What We Left Behind

by Robin Talley

  We have a big table at the restaurant since there are six of us—me, Derek, Eli, Nance, Inez and Andy. Nance instructs us all to order lobster or steak, the most expensive items on the menu, which we do. Except for Eli and Inez, who are vegetarians, but they promise to eat extra dessert to make up for it. We talk and laugh and forget, for a couple of hours, how much work is waiting for us at home.

  Even Eli is smiling, which is awesome to see. He told me last night that he talked to his mom again. Just her this time, without his dad. She told Eli that it was going to be hard for them for a while, but she thought his dad would come around before too long. Eli said he hopes his dad will have changed his mind by summer break.

  “If he hasn’t,” Eli said to me in a low voice while we huddled on the front steps of the guys’ house, “I guess I’ll just go back as Elizabeth. I’ve done it every other year.”

  Eli said it like it was no big deal, but I could hear the quiver in his voice. By summer he’ll have been on testosterone long enough to look really different. He’ll have facial hair, like Derek.

  Eli’s a guy. Through and through. To have to put on a dress and pretend to be someone he’s not...hell, I can’t even imagine. It makes me want to fly to Korea and grab his dad by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattle.

  But Eli’s sitting across from me at the table now with a grin bright enough to blind someone. So I grin back at him. If he’s happy, I’ll be happy for him.

  Today everybody’s grinning. Finals still feel far away, but friends are close.

  We’re almost done eating, and Derek’s in the middle of a story about how Shari, the hyper blond from the UBA, once tried to recruit people to volunteer at a “postfeminist sex-positive antiharassment bikini carwash, for charity,” and everybody’s howling with laughter, when our waitress comes over and calls out to the table at large, “Can I get you ladies any coffee?”

  The laughter cuts out all at once.

  Derek opens his mouth, then closes it. Andy blinks up at the waitress as if he isn’t sure he understood her. Eli just stares down at his empty plate.

  The waitress knows she did something wrong. She’s backing away, an apology on her lips, when Nance speaks up.

  “My friends are guys,” she says. “Get it? Not ladies.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the waitress stammers. “I didn’t mean anything, I was only—”

  “I know you didn’t mean to,” Nance says. “Just be more careful from now on. You can’t go around making assumptions like that. It’s not up to you to decide who people are.”

  The waitress leaves without waiting to hear if we want coffee.

  None of us does anyway. Not after that. Nance pays the check (the waitress gave us the dessert for free, thanks to Nance’s guilt trip) and we walk toward the train to go home. Ahead of me, I can see Derek’s shoulders slouching. Eli hasn’t said a word since the waitress left.

  No one suggests we go anywhere else. We’ve already wasted too much precious studying time, and none of us feels like trying to have fun anymore.

  Next to me, Eli takes halting, shuffling steps. I think about clapping him on the back, but if it were me, that would only make me feel worse.

  Wait. Is it me?

  How the hell should I know?

  I remember what Nance told the waitress. It’s not up to you to decide who people are.

  I stop walking.

  “Hey, I have to go, actually,” I say. I hold out my hand for a cab.

  “Uh, yeah, we know,” Nance says. “We’re all going. That’s why we’re getting on the train.”

  “No, I have to go to DC. I have to talk to my mom. I have to tell her something.”

  Everyone stops walking. They stare at me.

  “Your mom?” Derek says. “What, right now? Um, maybe you should stop and think about this.”

  “I don’t need to,” I say. “I’ve got to do this now.”

  “Do what?” Derek asks. “T, this is insane. You can’t make this decision just like that.”

  “It’s Reading Period,” Nance says. “You have too much work to go to DC. Besides, you’ll be back there in a week. You can talk to your mom then.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say. A cab pulls up. I tell the driver, “I’m going to Logan.”

  The driver nods, and I open the back door.

  “You’re going straight to the airport?” Inez asks. “Shouldn’t you at least go to the dorm first and get some stuff?”

  “Yeah, and on the way, we can talk this through,” Derek says. “Trust me, this isn’t something you want to decide on a whim.”

  “I don’t need anything from the dorm,” I say. “I already have my wallet and my phone. I’ll see you guys later.”

  “Tony, look, I’m begging you. This is a huge thing you’re doing. What are you even going to tell her, exactly? You’re still figuring yourself out. Please, just think about this, because you really don’t want to—”

  The cab pulls away before I can hear what Derek thinks I really don’t want to do.

  It doesn’t matter what Derek thinks. It isn’t up to anyone else to decide who I’m going to be.

  * * *

  My plan was to take a cab from the airport to my parents’ house. But I called Audrey while I was waiting for my flight to board, and Audrey called Dad, and Dad called his secretary, and his secretary called a car service. So when I come through airport security at BWI, the first thing I see is a bored guy holding a white sign that says Miss Antonia Fasseau.

  I don’t like car service drivers. Cabdrivers don’t give a crap about you and will do what you ask as long as you pay them, but car service drivers have a schedule. You can’t ask them to drive around the block twenty times while you make up your mind about whether you really want to go inside.

  So when the car stops outside my parents’ house, I have no choice but to step out onto the curb and gaze at the house I grew up in. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. If it ever did.

  It’s the middle of the afternoon. No one will be home except Consuela and my mother. Mom is home most days unless she’s out doing her “volunteer” work. Or shopping. Mainly the latter.

  Consuela opens the front door when I knock. I can tell from the look on her face that Audrey called the house, too.

  “It’s wonderful to see you!” Consuela says. “Such a surprise. I already made up your bed.”

  “Thanks! It’s great to see you, too.” She hugs me, and I hug her back. I’m still getting used to how hugging feels. “I’m not sleeping over, though. I’m flying back tonight. Where’s Mom?”

  Consuela steps back and points wordlessly toward the kitchen. I shed my coat on the bench in the entryway as I go. It’s so strange how different the house looks now that I’m not used to seeing it every single day. It was like this at Thanksgiving, too. The place is still huge, like always, but somehow it looks smaller than before. The kitchen countertops look like they’re slightly askew. The stainless steel appliances are so shiny they look fake.

  I don’t see Mom. I reach into the fridge for a soda and wander to the sink so I can gaze out the window. I’m unscrewing the bottle cap when I hear her voice. It sounds as though she’s in the den just down the hall.

  “No, I don’t know why she’s coming here,” Mom is saying. “You know no one tells me anything. That girl won’t say two words to me if I don’t pry them out of her. Neither of them will.”

  She’s talking about me. And Audrey, too. This is so weird.

  “No, I don’t know if she’s all right.” Mom sighs. It sounds like she’s on the phone. “I hope she is. I don’t know how to—no, no, please don’t speak to me that way.” She pauses. “Robert, I have asked you before not to speak to me that way.”

  She’s talking to Dad.

  I don’t want
to be hearing this. I back away toward the opposite end of the kitchen, moving slowly, trying to stay silent.

  My sneaker squeaks on the tile. Crap crap crap. My heart is pounding.

  Seconds later, my mother appears in the doorway, the phone hanging silently in her hand. She stares at me without speaking for a moment.

  “Did that idiot driver leave your bags in the trunk?” she finally asks. “Consuela, call Mr. Fasseau’s office and have the car sent back.”

  I hadn’t realized Consuela was in here, but when I turn, she’s just ten feet back, reaching for the kitchen phone.

  “No, don’t call.” I take a gulp of soda. It goes down the wrong way, making me grimace. “I didn’t bring any bags.”

  “I was afraid of that.” Mom glances at Consuela, who hurries out of the room. “When I heard you were coming I knew it had to be the sort of rash, impulsive decision you’ve made before. Did you drop out of school?”

  “No!” And she wonders why I don’t want to talk to her. “Of course not.”

  “Then why show up here out of the blue? Are you failing?”

  “Failing? No. Why would I be failing?”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t studied for your exams enough.”

  “We haven’t had exams yet. And all I ever do is study.”

  “When you were here at Thanksgiving, you made it sound like all you did was sit around talking to your new friends.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m capable of multitasking.”

  This is how it always is with my mother and me. She makes accusations. I give rude answers.

  But I spent the flight down thinking about how I wanted to handle this, and I resolved not to get caught up in our usual sniping. So I bite my lip before I can say any more. I have to talk to my mother like a normal person.

  I put my soda down on the counter, walk past her into the formal living room and sit on the couch. It’s the good couch. The one you aren’t allowed to sit back on because you might mess up the fabric draping.

  When we were kids, Audrey and I weren’t allowed in this room at all. Every single piece of furniture in here—this couch, the chaise longue, the armchairs, even the tiny “accent tables” that are scattered everywhere—is white. This room was always reserved strictly for cocktail parties and afternoon teas.

  While I’m sitting on this couch, there’s no risk I’ll let my guard down, no matter how far my mother gets under my skin.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say. “It’s important.”

  Mom sits down on the chaise, as far away from me as she can get.

  “I suppose it must be.” She looks me up and down, assessing, the way she always does. I arch my back ramrod straight. “Since you appear to have bought a last-minute plane ticket on my credit card to tell me about it.”

  I doubt Mom has ever looked at her credit card bill in her life. She went with her friends to some spa in Bethesda and paid twelve hundred dollars for a microderm facial the day after Thanksgiving because she needed to “decompress” after the trauma of watching Consuela cook our meal.

  “Yes, it is.” It would be so easy to snap at her. Instead I launch into the speech I memorized on the plane. “So. I’m sure you’ve noticed some unusual things about me. The way I used to repeat people’s names instead of using pronouns, for example.”

  “Of course I’ve noticed the way you talk,” she says. “So has everyone else. You sound like a foreign exchange student. I’ve always told people it’s part of your general obstinacy.”

  Why do you hate me?

  I don’t ask it out loud, but I want to. I’ve wanted to for years.

  Once last year, I asked Gretchen what she thought about it. We were in her basement watching TV. Gretchen was lying with her head on my chest. I was playing with her hair.

  “Your mother doesn’t hate you,” Gretchen said. “She doesn’t know how to relate to you. That’s all.”

  “My mother doesn’t know how to relate to my sister, either, but Mom doesn’t accuse Audrey of being worthless all the time.”

  “She’s never said you’re worthless,” Gretchen said. “Honestly, I think she just finds you intimidating.”

  I didn’t believe Gretchen at the time. I still don’t. The idea is really attractive, though.

  My mother doesn’t hate me. She just finds me intimidating.

  “Well, I talked that way for a reason,” I tell her now. “I didn’t want to use gendered pronouns because I didn’t want to reinforce the binary concept of gender.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  I’ve got to say, my mother certainly doesn’t sound intimidated.

  I shake it off. I close my eyes, throwing out the rest of my speech.

  “I’m transgender, Mom.” I swallow. “I’m a guy.”

  The words hang in the air between us.

  I take a long, uneven breath. There’s no turning back from this.

  I open my eyes in time to see Mom jump up off the chaise.

  She stands up, staring down at me. She doesn’t blink. I can see the whites around her irises.

  For a second I honestly think she’s going to hit me.

  Instead she turns around and walks into the kitchen, her footsteps steady, as if she’s going to retrieve a plate of appetizers.

  Am I supposed to follow her? I don’t know the rules here. I didn’t get a chance to brush up on any suggested coming-out guidelines. My phone battery died while I was waiting to leave the airport in Boston. Soon after the twentieth text from Derek came in, begging me not to do what I was doing.

  So I sit on the couch, growing stiffer and more frantic by the second.

  Did I seriously just tell my mother what I think I did?

  The clock over the fireplace says three minutes have passed when Mom comes back into the room. Her hand is shaking.

  She’s holding a cigarette. I never knew she smoked.

  I start to say something, but she holds up her other hand, palm facing out. That was how she used to order Audrey and me to be quiet when we were little. It works now, too.

  “You are eighteen years old,” she finally says, after a couple of puffs of smoke. “You don’t know what it means to be a woman yet. You have no idea what it means to be a man.”

  “I know how I feel,” I say. “I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. The best word to describe me is genderqueer, I think. I’ve tried a few others, but none of them feel quite—”

  Mom interrupts me.

  “You’re confused,” she says. “This is the sort of phase teenagers go through. It’ll pass as you mature.”

  Right.

  My mother has honed this skill over the years. She tries to think of the one thing she can say that will hurt me the most. I usually try not to give her the satisfaction of reacting, but I usually fail.

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay, then. Thanks. How silly of me to mistake my little phase for a set of complex emotions I’ve been sorting through for my entire life. Now that you put it that way, I see that you’re absolutely right. I’m just ‘confused.’”

  So much for being civilized about this.

  It’s that word. Phase. Is there a crueler word in the English language?

  Why do words have so much damn power over me? Over all of us?

  “That’s enough,” she says. “I’m sick of the way you always get smart with me.”

  I hate that expression, too. Get smart. As if she’d prefer I were stupid.

  Maybe she would. A stupid child over a deviant one.

  “I’m not the only one who’s this way,” I say. “There are thousands and thousands of people in the world who identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.”

  “You weren’t assigned any gender at birth,” Mom says. “It’s n
ot as though we picked it out of a hat, for heaven’s sake. You were a girl when you were born and you’re a girl now. Thousands of other people may be freaks, but that doesn’t mean you need to be one, too.”

  Wow. Maybe there’s a harsher word than phase.

  My first instinct is to walk out the front door, find a cab and go back to the airport. Instead I grip the arm of the couch, the Italian silk upholstery wrinkling between my fingers.

  “It wasn’t easy for me to come here and tell you this,” I say. “I knew you’d react this way.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m trying to cope with this without flying off the handle,” Mom says.

  She’s right. I don’t believe it.

  “What you have to realize, Antonia,” she continues, “is that no mother dreams her little girl will grow up and decide she wants to be a little boy.”

  “It isn’t a decision. It’s—”

  “I know, I know, it’s not a choice, et cetera, et cetera. We went through all this back when you were just becoming a lesbian.”

  Ah, the good old days.

  “The fact is,” she says, “I didn’t see it that way then, and I don’t see it that way now.”

  “Then I won’t try to argue with you,” I say. “Look, you don’t have to be happy about this, but you could at least take me seriously. This isn’t a phase. I’m eighteen years old. I’m an adult now, and this is my life.”

  She puts out her cigarette and draws another from the pack in her pocket. Her hands are still shaking.

  “All right, then. Since you’re such an independent adult now, what is it you want to do, exactly? Have a sex-change operation?” She says the last part with a laugh, as if she’s saying “fly to Neptune.”

  “The first step is taking hormones,” I say. “That’s as far as I want to go for now.”

  Wait. Where did that come from? When did I decide that?

  Well, where did it come from when I told her I was a straight-up guy? When did I figure that out?

  Jesus Christ, am I making this all up as I go along?

  “Well,” my mother says, “if you expect your father and me to pay for you to take drugs to support this ludicrous idea, you’re—”