Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  I had to get out of the school building without looking like I had to get out. By force of will I kept my feet steady, past my locker, past the lobby, into the biting cold, my car, the key in the ignition. Wait for it to warm up. Forget English class.

  Up until I was about nine or ten years old, I still held out hope that I would grow up to be a woman, even though the evidence was mounting against that idea. When the other girls started to speculate about what it would be like to get their period, I imagined that a period was the end of childhood, like the end of a sentence, and after that I’d get the right body parts. I was old enough to have given up on a magical solution, but somehow I convinced myself that my problem would be sorted out through puberty, that I would start to grow breasts and that thing between my legs would recede and I would become like the other girls.

  It didn’t help that my best friend at the time, Jessie, started to grow her breasts just before her tenth birthday. For years we’d both been flat-chested and then a few weeks before her birthday she snuck me into her room to show me the tiny bumps her breasts had become. We’d been comparing bodies on and off for a couple years, ever since she’d talked me into peeing in the woods with her on a park outing with our families.

  “I want my breasts to start growing too,” I told her. She looked at me like I wasn’t a real person. I slammed out of her bedroom and didn’t talk to her for a couple of weeks.

  I thought about that incident over a year later when I woke up to find that my nipples ached and felt swollen. For days I floated on clouds. I was going to show her and everyone. But the happy feeling just dissipated. I didn’t grow breasts. Instead I grew a couple inches in the space of a summer, my shoulders widened, and I started sprouting hair on my chest.

  I drove over to Claire’s. I couldn’t go home. I didn’t have swim practice and soon Dad and Mikey would be home. I couldn’t let myself cry with them in the house. And I needed to know where I stood with Claire.

  When I got out of the car I realized I’d left my coat at school. Fumbling the key into her front door, I pushed into the house shaking with cold. I planned to have a little cry and then wash my face and wait for her to come home so we could talk, but that planning part of my brain wasn’t running the show.

  I walked through the living room and into her room feeling like someone was crushing my chest, like I’d gone underwater and couldn’t get to the surface. My eyes swung from side to side looking for anything that would stop this feeling. Without thinking about it, I opened her closet door and curled myself into the bottom. Ever since I was a kid hiding in my mom’s closet, I’ve found comfort in dark, enclosed places. The small part of my mind that was still thinking told me I was being an idiot, a baby, a wuss, a fool and a dozen other sneers.

  I leaned against the back wall of the little space and finally managed to cry a few of the thousand tears I’d been saving up from the past months. Wiping my face, I looked at my hands. My freakishly huge hands. I hated them. I hated this stupid body. Whose bright idea was it to make me a boy? Was it so hard to put a girl together? Did they just run out of girl bodies that day? Did I do something miserable in a past life? Maybe I’d been Hitler or Stalin.

  “Chris?” Claire called from the living room, and then a little closer. “Chrissy?”

  God bless her.

  I cracked the door and crawled out to see her looking down at me with wide eyes.

  “Sorry,” I managed, hating my deep voice.

  She knelt down on the carpet and grabbed my hands. “What happened?”

  “Weird stuff,” I said. I cleared my throat and wiped a hand across my face again, managing to smear snot across the back of it. “Tissue?”

  She grabbed a box off her desk and handed it to me. “You look terrible.”

  “Cooper gave us this crazy assignment, to pretend we wake up tomorrow the opposite sex.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “And then this girl in my class was…she was just joking about it, but I couldn’t deal because I just—” My voice broke and tears started again. “I just want to be a girl so bad. Am I completely messed up?”

  Claire put an arm around my shoulders and dragged me to her chest. After all the times she’d curled into me, it felt so weird to lean my monstrously huge body against her, but it was also wonderful to feel held.

  “You’re okay,” she said. “You just have a girl brain in a boy’s body. Which I think makes me a lesbian trapped in a straight girl’s body.”

  I laughed and she laughed, and then I cried some more. When I finally sat up and blew my nose, I felt a lot more peaceful. That was when I saw that Claire looked worse than me. Her eyes were bloodshot and creased with tiredness.

  “You look like you were up all night,” I said.

  “Pretty much. I think I fell asleep for an hour in the middle.”

  “Of what?”

  She pushed up from the floor and I stood with her. Her bed was made, like usual, but with big wrinkles in the middle of the comforter and four books open on it.

  “Binge reading,” she said and grinned. “Come on, make me a sandwich.”

  We went into the kitchen together. Claire was a much better cook than me, but I had one specialty dish: the grilled cheese sandwich. I think it only tasted better when I made it because she didn’t have to do any work, but she insisted I had a special knack.

  “When’s your mom coming home?” I asked.

  “Late,” Claire said. “She has a date and he’s picking her up from work.”

  I wrapped the kitchen apron around my waist and tied it. Claire sat on one of two stools set up by the edge of the counter so people could talk to the cook. I put a big pan on to warm and pulled the bread, cheese and butter out of the fridge. The butter was the key ingredient. I believe that like popcorn, grilled cheese is just a fancy butter-delivery system.

  “I’ve been freaking out,” Claire said. “And I might freak out more, okay? But I think I’m good for now.”

  I took a long breath in. She wouldn’t have asked me to make sandwiches or called me “Chrissy” if she was going to just throw me out, right?

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Did you know that the Bible actually talks about transsexuals?” she replied.

  The breath I’d taken didn’t seem to want to come out now. “Um,” I managed.

  If she was going to get all right-wing Christian on me, I’d leave mid-sandwich. Claire had this kind of weird system of religious belief that I didn’t really understand. My parents took me and Mikey to church every now and then, but we didn’t make a fuss about it. Claire’s family had taken her to church a lot when she was young and apparently she really dug it, but then when she hit her teenage years, she started reading The Gnostic Gospels and getting really into the early Christians and the formation of the Bible and all that. Then she read the mystics, which included St. John of the Cross and his cloud of unknowing, which she was always going on about.

  I had no idea what the mystics thought about transsexualism.

  “There’s this bit in Isaiah,” she said and hopped off the stool.

  I turned the pan down because I wasn’t going to start cooking the sandwiches yet, just in case I had to run for it.

  Claire came out with her Bible and read: “For thus says the Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’”

  “Are you calling me a eunuch? Really?” I put down the spatula and started to untie the apron.

  “No!” she said. “Just listen to me for a minute because this is really cool.”

  I stopped untying the apron string and folded my arms. The frying pan was probably getting too hot even at the lower burner setting, but I didn’t care.

  “Back when the Bible was written, the Romans didn’t have a wor
d for transsexual. But their word ‘eunuch’ included three categories of people. Only one of those is what we mean by ‘eunuch’ today. And one of the other categories includes men who chose not to procreate with women and those who dressed and acted like women. It includes transsexuals.”

  “You stayed up all night reading about this?”

  She put the Bible on the edge of the counter and sat back on the stool.

  “I was really afraid,” she said. “I’m still afraid, kind of. I read bunches of stuff, about the brain studies and how there’s actually a lot of transsexual people. Well, not a ton, but more than I thought. But, you know, nothing’s more important to me than having a loving relationship with God, and I know people twist the Bible to say all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s not like I’m a literalist, but I think that the Bible is a valid way for God to communicate with us. So when I read that about the translation of ‘eunuch’ and that passage in Isaiah, and there are others too, that’s just the best one…I really got it.”

  I put the sandwiches into the pan and listened to them sizzle. “Good,” I told her.

  “It’s not like I was looking for God’s permission, like He’s some kind of angry parent,” she said. “The words just cut through my confusion and showed me what was already in my heart.”

  I had to ask. “Is dating me in your heart?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I grinned into the pan and flipped the sandwiches. “And you’re never going to call me a eunuch again?” I asked, even though I thought her point about the quote and the translation was awesome.

  She threw a dishtowel at me. It bounced off my shoulder and I tried to catch it on my thigh as it fell, but instead I ended up smacking my knee into the oven handle. I hopped on one foot for a second, holding the knee up, but it didn’t hurt that badly and the sandwiches were about to burn.

  I quickly slid the sandwiches out of pan and onto plates, then bent down to get the towel. Claire hopped off the stool again and took the towel out of my hand. She reached up and put her palms on either side of my face so she could pull me down to kiss her.

  When the kiss was over, she smiled up at me and said, “Besides, I’ve always wanted to give lesbianism a real go.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and picked up the sandwich plates. “Couch?”

  “There’s a Law & Order: Criminal Intent on the DVR. Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I slept for about eleven hours, which I’m certain shored up Mom’s hypothesis that I was depressed, but to me it felt great. Then I spent about a year in the shower letting the water run over me. I shaved my arms and legs again, even though the swim season was over. If anyone asked I’d just tell them that the new hair itched and it was easier to keep it shaved. I would not mention that I loved the feel of smooth legs under my jeans.

  Mom was cleaning up the kitchen when I made it downstairs, and Mikey was in the living room watching TV. He wasn’t old enough to skip cartoons yet. I hoped that lasted another year because I enjoyed my Saturday mornings without him flying around the house like a pinball.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Great,” I said. I poured a glass of milk and grabbed two of the cinnamon rolls she’d made. Mom seemed trapped between being a career woman and being a stay-at-home mom. I thought either one would be great, but she just wavered back and forth between the two, telling us to make our own dinner one night and then taking over the cooking for the next three or four days. “I’ve been up too late studying,” I added around a bite of cinnamon, sugar and dough.

  “Is school hard?” she asked, fishing for problems.

  “Nah, I just want to do good for college aps.” Which was true. I had no intention of going to college near Liberty and I knew Mom and Dad couldn’t afford to send me anywhere fancy.

  “Chris!” Dad yelled from the garage door. “Chris, come look at this!”

  I flashed Mom a grin and grabbed my old jacket from the closet, wishing I hadn’t left the good one at school.

  Some fool had driven a junker of an old Bronco the fifty-odd miles from the Cities, his girlfriend following in her dilapidated Chevy. The Bronco was in terrible shape and looked about ready to drop parts into the street.

  Dad and the scruffy man who’d driven it in were walking around it, looking under the hood, and then exchanging information and money. I was supposed to be in that circle with them, admiring the car and haggling over its value, but I just didn’t feel like it. I could smell the guy from where I was standing and his lanky brown hair hadn’t been washed in about a week. He smelled like burnt rubber and acidic sweat.

  In the rusty Chevy, his girlfriend was smoking a cigarette, blowing long streams of light gray smoke through a one-inch opening at the top of her window and leaving enough smoke inside the car to make it hazy. I couldn’t see her clearly, just the dishwater blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. What did she like about her boyfriend? Did she like the way he smelled and those skinny legs inside his faded jeans?

  Dad motioned me over. “This is my son Chris,” he said. “He’s going to work on it with me.”

  “Chris,” the man said. “You’ll make your dad proud.”

  “Sure,” I said, beginning to feel like that was the only useful word in my vocabulary.

  Then he was gone in the smoky car with his girlfriend and Dad drove the Bronco into our oversized garage. We may not have had the biggest house on the block, but we definitely had the biggest garage, which was ironic since I always had to park at the curb to make room for the cars Dad fixed up. The garage was two spaces wide and a little over two deep and had enough heaters to keep it at least in the fifties during the worst of winter. Dad had installed four spotlights and there were times when the garage seemed brighter and warmer than the house.

  Despite the fact that I was one hundred percent clean, I capitulated and helped Dad with the car. I had the feeling I was going to need a good stash of parental brownie points in the near future, so I pushed up my sleeves and got to work.

  At noon I cut out, had a quick lunch, showered again, put on my second favorite sweater and went to pick up Claire. She slipped into the warm car and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Claire, what do you like about having a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I’m not dating you because you’re a guy. I like you because you’re funny and smart and a total geek. And sure, I like that you’re tall and strong and all that.”

  “But what is it about guys that girls like?”

  “I think strength, for sure, and guys tend to be easier than girls, you know, less complicated…well, except for you. Guys make girls feel safe,” she said and pushed on my shoulder with the palm of her hand. “I wonder if I’m going to miss that,” she added quietly.

  “I’ll always be tall,” I offered.

  “Who’s this Natalie?” she asked.

  “She’s from a forum online, a support site. She knows me by my girl name ‘Emily.’ Is that going to be weird?”

  “Girl name?”

  “I’ll change my name legally when I can,” I said. It was hard to remember that Claire didn’t know that much about transsexualism, despite her long nights of study on the subject. She could sound so cool with it one moment and then completely clueless the next.

  “To Emily?” she asked.

  “Emily Christine Hesse.”

  “Is that why your mage in game is Amalia?”

  “Someone already took the name Emily, and anyway, I like the game to be a little different from reality. But yes, I wanted a name that was like Emily.”

  She turned a little sideways in her seat so she could look at me more fully. “I played a male character for a few months,” she said. “Like a year ago when I was really into player versus player combat. It felt like people listened to me more in the game when I was a seven-foot-tall guy. I thought you just played girl characters so you could look at their butts.”

  I laughed. That was
what other guys in our guild said who played female characters. I was often surprised at how many of the female characters in the game turned out to be played by men in real life. I had no idea how many were transsexual or gay or really did prefer looking at a female on the screen while they played.

  “I love that there’s at least one world where I can just show up and be female,” I told Claire. “It feels like magic to me.”

  “Like the Wizard of Oz,” she said.

  “Yes!” I agreed.

  We both fell quiet for a few minutes and then Claire asked, “Am I supposed to call you Emily?”

  “If no one’s around, I’d like that.”

  “Huh,” she said and went silent again.

  We drove past snowy fields and trees decked in white and more and more houses until we came into the western suburbs of the Cities. Southdale was in Edina, which was a suburb and not Minneapolis proper, but close enough that my parents didn’t make a distinction. Anytime I wanted to go to the Cities, they figured I was trying to score drugs or drink or something. Of course, Dad did a lot of drinking when he was a kid, so he didn’t exactly disapprove.

  This was one of those funny times when it worked out that people saw me as a guy. Mom and Dad didn’t worry about me like Claire’s mom did about her that I was going to get kidnapped or raped or sold into slavery. It must have been the crime shows they watched, because Claire’s mom could fret for days about something catastrophic happening to her daughter but she never seemed to worry about where Claire actually was on any given day.

  I pulled into Southdale and ended up driving around the mall twice before figuring out how to get into the parking lot in front of the theater.

  “Man, don’t you wish we lived closer,” Claire said. She paused and grinned, “And by ‘man,’ I mean ‘person’ of course.”