12. Fate and Hunger

Foregone conclusions. Fait accompli. Perhaps the only one, or at least the first one, is the knowledge that they exist. And that each of us has a different time, place or way of learning about them—except, of course, the ones who come to comprehend them at the moment of their death.

Me, I learned about inevitability, about marching with fate, one cool, damp, overcast Sunday afternnon. In those days, I always knew what day of the week it was because I was expected to. That’s how it seemed, anyway: someone decided I had to be in a certain place at a certain moment. Or I knew by way of other people that it was Sunday because they were going to and coming from church. And the store down the block was closed.

People walk differently when they’re drawn by the impossibility of taking a different step from the ones they’re taking. They don’t walk like people who are doing what they “have to do,” such as when they’re going to work or the dentist. On Sunday afternoons, at least on this block, there is only the repetition of fate: people going to have lunch or dinner, or fights, with those people they’re bound to see: family members, in-laws or their equivalents or substitutes.

Really, they’re not any different from people who’re spending the overcast afternoon indoors because it rained in the morning. They’re drawn by the momentum, the inertia of destiny, like amusement park rides that continue to run even when nobody’s on them.

It was on such a Sunday afternoon that I learned that some things couldn’t be stopped or steered any more than the forces of life—or death—on this block.

I think there’s always a moment—I’d’ve called it a decisive moment but for the fact that I don’t believe in a humanoid god—when a person begins the deperate run from this block or takes the first steps in the march to death.

I was chopping onions for the huge bowl of salad that would accompany the two big pans of lasagna she was making even though none of her friends or neighbors was coming over that day. They decided they didn’t want to go out in the rain, even after it stopped.

But we made that big Sunday dinner anyway, even though neither of us got hungrier on Sunday than on any other day of the week. Or at least not hungrier enough that either of us noticed. There’d be leftovers for the rest of the week, at least. Not that I minded: I’d rather eat my favorite foods—and I’ve never eaten anything that’s more satisfying than that lasagna-- a few days after they were made than something I don’t like as much fresh off the stove.

But leftovers weren’t the reason my mother went ahead and made that big dinner anyway. She didn’t eat much of them herself. And I couldn’t’ve, even if I’d wanted to. So I didn’t know what the reason was, but leftovers weren’t it.

She’d’ve made that huge Sunday meal, or something else just as voluminous, no matter what. She always had and, I realized that day, she always would.

She always did. After I left this block, she’d always tell me what she was cooking whenever we talked. For a long time I wondered whether she was trying to entice me back, but I realized that she knew I wasn’t coming.

She was going to make those meals, no matter what. Before she had me in her kitchen, and long after she knew I’d never be there again, she cooked. We—or she—‘d eat them, or whatever portion we could, whether or not we were hungry. That’s what we and everybody else on this block did in the presence of a big Sunday meal.

Hunger is the reason to eat; the hunger of several people is the reason to cook a big meal. I realized that was how I’d live—it’d be my philosophy of life, if you will. Talk when there’s someone to talk to, broadcast when you’re trying to reach a lot of people. It’s not a matter of what you’re trying to say, or whether you have anything to say just as, really, almost anything will do when you’re really hungry. Of course spinach and mineral water are better for you than hot dogs and soda, but you don’t think about that when you’re truly hungry: that is to say, when you’re not thinking about the vitamins or other substances your body breaks down when…I was going to say, when you no longer experience hunger, but I realized for all I know , there may be more of the same after death.

Mother cooked, no matter who was or wasn’t there. Adam talked—to me, to anybody who’d sit still for a while—even though he didn’t have anybody to talk to. They died on this block. So did Moon, the football player who attacked me, when he got into a fight with a guy who wasn’t perceptibly gay, hadn’t stolen his girlfriend (whether or not he ever actually “had” her or not) and hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way because, well, he hadn’t looked at Moon the wrong way and thus couldn’t be accused of a provocation.

Of course, on that gray mirror of a Sunday afternoon when I learned about fate, I couldn’t yet know what propelled Adam to his death or what he’d share with anyone who’d died and would die on this block. I knew only that I wasn’t going to die, at least not there or here. I couldn’t. I didn’t know why—I just knew I wouldn’t. That knowledge terrified me as much as—possibly more than—knowing that I’d have to make a choice not to.

I didn’t know how or when I would leave her kitchen—or this block—for the last time. I knew only that I would. For that matter, I knew that I wasn’t going to spend much more time in school, even though I had no premonition that Moon, Jack and Tigler would attack me.

I only knew that mother was going to make her dinner. That some people were spending the day indoors because it’d rained in the morning. And that the rides in the amusement part would run whether or not anybody was there to ride them.

And—I didn’t know how I knew this—I could never be a man, not even a young one, on this block. Not a woman, either. So I wouldn’t’ve been able to stay in the kitchen, with mother, for much longer.

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.