She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  They were still voting for Nelson Rockefeller, though.

  The Staines lived at the bottom of a steep hill, and their driveway was long and treacherous. For some reason, they erected the judging stand at the bottom of the hill, so that all the children participating in the bicycle parade had to jam their brakes on the whole way down Mount Staines.

  I was last in line. Alone, I stood at the top of the driveway, looking at the grown-ups far below, sitting behind a row of card tables covered with bunting. Verge Staines was playing John Philip Sousa marches on a small phonograph. His wife was pouring out glasses of lemonade.

  Then I began my approach. I saw the reviewing stand rush toward me. I saw my fingers, loosely holding, but not applying, the hand brakes. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t slowing myself down; it didn’t make any sense.

  With the force of an impending asteroid, I slammed into the reviewing stand. Card tables and bunting and glasses of lemonade went flying through the air, as did Verge Staines and our next-door neighbor, Mr. Wheeler (who came from Texas and once fired a shotgun over the heads of my sister and me when we decided, out of sheer cussedness, to defecate in his garden). Also airborne was our other neighbor, Dr. Wheeler, to whom, strangely, Mr. Wheeler was not related. Dr. Wheeler liked to walk alone in the vast woods of the Earle Estate, and now and again I would run into him when I was over there playing girl planet. What are you doing? he’d ask me.

  Oh, nothing.

  Years later, I wondered whether Dr. Wheeler was playing his own version of girl planet.

  Tables, bunting, glasses of lemonade, phonographs, Staines, Wheelers,Wheelers, and I all fell to earth with a loud thump. No one was killed, apparently. I lay on my back, the wheels of my bike spinning around and around nearby, as adults gathered around me.

  “Is he all right?” I just lay there listening to the voices of the grown-ups, a weird smile on my face. My father held me in his arms. “Are you all right, son?”

  We arrived at the hospital. There was some trouble finding the entrance. No one seemed to know where the front door was.

  At length, Grace and Russo and I got as far as the admissions desk on the second floor. They were expecting me. I filled out some papers, gave permission for an AIDS test, gave them a copy of my living will.

  Then they took me down the hallway to my room. Grace and Russo walked behind me. There were two beds in the room, and in the bed by the window was another patient of Dr. Schrang’s, a pale woman with black hair. A nurse sat on a chair by the window, reading a copy of GQ. The magazine contained an article I’d written about the woman business. There were some big Diane Arbus–type photos of me in the magazine, taken by The New Yorker’s Martin Schoeller.

  “Whoa,” said the patient. “It is you. It’s me, Melanie Seymour, from Virginia. Remember we swapped a couple of e-mails?”

  Actually, I didn’t remember her particularly well. I got a lot of e-mail.

  “Hi, Melanie,” I said.

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” said the nurse, looking up from the magazine, comparing me with my photo. “A celebrity, right here on my ward.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “Where do you want this stuff?” said Rick. He was still carrying my suitcase. It was nice that this time I was the celebrity for a change, even if my constituency seemed to be limited to a pale, bedridden transsexual and her scrub nurse.

  “Anywhere is fine,” I said.

  “You can use that locker,” said the nurse. “That’s for all your personal effects.” She got out a hospital johnny. “You’ll want to put this on.”

  I didn’t want to put on the johnny, actually. We puttered around the room, moving in. I got a stuffed moose doll out of my suitcase and put him on the pillow.

  “Now that’s going to come in handy,” Russo noted.

  “Listen, Jenny, we should let you get settled,” said Grace.

  “Okay,” I said. “I know.” I was in no mood for them to leave me there, though. Grace and Rick each gave me a hug.

  “We’ll be back after dinner, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Grace hugged me again.

  “Okay.”

  They walked off down the hall, and for a moment I lay on the bed, holding my moose in one hand. The nurse said, “You ring if there’s anything you need.”

  Then I took off my skirt and hose, peeled off my blouse, and slipped into the hospital gown. I hung up my things in the locker, then lay back on the bed. I realized I wouldn’t be wearing my own clothes again for a long time, over a week. All sorts of things would have happened once I got my own clothes back.

  “So, Melanie,” I said. “You had the operation when? A couple days ago?”

  “Last Friday,” she said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She nodded. “Okay,” she said tremulously.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

  Melanie nodded gravely. “But if I can get through it, you can get through it.”

  I wasn’t sure this was true, but for now I left it at that. It was better, maybe, not to know just how hard the coming week would be.

  By nightfall, Melanie’s spirits had fallen considerably. “Why did I do this?” she said softly. “I wish I were dead.”

  I went with Zero to an Alice Cooper concert in 1974, just a few months before Nixon resigned. Frank Zappa was supposed to make a surprise appearance, but he didn’t. That left us stuck with Alice. There was this big toothbrush that chased him around. Later he cut off his own head with a guillotine—Alice, I mean. Turned out later he was okay.

  Zero looked over at me about halfway through the concert. We’d been smoking pot. “Are you okay?” he said. I was holding one cupped hand next to my thigh, then slapping it on the top. “Seriously. Are you all right?”

  “I’m dissolving,” I explained sadly.

  I was painted with iodine, filled with magnesium. A nurse shaved me with an electric razor. I drank a gallon of an electrolyte solution that emptied me of my contents. Blood was drawn, and drawn again. The night came on, and I was sedated and I slept.

  The day before we’d come to Egypt, I’d taken a long walk up a mountain in our hometown. I walked the ridge above Great Pond, watching the boats dotting the lake below me. I saw eagles circling the sky above Long Pond. A gentle summer breeze shook the sugar maples and white pines.

  I reached the top of the mountain and sat there for a long time. I had wanted, I suppose, to engage in some sort of final farewell to manhood, to create an appropriate ritual that would mark my final passing into the world of women. Yet every rite I could think of seemed arbitrary or foolish. Anyway, there was very little about being a man that I had not already surrendered.

  All I could think about was Grace, and how I loved her still, and the terrible grief and guilt I felt for all the losses in her life. I realized I would never regret being female. But I would probably always regret not being Grace’s husband.

  Then I stood up and, for the last time, peed against a tree.

  Okay, I thought. Enough.

  In the morning, Melanie was watching the World Cup on television, England versus Argentina. We talked about ham for a while, the way certain Virginians will if you get them going. I didn’t mind. The way I figured, if she wanted to talk about ham, I might as well listen. It was better than having to hear about Second Manassas all over again. She allowed as how a Smithfield ham was best, but it had to be soaked before cooking. When Grace and Rick arrived, we were still discussing ham.

  “You like ham?” Melanie asked Grace.

  Grace nodded. “I’m partial to it,” she said.

  A man in green arrived at my door with a gurney. “Jennifer,” he said, “I’m here for you.”

  I said okay and got out of my bed, which had no wheels, and got into this other one, which did.

  Russo squeezed my hand. Grace hugged me. “Are you ready?” she asked me. I nodded.

  We went out into the hallway, and the man in
green pushed the down button. The elevator kept opening, but it was always filled with people. “I’m going to wait until we can get one of our own,” he said.

  I began to sing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”

  “You’ll be swell!” I said. “You’ll be great! / Gonna have the whole world on a plate! . . .”

  “Is that Ethel Merman she’s doing?” said Russo.

  “I think so,” Grace said, shaking her head.

  Russo looked at the orderly. “This isn’t the . . . usual reaction, is it?”

  “We get all kinds of reactions,” said the man in green.

  It was silent for a moment, then I started in on “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”

  “Man,” said Russo. “You know who I pity, is her anesthesiologist.” The doors opened on an empty elevator.

  “Okay,” I said to my wife and my best friend. “I’ll see you later.”

  “We’ll be here,” said Grace. Rick nodded. I was rolled in. The elevator doors closed.

  It was quiet in there. I didn’t sing.

  “Your friends are nice,” said the man in the green scrubs. We descended.

  “They are,” I said. “They’re about the two most amazing people in the world.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything.

  The doors opened, and I was rolled to a kind of holding area just outside the OR. “Okay,” said the orderly. “They’ll be taking you in to surgery in just a few minutes.”

  And then he left me there.

  It was silent in this place. There were half a dozen other gurneys all around me, but they didn’t have people on them. Across the hall from me was a supply cabinet. Nurses and doctors walked down the hall now and again, glancing over at me as if I were a work forged by the Cowboy Sculptor.

  The anesthesiologist came over to me, introduced himself. He told me to call him by his first name, which was Jeff. He connected a tube to the IV line on the back of my hand. We talked for a while. “I’ve got you on a mild sedative right now; we’ll increase it later, once we get you into the OR.”

  “Am I going to sleep?”

  “Chances are, you’re not going to remember anything, Jenny. You’ll be lying here one moment and the next thing you know it will be this afternoon.”

  “That’s so weird,” I said. “It’s as if the way we medicate pain now is not by removing the pain, but by removing the memory of it.”

  Jeff smiled. “That’s so wrong?” he said. He had a nice face. “I’m going to see if everything’s ready in the OR. Is it all right if I just leave you here for a couple minutes?”

  “It’s fine.”

  I didn’t mind. I just lay there in my little bed. I looked at the clock. It was 8:40 A. M., June 6, 2002.

  I felt like an airplane sitting at the end of a runway, waiting for clearance from the tower.

  Jeff was gone for more than a couple of minutes. I felt very peaceful. Quietly I sang “In the Still of the Night.”

  Shoo-doop, dooby doo. Shoo-doop, dooby doo . . .

  I lay there singing, thinking about everything.

  ’Tis a good life, the life at sea.

  “Okay,” said Jeff, returning at ten after nine. “Sorry you had to wait. You’re the second surgery this morning, and the first one went long.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve been fine.”

  “You’ve been singing?” he said, wheeling me into the operating room.

  “Yeah.”

  The OR had green tiles on the wall. There were a lot of machines in it. It was brightly lit. A woman in the corner with a face mask was washing her hands. I didn’t recognize her. I hadn’t seen her before.

  One night in 1987 the phone rang. It was a friend from college, who’d heard I’d died. I thought about Aunt Nora. Maybe what I needed was to drink some milk.

  I explained to my friend that I was not dead. Someone had seen a notice in The New York Times, he said, and my entire peer group up in Boston was now in mourning for me. They couldn’t believe it. I’d been so young.

  “Oh,” I said. “That was my father who died.”

  That cleared things up.

  That night I attended a performance of a play I’d written called Big Baby. It was about a baby that gets big. After the performance, the playwrights had to get up on stage and talk about their work. Edward Albee was in the audience, and he raised his hand and said, Listen, Mr. Boylan, about this baby in your play. Why is it so large? He seemed annoyed with me, although I do note that fifteen years later he also wrote a play about a baby. His was better than mine, though.

  I explained that the size of the baby was intended to create a comedic effect.

  At that moment, a tile fell out of the ceiling and hit me on the head, and I fell down klunk on the floor. This, incidentally, was much more effective at producing a comedic effect than my play had been.

  People offered to take me to the hospital, but I fended them off. I was all right. I had a big bump, though.

  Later, the series of events had me worried. I thought about the possibility that there was some sort of curse on me now, the result of people mourning for me under false pretenses. It’s because there’s this rumor I’m dead, I thought. It’s going to kill me.

  Surely the effects of enough people believing something, even if that something is untrue, are not without consequence.

  The next day I arrived at the airport to fly to Boston, to visit my friend Moynihan. There, on the tarmac, was my plane—a single-engine puddle jumper. As I looked at this questionable aircraft, I understood clearly what all the premonitions had been about. It was in this plane, surely, that I would make my final journey.

  I got on board.

  The propellers began to whirl. The tiny plane took off and flew up the East Coast of the United States.

  I looked out the window at all the places I had lived before my unfortunate demise. There was Philadelphia to the west, where I had grown up. Then there was New York, where I lived after college. I thought I could even pick out my old apartment building on 108th Street. To the east was Long Island, and now I could see, in the sparkling sun, the coast of Fire Island, where an old girlfriend’s family had a summer house. We traveled north and crossed Connecticut, and I could see the bend in the Connecticut River and Wesleyan University on the hills of Middletown.

  There was every place I’d ever lived. I said farewell. I felt all right about everything, even about dying. Okay, so you never got to be a woman, I thought. But you did all right.

  We landed safely in Boston. Again I had failed to die. It was something I wasn’t very good at, as it turned out. I got my bags and jumped into a cab, sailing off to Moynihan’s house.

  In Somerville, Moynihan’s door opened wide and a girl stood there. It was Grace Finney.

  I hadn’t seen her since the memorial service for Tim Alcock at Wesleyan, the one where I’d been too sad to sing “Beautiful Dreamer.”

  “Hey, James Boylan,” Grace said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were coming.” She looked embarrassed. “I heard you were dead.”

  We were in the hallway, rolling. “Jenny,” said Grace.

  It was Grace, and we were rolling. We were in the hallway. I was Jenny.

  “You’re all right,” she said. “It all went perfectly.”

  “It’s? It’s?” It was Jenny, and she was rolling. Grace was in the hallway.

  “It’s over,” said Russo. “The doctor came out and talked to us. He said he couldn’t be happier.”

  “You’ll be swell! You’ll be . . .”

  “You’re going back to the room now. We’re here with you. You’re all right.”

  “You’ll be swell! You’ll be . . . great . . .”

  The phone rang, and I talked to someone. It was Zero, it was my mother, it was Grace’s sister Bonnie, who had died of ovarian cancer two months earlier. I’d read a Galway Kinnell poem at her funeral. My hospital room was filled with flowers, from Grace, f
rom my mother, from my friends. A card read “It’s a girl!”

  “Grace,” I said, “can you sing me a song?”

  Grace looked over at Russo, who shrugged and looked back at her as if to say You’re on your own here.

  “Okay,” said Grace. “What do you want to hear?”

  “One of those . . . falling asleep songs you sing the children.”

  Grace looked out the window, thinking about the songs she knew.

  “Do you think I could leave you crying?” she then sang, taking my hand.

  When there’s room on my horse for two?

  Climb up here, Jack, quit your crying,

  We’ll mend up your horse with glue.

  When we grow up we’ll both be soldiers

  And our horses will not be toys.

  Maybe then we’ll remember

  When we were two little boys.

  I was awake, then I was asleep again, then I was awake. Grace was on the phone, talking to someone. “Whatever else you say about my husband,” she said, “she’s a remarkable woman.”

  Then it was late at night, and Russo was sitting by my bed and Grace was gone. “Where did she go?” I asked. My voice was slightly hoarse. I’d had a tube down my throat, but it wasn’t there now.

  “Grace went back to the hotel,” Russo said. “We went out to dinner. I told her to go get some rest.”

  “Were you drinking? I hope you were . . . drinking. . . .”

  Russo smiled. “We might have had a couple.”

  “Is she all right?” I said. “Is she really okay?”

  “She’s doing great,” said Russo. “She’s very proud of you. Apparently you sailed through. Schrang says you were amazing.”

  “Do you think . . . he’s nuts?” I said.

  Russo smiled. “Well, all we know is that he’s very, very good at one thing. And fortunately for you, it’s the thing you needed him to be good at.”

  “Russo . . . it’s done. It’s over. I did it.”

  “You sure as hell did. You did it, Boylan.” He smiled. “I’m proud of you, too, Jenny.”

  “I can’t believe,” I said. “It’s over.”