She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  The bouncer, a very large man in a white T-shirt and a shaved head, pulled him away from me.

  The band sang, “Fa fa fa fa fa-fa, fa-fa fa fa fa.”

  A moment later he was back, closer this time. He explained things again. “I want to play in your haaair.”

  He reached out for me. Less than two seconds after that, the bouncer had him. Mr. Clean hauled the young man halfway across the bar, at which location the young man was dropped onto the floor. The bouncer stepped on the boy’s neck with his large black boots. Shortly after that, my suitor was outside in the snow.

  During the break, I said to the bouncer, “Did you have to hurt him like that?”

  He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It’s our policy.”

  At nine A. M. the next morning, Grace said, “Jenny, wake up. It’s next year.”

  I opened my eyes to see her standing bedside with a very large pile of pancakes and syrup. “Hi,” I said. My voice was hoarse. My hair smelled like smoke.

  “Here, eat these,” she said. “We’re climbing a mountain in fortyfive minutes.”

  I ate the cakes.

  Forty-five minutes later we were ascending French’s Mountain in Rome, Maine. We’d done this with our friends Loretta and Dave every New Year’s Day for a couple of years running. By midmorning we were at the summit, and we looked around at the lakes shimmering with ice and the snow-covered hills that surrounded us. The kids threw snowballs and fought with icicles as if they were swords.

  Loretta talked about the first time she’d climbed French’s Mountain on New Year’s. “This old woman I know, Mrs. Voron, used to climb up here with all her women friends every year. The time she took me, she handed us all little squares of paper. When we got to the top, everybody made a wish, and then the wind came and blew the paper away.”

  Loretta paused to look out at the frozen lakes.

  “Then, at that moment,” Loretta said,“a red-tailed hawk swooped down, whoosh, just like that, and right after that , a sudden snow squall passed through. It was totally freaky.”

  Our children climbed trees as the grown-ups looked out at the horizon and handed around a thermos of hot cocoa. Lucy the dog stood at the edge of the precipice, gazing at the abyss.

  When it was time to go, I picked up a handful of powdery snow and held it in my mitten. I thought about the coming year, the year of finally having surgery, of all the trials that lay ahead. I closed my eyes and wished that my family would be protected from the world by our love for one another.

  The snow blew out of my hand.

  That night, Grace and I got a baby-sitter and went out for Thai food and a showing of Lord of the Rings.

  I asked Grace how she felt about the year to come. She was eating drunken noodles and spicy chili fish, along with a side dish of plad mun.

  Grace looked at me and said, “I know you always ask me how I feel, but there are times when I think it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters,” I said.

  “Jenny, shhh,” she said. “This time you listen.”

  She poured herself some tea.

  “You’re good at asking me how I feel, Jenny, about trying to have a conversation about your transition, but you know what I think sometimes? I think,What’s the difference. Since day one you’ve pretty much had an idea in your head of exactly what you wanted to do, and when you’d do it. All I’ve ever said all along was,Wait, please, stop, slow down, and to that you’ve responded with all sorts of words about your suffering, about what you’ve been through, about how you don’t have any choice, about how this is mostly a medical issue and all that. It seems like no matter what I say it doesn’t matter, because it’s all been decided a long time ago. You’ve just been on a freight train for two years now. You’re going where you feel like you need to go. For me, it’s just like I’m standing here watching.”

  Tears filled Grace’s eyes, dripped down her face, and fell into her drunken noodles.

  “Do you believe,” I asked her slowly, “that all of this is necessary for me?”

  She wiped her eyes.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she said. “But you can’t expect me to feel the way you do about this. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you, even now. I’m not the one who’s trapped in the wrong body, in the wrong life, in the wrong place. At least I didn’t used to be. No matter what happens from here on out, I lose.”

  Her lower lip trembled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I know you’re sorry,” Grace said. “But what can I say to you? You don’t want to be the person I married.” She shrugged. “I do love you. But this isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t what I had in mind, when I spent the last twelve years, building something.”

  “It was something I built, too,” I said.

  We both sat there for a long time then, not saying anything.

  “For all that,” Grace said,“I still believe that being together is better than being apart. I still want to be with you.”

  I said quietly, “No, Grace. What you want is to be with Jim.”

  “No,” she said. “What I want is to be with you.”

  We were silent again for a little while.

  “But being with you can’t mean what it used to mean. I’m always going to miss my boyfriend, the person I married, the person I love. The fact that all of this is necessary for you doesn’t make that any less hard for me. But I know I want us to be together. I know I will always be close to you, Jenny. I’m just not sure . . . how near.”

  “Do you want me to move into the guest room?” I asked. “Do you want me to move out of the house?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  We were silent again for a long while.

  “But,” I said, “that doesn’t mean you ever want to have a relationship with me again? That just means we’re like sisters , for the rest of our lives?”

  “I don’t know what it means, Jenny. I’m not sure what we are. It’s like you get to be happy, and me—well, we all just wait for me to get over it. But I can’t get over it. I’m always going to feel betrayed by you, abandoned, like our little family was not enough. You know how I feel? Gypped.

  “You asked me if I thought this was necessary, and yes, I do. I think it’s taken incredible bravery and courage for you to be the person you need to be, and I’m not going to stand in the way of that. I would never keep the person I love from being who she needs to be. But I can’t be glad for you, Jenny. Every success you’ve had as a woman is also a loss for me. I mean, I’m proud of you—you’re a beautiful woman, you’ve come so far. But all of that success for you just feels like failure to me. I can’t feel the way about your transition that you do; I’ll never feel that way. All of the good things that have happened to you—your acceptance at Colby, with the band, with the school—to me, they all just mean one more thing I’ve lost.

  “And I didn’t get to participate in this at all. I didn’t get to choose when you started hormones, or when you went full-time, or when you’ll have surgery. I mean, you consulted me, you included me, and we talked about it all again and again and again—but it didn’t really matter what I said about any of it, did it? I mean, really?”

  The waitress came by and asked if there was anything she could get for us.

  We said that we were fine.

  Later we sat in a darkened movie theater watching The Lord of the Rings. About an hour into the film I found my eyes suddenly filling with tears, and the next thing I knew I was sobbing uncontrollably.

  It was the scene at the end of the Council of Elrond, when Frodo accepts his burden.

  “I will take the Ring,” he says. “I will go to Mordor. Although I do not know the way.”

  I wept so hard that people in the next row glanced over at me. I reached out and held Grace’s hand. I held it for a long time.

  Then my tears stopped for a while.

  They started again when Frodo reunites with old Bilbo Baggins in
Rivendell and Bilbo tries to get Frodo to show him the Ring. For a moment Bilbo seems transformed into Gollum. Then he diminishes, and a look of exhaustion and horror comes over him.

  “I understand now,” Bilbo says. “Put it away! I am sorry. Sorry you have come in for this burden, sorry about everything.”

  Part 4

  June 2001. Okay, I thought. Enough.

  The Yankee-Doodle Girl

  In 1987, while I was living in Washington, my mother came down for a visit. We went over to the Lincoln Memorial. As we drove, she reminisced about coming to America as a child, her memories of Ellis Island and Depression-era New Jersey. It wasn’t a topic she visited often.

  “No matter what else you say,” she said, “you have to love America.”

  “I have to?” I said. “I don’t have a choice about this?”

  “No, Jim,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you don’t.”

  I parked the car near the Mall. Together we walked through the rain up the steps. There was Abe, sitting on his marble throne. It was quiet.

  Visiting the Lincoln Memorial is sort of like being sent to the principal. You feel ashamed of yourself for being such a shithead. You want to tell him, I’m sorry about being a woman, Mr. President. Honest I am. Lincoln looked at me, his melancholy face ravaged and discouraged: I’m not angry. I’m just terribly, terribly disappointed.

  “Boy,” my mother said. “He’s ugly.”

  Fifteen years later, Grace and Russo and I walked by the train tracks in a Wisconsin town we’ll call Egypt. Behind me, my suitcase on wheels went clackety-clack across the sidewalk. To our right was the small river that flowed through Egypt, paper factories built upon its banks.

  A gritty diesel groaned past us, hauling boxcars: Georgia Pacific, Chessie System, Southern Serves the South.

  We’d arrived the night before, checked into a hotel that was decorated with the work of an artist named Remington, the “Cowboy Sculptor.” I’d never heard of him before, but Grace and Rick had. There were broncos bucking dudes with big hats, bison staring down guys in chaps.

  Grace and Russo and I walked into a brightly lit office. On the door were the words Dr. Eugene Schrang, Cosmetic Surgery. For all that, it was a place like many others. The waiting room included stacks of old magazines, a television tuned to CNN.

  The three of us went into Dr. Schrang’s chambers.

  “Jennifer,” he said, standing up to shake my hand. He wore a three-piece suit and a white lab coat over that. Schrang exuded a kind of imperious dignity, as well as a not displeasing measure of eccentricity.

  “This is my partner, Grace,” I said, “and my friend Rick Russo.”

  We all shook hands, sat down. For a moment it was silent.

  “I’ve read your novel,” Schrang said. He meant Russo’s. “It’s good.”

  “Thank you,” said Rick.

  It was quiet in the office for a moment. I was waiting for Dr. Schrang to examine me further, to brief my partner and my friend on the surgery that would be performed the next day.

  Schrang got up, went over to the bookcase. He pulled out a copy of Empire Falls and gave it to Rick. On the cover were the words Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

  Empire Falls had done all right.

  “You wouldn’t mind . . . signing this for me, would you?”

  “Sure,” Rick said with a forced smile. He opened the novel to the title page. For a moment I thought I heard the gears turning around in his head as he tried to find words appropriate to the occasion.

  “How’d you become a novelist, anyway?” Schrang asked Rick. “Is it something that just came naturally to you?”

  “Oh no,” Rick said. “It took a long time to figure out how to do it right.”

  “Well,” said Schrang, “figuring out how to do sexual reassignment surgery was like that, too.”

  Rick rubbed his chin, having never realized how much his work and Dr. Schrang’s had in common.

  Schrang got up, removed three more books from a shelf, and handed one to each of us. The title was The Great Communicators. It appeared to be the work of a vanity press, a collection of essays about personal communications. A much younger Eugene Schrang was on the cover. He beckoned toward the reader with one hand, like a magician about to produce a rabbit.

  I opened the book, and on the first page was a huge photograph of Ronald Reagan. “This book is dedicated to President Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator,” read the inscription.

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “You don’t think you’re the only one who wrote a book, do you?” said Schrang with a dignified smile. He was talking to Russo.

  “Listen, I don’t know if I should tell you this before the surgery, but I’m a Democrat,” I said. The doctor looked at me, not sure if I was kidding.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. I was glad he was being so nice about it. Of course, Dr. Schrang dealt with transsexuals every day. Democrats probably weren’t that much worse.

  “Hey, where are my books?” I said.

  Dr. Schrang looked at me as if I had spoken a foreign language. It was clear, at that moment, that he had no idea I’d ever written anything.

  “I’ll send you one,” I said.

  “I’d like that.”

  It was silent again.

  “Well, do you have, like, any . . . questions for us?” I said. “Or any more examinations you have to do before tomorrow?”

  “Nah,” said the doctor. “Since you were out here in November, I know all that I need to know. You’re going to do fine.”

  “What are some of the things that could . . . go wrong?” said Grace.

  “Well, the biggest danger is a fistula, you know, a fissure between the vagina and the rectum. That’s the worst-case scenario. If that happens, I’ll have to put in a colostomy. I see that all the time, in patients who’ve had their surgeries done somewhere else, a fistula. Oh, there’s a lot of junk out there, you wouldn’t believe some of the junk I’ve had to correct.” He looked at the three of us. “Do you want to see some slides, some pictures of some of the junk I’ve had to fix?”

  “No,” all three of us shouted.

  “Is that going to happen to me?” I said. “A fistula?”

  “I sure hope not,” said the doctor.

  “Do you want to talk with the doctor privately?” Grace said.

  “I think I ought to,” I said. “You know, just so we do it.”

  “Okay,” said Grace and Russo. They stood, took their books, shook the doctor’s hand. “See you tomorrow.”

  The door to the office closed. I sat back down.

  “What do you get for a Pulitzer Prize, anyway?” he asked after a moment. “Is it money? Or a medal, or what?”

  “I think it’s money,” I said. “I don’t know how much, though.”

  “You think it’s a lot?”

  “I bet it is,” I said. Dr. Schrang looked troubled. “But I don’t know for sure. I know you get a certificate, like a diploma. I think Rick got a paperweight, too.”

  “That’s nice, a paperweight,” said Dr. Schrang. He smiled, all those years in medical school seeming worthwhile again.

  “So, like,” I said. “Surgery’s tomorrow and everything.”

  “How are you feeling?” Dr. Schrang asked.

  “I guess I’m excited. Kind of nervous. Afraid of the pain, of the unknown. I don’t know, it’s like you open a door, thinking you know what’s on the other side. But you don’t really know. I mean, I’ve done my research, I think I have a good idea of what to expect. But I won’t really know for sure until it’s all done, you know?”

  Dr. Schrang nodded. “It’s okay to be afraid. Most people are.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So you’re saying I’m normal?”

  He nodded. “That’s right, Jenny, you’re normal.”

  I had a strange affection for Eugene Schrang. He was an eccentric, perhaps, but he was also a genius. It must be hard, I thought, to be the pioneer of a field so arcane.r />
  Gingerly, almost shyly, he showed me some slides of the operation, which initially struck me as being about as appealing as watching a car accident. Yet as I sat there in the dark, it was impossible not to find something beautiful about these slides as well. I recalled the words I had so often heard used to describe Schrang’s work: Even your gynecologist can’t tell the difference. It was remarkable.

  “And you say I’ll be orgasmic?” I said quietly. “I mean, really?”

  “Well, that’s the goal,” Schrang said. “We want you to see stars and comets. The whole nine yards.”

  I nodded. That would be nice, stars and comets. Dr. Schrang reviewed some more slides. I could sense his pride as he described the intricacies of his handiwork. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a slide with his pen. “Nobody else makes a urethra like that, nobody!”

  Eventually the last slide clicked in its carousel, and the screen went blank. We were silent for a moment, Eugene Schrang and I.

  “Jenny,” said Dr. Schrang, “you’re going to be all right. You’re going to sail through.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “You will.” He put his hand out to shake. I put my arms around him and hugged him. He wasn’t a large man, and as I embraced my doctor I had to bend my knees. That way I could reach him.

  On the Fourth of July 1968, our neighbors the Staines had a bicycle contest. They were from Tennessee. The father, Verge, chain-smoked L&Ms and had a deep voice and cracks in his face that looked as if they’d been cut by running water.

  We all decorated our bikes, threading red, white, and blue crepe paper through the spokes. It was good that the Staines were doing this for the Fourth because it was becoming more and more self-evident, even to the children, that the country was down the drain. The loss of Martin Luther King that spring had torn something open that seemed unlikely to heal. My parents and I had sat around the radio in the kitchen, listening to Bobby Kennedy address the crowd in Indianapolis: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer . . .”