by Cris Beam
“I want to talk to Pops again.”
Carolina paused. “He just left for work.”
“He can’t have left that fast,” J said. Was she lying to him? “He was just there.”
“He was walking out the door, J. He just wanted to tell you ‘happy birthday.’ ” Now Carolina’s voice sounded defensive, clipped.
J lit another cigarette. “When am I going to come home, Mami? What’s going on over there?”
Carolina sighed loudly into the phone. “J, I told you at the restaurant. Your father’s not ready.”
“Not ready for what?”
“Not ready for you, J. You’re the one who decided to do this.” Carolina hesitated a moment and then said, “I don’t want to talk about this again. It’s your birthday.”
“I do. What is Pops saying?” And who was that guy on the phone?
Carolina’s voice got softer. “He thinks I’m coddling you.”
“Coddling me?” J felt his face grow hot. “You’re the one who kicked me out!”
“You ran away!” Carolina yelled back. “You started this whole thing.”
J wondered when his mother had become such a child. There was something she was hiding; he was sure of it.
“J, look,” Carolina said, softer now. “You’re fine where you are. I’ve worked everything out with Karyn.”
“What do you mean?”
“With rent. She’s a student, she needs the money, she—”
J stopped listening. So this was going to be a long-term thing, and Karyn was boarding him because she needed the cash. He was just a puppet. His mother wasn’t budging on his father’s real perspective (maybe he’d disowned J; he’d never know) and she was hiring stand-ins to deliver birthday greetings. Pitiful, he thought, plain pitiful. He hung up the phone and didn’t pick up when Carolina called back.
J spent Christmas indoors, feeling sorry for himself. Karyn was a pagan, but she made a ham for dinner before scuttling out the door to study, and Melissa had a rehearsal. Who has a rehearsal on Christmas? J had grumbled. But Melissa had said that the Bed-Stuy space was empty over the holidays and they could book free hours. He tried calling Chanelle, but she was in New Jersey visiting her foster mom’s family.
Chanelle called him back and said she was sad, too. Her boyfriend, Bonez, hadn’t gotten her anything for Christmas. For someone who claimed to be “over men and their superiority complex,” Chanelle certainly seemed to be obsessed with her boyfriend. She talked to J about him practically every day. She wrote poems about him, worried that he was seeing other girls, and mulled over his text messages and e-mails for hours, trying to decipher secret meaning.
“Do you think we’re meant to be together?” Chanelle asked J over the phone. “Me and Bonez?”
J didn’t think someone as smart as Chanelle should be dating someone with a name as stupid as Bonez, let alone imagining a future with him, but he didn’t say anything. Chanelle was brilliant, actually—J didn’t think there was a book she hadn’t read. She had been teaching J about poetry, which mostly felt fairly abstract but occasionally hit a nerve. Once she wrote a line from Rita Dove, one of her favorites, in J’s notebook. It went, “Any fear, any memory will do; and if you’ve got a heart at all, someday it will kill you.” J didn’t know whether it was the heart or the memory that was the monster for Chanelle, but despite her fierce attitude and her optimism, he had a feeling it was both. It was a sadness that showed in her eyes. He wanted to photograph her eyes.
“I told Bonez about you, and he got jealous,” Chanelle said. “So I was thinking maybe we should go on a double date once this stupid holiday’s done—you with your girlfriend and me and Bonez, so he can see he has nothing to worry about.”
J hadn’t mentioned Blue in weeks, and since she hadn’t returned his calls, he’d pretty much given up. Sometimes he’d wonder what would happen if he just showed up in the Starbucks, or he’d fantasize about how much more secure he’d feel with a girl to call at night, but that was lame. He wasn’t like Melissa or Chanelle; he didn’t need romance to validate his existence. He’d been doing okay without her, and the bruise to his ego had started to fade.
“Have you written her an e-mail?” Chanelle asked. “Sometimes that works better. The power of the written word, you know.”
J wasn’t the greatest writer. He’d always done well enough in English class at school, but when he wanted something badly and had to write to get it, he usually messed it up. He remembered his old photography teacher recommending him for an exclusive photo class at a museum. J sent two of his best pictures, of a chicken in a cage and a chicken playing chess in Chinatown, but he waited until the last minute to write the essay. All he could think to say was, “Pictures are worth more than a thousand words, so I use as few as possible.” He didn’t get accepted.
“I could help you,” Chanelle suggested. “I could be your Cyrano!”
J didn’t know who Cyrano was, but Chanelle was hooked on this idea of a double date. She thought that Blue would come running back if J sent her a poem, especially one he wrote himself. Or that Chanelle wrote for him.
“Except I would never write poetry,” J protested. The whole idea made him nervous.
“She doesn’t know that!” Chanelle was excited. “Trust me. We’ll do it as soon as break’s over.”
True to her word, when school started again, J found himself with Chanelle in the computer room, surrounded by poetry books he didn’t understand. Chanelle believed in borrowing liberally from published poets in order to “inspire her muses.”
“ ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent this night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! But where I say hours, I mean years, mean life.’ ” Chanelle was leaning back in her plastic chair, reading from a book. She was practically swooning. “I skipped some parts, but isn’t that amazing?”
“Chanelle, you’re weird,” J said.
“No, it’s sprung rhythm! Hopkins invented it. You can feel it in your whole body if you read it right. Here, look at it.” Chanelle tried to push the book on him, but J shook his head. “ ‘The black hours.’ We’ll use that. You have to show her how depressed you’ve been without her. What’s Blue’s favorite color?”
“Blue.”
Chanelle nodded and rummaged through her books.
“How’d you learn so much about poetry?”
“My mom used to work in a bookstore,” Chanelle answered, flipping pages. “My real mom.”
“What happened to her?”
“Died. Here’s one. I thought I remembered that ‘Ash Wednesday’ had a lot of colors in it! Does Blue like rocks?”
“I guess.” Maybe this would work, J thought. It would be nice to have a girlfriend again. But he wouldn’t hold out too much hope.
“How’s this?” Chanelle cleared her throat and read: “ ‘This is the time of tension between dying and birth, The place of solitude where three dreams cross, Between blue rocks.’ ”
“What does that even mean?”
“We can make it mean whatever we want. God, T. S. Eliot was a genius. Listen to this ending! ‘Suffer me not to be separated, And let my cry come unto Thee.’ ” Chanelle sighed. “We have to use that line.”
“ ‘Unto thee’? Chanelle, she’s never going to believe I wrote this.”
“She’ll think you’re a closet genius!”
“She’ll think I’m a closet something.”
Chanelle picked up an enormous book. Shakespeare’s collected works. “I think we should add a line or two from one of the sonnets for romance. We don’t want it to be depressing.”
“Chanelle, isn’t this plagiarism?”
Chanelle put down the book and looked at J as though he were very young, or too stupid to understand. “Think of it like being a poetry DJ. We’re just mixing music here to make something original.”
J sighed and looked at the ceiling.
“How’s this? ‘Love alters not with h
is brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.’ ” Chanelle was unstoppable. “That’s perfect, right? You’re saying love endures, even though you’ve had a rough spell.”
“Why do you like all this old poetry? It’s all from a different century.”
Chanelle looked hurt. “I don’t. I told you, I love Rita Dove. I showed you her stuff.”
“Yeah, but even her poems are about really old things.”
Chanelle considered this. “Sometimes I think it would have been better to have lived in a different era.”
“Because of what happened with your mom?” J asked. Maybe Chanelle had weird fantasies, too—like a different era would have produced a different outcome.
“I don’t know what happened to my mom,” Chanelle said quietly. “They didn’t let me go to the funeral. She left me with my grandma when she went on a trip, and then there was a funeral that I didn’t go to. That’s the end of the story.”
Rough, J thought. “How old were you?”
“Ten.”
Chanelle didn’t want to elaborate about the several years she said she spent with her grandmother before she ran away to New York and ended up in foster care. She just said she didn’t know whether her grandmother was dead or alive, and she didn’t care either way.
“So why would another era have been any easier?” J had imagined swapping genders but had never considered time travel or escaping his entire generation.
“I don’t know. I’d just like to start over. With a different life and fancier clothes.”
J wasn’t buying it.
“You really want to know?” Chanelle picked up a book and touched the inside cover. “A hundred years ago, children weren’t really children. I’ve read about it. People thought of them as little adults. They had to work, like in factories or whatever. But they weren’t so protected.”
“It sounds awful.” J tried to imagine his childhood without Carolina’s buying him things, without his manga, without even his camera.
“Not really. It’s like your question in class. Before there was a word for childhood, there weren’t really children, you know? So kids grew up fast. They went to funerals. They lived where they could, where they wanted to. I think they had more of their own minds.”
J wasn’t sure; he had a lot of questions. How could you be transgender in a time like that? Could you go to school? Weren’t the girls treated as subservient to boys a century ago? But Chanelle was still talking.
“People have controlled my life too much,” Chanelle said. “That’s why I’m taking control now. I put myself back in school. I’m going to put myself in college. I’m going to make myself a famous poet. Whether Bonez becomes my husband or not.”
But J was still stuck on this idea of living in another century. “Could you have been a poet if you were a girl back then?”
Chanelle closed the book she’d been stroking. “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
The poem Chanelle came up with was “brilliant,” in Chanelle’s estimation. J made her kill the thee and a few other lines he found obnoxious, but still the poem made him anxious. Aside from the fact that it was almost entirely lifted, it felt awkward to read it, like the way he felt when he was younger and his mother made him wear a more feminine shirt, or when he had to sing the soprano parts in chorus. It was just not him. Still, Chanelle was so excited and so sure this would bring Blue back, and then they could go on their double date. He owed Chanelle that; she had been his one real friend in this crazy school.
Chanelle asked for Blue’s e-mail address, and J mechanically spelled it out. Just don’t think about it, he told himself. She called the poem “Deep Blue” and pressed Send. She printed out an extra copy of the poem for herself, and handed it to J.
The paper read:
What black hours I have spent
But when I say hours, I mean years, mean life—
Without you.
In my solitude, my dreams cross between blue rocks.
Love is not altered by brief hours or weeks
But it is borne out to the edge of doom.
And back.
Suffer me not to be separated.
Hear my cry.
“It’s great, right?” Chanelle gushed.
J tried his best not to groan out loud.
Even without the testosterone, J was passing as male more and more on the streets. Before the chest binder, before he’d moved out of his parents’ apartment, strangers would look at him quizzically and only occasionally “sir” him. That was when he was trying to be a brain without a body, and he tried to not let anything stir him up too much. Except, of course, it did. Now, though, almost nobody did a double take, girls on the subway met his eye, and cashiers regularly called him “sir.”
J didn’t really know why. Maybe it was because he’d been practicing his walk; maybe his voice had deepened just because he dreamed about it so much. Could it be that a person became more male by wishing it so?
Philip was still encouraging J to go to a support group for transboys, but J resisted. He had already figured out who the transguys at his school were. There were two of them, at least, guys who were on T, and they were both aloof and distant. J didn’t want to go to a meeting full of jerks.
But Philip persisted. He told J he didn’t want him to go through his transition alone.
“Are you gay?” J asked during one of their sessions, to throw Philip off track.
“What do you imagine I am?” Philip asked. He seemed entirely unruffled by J’s question.
“I think you are.”
“And what would it mean to you if I were?” Philip asked.
J stared at Philip’s wrist braces. “Nothing. I mean, I don’t care.” Lobster Man. “It’s just, maybe you find men more fascinating than I do, so you think these meetings would be a good idea.”
Philip thought it would be a good idea to examine J’s aggressive feelings a little more closely. J got mad. “I hate the word aggressive!”
“And why is that?” Philip spoke so calmly, it aggravated J. It was like a fly buzzing against a screen.
“I’m not an aggressive! And why do you have those things on your hands?”
Philip burst out laughing. He said he had carpal tunnel syndrome, from too much typing, and that the braces eased the pressure.
“But this is progress, J,” Philip said. “You’re bringing some of your anger out, where we can deal with it.”
That day J wrote in his notebook, the one he used for reminders about men. Stay calm, he wrote. When someone pisses you off, laugh. Head back. And then, Don’t wear wrist braces.
He decided to go to a transgender meeting, just to show Philip he wasn’t afraid, and so they’d have something to talk about besides his stupid anger. Why did everyone think he had so much turbulence going on inside? Melissa had said that to him, too.
The meeting was for people along the “masculine spectrum.” Díos mio, J thought. Can’t escape the rainbow. But the flyer Philip handed J included everybody: transboys, transmen, transsexuals, trans-identified, gender-queer, and exploring. J figured everybody would be on T already. He just wouldn’t talk.
“We have a few new faces,” a man in jeans and a skullcap said, smiling, as J walked in. He was arranging folding chairs and encouraging everyone to make a sort of circle. Don’t make me talk, don’t make me talk, J thought. “Why don’t we just go around the room and introduce ourselves again.”
J didn’t hear anybody’s name, but he memorized the tops of his sneakers. He needed new ones. He could barely keep the white parts white anymore. He’d nearly convinced Carolina of the critical value of shoes, especially because he didn’t spend much on shirts and he got his hair cut at the Dominican barbershop for ten bucks. Really, he was saving her money. Someone nudged him. “J, I’m J,” he said reflexively. He didn’t look up.
The name game was endless; there must have been a hundred people in the room. When J cautioned a quick glance at the other feet
around him, though, he saw maybe only ten other pairs of shoes, mostly sneakers.
“We-Pee is a stupid name; wasn’t that what they called Popeye’s kid?” This was a voice from across the circle. Definitely on T. Christ, were they making fun of people’s names in here? In a support group? J would kill Philip.
“It wasn’t Popeye’s kid; it was Olive Oyl’s. She was an unwed mother. A hillbilly ho.”
As people laughed, J snuck another look. He made it as far as the knees all around the circle, and up to the face of the guy in the skullcap, who was laughing, too, but motioning for order. He had broad shoulders and muscles, J could tell, beneath his black sweater. He was South American, J thought. Maybe Ecuadoran? No accent. He wished he could stare.
“Zak, We-Pee is important. Can we please talk about this?” This came from a new voice, a higher one that squeaked and dropped like a thirteen-year-old’s.
So Skullcap’s name was Zak. That sweater was tight enough to show his pecs; this guy definitely worked out. Would he have scars under there? J had read something about “keyhole” surgery, where you could just remove breast fat from under the nipples and get practically no scarring. But you had to have a really small chest for that, and J was pretty sure he wouldn’t qualify. Besides, he’d have to produce a mountain of cash. At this rate, he could barely afford to buy Blue a slice of pizza. If she’d see him again. J wondered if Zak had gone to college; he certainly spoke as if he had. He was talking about the “gender binary” and “those of trans-masculine identification” as easily as reciting the alphabet. If J went to college, he wondered, would he be able to afford surgery? He wanted to study photography; he wanted to be really good. Maybe he could look like Zak one day and sell his pictures for thousands of dollars.
“Colleges are getting better,” someone in PUMA sneakers said, as if reading J’s mind. “It’s the high schools that are still a problem. Did you know you can get kidney problems from holding it all day?”
“My kidneys must be dead, then,” someone answered. “I piss like twice a day.”
