by Rachel Gold
Except that didn’t describe it. More and more, Claire could see Emily was there all the time, only most of the time it wasn’t safe for her to be seen. So she acted a role while wearing the most complete Halloween costume of all time.
Much of the information online talked about transitions and transformation, like people turning into other people, and on the outside that made sense. This person did show up looking one way and then change to look another way. Emily put on a sweater that softened the shape of her shoulders, put on a bra and filled it with whatever Natalie had given her that looked pretty darned real. Makeup blurred the angles of her face, smoothed over the places she’d shaved, emphasized her expressive, dark eyes and downplayed the brow ridge above them.
But also Emily let herself be visible in a different way. She’d laugh more and let her voice be lighter and softer. She’d tuck her feet up on the couch, gesture fluently and beautifully with her hands, and do this peering-up-through-her-eyelashes thing that made Claire feel fluttery inside—and also like she wished she could steal that expression.
She wasn’t sure what to do about the fluttery. It was good, of course, kind of exciting, like she was getting to date a new person who was also the person she’d known all along.
Emily flirted with her like a girl. She’d never been girl-flirted with before. She’d done it, but it was so different being on the receiving end of all the little touches and questions and being paid attention to. Claire wasn’t sure if she liked it a lot or a whole lot.
But she didn’t know how she was supposed to respond. So she went with the feeling of envy first. Much simpler to understand.
“Why are you better at girl flirting than I am?” Claire asked on one of their study breaks. They were on the couch, each sitting against an arm, feet tangled together in the middle and Emily’s toes had been playing with hers in a very cute way.
Emily gazed up thoughtfully. “I practice at it more?”
“How?”
“I’ve always watched women I want to grow up to be like. Don’t you?”
“I spend most of my time around a woman I want to grow up to be completely unlike,” Claire said. “But yeah, there are a lot of women writers, women theologians that I’m always paying attention to. I want to know how they think so that I can be like that. But how’d you get flirting?”
“TV. I have to remind myself to watch the guys too sometimes, so I know how people expect me to move.”
“You identify with the women?” Claire asked, voice small under the weight of that realization. Had Emily grown up the same way she had? Did Emily automatically watch the women around her and the women on TV to pick out the ones like her—or the ones she wanted to be like in some blurry, distant, imagined future?
The first time Claire had seen Abby on NCIS, all in black with tattoos and platform heels, she’d felt so electric. She’d had a sense of kinship and wonder, of wishing Abby were a real person and that Claire could raid her wardrobe. She felt the same way about religious scholar Karen Armstrong, except she was a real person and Claire wanted to raid her bookshelf.
She remembered being ten years old and going with her dad to visit his sister, who was a reporter in St. Cloud. Claire’s aunt had given them a tour of the newspaper, everything smelling of paper and ink. Claire thought her aunt was the most amazing person and wanted a job like that when she grew up. But not only the job: Claire had wanted to wear those kinds of no-nonsense slacks and shoes, carry a slender reporter’s notebook and a bunch of pens and a minicassette recorder, and wear intricate silver jewelry that looked pretty and serious at the same time.
As a kid it seemed natural to her that it all went together: being a woman and a writer and a thinker meant looking and moving in the world the same way her aunt did.
All this time, had it been the same for Emily? No, not at all the same. Emily could watch the women around her and pick out the ones who made her feel excited for her own future. But any time she tried to emulate them, she was punished. Emily had told her about the time her dad whipped her with his belt for trying on her mom’s dresses. And recently Claire had noticed the cutting looks Emily’s mom gave her whenever Emily, back in her role as Chris, gestured too soaringly with “his” hands or fluttered “his” fingers instead of making karate chops or whatever guys did.
“Do I identify with the women?” Emily repeated Claire’s question while she thought about it. “It’s hard to say when I know intellectually that I don’t look that way. But yes. Sometimes it feels like ‘oh, that’s me’ and other times more like ‘I wish I could be that.’ I hate when I’m watching a show and I’ll think ‘that would look so good on me’ and then I realize even if it would fit on this body, and look okay on this body, I wouldn’t be allowed to wear it.”
“You can wear it over here,” Claire said.
“That reminds me, can you help me find pants like this?”
Emily pulled a folded calendar page from her bag and scooted to the middle of the couch. Claire moved next to her and looked at the woman leaning against a low-riding muscle car. Emily’s shoulder touched hers. Emily’s fingers rested lightly on her thigh. Not the way I’m-being-a-guy-really Chris would’ve slung an arm over Claire’s shoulders, but she liked this too.
She wrapped her fingers around Emily’s and leaned closer.
* * *
Claire got so used to hanging out with Emily alone at home on the weekends that she had to be extra careful at school. She dreaded a moment like the one at Emily’s birthday dinner when Natalie had nearly blurted out the name “Emily” in front of her parents.
Perhaps sensing this, Emily didn’t hang out at her locker as much and didn’t seek her out in the halls. Whole days could go by with the two of them barely passing notes. Emily had started signing her notes with a big curving sideways arc, like the letter C, crossed by a small line. It could pass for an artsy “C,” but Claire knew it was “E.”
It felt like they were sharing a whole volume of inside jokes, most of them more sad than funny.
The weekend before finals was coming and they had a marathon study session planned for Saturday, but Emily passed her a note on Thursday that said, “Let me take you out to dinner tomorrow night.”
Two kinds of fear slithered up inside Claire. One easy: finals coming, big stack of books next to her computer, stacks of notecards to study. One hard: going out in public with her “boyfriend.”
After school, she called Emily, remembering to ask for “Chris.”
“Are you asking me out on a date?” Claire asked when Emily picked up the line.
She could hear the smile in the reply, “You are my girlfriend.” But tension ran under the words. Going out in public together as boyfriend and girlfriend again would be harder on Emily than on Claire.
They picked the new seafood place and an early time to avoid having to wait in line for ages. Emily said she’d come get Claire with a few minutes to spare in case Claire’s mom wanted to coo over them.
Or…should Claire be thinking “he’d come get her.” She’d better remember to switch to male pronouns, which she wasn’t used to doing outside of school.
She rolled her neck and stood up from the desk. How Emily kept her identity straight all those years was amazing. Now that she persistently saw the presence of Emily, even when Emily had to be Chris, Claire found names and pronouns colliding in her head all the time. She wanted to only think “Emily” and “she” to keep herself used to that and to honor the person Emily was—but they spent so much time together at school and in places where people could overhear them, that she had to keep saying “Chris” and “he.”
But sometimes when they were alone, she’d slip and say “Chris” and feel like dirt. Emily had so few places to be herself, she shouldn’t have to deal with Claire not having it all together.
Pretending she hadn’t slipped up felt worse than saying, “I’m sorry,” so Claire defaulted to that.
“I know,” Emily had said the last time.
“And it helps that you say that.”
“It does? I don’t know what to do when I screw up. I don’t think of you like that but it’s habit.”
“Say you’re sorry and move on. You knew me as Chris for longer than as Emily, I get it. But knowing it’s important to you—”
“You’re important to me,” Claire had interjected and then it all got too cuddly for talking.
* * *
Emily and Natalie had been hanging out more while Claire was busy with the yearbook committee and all her classes. Of course Emily had plenty of schoolwork too, but she hadn’t taken as many AP courses as Claire because she wasn’t aiming for a top college. She would eventually end up spending more money on surgeries than most kids took out in student loans. While Claire toiled away at home on Sundays, she covered for Emily’s trips into the Cities to hang out with Natalie and go to the support group. She and Emily had their Saturdays and swapped notes in school every day. Claire kept wishing Emily would shell out for some kind of mobile device so that she could text her.
Getting out of the shower before their first real date in months, Claire stood in front of her closet puzzling out what to wear. As Emily came out more, Claire felt herself changing, in ways she liked.
In the last two months, she’d learned more about makeup than she ever imagined she would—including the fact that a bit of indigo eye shadow really brought out the gold tints in her hazel eyes. When she watched women like her mother who put on makeup religiously to be more attractive to men, it scared her. She never wanted to feel like she needed a person so much that she’d add all that mirror time to her day.
But when she watched Emily and Natalie, a whole new view opened up. For them being beautiful wasn’t a burden, it was a self-expression they were willing to fight for. Their feminine beauty was the battle standard for claiming their own identities. She’d never realized that femininity could be a radical act because she’d never seen a feminine woman as strong in her identity as Emily or Natalie, or even Natalie’s mother.
Now that she knew what powerful beauty looked like, she noticed it in other women all over the place. Many of the women in the Bible exemplified it. Michelle Obama definitely had it. Closer to home, Claire’s English teacher wore her makeup so her dark skin and eyes gently grabbed and held the attention of anyone looking at her.
Claire drew thin black lines around her eyes. She brushed shimmering tan eye shadow under her brows and applied the indigo color on her eyelids the way the girls had taught her. Foundation and blush would be too much, but she chose a pink lip gloss from the basket full of the cosmetics her mom kept bringing home and applied that. She picked small silver hoop earrings and then crossed the hall to riffle through her closet until she found a blue-gray shirt with a cute collar to wear with her black skirt.
“Oh my God,” her mom exclaimed from the kitchen when she saw Claire. She stopped scrubbing the countertop and straightened up. “What have you done with my daughter?”
“Chris is taking me out to dinner,” Claire said. “Are you going out later? Can we watch a movie here afterward?”
“I’ll probably be home at ten, if that’s not too early for you,” her mom said with the patronizing lilt that reminded Claire she didn’t have a choice. She added, “I think Chris is a good influence on you.”
“I know he is,” Claire said with a grin and only a slight hitch before “he.”
When Claire heard the car pull into the driveway, she said a quick goodbye to her mom and scooted out the door, into the close warmth of the car. Emily was playing “Chris the boyfriend” to the teeth: dressy gray men’s pants, light blue button-down shirt and tie under a dark gray V-neck sweater, hair combed and gelled close to the scalp.
But when those warm, dark eyes turned to look at Claire, Emily was still there, the shared, sad joke between them again.
Emily blinked a few times, closed her eyes tight for a second and opened them. “Are you wearing blue?” she asked. “And eye shadow?”
“Yep. Come on, drive. I don’t want to have to wait in line forever.”
As they headed for the seafood place, Claire rested her hand on Emily’s leg just above the knee.
Claire said, “When I see how hard you have to fight to get to wear makeup, it made me realize that it’s not all about being some stupid girly girl.”
“Well not stupid…” Emily said and laughed her higher-pitched natural laugh at first, but then corralled it into a masculine range.
“Oh you know what I mean.”
At the restaurant, Claire regretted the makeup when the host cooed over them while steering them to a quiet table off to one side of the main dining room.
“I feel like we’re the cover photo of a travel brochure that says ‘welcome to heterosexuality,’” Claire whispered after they were seated.
Emily cleared her throat in a very Chris-like manner and managed not to laugh.
They proceeded to eat an obscene amount of crab, clams, shrimp and butter. At points it was like any other time they’d eaten out together. But Claire kept having flashes of what would happen if they were exposed as two girls together, dating, being bi and lesbian and trans all at the same time.
Those scenarios started with people yelling and throwing things. The more cheerful ones ended with her and Emily sprinting out of the restaurant and making it to the car.
She’d never questioned how safe she’d felt with Chris. After the bullying in junior high, she’d assumed the safe feeling came from being with a more popular person. But a huge amount of it was being with a guy. Not only the unassailable normalcy of it, but the fact that as “the guy,” Chris was supposed to protect her.
When two girls went out together, who was the protector? Did they take turns?
Claire leaned back in her chair, cradling her overstuffed belly in her hands, relaxing as much as she could. They’d been in the restaurant well over an hour and the worst thing to happen had been an older couple pausing at their table to say how cute they looked and using the term “handsome” three times for Emily.
“Did you want to catch a movie next?” Emily asked.
“Let’s go watch one at my house. Mom’s out for a while, and I like when we don’t have a bunch of other people around.” Claire didn’t add that she wanted to make sure she didn’t have to fight about who was paying for the movie. Emily had already dropped plenty of money on her with this dinner, and Claire knew how much she needed to save it all.
Plus she was tired of thinking of routes to the car if they had to run for it.
“Thank you,” she added. “This was perfect. Apparently I needed to consume a pound of protein covered in butter.”
Emily chuckled. “It’s for how sweet you’ve been. And I wanted us to have a real date again.”
“Real dates are nice,” Claire said.
She smiled, but Claire saw a flash of tension around her eyes.
“What are you worried about?” she asked.
Emily shook her head and paid the bill. When they were outside, sitting in the car with the sweet spring air rolling in the open windows Emily asked, “Are we going to end up just friends?”
“I’m not planning on it,” Claire said.
“You don’t kiss me like you used to.”
“We’ve had a lot going on!” she protested.
True, of course. But also she didn’t know how to kiss Emily. She’d known how to make out with Chris. That was fun, especially because he’d been easy to tease and fluster.
It wasn’t the same. But right now it was pretty close or maybe better.
Claire scrutinized the parking lot. People walked to and from the restaurant without paying attention to the cars. And anyway, right now the two of them looked like the picture-perfect hetero teen date.
She climbed awkwardly as far into Emily’s lap as she could get. Since she was small and Emily’s car had a big front seat, they’d made out like this before. But not like this. Half from reflex and half bravado, Claire kissed Em
ily hard. Emily’s arms came up around Claire with a tight desperation as their lips met.
When they broke apart, Emily’s eyes were still questioning her. And Emily looked too much like Chris. Claire’s head hurt from the inside out with the weight of being in the world with Chris but wanting to figure out how to kiss Emily.
She carefully got back into her seat.
“My house,” she said.
The sun sat low over the houses, but wouldn’t set for a while yet. Her mom’s car was out of the garage, and Claire figured they had at least two hours until they could expect her home. She took Emily’s hand and pulled her through the living room toward the bathroom. “I’m picking the movie,” she said. “You do the makeup.”
“What?”
“Put some on, I’m serious. And please take off that tie.”
She flicked on the TV and started flipping though the On Demand movies, though she didn’t care what they watched. Something shallow for background noise that they didn’t have to pay attention to.
Emily came out a few minutes later with a light touch of makeup around her eyes, solid foundation, a hint of blush and a lip shimmer. She’d fluffed her hair as much as she could, but it was still too short. Her pants and sweater were gender neutral enough to work either way and she’d taken off the button-down and tie.
Claire beckoned her to the couch. If she’d thought this through, she realized, she could have cued up “I Kissed a Girl” on the iPod speakers. When Emily sat, Claire leaned forward and gently traced the side of her face. She didn’t know what to say, or to expect, so she kissed her.
It wasn’t radically different from every other kiss they’d shared. They’d been kissing since Emily had come out to her, just not making out at length like they used to. Emily’s lips were warm, soft and familiar. But the presence of lip shimmer made the kiss sticky.
Claire pulled back. “This is silly.”
“What?”
She hopped up and got tissues and makeup wipes. “The other girl I kissed wasn’t wearing anything on her lips and my lip gloss on your shimmer is yucky.”
