Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  “Banana Republic,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s great. I have a pair of pants from them, very soft,” I told her.

  “They have great stuff, don’t they? I saw this white quilted jacket I wanted, but how would you ever keep something like that clean?”

  I laughed a little with her. It felt good to laugh, and to have some girl talk.

  “Your eye shadow looks really good,” I said. “Is it MAC?”

  “No, it’s actually Mary Kay. Mom’s a director, so I get all these free samples from her. You like it? I thought it was too blue.”

  “It brings out the light colors in your eyes, it looks good,” I said. “Do you like Mary Kay products?”

  “Well, I like the soaps and lotions best,” she said. “They make my skin so soft. Feel this.” She held out the back of her hand and I touched it. It was as soft as feathers, but without feeling fragile.

  “That’s amazing, I wish my skin felt like that.”

  She giggled. “I could do your hands sometime.”

  From across the table, Mom interjected, “Don’t you two look cute together.”

  I glared at her. She made it sound like we were dating, but she knew I had a girlfriend. I realized Mom didn’t like Claire even more than she let on. She’d rather have me with this blond Mary Kay girl than with my goth-haired, kohl-eye-linered best friend in the world.

  My glare didn’t stop Mom, she went on. “Did Chris tell you about how he restores cars with his father? He’s very good with his hands, but he also gets good grades. Well rounded.”

  “No, Mom,” I said. “We were talking about makeup.”

  Mom’s mouth shut in a chiseled line. Luckily the youngest sister chimed in about how she wanted to wear makeup and no one noticed the deadly looks passing between Mom and me. She didn’t let me forget that remark, though. As soon as we were in the car, she started in about it.

  “Chris, I can’t believe you said that at dinner. Talking about makeup, honestly. I just want to be able to take my family out to a simple dinner with my office and not be mortified by my own child. Can’t you just give it up for one night? Do you have to be a freak all the time? I don’t know why you want to stand out so much. Your dad and I have given you everything we had, and you persist in this…perversion of nature.”

  “Sharon,” Dad said in his warning tone.

  “Don’t try to calm me down. Chris is a man, and the sooner he accepts that, the better. I don’t know where he came up with this crazy idea, but I have raised him as a boy and he will never be anything other than a man.” She raised her voice and glared over her shoulder. “Do you hear that? You’re a man, no matter what anyone tells you. Just look at yourself. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

  Internally I wobbled on the razor edge of sanity. Dad pulled into the driveway and I opened the car door before he’d stopped. I had my keys in my hand and ran to the front door before anyone could follow me. I dashed through the doorway and up the stairs to my bedroom where I bolted the door behind me. Then, for good measure, I pushed my desk in front of the door, panting with the effort and my rage.

  I tore off my jacket, tie and shirt and looked around for a way to destroy them. In my top desk drawer was a pair of scissors and a hunting knife Dad had given me last year. First I thought I should just cut off the parts of me that had Mom so convinced I was a man. I stood over the desk, bracing myself on my left hand while the knife quivered in my right. I couldn’t. Even though I hated that part of myself, I couldn’t attack my own body that way.

  Instead I sat down on the edge of my bed in my slacks and cut the arms off my jacket. As soon as the scissors bit through the cloth, I started to feel a clear determination rising inside of my outrage. I took each arm and cut it into strips, then I cut off the collar and used the knife to rip the jacket to rags. I took apart the shirt the same way, and then snipped perpendicularly across the tie, so that it lay on the floor in one-inch wide pieces.

  I stood up and stepped out of my pants, which came under the blade next. I was naked except for my briefs and those weren’t coming off because I refused to confront what was underneath them. I opened my closet door and looked into the comforting darkness.

  Dad knocked on my door. “Open up,” he said.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Don’t make me break in there, you won’t like it.”

  “The desk is in front of the door, I’d like to see you try,” I shot back at him.

  He raised his voice. “Chris, open the door.”

  “No,” I said, and then more loudly, “No!” I was screaming now as loud as I could, defying all the bullshit they’d put me through, “No! No! No!”

  Leaning over the desk, I punched the door. I heard Dad step back from the other side, but it barely registered over my own shouting and hitting the door again with my fist.

  I screamed, “No!” and hit the door again, harder, over and over again.

  I saw blood on the door and heard my voice go hoarse from screaming, but I couldn’t stop. The fury drove through me into the wood as I hit it. Only when my knuckle scraped the edge of the deadbolt and tore off a half-inch of skin did the pain slice through my rage.

  I grabbed my right hand with my left and staggered into my closet to curl up in the clothes I’d dragged off their hangers. I was crying so hard I thought I was going to puke.

  A booming impact hit the door so hard from the other side that the wood around the hinges groaned. Then twice more until wood splintered and the lock tore loose. I heard the scrape of the desk being pushed back and then Dad was kneeling down in the doorway to the closet. He grabbed my bloody hands and turned them palm up. He was afraid I’d slit my wrists, I realized.

  “Didn’t…cut…myself,” I managed through my heaving breath. “Knuckles.”

  “Ah Chris,” he said and closed his hand over the back of my neck. He gave me a tiny shake. “Jesus.”

  He got up and left. I curled deeper into the clothes pile, wishing it would all just go away. My head felt crushed. My eyes and sinuses burned with a damp fire.

  Dad came back a few minutes later. I was still crying, but not so hard. Now the tears just rolled down my face whether I tried to stop them or not. Dad had a stack of washcloths, bandage pads, tape and a bag of ice that he put on my right knuckles once he had a washcloth in place to stop the blood. He cleaned up my left hand and then very carefully ran a damp cloth over the right.

  “Shit,” was the one word he said during this process. He opened a couple of sterile bandage pads, pressed them over the knuckles and taped them loosely.

  Then he helped me pull one of his baggy sweatshirts down over my head. I didn’t realize how cold I was until he put the shirt on me. Then I started shivering uncontrollably.

  He looped an arm under my shoulders and helped me across the room to my bed. Dragging my desk chair across the room, he sat next to the bed and put the ice pack on my bandaged hand. I struggled to come up with words but before any came I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  When I woke up in the late morning, my right hand had a swollen lump that joined the knuckles together in a puffy, blue-purple mass. As loose as the tape was on the bandage, it still strained from the swelling. I gingerly pulled up one edge and peeked underneath. A line of scabs crossed my knuckles where the skin had split and torn, and most of the skin that should have been on my middle knuckle was gone, leaving a raw, red patch.

  It hurt with both throbbing and burning pain, and I couldn’t close my hand completely. I went and stood in the shower for a long time, holding the bandage out from the spray and wondering if I could just leave home. I could get in my car and drive to the Cities and find a job doing something stupid, but I’d just be a kid from the sticks with no high school diploma.

  Back in my room I put on jeans and a T-shirt and then listened to the sounds of the house, trying to figure out where my parents were. I was hungry enough to feel my stomach growl, but no
t hungry enough to walk into the kitchen if Mom was there. I noticed that Dad had cleared out the remnants of my torn up clothes from the night before. The bolt that I used on my door had been torn out of the molding, leaving two ragged holes where the screws had been. The casing for the bolt, which had been screwed into the molding, was still on the end of the bolt, hanging at a ridiculous angle. I pulled it off and pushed the bolt back along the door.

  My parents weren’t making any of their usual Sunday noises. After ten minutes I began to worry that they were sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to come down. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. I’d starve myself first. I lay back on my bed and folded my left hand behind my head, staring up at the white ceiling.

  After a while, Dad’s footsteps came up the stairs, heavy and slow. He knocked on my door. “Chris?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He pushed the door open. “You coming downstairs so we can talk?”

  I shrugged. “Is Mom going to rail on me again?”

  “No,” he said.

  He sounded so tired that I sat up and looked at him. His jeans and shirt were as wrinkled as if he’d slept in them, and his face was deeply lined, eyes sunken and dark.

  “Okay.” I stood up more because of his face than what he said. I cared about him, and I felt a little afraid of him, but today he looked as beat up as I felt, so I figured I’d stick with him, at least until things got ugly.

  I followed him downstairs and into the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table, hands wrapped white-knuckle tight around a cup of coffee. If I decided to spend the rest of the day in my room, this would be my one chance today to eat something. I got myself a bowl of cereal before sitting down at the far end of the table, away from Mom. She looked at Dad.

  “We think you should go see someone again,” he said slowly. “Someone who can help you.”

  “You’re the ones who stopped the visits with Dr. Mendel,” I pointed out.

  “We want you to go back to Dr. Webber,” he said.

  If I hadn’t cried myself out the night before, I might have started yelling at them about what a jerk he was. But I still felt tired and worn out, and I wanted to know my options. I had nothing left to lose here and if it didn’t get better fast, I was leaving.

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked.

  “A chance to be well,” Dad said.

  I rolled my eyes. “I know what’s wrong with me. That is not going to make me well.”

  Mom sighed. “Honey, would you just try to have an open mind? Maybe you’re wrong about all this, have you thought of that?”

  “What if I’m not? How long are you going to make me prove myself?”

  They looked at each other. Dad shook his head slightly, Mom frowned. “What is it you want?” she asked.

  This was clearly not the time to bring up surgery or going out dressed as a woman. “I want to see an endocrinologist, to go on hormone therapy,” I said.

  “What is that?” Mom asked.

  “It’s part of the process of transition…to a woman,” I said. She opened her mouth, but I said, “Just listen. I’d start taking hormones for a year or two and the effects are reversible. If it turns out I’m wrong, I can just stop.” I wanted to tell them how much better I felt when I was taking the hormones, more like myself and in charge of my life, less angry and hopeless. But then I’d have to admit I’d been taking someone else’s prescription and that would get both me and Natalie in trouble.

  “You want to take women’s hormones?” Mom asked, her voice rising sharply at the end.

  “You will when you hit menopause,” I said. “Lots of people take hormones.”

  “I’m a woman,” she said harshly.

  “So am I,” I shot back.

  The three of us fell into another cold silence. I wondered where they’d stashed Mikey and if he was going to pop out of the other room at any moment and shout “fag” at me or if he was upstairs again trying not to cry. Then it occurred to me that they must have left him over at his friend’s house so they could have this talk with their unfortunate son.

  “All right, look,” Dad said abruptly as he stood up from the table. He put his palms on the tabletop and leaned in toward both of us. “I’m no good at this shit and I’m sick of it. Chris, you’re going to see Dr. Webber for the next month, and Sharon you go with him if you want. At the end of August if you still want to go, I’ll take you to a hormone doctor and we’ll see what he says. I don’t want to hear any more about this.”

  He stalked away from the kitchen and a moment later the slam of the garage door echoed through the silent house.

  Mom stood up and went upstairs. I washed my cereal bowl, dried it and put it back in the cupboard so it looked like I’d never been in the kitchen. Then I put on my coat and boots and left. Let Mom tell me later if I was still grounded.

  I drove around for a while and then went to the public library to update my friends online about everything that had happened. I wanted to see Claire, but I was afraid that when I did, I’d just start crying again. I sent her an email instead. Then I went home to a very quiet dinner.

  Monday morning, Mom and Dad went off to work as usual. I watched Mikey in the early part of the day, but then he went over to a friend’s house. I drove to the nearest Home Depot, which wasn’t all that near, and bought a new piece of molding for my doorframe. Then I went over to Claire’s house. She put her arms around me as soon as she saw me in the doorway and dragged me to the couch. She didn’t let go for about three hours.

  ***

  Mom got us in with Dr. Webber as soon as possible. It was only two days later that I took a short, silent car ride to his office. She said she wanted to come in with me, so we ended up in that dreary office, with her on the couch and me in a chair. I sat back, crossed my arms and waited to hear what he was going to say. His hair was still closely cropped and perfectly done as if it hadn’t grown at all since the last time I saw him six months ago. He looked like an actor playing the part of a psychiatrist in a commercial for an antidepressant.

  “Chris, I hear things have gotten worse since I saw you last,” he said with a slight, tense smile.

  Now that I hadn’t been to Dr. Webber in months I saw him differently, even through my anger. On the surface he looked so perfect from his distinguished graying temples and close trimmed nails to his sharply creased pants. But the overly tense way he sat in his chair made him always off balance. Dr. Mendel actually sat up straight and relaxed at the same time. I never saw her try to sit up straight, she just did it. Dr. Webber swayed and caught himself, straightened up and shifted his shoulders into place.

  “Actually, things got better for a long time, and then my parents freaked out, and since then it’s pretty much sucked,” I told him.

  Mom sighed loudly. “He wants to be a woman,” she said.

  Dr. Webber turned his chair more fully toward me and leaned forward. “Is that true?”

  “Close,” I said. “Actually, I am a woman, on the inside. I’d like my body to match my internal sense of myself.”

  “How do you know you’re a woman?” he asked.

  “How do you know you’re a man?” I asked back. “It’s a feeling you have, a sense of yourself. I’ve just always known I was a woman—or a girl, when I was a kid—and I was confused about why everyone always stuck me with the boys.”

  He swiveled his chair back toward my mom and this started another sway, shift, straighten sequence. “Did you notice effeminate behavior in Chris when he was younger?”

  “No,” Mom said, “not really. He’s always liked cars and girls and adventure games. He likes being outside a lot, and he’s been on the swim team since he started high school.”

  “Chris, when did you start thinking you wanted to be a girl?” the doctor asked.

  “I didn’t start thinking it one day. Actually, what I remember is being surprised that other people didn’t treat me like a girl. Mom, remember in first grade when I wanted a girl’s name?�
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  “Aha!” Dr. Webber said. His hands pushed down on the seat of his chair, popping him up even straighter. “How old were you then, five, six? What was going on in the home at that time?”

  That second question was directed to Mom who gave him a half shrug and raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I can remember.”

  “Was there any instability in the home?”

  “I’m sure there was some. Money was really tight. I’d just taken a job, my husband was out of work for a while.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Well, Chris, I think we can work on this. I suspect what happened is that you’ve idealized women and degraded men, probably having to do with that stressful time in your early childhood. You saw your mother as capable and your father as helpless and decided it’s better to be a woman. You may also have had some trouble bonding appropriately with your father and decided that you wouldn’t make a good man. What we need to do is to rewire these patterns.”

  I sat very still and tried hard not to roll my eyes. He went on, “I’m going to come up with a treatment plan for you. Now what is important for you to understand is that this problem of yours is not physical, although it may seem that way, it is psychological. To attempt to treat it physically, is to go in the wrong direction. You can take hormones and get plastic surgery, but a ‘sex change’ is a misnomer. You will never be able to change your biological sex. You need to think about what kind of person you really want to grow up to be.”

  He turned his awful attention toward my mother. “You and your husband need to set a good example for Chris of a well-balanced marriage with strong masculine and feminine poles. I’d like the two of you to come see me, and I’d like Chris to come see me on his own next week.”

  Mom said something in agreement and thanked him. I wasn’t listening. I hated him with a black, hopeless rage.

  “See,” Mom said when we got in the car. “He believes you can be cured psychologically. You don’t need to go through all this craziness to become a woman. You can be fine the way you are.”