Finding Tranquility

by Laura Heffernan

  “Yeah,” I said. No need to say more.

  When she put out one hand to shake, I thrust a stack of plates into it. Behind me, Val chuckled. Not fazed in the slightest, Julie grabbed a handful of silverware and spun toward the dining room. “When I get back, there better be coffee,” she called over one shoulder.

  By the time the table was set, the coffee bubbled on the stove. Val poured the steaming liquid into assorted heavy, ceramic mugs. No two matched each other or the plates.

  When we got married, Jess spent three weeks picking out the perfect china, making sure it matched the silverware, the glasses, the informal everyday dishes, and even the tablecloth. It took for-freaking-ever. She would’ve raised an eyebrow at the mishmash, but seeing handmade pottery decorate the roughly hewn wooden table somehow gave the place a homey feel.

  I needed to stop thinking about Jess. Even without anywhere else to go, I couldn’t turn around and go home. That ship sailed when I didn’t call her the moment the second plane hit the Twin Towers.

  Until I figured things out, Tranquility was my new home.

  Chapter 4

  People came and went at Tranquility. One girl took off the afternoon I arrived, having never spoken to me. A forty-something guy arrived on a Harley a few days later; he and Julie rode off into the sunset together shortly thereafter. Others came and went, many giving names as fake as my own. It didn’t matter. We all pitched in to keep the place running. Val and Henny never turned anyone away. Even when we filled up around Halloween, our hostesses slept on cots in the living room, giving their own bed to a young mother wearing a hijab and her three-year-old daughter. Everyone was welcome at Tranquility.

  Most of the guests kept to themselves, like I did. Even when we worked on two-person tasks like pulling up stumps, I kept my head down and spoke only when spoken to. For those first few weeks, I could count on one hand the number of times I voluntarily entered a conversation or offered up information about myself—none of it true, anyway. Physical labor helped me think, and I couldn’t think if I was chitchatting.

  About a month after I first showed up on the doorstep, I knelt in the side yard, pulling weeds, when an engine roared at the end of the driveway. Tires squealed, and the sound died. I barely had time to wonder about the new arrival before feet pounded up the steps. Moments later, a voice traveled through the open window above my head.

  “Hello?”

  A new visitor, apparently. Val was out back feeding the chickens, and Henny had gone into town to pick up a few things we couldn’t make or trade to get. I headed into the main room, pulling off my gloves and wiping them across my forehead. The grungy bandana that held my now longish hair out of my eyes while I worked got stuffed into a back pocket.

  “Excuse me? Anyone here?” Ding, ding, ding.

  An extraordinarily tall woman towered over the desk, in a skintight red mini-dress that matched her lipstick and hair exactly. She looked like a firework. On taking another look, I realized that she wore the highest heels I’d ever seen in my life. Once she removed them, she’d likely be about my height. Her frown remained as I appraised her.

  “What you looking at?” She demanded. “Ain’t you never seen a drag queen before?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. I was looking at your shoes.” Her face softened. “They’re amazing.”

  “They are pretty sweet, aren’t they? Anyway, I need a room.”

  “I can help you with that.” I summarized the rules and handed her the guest book when she nodded agreement. “Welcome to Tranquility. Are you working nearby?”

  “Girl, you think there’s an audience for a Chinese drag queen named Nina Wun-Wun these days?” She pronounced “Nina” with the long “i” sound. “I wear all red and walk around screaming things like ‘Help! Emergency!’ Shoot, I’m lucky no one used pitchforks when they ran me out of Buffalo. Second generation in America, I’m a citizen, but do they care? Of course they don’t care. Everyone walking around with non-lily-white skin these days is a terrorist. You spend a bit more time out in the sun, you might be in trouble, too.”

  She didn’t need to know how much trouble I was already in, so I raised my eyebrows at one tanned arm and kept my mouth shut.

  Nina kept up her monologue as she headed up the stairs. I grabbed her bags and followed. “Anyway, girl, I need a whole new act. New clothes, new make-up, a new name. I’m here until I figure my shit out. Meanwhile, you can call me Bo.”

  “Bo?”

  We’d reached the room, so I opened the door and carried her bags into the hallway. My friend took off her red wig, revealing close-cropped black hair. “Sure, honey. You don’t think I walk around like a lady man all the time, do you? Oh, hell no! I’m out of costume ninety-nine percent of the time. Bo is fine. And who the hell are you?”

  The change of subject was so abrupt, it took me a minute to remember the fake identity I’d been using for weeks. This was by far the most interesting person I’d ever met, and I had a million questions. But for now, he tapped one high-heeled foot, waiting for my answer. “Chris.”

  “You need to answer quicker, or people know it’s a lie.” Bo removed earrings and wiped off lipstick, transforming from red-headed bombshell to rather ordinary-looking black-haired, brown-eyed man in a matter of seconds. His eyes narrowed as he skimmed me from head to toe. “Oh, honey, you’re lucky you met me. You look lost, and helping people find themselves is my specialty.”

  ∞ ♡ ∞

  A few days later, I found myself in the barn, listening to the sweet rhythm of milk pinging into our metal buckets. Bo sat beside me, making small talk about the weather, the inn, the cows. When he paused for a minute, I seized the opportunity to ask a question that had been on my mind from the moment we met.

  “How long have you been doing drag?” I asked.

  “Feels like forever now,” he said. “I started dressing up like a girl for Halloween when I was a kid. My junior year of high school, I expanded into weekends. Then, when I turned eighteen and moved out of my parents’ house, I got a job at a local club.”

  “How did you get into it?”

  It took all my courage to work up the nerve to ask him about this. But I couldn’t live in a cooperative bed and breakfast in Vermont forever, so I needed to figure my shit out. Everything inside me told me that I didn’t want to be a guy anymore. Drag wasn’t the same as allowing myself to be a woman all the time, I knew that. Still, of everyone in my newly tiny social circle, he seemed the most likely to understand how I felt, trapped by my own skin.

  Bo leaned around the edge of the stall to meet my eyes. “Why? You looking for a new job?”

  I focused on the teat in front of me, on the stream of milk swishing into the bucket between my feet. “Just curious.”

  “Uh-huh. Like you were just curious about my bras and make-up? Yeah, I seen the way you eye my things.” His face vanished behind the partition, and a moment later, sounds of milk hitting the bucket reached me from the other side. “You don’t have to be embarrassed, you know. A man who puts on women’s clothes and dances around in front of people for a living ain’t in no position to judge anyone else.”

  I didn’t know how to express what I was thinking, so I focused on the task at hand. Milk neared the top of the bucket before I spoke again. “Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like.”

  “To wear women’s clothes?”

  “To...be...a woman.”

  These were words I’d never even allowed myself to think, much less say out loud. Not really. Maybe it was the illusion of isolation, each of us sitting in a separate stall. Maybe it was Bo, who had never been anything but open and honest with me. Or maybe it was that I felt like I was talking to Bessie, who cared not at all about my words or my gender, as long as I scratched behind her ears before leaving.

  “Well, the shoes are better, the pay is worse, and you’ll never be able to piss in public without standing in line for half an hour first.”

  I hung my head. I should’ve known he’d treat t
he whole thing as a joke. I was a joke. This wasn’t going to work out.

  His head appeared over the partition. “Hey, I’m sorry. My natural instinct is to go for the cheap laugh first. You shouldn’t be afraid to be who you are. I’m a boy who dresses in women’s clothes for a living, and that’s okay. If you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body, that’s okay, too. Really.”

  “Do you think that’s what’s wrong with me?”

  “I’m no therapist. I’m the last person to tell anyone there’s something ‘wrong’ with them or what it is.” I smiled at him. “But maybe there’s a reason you’re feeling so disconnected, and I can help you figure that out. Let’s go out tonight. See for yourself what it’s like.”

  My heart leaped at the thought, but fear made me shake my head.

  He continued, “Honey, you’re hiding in a cooperative bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. You don’t have any friends or family, right? What could you possibly have to lose?”

  He was right. I had no friends outside this property, no family who knew I was alive. If I put on the clothes and felt ridiculous, I could take them off, and no one ever had to know. I could write the whole thing off as youthful experimentation and move on with my life.

  If it felt right, maybe I’d waited long enough to find that out. Twenty-two years was a long time to live a lie.

  Still, this conversation put me miles outside of my comfort zone. “All those people looking at me? I don’t know.”

  “They won’t be looking at you. They’ll be looking at me. You think I’m going to make you up better than me? C’mon. I know how to do the natural look. We’ll find you something to wear. I’ll do your makeup. Your hair’s long enough now, you don’t even need a wig if you don’t want one. I can flat-iron it for you, maybe trim the ends a bit so it doesn’t look so scraggly.”

  Self-consciously, I touched my dark locks. They had grown a lot since I arrived. I like the way my hair looked a bit longer. “Where should we go?”

  “Does it matter? Any place you really want to go—or avoid?”

  Trying to hide a smile, I picked up my buckets. Bo had a keen eye for reading people, so no need to mention I’d prefer to avoid everyone I’d ever met. We weren’t likely to run into anyone up here, anyway. I scratched Bessie’s ears and followed Bo back to the house. “I guess it doesn’t matter where we go.”

  “There’s a college town about half an hour away,” he said. “We can drive to a bar if you want. Or maybe we should start out small. We’ll go to a movie theater, you can dress like a lady, sit in the dark, and realize there ain’t nobody out there who cares what you look like. We’re all the same sitting in a dark room, staring at that screen. Save the bar for next week.”

  The more he talked, the more excited I grew. It couldn’t hurt, just once, to try it. To see if dressing as someone else made me feel more like myself.

  By the time we handed the buckets over to Val back at the kitchen, I felt a million times lighter. I could do this. One night, go out, see what it’s like. Excitement filled me for the first time in as long as I could remember.

  Chapter 5

  Hours later, Bo led me into his room and shut the door firmly behind us. “Before we start, take off your shirt.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it is my job to make you look like a woman, and if you’ve got chest hair peeking out the top of my favorite bustier, it’s going to ruin the illusion.”

  More things I’d never thought about. Watching Jess get ready thousands of times, I’d focused on the movements of her fingertips, the lowered lashes when she applied mascara, the puckering of her lips, the smoothness of her skin. Not her lack of chest hair. It hadn’t occurred to me how much work it would take to make my outsides match my insides. I started to worry I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Or Bo had, anyway.

  “Stop thinking, start moving,” he said. “I’ve done this before, this is what you’ve been wanting to try your whole life, and I’m not about to let you talk yourself into chickening out at the last second. Shirt. OFF.”

  I pulled the T-shirt over my head and tossed it on the floor. My new friend appraised me for a minute before handing me a razor.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “You need to go into the shower, shave your face, your chest, and your armpits, and come back here. Shave your balls, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask any questions. You’ll thank me later. And don’t take too long, or I’ll come in and finish the job myself. I’ll be here, finding something for you to wear.”

  As I exited the door, razor in hand, he muttered behind me. “At least there’s no back hair.”

  Roughly half an hour later, I returned after removing quite a bit of hair, most of the skin off my testicles, and at least three quarts of my blood. A volcano of clothing erupted inside the room while I was gone. Skirts, dresses, pantyhose, belts, bras, and things I couldn’t even identify lay strewn across every surface.

  I offered Bo his razor, but he chucked it at the trash can in the corner. Probably a good idea, considering how much of my skin now coated the blade.

  “You’re a sadist,” I said. “Most painful half-hour of my life.”

  “Beauty is pain, darling. Learn it, live it, love it.”

  He directed me to sit at a stool in front of mirror draped with a towel and ordered me not to peek until he finished. I considered protesting, but my interest lay more in the final transformation than in how we achieved it. I could figure out all that other stuff later, once I saw if this “costume” felt more natural than the skin I wore every day

  Besides, after the horror he’d already caused me to inflict on myself, I feared what would happen if I ignored his warning.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, shut your eyes.”

  I obeyed. A moment later, a stabbing pain hit me in the forehead. “Ow! What’s that for? I wasn’t looking!”

  Bo blew on the top of my eye socket. Unless he was trying to piss me off, whatever he was doing didn’t work. I raised one hand to push him back, but he slapped my hand away.

  “I’m plucking your eyebrows. Now sit still, princess. Didn’t you say you used to play football? I thought you’d be able to take a little prick here and there.”

  “Being tackled is nothing compared to this,” I grumbled.

  I’d watched Jess pluck her eyebrows a dozen times, and she never screamed or jerked. All her nerve endings must have fallen out after years of abuse. What kind of asshole did this to themselves on purpose?

  Bo chuckled and raised the tweezers. I gritted my teeth but said nothing.

  His face hovered inches from mine as he plucked, dabbed, swept, blotted, and blew stray hairs off my face. When he finally finished, he wiped lotion across my brow. It felt so soothing, I could’ve kissed him.

  “Is that it?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re just getting started.”

  Bo picked up what looked like concealer and a large brush and went to work, the tip of his tongue clamped between his front teeth. A few times, he gave me directions to open or close something, but the room was otherwise silent. The air grew heavy with anticipation. The longer he took, the more I fretted that perhaps this was all a big mistake. Surely, if I was meant to look like this, it wouldn’t take so much time and effort, right? Maybe I looked even more wrong as a woman, and he couldn’t make me right?

  What if I was just losing my mind, and the whole thing was in my head? I’d been born a boy. In church, they said God didn’t make mistakes. Maybe it was time to go home, beg Jess’s forgiveness, and strive to be a better man. I could go to a therapist and learn to love myself. Then Jess and I might even start a family. That’s what people expected, right? Brett Cooper excelled at doing what other people told him.

  These and other doubts raced through my head in an endless loop as Bo continued his ministrations.

  Finally, he set down his brushes and stepped back. “Beautiful!”

  �
��Can I look?”

  “Nope. We have to do a couple more things.” He picked up the concealer that had been cast aside what felt like about three hours earlier.

  “Can you conceal after you put on everything else?” I asked.

  “This isn’t for your face, honey. It’s for your breasts.”

  “My what?”

  “Your breasts. Those beautiful, bouncy balls of flesh us womenfolk have sitting on our chests that we like to put on display when we’re in public? You know what those are?”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the concept.” I gestured at the mountain of clothing on the bed. “Can’t I just wear a good push-up bra?”

  “You can, and you will. But sometimes nature still needs a little help. That’s where I come in. Now sit back and shut up while I give you some cleavage.”

  I couldn’t begin to see what he was going to accomplish with a brush and some makeup, but I’d already promised to give myself over to this process, so I leaned back and shut up.

  A few minutes later, Bo stopped back a second time, walking around and scrutinizing me from all angles.

  “I changed my mind. You need a wig,” he said. “I’m not sure I have time to trim you after all, and your hair’s not quite long enough to pull back to hide the split ends.”

  “Do you have more than one wig?”

  “Do I have more than one wig? What kind of drag queen do you think I am?” Bo pulled a trunk out from under the tiny bed and flung the top open. “Now, Nina Wun-Wun is dead, but I do love her red wigs, so I’m going to wear that one until I can figure out my new character. But you can be blond, brunette, have striking raven-colored locks… There’s even a rainbow wig in here for Pride, once you can handle it.”

  I grinned, considering the possibilities. The chestnut color of my own hair was fine, if not terribly exciting, but the point of this experiment was to become someone else. “Give me the one on the right. We’ll see if blondes really do have more fun.”