9. What We Could've Known

 

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.

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.