Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  “Then why?” she asked.

  “Because I am a woman,” I said simply. “That’s all. What would you do if you’d grown up as a boy?”

  “I’d be a boy,” she said. “I wouldn’t be myself. That’s the point, Chris, people don’t go from one to the other. You’re not a woman. You don’t act like a woman, you don’t think like a woman. I’m afraid you’re just going to turn out to be a freak, and you’ll never get what you’re really looking for.”

  Normally, I would have fought with her and insisted that I am a woman and therefore I think like one and so on. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the mellow weekend I’d had, or the hormones I was taking, or being able to be honest to more people than I ever had before, but I didn’t feel angry at her like I usually did. I could start to understand that she honestly wanted me to be happy and she just didn’t see how all this could work.

  “I’m afraid of that too,” I admitted. “I’m afraid I’ll get through all this and I won’t look or sound like a woman.”

  “Then why do it?” she asked plaintively.

  “Because being treated like a guy all the time, having to pretend I am a guy, I’m lying to everyone. It destroys me. I would rather fail at being myself than succeed at being someone I’m not.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand it, and I’m still going to look for another way out for you.”

  “But not Dr. Webber?”

  “No,” she said. “Not him. But you’re still going to church at least twice a month.”

  I enjoyed church with Claire explaining it all to me, but I knew I had to pretend it was a chore. “Ugh, Mom,” I said and sighed heavily. “Fine. If I have to.”

  I thought the talk went well, and I was elated to have the weight of Dr. Webber off me, but Mom’s comment about me not thinking like a woman haunted me. Was it possible that even though I felt female inside, my growing up as boy had changed me forever? Would I never fit in anywhere except for the transgender community? Although I found support there, I couldn’t imagine living my whole life inside those boundaries.

  I asked Claire about it, and she quickly pried out of me the details of the entire conversation with my mother. Then she almost fell out of her chair laughing. We were sitting alone at the end of a long table in the cafeteria talking in whispers. We’d arranged our lunch periods together this year. I think that our highly visible joy at being together was the only factor that kept the other kids at school from deciding I was gay.

  “Why are you laughing?” I demanded.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “In the middle of a conversation in which you got out of seeing Dr. Webber by insinuating that he has a sexual interest in you, your mother suggests you don’t think like a woman. I don’t know what girl manual your mom got, but that’s in the first five pages of mine. That’s totally a girl trick. No self-respecting straight teen guy would suggest some man was leering at him to get his way.”

  I said in my best Valley Girl impression, “So, I’m, like, totally a girl.”

  “You’re certainly more of a girl than I am,” she said. “You actually like makeup.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re like an eleven-year-old worried that you’re never going to get your period. Chill out.”

  I made myself sigh and look down at my plate and frown.

  “What?” she asked with a hint of real concern.

  “You’re right, I am afraid I’m never going to get my period,” I said.

  ***

  The strangest thing happened a few days after Christmas. Mom was going through another phase of not really talking to me, and Claire had gotten her acceptance letter to that university in Iowa with the really good writing program. It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be together after next summer, so I was just bummed. She said she’d always be my best friend, but I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do without her. I didn’t have the money to go to a really good school and if I did have the money, I’d spend it on surgery anyway, so I figured I’d go to a community college for a two-year degree and then transfer to the University of Minnesota for the last two years. By then I planned to be living as a woman full time.

  But that remained a long way off and so my Christmas was bleak. Claire went to visit her dad, and I was stuck in the house with Mom glaring at me every time I did something girlish and with Dad wrapped up in his cars.

  Two days after Christmas while I was slumped on the couch trying to be interested in the television, Dad opened the door to the garage and said, “Come here.”

  I got up and followed him into his workshop that was, as usual, littered with tools and car parts. He picked a small, badly gift-wrapped box off his worktable and tossed it at me.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Late Christmas present,” he said. “Open it.”

  I did. It was a small box with a set of car keys. “Dad, I already have a car.”

  Standing next to me, he turned me toward the 1977 Ford Thunderbird he’d been working on. It was still a bit of a monstrosity, but, as he often boasted, for something he’d picked up for twenty-five hundred bucks, who could complain. It had good lines and with the right paint job it would look slick.

  “Now you have two,” he said.

  “What am I going to do with two cars?”

  “Sell one of ’em. What do you think you can get for the Chevy?”

  I felt my jaw loosening, wanting to drop open. “Sixteen,” I said with effort. “Maybe seventeen grand.”

  “Good,” he said. “There you go.”

  “For school?” I asked, still not quite believing my ears.

  “For whatever you want. I don’t need to know what you use it for.”

  Was he suggesting I use it to pay for surgery?

  “Dad—?” I started.

  He turned to face me fully. “Look Chris, I don’t understand this stuff you’re into. It makes no sense to me. All I know is that you’ve been angry and sad damn near your whole life, and now you’re happy. I want you to stay that way. You do whatever you need. And if I hurt you when you were little…well, I’m sorry.”

  I started crying. I couldn’t talk.

  He threw an arm over my shoulders and tightened it once. “Jesus Christ,” he said roughly.

  After a minute he dropped his arm and walked across the workshop to his latest project. “What do you think I can get for this shit?” he yelled back to me. “It’s shot to hell.”

  I wiped my face and walked over to where he was standing. “It’s worth something,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”

  He didn’t bring the topic up again, but I spent more time over that holiday working on the cars with him and a couple times I could have sworn he’d stopped calling me “son” and started calling me “hon.”

  ***

  I kept my head down through most of the winter, and toward the end of it, Mom seemed to have relaxed. She might have thought I was growing out of my “transsexual phase” as she once put it, because I had resolved not to bring it up until I could move out of the house.

  One evening in late January Claire and I were having dinner in front of her TV. Claire’s mom was now seriously dating the man she’d started seeing the previous summer and as a result was out late a couple nights a week. Whenever Claire saw such a night coming, she made sure I came over and let me wear whatever I wanted. I was in the Banana Republic pants Natalie had picked out and a knit sweater Claire got me for Christmas.

  “Hey,” she said on a commercial and muted the TV. “Know what today is?”

  “Did I miss an anniversary?”

  “Only of the night you came out to me.”

  “Wow.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “For trusting me and all that.”

  I just pulled her close. One year since I’d come out to her and my family, and I’d met all sorts of friends in the Cities. I had a therapist and a plan. Not too shabby.

  “Are you getting weepy?” Claire asked from my shoulder. “Don’t cry on me. You a
re such a girl.”

  “Me? You’re the one wearing eye shadow to watch TV.”

  “You put it on me.”

  We gaped at each other in mock horror and then fell together laughing.

  “Seeing you have to fight for all this,” she said. “It makes me appreciate more what I have.”

  I kissed the top of her head. “Glad I could help.”

  “Yeah, my mom says you’re a good influence. She loves you,” she said, laughing. Then she paused and I could feel her warm breath fluttering over my collarbone. “I love you,” she said.

  I tightened my hold on her. Small as she was, she’d been the most solid part of my life during the last year. I didn’t have the words to tell her what it meant to me that through all of this we still got to be people sitting together and just laughing or crying or kissing each other.

  EPILOGUE

  THREE YEARS LATER

  Claire and I went off to our separate colleges, not without envy on my part and a lot of loneliness for both of us. We tried to keep dating, but by that first Christmas, it was pretty obviously not going to work. So I put my nose down into my books and pulled a brilliant GPA while saving up as much money as I could. Weekends I got to be myself in the city, and on longer breaks I made some friends I could stay with there, including Elizabeth from the support group. She let me stay at the guest room in her house over spring break and for a few weeks in the summer as I got used to living as a girl for longer periods of time.

  I now have a two-year degree and am in the middle of my first year at the University of Minnesota. I enrolled here as Emily Christine Hesse and only a couple of people in admissions and the health office know I didn’t grow up as a girl. I had the facial surgery last summer and pretty much look like I did except that my nose is a lot cuter and I don’t have the caveman brow ridge; I now look like I did before I hit puberty and testosterone messed everything up. Claire came with me for the surgery and read me some of her writing while I recovered. She says I look like Jennifer Garner, which is ridiculous. But I do look good.

  I have some of the money in the bank for my last surgery and I’m hoping to have it next summer when I have plenty of time to recover so I don’t mess up my schoolwork. I’ll also use that time to edit this account that I’ve written of that crazy year when I came out and set myself to growing into the woman I am. Claire’s helped out by telling me her parts of the story, and I’ve tried to reflect the whole tale as completely and fairly as possible.

  Oh, and speaking of fairness, Mom turned out to be okay with her new daughter. She took an entire two years to come around. I think she felt like Chris died, and didn’t know how to grieve that. But she thinks I do look pretty great as a girl.

  It’s weird to still be in an in-between place, with one more surgery to go. I’m eager and a little scared.

  The waiting and all the trouble has been more than made up for by the fact that the pencil outline of my life has been filled in and I get to walk around campus fully visible and luminous as myself.

  Claire actually says it all better than I do, but you’ll have to read her book for that whole story. She says that when she’s around me now she can see that I’m in a state of wonder about life itself; I don’t take any day for granted. I don’t know if I would have done this life any differently if I had a choice. I don’t know anyone who appreciates a hot bath like I do, or the feel of my hair on the back of my neck when I turn, or the way my heart lifts into the back of my eyes when anyone says “Excuse me, miss.”

  Claire says she used to think ordinary life was boring before I came out to her, but now she realizes that every ordinary moment has extraordinary worlds contained within it. But then she’s the mystic. I’ll take my ordinary moments and enjoy every one of them.