Stuck in the Middle with You

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  As we drove back to the apartment, through the crazy narrow streets of Cork, I tried to get the details from him. Apparently there’d been some sort of race. Which he’d lost.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said to the six-year-old.

  “Whenever I race you or Mommy, I always win,” he said, deep in his misery.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe we’re not as fast as the Irish.”

  “I thought I was as fast as a cheetah!” he said.

  “You are fast,” I noted. “You just weren’t the fastest!”

  He sobbed some more.

  “You don’t have to keep doing that,” I said.

  He looked up at me. He had no idea what I was talking about.

  “The weeping. You lost a race, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  “It is for me,” he said.

  “Maybe you think that now,” I said. “But there’s worse things in the world than losing a race. You should save your tears.”

  “Why?” asked Zach. “Am I going to run out?”

  There were a couple of things I wanted to explain to my son. One of them was that, no, you’ll never run out of tears. At the same time, tears weren’t something you let fall indiscriminately. You wanted to save them for when you needed them. That was my theory at the time, anyhow.

  “No, Zach,” I said. “You won’t run out of tears. It’s just that there are times when it’s good to hold things in.”

  “Why would I hold things in?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Because that’s how you protect people,” I said. “It’s one of the ways boys protect girls. It’s like you put that sadness in a box, and you bury it in the ground.”

  Zach looked out the window. His tears had stopped. “I should protect Mommy, you mean?” he said. “By putting my tears in the ground?”

  We were almost home. Through the open windows of the Opel I could hear the bells of St. Anne’s ringing through the air. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  THAT NIGHT, a scream rent the air. Zach and Sean both came running into the living room. “What happened?” said Deedie, leaping to her feet.

  Zach held up his hand. Deep tooth marks were sunk into the meat of his thumb.

  “Sean bit me!” he said. He was sobbing.

  “I didn’t!” said Sean.

  “Seannie,” said Deedie. “Look at Zach’s hand! Look at what you did!”

  “I didn’t bite him!” said Sean. He was holding his friend Big Pig in one hand. Sean had a council of porcine advisers, including Big Pig, Little Pig, and Irish Pig.

  “Everyone makes a mistake once in a while,” said Deedie, casting a glance in my direction. “But we don’t lie to each other in our family.”

  Now Sean was crying. “I’m not a liar!” he shouted. Deedie picked him up and walked down the hall to his room. Seannie had kind of a grim room in the apartment, a damp, mildewy chamber just shy of growing mushrooms.

  “Time out for you,” said Deedie.

  I picked up Zach and held him in my lap. “I’m sorry I’m crying,” he said. “I wanted to protect Mommy. But it hurts too much.”

  “It’s all right, son,” I said. From down the hall, I heard the sound of Seannie wailing. His door closed as Deedie left him in there to consider his recent mistakes.

  Ten years later, Zach confessed to me that Sean had been telling the truth in this encounter. What had happened, in fact, was that in order to frame his brother, Zach had bitten himself.

  DEEDIE AND I were having dinner at the table in our apartment in Cork. She’d taken a leave from her job as a social worker for the year and spent her days working out at the Brookfield Health Club and shopping at the city’s English Market, a “farmers’ market” several blocks long. There were loaves of Irish soda bread, pink salmon laid out on ice, bottles of sweet cream and honey.

  She poured out a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and we clinked glasses. The boys were asleep.

  “Are ye all right then?” I said. This was a phrase we heard each day at the English Market, the Irish equivalent of “Can I help you?”

  “Brilliant,” said Deedie. She’d made salmon and green beans. It had been raining outside, but now the sun was out. Everything shone with rain.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Are we having a good year?”

  Deedie nodded. “I think I’m as happy as I’ve ever been,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said. “I thought I’d be homesick, but I’m not. Not much, anyhow.”

  Deedie sipped her wine. “Home will be there when we get back,” she said. “In the meantime, there’s all this salmon.”

  I looked at my wife. After ten years of marriage, she was as beautiful as when we married. I was not sure the same could be said of me.

  “And you don’t mind—the gender stuff?” I said restlessly.

  “That,” said Deedie. “Whatever. I’m not crazy about it, but you’re happy, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well, all right then,” she said.

  She ate some salmon. From outside, the sound of tires on the wet road made a sound like a shush.

  The doorbell rang.

  I put my glass down, but I missed the edge of the table. The goblet shattered on the floor.

  As I walked toward the front door, I stepped on a small sliver of glass. I felt it disappear deep into the flesh of my heel.

  I opened the door. There stood a deliveryman, holding a huge bouquet of roses. They were from my mother. I’m sending these for no reason at all, read the card. Except to remind you both that you are loved.

  A WEEK LATER, I went to Amsterdam by myself. I brought a suitcase of female gear, checked into the American Hotel on the Leidseplein, and did the presto change-o. After a few hours I stepped out onto the streets of the city, in a black skirt and a light blue top. No one looked at me twice. Was this because I was so undetectable as a female? Or because, when all was said and done, what I looked like turned out to be of far less consequence to the world than I had anticipated?

  I walked around Vondelpark and considered the swans, visited the Rijksmuseum and stared at paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer. They didn’t have Girl with a Pearl Earring, but it was just as well. I didn’t need to be called klootzak anymore. I knew how to say this in English.

  As I walked around the city, I was aware that my foot hurt. That tiny sliver of glass in my heel appeared to be sinking deeper and deeper. I pretended that I couldn’t feel it. When I failed at this, I simply hoped the sliver would work its way out on its own in time, although I’m not sure anything else in the world had ever behaved in that fashion, at least not in my experience.

  At the end of the day I found myself in the Anne Frank house on the Prinsengracht.

  I climbed the small staircase up to the hidden annex, walked through the passageway hidden by the bookcase, crept through those tiny rooms full of such longing and horror. There weren’t a lot of other tourists in the house that day. And so it was that I found myself dressed in drag, alone in Anne Frank’s bedroom.

  There was her tiny bed, the photographs of Hollywood movie stars from sixty years ago still pasted to the wall. A sheet of Plexiglas protected the photographs from the fingers of tourists.

  I stood there frozen, imagining the young girl passing her days here, waiting to be set free. There was a window on one wall. Birds were singing.

  In spite of the room’s aching sadness, it was still a teenager’s room. It made me think, for a second, of the room I had lived in when I was sixteen, a chamber with two different secret panels—one for my bong, one for my bras and earrings and my copy of The Feminine Mystique. Next to my bed, instead of a photograph of Joan Crawford, there had been a photograph of the surface of Mars. I used to lie in bed and look at the planet, imagine what it would be like to live there.

  I thought about Anne Frank, driven into hiding by Nazis. The glass in my heel ached.

  What about you, Jenny? I asked myself. Is this
really how you’re going to live?

  I fled from the girl’s bedroom, went down the stairs, and fought my way in a blind panic out into the streets of Amsterdam. I rushed in my heels to the Prinsengracht canal and stood there in self-loathing and despair, looking down at the dank green water.

  I have made up my mind, Anne Frank wrote, to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments.

  I saw two hippies coming down the street, American college boys with backpacks. I remembered the first time I had come to Amsterdam, back with my friend Doober, the summer between high school and college. I remembered asking him one morning, “Don’t you want to see the Anne Frank house?”

  “I don’t know, man,” said Doober. “Sounds like kind of a bummer.”

  The hippies passed me by. One of them cast a curious look in my direction, as if embarrassed just to walk by this strange distraught woman. It had to be admitted that he looked not unlike myself, when I was a young thing, with his long hair and leering eyes. I wondered if he was thinking the thing that I had thought at the lighthouse in Sanibel, that time I’d looked at the jogging woman who so strangely resembled me. Did he see, as he gazed upon me, how we all resemble each other? How any of us could be brother and sister? Or both?

  “Entschuldigen, Fraulein,” he said, pausing. “Sie sind verletzt?”

  Excuse me, miss. Are you hurt?

  “Mir geht es gut,” I said. I wondered if he could tell the truth about me from my voice. “Es ist ganz nichts.” I’m fine. It’s nothing.

  The boys loped onward. A few meters farther down the street, they laughed. I wasn’t sure about what exactly, but I had a guess.

  The burden of shame fell even more heavily upon me. There I was, in my twinset and skirt, standing in the very shadow of the Anne Frank house. Where boys had looked upon me. And concluded I was German.

  WHEN I GOT back to Cork, the boys were waiting for me at the door. They rushed forward, their arms spread, and I gathered my sons to me. They were still so small I could pick up one with each arm.

  “Daddy’s back!” they shouted.

  THE NEXT DAY, I went to the hospital to have someone take a look at the piece of glass in my foot. Ireland, while enjoying what turned out to be its all-too-brief period as the “Celtic Tiger,” had not poured a lot of its newfound wealth into its health care system, and as a result, the wait at the ER at the Cork hospital turned into an ordeal the likes of which I’d have been more likely to expect from a hospital in, say, Libya. I waited in a decaying chair next to a guy with an open head wound for about five hours, until at last I was ushered into an examining room and a doctor sat me down. On the floor in front of me was a bright red pool of blood.

  “Mind the puddle,” said the doc.

  An hour later I was in an operating room, as surgeons used knives and tweezers to feel around for the elusive splinter. It took them a while. The anesthetic didn’t work. I spent some of the time screaming my brains out.

  At long last, the doctor came up to me with the piece of bloodied glass held triumphantly in his tweezers. “You see?” he said. “There we have it at last!”

  I looked at it, thought things over, and screamed some more.

  When I came out of surgery, Deedie was waiting for me. “What happened to you?” she said.

  “Glass in my foot,” I said.

  We limped out to the car. “How long has there been glass in your foot?” she asked.

  “A couple weeks,” I said. “Remember that goblet I broke when that guy delivered the flowers?”

  She sat me down in the car, went around to her side to slide behind the wheel. “So you’ve just been walking around with a piece of glass in your foot for two weeks?”

  I nodded. She was angry with me. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to be annoying. I figured it would work its way out.”

  She drove me to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription for painkillers. “He didn’t want to be annoying!” she declared, as if making some sort of argument to an invisible third party.

  “Kind of stupid, I guess,” I said.

  She glanced over at me. “Did you have that glass in your foot the whole time you were in Amsterdam?”

  I nodded.

  She shook her head. “Why don’t you tell me when you hurt?” she asked. “Why do you have to keep it all inside?”

  Deedie parked at the apothecary to get my drugs. As I waited for her, I thought about my friend Johnny Neville, singing about his father.

  You wind him up and let him go,

  And watch him wobble, to and fro.

  Deedie came back to the car ten minutes later, drugs in hand, to find me wracked with tears.

  “Jimmy? Oh, my sweet Jimmy-pie,” she said, and held her husband in her arms. I lay my head upon her shoulder and shook.

  She had seen me weep, now and again, over the ten years of our marriage. But Deedie had never seen me weep like this.

  WHEN WE GOT HOME, the children were waiting for us. As Deedie ushered their babysitter, Liz, toward the car, the boys hugged me tight.

  “Daddy, you were crying,” said Sean.

  “I was,” I said. My face was all red, and my cheeks were still wet.

  Seannie pointed at me and grinned, as if he’d figured something out.

  “Daddy,” he said. “You were a bad boy.”

  I nodded. He had that right.

  “Why were you crying?” said Zach. “What’s wrong?”

  I gathered my sons into my arms again, wondering how on earth I could protect them, how I could save us all from the doom that was suddenly drawing near.

  “I don’t want pants,” I whispered. “Oh, I hate pants.”

  Zach was sitting at the lunch table with his friend Emma, eating a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich. On his napkin I had drawn a cartoon of our dog Lucy. From Lucy’s mouth came a word balloon, and in the middle of the balloon was a cartoon heart. This of course was ironic, given the fact that the dog loathed all sentient creatures, my sons not least, as mentioned earlier.

  “I saw your daddy,” said Emma. They were in second grade. “He looks like a girl.”

  Zach looked at the cartoon dog, then back at Emma. “Can I tell you a secret, Emma?” he said.

  “Yes.” By this, she didn’t mean that she would keep the secret, only that he could tell it to her. Emma had asked Zach to be the vice president of the Drama Club a few weeks before this, a post that seemed prestigious to Zach at first. Later, he learned that all the Drama Club did was appoint officers. They didn’t actually put on any plays.

  “My daddy’s turning into a girl,” said Zach.

  Emma’s eyes flickered. She put down her Ring Ding.

  “That,” she said, “is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

  “It’s okay,” said Zach. “She’s still the same person.”

  Emma shook her head, as if Zach somehow had failed to grasp the gravity of her words. “That,” she said again, “is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

  Zach didn’t understand what was so sad about it, but it was hard to disagree with Emma, once she’d decided something. In the years to come, he’d find this was true of lots of people.

  IN THE YEARS since “transition” we’ve often been asked how it was our family survived the whole miserable business. Looking back on it all now, it seems inevitable that the love our family shared was bound to triumph, that the things that bound us all together were fated to prevail over the things that were tearing us apart. But it didn’t feel inevitable at the time. What felt inevitable was the complete loss of everything we had ever known or loved.

  For one thing, the vast majority of our friends and relatives seemed to be subtly, or not so subtly, rooting for divorce. This was true not onl
y among Deedie’s supporters, who just thought the whole idea of staying with a transsexual “husband” the height of absurdity; it was true among mine as well. “You’re never going to really be a woman until you get away from the life you created as a man,” one friend told me. “You need to move away somewhere and start over.” According to these well-wishers, staying with Deedie and the boys, continuing on as a professor at Colby and living in the town in which we had made our home, would be like trailing my male life behind me, no matter what sex I became. I might change my name to Jennifer and switch over to diet from regular Coke, but as long as I stayed put, I would still be casting James’s shadow.

  People rooting for us to split weren’t necessarily mean-spirited, of course; splitting up and each of us “moving on” seemed like an obvious and generous way to do well by each other. Surely Deedie deserved what she had signed on for—a husband—and surely I deserved a chance to find the thing everyone presumed that I would now desire as well: a husband of my own. This solution—divorce for both of us, and a second marriage for us each to a decent, loving man—was the cleanest all around, it was felt. If the danger for me in staying with my family was that I would always still be casting James’s shadow, then the danger for Deedie was even more severe. If she stayed with me, she would be casting a shadow of her own, living the life of a woman who had never quite accepted the fact that the man she loved no longer existed. She would be like some twenty-first-century nether-version of Miss Havisham, frozen in time, still going through the rituals of a life that had long since gone on without her.

  In short, what our friends and family hoped was the well-intended hope of men and women in a culture riddled with homophobia—not to mention transphobia, a word most people had never even heard of. They hoped that Deedie and I, severed from each other, would henceforward be redeemed by the love of some nice man.

  That we would want to stay together, that we would want to continue our marriage as quas-bians, wasn’t just a hope that had not yet occurred to our friends. It was also one that had not yet occurred to us.

  IF THERE WAS a single person in the world who thought that my changing genders was a brilliant idea, it was Deedie’s sister Katie. Twelve years older than my wife, Katie was a United Church of Christ minister who had recently come out as a lesbian. It was Katie who had married the two of us at the National Cathedral in Washington back in 1988; it was Katie who had come to sit at Deedie’s bedside when the children were born. She had a mercurial, passionate, intense personality, and she was as quick to laugh as she was to dissolve in fits of bereaved, self-pitying tears. She had always been a big fan of mine, though; I think she saw in me an example of what she hoped a man could be—sensitive, emotional, and involved with his sons.