Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  That included Chris’s body. People liked to think that life was so stable, even her with her own pretensions of being holier than thou and oh so open-minded. But God’s plan wasn’t the same as the things we all made up day-to-day, she thought. What was the saying? “Men plan, God laughs.”

  She curled up in bed to read the whole Song of Solomon. The dialogue between two lovers was one of her favorite parts of the Bible. It echoed the longing she felt for God sometimes. She might not have any person she could talk to about the situation with Chris, but she could talk to God and as strange as it seemed, she understood that God knew what He was doing.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After the evening at Claire’s house playing with makeup, I figured it was time to tackle the psych class assignment. I sat down at the computer, opened a new file and stared at it. I couldn’t say any of the things that came to mind.

  What would I do if I woke up tomorrow as a girl? I’d cry for joy, to start. Then I’d run around and show myself off to everyone. I’d make Mom take me shopping for all new clothes, and I’d grow my hair long. I’d probably still swim; it makes me feel good and it would keep me in shape. The girls who swim have really nice bodies. I wonder if I’d still be this tall. If I could pick it, I’d be a few inches shorter with B-cup breasts, nothing too outrageous, and hips like Mom’s, kind of solid-looking.

  While I was thinking, I opened GenderPeace in my browser and sent a note to Natalie, asking where I could get hormones. I reflexively glanced over my shoulder, but my bedroom door was solidly closed. Since meeting Natalie I felt bolder, but I didn’t want to get careless. Message sent, I closed that window and stared at the blank page again.

  This was going to take all night. I heard Mikey coming up the stairs and yelled, “Hey, come here?”

  He stuck his head in my room, “What?”

  “I have to do this lame thing for psych class. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow as a girl?”

  “Gross,” he said. “I’d stay home.”

  He pushed himself out of the doorway and into the bathroom. Well, that was a start. I wrote:

  “If I woke up as a girl, I’d stay home and play video games. If it didn’t go away, I’d call the doctor. If I had to go out, I’d go to another city where no one would recognize me.”

  That was so stupid I had to stop writing. I went down a few lines and tried again, reversing it:

  “If I woke up as a boy I’d pretend everything was normal and go to school as usual. No one would know what happened and they’d be afraid to ask me about it, so I could pretty much go through my life as usual. They would wonder what had happened and if I was okay, but they wouldn’t know how to talk about it with me and I’d use that to my advantage. I would pretend it didn’t really matter to me what they thought, even if it did.

  “Over time I’d start to get good at pretending, and people would forget that I’d been different. They’d just go by what they saw and treat me like a boy and after a while I’d wonder if I’d really been a girl at all. I’d start to think I was supposed to be a boy, even if I felt like a girl on the inside.”

  Slightly better. I went back and changed “boy” to “girl” and vice versa. Then I went to bed.

  I dreamed that it was Sunday morning again and I woke up with a girl’s body. In the dream, I got up and showered for the longest time. No one treated me any differently, except Claire who said I looked really cute.

  ***

  It was Thursday and time for another session with Dr. No. I’d been dreading this stupid appointment all day. I didn’t want to talk about my childhood or my dad, so I figured I’d bring up something I really did want to know about. I dropped down on the couch and watched Dr. Webber settle into his seat, notepad in his lap.

  “What would you like to talk about today, Chris?” he asked.

  “What do you know about transsexualism?” I asked. I figured what the hell, I could always say I was joking, and I was sick of screwing around with this goon.

  He scribbled in his notepad and then looked up. “It’s a very rare condition,” he said. “Do you like dressing up in women’s clothing? Does it turn you on?”

  Not when you put it like that, I thought. Gross. “No,” I said.

  “You know what I think,” he said, leaning forward in a conspiratorial way. “I think you’re afraid of growing up like your father. You may have fantasies of being a woman because you think that’s the only way to avoid being like him. Let’s come up with some other options, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I should have known he’d be able to put a really crazy spin on this, but it still caught me off guard and shut me up again.

  “Who are some other men you can think of?” he asked. “Men you could be like when you grow up?”

  Natalie, I thought, or any of a dozen people I’d met on GenderPeace. Or Tammy Baldwin, the State Rep. from Wisconsin who had the guts to be an out lesbian in the U.S. Congress, she was great. Or any woman politician or scientist or those running big technology companies...Oh, right, those aren’t men—they were just the people I wanted to be like when I grew up. Think.

  How about Joan Roughgarden the biologist? I’d loved reading Evolution’s Rainbow and learning about how diverse sexuality and gender could be on our planet. Or maybe Susan Kimberly, the former St. Paul City Council member who publicly transitioned and went right back to being in politics? Nope, being born with a male body and having the guts to transition to be yourself wasn’t going to count for Dr. Webber’s “men you could be like” quiz.

  “Mr. Cooper, my psych teacher, he’s cool,” I said, thinking, crap, that assignment is due tomorrow.

  “What do you like about him?”

  This was the stupidest game, but I had to go on playing it for the next forty minutes. “He’s smart and educated and he usually listens to the students.” That last part was thrown in for Dr. Webber’s benefit, but he didn’t seem to get the hint.

  “Good, Chris, so you’d like to be a man who is smart and educated. Do you want children?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.” I looked at the clock on the wall. What I wanted was to carry my own children…I couldn’t even stand to think about it in front of this jerk. I stood up and paced across the room.

  “You’re afraid if you have children, you’ll hurt them, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking, You absolute dumb ass. I didn’t want to talk about children, so I went back to brainstorming other male role models and letting him pick out the qualities of the man he thought I should grow into.

  In the car with Mom on the way home I told her, “I don’t want to go to Dr. Webber anymore. It’s not helping.”

  “But you seem happier,” she said.

  I hadn’t thought about the effect that talking to Claire and meeting Natalie had on me, and that Mom connected that positivity to me seeing the shrink. Damn. I’d have to go again. Maybe I could fake an illness next Thursday.

  At home I automated my dinner table conversation.

  /run: dinner with the family

  1. smile

  2. listen politely

  3. look bored appropriate to normal teenager

  4. talk about math class

  5. ask Dad about the Bronco

  6. smile

  7. get Mikey talking about comic books

  8. exit

  As soon as I could excuse myself, I did so, saying I had to finish my psych paper. I pulled out a notebook and a pen and wrote so hard the tip tore through the paper in places:

  “If I woke up as a girl I’d have my own kids, and I’d let them grow up to be whatever they wanted. I’d get pregnant and carry them in my own body. I’d get a period like a normal girl. I’d be able to go through labor and nurse my own babies. I’d be able to be a mother.”

  At that point I was crying so hard I couldn’t write anymore. I tore the sheet out of the notebook and ripped it up until I couldn’t make the pieces any smaller. Then I threw the notebook acro
ss the room and crawled into bed, curling up as small as possible and crying myself to sleep.

  ***

  On Friday I turned in an essay to psych class that bore no resemblance to what I’d written the night before. Afterward, Claire told me that her mom was out on a date again and did I want to come over? I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I felt like I could sleep for a week.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You look like crap,” she told me while we were eating a pizza in front of the TV. “What happened?”

  “A bunch of stuff. Stupid Dr. Webber…and I have to keep going because Mom thinks that’s making me happier, and then that dumb psych assignment. What if I woke up as a girl? Geez.”

  “Harsh,” Claire said. “You know what you need?”

  “What?” I mumbled, thinking that if she wanted to make out for a while I could probably pull it off. The physical contact would do me good.

  “A hot bath.”

  “For real?”

  “Totally.”

  When we finished the pizza and NCIS, she started filling the tub and dumped in some bath salts.

  “Take as long as you want,” she said. “You can use my stuff if you want. I’ll be gaming. Vaorlea the Mighty is close to leveling, and then I can finally get out of that stupid zone.”

  “This whole bath thing is just so I’ll leave you alone so you can game, isn’t it?” I asked. It wasn’t a serious question because Claire had plenty of gaming time anyway. Her mom always assumed that being alone in her bedroom meant she was reading or doing homework.

  “Whatever you say, honey,” she said with a wink as she closed the bathroom door behind her. She was too sweet.

  I shucked my clothes and lowered myself into the steaming water. I took baths sometimes when I could get the house to myself. Mom’s bathroom was the only one with a tub, and I was afraid I’d give myself away if I took too many lingering baths. Plus at my house we didn’t have all this cool stuff: exfoliating facial scrub, a loofah, bath salts.

  I soaked for a while and then took up Claire’s razor to do away with the new growth of fuzz on my arms and legs. If I could have thought of a good cover story, I might have stopped shaving my arms, but since the going belief was that I shaved everything to cut drag in the water, I had to keep it all up or let it all go, and I wasn’t going to let that hair grow back on my legs or my chest. Most of the swim team guys stopped shaving when the season ended. Okay, except for me they all did. But they left me alone about it.

  All smooth, I drained out the hairy, dirty water and filled the tub again with clean, hot water. I put my head back and soaked longer. Then I tucked what Claire calls my “boy parts” down between my legs and had a good look at myself in the water.

  Yeah, I looked like a boy all right, but if I squinted a little I saw how I could have looked. I had good long legs and, if I kept weight off, a flat stomach. Still no waist to speak of. Claire had this cute little waist that I could almost wrap my hands around, which made me feel monstrous. I wondered if she’d trade my waist for hers.

  She tapped on the door. “Hey Little Mermaid, how’s it going?”

  I untucked and sat up a little. “Come on in.”

  She opened the door and stuck her head in. “I just wanted to warn you that we’re approaching the earliest time Mom could return home if the date wasn’t that interesting.”

  “Oh thanks.” I opened the drain and let the water start to run out.

  “You look cute,” Claire added and closed the door again.

  A few times in the past, she’d climbed into the tub with me, and I wondered why she didn’t now. Probably because her mom could come home, but it worried me a little bit. She still kissed me and touched me in that slightly possessive girlfriend way when we hung out together, but she hadn’t tried to initiate anything longer or more intimate.

  Before I came out to her, we’d make out at least once a week and if we knew we had an evening to ourselves, go further than that. She seemed to really like kissing and wasn’t that self-conscious about taking her clothes off. Often she’d end up mostly undressed and somehow I’d still have my jeans on. It was easier to be sexual without the constant reminder that my body wasn’t right.

  And Claire had rarely pushed me about that even though she usually initiated our times together. I wondered if she’d thought I was pathologically shy about my boy parts or how she’d explained that to herself and now that I thought about it, that was a pretty good explanation. In the last few weeks, she hadn’t really tried anything—not since that night she hopped into my lap when I was trying to come out to her.

  What would happen to us if she wasn’t attracted to me anymore? I was already cold when I stood up from the bath and toweled off quickly. She never would have just put me in the bath by myself before.

  I pulled on my clothes and left the bathroom intending to ask her. She was on the couch with another episode of NCIS cued up and a bowl of popcorn. She patted the seat next to her and my momentum dissolved. I didn’t want to have a long emotional talk about our relationship. This was comfortable.

  When I sat next to her, she put the popcorn bowl in my lap and leaned against my shoulder. I looked down at the top of her black hair and wondered, Was our relationship changing as I changed?

  ***

  The first sign of a bad week was that I got my psych paper back on Tuesday with a “C” on it and a note that said “See me.” I thought about bolting for my car again, but this meeting was going to be inevitable. I waited until the end of the day, so there wouldn’t be other students around in case Mr. Cooper was going to say something really embarrassing.

  He sat at his desk sorting papers, so I knocked on the open door. He looked up and ran a hand through his hair, which made it messier. Pink windburn still shone on his cheeks and two of the knuckles on his right hand were cracked from dryness. I didn’t know his story, but he was clearly not from Minnesota. If I hadn’t been freaked out about the paper assignment, I’d have recommended he get some Corn Huskers lotion like Dad used.

  “Ah, Chris, come on in. I thought you might be avoiding me.”

  I stepped up to the front of the desk. “You wanted to see me.”

  “About your paper. I was surprised. It showed a real lack of imagination,” he said. He tapped the paper in front of him with a long, blunt finger even though it wasn’t mine. “That’s not like you. And the end was pretty dark. Do you have a problem with women?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you can’t imagine yourself as a woman.” It was a question delivered as a statement.

  I shrugged.

  He picked up another stack of papers and thumbed through them until he found mine and read a few sentences silently to himself.

  “This end here. It sounds like you think that no one notices you. Do you struggle with low self-esteem?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Chris,” he said. “You’re one of my smarter students. You have the potential to be really good with people. If there’s something bothering you or you’re in some kind of trouble at home…”

  “Mom has me seeing a shrink,” I said. “And I’ve been doing better the last couple of weeks.”

  “Good, good. Now, do the paper over again and apply yourself, and let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  He stood up and held out his hand to shake. He was taller than me by a couple inches, which I didn’t notice when I was in my seat. I thought we were the same height.

  “Lotion,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Your knuckle is bleeding.”

  While he was looking at the back of his hand, I backed out the door. Do the paper again? He had to be kidding me. I wasn’t one for cheating, but this was one assignment I was going to hand over to Claire wholesale. She’d swap me for help on her geometry homework.

  If I hadn’t been so rattled by the thing with Mr. Cooper on Tuesday I might have checked my psych class schedule and realized that I’d planne
d to skip Wednesday’s class altogether.

  It wasn’t until I was in my seat that I realized I’d screwed up. This was the day we had the guest speakers from the Gay and Lesbian Action Council. As it turned out, we got one gay and one lesbian.

  They had guts to drive out into the boonies and talk to a bunch of high school kids about “alternative lifestyles.” Apparently they were also talking to a senior history class and someone’s social studies class. We were right in the middle and our class was combined with a second history class, which was how another twenty students, including Claire, got crammed into our room. Like a secret agent, she winked at me and then sat down across the room and ignored me completely, earning my profound gratitude.

  I already knew all sorts of stuff about being gay because a lot of the transgender resource pages I looked at were linked with gay and lesbian sites. Plus I liked girls, which meant I was going to end up as a lesbian at some point in my life. So I listened but practiced my totally bored look.

  Most of the kids in the class had pretty boring questions, so the bored look wasn’t hard to come by. “What do you think about the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality?” “Do you plan to have kids?” “Are you scared of getting AIDS?” “When did you know?” “How did you know?” etc.

  The speakers were better than I expected. The woman was a marketing person for a big corporation, and the guy was a carpenter, which I thought was neat. Thank goodness he wasn’t a hairstylist. He was awfully pretty for a carpenter, though; it might have been better if he hadn’t cleaned up so well for this event. He had carefully combed, short shaggy hair that hung over his forehead and big, dark eyes along with a wide nose. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, but no tie, and the woman wore gray slacks with a burgundy sweater that I wanted to touch to feel if it was as soft as it looked. Her black hair fell past her shoulders. I think someone at the Gay and Lesbian Action Center might have picked out a feminine lesbian and a butch gay man just to say See, we’re not all stereotypes.