She's Not There (18 page)

The conversation we had about how and whether people “choose” to be themselves has stayed with me, though—and it is interesting how you spoke of deciding consciously to become yourself. It was interesting that Barb said she couldn't imagine this, and that the idea of choosing fate like that was strange to her. It gave me the helpful insight that I really did “choose” to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

J

P. S. The letters are pouring in now that I'm out. I'm up to 150 so far. Do I have to write them all back?

[
From Professor Jools Gillson-Ellis. She had been my colleague at University
College, Cork.
]

Dear Jenny,

Blimey. It's better than a new hair cut.

I'm so glad you wrote. Yes—it's true, despite teaching lots of stuff to do with transgendered identities, your news profoundly unsettled me. I thought about you and your family for days. I think my whole psyche had to rework the Jim I knew when you were here in Ireland. I had a sense that something was held back, when you were here. I guess I just wrote it off as busy young parents.

Vittorio (my lovely honey) and I have bought an old cottage by the sea in East Cork. It needs lots of work, and it's still chaos, but we love it. We've only been here since August 1
^st
, and himself is off in Rome visiting his family. So I am alone with the mad neighbours.

For the first few days here, I was writing a letter to you in my head. It was about navigation, and how we sail through life. It was about the absolute primariness of gender, and the utter invisibility of that. It was about the taste of the journey you've taken, and how I wonder at it. It was about my curiosity, and your writing. It was one of the best letters I've ever not written, in fact.

On the beach this morning we found strange sea creatures. They are small translucent ovals. Around their edges, there is a petrol blue skirt, and tiny tentacles. They aren't like jellyfish at all. No one here knows what they are. We think they are a gift from the Gulf Stream. I brought some back to the cottage and sketched them. Strange things wash up on my shores, and you are not the first. I wish you love and a great imagination(!) If you've got this far, I am sure you have the strength to drag the rest of culture with you. It is fucking brilliant being a girl. Welcome.

You'd better bloody visit soon.

Joolser

To: “Jenny Boylan” From: Russo

Boylan—

I too was fascinated by our discussion of choosing to be who we are the last time you were here. I think Barbara was stunned to consider our more fluid and “artful” sense of the self. She possesses very little artifice and even less guile, and she finds these hard to grasp in others. I loved and believed your story about the night you asked Grace to marry you and chose to be James, and I understand, at least theoretically, your metaphor of finally getting out of jail.

What's less convincing, for me at least (and I suspect many of your friends, though I don't want to speak for them), is your claim that Jenny is not a choice—that she just naturally
is,
the way Barbara
is,
or Grace
is.
There are just too many of what seem (again, to me) wrong notes. You say you
are
Jenny, but to me it seems more like Jenny is somebody you need to be and want desperately to be and are determined to be. Like Gatsby, in way. He had to be Gatsby, not Jimmy Gatz, for anything in life to make sense. We've come to use this word
(is)
ironically, to suggest an excellent performance (“Paul Newman
is
Hud!”), even though we know he's an actor. You insist that Jenny is the real you, but you played the other role so long and so convincingly that we can't banish it.

From the beginning of your transition I've been reminded of that fiction writing student we've both had so many times during the course of our teaching careers. He hands in what everyone in the class agrees is an implausible story. Things don't happen this way, we tell him. People don't behave this way. The central plot incident is unbelievable. The kid sits there getting more and more pissed, waiting for his chance to speak. Finally, at the end of the class he says (either to the teacher or the whole workshop), “Yeah, well, you know the thing you say couldn't happen? Well, it really did. And the guy you said wouldn't behave that way? He really did.”

And then the kid leaves the room (usually slamming the door), convinced he's made his point about reality and has proven his detractors wrong. Later, in conference, we try to explain that reality isn't much of a defense when it comes to stories, that his main character wasn't consistent, and that his story isn't going to win many admirers until he begins to come to terms with what's gone wrong in the telling.

Your circumstance as a transgendered person is not a story, and I don't mean to suggest that it is, but we did agree on the deck that night that there are times when we've made decisions about “who to be.” I agreed (then and now) that I've invented (to some significant degree) the self that I use to face the world with. I am, to that extent, a fictional character; the reason I'm reasonably content with the self I created, perhaps, is that, while I'm not an open book, neither am I diametrically different from my fictional self. The reason you became uncomfortable in your created self is that it contained something so far from an essential truth that you couldn't live with it. A change was needed. Granted. Here, you insist, is
the real me,
the me I've kept a secret all these years.

And yet the real you—like the character in the student story— seems mannered, studied, implausible. Your claim that Jenny is real may be true, but it seems almost beside the point. That Jenny is the real you is something that I have to take on faith, because the evidence of my senses suggests the opposite. You may have chosen to be James every day for all those years, but the fact is that you got so good at it that the rest of us can't quite make the shift. You say you were miserable, but that's not what we witnessed. You say Jenny is the real you, but we see an actor learning a role, getting better at it all the time, but it still feels like a role.

It's not that we want you to remain in jail. We just prefer the other story. The one where you seemed happy, where Grace
was
happy. (That you
were
miserable we have to take on faith; that Grace
is
miserable now seems beyond question.) Reality aside (as if this were possible), the workshop (or this one member of it, at least) sees Jenny as not your best work, though it must be conceded (and it's probably the most important point of all) that we're looking at a rough draft, that the real work is ahead in the revision, and that our job is to help the writer arrive at her own conclusion, her own meaning, since finally the story is hers and not ours.

Okay. You said you wanted to know what was going through my mind. Does that still seem like a good idea? Since the afternoon I promised always to be your friend, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what the hell that might mean. Come to that, to whom did I make that promise? I've often considered honesty to be overrated, and the above may be a poor gift.

Russo

Some Pig (Fall 2001)

The band was playing in a place in Waterville called the Dog, which was down in the basement of what used to be the post office a hundred years ago. The door to the women's room had the faded words
Civil Service
stenciled on it in black letters. There was a pool table and a jukebox and flashing “Bud” signs on the wall, Shipyard and Geary's on tap.

The scene was the same as always—girls in their twenties, with navel rings and glitter spray and hair stacked high with Ultra Net; older guys at the bar, staring into their Millers; a few college students with dreadlocks and baggy pants; someone's mom at a booth passing around pictures of her grandchildren, women from the Hathaway shirt factory just getting off the late shift and coming in as a single raucous pack.

We opened the first set with “Rock Me Right,” followed by Nick singing “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” Shell went out into the audience with the remote mike and writhed on people's tables. The veins on her neck bulged as she sang.

Russo and Grace and Barb walked in about halfway through the first set. Shell was dancing on the bar at that point, singing “Respect.” As Rick and the women sat at a booth in the back, Shell swung her arm out suddenly and accidentally smashed a glass light fixture. Everyone applauded.

I was at the front of the stage, sitting behind my keys. I was wearing a black T-shirt top and a black-and-blue skirt, black hose.

Grace and Rick had a pitcher of beer at their table. From where I was sitting, I could see them trying to talk over the blasting music, laughing and drinking.

Rick and I hadn't talked much since we'd exchanged our series of perplexing e-mails. I understood, to some degree, what he'd been getting at, but his words—especially those describing me as “studied,” “mannered,” and “implausible”—stung deeply. I wasn't sure that there was anything I could do or say that would help salvage our friendship. My sense was that if I wanted to have Rick for a friend, I'd just have to get used to accepting his ambivalence. But that wasn't going to be easy—I didn't want my best friend to be ambivalent on the question of my existence. I just wanted to say, like David Tomlinson in
Mary Poppins
, “In the final analysis, it turns out what doesn't exist is
you
.” Which was the British way, I suppose, of saying,
Go to hell.

I'd even decided, in fact, not to introduce him at his Colby reading. Screw him, somebody else could do it. I wasn't in any mood to stand at a podium and sing the praises of a friend who considered me
implausible.

A guy in a black shirt sat at the bar, watching me. His face was surrounded by cigarette smoke. A big chain attached to his belt loop hung down one hip and curled back up into his back pocket. He had a black beard flecked with gray.

We finished “Respect,” and Shell came back up to the stage. “You know what?” she said. “Now that I'm forty, every time I jump up and down? I
pee
a little bit.”

There was a chorus of grossed-out laughter.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nick said, “your host this evening, Miss Shelly LaRoux.”

We kicked into “Don't Tell Me No Lies and Keep Your Hands to Yourself.”

Immediately the dance floor filled. There, gyrating, were all the young chicks with their navel rings, boys dancing with their beers sloshing out of their glasses. One dude, without a date, hunkered by the front of the stage. “It's my birthday!” he explained. “I'm the birthday boy!”

“Spankin' tunnel,”
said Shell.

There was applause as the words
spankin' tunnel
were spoken, and the band launched into “Light My Fire,” which was a song I loved playing, because I got to do a big solo using the Farfisa.

The time to hesitate is through. / No time to wallow in the mire. . . .

Somewhere in the middle of this, I saw Rick and Barb and Grace get up and quietly leave the bar. As they headed out the door, Rick looked at me and nodded. I nodded back and felt a stab of sorrow. I wished I were with them, heading out into the night, instead of sitting here stuck behind my keys.

Shell got about a dozen members of the audience to form a line. Then she ran the birthday boy through the spankin' tunnel.

The man in the black shirt kept watching me as the night went on. He reminded me of a hyena waiting to pick off a wildebeest.

I went into the ladies' room in between the second and third sets. A girl with a pierced lip stood by the sink. “Can I ask you something? Do I look too pale to you?”

We looked in the mirror. “We
both
look pale,” I said. “You think it's the light?”

“It's gotta be,” she said. “I don't really look like this.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I don't look like this, either.”

I left the ladies' room and went back on stage. We started the third set with “Sweet Jane,” which morphed into “Hot Child in the City,” briefly became the
Scooby-Doo
theme song, and wound up, at last, as “Hunka Hunka Burning Love.”

The next time I looked over at the bar, the hyena was gone.

The last tune of the night was “Dirty Deeds” by AC/DC, which is a song that I had never written a part for, so I just sat there with the synthesizer and generated senseless machine noise. Everyone seemed to like that.

We were done by one A. M., bar time, and then we had the usual forty-five minutes of tearing down the equipment, wrapping up the cords, getting the instruments back in their cases. Without any word from me, Jack and Nick had begun, around the time of my transition, carrying my amplifier for me, which was good because the Peavey weighed over a hundred pounds and I could no longer lift it.

The bartender poured me a drink and I sat at the bar watching everyone clearing out. The Red Sox were on television, although their pennant hopes had faded yet again.

“This guy's the designated hitter,” the bartender said, nodding at the screen. “See, in the American League, they allow you to stick one guy in the rotation who just hits.”

“I know what the DH rule is,” I said, annoyed.

“He substitutes for the pitcher,” the bartender continued.

“I know what the DH rule is.”

The bartender dried off a pint glass with a rag. “Purists are against it, you know, but whatever. Keeps the game interesting.” He looked over at me. “You like baseball, sweetie?”

Waitresses swept up broken glass with a broom. An old man wiped off the tables. I looked at the booth where Grace and Russo had been sitting, now empty.

Shell split the money and handed it out to each of us. I had everything in my car except my piano stool. “Good night, everybody,” I said.

“Good night, Jenny,” said Nick, and he came over and gave me a big hug. The feeling of his stubbly face against my neck gave me chills.

“Good night, girlfriend,” said Shell. “Chicks rule.”

I laughed, picked up my stool, and went out to the parking lot.

It was cold outside, and the wind blew my hair around. I walked to my van and unlocked the back while balancing the piano stool with one hand. It was very quiet. If there are places more dead than Waterville, Maine, at two in the morning, I don't know what they are.

“You need some help with that?” said a voice.

He was leaning against a banged-up Ford, parked next to my van. One of the doors was a different color from the rest of the car. He blew some smoke at me.

“I'm all right,” I said, and slammed the hatch. I moved toward my door, but the man with the black T-shirt took a step forward and blocked my way.

“You're sure I can't help you?” he said. “You look like you could use some help.”

“I'm all right,” I said.

“My name's
Max
.”

“Listen,” I said. “It's been a long night. I need to go home.”

“You want to get to
bed
, is that it, Jenny?”

“Listen—”

“I would love to help you get into bed.” He reached out and touched the side of my face.

I shrank back. “Get off of me,” I said.

“Aw, loosen up. Don't you want to
party
, Jenny?” he said. I could smell the beer on his breath. He had a space between his front teeth. Max swayed a little bit.

“I'm going home,” I said. “Okay?”

“Aw, Jesus, why are you such a fucking
bitch
?” he said, and grabbed me by the wrist. I thought he was going to snap my arm in half.

“Let go of me!”

“Relax already. You can't say you haven't been watching me. All night long, you've been checking me out.”

“I haven't,” I said. “Please. I just want to go home.”

“I tell you what, Jenny, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

“If you don't let go of me, I'm going to fucking scream.”

He laughed. “Go on, honey. Scream.”

“Help!” I shouted. Somewhere in the back of my mind, even as I shouted, I thought,
Jesus, it's come to this.
My voice echoed off the silent, empty buildings on Main Street. “Help, somebody!”

No one came. “Okay,” said Max. “You done?”

“No,” I said. “Let me
go
.”

“Come on, you fucking
cunt
,” he said, his face turning red.

This, too, I supposed, was
immersion learning.

Not expecting much, I shoved Max forward. To my amazement, he fell onto the sidewalk, just like that. Neither of us thought I'd had it in me.

I ran into my car, locked the doors, and started the engine. As I pulled out, Max stood up again. He started pounding on the windows of my minivan. I thought he was going to break them.

I drove home, shaking all over. I kept thinking,
What did I do to
him, why did he hate me so much?
Was this what the world was going to be like for me from now on? And another part of me replied,
Yeah,
well, when exactly did surprise set in, Jennifer?

I drove home down Kennedy Memorial Drive and past the three white churches that stand together in a row in Oakland.

As I left Oakland, a pair of headlights appeared in my rearview mirror.

He had his high beams on, and he left them on as he got closer and closer as we drove out into the country. On my left I could see the faint shadows of Snow Pond at the bottom of the hill.

I moved my rearview mirror so that I wouldn't be blinded by the headlights. Still, as I drove at fifty miles an hour toward home, he got closer and closer to me. I wasn't even sure it was Max; I couldn't see the driver's face.

But it was a pretty good bet.

I looked at my gas gauge, well below empty.

The car behind me revved its engine.

I was going to have to stop for gas before I got home, and the only gas station was the Irving station in Belgrade, across from the Town Hall. There wasn't going to be anybody there, either, not at this hour.

I remembered seeing something on television about making a weapon out of your car key, using it as a knife. I imagined trying to do battle with a minivan key. It wasn't going to do much good against a gun. There wasn't much doubt that Max would have a gun in his car, was there?

At the Irving station, a guy with a Harley stood at the pump. I pulled up next to him.

As I got out of my van, Max drove past, leaning on his horn. He held his middle finger up in the air. I heard his horn blaring for a long time as he drove into the distance.

The biker filled his tank and looked at me.

“Nice guy,” he said to me. “Friend of yours?”

“No, he's some
asshole
, he's been following me all the way from Waterville.”

I was still shaking.

The biker looked over at me. “Hey, honey,” he said. “You okay?”

Oh, my God, I thought. Here we go again.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I'm just, totally, fine.”

He got back on his chopper. “Coulda fooled me,” he said.

A few days later, I went down to the Town Hall to change my name on my voter registration. By this point I'd done my driver's license, all my credit cards, my Social Security card, a million things, it seemed. One day a notice appeared in the
Kennebec Journal:
“Notice is hereby given by the respective petitioners that they have filed the following petitions. These matters will be heard at 10 AM or as soon thereafter as they may be on the tenth day of September 2001. The requested actions may be taken on or after the hearing date if no sufficient objection be heard. This notice complies with the requirements of 18-A MRSA Section 3–403 and Probate Rule 4. 01–346 James Finney Boylan to Jennifer Finney Boylan.”

On the same day I became Jennifer, I noticed, Joseph Alden Wilkins, of Oakland, became Joseph Richard Bannerjee. I wondered what
he
was going through.

The ritual at the Department of Motor Vehicles had been relatively subdued. I arrived at the DMV in Augusta with my paperwork, and I went up to the counter and explained the situation, briefly, to the clerk. She was a young woman with freckles, and she looked over my documents and said, “Okay, great.” And proceeded to change my information on the computer screen.

“Oh, and by the way,” I said nonchalantly. “Would you mind changing that M to F while you're at it?”

“Hm? Oh, okay,” she said.
Click.

Changing my voter registration was nearly the last of the many legal details I needed to address in changing names and genders. When I explained the situation to our town clerk, I did so in her office. I gathered from the posters on her wall that she was one of our local Democratic representatives. After I explained what I needed, she got a form and handed it to me. I looked at it for a moment, then said, “Wait. This is the wrong form. This is for changing your political party.”