She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  He smiled. “Are you okay? Do you feel okay?”

  I beamed. “I think so. I keep dozing off, though. I think I’m on . . .” I felt a wave of pain. I picked up my Demerol drip and hit the magic button that released the drug. It dinged, as if I were at a gas station and I’d driven over the hose. “I keep, you know . . . Waking up and . . .”

  “You look like you’re doing incredibly well.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah. Quite frankly, it’s a little eerie. You seem so happy. To tell you the truth, it’s a pretty powerful thing to see, how happy you are.”

  “It’s just that I’m so relieved, Rick,” I said. “I was afraid . . . I was going to wake up . . . and have a sense of regret. Instead, I just feel glad. I feel so . . . grateful.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you right now?”

  “Would you read me something?” I had Empire Falls lying on the nightstand. “Read me some of this, would you?”

  He looked about as glad to read his own work at my bedside as he’d been to sign a copy of it for Dr. Schrang. But he did it.

  My friend read me the beginning of chapter 14 of his great novel, a scene in which Miles Roby and his father are driving in their car.

  On general principle his father was dead set against swerving to avoid obstacles. . . . Once, the year before . . . , they’d encountered a cardboard box sitting square in the middle of their lane on a narrow country road. Since no one was coming toward them and no one was following, and since there was plenty of time to slow down and maneuver around the box, Miles was surprised when his father actually accelerated into it. He braced for something like an explosion, but the box, thankfully empty, was sucked under the car, where it got caught in the driveshaft and made a hell of a racket for a hundred yards or so before it flapped away, mangled and reduced to two dimensions, into a ditch.

  “What if that box had been full of rocks?” Miles asked.

  “What would a box full of rocks be doing sitting in the middle of the road?” Max wondered back, pushing in the cigarette lighter on the dash and patting his shirt pocket for his pack of Luckies.

  Miles was tempted to reply,“Waiting for an idiot to hit it doing sixty miles an hour,” but he said instead, “If it had been full of rocks, we might both be dead.”

  Max considered this. “What would you have done?”

  Miles sensed a trap in this innocent question, but at sixteen he continued to play the hand he’d been dealt, confident he had enough to trump with. “I might’ve stopped to see what was in the box before I hit it.”

  Max nodded. “What if it was full of rattlesnakes? Then when you opened it, you’d be dead.”

  Miles had not grown up in his father’s intermittent company for nothing. “What would a box full of rattlesnakes be doing sitting in the middle of the road?”

  “Waiting for some dumbbell like you to stop and look inside,” Max said.

  Grace and Rick returned to Maine on Sunday, June 9th, leaving me to recover a few days longer in an Egyptian hotel. One day, I decided to kill a few hours by taking a taxi several miles north to the Houdini Museum, in Appleton.

  The Houdini Museum consisted, for the most part, of a collection of shackles, handcuffs, and straitjackets that the great magician had eluded over eighty years previously. There weren’t a lot of other people there that day, and as I rolled in my wheelchair around the museum’s environs, it was hard not to be struck with a sense of infinite loneliness. This feeling was amplified by the juxtaposition of the Houdini material with a very large exhibit in the main hall, a retrospective on Wisconsin’s own junior senator entitled “Joe McCarthy: An American Tragedy.” There were entries in a guest book such as this one:“Joe McCarthy was right—his only fault lay in not going far enough!”

  On the wall by the handcuffs was a tattered poster: “HOUDINI: ORIGINAL INTRODUCER OF THE METAMORPHOSIS! Changing places with his wife in 3 seconds! The Greatest Mystery the World Has Ever Seen!”

  From the next room came the recorded voice of Senator McCarthy harassing a witness, attacking his patriotism: “Will you tell us the names of these sympathizers, or will you not? By five o’clock today?” Before me, in a wooden box, were half a dozen loose handcuffs and a straitjacket on a hanger. “Slip on these shackles! Try the straitjacket on for size!” read the sign. “And see if you can escape.”

  I flew home on Father’s Day. My children met me at the door with a big sign that read “WELCOME HOME, MADDY” as well as a box containing the Milton Bradley game Battleship, tied up with a bow. Grace had a bottle of champagne on ice, a lobster dinner on the stove.

  A few weeks later, we got a package in the mail from Melanie, my roommate in Egypt. What did she send us? A ham.

  On the Fourth of July, Grace and I were in Boothbay Harbor, attending the wedding of our friend Frank’s daughter. The ceremony was performed down by the water, as yachts and lobster boats sailed by.

  There we were, two women in our early forties, wearing our summer dresses, watching our friends and their children walk down the aisle as a man in a white tuxedo played Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Wind blew across a microphone. The sound of the ocean was picked up by the PA system. Gulls flew in circles over our heads.

  The groom, a sweet-faced young man, came down the aisle in his white jacket and bow tie. The bride followed, on her father’s arm. In one hand she held a bouquet of white tulips.

  The ceremony combined the two families’ Jewish and Christian traditions; a minister officiated, but the vows were exchanged beneath a chupa, and a glass was broken. “We do this,” explained a rabbi by the minister’s side, “to remind us of the destruction of the Temple, to remind us that even in the midst of joy there is sorrow.” As if this were something we could ever, possibly, forget.

  Those two young people looked in each other’s eyes and shyly, softly, promised to love each other “as you are, and as you shall be.” They promised to make each other’s needs their own.

  After the ceremony, we sat inside a rustic lodge that overlooked the harbor, eating salmon and drinking champagne. Our friend Frank, a tall, burly, elegant man, stood before the gathered crowd at the side of the woman he had divorced twenty years earlier and toasted his daughter and his new son-in-law. His eyes filled with tears as he raised his glass, and as the big man cried, so did everyone else.

  Between the two of us, Grace and I had only one napkin, and we kept snatching it back from each other in order to dab at our eyes. After a few minutes we got up, still crying, and went outside. Salt air was blowing in across the harbor, and the moon was rising above the sea.

  Throughout that evening, I had felt the eyes of strangers upon us, silently asking the question for which we ourselves still had no answer: What are you two? Clearly we were not husband and wife; on just that much we could all agree. But neither, by any stretch of the imagination, were we a lesbian couple. We were parents, yes, of two remarkable and resilient children, both of whom had apparently inherited the unsinkable optimism and faith of their grandmother, the woman whose motto was “Love will prevail.” Were Grace and I “sisters,” then, two siblings somehow born to different parents? Was that what we had become?

  We were still legally married and could remain so even though I was now female. Although we could not legally have gotten married now, if we were to meet and fall in love for the first time, we were allowed under the law to remain married, for as long as that suited us both. If we chose to divorce and remarry, however, I could legally marry only a man. If I then divorced that man and Grace married him, then Grace’s ex-husband and her husband’s ex-wife would both be the same person. I smiled as I tried to make sense of all this and thought of the song I used to sing my children, “I’m My Own Grampa.”

  What were we? For her part, Grace was still a beautiful woman, still able to whistle with two fingers in her mouth as her eyes crinkled with devilish laughter. Even now, men still looked at her as she passed through a crowd and thought, just as I had twe
nty-five years earlier, Whoa. Who was that?

  As for myself, I had begun, to my own shock, to see men through different eyes. Dr. Schrang’s hope that I would be orgasmic postsurgery had been fulfilled. The sensation—which I’d cautiously, curiously, produced all on my own—was like nothing I’d experienced, and yet, sure, it was familiar. The Greek prophet Tiresias, who was said to have lived as both a man and a woman, claimed that “the pleasure for a woman is ten times that of the man.”To this, all I can add is that what it reminds me of, more than anything else, is the difference between Spanish and Italian.

  I had always imagined that post-transition my sexuality would remain constant, that I would remain fascinated by women no matter what form my own body took. Yet somehow, without any conscious thought, the object of my desire was gently shifting. Now, looking around at the world, I would occasionally think, Jeez. Look at all these men. Surely they haven’t been here all this time? Where did they all come from?

  Occasionally a man would give me a hug, and the sensation of his stubbly face against my soft neck and cheek made the hairs on my arm stand on end. Women no longer struck me as creatures of such wonder. Their world seemed like the one I knew, like the one into which I woke each morning. Men, on the other hand—to me they now seemed like a mystery.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that one or the other of us, at some point, would take a first tentative step in a new direction. Yet that time was not upon us, and it was impossible to know whether it would come months from now, or years, or never. In some sense, I think we both dreaded that moment as much as we hoped for it. Where on earth would either of us find men that we adored as much as we had adored each other? How could we want, even after all these losses, to ever wake up beneath a roof that did not cover the other as well?

  We knew what we were not—we were not husband and wife; we were not lesbians; we were not merely friends. We knew that we were not all these things. But what were we?

  “Are you all right?” I said to Grace.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “What about you?”

  I nodded. “I’m okay.”

  Grace turned to me.

  “Jenny,” she said softly.

  “Grace.”

  I had no idea what it was she was going to say next. It could have been anything—I want you to move out. . . . I want a divorce. . . . I want you to climb a mountain in Nova Scotia and allow yourself to be blown off a cliff by the wind. Nothing would have surprised me, I thought, with the exception, perhaps, of the one thing Grace did say to me then, the thing she said after all these years together.

  “So, Jenny,” she said. “Do you want to dance?”

  For a moment I didn’t know how to respond; she had caught me completely off guard. Then I said something I had said to her a long time ago, in the National Cathedral, in Washington. I said, “I do.”

  We went back inside and walked up to the dance floor, where scores of other couples were rocking out. The band was playing a Paul Simon song, “Late in the Evening.”

  And we danced.

  A conga line formed, and we snaked through the inn. Everyone was laughing and dancing, clapping their hands. We all formed a big circle, and at its center Frank danced with his daughter, and the groom danced with Sandra.

  A moment later, a man I did not know put his hand around my waist and spun me into the middle of the dance floor. He wanted to dance close, and all I could think of was, He’s got the wrong hand out and the wrong hand on my waist—until I realized that as a woman I had to do everything I had done before, only in reverse.

  I thought hurriedly, Am I leading?

  Well, I guess I’d been in love before, and once or twice I been on the floor. But I never loved no one the way that I loved you.

  The man spun me with one hand, and I saw faces I recognized whirling around me in a blur. There was Grace and Russo, Dr. Schrang and Hilda Watson and my sister, Donna Fierenza, Dr. Wheeler, even Seamus O’Twotimes. He just walked right out into space. Into space.

  A moment later I was by Grace’s side, back in the outer circle again.

  “Well, I’m back,” I said.

  Exactly twenty-six years earlier, on the evening of the American bicentennial, I was once more in Surf City, New Jersey, sitting on the beach with my friend Tad Pennypacker and his girlfriend, Lois. Before me was the very jetty on whose tip I had stood as a child, watching the hurricane blow up, the waves crashing against the rocks. Where would you get, I asked myself, if you went directly east from Surf City, New Jersey?

  SPAIN, said my grandmother to the medical student who was examining her. SPAIN.

  Whoop?

  Fireworks were exploding above the sea. Tad and Lois and I sat there on the beach, drinking a bottle of Mateus rosé. Through a series of incidents we could hardly have explained, Gerald Ford was president. People kept trying to assassinate him, but he was having none of it. I admired that.

  I was sitting in the middle, halfway between Tad and Lois. Drunkenly we sang “In the Still of the Night.”

  A few miles north of us was New York Harbor, filled with the masts of tall ships. As I lay there watching the fireworks light up the sky, I thought, What a beautiful night it was, what a beautiful country.

  Tad and Lois and I all had our arms around one another. I hadn’t been cured by love yet, but at that moment I felt as if I might be, if only I sat there long enough.

  Conundra, or The Sick Arab

  The best piece of writing ever published on the subject of transsexuality bears the title “Conundrum,” a clever Latinate word meaning “a puzzle whose solution involves a joke or riddle.” I am referring here not to Jan Morris’s classic 1973 narrative of her own transition, but to the even more classic trashing of same by Nora Ephron, collected in a sprightly Ephronasaurus published by Avon in 1984.

  Of the many autobiographies published by my gamy and tawdry colleagues, none reached quite so large an audience as Morris’s. This is, perhaps, because as James Morris, she was a widely respected travel writer; her work on Venice remains one of the best books ever written on the subject. She also emerged at a time when the culture, American culture anyhow, was first turning its attention toward the issue of civil rights for gays and lesbians. The time had come to add transsexuality to the rock pile, and add it she did.

  Conundrum was an instant smash; it was reviewed on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review; it became one of the standard texts in hundreds of college courses examining gender; it remains the one book on transsexuality that has been most frequently read by persons who otherwise would prefer live burial to “gender studies.”

  Morris showed that a transsexual can be mature, wise, dignified, and literary. Single-handedly her book demonstrated that transsexuals as a people were not lurid, crazy, or marginal, at least not necessarily. Conundrum generated (and continues to generate) tremendous respect. Jan Morris did more to advance public understanding of transsexuals than any other figure, including the pioneer of this odd domain, Christine Jorgensen, the former GI whose groundbreaking surgery in the 1950s shocked the Eisenhower administration into bombing Korea.

  For all that, it’s hard not to be amused by Ephron’s trashing of Conundrum. “I always wanted to be a girl, too,” writes Ephron. “I, too, felt I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could imagine, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was. . . . I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be—feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand I am not half bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl.”

  I personally do not know how Morris feels about Conundrum now, nearly thirty years aft
er its publication. Like most former transsexuals, she seems to be interested in being judged now more for what is between her ears than between her legs. (A well-regarded writer friend of mine who attempted to interview Morris for a book she was writing received the terse, one-sentence rebuff “When I hear the word gender I reach for my pistol.”) My guess is that she is proud of the work for the huge step forward it marked in the public’s understanding of transsexuality. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Morris felt that Conundrum reflected a sensibility that was—and I do mean this generously—somewhat adolescent.

  Transsexuals going through transition resemble nothing so much as gawky, wonder-struck teenagers, amazed and perplexed by their bodies, startled by an awareness of themselves as men or women, as if they have invented the whole business single-handedly then and there. This book of mine, in fact, almost surely commits this sin again and again, for which I can only say I am truly sorry. It does no good to tell a transsexual that this is all old ground and to get over yourself, any more than it does to tell this to a fifteen-year-old.

  There is nothing as annoying as someone for whom the world is new. At least to those for whom the world is old.

  For most forty-three-year-old women, many of the trappings of womanhood have long lost their wonder. One friend of mine said, “You know what it’s like, Jenny? It’s like gum that’s lost its flavor. By the time you’re forty, c’mon, let’s face it—the party’s over.”

  For me, of course, the party was just beginning—and I refer, of course, to the experience of being in this body, not to the accompanying losses and grief, which were anything but a party. I wore makeup on Sundays. I wore skirts when most other mothers were wearing yesterday’s blue jeans. I put polish on my toes. I read fashion magazines. Other women, especially Grace, looked on all this activity with annoyance, and who could blame them, or her? Indeed, I did, at times, not seem intent so much on being a woman as on being a girl.

  A transsexual’s womanhood is examined, considered, and criticized much more relentlessly than that of other women. In my early days, people would often look at me and conclude, if my clothes were too feminine, for instance, that this was because I just didn’t know what I was doing, and of course in many ways they were correct.