Woman as a Foreign Language

by Katherine Wyvern

  “Have you considered applying for the post of Transfiguration teacher at Hogwarts?” she said.

  Julia laughed, hugged her lightly from behind and kissed the top of her head, on a sudden whim. If I can convince her to grow her hair out a little, just a little… “Next time, I’ll show you how to do it. It’s not magic, you know?”

  Nina shook her head, but there was a flickering smile on her lips.

  “Come, let’s go,” Julia said, cheerfully, before Nina could become overwhelmed by her own prettiness. She took Nina by the hand, and led her back to the living room. They put on coats and scarves, and they went out into the night, together.

  ****

  Nina

  The lathe roars into life with a wonderfully satisfactory thrumming crescendo. It starts with a low droning rumble, shifts gears seductively through a whole scale of powerful, resounding mid-notes, and finally settles in a screaming, sustained mechanical howl that, from where I stand, drowns out every other sound in the workshop. Mine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. I feel like I am unleashing some huge beast every time I work on the lathe, but the beast is tame and under my control.

  More or less.

  And I am on top of the world today. Mine is the kingdom, indeed.

  The rough extruded steel bar in the chuck is a dull grey blur, but as the sharp new carbide insert cuts into it, a steady silver rod emerges. Unlike the rough surface of the raw bar, the freshly turned steel appears to hover completely still in mid-air, a shaft of metallic white light floating weightlessly between the chuck and the tailstock. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, as is the perfect spiral shaving that peels away as I watch. As I cut deeper and deeper into the cylinder, thinning it down 2.5 mm at a time, my mind wanders to Julia’s beautiful long legs, the way she, too, appears to balance weightlessly in mid-air.

  Julian is … different. At least four inches shorter, to begin with, less unapproachably air-borne. There is also a sort of awkwardness to him. Everything about Julia is so confident, so boldly sensual, that it’s hard not to notice the difference. Julian is a quieter, shyer creature, no doubt about it. He looks almost a bit uneasy in his own skin. Maybe it’s the freckles, I think with a smile, although, personally, I think that the freckles are adorable. He certainly has his own sensual beauty, deeply rooted in the slightly feminine allure that hangs about him even in his male form. But he doesn’t flaunt it. It is almost hidden away, like his long hair. I smile, thinking of his hands. They are Julia’s hands, but they move a bit different.

  Julia’s hands, her cool dry fingers. They have been all over my face, just Friday evening. I thought I might never wash my face again after that. I went to bed on Friday night with the scent of her moisturizer cream still on me, like a little bit of Julia’s charmed atmosphere, trapped and treasured, all for myself. But then I woke up with raccoon eyes, and I finally, grudgingly, splashed some water and soap on my face. I like to imagine there is still the faintest hint of a black shadow around my eyes, but it’s not something that the men here would notice.

  Men!

  So Julia is also a man. Or is she? I am not so sure of it. There is so much that is female in Julian that it is hard to say who’s what. Maybe Julian is a woman. The exact anatomical facts appear rather secondary, in this case.

  Julian … he does look like a man (although a very, very pretty man), yet sometimes, maybe a moment of distraction, something of Julia shines through, in the way he crosses his legs when sitting on the sofa, or the languorous way he holds a cigarette, and the graceful motion with which he pushes a loose strand of hair away from his eyes. There is a restful suppleness about the way he moves that is definitely not wholly male.

  And quite at odds with the perfectly appalling crunching crash that brings me abruptly back to the lathe.

  While I was daydreaming of Julia/n’s hands, eyes and freckles, the advancing tool smashed into the thick uncut section of the raw steel bar. All the music is a-jangle. The motor whines in distress, the workpiece shrieks in agony, and the carbide insert has cracked right out of its clamp, while the tool itself butts helplessly against the thick shoulder of uncut steel, screaming in red-hot pain. I have a hideous moment of panic before I recover my wits, hastily roll the tool post back, and stop the lathe. Too late to save the workpiece, and probably too late to save the tool, too. I look at the disaster completely abashed. Christ on a stick, it’s a miracle I didn’t run the tool post right into the chuck.

  I am shaking all over with the shock.

  I forgot that turning is not like welding. My brain needs to be engaged at all times. Oh, Julia/n, what a mess. And I must wait until Friday before I see you again. It’s going to be a long week.

  ****

  Julian

  Julian hurried up the crowded stairs with his shoulder-bag slapping against his sharp hip bone at every step. There are times when a pretty, androgynous, willowy frame is just, well, a bloody pain in the ass, he thought surly.

  He was late for class, something he would normally roast a student for. In a teacher it was downright disgraceful, but he always did the stairs, at work or at home, when he was not en femme. It was part of his attempt to keep himself in half-decent shape despite the chain-smoking.

  It had been a difficult morning since the very start.

  He had been in a bit of a nervous state since Friday night. He wished he could blame the execrable performance of the singer at the bar. It was something to put a man of taste out of humor for a week at least. But truth be told, he had rarely enjoyed a jazz night so much.

  Nina had been enchanting. She was so diffident that it was difficult to get her to talk, but when she did, she had a wickedly sharp sense of humor. She had admitted to being completely ignorant of jazz music, or any music in fact, although she liked to listen to the radio, and had a pretty fine ear.

  “He sounds like a basset-hound having stomach cramps at the bottom of a well,” she had said, unexpectedly and accurately, about the singer’s appalling voice, sending Julia in a fit of helpless laughter.

  Julian lived among words (and music of course), and a quirky, effective turn of phrase was as charming to him as a pair of pretty eyes.

  Nina. She was dressed like a girl for once, and a rather pretty one at that, although a weirdly boyish girl, with that cropped head of hers. She didn’t sit or walk like a girl either, even if the heels had lent a slightly unsteady grace to her stride. Part of Julia wanted to point this out, teach her to sit pretty, flaunt her stuff a little. But Julian had shushed her. It was a lot for Nina to be out like this. Pointing out the way she moved or sat would just make her uncomfortably self-conscious. There was no hurry. She’d come ‘round to it, in time. Or not.

  And did it matter? Nina didn’t need to pass. She was a girl, after all. Maybe she didn’t even want to pass for one, not really. It was hard to tell. It was hard to figure out what Nina really was or what she wanted to be. There was a lot of the tomboy in her, which came out even (especially?) when she was made up and dressed all pretty. Julian didn’t think that she wanted to be really “girly”. She just wanted to come out of hiding, out of those self-effacing oversized clothes, and everything that went with them. The heels, the makeup, the sparkly scarf, were an experiment. What she wanted was to find out, by trial and error, what and who she really was. Or what she could be, given half a chance. By now, Julian was rather curious to find out as well.

  Nina … she had a wildness about her. She was fiercely proud of her metal-work, as well she should be. Julian had a troubling feeling that the beautiful silvery sphere was not just a present, but also a subtle reproach for Julia’s doubtful reaction to her choice of job. She had wanted Julia to know that she was not a mere manual worker, but a fine crafts-(wo)man, an artist. A part of her had been hurt and damaged, but another side of her had preserved a peculiar sort of somber, quiet strength, capable of defending her beautiful dreams, despite her discouraging situation.

  And then, and then.

  “Whateve
r you choose to be, it’s perfect for me,” she had said, and that sentence kept running in Julian’s mind like a refrain, a chorus that gets into your ear and you can’t shake off, like an ABBA song.

  Truth be told, he had never heard such beautiful words in his life. He was in a flutter of excitement, which was why he had spent all of the early morning dropping things on his own feet, mislaying socks and keys, forgetting books and notes, and stumbling around the apartment on any blasted thing that happened to lie on the floor. He had had to go back to the flat twice to fetch forgotten items, which was why he was so abysmally late now.

  He had spent the weekend marking student papers and working on his own, but his mind kept running in circles, backtracking to that delightful sentence. “Whatever you choose to be, it’s perfect for me.”

  Julian emerged from the stairs, ran along an infinite corridor, dodging students as he went (if I am late, these guys will be even later, lazy bastards!) plunged headfirst through the classroom door and forged to the desk without looking right or left. He didn’t think he could stomach his students’ reproachful or amused looks right now. He slammed his bag on the desk, shrugged out of his coat and tossed it on the chair, gave the waiting faces a curt nod of acknowledgement, shushed a questioning student with one fierce, withering look, and started writing on the blackboard. Today he was talking in an introductory, general way about the great Romantic poets, so he split the board in six fields, and headed each field with a name, Blake (in a black marker) Coleridge, Wordsworth (in a blue marker), and Keats, Shelley, Byron (in a green marker).

  How handy to have colored markers. We never had those before, he thought, but without paying too much attention to it. Lectures were moved from classroom to classroom so often that most of the time he didn’t even know for sure if he would find a blackboard.

  He would face the class and start talking in a moment, but he always found that a good first visual breakdown of a lesson made a good, impressive start and gave his students time to sort out their pens and papers, and some idea of how to organize their notes.

  Finally, he turned around, steepling his long fingers in front of his chest in a gesture that was usual to him whenever he tried to concentrate and collect his thoughts.

  “To see a world in a grain of sand,

  And heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

  And eternity in an hour,” he declaimed, in his clear, carrying classroom voice, which was a pretty tolerable tenor, quite different from his low, slightly raspy “private” voice.

  He had hardly finished the last line, when the pesky questioning boy of a minute ago caught his eye again. Mouth open, a hand raised halfway, the very picture of a nuisance waiting to happen. He didn’t even know who the hell this fellow was.

  “Do I know you? Are you new?” he asked, coming down rather grudgingly from his lofty poetic start. He was civil, but none too warm. He was absolutely not in the mood to be interrupted before the lecture had even begun.

  “Er, no. And no. Are you?”

  “Excuse me?” asked Julian, “Ex-cu-se me?” he repeated for greater emphasis, glaring at the insufferable, grinning youth. He was a friendly enough professor to his students, but not one to be made game of. If you are not new, where the heck do you pop up from, and what the hell are you doing in my class?

  That was when he noticed that actually none of the students in front of him looked even remotely familiar. Not to mention those posters on the walls…

  “Er…” he said, with a cold feeling worming its way in the pit of his stomach. “Er…” Jesus Christ, what class is this? Where the fuck am I?

  And then the classroom door banged open and a short, bald, vastly overweight fellow of about fifty-five bounced like a basketball down the steps to the desk, spreading cheerful apologies right and left and smiling like a particularly happy golden retriever to every girl in the room. He stopped a yard short of Julian, peered myopically at the blackboard and then back at Julian, and then back to the blackboard again.

  “Blake and Coleridge, is it? And Wordsworth? My, my. Keats, Shelley, and Byron as well. I’ll be damned. The whole shooting match.” His gaze settled back on Julian. “What’s your name, lassie?” he asked, with more than a touch of wicked relish.

  Lassie? Did he just call me lassie? thought Julian, incredulous. In front of the whole class?

  He was too shocked to respond. He stood there staring like a traffic light, aghast, while sniggers started to erupt all over the room. For an excruciating minute he wondered if, distracted as he had been in the morning, he had slapped on some lipstick or a touch of mascara before rushing out. He surreptitiously checked his fingernails to see if they were still painted. Holy shit, it’s definitely time that I get myself a proper haircut and buy a wig for Julia!

  “Look, darling,” said the unstoppable fat professor, with a perfectly impish grin, “this is a Physics class. Physics? You know Physics? We mostly do it with numbers. I think you want to be upstairs, not here. Same general layout, I know, but one floor up. The fifth floor.”

  He showed five with his pudgy left hand, and pointed his fat right forefinger to the ceiling, in case Julian’s befuddled, unmathematical mind could not fully grasp the concept of up and down, or the enormity of such a number. “Upstairs. That’s where they do this poetry stuff, poor suckers. I can have one of my students show you the way. The building can be very confusing to the literary minds. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know. I worked here for twenty years and never got in the wrong classroom. Or the wrong floor entirely, for that matter. That’s cute though, really. I like you,” he actually patted Julian affectionately on the arm at this point. “Nothing like some comical relief to start the week on a good note, eh? Do you think you can wipe the board before going, dove? I’m not sure I can reach that high.”

  Julian was too genuinely well-bred to grumble even at that. He sheepishly cleaned the blackboard, collected his bag and coat in silence, and stole away towards the door with as much dignity as one in his position could expect to keep (precious little). Barely restrained hilarity followed him.

  Splendid. Jesus Christ! So, what, I meet a girl, and can’t even find my way to my own classroom anymore? What am I, sixteen years old?

  This time he made his way to the lift. He meant to check on his face in a mirror, in case he was still wearing fake lashes, unbeknownst to him. In the state I am, I would not even exclude that I am wearing a pair of boobs.

  There was nothing of Julia about him that he could see. All right there aren’t many professors of English Literature going around with long hair around here, but even so, that fellow must be unusually perceptive, and he sure as hell has a beastly cutting sense of humor, the brute. Despite himself, Julian found himself grinning. Lassie. Indeed, he thought, and he almost burst out laughing.

  Before the lift had reached the fifth floor, he had made up his mind to call on Nina that same evening. I’ll be damned if I wait ‘til Friday before I see her again.

  ****

  Nina

  It’s been a brutal day, hardly improving after my disaster on the lathe, and when I enter the flat, I think I might gag. The TV is on, very loud. Something like a tornado must have hit the kitchen, which I had left almost immaculate in the morning. There is a lingering smell of burnt cheese.

  I spend more time than usual under the shower, scrubbing myself until my skin hurts. There is just no way to feel clean in this flat anymore. I shave my legs, and then on a whim, I shave absolutely everything except my head. Who knows, maybe I’ll let my hair grow out a little, just a little. To go with my raccoon eyes, next time Julia feels like transfiguring me.

  Outside the shower, instead of my usual pajama and big t-shirt, I rummage into bags and boxes until I find a pair of black leggings and a grey t-shirt. It’s woman-shaped and skinny. I pass the living room door very quickly. I don’t want to talk about it with the pudding.

  I see what’s left in the fridge. Not a lot.
It’s instant noodle snack or pizza. I chuck a pizza in the oven. The TV is so loud that the oven’s panting is completely hidden. I almost wish she were on the phone, talking about her bowels. It might be marginally quieter. When the cheese on the pizza starts to run and bubble I take it out, and drop it in a dish. It’s hot, and vaguely foodish, and I am starving by now. If I eat very quick, I might be able to swallow almost half of it before the pudding makes her way from the sofa to the kitchen.

  I am on the point of biting into the first slice when the doorbell buzzes.

  “What now?” I cry, unnerved.

  The doorbell ringing is a pretty unusual occurrence. It’s part of the natural pig-headedness of things that it would ring while I try to eat a bite of dinner.

  Sometimes Abbie drops in a minute to have a chat with the pudding, or me, if I am around. It must be Abbie’s way to keep an eye on everything that goes on in the building, because nobody could possibly enjoy talking to the pudding. There is always a colonoscopy, or something even more gruesome she can throw at you if you try to have a conversation. Sometimes it is one of the older neighbors who comes over. They are about twenty years older than she is, but they love to sit together, exchanging every minute, grisly detail of their health worries, real or imaginary. I don’t think that either interlocutor listens much to the other. And there’s the pudding’s sisters and brothers-in-law, but they would ring from downstairs.

  I hesitate. Leaving the pizza unsupervised means losing my dinner, and I’m hungry, damn it. If the pudding has visitors, she might as well open the door. “Can you open the door, Mother?” I yell over the blare of the TV. There is no answer.

  Ah, screw it. I stomp to the front door with the pizza dish balanced on my hand, ready to give Abbie, or whoever it might be, an earful about interrupting working people when they finally get to sit down to their dinner.

  When I open the door, I almost drop the dish. It takes some acrobatics to save it.