11. The City of Ladies

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?

10. Never Going Home Again

As far as I can tell, being a woman means not being able to go back. Some have relationships—mothers, sisters, friends; almost always other women—for their entire lives. And sometimes they reminisce, whether about the cute boy in the coffee shop, the days spent with mothers and grandmothers, the children who’ve left. But these fleeting visions of the past don’t become dwelling places, note even for those rouged old women who wear their old dancing shoes and spend their days trotting from their rooms to coffee shops they’ve seen every day for thirty years. You can find women like that in almost any city, marooned in space but, contrary to appearances, not in time.

It always has amazed me that men can tell each other the same stories, over and over again. About the Thanksgiving football game thirty years ago. Or the cheerleader known, however briefly, before she moved on, even if only to another young man and a house one neighborhood over from the one in which she grew up. Men will live with those fantasies of the past before it changed into the current reality. There was always that pass caught, grasped for life even when they couldn’t run anymore, not even for their lives.

Run for your life! I don’t think any man, anywhere, understands what that really means. They’re usually talking about a fast-paced trot, or occasionally a sprint, to keep frangible property, body parts or even more fragile egos intact. Even when he’s at war, in a street fight or some other physical altercation, he’s running, not for his life, but rather to evade the brutal forces of other men. Then there is not life: he has not run for that: he is a survivor. No, not even that, really.

He’s run from a force—which is to say, himself. Now of course if I ever saw a grenade or someone with an equally deadly weapon headed in my direction, I’d run, too, probably, whether or not I could escape. And I won’t pretend that there was no danger.

But I know this: Even after my therapy and surgery are complete, even when the transformation is finished, or at least in a new stage, I still won’t ever have to run for my life, or any life. More women have died, or have been made seriously, chronically or terminally sick, by giving birth or doing all those tasks that keep babies and children—and sometimes even siblings, lovers and husbands—alive than men have succumbed to all the wars, job-related accidents, street crime and car crashes combined.

They can talk about war, tell war stories; they can tell and write all their memoirs about fox hunting or whatever feats of daring procrastination they performed in those Edens that endure only in the retelling of faded memories.

Hey, they’ve even got organizations and institutions to enshrine all those exaggerated, elongated reminisces—returns to their own minds, that is. What’re the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the alumni associations of schools and colleges—or the colleges and schools themselves—all about, anyway? Everyone’s a hero, triumphant over someone who’s not there anymore, or someone or something that never was.

I’ve known, or at least met, women who’ve been in war, as nurses, doctors and even infantry soldiers. When they talk about such experiences—and they do so far less often than men who had them and even less than the men who didn’t—they talk about the suffering, whether their own or someone else’s, and the efforts to keep themselves and others alive.

Raven-haired Daisy Proudfoot—I never did ask which tribe her family came from—‘d been in An Khe about the same time as my cousin Dennis went and never came back. I was never sure of whether she’d rescued people or tried to patch them up or put them back together. I only knew she’d been in a MASH unit of some sort. In fact, she never talked about what she did there. If she’d talk at all, she’d only tell me who lived, who died and which ones she’d heard about since. Sometimes she’d talk about the things that blew up under, above or behind her. Or the others who were there or the children, the infants she saw. I have to admit, whenever anyone talks about combat, it all sounds the same to me, no matter who’s telling it. I never remember the details. But I do remember how, when she did talk about the war, she’d talk about anybody or anything but her.

Now I’ve been told—and I’ve been told that Hemingway’s said—that soldiers, among other soldiers, talk about being scared or bored most of the time they were in battle. I wouldn’t know for sure. There was an uncle or some man very early in my life—I don’t even remember his name now—who used to tell stories of his own heroism. And two other men—Were they friends or brothers? —used to tell theirs. Of course, neither mother nor I could tell for sure whether their stories were true, though I knew somehow she didn’t believe them—especially the uncle. She never tried to convince me one way or the other, though, or for that matter to talk me into or out of any idea—which I never had anyway—of going into the military.

She never tried to convince me, as those men and others did, that I needed to run at, hit or pounce on another boy’s or man’s body for titles, bragging rights or anything they called “respect.” No account of playing- or battle-fields impressed me (which, I realized much later, was one of the many reasons I had so much difficulty with school), and she never repeated any of them to me.

Now I know why—I’m at her funeral now, the last one one I’ll have to attend for anybody from this block. And why it’s been years since I’ve seen anybody, dead or alive, from or on this block. Sometimes I wish she’d told me that athleticism and heroism—actually, jock- and ego-ism—wouldn’t be necessary, that the real run and real fights for life would come much later, after most of the boys were gone or dead. Maybe she didn’t know—though how could she not?--that all their exploits, all their aggrandizements, would mean nothing, to me or in any scheme of life that’s presented itself to me. I only wish that she, or someone, could’ve told me—or better yet, shown me—that when I’d had to walk through or around all the men who swaggered with the threat of homicidal harassment through school halls or down this block..

How could she not know that to survive the day is one thing, but that you’ve got to fight and run harder, faster and longer for life—yours or anyone else’s. Which, I guess is what people mean when they capitalize the L in life.

Here’s something I do remember. One night when I was about twelve I told her I was tired. From what, I can’t remember. Maybe I felt like a child whose mother was about to put or send him to bed even though he didn’t want to go. I wanted to rest my head on my hands, on a table, on anything that would support it. But not to bed: that would be so much more final, so authoritative. When I put my head down or my feet up, I could open my eyes, open a story book, walk around when I felt ready. But when I went to bed, I couldn’t get up until it was time. Whenever you do something when it’s time, you don’t get to decide when or whether it’s time.

I think my mother understood that much anyway: that I wasn’t suffering from fatigue, or even boredom. I was still living by a child’s clock. And so when I told her I was tired—the only word I’d heard before that even came close to describing the way I felt—she intoned, “You don’t know what tired is.”

One thing about her: She never said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” or “You’re too young to understand.” She’d only say that I didn’t know one thing—“tired”—or another. Sometimes I’d find out fairly soon that she was right. Other times I’d have to wait. And there are still things I haven’t understood, and maybe never will. Like—Here’s one I can think of right now—“You don’t respect anybody or anything more than you respect your own body.” Sounds good, and she wasn’t a philosopher or anything like that. But what did she mean? Will I find out after I have the operation? Maybe I understand a little bit now: Ever since I started taking hormones, I feel cold—yes, physically, right to the bone—in places like the funeral home.

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.