Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  Dr. Mendel sat back in her chair. I wanted to bottle that speech so I could listen to it every day for the next year or two.

  “Are you done?” Mom asked coldly.

  “Yes,” Dr. Mendel said. “Though we have a few pamphlets and books for you to look at if you’d like.”

  Mom looked at me. “Anything else?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Her face looked like an ice sculpture. I was tempted to turn to Dr. Mendel and say “rescue me” but I figured that wouldn’t help much.

  Dad broke the silence. “There are other kids like this?” he asked Dr. Mendel.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How do they know?”

  “There’s a persistent sense of being the wrong gender that lasts for years, sometimes life-long. It’s natural for children to be curious about the opposite sex, maybe even wonder what it’s like, but I think you’ll agree that having a persistent belief that you’re a girl over ten years or more is something more than curiosity or a desire to avoid manhood.”

  He looked at me. “You always did cry a lot. I thought you were a sissy. But you toughened up.”

  “I’ve been pretending,” I said.

  “So you want to be a woman…does that mean you want to date guys?”

  “No,” I said. “Actually I still like girls better.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said and all but rolled his eyes. “That makes no sense at all.” He picked up a pamphlet from the side table, stood up and crammed it into his pocket. “All right, I’m done with this. Chris, you coming with us?”

  “Sure,” I said and stood up with a wide-eyed look at Dr. Mendel.

  “Would you two wait outside just for a minute?” she asked.

  After a final glare from my mother at Dr. Mendel, they walked through the door and shut it loudly behind them.

  “That sucked,” I said.

  “Give them time,” she said. “They’re going to go through stages. They’re in shock right now, and then they’ll be in denial for a while. Try not to let them blame themselves, and if they get too angry…if you’re afraid, call me and get out of the house, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me you won’t try to tough it out if it’s more than you can handle.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You can do this,” she told me. “You have me and Claire and Natalie, lots of people supporting you. Let your folks know that you love them and you’re being honest with them.”

  I nodded and thanked her, then headed out the door. Mom and Dad were already in the car with the engine running.

  When I got into the backseat, they didn’t say anything at all or look at me; the silence held all the way home. When we walked in the air felt icy compared to the warmth outdoors, and it wasn’t because of the air conditioning. Dad made a beeline for the garage.

  Mom dropped her purse on the table with an angry clatter.

  “What the hell are you trying to pull?” she yelled at me.

  “It’s the truth,” I said.

  “You want to be a woman? That’s ridiculous. Look at you!”

  Into the pause in the tirade Mikey yelled from the living room, “Fag!”

  Mom turned toward him. “GO TO YOUR ROOM!” she screamed louder than I’d ever heard. He leaped to his feet and tore up the stairs.

  She dropped her voice, which didn’t help much because now it sounded like a butter knife trying to saw through bone. “Being a woman isn’t going to solve anything,” she said to me. “It’s just going to make your life hell. Look at you, you’d make the ugliest woman I can imagine. You’d be a freak. You need to drop this bullshit right now, young man. I don’t want to know what put this crazy idea in your head, but you are grounded until you come to your senses. No more computer, no more trips to the city, and I’m going to find another doctor for you. Now you go to your room too.”

  I ran for my room. I logged on to GenderPeace and quickly posted a message that my mom had lost it and I might not be able to get online in the near future. Then I sent Natalie a quick note, and an email to Claire saying I was going to need help.

  Moments after I hit send, Mom threw the door open.

  “Get off that,” she said.

  I stepped back. She yanked the cords out of the wall and picked up the whole computer, carrying it out of the room. A minute later she came back and took my phone. Then she slammed the door behind her.

  I waited. The house was quiet. No, I could hear her in the garage yelling at Dad. Then him yelling back. I couldn’t tell what he was saying and I thought about putting my ear to the floor, but I didn’t really want to know. Instead I snuck out into the hall and tapped on Mikey’s door.

  “Yeah,” he said softly.

  “It’s me.”

  He opened the door. His eyes were red and he sniffled a few times, trying not to cry. “I didn’t mean it,” he said almost in a whisper. “Why is Mom so mad?”

  I shut the door behind me and sat on the edge of his bed. He had a Batman bedspread, though I’d heard Mom tell him he was getting too old for it. Right now he looked pretty young even for nine. His brown eyes were huge and red with the effort of not crying.

  “Mom’s not mad at you,” I said. “She’s mad at me.”

  He sat on the foot of the bed, one leg tucked up under his other leg, and idly rearranged the action figures beside him. “She said you want to be a girl?” he asked. “That’s weird.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Am I going to turn out like that too?” he asked.

  I smiled. “No. I’ve always wanted to be a woman. You don’t. You’re a boy.”

  “I am,” he said with gusto. “Girls are gross. I don’t know why you want to be one. Does this mean you’re going to turn into my sister?”

  I tried to read his face to see if he was going to use this against me later, but his pale skin and tight lips looked genuinely scared and concerned. “In a few years.”

  “Can they really make you into a girl?” he asked. “I never heard of anything like that. What do they do?”

  I didn’t know how much to tell him, so I stuck to the basics. “It takes surgery and hormones. They don’t just zap me with a laser.”

  He laughed a little, as I’d intended. “That would be a funny power to have. What would you call that superhero? Girl Man? I’d zap Zach, he deserves it.”

  He’d started to grin, and I smiled back. “I think maybe we should only turn people into girls who want to be girls,” I warned. “Otherwise it’s not fair.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Is Mom going to be mad at you for a long time?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Can I have your car?”

  “You can’t drive for seven more years,” I pointed out. “What would you do with it? Sit in the driveway?”

  “It’s cool.”

  “I still like cars,” I told him.

  “You’re going to be a girl who likes cars?”

  “Such creatures do exist,” I told him.

  “But you’re still my brother right now, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to play superheroes until Mom’s not mad at you?”

  I pretended to think about it. “Can I be the girls?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” he said with emphasis. “I don’t want ’em.”

  His favorite game these days was to compose teams of superheroes and explain how they pounded the crap out of each other. I picked my five favorite girl heroes and he picked an amalgam of men and aliens. We whaled on each other until Mom called us down for a very silent dinner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A large vacuum invaded our house, which is to say: life sucked. Mom rescinded all my communication and travel privileges. She cancelled my appointments with Dr. Mendel and set one up with Dr. Webber. I refused to go. I was putting up with her other bullshit because I didn’t want to find out if Claire’s mom would really take me in if Mom threw me out, but there were a couple bound
aries I was holding firm, and that was one.

  We were at a standoff. I spent a lot of time working on cars with Dad who never brought up anything from the visit to Dr. Mendel. I also played with Mikey a lot. My girl team even beat his men and aliens team a few times.

  With permission, I managed one trip over to Claire’s in late June, when she said she needed my geometry book, and told her what had happened. I stashed the duffel bag at her house. When I got home it was clear why Mom allowed me to visit Claire. She’d been through my room and taken my copies of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There and the volume of True Selves I was hoping she would read. She also took some of my X-men comics, which puzzled me, and the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, which was actually Dad’s but I had lifted it to imagine myself as those models.

  My senior year of high school started in two months and then she wouldn’t have so much control over my activities. I figured I could wait her out. After I talked to Dad about it, we set my computer up in the garage so I could keep selling his car bits on eBay. I still had a roof over my head and food, and I was making decent money with the eBay work, so I could wait a few months to have my girl-time back. Half the time Dad didn’t pay any attention to what I was doing on the computer because he was under a car or deep in its engine. I’d open another browser window under the eBay window and post on GenderPeace. It was amazing to see so many people from all over the world offer support for my situation.

  “Remember, it’s a process,” one post said. “It took me a while to realize that my parents had to go through all this mourning for the loss of their son. My mom was crying almost every day and I thought it was because she was so ashamed of me. But really she was trying to let go of her old idea of me. Then for a while I felt like I was the one who killed her son and that was awful. But now we can talk about it, and she actually asked if I would come home for a visit sometime this year. Hang in there and give them time!”

  “I’m sorry she cut off your good therapist,” another said. “Keep coming back here, you need all the support you can get right now. You can do this.”

  The only funny part of the whole dismal time was a surprise visit from Claire. She brought me some of her science fiction novels and an English textbook that I didn’t need. While we were sitting in the kitchen talking, because Mom said I couldn’t have anyone in my room, Mom came in.

  “Did he tell you why he’s grounded?” she asked Claire.

  She shrugged. “School stuff.” She was lying. I had told her everything and she thought it was awful, but she had two years of drama club and she sensed an opportunity.

  “He thinks he wants to be a girl,” Mom said. “Isn’t that disgusting?”

  Claire’s eyes got huge. “Oh my God!” she said. She turned to me. “How could you!? You said that was only a phase. Chris! I’m so embarrassed!” She stood up and ran out of the house.

  “Claire!” I yelled, quite dramatically. I grabbed my car keys off the counter and glared at Mom. “Thanks. Thanks a lot!”

  Claire was standing by the passenger side of the car, face in her hands, shoulders shaking. When I got closer to the car, I could hear her muffled laughter. I bundled her into the passenger seat. Her mother had dropped her off and was going to come get her in an hour, but I got into the driver’s seat and peeled off. Mom could re-ground me later when I got home.

  A couple blocks away I had to stop because I was laughing too hard to see straight. “That was priceless,” I said.

  “I hope it wasn’t too mean,” Claire said. “But I just couldn’t stand her crap. Maybe she’ll actually feel bad for once. How long do you think it’s going to take for you to comfort me?”

  “Few hours?” I suggested.

  “Good, I’ll call Mom and tell her not to pick me up. We can catch a movie. I’ve got liner and eye shadow in my pocket if you promise to wear shades.”

  “You’re making me feel like a junkie,” I said.

  “You don’t want it?” she teased.

  I smiled. “You’re wicked.”

  “Just what you need. Come on, let’s go see something mind-numbing while I plot my next performance.”

  I had one thing I wanted to bring up with her, and I didn’t know how to say it. “Claire, would you talk to Natalie and see if there’s a way you can order hormones for me? Natalie knows the right stuff, and I’ll pay you back for all of it.”

  I could feel her looking at me, though my eyes were on the road ahead. “That’s not legal is it?”

  “No,” I said. “But my parents aren’t going to take me to a doctor and…I need them.”

  She took a deep breath. “Chris…Emily, it’s not going to hurt you to wait a few more months…” She sounded like she was going to say more, but I’d pulled over a few blocks from the theater.

  I put my head forward on the steering wheel and sobbed, all the tension of the past weeks at home and the awful things Mom had said, plus the hopelessness of running out of the one thing that was making a positive difference, it all came out of me in deep, dry sobbing, my fingers wrapped white-knuckled around the wheel.

  Claire rubbed my back with her palm. “It’s going to be okay, it’s just a matter of time.”

  “I don’t have time,” I managed. “Seventeen years and every day is torture. I can feel this stupid testosterone masculinizing me. It’s making me all rough and hairy. And now it’s worse because Mom and Dad know and they’re awful. And I’m so close. I just want to be normal…a normal woman.”

  She rested her cheek on my shoulder. “Honey, I’m not sure you should ever want to be normal. I’ll talk to Natalie, but I can’t promise anything. I’m not into illegal and no matter how crazy things are, you shouldn’t be either.”

  I dug into my pocket for a tissue and blew my nose. “Thanks. I’m sorry.”

  “I worry about you,” she said. “Maybe you should call the good doctor.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  ***

  I had tried being a good kid for three or four weeks, but Mom showed no signs of relenting. She glared at me a lot. In her softer moments, she’d compliment me on something I was wearing and say how nice it made my shoulders look, or how tall I was getting. I started avoiding her. For a few days here and there, I could lose myself in the work on the Bronco with Dad.

  I also started staying up later and later at night. In the quiet, dark hours, I could feel like myself again. Even if I didn’t have my computer, I could dream about going out as a woman. For hours at night I would lie awake in bed and go through every detail of the trip to the mall with Natalie and her mom, and the few shopping trips I’d had with Natalie in May, and then I’d build out from there, imagining myself with an apartment in Minneapolis and a job, and everyone would call me “ma’am” or “miss.” I could wear my hair long, and my skin would feel soft, even softer than it had on Natalie’s borrowed hormones.

  I wrote a few stories in the back of my chemistry notebook about a girl named Emily. Mom didn’t know my name, though I was sure she’d be furious if she found them. I just didn’t care so much anymore.

  Staying up late meant that I could sleep in later. Even after I woke up in the mornings, I didn’t get out of bed until I was forced to either by having to pee, or someone knocking on my bedroom door. Most days I could stay in bed until nearly noon, and then I only had to navigate the hours between noon and ten, when Mom went to bed.

  I thought I was holding myself together pretty well, though I was only existing day to day, waiting for the next and the next so that I could get back to school and eventually escape this house completely. Until the dinner.

  The dinner was out at a fancy restaurant in the neighboring town. The financial planning firm Mom worked for hosted it as a summer bonus because the business was doing well. Only the older kids from the families were invited, so Mikey got to luck out of it and spend the night at a friend’s house.

  Mom insisted that we dress up for it and make a good impressi
on. “That means a jacket and a tie,” she told me.

  I wore them. I didn’t much care one way or the other. The body in the jacket didn’t feel like mine anyway. In the restaurant, we sat at a table with one of Mom’s bosses and his family, a wife and three girls.

  Mom introduced me as, “Chris, our oldest son,” which seemed excessive, but I let it go. She didn’t.

  “We’re very proud of Chris,” she slipped in later. “He got a letter in swimming this year. He likes distance swimming best, can you imagine that? Swimming a mile?”

  “Really?” the oldest girl asked. She was about my age and pretty in that I-would-kill-to-have-her-brow-line style. Too blond for me to be attracted to her, but slender in a way that made me envy her waist.

  “Yeah,” I said, sounding like a Neanderthal.

  “You two are about the same age,” Mom pointed out the obvious. “Why don’t you come over here so you can talk to each other.” She actually got up and switched places with the blond girl.

  I didn’t know what on earth she thought she was doing, and if it hadn’t been a dinner for her work, I would have gotten up and left. Also I didn’t want to offend this girl who was clearly caught in the crossfire of our feud. I kept my hands in my lap because they’d started to shake with the effort of sitting still.

  Betsy was the girl’s name, and she had that same nervous habit of talking that Claire has. We made it through the entrée with her telling me all about her school activities and her sisters, without my having to give more than one-word answers.

  When she started winding down, I asked, “Where’d you get that sweater?”