Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  Although the crime shows followed the same pattern, it felt more comforting than boring. The contents of the stories were sensational enough that Claire could always watch one, plus it counted as bonding time with her mom. She settled back on the couch, glad to have something to take her mind off Chris.

  Twenty minutes into the episode, one of the suspects was revealed to be a transgender woman. A bolt of electricity zinged through Claire. She peered upward and asked God silently, Are you hinting? Seemingly random coincidences were usually the divine trying to get her attention.

  Of course the story was overblown, with the character having accidentally killed a man to protect herself and then being sent to men’s prison where she was severely beaten. At the end of the episode, she was wheeled into the emergency room, beaten to a bloody mess and covered in bruises.

  What was God trying to tell her? That there were enough people in the world who wanted to beat up Chris that she didn’t need to be one of them? Or that the path he’d chosen was a dangerous one and he shouldn’t take it?

  How many transgender characters had she seen on TV? This wasn’t the first time she’d seen one on a crime show, but they were always the victims or prostitutes, never the cops or pathologists or lawyers. And yet in her online research she’d seen transgender women with cool jobs: scientists, doctors, engineers, clergy, company owners, poets, writers.

  She wanted to warn Chris away from this path, make sure he knew how dangerous it could be, but then she’d be just like those crime shows. He didn’t need her to cast him as a victim.

  This was like the one time she’d tried to seriously come out to her mom. She’d said, “I think I’m bisexual.”

  Just that and her mom had gone on, at length, with variations of, “Oh honey, that’s such a hard life, are you sure that’s what you want? Maybe this is a phase. You still like men. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  She’d repeated herself a few times that week. Claire got the feeling that it wasn’t about her mom’s concern for her. Otherwise why not try to keep her from much more dangerous pursuits, like driving a car? Instead this was the only acceptable way for her mom to say she didn’t want Claire to be bi. After all, what would the neighbors think?

  And the result had been that Claire had stopped talking to her mom about it, pulled away and made jokes, waiting to see if it would ever really be a safe topic.

  Was she about to do the same to Chris? Was she on the edge of making it so he wouldn’t talk to her about one of the most important parts of his life?

  Just because she didn’t like the idea of him being transgender, because she wasn’t comfortable with it, that wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t have to carry the burden of her freaking out.

  The trans woman in the TV episode had to deal with the reactions of everyone around her until they nearly killed her. That was like what God had been saying with the Book of Job: don’t be a jerk. Don’t let your reactions and your fear drive you to hurt someone you care about.

  She’d already started to pull away from Chris because of her fear. A piece of her solid world fell away when he said he was a woman. The belief that men were men and women were women was a foundational part of her world—until it was gone and she found herself teetering at the edge of the unknown.

  Underneath her initial disgust, and all that questioning and discomfort lay simple fear. Well, she could handle fear.

  She went into her bedroom and pulled out her journal. She spent so much time on the computer she knew her mom would look for a journal there, so she kept hers in physical form and hid it among her books.

  She opened it to a clean page and wrote out her fears:

  What if Chris goes through all of this and he’s wrong but he can never go back again?

  What if I can’t be attracted to him through this and we split up?

  What if the rest of the school finds out?

  What if tonight was a warning and God doesn’t accept transgender people?

  If I keep loving Chris, what am I?

  Chapter Seven

  Though I loved Dad, I often avoided him because the older I got, the more likely he was to clap me on the shoulder and start a sentence with “Son.” Anything that started that way wasn’t going to end well. Nevertheless, he caught up with me on Friday morning, clapped me on the shoulder of sweater number three and said, “Son, I’ve got something you’re going to like.”

  “What, Dad?” I asked, feeling like a poorly cast character in Leave It to Beaver.

  “It’s a beauty,” he said, which meant either a car or truck. “A 1976 Ford Bronco. The seller’s driving it out from the Cities Saturday morning. I thought you’d work on it with me.”

  Okay, guilty confession, I do think cars are cool. I’m willing to give that up if it prevents my entry into the world of official girlhood, but for the time being it’s saved my butt with my Dad more often than I can count.

  “Sweet,” I said, letting some actual emotion into my voice. “I’m taking Claire to the city at one, but I’m around all morning.”

  He beamed and smacked my shoulder a couple more times, then sauntered off to work. When he had work, my dad was a happy man. The few times he’d been out of work were miserable for all of us.

  I grabbed two slices of bread and hightailed it out the door before Mom could appear and grill me about Dr. No again. I cruised through the school day, buoyed up by the thought of Saturday afternoon. Claire and I missed each other in the halls. This was the time of year she started to get busy with all the clubs so I didn’t worry about it more than the low level background freaking out about whether or not we were still dating. At least she’d said yes to the movie. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t want to see me anymore, right?

  I ran aground abruptly in psych class. Mr. Cooper handed out our assignments. The guys booed, and I forgot to join in because my mouth was hanging open. My heart threatened to leap up my throat in a mixture of excitement and panic. The assignment said, “Pretend you wake up tomorrow morning the opposite sex. Write a four hundred word essay about your experiences.”

  “Gross,” the guy in front of me said.

  “Neanderthal,” Jessica shot back to him. She turned to me and batted her eyelashes. “You wouldn’t be a jerk about being a girl, would you?”

  /run: emergency avoidance procedure

  System Failure

  I stared at her blankly. “Uh,” I said.

  “If I were a guy, I’d show some of the guys around here how to dress,” she said, clinching the fact that she’d make a terrible guy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Funny.” There was no emotion in my voice and I could hear that it was missing, but I couldn’t do a thing about it.

  “It’s not bad being a girl,” she said, putting her hand on my forearm. She was flirting, of all things.

  “Sure.” I stood up as the bell rang.

  “Jeez,” she said. “You guys are all alike. You’re afraid of anything the least bit feminine.”

  “Sure,” I repeated and bolted from the room. The walls were a blur closing in around my head.

  An assignment to pretend we were the other sex. Who comes up with something like that?

  How was I supposed to write this? My body faded rapidly from a solid to an invisible membrane so thin that if anything brushed against me I’d split open. I would have to write about waking up as a girl for the assignment even though every morning, for those few minutes between waking and having to move, I got to be a girl completely, with no stupid physiology to contradict me.

  I had to get out of the school building without looking like I had to get out. I forced my feet to move, slow and steady, past my locker, past the lobby, into the biting cold, my car, the key in the ignition. Wait for it to warm up. Forget English class.

  Up until I was about nine or ten years old, I held out hope that I would grow up to be a woman, even though the evidence was mounting against that idea. When the other girls started to speculate about wha
t it would be like to get their periods, I imagined that a period was the end of childhood, like the end of a sentence, and after that I’d get the right body parts. I was old enough to have given up on a magical solution, but somehow I convinced myself that my problem would be sorted out through puberty, that I would start to grow breasts and that thing between my legs would recede and I would become like the other girls.

  It didn’t help that my best friend at the time, Jessie, started growing breasts just before her tenth birthday. For years we’d both been flat-chested and then a few weeks before her birthday she snuck me into her room to show me the tiny bumps her breasts had become. We’d been comparing bodies on and off for a couple years, ever since she’d talked me into peeing in the woods with her on a park outing with our families.

  “I want my breasts to start growing too,” I told her. She gaped at me like I wasn’t a real person. I slammed out of her bedroom and didn’t talk to her for weeks.

  I thought about that incident a year later when I woke up to find that my nipples ached and felt swollen. For days I floated on clouds. I was going to show her and everyone. But the happy feeling dissipated. I didn’t grow breasts. Instead I grew two inches in the space of a summer, my shoulders widened, and I started sprouting hair on my chest.

  From school, I drove over to Claire’s. I couldn’t go home. Dad and Mikey would be home soon. I couldn’t let myself cry with them in the house. And I needed to know where I stood with Claire.

  As I got out of the car I realized I’d left my coat at school. Fumbling the key into her front door, I pushed into the house shaking with cold. I planned to have a little cry and then wash my face and wait for her to come home so we could talk, but that planning part of my brain wasn’t running the show.

  I walked through the living room and into her room feeling like someone was crushing my chest, like I’d gone underwater and couldn’t get to the surface. My eyes swung from side to side looking for anything that would stop this feeling. Without thinking about it, I opened her closet door and curled myself into the bottom. Ever since I was a kid hiding in my mom’s closet, I’ve found comfort in dark, enclosed places. The small part of my mind that was still thinking told me I was being an idiot, a baby, a wuss, a fool and a dozen other sneers.

  I leaned against the back wall of the little space and finally managed to cry a few of the thousand tears I’d been saving up from the past months. Wiping my face, I glared at my hands. My freakishly huge hands. I hated them. I hated this stupid body. Whose bright idea was it to make me a boy? Was it so hard to put a girl together? Did they just run out of girl bodies that day? Did I do something miserable in a past life?

  “Chris?” Claire called from the living room. Then closer and more tentative, “Chrissy?”

  God bless her.

  I cracked the door and crawled out to see her staring down at me with wide eyes. Not because I was in her closet—she’d found me sitting in my own closet a few months ago when I got a C- for a whole semester of slogging through history—but because she’d never seen me cry before.

  “Sorry,” I managed, hating my deep voice.

  She knelt on the carpet and grabbed my hands. “What happened?”

  “Weird stuff,” I said. I cleared my throat and wiped a hand across my face again, managing to smear snot across the back of it. “Tissue?”

  She grabbed a box off her desk and handed it to me. “You look terrible.”

  “Cooper gave us this crazy assignment, to pretend we wake up tomorrow the other sex.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “And then this girl in my class was…she was joking about it, but I couldn’t deal because I just—” My voice broke and tears started again. “I want to be a girl so bad. Am I completely messed up?”

  Claire put an arm around my shoulders and dragged me to her chest. After all the times she’d curled into me, it felt so weird to lean my monstrously huge body against her, but it was also wonderful to feel held.

  “You’re okay,” she said. “You just have a girl brain in a boy’s body. Which I think makes me a lesbian trapped in a straight girl’s body or, you know, bi.”

  I laughed and she laughed, and then I cried some more. When I finally sat up and blew my nose, I felt a lot more peaceful. Then I noticed that Claire looked worse than me. Her eyes were bloodshot and creased with tiredness.

  “Were you up all night?” I asked.

  “Pretty much. I fell asleep for about an hour in the middle.”

  “Of what?”

  She pushed up from the floor and I stood with her. Her bed was made, like usual, but with big wrinkles in the middle of the dark gray comforter and four books open on it.

  “Binge reading,” she said with a grin. “Come on, make me a sandwich.”

  We went into the kitchen together. Claire was a much better cook than me, but I had one specialty dish: the grilled cheese sandwich. I think it only tasted better when I made it because she didn’t have to do any work, but she insisted I had a special knack.

  “When’s your mom coming home?” I asked.

  “Late,” Claire said. “She has a date and he’s picking her up from work.”

  I wrapped the kitchen apron around my waist and tied it. Claire sat on one of the two stools set up by the edge of the counter so people could talk to the cook. I put a big pan on to warm and pulled the bread, cheese and butter out of the fridge. The butter was the key ingredient. I believe that like popcorn, grilled cheese is a fancy butter-delivery system.

  “I’ve been freaking out,” Claire said. “And I might freak out more, okay? But I think I’m good for now.”

  I took in a long breath. She wouldn’t have asked me to make sandwiches or called me “Chrissy” if she was going to throw me out, right?

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Did you know that the Bible actually talks about transgender people?” she replied.

  The breath I’d taken didn’t seem to want to come out now. “Um,” I managed.

  If she was going to get all right-wing Christian on me, I’d leave mid-sandwich. Claire had this kind of weird system of religious belief that I didn’t understand. My parents took me and Mikey to church every now and then, but we didn’t make a fuss about it. Claire’s family had taken her to church a lot when she was young and she’d loved it. When she hit her teenage years, she started reading The Gnostic Gospels and getting into the early Christians and the formation of the Bible and all that. Then she read the mystics, which included St. John of the Cross and his cloud of unknowing, which she was always going on about. At least with the cloud of unknowing, she never expected to me to know anything about it.

  I had no idea what the Christian mystics thought about being trans.

  “There’s this bit in Isaiah,” she said and hopped off the stool.

  I turned the pan down because I wasn’t going to start cooking the sandwiches yet, in case I had to run for it.

  Claire came out with her Bible and read: “For thus says the Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’”

  “Are you calling me a eunuch? Really?” I put down the spatula and started to untie the apron.

  “No!” she said. “Just listen to me for a minute because this is really cool.”

  I stopped untying the apron string and folded my arms. The frying pan was getting too hot even at the lower burner setting, but I didn’t care.

  “Back when the Bible was written, the Romans didn’t have a word for transgender. But their word ‘eunuch’ included multiple categories of people. Only one of those is what we mean by ‘eunuch’ today. And one of the other categories includes people who chose not to procreate, and men who dressed and acted like women. It includes transgender people.”

  “You stayed up all nigh
t reading about this?”

  She put the Bible on the edge of the counter and sat back on the stool. Pressing her hands together between her knees, she stared down at them.

  “I was really afraid,” she said. “I’m still afraid, kind of. I read bunches of stuff, about the brain studies and how there’s a lot of trans people. Way more than I thought. But, you know, nothing’s more important to me than having a loving relationship with God, and I know people twist the Bible to say all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s not like I’m a literalist, but I think that the Bible is a valid way for God to communicate with us. So when I read that about the translation of ‘eunuch’ and that passage in Isaiah—and there are others too, but that’s the best one—I got it.”

  I put the sandwiches into the pan and listened to them sizzle. “Good,” I told her.

  “It’s not like I was looking for God’s permission, like He’s some kind of angry parent,” she said. “The words just cut through my confusion and showed me what was already in my heart.”

  I had to ask. “Is dating me in your heart?”

  Claire tipped her face up toward me, eyes shining. “Yes,” she said.

  I grinned into the pan and flipped the sandwiches. “And you’re never going to call me a eunuch again?” I asked, even though her point about the quote and the translation was awesome.

  She threw a dishtowel at me. It bounced off my shoulder and I tried to catch it on my thigh as it fell, but instead smacked my knee into the oven handle. I hopped on one foot for a second, holding the knee up, but it didn’t hurt that badly and the sandwiches were about to burn.

  I slid the sandwiches onto plates, then bent down to get the towel. Claire hopped off the stool and pulled the towel out of my hand, dropping it back onto the floor. She put her palms on either side of my face so she could pull me down to kiss her.