Mother has now accomplished something I didn’t think she’d even try to do: For the first time in my life, I’m part of a reunion.
Or am I? I’m here with a bunch of other people who lived on this block and who—with the exception of that woman whose name I never knew—haven’t been here in many, many years.
So I suppose some people would call it a reunion. Except that we haven’t been reunited. We never will be because we were never joined, save for the fact of having lived on this block. Mother and the woman whose name I never knew never left and, as far as I know, never disconnected their relationship, which of course was a consequence of living on this block. They talked about things they never talked with anybody else, including me. Now that mother’s gone, I don’t know who else she’ll talk to, if anybody. Somehow I imagine she won’t have any reunions after today.
For that matter, I don’t know if I’ll ever have one. I didn’t graduate from any school or participate in any of those other rites of passage that seem to mark other people’s lives. No war, no marriage, no Manhattan Project. In fact, I haven’t stayed on any job or lived in any place long enough to develop a camaraderie with anyone.
Then again, I’ve been told that I’ll never develop such relationships, no matter how long I live or work with anyone. I wonder if he—my guidance counselor—ever knew about Louis’s rape, or that I knew about it. In any event, he made his judgment of me not long after it happened, which was not long before I stopped going to school for good.
Funny, though, how he never talked to me about staying in school. I remember another time when I had a conference with him—I forget exactly why, but I think it was about my always low-but-still-falling grades—when I told him I wouldn’t be around for very long. “I know,” he said.
I’d already made up my mind that I was getting out of that school the first chance I got, but I still don’t know whether that’s what he meant. He was known for giving his one-sentence assessments: “You’re not staying in this neighborhood” or “It’ll be the Army or jail for you.” Then, I’d’ve accepted either to get out of that school and off this block. But his most famous one-liner, which he bestowed on one of the cheerleaders, was, “See you at the reunion.”
If he’d told me that, I don’t know whether I would’ve heard it as a sentence or a challenge. A dare, maybe—and only because I’d already developed such a thorough contempt for the place and almost everyone in it, including him. Somehow, I don’t think anybody said, “He inspired me” after spending sessions with him in his office or, in his earlier years, his social studies classes. Then again, maybe he did inspire, or at least motivate, somebody for all I know. But there’s nobody I can point to and say, “He (or she) inspired me.”
Sometimes mother instructed. Other times she empathized. But inspired, no. Adam--as much as he tried (and as much as he could) cultivate a companionship with me-- never could’ve motivated me because I knew, even before he stuck his head in that oven, that I would never, in any way, become a man who resembled him. Then again, I never expected to become a man—or even get to where I am now, on the brink of my sexual reassignment surgery—because I’ve never seen anyone do that on this block.
For that matter, I never saw anybody become a woman, or grow or change in any significant way on this block. Of course, when we’re children, we can’t imagine our parents as children, no matter how many photos we see or stories we hear about them from that part of their lives. But my mother: it seemed that she had been born as she is, as my mother. As, in other words, the one I’d always known and will probably recollect for the rest of my life. I say “probably” instead of “will” simply because predicting the course of anything in my life has never been a talent or skill of mine.
And then—then what? I’ve never had any faith in any of the religions that entangled my mother and other people and purport to teach what happens in this life and show or warn us what happens after it. According to the nuns and the brother, in whose classes I sat for as long as mother could afford it, she and I’lll be together again—or at least we’ll re-encounter each other—if both of us lead moral or immoral lives. Or we’ll be together again for a while, then part and possibly reunite later on if one of us has to purge more than the other.
If I survive the operation—I expect to, though I may become someone I can’t imagine now—there’s no way, I think, we’ll be together again. I was sent to this planet male; according to the teachings I got, I can’t enter the kingdom female. Or that’s how it seems, anyway. As far as I know, my mother didn’t commit any sin deemed irredeemable by the old men who run the church. Then again, I never quite knew whether she’d been married to, or divorced, the one who fathered me. Well, I had his last name all through school, so I don’t know; I guess they were married. Then again, she never used his name, except to enroll me in school.
I never asked mother about him, about his name. In time—not much—I realized my situation was different from what was supposed to be and I came to my own ideas about how it came to be. I knew that, one way or another, they weren’t married for all the time I can remember. I didn’t need to know anything else, really.
Maybe that’s why I never had what most people think of as curiosity. When you learn what you need (or want) to know without asking questions, you don’t learn how to ask questions. And you never expect to learn the truth about anything, about anybody, by asking questions.
When you don’t expect to know anybody long enough to be curious or need to know, you lose the need and the desire to ask questions. You don’t wonder what will become of somebody, mainly because you don’t know whether you’ll survive long enough to find out. Or whether your life will be entangled with someone else’s for long enough so that any of it matters.
Then there’s no point to meeting somebody again five, ten twenty or however many years later. I read or heard, I’m not sure of which, that people who don’t go to their school reunions don’t form long-lasting relationships throughout their lives. Well, I guess I’m another ticker on that statistical table. Maybe I can’t predict the future, but I don’t expect to come back to this block again after we bury mother. For that matter, I don’t think anyone else—except for that woman whose name I never knew—will ever be on this block again.
I’ve the feeling I probably won’t be at another funeral, except my own, if anybody decides to have one. It doesn’t matter to me, and how could it once I’m gone? But I can’t speak for other people.
I expect—I didn’t say think, much less anticipate or predict—that barring some accident or disaster, no one who knows me will die before I undergo the operation to complete my transformation. So mother’s the last person to know me only by my current name, a label chosen for the vessel I’ve inhabited through these years. For a good many years, she’s heard my voice only over the phone. Still, it was the voice of the boy, the young man, she raised. As time went on, of course, I wasn’t as young or as much of a man as the one who inhabited her house, ate her and ate her food. Had she seen me, I’d’ve borne less and less resemblance to the one she birthed.
But, I guess she’d’ve recognized me. And that’s the reason why our relationship continued only over the telephone through the years. I know this; I stayed away because I didn’t want to be around anyone who’d recognize the boy, the man, I once was, even if they could see and understand who stood before them and what that person—I-- was becoming. For no one, including me, ever recognizes what is present. And there’s no way to reunite with it, and sometimes no way to connect with it in the first place.
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