another day. It was Aunt Phil who finally rousted her out, ignoring her snarls and even a flailing fist, nudging and nudging with unfazeable good humor until Zen got up just to
make it stop. And then there were fresh doughnuts from the little doughnut shop at the bottom of the hill to go with the usual healthier fruits and grains, and that was enough to get Zen out the door. Despite the dark tunnel the roller coaster had entered today.

  As she approached school she saw Clem coming from the other direction, across the bridge over the highway. He waved, and when they were close enough to talk he said, “Did you hear? The hacker struck again last night.”

  For the first time since waking, Zen felt something like a spark. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “More anti-Muslim stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  Clem looked puzzled. “You think it’s cool?”

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s just, maybe my tracker worked. I gotta go.” And despite it being ten minutes before the bell, Zen hurried to Mr. Walker’s room.

  When she arrived, Mr. Walker wasn’t there, but Robert was. She didn’t think to scope first, and there they were, the only two people in the room. The boy looked up and scowled. “You again,” he said.

  “Is Mr. Walker around?” One hopeless try to keep it normal.

  “He was, but he went to the office.”

  “Oh.”

  A crackling, mega-awkward silence. Zen kept her eyes down, but she knew she was being stared at. When Robert spoke again his tone was carefully light. Underneath, though, she could hear the whisper of the sword being pulled from its sheath. “So, you a gamer?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Right.” Zen risked a glance. He was still staring. “Like, Lukematon. And mice.” Tone still light, but this was all-out battle now.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  Zen had started to shake. Eye contact now. “Take that back.”