by Melanie Finn
“My wife struggled with that,” Christianne said. “She just wanted some small acknowledgment from her children that her careful mothering meant something.”
“Did she get it?”
“I thought so. But just not in the form my wife wanted or needed.”
Rose drew up an image of Miranda, tall and bold and certain. What was it like to be so certain? She felt herself smile: “My daughter kicks ass.”
“Good for her!” Christianne raised her glass.
They spoke about Santa Fe.
Christianne said: “I love the mountains. I love the history. The landscape that you just walk out into. But a lot of it is rich old white people with too much money, having colonic irrigation and culturally appropriating Native American spirit ancestors or whatever. I find it ridiculous, but I also realize, I’m rich and white, and an appropriator, too.”
A moment passed. They finished their food, Rose careful not to scrape the plate too loudly. “Why did you contact me?” Rose asked. “I don’t really think it was to return those photos.”
The waiter was there again. Did they want another bottle? Rose demurred — she had to drive. He cleared their plates, asked about dessert. After conferring, they decided on the crème brûlée and the raspberry mousse, and they’d split.
“Did you learn that from women?” Rose asked.
“Oh, yes. As a man I never wanted to share my dessert. I felt I’d hunted it and killed it, it was mine.”
Those years and years ago, parked in his car on Moorehouse Lane, the warm summer dark when there were still lanes and fields in Lowell, Chris had made her laugh. He’d been an incredible mimic, he could reproduce Miss Vickers, the uptight chemistry teacher, with deadly accuracy. And Rose remembered how Rosie had felt safe with Chris. Maybe because of the femininity hidden within him.
“To answer your question —” Christianne was neatly dividing the desserts. “I think — right, ‘I think’ — I think it was because we’d been happy together. You and I. We were in a little cocoon. Everything before and everything around and everything after were so complex and sometimes cruel and almost belligerently confusing. You were like this lovely night light.”
Rose felt startled — the idea that she could have given anyone light all those years ago when she’d been bumping around in the dark, someone always changing the position of the furniture so she could never find her way. Christianne seemed to have known an entirely different version of her, a talented, clever, light-filled Rosie with amazing breasts. To deflect, Rose said: “Couldn’t you have just started wearing women’s clothes?”
“No.”
“Do you sleep with men?”
“Once.”
“Did he know?”
“I’d paid him. So he didn’t ask. I just wanted to know what it felt like.”
Rose could not quite explain the anger she felt rising. The audacity — perhaps — required to hire a prostitute, because that is what men do, they hire women for sex and don’t care what they feel or think, don’t consider their repulsion, and they deny it has any value. The joke she’d heard Bob snicker to Silas: “What do you call the useless flesh around a vagina? A woman.” Haw haw.
“And what did it feel like?” The heat began now, the furnace heat sweating and staining the lovely silk $259 blouse.
“Wonderful. It felt absolutely wonderful.”
Rose put down her fork. “Good for you.”
Christianne heard the tone. Maybe this had happened before, the easy chat, the appearance of tolerance and acceptance. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“What? Talk about what?” Rose challenged her now. Her hair was sweating for God’s sake, her eyebrows, behind her ears! “My tits look like something that got left in the microwave for too long.”
“Rosie —”
“No. Rose. You think you’re so good at listening but you didn’t hear. All I could do to change myself was to drop the ‘i.’” She pushed the chair back, she frantically fanned herself with the starch-stiffened napkin. The sweat was dripping down her back, pooling in the heavy-duty waistband of the compression pants that now felt like tightly wrapped cling film. She was a human sauna.
“Being a woman is not about having tits and a cunt and a manicure. Chris, you’re from the other side, you probably took your daughter up the aisle and gave her away —”
People were looking at her, Rose knew but did not care. Christianne, though, was averting her gaze.
“— to her husband. Do you know what that means? Do you even know there was no such thing as ‘marital rape’ until 1983? The law didn’t recognize that a man could rape his wife, because the law — written by rich white men like you, like you were until very recently — saw women as chattel —”
In a flash Christianne flung her glass of water in Rose’s face.
“Stop!”
Rose stopped.
Christianne was shaking, her eyes brimmed with tears. “Do you think I need a lecture?”
Rose wiped the water from her face.
“This isn’t a statement I’m making.” Christianne’s voice was slow and even. “It’s my life.”
Slowly, elegantly, she stood. “Don’t worry about the bill, it’s on my room.” She rounded the table and walked away, the broad shoulders in a tailored cotton blouse above the narrow hips in a sleek suede skirt and the hairless, muscular calves funneling to narrow ankles, the big feet in Italian sling-back sandals, so very nearly pulling it off.
For a long moment, Rose sat. Around her, the other diners carried on, tilting in to discuss or chuckle, the old trannie and her old friend having an argument. The internal heat had diffused, but of course she was soaking wet with water and sweat. She reached over and finished Chris’s glass of wine in one slug.
The waiter came. “Will there be anything else, madame?”
“No. I think that’s been quite enough.” And there it was, the insertion of ‘I think,’ bracketed with a question. So she said, louder, deeper: “It’s been quite enough.” She drained her own glass and stood. Lacking Christianne’s practiced slink, Rose tramped out in her thrift-store shoes, her thrift-store bag briefly catching on the back of a chair. She didn’t bother to apologize to the occupant. Fuck these people, anyway, with their coulis and their soup spoons. Bennett telling her to scoop the soup away from her, tilting the bowl delicately, and absolutely no slurping.
In the lobby, people spilled out from the private party. Glittering, laughing. She noticed their teeth, because the teeth of rich people are different to the teeth of the poor. Rich teeth are white and straight and gleaming. These teeth were snapping all around her, bright as flashbulbs, and for a moment she was bewildered. Somehow, the group had pulled her into their eddy — her hair, her clothes, she was one of the tribe.
“…lovely bistro on the Ile St. Louis…”
“…Bunny is expecting to hear from you the moment you get to Vienna…”
“…Cap d’Antibes…”
“…Darling…”
“…Hobie, old chap…”
“…do you know Fritz and Wally…”
Rose turned, hooked like a fish by the name. And there he was, with his age app switched on. On his body, he wore a full old-body suit, a prosthetic body that rounded his shoulders and flattened his ass. Hobie’s chin jutted more than she remembered, his hair was thinner but still substantial for an old man. On his arm was the woman from the bathroom, dazzling in her pale blue sheath dress.
They swept past Rose, so close she could smell their lavender soap — it came wrapped in paper from a special savonnier in France — they moved on their tide of tidings, fluid, lubricated by vintage port and private healthcare. Polo refers only to ponies. The room behind them was almost empty — a stooped white-haired woman was rummaging around in her handbag, the wait staff were clearing up the dishes. Rose picked up a napkin. Its silver letters said: BON VOYAGE HOBIE AND BIZZA!
“Personally, I don’t care for travel these days.” The woman
had arrived at Rose’s side. “In my day, there was only one cabin. And it was slanted. The cheaper seats were always down in the rear. Gravity, my husband used to say, you can’t fight it. Now, well! People travel in their pajamas.”
Rose looked non-committal.
“But he’s got to keep up with her, you see. She’s so much younger. Good luck, good luck, I say.”
“Where are they going?”
The woman sized her up, just like Chip at the club all those years ago. Perhaps she was blind, perhaps she saw only the expensive clothes not the shoes, and so she engaged: “’Round-the-world. Europe. Kenya. Honk Kong. She’s from Australia, that’s where they’re ending up.”
Out the door, in the lobby, Rose could just see the back of their heads, Hobie’s white hair, Bizza’s thick brunette mane swept into a bun. They were chatting, laughing with their friends. From this angle, Rose could see Bizza’s profile; she was — in fact — closer to her own age: note the slight slackening of the skin around her jaw line when she tilted her head down. Hobie did not see Rose, he did not sense her. And anyway, he would not remember her. He would not remember the power he’d had. Possibly, he had even intended to help her — but like that, with his pocket money for an abortion?
Rose sat in her car in the crepuscular gloom of the parking lot. She was unable to sort out her feelings, perhaps because of the wine, but she suspected there was no sorting out — neat little plastic tubs of laundry, whites, coloreds, permanent press, regret, blame. For a very long time, her life had been incredibly still — mid-pond on a summer day. She had, herself, made sure of this: the steady jobs, the careful spending, the careful friending. The years of raising Miranda had left her exhausted, though she’d been unable to calibrate at the time. Not merely the anxiety about money, but actual, physical exhaustion; the healthcare jobs, the waitressing, the kitchen work that required her to be on her feet more than eight hours a day, sometimes 12, then driving home in the dark, Miranda curled up in the back seat, only to get up six hours later to take her to school. The pretense had cost her, too: the lie that Bennett had left money for Christmas and birthday presents. And that he wasn’t dead and buried in the basement. Rotting in the earth beneath their feet. All that Miranda never knew, all that she must never know. Rose blew the fringy bit of her new hairstyle out of her eyes — it was supposed to cover her frown lines. She wanted a drink, this would be the time to have a flask of brandy. She put the keys in the ignition, and the car beeped at her, seatbelt, engine, car door, all different beeps. So she pulled out the keys. And sat.
Why — the question like a loud bell kept ringing — why become a woman? What on earth appealed to Chris? She thought her body was hers — that was the difference, for she’d created it. Chris-Christianne would never have the visits to the doctor, feet up, splayed open, lit up, sometimes a medical student nervously peering in, oh yes, step right up, step right up and look inside, a circus exhibit. Breasts squashed in a machine, the delicate tissue flattened like pita bread. Women’s bodies are communal, they always have been, a father gives away his daughter as a spare hammer or chain saw. A grandmother sends her granddaughter up the stairs and along the hall to help pay the bills with her seven-year-old body. Does that feel good. Do you like it when I do this. No question mark attached! Tampons, douches, diaphragms, penises, fingers, speculums — all go into your body, in and out, in and out, like a busy parking spot. Until no one wants it anymore and it’s more like an abandoned shopping mall, windy and weedy. Ginny’s mother had been having problems with her vagina actually falling out like a sock — apparently, this is common for women in their 80s — and the mother had taken the doctor’s advice and simply had her vagina sewn shut and that was the end of that. Yet Christianne had chosen to make one. The idea of womanhood was entirely different for her, not merely the form but the context.
A couple sauntered past her car, arm-in-arm. Their laughter echoed around the cement walls. The man’s hand drifted down onto the woman’s ass and gave it a squeeze.
Rose exhaled. Perhaps what really made her angry with Christianne was her ability to transform — to have such a clear vision of her authentic self. Perhaps it hardly mattered that she’d cut off her penis and dug a hole in the flesh between her thighs; these were either physical mutilations or corrections. She was free in a way Rose wished to be free.
Grubbing around in her handbag for her phone, she rang the hotel and asked for Christianne’s room. She picked up, but said nothing. Rose imagined her there, in her room, mascara running down her face, feeling defeated and sad and old. She’d taken the same kind of preparatory care Rose had.
“I’m sorry,” Rose began. “I can’t take it back and I can’t even say I didn’t mean some of it. But you don’t deserve to be hurt like that.”
The silence continued.
“I’m in my car, here in the hotel parking lot, and I want to drive to Lowell right now and I’m wondering if you’ll come with me.”
Christianne sighed softly. “I’ll be at the front of the hotel.”
The drive was mostly wordless and this heightened Rose’s awareness of the woman sitting next to her: the shifting of silk, the clink of bracelets, the lemony scent of lotion. She could even hear Chris’s stomach gurgle. When Rose pulled off Route 3, Christianne murmured a soft, ambiguous, “Oh.”
In the darkness, street-lit, neon-winking, blind-alley-ed, Lowell emerged around them, the way a dream transforms the familiar into the strange and absurd and unpredictable, and Rose found herself in the landscape of de Chirico, the shadows in the wrong places or not where she remembered them. Within them lurked the misshapen flotsam that sometimes emerged when she couldn’t sleep.
Rose and Christianne knew the roads, a grid laid down over which humanity had hung its shabby, transitory décor. Trees had been cut down, there was a parking garage where the Dairy Queen had been, yet the schools, the parks remained, haplessly pinned in time and space. The town retained its deeper sensibility — the slipperiness of its exits, its horizontality. The idea of a dream was persistent and filled Rose with unease. She was so very far from home and suddenly sure something terrible was about to happen.
“I want to turn around,” she said.
“No.” Christianne was firm. “I need to know that this place is real. We were here.”
They drove on, turn upon turn through this facsimile town, arriving by unspoken agreement at Chris’s house, or where it had been, for now there stood a brown brick office building, the suites for various doctors of internal medicine, their titled names illuminated on a white sign under a fake carriage light. Christianne got out and stood, peering at the sign and then the office block, short-sighted in middle-age, her silk shirt sticking to her narrow back. Above her, the night frayed into a dull brown sky, pocked by plane lights, absent of stars. Far-off traffic hummed along the interstate and the busy main roads, and, occasionally, a car closer by, the noise un-zippering and zippering the air of the still, abandoned street.
At last Christianne returned to the car, folding herself into the front seat with considered femininity — her hand flattening her skirt along her buttocks before sitting.
“Are you OK?” Rose ventured quietly.
“I’m glad the house is gone, I’m glad it’s obliterated.” Christianne exhaled. Her eyes sparkled, tears accumulating. “That little boy. He was so unhappy.”
As teenagers, they had never spoken of childhoods, for the whole purpose of being 16 had been to abandon the past like a sacked town, just as they never spoke of their home lives — for they were leaving that, too, discarding the adults who held the car keys and locked the doors and who had incrementally diminished over years to their actual life-size. Neither Rose nor Rosie knew what had really happened to Chris, though Rose sensed some sly brutality, some bruiseless damage that injured the deeper tissue of the child. The shouting, drunken parents, the deep-space silence Chris had sometimes entered. Rose put out her hand, and Christianne returned the gesture. They held hands
as once they had, back then unable to fathom the superpower of their connection.
“Where is he?” Rose asked.
Christianne put her hand on her chest, which heaved with a sudden sob. “Safe.”
“Your house now,” she said. Yet Rose faltered. Dread scrolled down from the sky, that suffocating fabric unpinned and smothered her face.
“Come on, I’ll drive.” Christianne was already getting out of the car. They switched places, and Chris removed her high heels. “These bastards,” she hissed. “Are dead. And we’re not.”
Gran’s house remained, wedged as always within a row of similar architectural refrain. It was painted white now, and Rose considered the effort it must have taken the owners to obscure the dark brown. Otherwise, the house was anonymous, the owners gave no outward hint of their political or financial status. There was no evidence of children or pets. Instinctively, Rose glanced up to the second floor, not to her room — for that was at the back — but the lodger’s room. Gran would not take pets or children. These lodgers had moved on a secret tide, the swift, merciless currents of their adult lives swept them in, then out, in mystery and melancholy. The Giggle Man had been among them, and if she looked up she might see him move into the frame of the window, his narrow grey face, she now remembered the angularity of it, the froth of eyebrow, for she had glimpsed the wiry hairs emerging like restless antennae as he had peered down at her. He’d been so deliberate, so careful to avoid her genitals. That way he couldn’t be accused of sexually molesting her. It was just tickling, he could say, just tickles and giggles. All anyone heard was her laughter.
Rose pressed herself back into the car seat as his gloved hands moved up her legs — oh, her body remembered with spiteful and treacherous accuracy! — he pricked and squeezed her bare legs and even a violent Charlie horse upon her thighs and the relentless playing on her bare torso and armpits do you like it when I do this as if she could say No. But then Christianne’s voice was commanding, suddenly male: “You’re here with me, with me. Rose. Look, look at me.” And Rose saw the familiar face, the boy who’d held her and whom she’d held in return, and she leaned forward and kissed him, and Christianne kissed back with familiarity, tongues flickering, mouth hard to mouth as if resuscitating, half-laughing and amazed by the sizzling of flesh, the vibration of nerves through the spine and the groin.