by Gold, Rachel
What boy thing? I thought, but that was answered as soon as I got home and broached the subject with my mom.
“You can’t have a sleepover with two girls in the city—one of whom we don’t even know!” she said.
“Oh, yeah, you’re supposed to call her mother.” I handed Mom a sheet of paper with Natalie’s home number on it.
“How do you even know this girl?” Mom asked.
“We met online. She plays the same games that Claire and I do. We’ve hung out with her a few times. Her mom’s a successful lawyer.” The part about games wasn’t true, but that last bit was the important part. It was meant to convey a sense of safety to my mother and a sense that I was spending time with the right kind of people.
Mom sighed and went to the phone. The conversation went: “Hello? Yes. Yes, Chris’s mom. Good to meet you too, Susan. Online games, he said. Well, I wonder that too.” Pause and a laugh. “Really? Oh separate rooms, of course. A daughter in college, that’s nice. Princeton? My goodness. And you’ll be there all night with them?” Pause and laugh again. “Oh no, no that’s not necessary. Yes, that would be nice. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.”
She hung up and turned to me. “Well, I suppose it’s all right. They sound like very nice people. She said you’ll have your own room for the night. She even offered to drive out here so we could meet her. Isn’t that nice?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking that Natalie’s mom had to be fantastic to make that offer.
“Go have a good time,” she said. “And tell me all about it. I bet they have a wonderful house.”
I smiled. “Okay, Mom.”
***
I picked up Claire at four on Saturday and we drove into the city. Her mom had also talked with Natalie’s mom and experienced a similarly reassuring conversation. I wondered what it was they thought we would do without parental supervision? Maybe an all-night drunken, pot-smoking orgy. Of course if Mom knew what we were really up to, she might have preferred the orgy.
Natalie’s family lived in the northern part of the western suburbs in a sprawling two-story house. When we pulled up, Natalie came out in tan boots that had white, furry cuffs on them, and a coat also with a line of white fur around the hood, to help lug our overnight bags in, along with the secret duffel.
“My brother’s at a friend’s until tomorrow afternoon,” she said when we all crammed into the entryway. “And Dad has locked himself in the master bedroom. He tries to be cool, but this girl stuff creeps him out sometimes. So we have the house to ourselves.” She turned and yelled into the house, “Mom, they’re here!”
I expected Natalie’s mom to be kind of glamorous, but she wasn’t. She had dark hair shot through with gray that she’d looped into a bun at the base of her neck. She had the same big, dark eyes that Natalie had, but a smaller chin and nose.
“Welcome,” she said. “You can call me Susan, I much prefer that to ‘Natalie’s mom’ or, heaven forebid, ‘ma’am.’ Come on in. We have enough beds for you if you want, but I thought you girls might like the lower level for a full slumber party atmosphere.”
She went toward the downstairs and Claire followed, but I didn’t know what to do. She’d said “girls,” did that include me? At the top of the stairs she paused and looked back at me, beckoning. I guess I was one of the girls. Grinning, I followed.
The lower level had been set up as an entertainment center, with a big TV and a huge L-shaped couch. Three sleeping bags were rolled up at the end of the couch and a small stack of blankets lay next to them.
“Make yourselves comfortable, I’ll go put the pizza in the oven,” she said and headed back up the stairs.
I followed her.
“You told my mom I was going to be in a separate room,” I said.
“Yes,” Natalie’s mom…Susan said. “If you’re more comfortable, you can have Natalie’s sister’s room, but if you want to sleep in the lower level, you could just roll a sleeping bag out on the left side of the TV, which is, technically, a separate room, or at least would be if we hadn’t torn down that wall. I think it’s still listed as separate on the property report.”
I smiled. “You planned that.”
“Natalie did,” she said. “She said it would be good for you to have a girls’ night and promised me no funny business.”
“No ma’am,” I said, unable to stop grinning. “Why are you so cool about all this? I think my mom would totally freak out.”
She opened the freezer and took out two pizzas. “I did some freaking out,” she said. “But, I don’t know if you’ll understand this until you’re a mother, there are much worse things in life than gender identity disorder. There were nights I’d lie awake and wonder if Nat was going to kill herself and why it was happening and if I’d be able to stop her. I’d try to think of how she might do it, and to take away anything I thought she could use to hurt herself, but it was never enough for me to know she’d be safe. I had some rough nights after she told me what the problem was, why she was so depressed, but I knew…after that I knew she’d live, that she’d grow up and actually have a good life. That’s a gift. That’s what a parent really wants for their kids. I think your mother will come to understand that too. She does love you and she wants you to be happy.”
“She’s not as…educated as you,” I ventured.
She laughed. “Law school doesn’t prepare you for this, believe me. Your mom can learn the same things I did. Now come on, Claire said you need shopping therapy tomorrow, and we have another little surprise.”
The surprise turned out to be a couple of the wigs Natalie used to wear before her hair grew out and that her parents hadn’t gotten around to giving away yet. The fit was tight, but with the right bobby pins, the plain brown, wavy hair would work. I think I spent an hour in the bathroom staring at myself with the hair falling past my shoulders. Without makeup, I looked kind of silly, but I could start to see how it would come together.
I counted my lucky stars that I’d been born at a good time. In earlier decades, earlier centuries, people like me had had to content themselves with just dressing as women, but I could actually have my body altered to match my sense of myself. I lifted the hair off my forehead and looked at the ridge under my eyebrows. I was definitely going to need to save up a lot of money this summer, and the next and probably for a few after that, but I would figure out how to get the facial surgery that would take away the caveman aspects. Natalie hadn’t needed it and I envied her.
Claire banged on the door. “You going to stay in there all night?” When I came out she added, “You are such a girl.”
I’m not sure she meant it as a compliment, but I took it as one anyway. Then we all sat around, including Nat’s mom, and painted our toenails. We talked fairly unsuccessfully about makeup and movie stars for a few minutes, but I had a lack of knowledge and Claire protested the whole thing, so we ended up talking about school and politics and what the world had been like when Natalie’s mom was a kid. Okay, during that last part we just listened politely.
Natalie’s mom showed me where to put a sleeping bag so that I was technically in another room, and Natalie scared up a pair of silk pajama bottoms that fit me rather than the boxer shorts that were all I’d had. I lay awake for a long time feeling my heart floating in my chest.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CLAIRE
She lay awake for a long time too, dealing with a much stickier situation. If my boyfriend is a girl, she wondered, what does that make me?
Sure she could just say “a lesbian” and leave it at that, but that didn’t answer the doubts gnawing at her. From what she’d seen and read, even a lot of lesbians weren’t too keen about girls who dated girls who used to be boys. If she continued through all this with Chris, would she wake up one morning to find there was nowhere in the world where she belonged?
She almost laughed at that thought. When had she ever been worried about belonging? But she’d never felt this kind of isolation before. When she provoked her mom
and other kids at school with her goth look, or by saying she was bisexual, or by entertaining the possibility of being a lesbian, or by spouting esoteric bits of poetry or religion, that was she herself drawing the boundary and saying what groups she was and wasn’t in. Suddenly, a whole lot of lines had been drawn for her.
As she often did when something bothered her, she tried to pull apart the different aspects of it. Number one was that she could end up even more of an outsider. Number two, much as she hated to admit it, was that Chris was getting more attention than she was. He’d been the quiet guy for most of their relationship, and now, at least here, all the attention was on him. Claire didn’t begrudge him that, he certainly deserved some care. She just wanted more of the spotlight.
Number three was an uglier aspect than the first two. She accepted that Chris didn’t have a choice about this situation, that he…or she, rather, had been born this way and had to go through all kinds of hell to get to a life that worked. But she had a choice about loving Chris. She could walk away, she could explore whether that fairly normal-looking kid in her history class really was interested in her.
She stared at Chris in his sleeping bag across the room. Who loved someone like that? Was she that desperate to be weird? Was there some way in which all of this was still about her?
No, she decided. She didn’t want to walk away. She’d come to know Chris and this whole business about sex and gender didn’t change the person she’d gotten to know. Well, except for making her a girl. But in some way she’d always been a girl, just in a really good disguise.
Claire stared up at the ceiling. It was a gray waffle board pattern, and she missed the plain white of her bedroom. Why was she here? Had she really needed to come along on this mission? She could have just sent Chris to spend the weekend with Natalie and stayed home.
Sometimes when she prayed or talked to God she had the feeling of a huge intelligence looking at her, usually smiling. It was there now, surrounding her. Trust me, it seemed to say.
She rolled up onto her hands and knees and crawled across the basement floor to where Chris was lying on top of his sleeping bag with a light blanket over his legs. His eyes were still open. Claire rolled down against Chris’s side and he put his arm around her. She took a deep breath and stopped—he smelled different. Chris had always smelled like salt and sand and warm metal, but now the metallic part was fading. Claire knew she was smelling the lotion he’d put on earlier in addition to the natural smell, but still there had been a change. An edginess was gone and she kind of missed it.
But this was good too. Would his smell keep changing? But that wasn’t really the most important question. When are you going to stop thinking of Chris as him? she asked herself. You know she doesn’t like that.
Oh shut up, she told the highly evolved part of her brain, I want to hold onto something of him.
But why? She draped her arm over Chris’s stomach. This was all she needed to hold onto, she thought. Just the person.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the morning, Natalie’s mom made us eggs and bacon. Her dad came down for a few minutes to eat with us. He looked at me for a while but didn’t say anything. Then he excused himself to go to the gym.
“What’s up with your dad?” Claire asked when Natalie’s mom was out of the room.
“He’s really my stepdad,” she said. “But he and Mom have been married for, like, twelve years, so I figure he gets to be a dad too. He’s actually pretty sweet about the whole thing, but I think it scares him. I think he’s afraid that someone’s going to show up in the middle of the night and take his guy parts away and turn him into a girl.”
Claire laughed, but I wondered how often people respond badly to transgendered people because somewhere inside them they’re afraid it’s going to happen to them. “How about you?” I asked Claire teasingly. “Are you afraid the bad fairy is going to turn you into a boy?”
She cocked her head to one side, the way she did when she was thinking hard. “Kind of,” she said. “I was thinking about that when I did your homework last week.” She paused and poked my arm for emphasis. “If I just woke up as a guy, it might be kind of cool, but if I had all the memories of being in this body, and all the girl experiences I’ve had, and the dreams for my life, then yeah, I’d be totally freaked ’cause I’d know that wasn’t really me, you know?”
“Boy do we,” Natalie said.
Claire’s mouth hung open. “Oh yeah,” she managed. “I guess that is how it is for you. Everything inside you says one thing, but no one believes you. Wow, I never thought about it that clearly. It is just like how I’d feel if I were hit with the ‘boy gun.’”
Natalie’s mom came back in and Natalie started clearing the dishes. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan. We have two showers, so Nat and Emily you’re first. Then, Nat, you’re doing Emily’s makeup. Claire and I will sit in the living room and talk about politics.” She grinned so we knew she was joking, though I suspected that was how it would go. “Then we are going to Southdale Mall to get Emily a decent pair of shoes and whatever else strikes our fancy. Natalie says you’re not great with your voice, so I think you can just fake laryngitis. Anything you want to say, just whisper to one of us. We’ll provide the cover story. Sound good?”
I nodded, thinking that heaven was probably populated with people like this.
Natalie gave me the upstairs shower and took the one in the basement, a generous gesture that I understood when I got into that shower. It had all sorts of fancy shampoos and soaps and scrubs. Except for the lure of shopping, I could have spent an hour in there.
Natalie knocked on the door as I was drying off. When I cracked it open, she pushed in and looked at me. “Nice legs,” she said.
I kept the towel around my waist and tried not to blush.
“Here,” she said, and set down two fist-sized packets of an indeterminate nature. “Use these in your bra.”
“What are they?”
“Birdseed mostly, they’re the best because they’re pretty close to the feel and shape of real breasts. You can keep ’em.”
“Thanks!”
She slipped out and I dressed quickly in case she was going to barge in again. I wanted to wear the brown pants, so I used the control-top hose that I’d cut off mid-thigh to tuck up between my legs and brace the parts that didn’t really fit in girls’ pants. Then I put on my bra and fit the falsies into the cups. Natalie had a point, they filled out the bra so much better than cotton balls. I pulled on my sweater and looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked weird. My body actually looked like an athletic girl’s body, but with no waist. My face looked half-boy and half-girl. “Jeez, I’m an alien,” I said, and pushed out the door in search of Natalie and makeup.
Half an hour later I was back in the bathroom and I looked a lot better this time. Natalie’s mom had pinned the wig on in a way that gave me short bangs and long brown hair. I wasn’t sure I’d wear my hair like that if I had a choice, but I was not going to argue right now. The wispy bangs covered my typically male sloping brow and the ridge over my eyes. Natalie’s makeup job partly hid the other masculine planes of my face. I didn’t exactly look pretty, but I could pass if I didn’t talk.
When we got close to the mall, I started to feel extremely nervous, almost panicky. All I could think about was the stupid attempt I’d made by myself and that jackass security guard. I reached over and took Claire’s hand and she squeezed my fingers.
“You look good,” she said.
I couldn’t tell how much of that was true and how much she was just trying to make me feel better, but I was pretty sure that no one we would run into at the mall would want to go toe-to-toe with Natalie’s mom. She wore jeans but she’d put on a silk T-shirt and a navy blazer, along with thick gold hoop earrings, and I could see a hint of how tough and capable she must look in court. She parked a few hundred feet from the doors because the lot was almost full, and we had to carefully avoid the frozen-over s
lush puddles that were the land mines of a Minnesota spring. With a light dusting of snow on the ground, you’d think you were going to step on solid land until your foot broke through the paper-thin sheet of ice and a couple inches of freezing water soaked your shoe.
Inside the mall, it was hot so we took off our scarves and jackets right away. I carried mine under my right arm with my purse looped over my left shoulder. Natalie said the purse looked good for a thirty-second Walmart purchase. I hoped that was a compliment.
“I can’t believe you tried this alone,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had the guts.”
“I figured if I screwed it up, no one would know,” I said quietly, and indeed they didn’t know the horrible details.
Natalie’s mom beelined for a shoe store. “What’s your size?” she asked.
I shrugged, “Eleven maybe?”
Three minutes later I was sitting on the shoe bench with four pairs of boots around me, a salesman running to the back room for more, and Natalie and Claire arguing over styles. Boot in hand, I stopped to take a deep breath of shoe leather and polish. If I kept a photo album of life’s central moments, I’d put this in. I wanted to be able to remember everything: the crazy fluorescent lights shining harshly on the red highlights of Natalie’s hair, the way Claire bit her lip when she was listening to something she disagreed with, Natalie’s mom calling all three of us “the girls,” the way the salesman called me “miss” without even thinking about it.
Everything around me seemed so real, as if it had more weight and density than my former everyday life. I must have spent a lot of time not really looking at things until now. That made sense because I spent so much of it looking at myself and making sure I wasn’t going to screw up.
I dropped right into the bit about laryngitis and figured out how to laugh soundlessly so I could join in the jokes Claire was making about women’s shoe styles.
