Sometimes I wish I could’ve stayed in one place longer than I ever did. It could’ve been this block, and a life like my mother’s—or Adam’s. Could’ve been high school, and the ones I knew there. The ones whose teen years never are full of camaraderie never seem to need anything else for the rest of their lives.
And there are people like the ones who live year ‘round in beach towns. At least half the houses in those places are empty the weekend after Labor Day. The people who stay dry up and splinter like the driftwood that washes up near their homes. They never pick it up; they never wonder where it might’ve come from; the days grow shorter but they don’t darken. They flicker like the lamp that must be kept lighted, if less intensely, to keep it from going out altogether.
The ones who stay fade out long after they’ve been forgotten. I guess that’s true of most people’s deaths. Whenever you hear r read in the news that some celebrity or institution has just died, it almost never seems like a tragedy unless he or she “had so much ahead’ until a car flipped over, a plane went down or the body couldn’t handle any more alcohol, or any other opiate, chemical or otherwise. But most of the time, the famous live long after their last movies, games, books, discoveries or other efforts toward recognition and remuneration.
I remember a seaside town—which I only passed through, and only once—that was populated by citations and proclamations drying in parchment; by abandoned or forgotten travel plans; by resumes, summations and other documents people hold onto but never read, rather like the books on many a professor’s shelves. And nobody asks what’s inside.
That was the narrative I got from Vivian as she drove and I rode down the two-lane road that separated the boat marinas on the bay side of the narrow peninsula from the seawall and the ocean beach on the other side. Even though it’d been weeks since the season’s first cold snap, the air simmered with sunlight echoing the hissing tide. Waves had washed over the wall two days before, she said; for the people who lived there it wasn’t even a rainy day.
Vivian’d grown up in that town—yes, grown up, far more than I ever did on this block. She’d never gone swimming from that surf. She’d never gone into the water for any reason and showered only when she (or, when she was younger, someone else) thought she absolutely must.
The one time she ever walked into the sand while wearing a bathing suit, a bunch of the local hoodads—the surfer homeboys—jeered at her body, “flatter than our boards.” The lifeguard, a teenaged son in his 20’s who lived with an uncle who retired to this town after Korea, pushed her out into the churning water to see “if she’ll float.” The hoodads applauded.
A couple of miles down the road, Vivian and I’d spent a weekend on one of those hooks of sand that catches the sea and people like us who didn’t have kids and didn’t want to listen to other people cursing at theirs as they basted in the afternoon heat.
Under other circumstances, neither Vivian nor I’d’ve gotten out of one of those beaches alive. But on our weekend getaway, almost everyone on the beach was a gay man. They ignored her; only a few gave me more than a cursory glance. I hadn’t yet begun to take hormones, so except for a couple of donut handles near my middle, I was nearly as flat as she was. But I also had no hair except for what was on my head.
That Monday, she drove back to the place where I’d been living with her. To get there, we had to pass through that town—I was going to call it her old town, but I realize that she’d’ve never described it that way. She never would talk about how, why or when she left. We didn’t stop, but she slowed the car past a yellowed porch that looked as if it would separate from its clapboard house in the next squall as easily as the shingles flew off the roof during an earlier storm.
Maybe her father was living there. Or maybe he wasn’t living. Or he wouldn’t recognize her if she walked in. She never told me why we looked at that house—I can’t imagine, from what little she told me, why she would’ve wanted to come back to this place.
About an hour later, she said, “I can’t ever let him touch me again. I’ve got to let him die.”
When we got back to her place, her glance signaled that I wasn’t to ask any questions about that place, or “him.” As if that would stop me! And as if I’d stop asking just because she didn’t want to talk about it.
“He might’ve guessed who you are. But then again, he might not’ve recognized me. If he was as bad as he can be to me—or you—you would’ve been angry with me for bringing you in. But if he was nice—he can be charming—you’d wonder why I hated such a sad old man.”
I couldn’t dispute her—actually, it was true, I never could dispute her. So of course I had no response when she accused me of betrayal when I started taking hormones. I could only sputter “But I thought…” that she liked me femme, and that I’d be the first who’d take from her only after getting permission. “I thought, just for once, someone’d fuck me and wouldn’t run,” she cried.
It didn’t make any sense to me. Vivian’d asked me to put on a black lace negligee the first time I came to her place. As if somehow she knew. Later, we’d swap genders—or the appearances of them—when we went out on dates. I shaved my legs, arms, chest—everything except my head. I raised my voice an octave, whether we were in her house or somewhere else. I soon owned more skirts and pantyhose than pants and socks. Of course, I didn’t complain; every time she gave me a silk “flower” that unfurled into a pair of purple or pink panties, I felt as if my feet were lifted further from the ground as my lips drew closer to hers.
But as soon as I started taking hormones, I could as well have been her father, or whoever raped her.
She never told me. But I’d gotten to a point where I just knew. About her, and about those women at my mother’s funeral, too. Each of them’d made eye contact with my mother when they lived on the block. That woman whose name I never knew: She’d look into my mother’s eyes when she talked to her. But with her husband or other acquaintances, she could just as well’ve been looking through a reversed telescope. She looked at one other woman—whom I didn’t remember from any time before the funeral—as they spoke. But not to Mrs. Littington. Or me.
