72. Fatigue

 

I’d love to make Mrs. Littington disappear. And the lady whose name I never knew, I never want to know. Get rid of all the others, the ones I’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place. What did they have to do with mother, with any of us?

I’ m so tired now. I’ve been tired for so long, I want to close a door and cry. But the tears won’t come now, even if I want them, because I don’t have the emotional energy, or even a space inside me, to allow anyone to see them. For crying in the presence of others is always an involuntary form of sharing, or at least diverting one’s attentions. Those activities require energies that I just don’t have right now.

Maybe it’s this day, and the hope that it will be my last on this block, that’s so drained me. But taking hormones does that to you, too.

The first time you take them, you’re expecting something to happen even though the doctor or whoever prescribes or gives them to you tells you nothing will, at least for a while. Two pills: one is white and has the texture but not the taste of an aspirin tablet. The other, small with a hard shell in a shade of candy-coated cow piss—which is pretty much what it tastes like. Not that I’ve tasted cow piss, candy-coated or otherwise.

After I took those pills every day for a couple of months, I couldn’t notice any difference. But Vivian did. She called me, ostensibly because she wanted to return something I couldn’t recall leaving.  It’d been a few months since she pronounced me “too much of a woman” for her tastes and broke up our relationship. She’d found a watch with a woven black leather band when she was cleaning, she said. And indeed she gave it to me when we met for supper in a Greek restaurant.

But there had to be another reason for her wanting to see me—I could hear it in her voice when she called. I couldn’t imagine her wanting sex with me again. So what, I wondered, did she want?

As I cut into the piece of chicken I ordered, I got my answer. She called my name—my old one. I looked up at her. “Something’s different about you.”

“What?”

She reached across the table and dabbed her fingertips on my left cheek, where she used to stroke. “It feels different.”

“How so?”

“It’s….softer.”

“Huh?”

“It really feels softer.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

All right, I said. I’ll confess something: I am taking hormones. Her face grew longer. “The doctor said my skin would get softer. But not this quickly.”

Then she asked me to stand up. “Wow! Your body’s changing.”

“How so?”

“None of your clothes fit you right.”

“I think I’ve gained a bit of weight.”

“Maybe you have. But it’s in your rear…and you’re growing boobs!”

I couldn’t notice those changes yet, I said. And I felt like I needed more sleep. “But,”she cut me off, “You don’t seem depressed.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not. I don’t even feel sad that much. Or even angry. Maybe…”

She cut me off again, “Maybe you accept things, or are resigned to them.”

“You could say that.”

She could. None of it surprised her. Before that night, I hadn’t told her I was taking hormones. And I don’t know who could or would’ve told her. But she asked me to supper so she could find out what I was like on hormones. Why else?

The old lady whose name I never knew is looking my way again. Who could or would’ve told her.

Make it tomorrow, please. I’m so tired. I want the operation, then some rest.