She's Not There (19 page)

“Oh,” she said. “I'm sorry. Wrong form.”

Then she took that away and gave me another one. When I finished I said to her, “You know, you're being awfully nice about this.”

She said, “Whatever, Jennifer. It's no big deal. Just as long as you aren't going
Republican
on us.”

Grace and I were driving down to Freeport, to shop at L. L. Bean. I looked over at her. “You're pretty tough, aren't you,” I said.

“That's what everybody says,” said Grace.

“I can't believe you're so strong.”

“I'm not strong,” Grace said. “I'm just surviving.”

“Well, I think you're amazing. Most people would have left me a long time ago.”

“Well, I'm not most people.”

“Can I ask about the surgery? Is that okay?”

Grace sighed. “Sure,” she said. “We can talk about the surgery.”

“Well, you'd said once that you weren't sure how far with me you could go. You'd said that maybe you could stay with me just that far, but that that was the breaking point. Is that still how you feel?”

“Do you want the surgery, Jenny?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“Well, you should have it,” she said. “I mean, there's no reason not to.”

“Yeah, but— If this one thing would keep us together, I'd be willing not to do it.”

Grace laughed sadly. “Jenny, that's not what's keeping us together. It doesn't make any difference at this point, does it?”

I didn't say anything.

“Does it?”

I shook my head.

We headed up to Freeport Studio, the high-end women's line at Bean's. I was standing before a three-way mirror, examining the fit of a dress, when I heard a voice behind me. “Boy,” a woman said, “wouldn't you love to look like
that
?”

I turned around, and there was a customer talking to the sales clerk. The two of them were looking at me. “You're kidding,” I said.

“Of course I'm not kidding,” the woman said. “I'd
kill
for your body.”

“Believe me,” I said, turning around. “You don't want this body.”

“Isn't this typical of women?” said the customer to the clerk. “We're never satisfied with ourselves.”

I took a plane to Wisconsin to meet Dr. Schrang. We had an interesting conversation. “Oh, my patients are all very pleased with their vaginas,” he observed. The doctor gave me a unique examination. At length he nodded. “You'll make a nice woman,” he said cheerfully. “You're excellent material.”

I was excited about the surgery. I was also scared of it—scared of the pain, scared of the unknown. Still, looking at photographs of the results of Dr. Schrang's work, I had to agree that he was very, very good at what he did. Of his patients it was frequently said, “Even your gynecologist can't tell the difference.” Or, in the words of transgendered author Kate Bornstein, “The plumbing works, and so does the electricity.”

“I have three goals for you, postsurgery,” Schrang said. “I want you to be
sensate
,
mucosal
, and
orgasmic
.”

Sensate, mucosal, and orgasmic, I thought. It sounded like the blurb on a book, one I probably wouldn't want to read. At least not in hardcover.

On a Saturday morning a few weeks later, I was drinking Bloody Marys with a dozen of my mother's closest friends, most of whom I had known since I was a child. Mom had decided that the best way to deal with the issue of her problem child was to have a coming out party for me. There were cucumber sandwiches and crackers with cheese.

My mother's friends arrived, one and two at a time, and got a good look at me. One of them exclaimed, “For heaven's sakes, Jennifer. You make a damn fine broad!”

I talked to them all, briefly, about what it meant to be transgendered. I then went on to say, “Look, it doesn't really matter if you get this or not. You don't even have to like me. The important thing is Mom needs you right now, and more than ever she deserves the support of her friends.”Without exception, they all pledged their love to her and, in some cases, to me.

It took only about fifteen minutes for everyone to loosen up. Following the by-now-standard pattern, her friends there who had no memory of me as a man had nothing to get used to. And the others did their best to follow me to the place I had gone. In the end it was easier than they had expected.

They had come to my mother's house as a favor. Before they left, they were doing my colors and trying to sell me Mary Kay products.

That night, Mom and I went out for dinner. Before we left I gave her a photo album of moments from her entire life, and she was deeply moved by it. I'd even found her high school yearbook photo, and we agreed, with some shock, that I looked now very much the way she had looked in her twenties. Then we made gin and tonics and sat at the piano, the same piano where I'd played “Mrs. Robinson” for the Vietnam Santa over twenty-five years ago.

We sang “My Favorite Things” together. Then we went on to “You Are My Sunshine.” The tears rolled down our faces.

At dinner, we sat by a large fire in the crowded restaurant and drank red wine. I finally said something to her like “By the way, Mom, I'm sorry about the whole woman business.”

And she said, without missing a beat, “I'm not.” She raised her glass. “I am so proud of my beautiful daughter. Cheers.”

We clinked glasses.

Later that night I lay in bed, thinking of what she had said.
I am
so proud of my beautiful daughter.
It made me feel good. Then, I thought,
Jesus, I hope she wasn't talking about my sister.

Of my sister, all that should be said here is that her reaction to the situation was very different from my mother's. I wrote her a lengthy letter in January of 2001, explaining things as best I could and asking for her understanding and her love. She wrote back a month later, saying she didn't want to know me anymore. She hasn't spoken to me since.

Mom thinks she'll come around, though.

One day in the fall, a professor of medieval literature stopped me in the hall and asked if I minded a question. I didn't mind, and since she was a professor of medieval literature, I presumed the question would be interesting, since professors of this period are almost required by the Modern Language Association to be completely insane. The previous professor of medieval literature was a guy with a long ponytail who had written his thesis on the confluence between the works of Chaucer and gangsta rap. He'd been the lead guitarist in Diminished Faculties, in fact, at least until our geologist harmonica player was denied tenure.

Anyway, the professor pulled me aside and said, “Can I just ask you—how do you learn to put on makeup? I mean, can you go to a school?”

I mumbled something about going to the Clinique counter and giving them your credit card.

But she interrupted me and said, “No, no, I mean I own makeup. I just don't know how to wear it, you know? I mean, you look great. Are you wearing makeup right now?”

I allowed as how I might be.

She said, “That's the thing, you don't look like you're wearing makeup. Me, I always look like a little girl playing with her mother's cosmetics. See, you look like a normal woman in makeup. Me, I look strange and artificial. How do you explain that?”

I told her it just took practice, but she wasn't convinced. Fortunately, she had to go teach a class, or we could have been there for a few more hours. I did think, as I walked toward my car, that it was interesting that genetic women didn't necessarily know anything more about this than I did. As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves.

One afternoon, Russo and I were back in the Seadog in Camden, drinking Old Gollywobbler. Barbara was out of town. The Yankees were on television. We finished our pints, talking shop for a while.

A waitress came by. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

“I'll have another pint,” Rick said. “And get him whatever he wants.”

The waitress looked confused. “Who?”

Rick blushed.

“He's talking about his invisible friend,” I said.

“Do you want anything, miss?”

“I'll have another one, too.” The waitress walked off.

Rick looked at me, strangely emotional. “Sorry,” he said. “You're not invisible, Boylan.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Are we okay?” Russo said. “You and me?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Some of those e-mails we swapped were kind of awful, I think.”

Russo shook his head. “I was afraid you'd think that. I told you, Boylan, I've never had a very high opinion of the truth.”

“I'll tell you what, Rick. I don't mind being called ‘studied' and ‘mannered.' But ‘implausible'? That hurts.”

He looked saddened. “Maybe that's the wrong word.”

“I mean,
you—
some kid from Gloversville, New York, the glove-making capital of the world, who winds up a famous novelist?—you think
I'm
implausible?”

“Okay, it's
definitely
the wrong word.”

“Hell, Rick. Isn't this the reason we become writers, our understanding that all sorts of implausible things turn out to be true? Just because we can't believe them, or understand them, doesn't mean they aren't real.”

“You sound like that kid in the workshop again,” Rick said.

“I'm not a kid in a workshop, goddammit,” I said. “I'm a real person, someone with a condition so strange, it seems to make me into a work of fiction.” I was yelling at him now, and I paused to catch my breath. “But I'm not a work of fiction. I'm your friend, and I need you.”

Russo was quiet for a long time. “You know what it is,” he said at last. “It's not just learning about . . . the woman stuff, that's hard. I've almost caught up with that. But unlearning that you're not a man anymore—that takes longer. I have a long history with you that I don't especially want to give up. Jesus, I
liked
you as a man.”

“Rick,” I said, “you don't have to give up your history.”

“I don't know about that, Boylan. In some ways, I do, at least my history as I understood it at the time. But giving up history isn't the same as giving up memory. It's just hard.”

He drank from his pint. “You know what it is? If learning is hard, unlearning is harder. You just have to be patient, all right? I'm a slow unlearner.”

I nodded. “Don't worry, Russo,” I said. “We'll always have Paris.”

A few weeks later, I stood before a roomful of people, introducing my friend, comparing our time at Colby together to life inside the barn in Charlotte's Web—the nearness of rats, the friendship of spiders, and the glory of everything. “It's not often you have a good friend who is also a good writer,” I said, quoting Wilbur the Pig. “Charlotte was both.”

Russo took to the podium as I sat down, and he looked at me sitting there in the audience, smiled, and said,
“Some pig.”

On Halloween I entered Lorimer Chapel with my old friend Charles Bassett; I was wearing a long black dress and a witch's pointed hat, a battery-operated raven on one arm. Bassett, who liked to call the people he loved “toad,” was perhaps Colby's most beloved professor, an adorable old grouch who had pretty much invented American studies single-handedly. Together we'd been reading ghost stories for students in the chapel on Halloween for over a dozen years now, and it was a tradition I wasn't going to give up.

It was the first time most of my students had seen me since transition, though, and as Bassett and I walked down the aisle of the chapel, the building lit only by candles and jack-o'-lanterns, I felt the weight of their gaze upon me.

For a moment I thought,
I can't do this. I'm not going to make it.

Then we arrived on stage. The place was filled. There were students in the organ loft, in the pews, in the upper balconies. Some of them were even sitting cross-legged on the floor before the pulpit.

According to our tradition, I opened the reading, and Bassett was the closer. So as he sat in his chair, I went up to the microphone and said, “Good evening.”

Just at that moment I felt a sudden inspiration. I knew I wanted to say something, but on the other hand, I hadn't wanted to say too much, either. So I looked over at Charlie and said, “Hey, is it just me, or does Charlie Bassett look really different from last semester?”

There was some nervous laughter. Bassett rubbed his face with his palm and muttered, “Don't do this, Jenny.”

I was touched he'd remembered to use the right name.

“No, I'm serious,” I said into the mike. “Doesn't he look different? Man, Bassett! You've really changed!”

This time everyone laughed. They got the joke. Bassett sat there grimacing.

“Oh well,” I said. “I guess he's still the same person inside.”

And with that, the entire place went nuts. They burst into applause. They cheered and hollered and stamped their feet. Bassett looked over at me and smiled.

“Boylan,” he said, “you're still a toad.”

I went to the credit union to have my name changed on the account I kept there. I told the manager I needed to change my name.

“Did you get married?”

“No.”

“Oh—divorced?”

“No. See, the thing is, my name used to be James. Only now it's Jennifer.”

The manager looked at me over the top of her glasses. “You were named James?”

I nodded.

She put the glasses on her desk. “I don't understand—did your parents want a boy?”