16. Exposure

 

Even if I hadn’t mother’s funeral to attend, this day’d’ve seemed different from any other I spent on this block. Of course, there’s the fact that I came on my own and I expect to be gone again very soon. Also, my mother was, to my knowledge, the last person I knew who remained on this block. The others are dead --or somewhere else, which is really the same as being on this block.

This day, at least as much of it as I’ve seen, is much warmer than any fall day I can remember on this block. But I can’t remove any clothing. On unseasonably warm days at this time year, my mother made me keep my coat on no matter how much I complained about the heat. In this funeral parlor, it’s a musty kind of heat, like what you feel in some washrooms. Still, I can’t take off anything. Some of that has to do with being in the funeral hall, of course: Sometimes you have to respect protocol. And everyone else here is a woman around my mother’s age, so I don’t have the kind of fear I’ve had when I’m trapped inside four walls with a bunch of men. But even if it were acceptable, I couldn’t take anything off, just yet.

I’m just not ready. These days, I’m almost never addresses as anything but “Ma’am” or “Lady”—or “Miss” on good days—but every once in a while someone detects, in a way the French call au pif, the traces of the person I’m leaving behind. For now, I can only cover them up. It seems that’s what I was always doing: When I was living on this block, I always had to cover myself up. On unseasonably warm days at this time year, my mother made me keep my coat on no matter how much I complained about the heat. I realize now that she had the right idea.

I may not understand much; perhaps I still don’t and never will. But I know when I’m being looked at, stared over, scoped out: I can feel it on my skin. Whenever someone’s contemplated, for more than an instant, a sexual assault or any other kind of violence on me, a film slithers under my skin and slips away from me. Others talk about the “pins and needles,” but the feeling I get in my skin scares me much more because I have less control over it and it’s a much more certain and ominious signal than any other bodily sensation I’ve had. When that film slips away from my skin, I know I’m a victim or about to become one.

Someone—one of the last sexual partners I took, or who took me, before I began my transition—told me her childhood bedroom didn’t have a door on it. Even after she started attending the local art college, her mother and father watched her while she dressed, supposedly to be sure she left the house “looking like a proper lady.” She wasn’t allowed out of the house unless she was wearing a skirt and blouse or a “becoming” dress. “You have to think about your reputation,” her mother insisted.

And think about her reputation she—and the other students and her professors—did. “Hey, you’re not in Catholic school,” they’d yell. A shipping—actually, trucking—executive’s daughter finally gave her a frayed, patched pair of blue jeans , a man’s shirt embroidered with a paisley in shades of red and green, and a T-shirt that exhorted, “Ban The Bra!” Then someone decided the patent flats had to go, and a pair of high-topped basketball sneakers, in her size, appeared by her drawing table.

She never could’ve brought the clothes or sneakers to her parents house, much less put them on there. Lucky for her, lockers lined the hallways of the terminal where she got off the bus she took from her parent’s corner. And they were a short walk from the long cubical stalls of the women’s bathroom, where the walls burst with the smell of sweat and menstrual blood held for too long and of cigarette butts stomped out on the floor. But at least she could close—and lock!—the steel door of the stall. All she worried about—at least for a while—was who’d see her when she got off the bus and out of the bathroom. Finally, one day she realized that none of the men—they were all men—who took that same bus with her every morning were anybody her parents knew. They came to the city just after dawn, like her, and went back to their town in the evening. During the hours of her and those men’s departures and arrivals, her father was driving to or from the rusty railyard at the other end of town. Once he got there, he went into a bathroom, locked the door and changed into a blue work shirt and permanently stained gray overalls. At the end of the day, he returned to the lavatory, locked the door behind him, took off his work clothes and took a shower before putting on slacks, a button-down shirt and a tie.

She never told me the names of her parents, or their town, or the name of the city where she took her drawing and painting classes. She didn’t tell me much at all, and I was trying to tell her even less. But what to say--or whether to say it—would, as it would turn out, be one of my lesser worries.

I’d no idea of what she might’ve wanted. I knew—thought, anyway—that whatever it was, she wanted it from a woman. The way my hair—at that time, a wig—fell against my cheek, the cut of the black skirt that seemed to be knitted around my hips (mainly because of the padding I wore in my briefs)—she always complimented me on such things. And my nails—for once, I managed not to smear or streak the coloring, not even on my toes. For once, amazingly enough, no part of my body was too big—not even my feet, in strappy stiletto sandals—or too small. And I didn’t have to worry about such things as long as…

..As long as she didn’t start taking off my clothes. Well, some of them anyway: I’d shaved all the hair off my body. Since she was nearly as flat-chested as I was (I had just begun to take hormones.), I figured—hoped—she might not notice, at least until she got to the half-slip under my skirt. Opaque black: She couldn’t see anything under it, so I hoped she wouldn’t notice anything before she fell asleep. Which I hoped would be soon, since she’d had some strong red wine in her. Then again, so did I.

Luckily—or so it seemed at the time—she wasn’t looking for the kind of girl who just lays back and waits. When she touched me, I roiled, slid, pushed, tumbled: anything to divert her for another moment. My writhings and wrigglings excited her even more with each moment. How could I—or she, we—know I’d behave exactly the way every girl wants her submissive to behave? That was something I didn’t understand until I was well into my metamorphosis. The dominantrixes I’ve known were never happy merely to tie me up and leave me motionless.

How could I’ve known that not struggling, not fighting back against the boys—including the middle-aged ones who’ve paid to fuck me—would keep me alive long enough to escape from them, from it, from this place, for a time anyway? Once they’ve got your clothes off, you’ve got no defense, anyway.

But for the art-school woman—Why can’t I remember her name now?—as long as I had something on, she—and I—could struggle. I’d wanted her to want the femme (though feminine, not quite female) being I’d presented to her. She pursed her. I panicked: What if…All I could do was tire her out, let her fall asleep—in her submissive’s arms.

Which is where I found her the following day. She sweated, but I shivered. Of course..a bra, a padded brief and a half-slip don’t cover much. But I couldn’t pull the top sheet or blanket over me, over us. I kissed her forehead, slid my chest from under her blonde bob and pulled my clothes off her dresser. I left; her eyes clenched.

Once outside, I felt even colder than I had before I’d gotten dressed. True, it wasn’t a warm day and my jacket came barely to the waistband of my skirt. And I wasn’t wearing stockings. But the sun burned through a light film of haze; maybe the sun had expended all of its heat on that task.

Today certainly seems warmer than that day. True, I’m dressed more modestly, in a black dress and heavy opaque hose—what a woman might be expected to wear at this time of year for occasions like this one. Yet, at the same time, I still worry that they—or perhaps even mother—will see through. Especially mother, who kept me in the kitchen and covered me. I don’t believe in ever-afters, or anything beyond what I’ve seen and see now. But I still wonder: Does she see me? Or did she, through all those years we talked over the phone?

15. Exodus

When I left, I swore to myself—there was no one else I could swear to—that I’d never return. I didn’t tell mother—I didn’t have the chance—but I’m sure she knew. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t’ve known, that this day—when I could and had to come back—would come. And of course, I couldn’t’ve predicted that it would come after the deaths of everyone who actually knew me here, including my mother. Or that it would come near the end of my own transformation.

But a day came, years ago, when I came to believe that by leaving, I’d precluded any chance of returning, whether or not I wanted to.

Through a series of lies, missteps and sleeping on various floors, couches and hallways (Men like to tell stories about stuff like this.) I opened my eyes one day—I didn’t know what time of day it was—to hissses rising from the narrow, sunwashed street into the window. I was warned that the weather would be very hot in that place. Though it wasn’t, it was the week before, I was told. The past weather—the past—sizzled in the cauldron of deep, dusty rose-colored brick and stone houses. The steam, the mist of dissipating voices, echoed the warmth of the morning’s—or was it the afternoon’s?—sun, which sucked away the film left by the shower that slipped onto, and away from, that street while I slept.

I only hope—and this is one of the few hopes I still hold, or have ever held—that I’m making some sense of this, as I describe it now. For I woke on that day and I had no words—not even the inelegant ones I’ve been using to describe my life on, run from, and return to this block where my mother raised me in the kitchen—to describe that day, not even to myself. It wasn’t just that I was in a country where I hadn’t been raised and knew none of its language other than a few words Mrs. Littington yelled in anger or exasperation at her children when her husband wasn’t in the house.

A slender gray cat with a long tail slinked from the door of one of those rose-colored brick houses and into an alleyway lined by vines climbing a fence I couldn’t see. “Venez-y! Venez-y!” A woman whose brown hair swept from swirls above her ears into a mane at the back of her neck hollered for the cat, without the sharp, angry edges of the voices calling—or sending away—children and other domesticated milk-drinkers on my old block.

“Venez-y,” she intoned once more before turning away from her window. Not much later, the slick gray cat bounded, seemingly on tip-toes, toward the front of that rose-brick house. The door opened, and the cat disappeared inside.

For several days, the evening’s rain dissolved into a haze of the morning’s sun and the afternoon warmth simmering among the bricks. Bicycles and small cars left their places by the curbs and returned, along with their owners. Somehow—I didn’t know how—I knew they would. But when another woman who swept her hair back and lived with a cat and another woman left for a few days, somehow I wasn’t surprised when she came back on the day she did. And I didn’t hear any angry words from the woman who lived with her—who, I realized, was her lover—or any howls from their gray cat.

I also realized—again, I didn’t know how at the time—that none of those women’d been born or raised in that city. Later, I realized that their accents revealed that fact: Even though I knew almost nothing of their language, I realized they didn’t sound like the women behind the counters at the charcuterie, boulangerie or librarie. In fact, the woman at the bookstore didn’t sound like the deli- or bakery proprietors’ wives; I could even tell that the woman at the bookstore wasn’t somebody’s wife.

Whenever I left any of those shops, they chirped, “Au revoir, madamoiselle.” Of course, that’s customary in their country, but there was something in the sing-songiness, and the seeming accent on the “voir,” that left a door, a window, or something—even a ventilation duct, perhaps—open. The interaction, the story, between me and whichever of those women said “Au revoir, madamoiselle” was complete—whole, actually—whether or not I came back, or whether or not we met in some other way.

Of course, I returned to all of those shops—especially the bookstore, whose proprietress/manager/eminence let me stay as long as I wanted, knowing full well by my few and halting phrases in her language that I could read almost nothing on her shelves. I did what any child does: I looked first at the books full of pictures. For the frist time in my life, I looked at art, at photography. I found a few things I liked, though to this day I still don’t understand why people go to look at most of the things they look at in museums, or why they buy almost anything displayed in galleries.

People came because they could. And left for the same reason. In that city—Toulouse, France—I realized that I had those same prerogatives, which I mistook first for privileges and later for rights. You were never neither terminally here nor gone: You were in transition, coming or going. Thus, for once, I didn’t find myself eternally condemned to the present, to a moment when you’re either here or gone.

If nothing else, I realized I was no longer one of the boys, one of the would-be men, of this block. It hadn’t occurred to me that I never was, that I’d struggled to fit , on lines and into clothes, into schools, churches, and other bodies where I didn’t belong. I realized then, for the first time, that I wasn’t going back to this block, not for a long time, and that I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to.

I also never realized how quickly I could forget, or simply lose, people. I knew that nobody from this block—not even Mrs. Littington, who’d lived in this country until she met Mr. Littington—would find me in Toulouse. In fact, no image or thought of her ever, or anyone from this block besides mother, crossed my mind while I was there. For all they or I knew, I could’ve been in some other country yet, even though Toulon, where Mr. Littington got off a Royal Navy ship and met her in a café, wasn’t even half a days’ train ride away. I was in the city the French call la ville rose; she’d come from the war, from a town that was shelled and burned because the Republique’s battleships and submarines entered and left with the tides. It was never fully rebuilt, or made into any habitable place worthy of the appelation ville for the very same reason. More than one tourist guidebook has called Toulon the ugliest and dirtiest town in France; the same books celebrate (rightly, I believe) Toulouse’s color and light.

But none of those books, no matter where or in what language they’re published, will tell you about this block: the one on which I grew up and where I met Mrs. Littington. They couldn’t, any more than I could (or still can) describe exactly what I felt on that street on my first day in Toulouse. They, by the same token, couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell you about the women or the cats, not any more than I have in my own ragged, clumsy way.

No, nobody’s written—nobody’s described or shown—in verse, story, music, paint or stone—the world in which I began: the day I left this block to make a transition I’ll never quite complete, simply to stay alive, and in the hope that I might be safe. But soon, very soon, I’ll travel to the physical end of that journey. I’ll have gone as far as that road I took from this block to that street in Toulouse and beyond, back to this block for mother’s funeral, can take me. I’ll’ve lost that last appendage connecting me to who I was on this block, to whatever memories the women in this funeral parlor may’ve had. Even though I now use that part of my body only for excretion, and am eager to be rid of it, I still wonder what I’ll be like when I no longer have to hide it under my skirt.

14. 84

Eighty-four. That seems to be the number that seperates this block from all the others. Or anyone who’s lived a life or died a death that intersected with mine in any way.

I’ve never known a man who’s lived to that age. On this block, the boys all seem to embark upon their paths—never by design—at the age of thirteen, or sometime around then. You know which ones will “make it”—that is to say, get out of this place—and which ones will die here, whether physically, mentally or emotionally. About that age, the few who know how begin to prepare themselves for life after leaving. A few are guided—always by women, it seems.

But most start moving toward the commands of the immediate gratifications this block has to offer. It comes when a boy first handles, however clumsily, his capability of ending someone else’s life—or his own. Something that would’ve been nothing more than a physical scuffle only a few days earlier lands somebody on a table. If he’s conscious, the murmurs of men in gowns melt into the black cones of the victims—and the ones making assesments of, and pronouncements about, his condition.

The ones who return—well, some, anyway—make plans to die or leave. Or, perhaps, they live as if they had the proverbial three score and ten coming to them. Some women live to such an age; so do some men—though none of the young men realize that these survivors to thirteen plus three score and ten found another place, another way.

Thirteen, then three score and ten. No man who’s ever lived on this block is aware of those two stages or lengths of a life span. A few men and a few more women get to live both—but no man, it seems, endures beyond them if he’s from or on this block.

Long after I left, I learned that Judaism has a ceremony that’s like a second bar mitzvah for men who live to be eighty-three: three score and ten years after the age of thirteen. I didn’t know about it growing up: Why would Adam’ve told me? He wasn’t the only Jewish man on this block, although this was also something I didn’t realize until long after I’d left. I wouldn’t’ve cared anyway, since I never planned to practice their religion, or anyone else’s, the moment I had the liberty to make that choice.

In fact, I never expected to live long enough to reach any Biblical or other milestone. I didn’t even think I’d live as long as I have: long enough to reach this moment, the last one I’ll spend with my mother or anyone else on this block: the last time I’ll live as the person who lived among them. The boy among dead and dying men; the boy who grew old. Which is the reason why, I realize now, mother had to keep me at home, in the house, until I left.

Eighty-four still seems very, very old to me, even though I’ve since met men and women who were older. Actually, it’s the age at which one can say for sure that someone has become, or will be, an old man or woman, not simply another who’d withered or fallen, and died. The first person I met who’d accumulated that many years was the owner of a gas station near Vivian’s old town. After we were driving back to her place, she told me how old that man was. I wanted to go, to take one more look at someone eroded but not corroded, a bit stooped but still standing and walking.

Now I know what I would want to know from him. How had he made it? That might seem like the most banal question in the world—unless you’re from this block. Every man who’s survived on this block, however briefly, did so by subduing in any way necessary for victory in a fight with to the death with another man. Of course I include Coach Tigler, Moon and Jack; I include me. In order to live long enough to make the transition I’m making, I not only had to vanquish a man; I had to kill him in order to render him nothing more than a name and a set of dates and other statistics.

At eighty-four, one is no longer a statistic. Or even a name. One becomes, finally, like the seacoast in Vivian’s old town or the mountain in another: one who has the lines of the succession of storms and sunshine that no other has experienced. Nothing anybody builds around those places ever fits quite right, like the clothes on old people. One’s belly shrinks or swells; another’s shoulders sag or neck bends: simply buying a coat in a different size won’t protect them from this year’s torrents. But somehow they survive. Like the man at the gas station. Even though it’s been years since Vivian even spoke to me, let alone since we drove by him, I don’t doubt that he’s still around. But I’m not sure how I could talk to him or whether he’d want to talk to me. Or what I’d do now with his answer to that question.