22. What We Become

On this block, even in this day and age, most women become mothers, sometimes by choice but usually by circumstance. Some become wives—many more, I believe, than would ever’ve chosen such a fate. I always wonder whether I’d still come to such a conclusion had I been born female rather than to a female born. Would I’ve had a child—like the one I once was? Would I’ve wished him—given him—that long garden of childhood everyone wished he’d had or somehow remembers having had? For that matter, what would I make of a boy—or a girl? That is to say, what if I’d had a child who didn’t fall between his or her own nature and what teachers, priests, government authorities and others expect?

Long before I knew I could undergo the transformation I’ll soon culminate, I swore I’d never have children. It’s one of two resolutions—getting away from this block was the other—that I’ve ever stuck to. I knew, even then, I couldn’t bring anyone into this world to the same kinds of conflicts I had, or anything like them. Not that I regret them now: the struggle, the frustrations have turned me into a person who’s embarked on the most exciting, excruciating and ennerving experience one can have, I think, short of giving birth to another human being. Since I’ll never be able to do that (barring a sudden advance in medical technology) even after I’ve completed my transformation, I’ll never know for sure. But, as I said, I still have no wish to bring the needs of another mouth, another pair of eyes, another skin in to being.

I still can only wonder how many mothers…including mother…actually chose the role born to their children…and the role to which they’re always identified.

If you don’t give birth to or raise children, then the world –most men, anyway—will fix one of three labels to you: bitch, whore, dyke. A woman can be a bitch and and dyke, but one who isn’t a whore is a bitch. But somehow, the reverse doesn’t seem to hold true. And perceived lesbianism seems to preclude other two and men profess more hatred—because they feel more fascination—than for all of the other experiences put togther..

I’m curious as to where I’ll fit. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, in a way, because I’m not going to have any more to do with the male species than I have to. Hopefully, I’ll never have to turn tricks again, but I know better than to say “never again.” What I hope, at least now, is that I’ll never have to be of use to anybody again, for any reason or in any way.

21. The Seasons

That first sunny day, after the wind drew away the blanket of clouds that clung to the sky—twisting and tangling it with gray air reflecting the sullen sea and listless, dessicated leaves—filled me with the same fear, the same dread, I’d later feel when I thought mother was going to ask me when I was coming to see her. Sunlight fell and glinted like sleet striking glaciers of mirrors.

Even at such a young age, I could see that the sunlight—and the sun itself—weren’t the same ones that lit the previous November like a dream. The previous year’s light had already faded and dissipated into particles of green, yellow and the colors of bricks that disappeared from view any time I tried to explain them. Perhaps I’ve been fortunate for not having any illusions, ever, that I’m an artist of any sort. Some people think that anyone who gets away from this block, or from any of those other places that consume the youth of anybody who’s had to sleep in them, is a survivor. But I digress—I’ve left only because I could run, even if only for a time in my life. Even if I weren’t going through the transition I’ll soon culminate, I’d never be able to run that fast, for that long, again. Age has something to do with it, and so do the hormones. But I think—hope—the real reason is that I won’t have to run like that again.

But on that day I was describing, there was only raw, naked sunlight—not sunshine. And the cold. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe the barren trees couldn’t feel it. Perhaps everyone’s born into it; that’s why mothers swaddle their babies everywhere in the world, even in climates that resemble the womb. I don’t know whether I was born into that light—I suspect I was. I know for a fact –at least from the most reliable sources I know—that two of my cousins (the ones I know about, anyway) were born in different years but in the same final autumnal shroud just before it was torn away by glinting, glittering cold.

One came just before graying November—the last man related to me, as far as I know. The other I’ve never met: He died on some nameless hill fighting in a country nobody on this block ever thinks about. (At least the women don’t, anyway.) When he was born, somebody—my grandmother, the doctor and my great-aunt say it was one of the others—declared him “not long for this world.” Which was strange because he wasn’t sickly: In fact, he was a larger and hungrier baby than any other born to this block—or so I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that his father—I never met him, either—said that on that day, he knew it was going to be a long, cold winter and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it.

From that year, when I first understood the middle of November (Now I know what Gertrude Stein meant when she said T.S. Eliot “looked like the fifteenth of November.”) I stopped remembering my dreams, except on very rare occasions. I also realized, then, that from that time of year until the spring I wouldn’t see Adam sitting on his stoop again. No one seemed to know what he did. Apparently, he stayed in the house, but nobody knew whether he slept, read books, drank or did some combination of those and other things. Whatever he did, it was hard to blame him: If this sun was too bright for my eyes, I couldn’t imagine how it affected him.

It’s hard to see how he couldn’t’ve been born at this time of year, into gray chill followed by blindingly clear cold. I’d’ve come to such a conclusion even if I hadn’t known his birthdate: what people in America call Veteran’s Day; what others call Armistice Day. On this block, it was probably just another day, just like any other—that’s how it was every year I can remember.

And the day he escaped from the concentration camp: As best he could tell, it was his 24^th birthday. In those shadowy windowless chambers he’d lost track of day and night. It was only much later, when he tried to retrace the march of his days, that he concluded it must’ve been his anniversary, as he called it, or close to it.

He ran, across a frozen river, under the moon. It was the moon; he never mentioned “moon light.” The cold, and the moon—and the wind: They were his only guides as he ran in what he believed to be a direction away from the camp, away from the German Army. After hours—or so they seemed—a truck pulled up alongside him. “Get in!” The voice was in English.

He jumped onto the hay-bale and wheels lurched and rocked him along a road. The same voice later yelled, “Get out!” and soon after he did, the truck disappeared.

Fighting his own reluctance, he walked across a field of frost crystals to a half-timbered house. Inside, about fifteen men in different uniforms clustered around a fire. He didn’t follow the chatter, not only because he couldn’t understand whatever language(s) they spoke: their gathering had the quality of furtive cameraderie forged among people stranded in the same place by different circumstances.

He thought about jumping through the window, back out into the cold. But then he realized that at least two of the men were Americans and that two others, whatever they were, sided with la Resistance. But the realization that he could stay, at least for a while, frightened him almost as much as the thought that those same men could’ve been spies-in-waiting.

Poets love autumn in places like the mountains that surrounded that house. That season fits, almost perfectly, the definition of “melancholy”: a beautiful, gentle—or at least not violent—sadness. But the last flowers lose their grasp on the hillside; the silver air turns gray and the brutal, endless winter begins.

When the absence of the sun’s warmth accompanies an abundance of its light, colors disappear. Or at least one stops seeing them: they, without the filter of haze, seem to disappear; so do the sweet fruits and richly bitter vegetables. For months, he said, they lived on small animals they shot from the windows and dark, coarse peasant bread.

When he’d gotten to that house, he’d had no clothes but the prison uniform he’d worn since the day he escaped. The soldiers gave him cammoflage shirts, wool parachuter’s pants, socks—whatever they could drag up. They were all thicker and heavier than the striped shirt and pants from the camp, but he still felt cold, no matter how long he sat by the fire. Nobody pushed him aside, but he knew that sometimes he had to give the soldiers his space—by agreement, that’s what it was—because only half of them could sit by it at any given time.

It amazed me—but not him—that nobody came looking for him. In fact, no battalions, not even any individual soldiers, marched through that village for almost five months.

But the river he crossed melted; buds opened blood-red and the air filled with haze. Eventually, there were berries and other fruits, but neither he nor the other men could stay and eat them.

20. Gray Escapes

 

Three days, gray everywhere I looked. The bridge glinted because it was a brighter shade than the water, the sky—or the air, as shorn as the branches and growing colder, sharper each day, like a dull ache that throbs into pain.

Brutal, endless winters began with November days like those. And that year was no exception, except that I had no way of knowing that. I knew only that I’d felt as brittle as the wind breaking against waves under the bridge as cables wound around each other, carrying lots of people away from this place, this block—or through it, so they’d never have to see it.

The cold wasn’t so bad. At least it gave me a chance to cover myself—mother never had to tell me to put my coat or gloves on. No, I didn’t mind it when I got to cover everything except my eyes.

In those days—not so long ago, really—nobody wore sunglasses except movie stars and gangsters. Mother’d never wanted me to become either, and she didn’t have to worry about that. But with nothing to cover my eyes, the steely reflections that surrounded me were too much sometimes. I asked whether I might be going blind; it was the one time I can recall my mother using the word “foolish” in reference to me. Sometimes tears’d flicker down my face—really, I wasn’t crying. I wouldn’t’ve—at least, not about that, the secret I never told her. But I’m sure she always knew.

It was turning into a secret from me, too. Already, at an age when one is much too young for nostalgia, the previous year—when it seemed we were spending weekends going to and from the cemetery—already looked like a paradisiacal garden about to be lost. The sunlight and warmer air of the previous season, the previous year, had already begun to grow diffuse and ephemeral, like the illumination of dreams,, which is the very reason that season’s light didn’t seem as harsh and relentless as that of the following year, separated from me and its source by glimmers of clouds.

The previous year, my grandfather—the last man on this block related to me—died. Actually, he’d died in the spring, at the very beginning of the season, on a day not much different from the one I’ve been recalling, and it wasn’t so much his death as his absence that I noticed. Even then, when people I knew were “away”—and somehow I thought that was where my grandfather was—I could take solace, in surroundings. To this day, there’s no light that comforts me as much as the flickerings that follow the autumnal equinox in cemeteries.

But it seemed that in the following year, I saw no such light—only lines reflected in opaque mirrors. And I couldn’t escape: You can’t, as long as metallic reflections surround you. You’ve no choice but to cover yourself in the iron gray cloak that wraps around the hills and treetops, no matter what clothes you gathered after you’ve been taken naked but unable to scream into a place where a window opens in directions from which nobody else can see you.

Then you come back out. You’ve been told not to talk about it, but that wasn’t necessary because you won’t know how to for a long time. You won’t remember why, or if, thee was a reason why your body reacted as it did.