She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  Dad had always been a shy, polite man, and for a moment he looked almost embarrassed to be materializing, as if it were such a tacky and clichéd form of behavior for the dead.

  He raised one hand as if to tell me not to worry. I could smell the Alberto VO5 he used to use on his hair. He glowed.

  “Jenny,” he said.

  I wanted to respond to him, but I could not find my voice. Still, for all that, his presence wasn’t frightening. As in life, my father seemed incredibly gentle in spirit. Being dead didn’t seem to have particularly embittered him.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “I’ve been looking out for you, protecting you, for these last fifteen years. Being your guardian. I know a lot of things now I didn’t used to know.”

  He looked sad.

  “I know that you have to become a woman, Jenny. It is going to be all right. Your mother will always love you, and so will I.”

  He stood there floating for a while.

  Then he said, “But you need to know this. If you become a woman, as I know you must, I’m not going to be looking out for you anymore. You will be on your own.”

  Then he looked at me coldly, harshly, and faded.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, terrified. I turned on the light. The room was full of the smell of his hair gel.

  Russo and I went out drinking at our usual place, the Seadog in Camden. I wore a white T-shirt and jeans. We occupied a booth near the bar. The Red Sox were on television. We drank something called Old Gollywobbler.

  Russo was finishing up the novel he then called Nantucket, later to be renamed Empire Falls. He’d asked me to take a look at one chapter in it, a scene in which the hero, Miles, goes in to visit Mrs. Whiting, who wields all sorts of power over him. Her daughter, who hobbles around on crutches, is desperately in love with Miles; in that particular scene, among other events, her cat scratches Miles until he bleeds.

  “So I need to know if you think this is too cruel,” he said. “It’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t know. My work seems like it’s getting darker and darker.”

  “What, now that’s my fault, too?”

  He laughed. “I don’t think it’s your fault,” Russo said. “Although . . .” He paused, happily, to consider what might, after all, not be his fault.

  “I don’t know if the cruelty issue is the right question,” I said, and sipped the beer. “I think the issues are whether it’s funny, and whether it’s real.”

  “Okay. So is it funny?”

  “Yeah, Russo,” I said. “It’s a riot.”

  He laughed again. “Good. I’m glad you think so. I’m crazy about it.”

  “Well, that’s probably a pretty good sign right there. But, see, the reason it’s funny is because it’s serious. And that makes it feel real, too. I think the reason you can get away with the comedy is that you’ve got that terrible cruelty of Mrs. Whiting simmering underneath the scene. It acts like ballast, to keep the silliness of the business with the cat from getting out of hand.”

  “Well, I wanted to know what you thought, Boylan, because that’s what your fiction does, too, when it works.”

  “Right,” I said. “On those rare occasions.”

  “Yeah, on those incredibly rare occasions.” He laughed. “You love that place between what’s funny and what’s terribly sad.”

  I nodded. “It’s a great place for a story to be,” I said. “Keeping a reader unsure whether to laugh or cry.”

  He drank his pint, looked at me. “I guess there’s a reason you write that way, huh.”

  I nodded.

  He said, “You know, of all the writers I know, it’s always seemed to me that, there’s the least of you, personally, in your fiction. I mean, some authors I know, all they really do is change the names of the characters in their own lives, and that’s it, that’s the novel. But you, Boylan, whenever we have dinner together, you always tell these amazing stories about your own life, that just have everyone on the floor. But those stories never wind up in your novels. Your stories are always about people a million miles away, acting like maniacs. I mean, your friends would recognize a certain entertaining voice in your work, but the actual events and the characters seem to come from someplace very far away from you.”

  I finished my beer.

  “I used to wonder why it was you didn’t write about your own life, examine your own emotional center. But now I know why.” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ, do I know why.”

  The waitress came by. “Would you like another one, miss?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Please.”

  She took my glass and walked back toward the bar.

  “Jesus, Boylan,” Russo said. He turned deep red and looked around the Seadog. All this time he’d presumed we’d just been two guys sitting at a booth drinking. Suddenly it occurred to him that people thought he was sitting with some girl, getting drunk. Did people think I was his date?

  “I gotta go to the men’s room,” he said, and stood up.

  “I gotta pee, too,” I said, and followed him. As we walked toward the bathrooms, he seemed to take another hard look at me. “Which one are you going to use?” he said. “Will you at least do me that favor, and tell me before we get there?”

  “Which would make you more uncomfortable?” I said. “I’ll use that one.”

  “Tell you what, Boylan,” Russo said. “If you get back to the table first, you leave a mark. If I get there first, I’ll rub it out.”

  Our children ran around the house, pursued by their friends Carrie and Sam, carrying water guns. There was a squirting sound, then a scream. Luke and Patrick came running back in the other direction, soaked to the skin. Grace and I sat on the porch, watching the sun reflect off the lake.

  Sam came running up on the porch, holding his Super Soaker. He paused when he saw me.

  “Why are you wearing those earrings?” he said to me.

  “Don’t you like them?” I said.

  Patrick and Luke came up on the porch behind him, out of breath.

  “They make you look like a girl,” said Sam. “You look like a girl!”

  “Our daddy’s a boygirl,” said Patrick, smiling. It didn’t sound like a bad thing, the way he put it.

  “But we love him anyway,” said Luke. He came over and gave me a big hug.

  Then the kids ran inside to fill up their water guns again.

  Grace looked over at me. “We’re going to have to tell them something,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But what can we tell them?”

  “Well . . . ,” said Grace. She sounded more confident and clear than she’d seemed the previous winter. “I’ve tried to do some research on what families do when someone changes genders. I checked with some other therapists.”

  “And?”

  “There’s no research whatsoever.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  “I tell you what,” she said. “When all else fails? Use common sense.”

  From inside came the sound of a terra-cotta planter smashing into a thousand pieces.

  “Oops,” said a voice.

  “What was that?” Grace called inside.

  “Nothing,” said Luke.

  They all ran out the door, soaking one another with the squirt guns.

  “What do you mean, common sense?” I said.

  “Well,” said Grace,“first off, they should know that they’re loved. They shouldn’t question whether any changes in you mean that your love for them is different. I think that’s probably the most important thing.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “And they should know that this won’t happen to them, that it’s rare. They should know they didn’t cause it. They should know they can talk about it whenever they want, and that it’s all right to find the whole thing pretty weird.”

  I nodded.

  “And most of all, I guess they should know you aren’t going anywhere.” The sound of our children’s voices grew distant as they r
an toward a neighbor’s.

  “I’m not?”

  “Well, of course not.”

  “Does that mean we’re not getting divorced?”

  Grace sighed. “I don’t know what the future is, Jenny. But we’re all going to be together for the foreseeable future. That isn’t going to change. I mean, who knows, one day it probably will. But not for now.”

  “Is that what you decided?” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s not a decision. It’s the only choice we’ve got. I mean, I don’t want to be apart from you, and I don’t want the children to lose you. And you don’t want to leave. So what can we do? We have to figure out a way of making this work as a family.”

  I reached out and took her hand. “It sounds like you’re coming to terms with things.”

  She squeezed it and let it go. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I am so totally pissed off at you, I don’t know what to say. Except I can’t be pissed off at you, because it’s not your fault. So I just sit and steam at everything. I feel totally gypped, like I’ve been cheated out of my husband. It’s not fair!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I know you’re sorry,” she said. “But your being sorry doesn’t help. There aren’t any good choices for me. Every choice I have sucks.”

  The children came running back. Patrick had somehow lost all of his clothes. Water dripped down from his hair. “Can we go to the toy store?” he asked.

  Patrick’s phrase boygirl became the personal shorthand that I used to describe the place I was in during 2000–2001. I made up a little joke during this boygirl period, namely: What are the three phases of male-to-female transition? Step one: Hey, that guy looks a little weird. Step two: Hey, that person looks really weird. Step three: Whoa, that chick is ugly!

  By now I was hovering, it appeared, between steps two and three.

  I seemed to pass from being perceived as male to female at a moment’s notice, depending on whom I was with, where I was, whether my hair was tied back or loose, how I crossed my legs. During the boygirl period, I gradually increased the amount of time I spent “presenting” as a woman. By the end of that year, the only places I was consistently male were on the Colby campus and around my children.

  My voice had always been somewhat androgynous, and after two or three sessions with Tania Vaclava, the voice coach at Bates College, I became relatively content with the way I sounded. I managed to perfect, with the coach’s help, a spectacularly convincing female voice; my coach said it was because I was a musician and a writer. My pianist’s ear helped me hear the appropriate female pitch and modulation; my author’s sensibilities showed me inflection and phrasing. For a while, it was like learning a whole new language.

  Yet after a few months I gave up on this new voice. It sounded convincing, but it didn’t feel authentic, I suppose. My voice dropped back into a more androgynous place, and although its resonance and inflection became more feminine, as a matter of course I no longer gave my voice any thought. This was much to the relief of my friends, who’d found that the “Jennifer voice” sounded like the voice of a stranger.

  Above all, I wanted my friends and family to know that Jenny was not a stranger, that she was someone they already knew. It was a puzzle, though—if Jenny was so very much like James, didn’t that mean she was not really female? And if she really was female, didn’t that mean that she was someone unknown? That I could be both unambiguously female and, at the same time, the person they had always known seemed impossible. Yet it was an impossibility that was largely true.

  I was aware, during the time of boygirl, that I had been given a rare and precious gift, to see into the worlds of both men and women for a time and to be able to travel almost effortlessly between them. I taught my classes at Colby with my baggy, button-down shirts hiding my figure, I wore a tweed coat and my hair tied back in a ponytail. In the parking lot, after class, I would take off the coat and the shirt (leaving on my undershirt), slip in a pair of earrings, and shake my hair loose, and I would then be seen as female, at least by people who did not know me. It was like being Clark Kent and Superman, in a way. I really did have that sense of “Into a nearby phone booth . . .” and could move from one world to another with an ease I found uncanny.

  I undertook, during this period, the writing of a supposedly amusing magazine piece making use of my superpowers. What I had in mind was to perform certain gender-pungent rituals in society, several weeks apart, first as James and then as Jenny, and to then compare the experiences. I wanted to apply for a job, for instance, first as man and then as a woman, and see which one of me would get the offer and whether the starting salary would be different. I thought of spending an evening sitting at a bar with Russo and going in the following night as Jenny with Grace. I considered going to a formal shop, getting fitted for a bridal gown, then a week later being measured for a tux. I was full of ideas.

  I actually got as far as three of these exercises—buying a car, shopping for a handgun, and purchasing a pair of blue jeans at the Gap. I wrote the story and showed it to a few editors, all of whom loved it and wanted to know when it would be available. I said I wanted to wait until I officially “came out” and became Jenny full-time, probably in the summer of 2001. (By that time, however, I put the article in a drawer; it seemed by then too playful and sarcastic, as if being a woman were all just a clever game for me. The piece didn’t seem to reflect the sorrow of the journey, and its joys seemed superficial.)

  My experiences in writing the piece were perhaps predictable, but I found them amazing, at least I did at the time. For instance, when I went to the Nissan dealer as Jenny, the salesman showed me the most expensive car on the lot, the Maxima, and talked up the cup holders and the illuminated speedometer. A week later, he tried to sell James a midrange car, the Altima, and his focus now was on the platinum-tipped spark plugs. The punch line, although inevitable, was still remarkable, I thought: The deal they offered me as a man was a thousand dollars better than the one they’d offered Jenny.

  The gun shop part of the article didn’t really work, since I didn’t know anything about guns and couldn’t bring myself to go back there a second time as a man. The owner of the store, though, a nice man in Winslow, Maine, tried to sell me something called the “Chief’s Special.” He said the two good things about the gun were 1) that it had no safety, and 2) that it was “double-acting.” This didn’t make much of an impression on me, though; the only thing I knew that was double-acting was baking powder.

  Buying the jeans at the Gap was more sobering to me as a soon-to-be-former man than it was to my female editors. What I found in the Gap was what most women know already—that buying clothes is complicated. As a man, of course, you simply made the choice between regular or relaxed fit, told the salesman the measure of your in-seam and waist, and were then led to a huge wall of pants in your size, all of which you knew would fit just fine, even if you never tried them on. As a woman, I found that there were six different styles of jean, from “boot cut” to “reverse,” and that the sizes bore no relation to any known system of measure.

  The jean that fit me best at the Gap was the “reverse,” which I thought was appropriate. I was right between a ten and a twelve and spent some time neurotically trying to tell myself I could get by in the tens. They’re perfectly comfortable if I don’t sit down, I thought. How much time do I actually spend sitting, anyway? If I buy the tens, it will be an incentive to lose weight.

  I recognized the insanity of this kind of talk, recognized it from the lives of the women I knew, and as I moved into this territory I realized, not for the first time, that all of the cruel expectations that society puts upon women—and that so many women put upon themselves—were now falling on my shoulders. I had seen so many transsexuals who felt that being a woman was the same as being a girl, and the lives they lived post-transition seemed to be those of completely unapologetic prefeminists. So many “former” transsexuals, although now ostensibly female, spoke in odd f
alsettos, teetered around on heels, and demanded that doors be held open for them. Again and again, I told myself, you’re going to incredible e fort to become a woman, Jenny; don’t surrender your common sense in the bargain.

  No issue was as hard to resolve as the issues around food. My weight was stable, and at five feet eleven, I was healthy, tall, and slender. Yet whenever I went out for lunch, I would hear myself ordering diet soda or asking for the spinach salad. I bought a scale and started weighing myself constantly. I’d say, If only I could lose five pounds. I bought Slim-Fast and had thick, gloopy milkshakes for lunch instead of food.

  It was madness, and it was exactly the kind of madness that I found least appealing in the lives of the women I knew. Yet the culture had its hooks in me, like it or not. In no time at all I’d internalized many of the things I’d spent years imploring my students to fight against. I worried that I was too fat. I apologized when someone else stepped on my foot, as if it were my fault. My sentences often ended with a question, as if I were unsure of myself. All of these changes transpired without any conscious thought, and if I became aware of them, I felt ashamed.

  Partially, I think what I wanted was to belong. If being female— to others, at any rate—seemed to include self-doubt, insecurity, and anorexia, then some part of me felt, Okay, well, let’s do all that, then.

  Later, when I tried to let some of this go, there were some who saw me as “less female”—like when I ordered the barbecued baby back ribs for lunch instead of a salad and a diet soda. Why shouldn’t a woman eat real food for lunch, I wondered, instead of the pretend kind?

  I realized, as Jimmy Durante used to say, that “them’s the conditions what prevails,” but it didn’t sit well with me. There were times when it was as if I were trying to prove I was truly female by oppressing myself.

  Luke and I were reading a book about Eskimos. “What would you do, Mommy,” asked the Inuit child, “if I turned into a walrus?”

  “I would be afraid,” said the mother. “But I would still love you.”

  “What would you do, Mommy,” asked the child, “if I turned into a polar bear?”