27. Time

Now that I’m coming closer to my surgery, I realize that I am probably not going to become a better, wiser or more capable person, ever. I’ve also been released from the illusion that I hate men. These days, they just don’t figure much into my life. I could even say, perhaps, that I have no need for them. The funny thing is that they’ll have even less need for me, as a woman, than they did in my male existence.

Those guys—the ones who fucked me when they saw me in a dress—won’t come near me after my surgery, any more than they’d do it with any woman who’s not a wife, or perhaps a sister. Actually, most of them would lose interest in me soon even if I were to keep my male apparatus intact: I’m getting to be too old for their tastes.

Actually, I’ve felt too old for most people for a quite a while now. If I am, I don’t mind. Mrs. Littington seems not to’ve noticed me at all, and that woman whose name I never knew squinted in my direction as if I were somehow familiar, but she wasn’t quite know how. Or does she? Then maybe I’ve become another of her secrets like the ones she kept with my mother, or that mother had with her.

There’re some things that bind people more closely than the secrets they tell each other: the true secrets; that is to say, the intimate knowledge that they both know but never speak of. Now I know why mother never begged me to come back, not even in her last days. I think she always knew I wasn’t another boy, another man, from this block.

They’d had no need of me, nor I of them. And I think mother didn’t need to see me as I was, as I was becoming, as I am about to become. In any moment, there is only what I am and what she is and whatever anybody else may be. And the moment passes; I pass; I’m passing. So was she; so she is.

What would she’d’ve known about me had she seen me through the years that have just passed? What do people know about those whom they see regularly? Hobbies? Fact is, I’ve never had any. Or favorite TV shows, or favorites of much of anything else. None of that stuff matters, anyway. You can have in common with another person, usually a man (if you’re a man), the most banal compulsions—namely, the collecting of objects and the emotions and connotations attached to them, from one’s own or someone else’s past.

That’s the reason I don’t save things. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t stayed in one place long enough to store them. But the first bras, the first pumps, sandals and skirts I acquired have no sentimental value for me. In fact, I don’t even remember what color they were or what, if anything, I paid for them. I needed them, or something like them, and they were the best—which is to say all—I could get. Some things wore out; some stopped fitting and other things I just couldn’t stand anymore. The time for change inevitably comes, and it’s all you can do if you expect to stay alive.

So it is with becoming a woman. The male aspects of my body’ve outlived whatever usefulness they had: they never protected me, and I’m not going to use them to propogate. So I’m going to change, and I’ve been changing the chemistry of my body to prepare for my surgery.

And mother doesn’t need for me to be a man any more than I do.

4. Stories of Men and Women

 

Nobody’s a hero; nobody’s decorated.  Nobody’s remembered…at least not the men, anyway.  Now, with my mother gone, I hope that nobody here remembers me, either.  It’s a privilege I could’ve claimed for myself the day I left, no matter where I went next. 

But of course I didn’t have to.  That may be the one advantage I have as a result of growing up here:  that I’ve never had to claim privilege; I’ve never had to pull rank on anybody.  Or at least I’ve never felt any such need.  You might say that I’m not impressed with people or with anything they do; I’m even less awed by men and their stories.  This isn’t to say I fear no one:  I simply know how one can or can’t or will or won’t do what, and to whom or what.

So there’re lots of things I’ve never had any use for.  Like most of the things they tried to teach me in school—or more precisely, most of the things  they were supposed to make gestures of teaching me and I was supposed to make them think I’d learned—and everything I heard in church.  The canons of the academies and monasteries echo thousands of lies and even more exaggerations and misrepresentations.  No one you ever meet is like anyone you read about in any history book or in any epic tale, whether it’s Beowulf, The Deerslayer or All Quiet on the Western Front.  The ballads I had to hear and the paintings we looked at in textbooks and on school trips to museums were all about generals, emperors or mystic visionaries:  about solitary men leading lonely young men to their deaths, in the fields or in the trenches or at their own hands.  No man like any of those characters ever came from this block—or, for that matter, like any other blocks like this one that I’ve seen or heard about.

Who’s ever written an opera about a woman and her cat?  Or a woman and another woman, or a woman and her children?  About the latter, there’s the story of Mary and Jesus.  Of course:  two people who never could’ve existed on this block.  Not only is he to good to be true, she…well, let’s say she contradicts one of the few relevant facts that’s ever been taught in any science class!

Why can’t we have a religion—if we have to have one—based on a story of a woman and her cat?  At least someone could get that one right, I think.  I don’t believe anyone could ever set down the story of a woman and her child, and whenever anybody’s set down the story of a woman and a woman, it sounds like a man’s fantasy.  (Trust me. I know the difference:  I’ve had lots of time—and more opportunities than anyone should have—to learn.)

But about a woman-and-cat tale: If someone could write it, that person is not me.  I’ve never kept a feline, at least not long enough to have such a relationship.  The one time I had one—a gray, smoky shadow I never named—I ended up giving him to an old woman.  It just didn’t seem fair to make that cat dependent on someone like me; it was no more fair than my dependence on my mother for so much of my life.  Since then, I’ve avoided making any need for me in any other living being 

Even if I’d had a cat, a child, or any other permanent companion, I couldn’t’ve written about me and him, her or it.  Maybe if I’d stayed in school, I’d’ve learned how to put some experiences—my own and others—on a page, or even between the covers of a book.  There’s so much I’ve never learned. As a kid, I asked myself, “Why should I?” So I could write the kinds of things they made us read? I wondered.  Or to play what they told us was music, or how to say their prayers?  I never could understand why I should learn how to do such things.

Now, I have practically no education, and as far as most educated people are concerned, I’m illiterate, or close to it. Still, I’ve managed to read a bit outside of school.  I’ve even finished a few books, a couple of plays and a whole bunch of poems—something I never did while I was in school.  I’m not going to explain or analyze anything I’ve read:  Anything I could say about them isn’t that important and probably has already been said.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d’ve stuck with school or “done something with myself” if I’d known, while I was still in school, that those pieces of writing existed.  Let’s just say that they’re not about war heroes, and they’re not the sorts of things that give men excuses for believing that women are neurotic.

 

I don’t think anybody on this block has read about them.  Living here isn’t like being in one of those books-and-brunch neighborhoods.  I don’t think even Mrs. Littington-- who’d seen more of the world than most of us and spoke at least two languages--ever read them.  (I can only hope that she didn’t have to read some of those really awful books and even worse translations they tried to shove down my throat:  The Bible, for one.)  As far as I know, the male gender has produced three real poets—at least, when it comes to writing about other men.  One of them—who actually could write about women, too—wrote Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth, and of course a whole bunch of sonnets.  Another wrote some great poems and Les Miserables.  And, finally, there’s the one who wrote Don Quixote.  I’ll  pass on all the rest.  Just for once, I want a story about a woman opening—or closing—her window.

3. Survivors

 There’ve never been any statues, plaques or other monuments on this block or any of the others around it.  None of the streets around here, including this one, has been named for anyone who lived or died on it.  Perhaps it’s just as well.  After all, building a statue or naming a street for someone who’s not here is just about the last thing a neighborhood with cemeteries on either end of it needs.

Some of the gravestones always seem to have flowers in front of them, or wreaths on them, even though nobody seems to visit them.  In fact, I can’t seem to recall anyone at either cemetery, which is the reason I went to one of them before going to mother’s wake.  I’d hoped to have, finally, the one thing I always wanted while on this block: a moment alone, one in which I wouldn’t have to suffer in the isolation of forced company.  Nobody’d demand anything of me, not in the form of a direct question or from silence.  There’d be only names, ignored or forgotten, on stones on which the dead were set, set by the dead.

Or so I thought.  I’d fallen, momentarily, into an old habit—looking downward at an oblique angle, but not quite at the ground—and saw, not a name, but a pair of dates:  August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992.   The date of my own birth, and the date on which—according to the state, at least—I died.

The body, supposedly, was found almost a year later.  So close to this block.  But on the other side of the tracks, where they curve away from this block, toward rows of subway cars waiting with their doors opened in the city railyard that separates this block and the neighborhood from endless rows of abandoned bungalows that splinter into the sea.

 

On one of those streets—which I never saw in all the time I lived on this block—actually, just underneath one of those streets, in a space that couldn’t even be called a cellar anymore because two floors of the house had collapsed into it—someone found strands of hair, a few more of rope and a six-inch long strip of duct tape.

I never found out who was walking and prodding through remains of the house that day, or what he was doing there.  For that matter, I really shouldn’t’ve assumed, just now, that the person was male.  I assumed so only because nobody was living in that house at the time and in the nearest habitations—this block and the ones around it—there are only women.  At any rate, you can depend only on the women to be on this block.  The men were off someplace doing the things you heard about, then forgot.

But I know one thing: the gender of the dead person.  I know: I saw the name on the tombstone.  Yes, that tombstone: the one with my date of birth.  And, as far as anybody knows, the last day I spent in this world.

 

I forgot to mention: There was an old leather wallet that broke apart like a cracker when the police examiner opened it.  Empty, except for a driver’s license: mine, supposedly.  Or so the police believed, and probably still believe, if any of them still think about it.  No Social Security card, no credit card: the person identified by the driver’s license never had them, or any military or criminal record, as far as the investigators could tell.  Current address unknown.  Last known address: this block.

It’s not so hard to fathom that the victim had my name: There was, I suppose, some bodily similarity between him and the young person I was when I lived on this block.  Only two other people had physical traits that bore any resemblance to mine.  One—the man who fathered me—hadn’t been seen by anybody on this block in years.  I never even knew him.  And mother.  The one thing that surprised me was that the police never spoke to her. 

At least, I don’t think they did.  She never mentioned it to me, and never asked what I may’ve known about it.  Then again, she might’ve known after all: For years after I left, she never asked my whereabouts, only that I had enough to eat and some place to stay. Whatever she knew, I don’t think she’d’ve told the cops, or anyone else.  In one of our phone conversations, she said, “You’ll come home again when the time is right.”

As for that body: I can’t tell you exactly how it came to have my proof of existence on it.  Since leaving this block, I’ve lost, sold, given away and thrown away more stuff than I can remember, or want to remember.  Especially—yes—around the time of that person’s death.

When you leave this block, the things you used to keep in your wallet, pocket or purse lose whatever meaning they had.  This is not the same, of course, as losing their usefulness: about the only way you can get a place to stay or something to eat without using the things you carry is to offer your body, if someone’s willing to take it.  Or, once you learn a few tricks, you use them: You offer, but you don’t give.  I may not’ve learned much, but I can say this with certainty: You are a free human being when you no longer have to tease, tempt or titillate anybody to get through another day.  Until that time, you’re just turning tricks for somebody.

That’s what I did for years—for ages, it seemed—after I left this block.  Mother never asked how I got enough to eat or a place to stay, and I don’t think I’d’ve told her unless I’d moved on to something else.

I’ve heard plenty of women call each other “whore” or “slut.”  But those words are mainly perjoratives, like “faggot” and “wuss” are when men use them in reference to each other.  No, that’s not quite right.  There is no parallel for one female accusing another—without proof—actually, no, imputing the world’s oldest—only—profession—onto another member of her part of humanity.  They’ll—We’ll—say it to tear at one another, in situations when “bitch” won’t do.  However, I still haven’t seen one woman condemn another for actually using what may have been the only means she had at some point in her life to feed, clothe and shelter herself, or anyone who may’ve depended on her.

One man may honor, or even revere, another man who’s killed.  Has killed—emphasis on the past tense.  Men who’ve killed may get citations, medals and sometimes even statues in parks with their names on them.  No woman has ever been exalted in quite those ways.  But, like the has-been killer, the woman who’s sold herself is not dishonored by her other women—as long as the deed’s been done, finished, out of sight, and out of mind, as they used to say. 

But while men can forget the killings they or their comrades have committed by pretending there was some purpose or honor to them, every woman knows the compromises, the accommodations other women—or they themselves—have made.  And—again, I have no way of proving what I’m about to say—they accept it or at least tolerate those collaborations with, or concessions to, the other side because, well, a survivor doesn’t condemn what another does to survive.  Sometimes the survivors don’t even ask.

2. The Women

 

There was a time, I know, when I didn’t know any of those women, even though I can’t remember it now.  I’d forgotten them, or simply hadn’t thought about them, for a long time.  Perhaps I’d’ve never thought about them again unless—well, unless my mother hadn’t died.  Of course, it had to happen some time.  A few people in this world can predict such things, supposedly.  Do they plan their lives accordingly—that is, do they plan more than I do, or more than almost anybody else does?

When you wake up in the morning—or whenever you wake up—all you actually know is that you have a certain amount of time—though you don’t know how much, exactly-- ahead of you.  Seconds, minutes, hours…how many days, how many years?  You can’t know for sure, and really, it has nothing to do with the amount of time you’ve passed. A young man will die today; his grandmother could live to see his grandchild, whom he’ll never know.  Happens all the time on this block.

Or you come back and the men are gone.  To where, almost nobody knows.  I can—perhaps I will—tell what happened to at least one.  I may’ve already mentioned one, Adam. He’s the only man I ever knew, or knew me.  He was on this block longer than any other man, I think. When I was hot and thirsty, he gave me cold sodas.  When I was bored, he told me stories, most often about himself.  But he never recited them with that vacant, faraway look you see when someone’s telling you a story he or she could’ve told any number of other people who’d never listen.  It seems that most of what men have told me, they related in that absent, absented monotone I’ve only know one woman to use when speaking to me.

She’d come, by way of Venezuela, from some other country, to this block to “conquer America.”  She was gone not long after she came; mother knew I wouldn’t ask about her because she wasn’t willing to talk about her—whether from lack of information, I’ve never known. None of the other women mentioned her, either, as if they knew enough not to.

Word was that she’d come her to meet husband number three, four or five.  Or that she’d never been married to number one or two, or had never divorced them.  She’d had two sons in Germany, a daughter in Macedonia or some other place nobody on this block had ever seen or cared to see.  One son had denounced her to the police, supposedly to get out of compulsory military service in some country.  Then the same son wrote her a letter begging her to come back to Denmark—or Sweden, or wherever he was living after she’d left him,  Her daughter wouldn’t speak to her because she was “at that rebellious age”; a week later she was seven and pining for her mother.

She’d come to this block long after Adam’d died—long, anyway, in that seemingly eternal expanse of childhood as it is spent on this block.  Somehow I think he’d’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve been charmed by her and her talk of “amore” and “espirito”.  He might’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve cared when she hiked up her skirt as she gesticulated toward the god that gave her “la force,”

1. Here, Mother

When, exactly, did I leave?  I probably could pinpoint a date when I first crossed the boulevard, the parkway or took one of the buses or trains, if I spend enough time recollecting.  Or maybe not.  Will I remember the day, the month, the date of the funeral: today’s date?  I just might, simply because it’s hers.  But after today, I’ll have no reason to remember most dates, even my birthday.   It’s been a long time since I’ve been under anyone else’s command, since anyone’s had any authority over me.  Which is not the same as having influence, or even power.

 

One who can make your decisions for you, who can decide whether and where and how you live, gains authority only through desperation and imposition.  Another person can lead you to or from any place you may consider home: that man or woman seizes or gains power from you.  Someone else still helps or nudges you to decisions, from what color sweater you’ll wear today to the career or lifestyle you choose: that person’s influences derives from your dreams, wishes, fantasies and tears.

 

For years, I’ve spent most of my time alone for many years, and I haven’t been bound to any schedules.   Once I left her home, I never went back to school and stayed on jobs and in rooms or apartments only until I couldn’t, for whatever reasons,  anymore. So, no-one’s had any authority over me for a long time.  Mother was one of the last people, if not the last person, to have any authority over me

 

Some would say that’s the reason I’ve come to the funeral.  Maybe.  After all, now that she’s leaving, I may never again have anyone to respect.  Matter of fact, I can’t think of anyone I respected besides her.  The nuns would stroke my hair and pinch my cheeks, then smack them.  The teachers in public school couldn’t lay a hand on me.  But some of them are masters of glances, if they’ve mastered anything at all.  And the gestures:  the wave of the hand, the curl of the lip, as if they could wish away some odor they’d always tried to avoid.

 

Sometimes they’d say, “I suggest that you…” Whatever followed, it could just as well’ve been, “Get out of sight.”  I’d’ve obliged them if I wouldn’t’ve run afoul of the law for doing so.  Actually, I stopped going to school long before I’d passed the age of compulsory attendance.  That is the one good thing about authority, or anybody who has it over you: that you can drop out of its and their sight.  Once they’ve noticed that you’re gone, there’s nothing they can do about it.

 

Power’s another matter: You can’t break its hold without engendering some sort of rage, which can turn suicidal, from or toward you.  You run from that; you have no choice.  Not only that, you can’t look back, not at the force, or the ones who use it.

 

But aside from respect, what’s brought me to her wake and funeral?  Something, perhaps, that even if I couldn’t recall it, it recalled me.  It reposed in those velvet walls, in the silk lining of the casket, with her.  It lies within the folds of her yellow blouse, folding and unfolding around her face, descending from eyelids clenched against the cold.  Yellowish rays, disconnected from their sources, spreading throughout the room—and the faces, the shoulders and into the eyes of the women who came today.

Foreword

 This was told to me by its narrator.  It seems that we had been circling about, and glancing away from, each other for decades before we finally spoke face-to-face.

For the next three years, we would meet nearly every week in a coffee shop where neither of us could reasonably expect to meet anyone we knew.   Every one of our conversations revealed something that shocked, infuriated, saddened or surprised me.  Even more unexpected was the humor, sometimes unintentional, always ironic, that crept into our exchanges.  The tone of our conversations—or the narrator’s monologues—became more somber during our third winter. Then again, almost everything around us, it seemed, grew more solemn.

One stiflingly hot day the following summer, we both knew, though neither of us said, would be our last meeting for a long time.  I can’t recall any other time when knowing something left me feeling so anxious.  I felt something was about to change in my life; perhaps this person for whom I had become a repository (if not a confidant) felt the same way.  But one might say I had selfish interests:  our meetings were, by then, one of the few constants in my life.  I was about to enter into all matter of uncertainty and I was about to lose one of the few rituals, if you will, I’d ever developed without any prodding from anyone else.

On the other hand, my confidant (I have no better term) was used to change, if I were to believe what I heard.  I had no reason not to.  That might have been the most surprising thing I learned.

Anyway, we fell out of touch for a couple of years.  During that time, friends, family members and other people who were in my life while we were having those weekly conversations dropped out of my life.  There were deaths; others had faded out of my life or simply left.   When we re-connected, my confidant exchanged stories of our losses and, as expected, of new experiences.  I am surprised at the amount of empathy, or at least the lack of judgment, I received.  I wonder whether I reciprocated .

Some time after the New Year, we lost touch again. There was no “falling out” or other confrontation; we simply dropped out of each other’s sights for a year or so.  Then, the Friday of a Memorial Day weekend—an unseasonably hot and preternaturally clear day—we once again bumped into each other in the company of strangers.  There was one more thing to be said—about yet another death.  I heard it after promising that I would not reveal my confidant’s name to anyone or tell the story you’re about to read to anyone who would “take it the wrong way” or “make too many assumptions.”

I still don’t understand that request, but I am honoring it as best I can.  I have done my best to convey the story I’ve heard over these past few years, in the language, tone and voice I heard, so that no one will misunderstand.  Each "chapter" of this book is a session with the narrator; the titles are all that I added. 

I have undertaken this task not only out of a sense of honor, but in the realization that I was—if you’ll indulge me a cliché—hearing my own story, in some way.  

I don’t know whether I’ll hear from my “friend” again.  Even if I do, I’m not sure the story will change much.  There will be new names, new places, and changes in our bodies—all things that happen with the passage of time.  I can’t tell you how any of our stories will turn out.  I know only this:  In the end, there are only people because along the way there are only those stories whose endings we don’t predict because they follow their own immutable, if sometimes mysterious, logic. 

Those peoples and stories are, ultimately, what the narrator of this book gave me over the years.  And they are all I have presented because I can’t offer anything else.  They are this book.

My life is about to change again.  How, I don’t know.

Thank you,

The recorder of this story, Justine Valinotti