46. Destinies

I wonder whether mother ever had a moment when she knew, for that moment and all others in her life, exactly what she’d be. Mother. Could she’ve avoided it, changed it, ended her life or begun it again? Mother, another life on this block, for the moment, for every moment she, the woman whose name I never knew and the voices—I thought I’d escaped them, but I’m hearing them again—stayed here. Did she ever think it could or couldn’t’ve been any other way? In short, did she think she might or might not’ve had a choice.

I don’t remember her ever criticizing other people, or second-guessing the decisions they made. Not that they always made her happy—not that I always did so, I’m sure—or that she agreed with them.

How else could she’ve, for all the years that’ve just ended, kept herself from asking about the changes in my voice, or what the voice said? Perhaps she saw those transformations—part of the bigger, longer one in which I’m about to reach a major turning point—as inevitable. As I realized they were, one day.

Nothing’s as scary—no, terrifying, in the way of a near-death experience—as knowing exactly who and what you have no choice to become. Well, for some—like me, anyway—it’s traumatic in part because there’s no way to prepare for the experience or what you learn from it.

I realized, of course, that I’d do what I’ve been doing for the past few years. I had no vision of time: I could see myself as a woman in the present moment, but I knew that I might still be living as a man ten, twenty years hence. Gradual transformations—the prospect of them, anyway—generate more anxiety because it’s harder to see the stages than the end (at least, the end one hoped for or imagined) of such a journey.

I knew that I’d no choice but to “turn” female, though I had no idea of what or whom that would mean. My mother? Mrs. Littington? The lady whose name I never knew? The nuns?—oh, kill me first!

Wait a minute. None of them lived with men, I realized. (I don’t recall seeing Mr. Littington.) They didn’t have to have children who would be abandoned by the men who fathered them. They didn’t have to get fucked, literally and figuratively by men. Or did they? They still could be raped, after all, and have other people’s children.

Still, most of them lived in a world without the male race—except the ones they taught or raised. No men, and they were women. Only the children interrupted their cloistered calm. Now I know why nuns were so mean to kids!

Still, nobody’s ever been able to explain why Sister Martha O’Connan slapped Amy Deirian across the hand with a yardstick when she refused to—no, the truth is, she couldn’t—put her hand down for more than half hour. She grimaced, her skin turned red and she began to cry the lonely, desolate moan of someone who knows she’s not going to get help because nobody’s there to give it or even to explain what’s happening. Actually, there was one—Sister Martha—who could, but to this day, I don’t understand why she didn’t.

She struck Amy, who would’ve furled into a fetal shape if there hadn’t been a desktop between her head and knees. Tears dripped, slowly, like wax from a candlestick, down her fingers cupped over her face, which her arms propped on the desk across the aisle from mine. I glanced downward as the blood oozed from her seat to the floor and crept toward the book basket underneath my seat.

Through the ensuing weeks and months, other girls, some of whom snickered into the palms of their hands when Amy bled, would meet Amy in a corner of the playground at lunch time. First there was Melissa Farrington, a pale girl who was repeating the sixth grade because she missed two months of school the year before. Then Joanna Torres, a plump, dark girl who, according to the aunt who was raising her (One never heard about the parents or grandparents.) never “got into trouble” because she came directly home from school and wasn’t allowed out again unless she finished her homework before it got dark. Even for someone as dutiful as Joanna, such a feat was impossible, at least from some time around All Saint’s Day (when we were supposed to go to church) until Easter or thereabouts.

I wasn’t surprised when Stacy Sunnyfield joined them: She was always trying to win a popularity contest that nobody was running, at least not officially. But I saw, at a glance, that her face bore a more thoughtful, less calculating and expression and that she hardly talked at all.

Although nobody explained what she or the other girls in that new clique were doing, I knew somehow that Amy’s blood brought them together.

The following year—or maybe it was two years later—Joanna’d moved, or been moved, to some other relative, I don’t know where. All I know is that the relative was male because I heard he raped her. Abortion was out of the question, so she was moved again, to some other place. And neither I nor any of the other kids heard about her again.

By the time I left this block, not only Joanna, but also Stacy, already had children. Melissa didn’t only because getting fucked didn’t improve her health, as some smooth-skinned man twice her age promised. Amy was gone, too, but I never found out where she went…except to the yard, like the cemeteries on either side of this neighborhood, where everyone remained as I knew the: not safe, not immutable, but touched by nothing but the moon , which I am bound to follow.

That, by the way, is—at least as best as I can tell—the light of those few dreams I can remember. It’s like seeing shadows of moonlight during the day.

Back to those girls: Whenever a boy stood on their periphery or anywhere near it, at least one of the girls would flash the stare of someone who could kill or knew someone who would. A lot of men say they see that look on Sunday afternoons, when they take themselves away from the football game on TV long enough to go to the kitchen for a drink and they find their mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts gathered around the table as dinner simmers.

The only woman from whom I’ve ever gotten such a reaction was the one whose name I never knew, when she was talking with my mother. But I never encountered it, oddly enough, from those girls on the playground. I don’t think they liked me better than the other boys in the class. I take that back—Joanna did, or at least once she told me so. I stood, my head tilted slightly forward, like the girls who hadn’t yet entered their circle, but would.

The last time I tried to play basketball with the boys on the playground—because Father Byrnes, who taught catechism to those of use who were about to “become confirmed as soldiers of the Lord” said I should—Tom Rupett, my height and weight in solid muscle, flung the ball at the side of my head. When I fell, two other boys—maybe more—ran and threw punches at me. “We don’t want no sissy boys here,” one of them growled. “Yeah, go to the girls, where you belong,” snorted another.

By then, I knew better than to believe that one of the boys would pick me for his team or include me in their “parties,” which included everything from going to old Lenny’s store and helping themselves to whatever they wanted to fights with kids from other blocks, if I spent time by the court, played and started a conversation with one of the boys. I forget who told me that, and I’m not sure which was more misguided: that person’s method of making friends or his notion that I wanted to play basketball or any other game with those boys.

If that person—whomever he or she was—had known what I knew about myself at that moment, he or she probably would’ve tried as hard as I did to wish it away, forget about it, “train it out” of me or to deny it in some other way. After I left this block, I met people who left families whose members ridiculed, beat or tried to kill them when they realized there was no way to deny what was in their bones.

“If I know, everybody else must know.” I don’t remember where or when I heard or read that. But, recollecting those days one more time, before mother, I know they had to’ve known. At least some of them did, anyway. Mother, certainly—I can’t think of any other reason why she didn’t fight it, why she kept me in the kitchen. Possibly those girls—and the boys, too—knew. But, even if you believe in their God, how can you ask him to “say it ain’t so.”

I don’t know whether Adam knew my destiny, or whether knowing it would’ve stopped him from beckoning me over to his stoop to drink soda and listen to his stories. If he understood, he also would’ve understood that it couldn’t’ve been prayed away or exorcised in any other way. The woman, the girl in the chimeric embryo of a boy, or what appeared to be a boy: Could he’ve seen that? Or maybe—I know this is a wild guess, as Adam’s been dead a long time—he saw his own life in me. He couldn’t stay in the house in a Polish town to which he returned, he said, in his dreams—“but so different, like an accident let it.” Soldiers marched him and his family away; other soldiers burned it. And the synagogue where he had his bris, his bar mitzvah—it closed its doors forever because there wasn’t even a minyan—ten men—left in the town. Somehow the building survived a Nazi-ignited firestorm, he said. Or at least that’s what he heard. He never knew for sure, because he’d never gone back, as he knew he never would.

He once told me, “You leave. You don’t come back.” Somehow, in the way he said it—in that almost-British accent inflected with, I would learn later, the French vowels and German rhythms prewar Continental Europeans learned in gymnasium—told me, in its otherworldliness (at least in comparison to anybody else on this block) that “you” meant “me.”