47. Nakedness

Somehow I always knew that if I’d ever seen the ocean, I couldn’t come back to this block. The sea was only three miles away, but I got my first glimpse of it from a plane. By then, I was far away from the beach where the Puerto Ricans and Blacks –but nobody from this block—went.

I had no idea what people looked like when they sunbathed, swam or simply fidgeted about on the sand. I’d seen pictures, heard stories about them, about waves that turned and spread their skin over sand. Nobody on my block went to the beach—not to that one, anyway.

Never could I understand why anyone would want to take off most of their clothes in front of total strangers. Or—especially—in front of people they lived with.

I can’t remember mother or I seeing each other without clothes. I’m sure she saw me, when I was a baby, perhaps in that part of my childhood that returns in dreams I don’t remember.

And mother: She must’ve known—or did she?—about the rape: she never made me strip. She didn’t even mention the calls the dean made—I know, I saw him—when a gym teacher sent me to the dean’s office because I wouldn’t go into the locker room and change my clothes. Oh, those nuns could be so unpredictable and sadistic. But, no matter how badly they treated us, they never made us take off our clothes.

I’ve since heard that in junior high or high schools everywhere, boys and girls go to their respective locker rooms and change from their pants or skirts and sweaters to T-shirts and shorts. And at the end of gym class, everyone takes off his or her gym clothes and showers. No way I wanted to shower in front of all those boys—or the gym teacher. And I told the dean so. And every week or so, after I’d spent a few days worth of gym classes in the dean’s office (or didn’t go to school at all), I’d be back, and the cycle would begin again.

I don’t know what mother told that dean or gym teacher. But, like I said, I never heard about it from her.

And the first time I saw the ocean, from a plane, I’d taken off only my shoes. In fact, I put on a jacket I carried with me—Why are planes so cold inside? By the time I saw the ocean for the first time, then, I didn’t have to think about or fear my own nakedness, for I had exposed my body—for money. They never looked, except perhaps for a moment, at my flesh. It was there for them to touch, grab, pull, for as long as they rented it.

At first, I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—I’d experienced it only in the basement of that abandoned house down the block, with Rob. Most of the customers were close to the age Rob was when he raped me. Though I experienced no pleasure—I wouldn’t’ve known what that felt like in my body—they were still somehow different from Rob, and not just because they paid.

They paid, and left me alone. They probably wouldn’t’ve known me in daylight, or acknowledged me if they did. They probably wouldn’t’ve looked at me even if I approached them stark naked and stopped them.

They probably would’ve ignored me on the beach, too. I wasn’t offering; they weren’t buying. Of course, they never would’ve gone to the beach near this block, or any one in this state, on this shore, for that matter.

One of them wanted to take me there. For pay, of course. It tried the litany of excuses: I didn’t know how to swim, I burned easily and my eyes and skin were really sensitive to sand. “It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “But you must pay first,” I told him.

I set my fee, he paid and on the day of our scheduled rendez-vous, I was nowhere nearby, nowhere where he could find me. His fee was enough for the plane ticket. I had no idea of what I’d do when I got off the plane, but somehow that didn’t matter.

Getting that ticket was surprisingly easy. They ask where you’re going so they know how much to charge you; they don’t ask what you’re doing once you get there. You just go. And, in my case, it meant crossing the ocean, seeing the ocean. No one tried to get me to the beach, take off my clothes, not unless they were going to pay for it. Even then…

46. Destinies

I wonder whether mother ever had a moment when she knew, for that moment and all others in her life, exactly what she’d be. Mother. Could she’ve avoided it, changed it, ended her life or begun it again? Mother, another life on this block, for the moment, for every moment she, the woman whose name I never knew and the voices—I thought I’d escaped them, but I’m hearing them again—stayed here. Did she ever think it could or couldn’t’ve been any other way? In short, did she think she might or might not’ve had a choice.

I don’t remember her ever criticizing other people, or second-guessing the decisions they made. Not that they always made her happy—not that I always did so, I’m sure—or that she agreed with them.

How else could she’ve, for all the years that’ve just ended, kept herself from asking about the changes in my voice, or what the voice said? Perhaps she saw those transformations—part of the bigger, longer one in which I’m about to reach a major turning point—as inevitable. As I realized they were, one day.

Nothing’s as scary—no, terrifying, in the way of a near-death experience—as knowing exactly who and what you have no choice to become. Well, for some—like me, anyway—it’s traumatic in part because there’s no way to prepare for the experience or what you learn from it.

I realized, of course, that I’d do what I’ve been doing for the past few years. I had no vision of time: I could see myself as a woman in the present moment, but I knew that I might still be living as a man ten, twenty years hence. Gradual transformations—the prospect of them, anyway—generate more anxiety because it’s harder to see the stages than the end (at least, the end one hoped for or imagined) of such a journey.

I knew that I’d no choice but to “turn” female, though I had no idea of what or whom that would mean. My mother? Mrs. Littington? The lady whose name I never knew? The nuns?—oh, kill me first!

Wait a minute. None of them lived with men, I realized. (I don’t recall seeing Mr. Littington.) They didn’t have to have children who would be abandoned by the men who fathered them. They didn’t have to get fucked, literally and figuratively by men. Or did they? They still could be raped, after all, and have other people’s children.

Still, most of them lived in a world without the male race—except the ones they taught or raised. No men, and they were women. Only the children interrupted their cloistered calm. Now I know why nuns were so mean to kids!

Still, nobody’s ever been able to explain why Sister Martha O’Connan slapped Amy Deirian across the hand with a yardstick when she refused to—no, the truth is, she couldn’t—put her hand down for more than half hour. She grimaced, her skin turned red and she began to cry the lonely, desolate moan of someone who knows she’s not going to get help because nobody’s there to give it or even to explain what’s happening. Actually, there was one—Sister Martha—who could, but to this day, I don’t understand why she didn’t.

She struck Amy, who would’ve furled into a fetal shape if there hadn’t been a desktop between her head and knees. Tears dripped, slowly, like wax from a candlestick, down her fingers cupped over her face, which her arms propped on the desk across the aisle from mine. I glanced downward as the blood oozed from her seat to the floor and crept toward the book basket underneath my seat.

Through the ensuing weeks and months, other girls, some of whom snickered into the palms of their hands when Amy bled, would meet Amy in a corner of the playground at lunch time. First there was Melissa Farrington, a pale girl who was repeating the sixth grade because she missed two months of school the year before. Then Joanna Torres, a plump, dark girl who, according to the aunt who was raising her (One never heard about the parents or grandparents.) never “got into trouble” because she came directly home from school and wasn’t allowed out again unless she finished her homework before it got dark. Even for someone as dutiful as Joanna, such a feat was impossible, at least from some time around All Saint’s Day (when we were supposed to go to church) until Easter or thereabouts.

I wasn’t surprised when Stacy Sunnyfield joined them: She was always trying to win a popularity contest that nobody was running, at least not officially. But I saw, at a glance, that her face bore a more thoughtful, less calculating and expression and that she hardly talked at all.

Although nobody explained what she or the other girls in that new clique were doing, I knew somehow that Amy’s blood brought them together.

The following year—or maybe it was two years later—Joanna’d moved, or been moved, to some other relative, I don’t know where. All I know is that the relative was male because I heard he raped her. Abortion was out of the question, so she was moved again, to some other place. And neither I nor any of the other kids heard about her again.

By the time I left this block, not only Joanna, but also Stacy, already had children. Melissa didn’t only because getting fucked didn’t improve her health, as some smooth-skinned man twice her age promised. Amy was gone, too, but I never found out where she went…except to the yard, like the cemeteries on either side of this neighborhood, where everyone remained as I knew the: not safe, not immutable, but touched by nothing but the moon , which I am bound to follow.

That, by the way, is—at least as best as I can tell—the light of those few dreams I can remember. It’s like seeing shadows of moonlight during the day.

Back to those girls: Whenever a boy stood on their periphery or anywhere near it, at least one of the girls would flash the stare of someone who could kill or knew someone who would. A lot of men say they see that look on Sunday afternoons, when they take themselves away from the football game on TV long enough to go to the kitchen for a drink and they find their mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts gathered around the table as dinner simmers.

The only woman from whom I’ve ever gotten such a reaction was the one whose name I never knew, when she was talking with my mother. But I never encountered it, oddly enough, from those girls on the playground. I don’t think they liked me better than the other boys in the class. I take that back—Joanna did, or at least once she told me so. I stood, my head tilted slightly forward, like the girls who hadn’t yet entered their circle, but would.

The last time I tried to play basketball with the boys on the playground—because Father Byrnes, who taught catechism to those of use who were about to “become confirmed as soldiers of the Lord” said I should—Tom Rupett, my height and weight in solid muscle, flung the ball at the side of my head. When I fell, two other boys—maybe more—ran and threw punches at me. “We don’t want no sissy boys here,” one of them growled. “Yeah, go to the girls, where you belong,” snorted another.

By then, I knew better than to believe that one of the boys would pick me for his team or include me in their “parties,” which included everything from going to old Lenny’s store and helping themselves to whatever they wanted to fights with kids from other blocks, if I spent time by the court, played and started a conversation with one of the boys. I forget who told me that, and I’m not sure which was more misguided: that person’s method of making friends or his notion that I wanted to play basketball or any other game with those boys.

If that person—whomever he or she was—had known what I knew about myself at that moment, he or she probably would’ve tried as hard as I did to wish it away, forget about it, “train it out” of me or to deny it in some other way. After I left this block, I met people who left families whose members ridiculed, beat or tried to kill them when they realized there was no way to deny what was in their bones.

“If I know, everybody else must know.” I don’t remember where or when I heard or read that. But, recollecting those days one more time, before mother, I know they had to’ve known. At least some of them did, anyway. Mother, certainly—I can’t think of any other reason why she didn’t fight it, why she kept me in the kitchen. Possibly those girls—and the boys, too—knew. But, even if you believe in their God, how can you ask him to “say it ain’t so.”

I don’t know whether Adam knew my destiny, or whether knowing it would’ve stopped him from beckoning me over to his stoop to drink soda and listen to his stories. If he understood, he also would’ve understood that it couldn’t’ve been prayed away or exorcised in any other way. The woman, the girl in the chimeric embryo of a boy, or what appeared to be a boy: Could he’ve seen that? Or maybe—I know this is a wild guess, as Adam’s been dead a long time—he saw his own life in me. He couldn’t stay in the house in a Polish town to which he returned, he said, in his dreams—“but so different, like an accident let it.” Soldiers marched him and his family away; other soldiers burned it. And the synagogue where he had his bris, his bar mitzvah—it closed its doors forever because there wasn’t even a minyan—ten men—left in the town. Somehow the building survived a Nazi-ignited firestorm, he said. Or at least that’s what he heard. He never knew for sure, because he’d never gone back, as he knew he never would.

He once told me, “You leave. You don’t come back.” Somehow, in the way he said it—in that almost-British accent inflected with, I would learn later, the French vowels and German rhythms prewar Continental Europeans learned in gymnasium—told me, in its otherworldliness (at least in comparison to anybody else on this block) that “you” meant “me.”

45. Why We Cannot Reunite

 

Mother has now accomplished something I didn’t think she’d even try to do: For the first time in my life, I’m part of a reunion.

Or am I? I’m here with a bunch of other people who lived on this block and who—with the exception of that woman whose name I never knew—haven’t been here in many, many years.

So I suppose some people would call it a reunion. Except that we haven’t been reunited. We never will be because we were never joined, save for the fact of having lived on this block. Mother and the woman whose name I never knew never left and, as far as I know, never disconnected their relationship, which of course was a consequence of living on this block. They talked about things they never talked with anybody else, including me. Now that mother’s gone, I don’t know who else she’ll talk to, if anybody. Somehow I imagine she won’t have any reunions after today.

For that matter, I don’t know if I’ll ever have one. I didn’t graduate from any school or participate in any of those other rites of passage that seem to mark other people’s lives. No war, no marriage, no Manhattan Project. In fact, I haven’t stayed on any job or lived in any place long enough to develop a camaraderie with anyone.

Then again, I’ve been told that I’ll never develop such relationships, no matter how long I live or work with anyone. I wonder if he—my guidance counselor—ever knew about Louis’s rape, or that I knew about it. In any event, he made his judgment of me not long after it happened, which was not long before I stopped going to school for good.

Funny, though, how he never talked to me about staying in school. I remember another time when I had a conference with him—I forget exactly why, but I think it was about my always low-but-still-falling grades—when I told him I wouldn’t be around for very long. “I know,” he said.

I’d already made up my mind that I was getting out of that school the first chance I got, but I still don’t know whether that’s what he meant. He was known for giving his one-sentence assessments: “You’re not staying in this neighborhood” or “It’ll be the Army or jail for you.” Then, I’d’ve accepted either to get out of that school and off this block. But his most famous one-liner, which he bestowed on one of the cheerleaders, was, “See you at the reunion.”

If he’d told me that, I don’t know whether I would’ve heard it as a sentence or a challenge. A dare, maybe—and only because I’d already developed such a thorough contempt for the place and almost everyone in it, including him. Somehow, I don’t think anybody said, “He inspired me” after spending sessions with him in his office or, in his earlier years, his social studies classes. Then again, maybe he did inspire, or at least motivate, somebody for all I know. But there’s nobody I can point to and say, “He (or she) inspired me.”

Sometimes mother instructed. Other times she empathized. But inspired, no. Adam--as much as he tried (and as much as he could) cultivate a companionship with me-- never could’ve motivated me because I knew, even before he stuck his head in that oven, that I would never, in any way, become a man who resembled him. Then again, I never expected to become a man—or even get to where I am now, on the brink of my sexual reassignment surgery—because I’ve never seen anyone do that on this block.

For that matter, I never saw anybody become a woman, or grow or change in any significant way on this block. Of course, when we’re children, we can’t imagine our parents as children, no matter how many photos we see or stories we hear about them from that part of their lives. But my mother: it seemed that she had been born as she is, as my mother. As, in other words, the one I’d always known and will probably recollect for the rest of my life. I say “probably” instead of “will” simply because predicting the course of anything in my life has never been a talent or skill of mine.

And then—then what? I’ve never had any faith in any of the religions that entangled my mother and other people and purport to teach what happens in this life and show or warn us what happens after it. According to the nuns and the brother, in whose classes I sat for as long as mother could afford it, she and I’lll be together again—or at least we’ll re-encounter each other—if both of us lead moral or immoral lives. Or we’ll be together again for a while, then part and possibly reunite later on if one of us has to purge more than the other.

If I survive the operation—I expect to, though I may become someone I can’t imagine now—there’s no way, I think, we’ll be together again. I was sent to this planet male; according to the teachings I got, I can’t enter the kingdom female. Or that’s how it seems, anyway. As far as I know, my mother didn’t commit any sin deemed irredeemable by the old men who run the church. Then again, I never quite knew whether she’d been married to, or divorced, the one who fathered me. Well, I had his last name all through school, so I don’t know; I guess they were married. Then again, she never used his name, except to enroll me in school.

I never asked mother about him, about his name. In time—not much—I realized my situation was different from what was supposed to be and I came to my own ideas about how it came to be. I knew that, one way or another, they weren’t married for all the time I can remember. I didn’t need to know anything else, really.

Maybe that’s why I never had what most people think of as curiosity. When you learn what you need (or want) to know without asking questions, you don’t learn how to ask questions. And you never expect to learn the truth about anything, about anybody, by asking questions.

When you don’t expect to know anybody long enough to be curious or need to know, you lose the need and the desire to ask questions. You don’t wonder what will become of somebody, mainly because you don’t know whether you’ll survive long enough to find out. Or whether your life will be entangled with someone else’s for long enough so that any of it matters.

Then there’s no point to meeting somebody again five, ten twenty or however many years later. I read or heard, I’m not sure of which, that people who don’t go to their school reunions don’t form long-lasting relationships throughout their lives. Well, I guess I’m another ticker on that statistical table. Maybe I can’t predict the future, but I don’t expect to come back to this block again after we bury mother. For that matter, I don’t think anyone else—except for that woman whose name I never knew—will ever be on this block again.

I’ve the feeling I probably won’t be at another funeral, except my own, if anybody decides to have one. It doesn’t matter to me, and how could it once I’m gone? But I can’t speak for other people.

I expect—I didn’t say think, much less anticipate or predict—that barring some accident or disaster, no one who knows me will die before I undergo the operation to complete my transformation. So mother’s the last person to know me only by my current name, a label chosen for the vessel I’ve inhabited through these years. For a good many years, she’s heard my voice only over the phone. Still, it was the voice of the boy, the young man, she raised. As time went on, of course, I wasn’t as young or as much of a man as the one who inhabited her house, ate her and ate her food. Had she seen me, I’d’ve borne less and less resemblance to the one she birthed.

But, I guess she’d’ve recognized me. And that’s the reason why our relationship continued only over the telephone through the years. I know this; I stayed away because I didn’t want to be around anyone who’d recognize the boy, the man, I once was, even if they could see and understand who stood before them and what that person—I-- was becoming. For no one, including me, ever recognizes what is present. And there’s no way to reunite with it, and sometimes no way to connect with it in the first place.