Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  “If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me what’s going on with you. It’s not unusual for boys your age to struggle with anger and sometimes depression. Your mother is worried about you, and I’d like us to have productive visits here. What you say to me is confidential.”

  Right, I thought, my ass. I had the distinct impression that it was confidential as long as it fit within his expectations. There was no way I was going to tell him the truth and trust him not to talk to my parents.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I told him.

  “Why don’t we start with a small test,” he said.

  He handed me a clipboard with the usual depression questions that were on tests like this all over the Internet. Did I have a loss of appetite? Was I having trouble sleeping? Did I think about suicide? I answered it, putting in some positives and fudging the other answers toward the middle.

  He looked at it for a few minutes, nodding. “What about anger?” he asked. “Do you have a lot of anger?”

  Yeah, I wanted to tell him, but it’s because of all the fucking testosterone that my mutant gonads are shooting into my bloodstream. “I suppose,” I said. “I don’t yell and stuff, but I can get pretty mad.”

  “What makes you angry?” he asked.

  “My brother’s a pest. Some of my teachers are pretty stupid.” Oh, and did I mention that I’m stuck in the wrong body 24/7 and people keep treating me like someone I’m not?

  “What about your father?”

  His question cut through my thinking. Why did he want to know about Dad?

  “Dad’s okay,” I said, picking at the round border at the edge of the couch arm. “He’s a regular dad, you know. He’s not home a lot these days, now that he has the building job.”

  “Has he ever hit you?” he asked.

  I was on to his line of questioning. He thought I was all depressed and pissed off because I was abused and sublimating my anger at my father. I debated whether it would work to use the word “sublimating” out loud to him, but then he’d probably say I was transferring my anger at my father on to him. I’d read plenty of psychology books while trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

  “No, not really. He whipped me a few times when I was misbehaving, when I was a kid,” I told him, all of which was actually true. It’s important when hiding something big to tell as many small, distracting truths as possible.

  Dr. Webber rubbed his chin, which would have looked very distinguished except that his face was too square and smooth to really pull it off without looking self-mocking. “And what were you doing to misbehave?”

  Wearing a dress, I thought. “I was going through my parents’ stuff,” I said. “I was eight, and I was curious. I think he had his porn stash in there or something.” I went on spinning a story that was as close to the truth as possible without actually revealing the important details.

  I went into my mom’s closet a lot as a kid. I loved the way her clothes felt. I’d rub her dresses against my cheeks and sometimes I’d fall asleep in there. My parents thought it was cute. I guess they thought I was comforted by her smell, or the close darkness of the closet, both of which were true, but what I loved most was dreaming of the day when I would grow up and get to wear clothes like that.

  One afternoon when they were out and the babysitter was watching TV, I figured I’d try some of them on, in practice for that far-off day when they’d be mine. In my kid’s logic I’d already given up on changing my name as a way to change sex, but I still figured that when we grew up, Mikey would get all of Dad’s stuff and I’d get all of Mom’s stuff and when I got to wear her clothes for real, I’d become the woman I was supposed to be.

  Dad caught me in one of Mom’s summer dresses and that was the end of that fantasy. I stayed out of the closet from then on, but not because of the beating. What really scared me was the way Dad stayed quiet the whole time. The few other times he’d spanked me in the past, he’d talked through the whole thing, telling me what I did wrong and how he was sorry to have to spank me but it was for my own good and so on. This time he didn’t say a word, and I knew I’d done something so awful he couldn’t talk about it.

  I told Dr. Webber that I was making a real mess in their room and didn’t mention dresses. He nodded and made understanding sounds. I kept an eye on the clock and kept talking.

  I was trying to draw these stories out as long as possible and fill up the hour. I told him about another time Dad gave me a whipping for stealing some of his tools and burying them out back of the house. Actually the tools were mine. Dad gave me a toolbox for my tenth birthday and I was trying to get rid of it, but that story sounded close enough. Dr. Webber kept asking for more details about how I felt, what I remembered Dad saying, and I paused as long as I could before answering, pretending to scour my memory for details about each one. The minutes ticked by.

  At the end of the hour, Dr. Webber shook my hand and said we’d see each other again next week.

  I got into the car and looked out the window, trying not to feel like I’d been kicked in the gut. Saturday, I told myself, that would make it all worthwhile.

  “Mom, can I take Claire to the city on Saturday for a movie?” I asked.

  I planned to go whether or not Claire would come with me, but saying that I wanted to take Claire made the trip sound less suspicious. If Claire didn’t want to come, she’d probably cover for me. Or if she wasn’t talking to me, at least she wouldn’t be around for my mom to ask how she liked the movie.

  “At night?”

  “No, a matinee. We’ll be back by eight.”

  “All right,” she said.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. One more day of school and then the blessed weekend would be here and Minneapolis and Natalie. I really wanted Claire to come with me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CLAIRE

  She paced across the living room and into her bedroom and back to the living room again. Then she tried to stop. Then she paced again. Chris had gone to the shrink today, and she wanted to know what he’d said and how it went. If there was some psychological way for him to fix Chris’s problem, she hoped he’d listen to it. Chris could be stubborn when he made up his mind on something, which was actually pretty rare.

  When the phone on the end table rang, she lunged for it. It was Chris’s number on caller ID.

  “How was Dr. No?” she asked, recasting the psychologist as the villain from the first James Bond movie.

  Chris laughed, but it was a sharp sound. “As well as you’d expect.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Lousy. He’s no good. There’s no way he’s going to help.” His voice was a low monotone.

  “Come on, you don’t know until you try,” she suggested, trying not to let her disappointment show in her voice. Life would be so much simpler if this was something Chris could solve in therapy.

  “He just wanted me to talk about how angry I am and if Dad ever beat me. He thinks I’m an abused kid with a bunch of pent- up rage.”

  “You are kind of angry,” Claire ventured. He didn’t show it often, but there were times she could feel Chris’s body vibrate with tightly held frustration.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But now you know why.”

  “True.” She sighed.

  She wondered if she could get her mom to send her to a therapist for a bit. Maybe she could find one who did know what to do about a teen who thought they were transsexual. Even just having someone confidentially to talk to felt like a good idea, but then she’d have to talk about her own life too and her feelings about her father leaving and all of that. She didn’t want to go digging around in there until it was time to write her memoir.

  “Hey.” Chris’s voice brightened. “Want to go to a movie in Minneapolis on Saturday?”

  “Why not just go to one out here?” Claire loved going into the Cities for any reason, but she didn’t want to show her excitement too soon. Since she was always the one pushing for a field trip, the fact tha
t Chris brought it up meant that he had something planned, and she wanted to know what that was before she got her hopes up.

  “We’re meeting a friend. From my support group online,” he said.

  “A transsexual? Really?”

  “Claire!”

  “What?” She tried to sound innocent, though she was a little embarrassed by her own outburst. Still, she’d never met a real transsexual before and she was curious.

  “That’s kind of…reductive,” Chris said. “We’re more than a one-word label, you know, and I think Natalie would rather be called a girl.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” She paused and wondered if she should apologize more, or if that was enough. “Okay, movie on Saturday.”

  They hung up and she stood and looked at the phone as if it was going to ring again and answer all the questions still chasing each other around her brain.

  Chris talked about everything so naturally: being a girl, meeting another transsexual girl in the Cities, but it felt so alien to Claire and vaguely disgusting. She tried to imagine Chris with long hair and breasts and in her mind it looked so wrong.

  Mom was out in the living room watching TV, so Claire dropped onto the couch with her. She’d learned long ago that if she maintained a certain amount of Mom-time every week, she could get away with just about anything. Her mom acted younger than Chris’s parents, even though she was a little bit older, and often Claire felt like she had more of a big sister than a parent. That bugged her in junior high when life was tougher and she wanted a parent she could ask for help, but now she appreciated how she had so much more freedom than other kids at her school.

  “I’m going to the city with Chris on Saturday,” she said.

  “Are you having sex with him?” Mom asked.

  “Whoa, where’d that come from? No,” she protested.

  “Honestly, Claire, I want you to tell me if you are.”

  For a moment she considered what would happen if she said “Mom, he thinks he’s a girl” but Chris would kill her.

  “No, Mom, we’re not having sex. We fool around and stuff, but I don’t want to get pregnant or anything, that would be a real mess. Besides, I might turn out to be a lesbian.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I swear, Claire, you make this stuff up just to torment me.”

  “I thought that was my job,” Claire replied automatically, but she was thinking about how her mom had no idea what a person could be tormented with. She wanted to be supportive of Chris, but she couldn’t shake the nagging concern that he wasn’t right, that all this stuff about transsexualism was wrong.

  “Oh, I’ve seen this one before,” Mom said, and Claire looked up as she switched the channel from Law & Order to Law & Order: SVU. Pretty much either of them could turn on the TV at any time and there would be some Law & Order show on. Mom could go for months sitting on the couch every evening watching crime shows, and then suddenly she’d decide she was ready to date again and be out almost every night of the week socializing with the women from work and trying to meet a decent man. Claire’s money was on that happening in April this year.

  Although the crime shows always followed the same pattern, that felt more comforting than boring. The contents of the stories were sensational enough that Claire found she could always watch one, so 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 pre-operative transsexual. A bolt of electricity jagged through Claire. She looked upward and asked God silently, Are you hinting? Seemingly random coincidences like this were usually the divine trying to get her attention. There would be some message for her either in this show or the one right after it.

  Of course the story was overblown, with the character having accidentally killed a man to protect her secret and then being sent to men’s prison where she was severely beaten. At the end of the episode, she was shown being wheeled into the emergency room, bloodied 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?

  As the credits rolled, she picked up her glass of water and took a long drink, and when she looked up again the image on the screen made her jump so hard she spilled half the water in her lap. The face speaking into the camera had no nose and only part of a mouth and the eyes were surrounded by what looked like a mass of melted skin fused into place. Claire’s breath froze in her throat.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” her mom said. “I didn’t mean to scare you I just wanted to show you this while it was on. It’s amazing. This man was terribly burned as a kid, and now he makes films to help families of burn victims.”

  Claire stared at the man’s ruined face as he spoke. He had a deep voice that didn’t fit his hairless features. He was talking about how hard it was for his siblings to deal with the aftereffects of the fire in their home that had scarred him, and how he wanted to help kids with these kinds of burns just feel like normal kids. The longer he talked, the more Claire could see the person he was, the kind soul, rather than the terrifying face.

  This was an imperfect world, one in which children could be burned and hurt, or even born into a body that was wrong for them. In this man’s case his own tragedy became his life’s work. Hardship was a way in which people could really connect with each other and could show their greatness. Maybe Chris would turn out to be like this man, someone who taught others how to deal with hard situations with grace and compassion. Or maybe his journey would take him somewhere else, but as she wouldn’t blame this man for his scars, she wasn’t going to blame Chris just because she felt afraid about transsexualism.

  And that was the basis of it. Her reaction to the burned man’s face showed her this clearly. She had been startled, and while her startled reaction to Chris’s news had been slower, it was similar. 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 transsexuals?

  If I keep loving him, what am I?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Though I generally liked the man, I avoided Dad as often as I could, 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 b
eamed and smacked my shoulder a couple more times, then sauntered off to work. When my dad was working, he was generally a happy man. The few times in life he’d been out of work were miserable for all of us.

  I grabbed a few 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, but this was the time of year she started to get busy with all the clubs so I didn’t worry about it.

  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 while 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 said 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 said and 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 said again and bolted. The walls were a blur closing in around my head.

  An assignment to pretend we were the opposite sex, who comes up with something like that? And how was I supposed to do it? My body was fading 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, just for those few minutes between waking and having to move, I was a girl with no stupid physiology to contradict me.