Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  Okay, he definitely had something in mind. Was he thinking what I was thinking? “So you know someone else with my…situation?” I asked. I felt like I was on some perverse game show where the loser is taken out back and shot.

  “Oh yeah, some of the guys I work with. You know, it’s natural to go through this.”

  Now I knew we were not on the same page. But what page was he on? “What did they do?” I asked.

  “Well, you should make sure you’re taking your vitamins and eating well,” he said, fingers rubbing along the tips of the pliers like he was cleaning them. “And your mother thinks you’re not sleeping enough. Try not to be so uptight all the time, and don’t…ah…take too many solo flights, if you get my drift.”

  Suddenly I was in that Star Trek episode where Picard cannot, for the life of him, figure out what the alien captain is saying because that race speaks entirely in metaphor, and yet they’re supposed to fight a monster together. Vitamins? Solo flights?

  He went on. “You tell Claire it’s normal, and I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “She’s fine about it, Dad.”

  “That’s good. If it doesn’t clear up in a few weeks, you come talk to me and we’ll take you to a real doctor.” He paused, jaw set, looking from the pliers to me. “It still works some, right?”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “You can get it up some of the time?” he asked. “And you’re not having trouble peeing or anything like that?”

  My face turned redder than Mars. I wanted to burst out laughing and crying. He thought I was having trouble with impotence. Good Lord!

  “No, Dad,” I managed, barely remembering the question he’d asked. “It’s probably the late nights and stress.”

  He stood up and clapped his hand on my shoulder, pliers vanishing back into their pocket. “That’s my boy. Don’t be afraid to talk to me.”

  “Sure,” I said, holding my breath until he was safely out of the door.

  The room felt too small and closing in even further, but where could I go? It was February and I didn’t want to go for a walk in ten-degree weather. No stores were open on Sunday night. I swore soundlessly for a few minutes and then put my face in my hands. I try to talk to my parents about being transgender and they think I’m impotent.

  Well, I thought, it’s almost in the ballpark. I still wanted to put my fist through the wall.

  I carefully went downstairs saying to Mom, “Books are in my car” and then continued on blessedly outside into the frigid night. The icy air helped. I’d left my scarf inside and kept my jacket unzipped, standing out by my car, staring up at the sky until the tips of my fingers started to go numb.

  * * *

  After school on Monday, Claire had one of her bazillion clubs and Tuesday I had a short off-season swim training, so it was Wednesday before I could tell her about the bizarre conversation with Dad. She literally fell off the bed laughing.

  “Impotent,” she gasped from the floor. “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was,” I admitted.

  She pushed up on her elbows, static making single strands of hair rise behind her head. “Well I don’t. I like your…boy parts.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “Oh don’t mope,” she said, picking herself up. “I got you something.”

  “What?” I asked, hoping for a new computer game or a book.

  She got a small black satchel from her closet and handed it to me. Square and moderately heavy for its size, it had a zipper around the top that I opened. Inside was liquid foundation, a compact with four shades of eye shadow, a bunch of brushes ranging from tiny to medium-sized, bronzer, an eyebrow pencil, two lipsticks and mascara. My face must’ve registered the confusion and sparks of fear I felt, because she sat down looking worried.

  “Is it okay? I told Mom I wanted makeup, so some of it might be the wrong colors, but I can show you how to do the eyes, I think. I’m sorry, I’ve avoided my mom’s crazy ideas of womanhood so long that I missed a few lessons in all this stuff.”

  I’d been afraid to believe she got this for me, but she had! I hugged her until she grumbled, “You’re crushing me.”

  “It’s the best,” I told her.

  She shut her bedroom door and locked it. “Here are the makeup removing wipes. Mom isn’t supposed to get home for a couple hours, but if she does, I’ll go distract her while you get it off, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “All right, hold still.” She took the foundation and a triangular sponge out of the bag. “Man, this is weird.”

  “If you don’t want to—” I started.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Just let me be weirded out, okay?”

  Her little smile seemed real, so I let it go.

  We played around for about an hour, and I turned out to be better with the eye makeup than Claire. “You are so doing my makeup for prom,” she quipped after seeing herself in the mirror.

  At the end of it, I looked okay. Slightly drag queenish because we overdid the eye color and Claire put the blush too low, but on the whole, very good for a first try. I was going to have to figure out some reason to pluck my eyebrows. Maybe I could audition for the school play; that would give me a good cover story.

  I contemplated my face and hair in the mirror for a while, wondering where I could get a wig. Natalie would know. Then I wiped off all the makeup, using three wet wipes to make sure I got every last trace.

  “Thank you,” I told Claire.

  I flopped down on the bed on my back and held my arms open to her. She cuddled in beside me and propped herself up on her elbow so she was looking down into my face.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. “Is it okay if I still think you’re cuter without makeup?”

  “I guess. I kind of still have a guy face.”

  “You should try guyliner sometime.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You know, when guys in the movies wear dark eyeliner and it makes their eyes look sexy.”

  “But—” I started.

  “I know,” she said. “You’re not a guy. But if you ever get busted, tell them you were going for the guyliner look.”

  I grinned up at her and wondered if she would think it was too weird for us to kiss after I’d been wearing makeup. I didn’t get to find out because we heard her mom coming in the front door and she sat up quickly on the bed. “That’s your cue,” she said, giving me a quick kiss. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye, Ms. Davis,” I called to Claire’s mom as I was heading for the door.

  She turned from the counter where she’d set her purse. “Hi Chris, you don’t want to stay and catch NCIS? There’s a gothic woman in it, like Claire.”

  From the doorway to her room, Claire rolled her eyes at me, though we did both agree that the character of Abby on NCIS was awesome. The issue was her mother’s attempts to be friendly. Claire thought it was bad enough that her mom was more like a sister to her. She didn’t want the three of us to pal around together, even on the couch in the privacy of her own home.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got to get working on my homework,” I said and slipped into the cold air.

  I drove home and checked myself in the rearview mirror one more time to make sure I had no lingering eyeliner. I felt a little stupid to be so jazzed about makeup. The guys at school would royally kick my ass if they knew. But on the other hand, I looked better than some of the girls who went crazy with makeup and huge hair. I had to figure out how to look less like a drag queen, though. If only I had a sister whose fashion magazines I could steal. I’d have to find good makeup tips from the Internet.

  Chapter Eleven

  Claire

  Claire cleaned up the compacts, bottles and jars scattered across her bed. She’d put on light eye shadow so she could tell her mother she’d been showing her boyfriend her new makeup. Mom was delighted, but Claire was feeling more than a little freaked out as she wiped the makeup off after two hours of NCIS.

&
nbsp; The first problem was that Chris looked good with makeup—and not just Zachary Quinto with eyeliner good. In part it was the way Chris’s whole self brightened around girl stuff. Again Claire had that sense that she was seeing parts of him—maybe the most real parts—that he’d buried for so long. “Parts” was the wrong way to think about it, though. She’d been only seeing parts before. Now she saw a whole person.

  Plus Chris’s deep brown eyes got super intense with a good application of color. And he was better at putting it on than she was, which embarrassed her, though she’d spent a few years deliberately screwing up any nonblack makeup so Mom wouldn’t make her wear it. When she had to wear it, it felt oppressive. She didn’t think girls should have to paint themselves to be pretty.

  Too bad she and Chris couldn’t swap bodies. Not that she wanted to be a boy. She liked the whole girl thing, minus the übergirl activities that her mom went in for, manicures and that stuff. She liked being able to cry at movies and the feeling of being held by someone bigger than her. She really liked that part, and she and Chris hadn’t done as much of it since he started talking about being Emily. Come to think of it, she’d spent more time holding him lately. Tonight was the first time in weeks she’d curled up under his arm.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked in the general direction of up. “You couldn’t just keep the girls in the girls’ bodies? Aren’t giraffes weird enough?”

  She didn’t get a direct reply, but she did feel a vast patience settling down on her as she often did when she asked something ridiculous.

  “I guess I’m still scared,” she said more calmly. “Like what if that happened to me? And what’s Chris going to do? And what…what are people going to think about me because I love a freak?”

  She paused. “I don’t mean it like that. He’s not a freak. Not much anyway. I mean not any more than half the kids at school, the Future Farmers of America and all that. I don’t know what you were thinking with those kids either.”

  She felt smiled upon. At least God had a sense of humor. Claire reached for her Bible and let it fall open. She probably shouldn’t dog the FFA kids when she consulted her Bible on a regular basis.

  It opened to the Song of Solomon, Chapter Three: “On my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not. I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.”

  Her Bible study group had a guest speaker last summer who talked about how the Song of Solomon was a metaphor for the love affair between the soul and God. “Him whom my soul loves” could refer to God, Himself.

  “It’s another way to find You,” she said, mostly to herself since God already knew. “You want us to keep discovering You, and this whole thing with Chris, it’s another way to have faith in You, to see You in the world no matter how crazy it looks at first.”

  There was something St. John of the Cross said in a poem he wrote. She pulled the book off her bookshelf and thumbed through to the poem entitled “A Vital Truth.” There was the line: “An altar is every pore and every hair on every body—confess that, dear God, confess.”

  That included Chris’s body. People liked to think that life was so stable and easy to define, even her with her own pretensions of being holier than thou and oh so open-minded. But God’s plan was so much more vast and diverse and wondrous than the small, constricting ideas humans had about the world.

  What was the saying? “Men plan, God laughs.”

  She curled up in bed to read the whole Song of Solomon. The dialogue between two lovers was one of her favorite parts of the Bible. It echoed the longing she felt for God sometimes. She might not have any person she could talk to about the situation with Chris, but she could talk to God and as strange as it seemed, she understood that God knew what He was doing.

  Chapter Twelve

  After the evening at Claire’s house playing with makeup, I figured it was time to tackle the psych class assignment. I sat down at the computer, opened a new file and stared at it. I couldn’t say any of the things that came to mind.

  What would I do if I woke up tomorrow as a girl? I’d cry for joy, to start. Then I’d run around and show myself off to everyone. I’d make Mom take me shopping for all new clothes, and I’d grow my hair long. I’d probably still swim; it made me feel good and kept me in shape. The girls who swam had really nice bodies. I wonder if I’d still be this tall. If I could pick it, I’d be a few inches shorter with B-cup breasts, nothing too outrageous, and hips like Mom’s, kind of solid-looking.

  While I was thinking, I opened GenderPeace in my browser and sent a note to Natalie, asking where I could get hormones. I reflexively glanced over my shoulder, but my bedroom door was solidly closed. Since meeting Natalie I felt bolder, but I didn’t want to get careless. Message sent, I closed that window and stared at the blank page again.

  This was going to take all night. I heard Mikey coming up the stairs and yelled, “Hey, come here.”

  He stuck his head in my room, “What?”

  As usual, his light brown hair was going in three directions. His Marvel T-shirt had a dribble of milk down one side and he was clutching a Spiderman action figure like any of us might dare try to take it from him.

  “I have to do this lame thing for psych class. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow as a girl?”

  “Gross,” he said. “I’d stay home.”

  He pushed himself out of the doorway, without bothering to close my door again, and into the bathroom. Well, that was a start. I wrote:

  “If I woke up as a girl, I’d stay home and play video games. If it didn’t go away, I’d call the doctor. If I had to go out, I’d go to another city where no one would recognize me.”

  That was so stupid I had to stop writing. I went down a few lines and tried again, reversing it:

  “If I woke up as a boy I’d pretend everything was normal and go to school as usual. No one would know what happened and they’d be afraid to ask me about it, so I could pretty much go through my life as usual. They would wonder what had happened and if I was okay, but they wouldn’t know how to talk about it with me and I’d use that to my advantage. I would pretend it didn’t matter to me what they thought, even if it did.

  “Over time I’d get good at pretending, and people would forget that I’d been different. They’d go by what they saw and treat me like a boy and after a while I’d wonder if I’d really been a girl at all. I’d start to think I was supposed to be a boy, even if I felt like a girl on the inside.

  “I wouldn’t forget how heavy it is to act like a boy all the time, how much attention I have to spend to get it right, but I might start losing hope that things could be different. Maybe I’d stop thinking I deserved to have my own interests, my own attention, maybe I’d stop thinking I have the right to my own body. I’d let other people tell me what to wear and how to act. I’d tell myself it didn’t matter that I wasn’t there.”

  Somewhat better. I went back and changed “boy” to “girl” and vice versa. I cut the last paragraph, putting it into another document. I couldn’t turn in that part, no matter how true it was, or because of how true it was.

  That night I dreamed that it was Sunday morning again and I woke up with a girl’s body. In the dream, I got up and showered for the longest time. No one treated me any differently, except Claire who said I looked really cute.

  * * *

  Thursday brought another session with Dr. No. I’d been dreading the stupid appointment all day. I didn’t want to talk about my childhood or my dad, so I figured I’d bring up something I did want to know about. I dropped down on the couch and watched Dr. Webber settle into his seat, notepad in his lap. The creases in his khakis were super crisp, his button-down shirt almost without wrinkles, but no tie and the top button open, edge of a white undershirt showing, like he was trying to look as approachable and comfortable as a rigid guy in khakis and a button-down could.

  He opened a tin of mints from the
table next to him and put one in his mouth. When he held it out to me, I shook my head.

  “What would you like to talk about today, Chris?”

  “What do you know about transgender people?” I asked. I figured what the hell, I could always say I was joking, and I was sick of screwing around with this goon.

  He scribbled on his notepad and then looked up. “It’s a very rare condition,” he said. “Do you like dressing up in women’s clothing? Does it turn you on?”

  Not when you put it like that, I thought. Gross. “No,” I said.

  “But you have concerns.”

  “Just curious.”

  “Have you ever dressed in women’s clothing?” he asked, crunching his mint.

  “I don’t know, maybe as a kid. Did you?”

  “You know what I think,” he said, leaning forward in a conspiratorial way. “I think you’re afraid of growing up like your father. You may have fantasies of being a woman because you think that’s the only way to avoid being like him. Let’s come up with some other options, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. Worried this sounded like I was agreeing with him, I added, “But it’s not about that. We’re studying it in class. I was just asking.”

  I should have known he’d be able to put a bizarre spin on this, but it still caught me off guard and shut me up again. I wanted to be able to tell him I didn’t have fantasies of being a woman when I grew up, but that felt too important to lie about.

  “Who are some other men you can think of?” he asked. “Men you could be like when you grow up?”

  Why was it a fantasy if I saw myself as a woman but it wasn’t when Dr. Webber asked me to imagine growing up into a man? What counted as a fantasy? Being able to shoot fireballs like my World of Warcraft mage—now that was a fantasy. Getting to grow up so people saw me the way I saw myself seemed healthy and kind of awesome.

  Dr. Webber watched me with his brows elevated, like “I’m waiting,” and sucked his mint.