by Renee James
It comes pouring out of Annie, now. Mandy thought this man was her sugar daddy. He helped with the rent, paid for her surgery. Bought her clothes and jewelry. But he also smacked her around sometimes. So did his friends, Annie thinks.
“I wanted her to get away from him, but she was having a hard time with that. You don't make enough in retail to have your own big apartment in a nice neighborhood, and she had the nice clothes, cool sound system, good food. She’d have had to go from that to sharing a place with someone and shopping at Target, you know? She was coming around to that decision, but it took time.
“That was the big thing. But also, she really got off on sex with him. Maybe even with some of the friends. I think she liked the danger. It could have been any of them.”
Annie sips her coffee and looks at her watch. Our time is almost over.
“What was his name?” I ask.
“She never mentioned his name,” she says. “It was some deep dark secret because the guy
***
AS I HURRY TO the salon, deep in thought, a young man, possibly in his late teens, stands beside me at a stop light, looking me up and down.
“You’re really stupid looking, do you know that?” he says. Out of the blue. I hadn’t even looked at him.
“Of course I do.” I’m shocked that I can speak at all. My self-esteem has just been pulverized. “If a dim wit like you can see it, I certainly can.”
I am startled at what I’ve said. And he is stunned into a moment of silence, staring at me. I expect him to hit me, then and there, or scream at me. His face is flush with anger and hatred.
“You fuckin’ queer!” he says, finally. He clears his throat and spits in my face, a great wad of goo splattering against one cheek, ringed by droplets of spittle covering a broader area. He stomps off.
Several other people at the crosswalk take this in. When the light changes, they walk on without comment. Though I try not to, I have mental flashes of what they see. A pathetic man in a dress being cursed and spat upon by a brainless punk. I remove a tissue from my purse and dab the spit from my forehead and cheeks, and from my black silk T-shirt. I am humiliated, but I’m also angry. No one should be treated the way I was just treated. And no one should do what that punk just did and get away with it.
As I walk I think about what I might have done physically to defend myself. Cecelia favors pepper spray, but I am much less evolved than she is. I’m thinking of a karate fist to the Adam’s apple, or a quick shot to the solar plexus, or the old standard, a well-placed knee to the groin.
My thoughts bounce back and forth between my humiliation and John Strand. There was a man who vented his anger with his fists. In lethal doses. I try to convince myself that being spit on by a stranger is nothing compared to being beaten to death. But it’s not working. They are kindred acts of violence and disrespect, perpetrated by people who feel they have the right to violently disrespect other people. One was murder. The other was a prelude to murder or something like it.
***
MAYBE FOR A SOME PEOPLE the spitting incident would just be a bad day, something you shrug off after a bad night’s sleep, or maybe sooner. For me, it strikes much deeper. It has been three days since the incident. Everywhere I go I feel like an assault from a stranger is imminent. I have to force myself to leave my apartment and every moment I’m out I feel like a misfit and a fair target for every thug and right-wing whack job on the street. I admitted as much to one of my colleagues in the salon. Kelly isn’t much of a talker and isn’t really friendly with anyone, so I was surprised when she asked me how I was doing in my new skin.
I told her about the spitting incident, and how I’m still obsessing about it. She patted my hand in a sort of understanding, caring way, then asked, “Have you considered going back?”
It took me a moment to realize she meant back to being a male. “No,” I said.
Funny, even though I still wonder if I am really a woman, I realized at that moment that I haven’t ever thought about “going back.” Maybe I will in the future, but right now, I can’t change what I am any more than Kelly can make herself into a warm, slim woman instead of the plump, taciturn person she has always been.
In the middle of my musings, I seat my third client of the day. She’s a late-twenties/early thirties lady wearing conservative business attire. Top-buttoned blouse with ruffled button line, summery cotton skirt below the knees, matching jacket, comfortable shoes. She has minimal makeup —mascara, a hint of blush not well placed, a touch of eye shadow, no lipstick, no foundation. She has thick hair, pulled back in a bun, granny glasses. She could be attractive but she’s going for plain.
I seat her, loosen her hair and let it fall. “Tell me what you’d like to accomplish today,” I say as I lift and drop tresses of hair to get an idea of its texture and weight.
She looks at me in the mirror. “Well, I need to trim the ends. I want to keep the basic length. I need to pull it back. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
Something in her tone tells me she wants to say more.
“How long have you worn your hair in this style?” I ask. She has a very basic, one-length haircut. No layers. No face framing. Simple. Plain.
“Oh, God. Forever. But the few times I’ve ever gone for something different I felt like a fool. This seems to be me. Or at least the me I’m comfortable with.”
We go back and forth for a while. I want to give her a style she can wear straight and simple or glam up a little and get out for a party or a night on the town. She’s okay with layers and texturizing, but I have to sell her on my face-framing concept, which is basically a long, swept bang that tapers down to her full length. It would open up her face so much more and reveal it as the face of an attractive, complex woman. I hold the hair back in the angle I’m suggesting. What looks back at me is an independent, mature person whose bemused expression does not hide an inner need for affirmation of her desirability.
“Okay,” she says, finally. “When Mandy told me to have you do my hair, she said to trust you. So I’m trusting you.”
“Oh,” I say, more than a little surprised at the coincidence of her showing up at a time when I am obsessing on Mandy’s death. “Are you a friend of Mandy’s?”
“I’m her sister,” the lady says.
I stop dead and study her face in the mirror. Then I come around in front of her and look directly at her. Yes, I can see some faint resemblances to Mandy. Her face is more oval than Mandy’s, but they shared strong bone structure. They also share level-7 blonde hair, medium texture, moderate wave. Blue eyes. Medium skin tone that browns in the summer sun.
After a long pause, I collect my wits. “I’m so very sorry for your loss. I can’t tell you how much all of us in the community loved her, me especially.”
“Thank you,” she answers. “I was hoping we could talk about her while you do my hair.”
We talk constantly from that point on, through the shampoo, the cut, the blow dry. She doesn’t have to get back to work, and I don’t have another service for an hour, so I continue working on her long after the cut, setting her hair in hot rollers, teasing and roughing it.
I ask her about Mandy as a boy and a sibling. They were close, Melissa says. She knew about “Mandy” from the beginning, let Mandy wear her clothes when their parents weren’t around. Marvin was always effeminate. Her father could barely tolerate the boy, was embarrassed that he was “queer.” Mom tried to keep him within the bounds of middle class normalcy for the sake of peace in the family, but when Marvin was a senior in high school he rebelled once and for all. He came to the dinner table one night with his somewhat shaggy boy’s hair done in a feminine spike, tight jeans, tank-top, dangling earrings, a touch of blush and lipstick.
“From now on, I’m Mandy,” she said, as the family, even Melissa, stared at her.
When dad recovered his ability to speak, he issued the age-old proclamation: not in my house you won’t. Then the ultimatum—dress and act like a boy or get out.<
br />
Mandy got out. She came to Boystown, crashed with whoever would take her in, worked as a waitress and a hooker. Melissa stayed in contact, gave her money and essentials as best she could, until the prostitution started.
“I just couldn’t watch it,” Melissa says.
Sometime after that Mandy reached out to TGA for some support. Not many young trans girls do that, especially ones as pretty and passable as Mandy. But Mandy needed acceptance. Not from hungry johns. Not even from admirers. She needed some sense of family. I tell this to Melissa. She nods, sad eyed.
Melissa was away when Mandy had her gender reassignment surgery. She was living in Pennsylvania, where her husband had been transferred. Her husband forbade her to have anything to do with her degenerate brother. To try to save a failing marriage, she didn’t see Mandy through that terrifying phase of her transition. That had proved to be the final straw in her marriage; soon after, she divorced and moved back to Chicago and tried to patch things up with Mandy.
There is not much for me to say. Mandy’s story is a familiar one.
In the end, Melissa feels better for having talked about it. She says so, and she looks like she feels better. She looks great, too, but that doesn’t mean much to her. She’s not in the mating game anymore. Has heavier things on her mind. I like her. I think she likes me, too. But I doubt we’ll ever see each other again. We live in different worlds. We connected this once over someone we both loved, but there’s not much more for us to say. Still, I tell her I’d love to have her in again, and next time I’d like to do her makeup. She smiles but stays non-committal. She won’t be calling. She’s numb from the compound tragedies of her life, an unworthy husband, a failed marriage, a beloved sibling dead. I feel her pain as if it were a hot tear on my own cheek. She is a victim of Mandy’s murder, too. When she leaves we just shake hands. Melissa is not a hugging person at this stage of her life.
As I start on my next client, I am haunted by the image of Mandy as a child going out as a girl for the first time with her sister, flushed and excited. The sweet innocence of youth. This image stays with me all day, and I mourn quietly on my walk home.
My grief is fueling a glowing ember of anger deep inside. It started with the bigot on the street corner. His meanness. His face twisted in hate, a sneering bully assaulting someone for no reason other than he could. He somehow made what happened to Mandy personal.
A genetic woman would want to talk about it, but I’m not there yet. I may never get there.
I want revenge.
***
CECELIA TOLD ME her party would be a small gathering of friends for a buffet dinner and cocktails. There are fifteen or twenty people in her sumptuous apartment when I arrive. Most are in the living room, nibbling and sipping and gazing out her floor-to-ceiling window. Hundreds of feet below, the Chicago River winds like a jewel through the Loop, dark blue in the shadows, almost turquoise in the direct sun. A canyon of breathtaking architecture towers around it, in its own way as majestic as the Grand Canyon.
I can't help but pause to gape, too. This is a million dollar view of the continent's most beautiful city.
There are a few TGA girls in the gathering, but most are straight people Cecelia knows from business or her volunteer activities outside the community. Cecelia is directing servers in formal attire, trays of hors d’oeuvres in hand.
Delicious vapors of garlic and butter and bread float over the room like clouds of temptation, sheer torture for a weight-conscious girl on hormone therapy.
I bypass the guests and the food and drift quietly through Cecelia’s pad. It’s elegant and tasteful. The décor is soft earth tones with bright white moldings at the top and bottom of each wall, and white wainscoting in the dining area. Her furniture is comfortable modern—a rust-colored couch and matching recliner, four wing chairs in browns and teak wood tones, teak coffee table and end tables, a teak dining set.
Her bedroom is done in cheery yellow and white. The four-poster bed looks like something from a little girl’s dream book, with its yellow and white checked canopy and thick mattress. The childhood Cecelia never had. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase facing the foot of the bed is packed with hard cover and large format books. I move closer. It is a transgender library, with a full compendium of the most respected journals of early transsexuals, psychology texts, biographies, and obscure titles, some in foreign languages.
The second bedroom is a sort of office/den/library. Bestseller titles fill the bookshelves and a heavy oak desk with computer paraphernalia takes up most of one wall. A reading chair and footstool sit next to a floor lamp and face an overstuffed visitor’s chair.
As loud and vulgar as Cecelia can be in her public behavior, she is clearly a woman of taste in her private life.
I’m browsing the titles in the bookshelf when someone else enters the room. I turn.
“Hi Bobbi!” he smiles. It’s Officer Phil, but he could pass for Adonis. My breath gets shorter, like a teenage girl standing in Elvis’ shadow. There’s no denying it, I have the hots for this man.
“Hi Officer,” I answer, smiling back.
“Please, please, it’s Phil,” he says. “How have you been?”
We make small talk. I can feel my face flush the whole time, and I can’t think of anything intelligent to say. I am a middle-aged adult with a lot of life experience behind me, yet I’m acting like a schoolgirl. Marilee is right. I may be thirty-eight years old, but right now I’m an adolescent girl hormonally.
Phil asks if I’d like a glass of wine.
“Yes,” I say. “And I need to start introducing myself to the other guests. I’m afraid I started exploring Cecilia’s place before any of that. I’m not much for meeting new people, especially straight ones.”
Phil raises his eyebrows in surprise. “Really? You seemed so comfortable at Marilee and Bill’s party. Personally, I would have been shaking in my shoes meeting all those cops at one time.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, but please don’t think it’s true. Deep down inside, I was wetting my pants.”
I can hardly believe I used the wet pants analogy. But when I start working the room, it turns out to be an apt metaphor: when I’m among strangers and feeling self-conscious my bladder shrinks to thimble size. After meeting a half dozen people I can hardly walk for how badly I have to pee. I break away from the clusters of people and wend my way to the hall bathroom. It’s in use. Of course.
Desperately, I go to Cecelia’s private bath, adjacent to her bedroom. The door is locked, but a voice inside calls “just a minute” as I try the door. I wait in agony, wishing I could grab myself. The doorknob turns, and I ready myself to dash into the bathroom. A man’s form fills the doorway and blocks my access. I want to push past.
“Oh, hello!” says a familiar voice. “We’ve met, I think.”
I look up from the floor, from his Alan Edmond shoes and wool worsted slacks to his custom-tailored shirt to the face of John Strand.
“Yes, that’s right. You’re Cecelia’s friend from the restaurant. Let’s see. . . Bobbi, right? You’re a hairdresser?”
When I recover my poise, I answer. “Yes. And I’d love to hear more about you and Cecelia in the old days. But first, I really, really need to go.”
He stands aside but doesn’t apologize for delaying me. “Need some help?”
My eyes swivel from the toilet to his face. Did I hear right? He has a playful smile on his face. Good god! He’s flirting with me. With ME!
“I think I can handle it.” I start to close the door.
“So to speak. . .” he quips just as the door closes.
It’s a boy joke. This does not fit the suave, debonair image he projected at the restaurant. I wonder which John Strand is the act.
When I rejoin the party, Cecelia is orchestrating a conversation between Officer Phil and John Strand. Now I know why she invited the man she suspects of murdering a sister. She wants to get Phil on Strand’s trail. Personally, I don’t see how that
can happen. Strand isn’t going to talk about his involvement with Mandy. He’s a smart guy and no one is that dumb anyway.
Cecelia’s guests are a pleasant lot. I converse easily with them. They are the guests of a transgender sister, so acceptance isn’t an issue.
After nearly two hours, I find Cecelia and say my thank-you’s and goodbyes. I’m hungry for my kind of food and, as much as I love my little black dress, I long to take it off and get out of my heels and just kick back and relax.
John Strand intercepts me at the door. He holds my elbow in one hand and escorts me into the hallway to the elevator alcove. It is set off from the hallway to Cecelia's flat, silent and secluded. He pivots in front of me to press the down button, pinning me against the wall. He does not move back after pressing the button. He stands very close to me. Very close. Our faces are inches apart. I can feel his breath on my skin. Warm and moist. I detect the aroma of white wine as I breathe in. The intimacy of the moment has an aphrodisiac effect on me. I should be uncomfortable with how close he is. Especially him. And yet, looking into his gray eyes, feeling his closeness and masculinity, I’m dizzy with arousal. I half expect him to kiss me because his lips are so close to my face. God help me, I want him to.
“I’m booking an appointment with you next week.” His voice is as soft as a sunbeam, his lips so close to my skin I can feel the heat of them. I remember handing him my business card when we met in the restaurant.
“I’m really looking forward to it.” He shares a seductive smile. He has the sincerity of a used car salesman. “And by the way, you look really hot tonight.” With that, he puts his tongue in my ear and softly cups my breast with one hand and pulls my lower body to his with the other. I will myself to act horrified but he’s gone before I complete the thought. No matter. I can’t muster any indignation. I can barely keep enough strength in my knees to remain upright.
