I’m sure that if I stay on this block after her funeral, after her burial, and someone were to realize who I am, someone’ll blame me for mother’s death. People’ll say that my absence, through all these years, put too much strain on her heart, her spirit. (The one is a physical organ, so their accusations would make no sense. As for the other: What is it, anyway?) I’d be accused of selfishness when selfishness. In a way, that would be right, if not fair, I guess.
I haven’t been around because I was worried about my own safety, and how mother’d react to me. Even though she could sense that I’d changed—sometimes she said as much when we talked over the phone—I’d had no idea of how she’d react to my hair, nails, the new clothes, the changing shape of my body. And, even though she’d told me, “Everybody’s gone” time and again, I still wondered whether I’d get off that block alive if I came back. Until recently, I wasn’t entirely confident about my transformation. When you’re not among the community of which you’ve become a part, whether by birth or choice, whatever image you try to project has to be created and transmitted even more seamlessly than when you’re among your own. When you’re not in one of those neighborhoods where people in transformation congregate, or at least are accepted or tolerated, it’s all the more important to pass—to be unnoticed, in other words. I even wondered how I’d navigate through the wake, the funeral, the burial.
I must say that until today, it had been a while since anyone gave me a second glance or stared. Now only the operation to alter my genitals separates me from the next stage of my life, whatever that may hold. People hearing me for the first time over the phone call me “ma’am,” even before they’ve heard my name. Older men—and sometimes younger ones—hold doors open for me and let me pass in front of them. More important, they—and women, too—give me more space than I ever used to get.
Just last week, Charmayne, who’s shaped my hair as I’ve grown it, slid the hem of her skirt over her knee and revealed a scar and two bruises that her boyfriend, the father of her three-year-old daughter, left. I resisted an impulse to tell her to leave him. Instead, I embraced her as she sighed. “As long as I don’t set him off, he’ll get better.” Once again, of course, I didn’t say what I was thinking. She just knew: I could tell when she lowered her eyes.
After I was gone a while from this block, mother’d begun to tell me about the brutality of other men. She never named names, but I knew that at least one of them had to be my father. All the more reason not to find him, to find out about him. He left her bitter and angry: spent, even though she had to—or at least felt that she had to—continue living and working in whatever ways she could for my sake. A man hit her, pushed her head against a wall. And she never could recall what she did next, but the next thing she remembered seeing was him, doubled over with his hands gripping his crotch. She doesn’t know how she could have kicked or punched him after he knocked the wind, and nearly the light, out of her. At that moment she wasn’t even thinking of me, she said, though she’d decided earlier that she wouldn’t let him do to me what he did to a baby girl—hers?—who was classified as a victim of “crib death,” whatever that is.
I remembered those conversation, and our days in the kitchen with other women, no men anywhere in sight. And the things mother used to say as if she were instructing me rather than answering a question or explaining a point. Mother never wore—in fact, as far as I know, never even owned—any polo or T-shirts, sneakers or any other shoes or articles of clothing she was brought up to believe were men’s except for pants—and long ones, at that, which she wore only with completely enclosed shoes. And no sleeveless tops, and always a jacket, even on warm days. Only her house slippers had open toes and backs, and sometimes on warm days she’d wear something that looked like a cross between a housedress and a smock if she didn’t have anywhere to go.
But one day she put on a black silk dress that skimmed her breasts and curves down to her knees. I didn’t know that she owned it, or the black pumps she slid into. Though they were out of style—actually, nobody on that block is ever in style; some of the women are simply en vogue—she seemed elegant, even pretty, if a bit severe. I didn’t even have to ask. “A lady wears a dress to a funeral,” she intoned.
That was all I need to know for today. The fact that I don’t have a dark men’s suit or even a sportcoat is beside the point. For that matter, I no longer own any ties, or anything that resembles men’s dress shoes.
A lady: the only kind of person who could attend her funeral. Mrs.Littington, and the woman whose name I never knew—when my mother talked about them, they were “ladies.” So were other females of a certain age. As in, “the lady up the street,” or “the lady with the sheepdog.” They were the only ones she talked to, who talked to each other about each other. The ladies: The Crossing Guard Lady, The Grocery Store Lady. “Go to the lady at the newsstand for some change.” All my life, as a kid, I was always directed from one lady to another by my mother or some other lady.
So who else could come to see her at the end of her life but other ladies?
