17. Of Currents and Wakes

Only the wind’s mattered to me. Not the sun, the rain, the heat. Just the winds, and clouds opening and rippling across the sky like scarves. Leaves and sand whirl around and over shoulders of rock, of soil, and skid skitteringly toward your eyes or away from your head.

I suppose that if I could’ve stayed in one place or time, I’d find some way to end my days with the late autumn, on a beach. Alone, with nothing but my own breath and blood curling around splintered rocks and driftwood. Whether the sea glazed with the sun or grew heavy and gray with the sky, it always carried my image, or rather my echo: always a storm within, rising in a rage that turned and spilled itself on whatever, whoever came too close. They’d grow angry, they’d rage, but there was nothing they, I or the sea could do to change.

No, the rage isn’t against the dying light. What kind of light, anyway? (Amazing, the nonsense they had us take seriously in school! No wonder I’m practically illiterate!) I always preferred those days colored like gunmetal and brass to the polished, gilded jewels of spring and summer days. That kind of light, colorless to some but really clearer—that is to say less of a shield against sight, if not vision—than any other, brightens and darkens the way a day enters and leaves when there’s nobody to embrace against, or embrace, it. Or dress it in words it would never echo unless someone—someone I didn’t know growing up—uttered them, in colors I’ve never seen to this day.

The light doesn’t die on those days, on those beaches because, without those distractions of all of those men who’ve been called poets, your eyes adjust. So do your ears, because as the gray cloak of the day disappears like the walls in a darkened room, the rushing, rustling wind and hissing tides mimic each other’s voices, but you can still tell one from the other.

Some people stay away from those days that turn beginnings into endings, and back again, moving in circles around caverns and sinkholes fill of names, full of gazings. But I look for them when I’m awake; any dream I can remember the next day takes me there.

Those days by the sea—I’m not talking about a beach, a piece of sand to which people cling, or to town like the one Vivian showed me—grow colder. But my skin opens, like my eyes to the grayness, and rasps its glaze, a prickly film of misty needles, over me. I’ve always gone to the sea as late, or early, in the year as I could without getting sick. As long as I had the sea, the tides of clouds, and the wind that brought them all in—the wind that gave them life, the only life that didn’t assault or abandon mine—I could stand the cold, the wind, the rain. No, I wanted to be there, awake or in my dreams.

As I’ve said before, there’s really no such thing as memory. Some people’s recollections simply have more tangible, tactile reference points than others. Sometimes those touchstones are buried or locked in the vaults behind people’s eyelids. There’re recollections, for me, for the ladies at mother’s funeral, of this block. Of course, they brought me back, for mother: her funeral, and for other reasons, I’m sure. But somehow those recollections presented themselves—no, they nudged their way to me—more forcefully, more vividly, along those windswept stretches only a few steps from water too cold to swim, from the first hint of frost through the deceptively mild first days of November.

Then there was the fifteenth. That’s when you knew the winter’d come, and how long and cold it would be. Grandmother—mother’s mother—told me so. The firteenth—the day when an uncle, my mother’s brother—whom I never met—entered the world. She told me—actually, mother told me she said this—that she knew winter’d be long and his life’d be short. And that both would be difficult.

As I’ve been told, he died away from this block, on the opposite end of this planet. Still, he died the same way as all the other boys are snuffed out: from violence carried out by another boy, who may or may not grow up somewhere else. But, because he was taken from this block to a place marked only by two coordinates on a map on the other side of an ocean he never saw until he got on the troop ship that carried him across it, his death seems—no, is—more arbitrary than any other on this block. At least on this block, a boy dies because of something he’s done. He may not’ve recognized its possible consequences at the time, and most often, the act—it may be a single word uttered at the wrong time, in the wrong tone of voice—seems, at least to anybody who hasn’t lived and escaped death here, not to warrant the price of someone’s life, whether at the moment the act was committed or a few years later. Hey, someone can die simply for allying one’s self with someone whom someone else detests.

Even Adam. He died, I’m convinced, because he moved, because of whatever circumstances, here. He may’ve died in the same way, or even on the same date—the night before Christmas Eve—if he’d been someplace else. However, he came to this block: a place that couldn’t ease his, or anyone else’s, pain. It allows you only to hold it down, whether with food, alcohol or other substances, until there’s no other way out.

Of course, he might’ve lived—and died—in exactly the same way as he did in another part of this city, or some other city. Maybe no place in the world could’ve offered him an alternative, or distractions besides children who’d stop by and listen to his stories because he’d give them sodas.

One year, I managed to convince Vivian to take me down to the sea—always near, but never in, the town she showed me—every weekend until the middle of December. Then we went every night, for as long as we could stand the chill and stay awake, until that night: the twenty-third of December.

There was no escape from the wind that night. The completely clear sky and the water, rippled even at low time, reflected the moon and sky. It was all almost too bright for my eyes. Our feet shifted, sank and shoved sand the wind whirled to the backs of our necks.

“I’m tired of carrying these!” I hurled one of my sandals—strappy silver slingback stillettos stolen (no, saved) from a Salvation Army donation box around the first time I met her—with the wind, blowing along the tide toward a spot where it curved and crests of foam crept a few feet closer to the deserted board walk. The glittering shoe I hurled landed in a wave, which receded and left the sandal among shards of rocks and shells. “Damn!” I muttered.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, I dunno. Hey, what do you say we throw a few things out. See who can make them skip.” I’d seen someone do that on TV once.

“Yeah. But you have to throw side-arm.” I never done that before in my life. “How many times can you make it skip before it sinks”

She made a pebble skim across the tops of ripples---I didn’t count how many times—before it disappeared. Then I pulled off my other sandal—They never fit and they looked awful on my feet—sidearmed, like she demanded. But it sank.

“No, you’ve got to do it like this.” I didn’t pay attention. What could I throw next? There was nobody else on the beach, so I could’ve stripped naked and thrown myself in the water. But I kept on the long, flowing gown—really a loose, shapeless smock—and reached underneath to unhook my bra (the first one I’d bought) because it was too tight around the chest even though the cups were too big. And I'd had to pull back my panties up because I’d stretched them. I’d’ve taken the dress off, too—Vivian wouldn’t’ve minded—but I’d already begun to bristle in he chilly wind. And she wanted to get back to her place.

Neither of us spoke on the way back. I remember thinking that the few weeks that preceded that night—from the fifteenth of November, which’d been the coldest in the history of that town, though the milder yet darkening gray days that followed—had been just an interlude.

I wondered if, or when, she’d see the new clothes inside a box of mine that she wouldn’t open. Or the jars I’d stashed inside of them.

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.