I’ve been watching you, said my father, without his lips moving. There are a lot of things I understand now, Jim, that I didn’t understand when I was alive. He inhaled his L&M King and blew out the smoke. If you have to become a woman, you should know that I will always love you, and that your mother will always love you. But if you do go through with this, there is something you have to know. He gave me a cold look.
I’m not going to be watching out for you anymore.
He stared at me with that harsh, judgmental expression. And then he disappeared.
I sat up from the dream into the darkness of my high school bedroom. I turned on the lamp, my heart pounding away.
The room was full of the smell of his hair tonic. I’d have recognized it anywhere.
IN THE MORNING, I went for a long walk around the old neighborhood. I stood by my friend Mark’s old house, a house not unlike the one my mother lived in. After Mark’s family moved out, Lenny Dykstra had moved in. He had been the center fielder for the Phillies, but he was gone now too. I didn’t know the people who lived there now, or what was inside their barn, the place where we’d had the cast party for Our Town back in 1975. I thought of a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and the man who looks down at the town “where strangers would have shut the door that friends had opened long ago.” I walked down the street and stood by the meadow with the stream, where once Mark and I had spent a whole evening watching fireflies electrify the night.
Then I walked back to the house, and I sat down with my mother, and I said, “Mom. There’s something I need to tell you.”
She put down her knitting. Day after day she made baby booties for her church’s charity. I can’t even imagine how many pairs she’d made, all those booties for babies she did not know.
“Is it something good?” she said, although she knew better.
“I don’t know what you’re going to think,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s something that’s going to hurt you, no matter how much I want not to hurt you.”
My mother drew into herself a little bit. I could feel her raising her shields, as if to prepare for whatever blow was surely coming next.
“You need to know I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m not gay, and Deedie and I aren’t getting divorced.” And for a moment my mother relaxed a little bit, since the three of these were the obvious first choices. That there was something other than these, that it was something she had hardly heard of, was what she did not yet know.
“You have always been the best mom,” I said. “You have always had that optimism and faith in everything, and I think I’ve inherited that, too; it’s given me a sense that things are always going to get better, no matter what happens.”
I was reaching the hard part. I couldn’t believe the words that were falling from my lips, couldn’t believe the pain I was about to cause her, wondered even now if there was any way to protect her from what I had to say. Hadn’t that been my job as a man, protecting my mother and my sister and Deedie and the boys from all the battering evils of the world?
“I have had a happy life,” I told her. “There’s been pain and sadness but mostly it’s been a happy life. In part because you and Dad always loved me, but in part because I have that optimism of yours, that same faith in the goodness of people.”
My mother sat there in silence. I could hear her thinking, Yes, honey. And what’s the catch?
“But I have had a secret from you, all these years. Ever since I was a child. And now I’m afraid to tell you, because I’m afraid that if I tell you the truth about my own heart that you won’t love me anymore.”
The tears were coming down now, and my mother still looked at me, waiting. It was lucky I had rehearsed this speech, oh, about a hundred thousand times. I’d given it to her in my head so many times that it was hard to believe it was actually happening now for real.
“But the reason you haven’t known this secret is because I wouldn’t share it with you. I have barely been able to share it with myself, because of the shame I’ve always feared it would bring on us. But I’ve reached a point where I have to tell the truth, where I have to accept myself, or I can’t go a step farther.”
My mother spoke softly. “What is it, honey?”
“The fact is, Mom,” I said, pulling back the string of my bow, “that I’m transgender. I’m a transsexual. Someone who’s always believed herself to be female, even though I was born male. I’ve fought against it my whole life, because I didn’t want anyone to be ashamed of me, because I wanted you to be proud of me. I wanted you to—”
But at this point I was unable to speak further, because I was weeping too hard. My mother looked at me hard. Tears began to stream from her eyes as well.
Then she stood up, and she sat down on the couch next to me and put her arms around me.
“Oh, Jimmy,” she said, her voice shaking with tears. “I love you, and I’ll always love you. I would never desert my child. I would never abandon you or turn my back on you. And even if you’re my daughter, instead of my son, I’ll always be your mother. And we’ll always have each other.”
And then she held me, and the two of us cried until each other’s shoulders were wet.
“But, Mom,” I said. “Don’t you understand? If I become your daughter, won’t that be an embarrassment? Won’t you be ashamed? Won’t it be a scandal?”
“Well, yes,” she said thoughtfully. “Probably it will be a scandal, for a while at least.” Then she shrugged. “But—I will adjust.”
We talked about the logistics of the situation, which, given the particulars of transition, were complicated and took a lot of explaining. But in the end, when she got her mind around the most important facts—that Deedie and I were trying to stay together, that the children were generally okay about things so far, that I was under the care of a doctor and a specialist and a social worker—she seemed content to trust that I knew what I was doing. Looking back now, I also know that she hadn’t given up all hope of talking me out of it, or abandoned the hope that somehow she could “fix things” all by herself, through the force of her own kind, generous, carbonated personality.
But for the moment she just held me in her arms. She said, “Love will prevail.”
That evening, she sat me in front of a fire in a room filled with books and showed me how to knit. She didn’t feel there was a lot she could teach me about being a woman, at this point, but she thought that knitting might help.
“Now you have to remember,” she said, as she parsed the differences between knitting and purling, “that I learned this in East Prussia, a long time ago, from my own mother. Which is why I do it backward.”
“You knit backward?” I said, a little confused.
“Well, that’s what everyone tells me. I just knit the way I was taught. So if you knit the way I teach you, you need to know one thing. You’re going to knit backward too.”
“That’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll do it the way you teach me.”
And so we sat there by the fire together, knitting booties for babies we did not know.
ZACH LOOKED at us in anguish. “Mommy? Maddy? There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
In my heart I again heard myself speaking to my mother. I remembered her looking at me and saying, Is it something good?
“I’ve reached two important decisions in my life,” he said.
Deedie and I exchanged a glance.
“Okay,” said Zach. “First off, I’ve decided—” He looked down. “Man, this is hard to say.”
Deedie and I looked at each other, in agony. What was it our son was about to let loose upon the world?
“I’ve decided that I want to become—”
I closed my eyes. Please, no.
“A pacifist.”
Deedie and I exchanged glances again. “A pacifist?” I said.
“Yes,” said Zach. “I want to work for peace.”
There was a moment of silence as we thought this over. Then Deedie spoke for us b
oth. “Good for you, Zach,” said Deedie. “We’re proud of you. We’ll go online, see if we can find, like, some peace marches we can all go to. If you want.”
“Yeah,” I said cautiously. “But you said you’d made—two decisions? What was the other one? Do you want to share that with us as well?”
“Yeah, okay.” He blushed. “This is the hard one.” He looked at me and said, “Maddy, I really don’t want to disappoint you.…”
“You could never disappoint me,” I said, and shot him a look. I wondered, briefly, if the look I was giving him was similar to the look my father had given me, years earlier, when we’d shared a fleeting glimpse of Frank-N-Furter together, dancing in his fishnets.
“All right,” he said. “I think I want—to stop playing tuba? And instead to start playing—the Irish fiddle.”
He let this sink in.
“That’s it?” said Deedie.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at the two of us, still biting our nails. “What did you think I was going to say?”
“Nothing,” I said. I went over and hugged him. Love will prevail. “It’s okay, Zach,” I said. “You were great on tuba. I know you’ll be great on fiddle.”
He heaved a sigh. “Whew,” he said. “That was really hard.” He looked at me. “Did you ever have to tell Grandmama anything like that?”
“Once or twice,” I said. “Why? Were you scared? You should never be scared to tell the truth.”
“I wasn’t scared,” said Zach, and he looked out the window at the snow. “I just hate to let anybody down.”
Dick Clark had had a stroke. We couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, although we knew he wished us well. The Waterford crystal ball in Times Square was slowly descending toward the earth. Our guests counted down the seconds remaining in the year of 2009. Five … four … three … two … And then the lights were flashing and strangers were embracing and bands began to play “Auld Lang Syne.”
I turned toward Deedie. She did not kiss me.
That look of loss crept over my face. It’d been ten years now since I’d stood by the banks of Great Pond in Belgrade, Maine, my six-year-old son in my arms, watching the fireworks over the frozen lake inaugurate the new millennium. It had only been days later—January 6, 2000, to be exact—that I had looked up into the night sky and seen Orion the Hunter shining down at me, asking me, How much longer do you intend to avoid the truth of your own life?
Later, I’d learned that January 6 that year was the date of the Feast of the Epiphany. Now here we were in our home, a decade later, surrounded by many of the same friends with whom we had crossed over from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Our family had endured. Here was Deedie Finney, a straight woman, still married to me.
I’d hoped that as the years passed, she’d find herself more attracted to me, in spite of the bosoms. But this wish—alone of so many of the insane, ridiculous wishes I’d carried in my heart all those years—had not been granted. Deedie could spend her life with me and love me as her soul mate. But she could not kiss me.
“Don’t be sad, Jenny,” she whispered to me. “You know I love you.”
“I love you too,” I said as she rubbed my back.
On the television, Dick Clark was trying to make his impressions clear. Hppy Nnnh Yr!, he said. Hppy Nnnh Yr!
I thought that he was very brave.
WE WERE SITTING in the auditorium of an ancient building on the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington. I suspected that this large, ornate chamber had once been a chapel. There were stained glass windows and a dusty chandelier.
The conductor raised his baton. The violinists placed their bows upon their strings. The trumpeters pressed their lips against their mouthpieces. A young, terrified xylophone player raised his mallets in the air.
The “Jupiter” movement of Holst’s symphonic piece The Planets begins with a trembling upon the strings. Then the horns come in. The full title of this movement is “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.” I’d had a long history with this piece of music. When I was a teenager—although I did not know this at the time—I’d heard it quoted by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in their composition “Call Any Vegetable.” Later, at college, my friend Beck had used the “Uranus” section as backdrop for the conclusion of his production of Ibsen’s drama Ghosts. When I was in graduate school I started sketching out a novel based on the symphony, using the titles of the movements as titles for chapters. In 1991, three years after I got married, The Planets was the title of my first novel.
“Jupiter” was one of my favorite pieces of music in the world, a composition so abundant with hope and celebration that there was nothing to do in its presence except smile broadly and let the tears roll down my cheeks.
Sean’s eyes were fixed upon the conductor, waiting for the downbeat. He was in ninth grade now. My younger son had continued to thrive as our family’s wry, loving savant. Unlike his older brother, it was harder to know what Sean was thinking sometimes; he kept his emotions closer to his vest. Now and again evidence of his wild brain and sweet heart would surface, however.
One day I came home to find him cutting and gluing paper. At dinner, he came to the table holding a sphere with ninety-two sides. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Snub dodecahedron,” Sean said.
Deedie put a bowl of green beans on the table, next to a platter of chicken.
“Look at Ranger,” said Zach. The dog was underneath the table, praying for beans.
“A snub dodo—” Sean could apparently build what I could not even pronounce.
“Dodecahedron,” said Sean. He looked at the green beans as if he were observing a distant star.
“You made that?” said Deedie.
“Sure,” said Sean.
“Is this a project for school?” I said.
Sean smiled, as if I had said something very, very funny.
“No,” said Sean. “It’s just something I made.”
“Ranger is cute,” said Zach.
“Are you going to eat your green beans?” asked Deedie.
Sean thought it over. “I don’t think so,” he said.
SEAN’S HAIR turned curly. Like his brother, he decided that he liked growing it long. It was thus impossible not to know where my son sat in the orchestra, even though his face was partially obscured by a line of clarinetists and oboists. His huge head of abundant blond curls shook and shimmered with the music. Earlier, as the musicians had taken their seats, a man in front of me had turned to his wife and said, “Boy, look at the hair on that kid.”
I wanted to shake the man’s shoulders and say, Yes. Look at it! Isn’t it insane? Have you ever seen such hair! That’s my son. He builds snub dodecahedrons in his spare time.
I could not wait for the music to begin. I looked at the glowing cloud of Sean’s hair. I thought at that moment that I may have never loved anything as much as I loved our lives together.
I turned to my right. There was Shannon,* Sean’s girlfriend. She was looking at him too.
ZACH AND I went out to dinner one night while Deedie drove Sean to a soccer tournament. (In addition to being a hornist and a dodecahedron builder, he was also a remarkable athlete, nicknamed Bee Sting on the field because of his intensity and speed.) Zach wore a tie.
The waitress fawned over him. At first I thought she was putting on a show, but as the evening went on it was clear enough that this young woman thought my son was cute. It was hard for me to remember that, at sixteen years of age, other people saw Zach for what he was—a young man—rather then what I saw, which was the person he had been: a four-year-old weeping when the lemurs in the Cork city zoo had stolen his ice cream.
He had a steak. I drank a glass of red wine.
“Maddy,” Zach said, “can I ask you about something?”
“Sure,” I said. My heartbeat quickened slightly.
“What do you do—” he asked. “If the person that you love … doesn’t love you?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. I wanted to tell him, Well, you just love them anyway. No one can take that away from you. But I wasn’t at all sure it was the right advice.
“Are you in love with someone, Zach?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hppy Nnnh Yr!
“Have you told her?” I paused. “It is a girl, isn’t it?”
Zach nodded.
“Because if you’re ever attracted to a boy, you know that would be just fine. Your mother and I will love you and support you no matter—”
“Maddy,” said Zach, with just a hint of exhaustion. “I know.”
“And it’s okay if you’re trans, too,” I said, although to be honest, this was more of a statement of general principle rather than an actual commitment. The last thing I wanted either of my sons to be was transgender. And this was not because I wouldn’t stand with them, and love and support them throughout whatever journey fate demanded of them. But I knew better than anybody what a hard life it was. Even in the best-case scenario—which by many people’s measure, mine was—it was a condition replete with miseries. I hoped my children would not be trans in the same way that my own parents had hoped I would not become a writer.
“She doesn’t know,” said Zach. “She’s in love with someone else.”
“Is this a girl I know?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not sure she even knows who I am.”
“Who is this other person she’s in love with?” I asked.
“Some random guy,” said Zach with contempt.
I felt a strange anger for this girl, this creature who could look over all of the men in the world and somehow give her love to someone other than my son.
Stuck in the Middle with You Page 17
