8. Passages

 

When I saw those women again, I’d thought they were the only ones who survived this block. As far as I know, none was still living there, at least physically, when we came to see my mother for the last time. Of course I knew Mrs. Littington had gone years before. But the others, I’d just assumed they’d left.

And, at least for a time, it confirmed what I’d always suspected: only women survive. And that, in the end, mothers don’t have much more than their daughters and females—no matter how bitterly one may fight the other—have only each other. Nobody and nothing else—including this block—survives. Or so I came to conclude.

Later I believed, briefly, that there were exceptions, contradictions—including me. Sometimes it’s said that the exception proves the rule, or more precisely, that the contradiction confirms the theory.

My own experiences, though, led me to revise what I thought was a truism. Most of, if not all, of the survivors are female. They’ve got the Y chromosome, or some equivalent to it, somewhere in their bones. The bones—the only part of the universe you can’t escape. The scientists may unravel the helix, the spiral that twines the uterus, the intestines, all the visceral matter, together. But the things that can’t be changed are still woven and bound, still bred, in the bones.

Even when you’re really young, your bones ache when you’re trying to do something they just weren’t made to do. Sometimes those tasks can even break that latticework—Just ask any tiny, skinny boy whose father, uncle or older brother prodded him into playing football.

So yes, there are two genders on this block, just as there are anywhere else. But, just as important as the biophysical division of the species is the divide between those two zones of life on this block. I suppose that it exists in other places, too, but I first noticed it on this block: It seems that you’re either in the kitchen or on the streets.

Most of the boys end up on the streets. They live long enough to leave another boy behind for another boy to take in or mold. One day, when you’re a boy, someone teaches you how to raise and swing your fists, if you haven’t learned it on your own. Someone else shows you (again, if you didn’t pick it up) the walk: head slightly back, chest ahead, arms firmly at sides. Somehow it seems to take up the width of the sidewalk and others step aside—or challenge you. There’re other things, too, that they teach you in the name of “becoming a man.” And—oh yeah—there’s always the first drink, the first smoke, the first rape. Nobody calls it that, of course. It’s not a violation if you do it in some other neighborhood, to someone who’s not the sister of anybody you know.

But my mother, my grandmother and their friends—they knew my nature. They always started to cook meals right about when some uncle or cousin wanted to take me outside. Garlic had to be pressed, onions chopped, tomatoes sliced. Later there would be soups to simmer and pasta to boil.

I didn’t mind doing those culinary basics—I was going to say “grunt work,” but in a kitchen all tasks, from peeling carrots to baking soufflés, are equally important. Anyone who’s not in the kitchen sees only the complete meal and has the idea that the chef, or whoever conceived of the repast, is the most important person.

Anyone who’s spent any time in a kitchen knows that all of the work is important because it’s all necessary. No one who’s ever fed, burped, changed or bedded a baby will tell you that one of those tasks is more important than the others. And so it is with cooking: One step leads to another, which is precisely the reason why one step isn’t more important than another.

That lesson wouldn’t become clear to me until much later. But spending time in the kitchen—it’s probably the reason I made it to my mother’s funeral. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I wondered whether I’d “make it”—whatever that meant—without learning those secrets the males of the species reveal to each other during their brief lives that still sometimes seem too long.

At some point—somewhere just after my puberty, I think—the uncles, family friends and other males who passed through gave up on me. Before that, one of my uncles wanted to take me on a fishing boat. He convinced my mother to let me go, for one day, even though I didn’t want to. All I can remember was feeling nauseous I wasn’t sure whether it was the rocking of the boat or the smell of the rotting bluefish carcasses that got to me. After that, I was always grateful that my mother would never, ever allow anything that had ever swum to end up on her counter!

Anyway—I know I’m wandering again—but once there weren’t any males older than me trying to toughen, or roughen, me up, there just weren’t any more males. Except for school—and that’s the main reason I didn’t stay long enough to get any certification that I’d stayed. Once I passed through that summer when voices deepen and boys’ bodies bulk up, nobody saw much of me on this block—or, rather, I didn’t see much of anybody else. So getting to school wasn’t difficult, until I got near it: after Adam died, there just didn’t seem to be any men or boys left between my house and school.

But once I got to school, my troubles began. Most of the kids, I suppose, had they been left to themselves, would’ve simply talked among themselves about me if they’d noticed me at all. Sure, I’d’ve been body-slammed into my locker—What kid isn’t?—and I’d’ve probably heard “faggot” or “N (as in Nancy) boy.” But even the most macho boy, at some time, has his status challenged. He deals with it (in one way or another) and the taunters move on.

It seemed, though, that the teachers egged the adolescents on. Promoting, prolonging, their adolescence—the kids’, and their own—that’s what those teachers seemed hired to do. Young people call each other “faggots,” “he-shes” and so on because they have no idea what those words mean. (The same, by the way, for “nigger” and any other racial epithet.) They’ve heard the names; they echo them and think someone will answer.

The one thing I learned for certain when I was in school is this: Those who don’t graduate, teach. The ones who can’t deal with grown-ups—that is to say, people who do what they need to do and not simply what they’re “supposed” or expected to do—spend their lives among adolescents, among people who’ve learned no more than they have. And they do everything they can to make sure their students turn out no better than they did.

I’m not thinking only about the “fag” or “sissy boy” jokes one of my teachers told. Or the one some really puerile pedagogue—I can’t remember his name—uttered. (It goes like this: Two women are in a room. One says, “I want to be frank with you.” The other says, “No, let me be Frank!”) Or even the one who divided the class this way: Boys, Girls and my former name.

In a way, public school was even worse than Catholic school. Even though my speech and body mannerisms bore more resemblance to those of girls than boys (People have always told me this.), the fact that I wore the St. Thomas School’s maroon and gray plaid in a tie rather than a skirt at least identified me with the gender the nuns hated less, or at least didn’t know enough about to hate as much as their own. They hated all the boys equally and all the girls equally, but there was a particular rage they could direct only at the ones in Mary Janes and round collars.

And I do feel fortunate for this: that I was never subject, from a nun, to the beating one girl got when, after writhing in her seat with one hand raised and the other curled around her stomach, her blood ran over the edge of the wooden slat she sat on, to the floor. It never occurred to me, before or since, that women could inflict such violence on each other—mainly because, back then, I didn’t think nuns were really women. Their habits hid their hair and everything else that identified their gender. I guess even today, as I’m almost at the end of my transition, I still hold that image.

But the public-school teachers were far more capricious and unpredictable. No nun ever said, “You can talk to me,” or even pretended to want to hear what you were feeling. Which meant, of course, that they couldn’t use what I said against me. Some public-school teachers didn’t, either, and I had respect for the ones who didn’t try to gain my confidence. But the ones who cooed their concern for you were the ones who told the other kids whatever you talked about. They had to be—I wouldn’t have told any of the other kids, boys or girls, that I helped my mother in the kitchen, much less that I enjoyed it. Or anything else about my life that they couldn’t see: I knew I’d never hear the end of it.

And no nun ever did what the teacher in the last class I ever attended—I don’t remember what subject it was—did. I sat, my face in my hand, pretending not to hear a question. He walked over to me, rapped his knuckles on my desk, then on my head. “Knock knock? Who’s there? A guy or a girl?”

Finally—and I have to admit again that Catholic school could’ve been much worse had I been a girl—no one, anywhere, before or since, has done anything like what the football coach and two of his players did on the last day I spent inside the walls of that public school.

In those days, at least in that school, coaches had to teach something besides football or basketball. Mr. Tigler was given a class in art—actually, it was more like diagram-drawing—to instruct. Now, he knew about as much about lines and proportion as I know about wide-outs. So he tried to teach the way he saw teachers in other subjects doing it: by reading from the textbook and giving the class an assignment.

All right, so there’re lots of teachers in the world. But they, even the most hateful ones, don’t do, or tell their students to do, or even allow, what Tigler got Jack and Moon, two of the tackles, to do

I could see some sort of cue in Tigler’s eyes. Moon whined, “Aww, I thought we were gonna draw nudes in this class.” On cue, Jack’s eyes lit up: “Yeah, naked girls.” They turned to me, and Moon, who was sitting right behind me, spun me around and started to unbutton my shirt. Tigler chuckled.

No wonder the girls—who thought they were signing up for a real art class—dropped the class within the first week. Two that I know of actually signed up for sewing classes simply to get away from those boys.

After that class, as I walked down the long hallway that led from the class to the athletic field, Jack and Moon took turns body-slamming me against the lockers. Someone else yelled, “Be careful! We don’t want to mark her up!” Then they laughed and ran down to the doors.

Much as I hated those guys—and because of them and others like them, sports—I used to walk by the field, even when they were there, because it was the quickest way to Featherstone Boulevard, which I could take back to my block or to the movie theatres. Sometimes the players would blow kisses, held their hands up in a limp-wristed salute or yell, “Nancy Boy!” as I walked by. But I always thought none would attack me, because even if they weren’t arrested, they’d get kicked off the football team.

As I walked out the door, I thought I’d heard someone under the grandstand, about a hundred yards to my right. Someone grabbed my right arm, someone else my left, and they dragged me.

Underneath the steel girders, they threw me onto the sand. Someone rolled me around-- I was in a daze so I couldn’t tell who--and other hands pressed mine to the ground. I pushed, they pushed harder, and someone kicked the crown of my head.

“Today we’re going to draw the female nude!” That gruff drawl: Tigler! “But first we need a female.”

“Yes, coach,” Moon droned.

“Are you sure we’ve got one?” –that drawl again.

“There’s only one way to tell, coach,” Jack intoned.

Moon tugged at my belt. “Must be a female, coach. She kicks.” But not enough to get him or the others away. They couldn’t open my belt; Moon pulled it so hard the buckle felt like it would pierce my abdomen before it snapped off the leather.

“Come on. This is taking too long,” someone else yelled.

Then Moon and Jack each tugged one side of my waistband. The button flew off, the zipper unraveled and my pants split in two. Then, as Jack started to pull down my white cotton under-briefs, Tigler drawled, “Let’s go boys.” They nearly broke my arms pulling me up off the ground and pushing me out from under the bleaches when they saw the principal walking through the parking lot on the opposite side of the field.

7. Crossings

Some people traverse boundaries every day. A few of them lived on this block, though not for long. They worked, they conducted business—or did other things nobody tells you about when you’re a kid—on the other side of the boulevard, the intersection and the cemeteries. The had resumes, plans and other collections of abstract data in other parts of the community, or even in other towns.

Such people—when I was young, they were almost always men—cross neighborhood, city, county or state lines every day. You see them in Penn Station, or any other large terminal in any city, at the same hours every weekday. They ascend escalators to the places where they work. According to Mrs. Littington, her husband never set foot on the streets surrounding the place where he worked during the time he stayed—actually, slept and clipped his hedges—on this block.

I wonder what he—or she—felt whenever they stepped off a bus, train or plane and saw a sign that read, “Welcome to” some town, state or country. Was it relief or despair—or some strange, desperate combination of the two?

Whenever I entered the state in which this block is situated—especially when I came in on a particular rusty bridge that transverses a creek separating the acidic swampland on the other side of the creek from the gnarled bark and vines the side on which this block is located—I could feel late-fall afternoon air through slits of windows and bricks simmering bubbles from the heat within and the cold outside. I could feel the days growing colder and shorter; and knew there was nothing to do but move ahead, to shelter—which is to say, light—or some place where I know how to find and take it.

Any time I saw the “Welcome to” sign at the end of the bridge, I knew that for the time being, I could stay. But I also knew that I never knew how long I’d remain. I knew only that I’d come and that I’d go. Of course, for a long time, I didn’t know that one day I wouldn’t be able to come back, not for a very long time.

But after my most recent crossing I didn’t expect to stay forever. Long enough to bury mother, certainly. But beyond that, I had no expectations. I didn’t think I’d see anybody I remembered or who remembered me: as far as I knew, they were all gone, like Mrs. Littington, or dead, like Adam. I certainly hadn’t expected her, or any of our onetime, sometime neighbors. I felt, at first, like some émigré who returns, not for business, not for pleasure, to the land where he or she began—which is not necessarily the land of one’s birth. For I could never be sure that mother’d given me life here: She never talked about that, or anything that included the man who fathered me.

His identity, or that of wherever we might’ve lived before we ended up on this block, was like so many other things on this block: You didn’t ask about it. And if mother wouldn’t tell, nobody would. At least, nobody on this block, where I knew only women.

In any group of women, if one won’t tell, nor will any of the others. Sure, they’ll gossip among themselves, one to another, sometimes in the presence of others in their group. But not with anybody else—certainly not with a man.

Mother’d never talk about him. But, when we stayed in touch only by phone, she began to answer some of the questions I wouldn’t have dared to ask and others that hadn’t occurred to me—on the unspoken condition that I’d never tell anyone else. But by that time there was nobody else for me to tell. In any event, she stopped wanting sex a long time ago, she said. It’s nothing but gymnastiques—She, who never knew any language but what she spoke, used one of Mrs. Littington’s words and a very good approximation of her accent!—and you could get hurt very, very badly in the hands of a careless partner. Which, she said as if to warn me, is what a man is: a careless partner.

And the children forget about you, she said. Once, I tried to console with an apology—for what, I forget—but she short-circuited a declaration of my intention to be more attentive and not to forget her efforts. “You’re doing what you know how to do,” she said.

I’m still not sure of what she meant. Sometimes, I can tell you what I’ve done, and on rare occasions, why. But I still don’t know what, if anything, I know or have ever known how to do. I’m not talking only about a trade or profession, though I’ve practiced a few, legal and otherwise. Growing up, I wasn’t a particularly obedient child or attentive student. Nor was I an athlete, musician or anything else one becomes through various combinations of talent and practice. And I couldn’t tell anybody how to do anything more complex than unwrapping a candy bar.

Perhaps the one and only thing I’ve ever known how to do is take flight, to absent myself from situations. I can sit somewhere, and the time of day, the locality or even my own name don’t matter. Sometimes, of course, such information doesn’t matter. Who came to her funeral or what kind of service or ceremony was held for her wasn’t going to bring mother back from the dead, or more accurately, bring her back into this world. But some parts of my life—for that matter, maybe my life itself—may be allowed on one side of the bridge but not the other. And once I complete this stage of my journey—my transformation—I won’t be able to stay on either shore. Or on this block.

But that one skill—absenting myself—I’m still not sure how, or if, it relates to anything else in my life, or anyone else’s. Maybe it’s the reason why the people I’ve met in passing since I’ve left this block have told me about their families, partners, friends. People who had no identifiable reason to trust me have expressed their frustration with husbands or dissatisfaction with boys who wouldn’t become men.

Even before I began my transformation, I’d hear the stories. Like the beautician who showed me the cuts, bruises and cigarette burns her boyfriend inflicted on her the night before, before he started fucking her.

She revealed those marks just above the hemline of her skirt and the caps of her sleeves—during my second session in her chair, when she fitted and styled the first wig I bought in her shop. At that time I couldn’t’ve, and wouldn’t’ve, told anyone else her story, any more than I’d’ve repeated what my mother told me. There were only two other people—one of whom owned the shop—who knew that I’d been going there. My mother wasn’t one of them. And nobody—from this block, or anywhere—knew, or could’ve known both my mother’s confession and the beautician’s revelation. Or anything I told either, or both, of them.

One thing I know: I never called my mother from that shop, or the neighborhood around it.

6. Memory

Amazing, how many people you meet, even if you’ve lived as I have. Of course, you forget most of them. No, that’s not quite right. They become like one of those files the FBI or some other group of snoops keeps. Pictures of them are stored somewhere in memory. There’re very few you’d ever have any reason to recollect. And when you do see one of them again—always in the most inevitable, which is to say the least expected, time and place—it’s a surprise.

If I or anybody’d thought more about it, the women who came to mother’s funeral are precisely the ones one would’ve expected. Which means, of course, they all surprised me. Mrs. Littington—where did she come from? And the woman who seemed to recognize me by the door to the bathroom: I never would’ve expected her to leave the patch of grass people called her lawn. As for the others: They seemed to exist only on this block, along the streets bounded by the parkway and the cemeteries—an area just away, but a whole neighborhood away, from the train tracks. And, it seemed, those women wore only pastel-colored housedresses or stretch pants and baggy blouses. If they went to church or some other worship place, they always seemed to wear the same hues of washed-out lace and linen they wore to some school dance, to a graduation or one of those terminally immemorial events of those women’s youth. Those clothes always seemed to fit—or, more precisely, not fit-- the same way, no matter how much weight they’d gained or lost.

Then again, Mrs. Littington doesn’t look that much different from the way I remembered her, and I remembered her because she didn’t look like the others. The others also looked more or less the way I remembered them. I guess that’s because they seemed like old ladies when I lived on this block.

There they were: photos pulled up from some old image bank. Like the ones that flash on the television screen of some actor thirty years past his last role or some athlete who retired before his kids were born and nobody knows what he’s done since. They die, and it takes everyone by surprise, even though they’d “valiantly fought cancer” or some such thing.

Funny—when I came back to this block, I didn’t know how she died. For a time, I knew she wasn’t well, but she’d never talk about it. Which isn’t to say that she never complained. Oh, there were the stories about people who lied, who were supposed to know better but didn’t, about someone—usually a man—who screwed something up she probably could’ve, and should’ve, done herself.

It was usually the men. They, the ones who didn’t finish a job, who left before doing so, who showed less loyalty to their women and their children (which they denied responsibility for, while boasting of their ability to make them) than the average housecat. Men, sometimes coming, usually going. A few, the women remember. Me—none. When you don’t know your father’s name, it’s hard to find any reason to remember any other man’s. You don’t expect other men to stay, and you may not stay, either.

For a long time, I hadn’t left anything or anybody on this block but mother. Not even a fragment, a memory of me, except what mother held. I don’t doubt that she thought about me as much as she said she did, but I wondered what exactly she recalled. Whatever it was, it had less and less relationship to the person with whom she spoke on the phone with every conversation we had. Soon, whatever image she had of me won’t have anything to do with me, with the person I’ll soon be.

And what were those women thinking when they looked at me? Could it be the child, the teenager, they knew? That’s hard to imagine: too many years have passed. My size, my shape, even my voice, has changed since any of them last saw me. And, as I said, my transformation is not complete.