She's Not There (20 page)

“My parents— No, wait. See, my parents got a boy. I used to be a boy. Now I'm female. I had my name changed.”

“You're saying you used to be a boy?” she said, looking at me very carefully.

“Uh-huh.”

“Huh,” she said, and started typing into her computer. “Okay, well, this is simple enough. We'll just change your name in the data field here—”

“While you're doing that, can I ask you a question? You know how I have this money deducted from my paycheck and deposited each month? I started doing it when I had a lien on my car, until I paid it off. . . .”

“Right. The Audi.”

“Yeah. Well, I'm having surgery this spring—you know,
the
surgery—”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, I wanted to know if I could write one big check for the surgery, and slowly pay it back out of this account. You know, like I did with the car?”

She thought about it. “No, ah—I don't think so.”

“But why not?”

“Well, Ms. Boylan—don't you see—with the car we had the car itself as collateral. If you'd defaulted on the loan, we could have asked for the car back. If you defaulted on this . . . well, what could we take? I mean, what could we get back from you as collateral?”

We looked at each other for a long moment, and then she started to turn deep red. Then we both laughed.

“Well, you can have that, if you want it so badly,” I said.

“No, no,” she said. “It's just that we'd have to charge you—interest—on it.”

“You don't think it would give you any interest?”

She wiped her forehead with a tissue, then went back to her computer screen. “Fortunately,” she said, “that's not my department.”

Persons Such as Themselves (Fall 2001)

The first thing we do in support group is go around the circle for “check-in.” It's an unusually low turnout this month. We're down to only five of the twenty, plus the therapist who acts as moderator. Ted, the leader, was having a good week. Ted, who used to be Eleanor, has a big black beard and muscles like a lumberjack. He's dating a girl named Candy, who used to consider herself a lesbian but isn't quite sure anymore. Ted has a deep, growly voice and a rich laugh. He was just promoted to foreman at Central Maine Power, where he's worked for years fixing downed power lines.

You'd never know in a million years that Ted used to be a woman. It's hard enough to believe he was ever even clean-shaven.

Millicent was also having a good week. She had her operation nine years ago. Her husband, George, comes to the meetings once in a while, but not to this one. Millicent is a secretary at a law firm, has two children from a previous marriage, and is in an all-women's bowling league called Pins N Needles.

Victoria's doing all right as well, which is good because we worry about Victoria. I don't know Victoria's real name, although no one other than the members of the support group calls her Victoria. She isn't “out” at all and comes to the meeting looking just like another guy you'd see on the street. She has thick stubble, sideburns, hairy arms, a low voice, and one pierced ear. Victoria dreams of the day she too will be female, but she is afraid of losing everything, and this is not so unlikely, given the fact that Victoria's wife has said that she will phone the police if Victoria ever so much as even
mentions
this topic again.

Then there's me. I tell everyone I'm okay but that sometimes I feel incredibly alone. Everyone nods.

Finally we get to Trudy. Trudy is young, about twenty-three. She is shockingly beautiful—about five six, with long blond hair, beautiful legs. Trudy isn't out, either, although how anyone could look at her and see a man is beyond me. On the other hand, I've only seen Trudy as Trudy, so I don't really know what she looks like.

“Well, I've been having a hard time,” says Trudy, and she says this in a deep male voice. The voice is Trudy's weak spot. We keep urging her to call my friend Tania, the Bates professor, but Trudy isn't sure. She says she doesn't want to sound all
fakey.

“Tell us about . . . ‘hard time,'” says Andrea, the social worker who sits in at our support group. Andrea is a middle-aged woman with an iron gray braid. She has Benjamin Franklin–type glasses that usually rest on top of her hair like a headband.

“Well, okay,” says Trudy. “First of all, like, I got fired at work.” This isn't news, since Trudy's been on the verge of termination at the paper factory for some time. She's in charge of quality control for a manufacturer of paper plates, and apparently some of the products she's approved for shipping have had visible pieces of bark and unprocessed pulp in them. “They gave me a warning, then said they wanted to talk to me about the situation, then they just called me in and fired my ass! I went ballistic, punched out Larry, then threw his computer out the window. It was like a bloodbath, with the glass from the window all over, and Larry running around holding his bloody nose, plus—you won't believe this—when the computer went out the window it almost hit this old guy, and now
he's
out shouting on the sidewalk like I was
aiming
it at him.”

Andrea nods her head sympathetically and says, “That sounds hard, Trudy.”

“Fuck yes, it was hard, so they fuckin' fire my ass out of there, tell me to take my vending machine with me, and not only that but now I can't get unemployment because you can't get it if you got fired for whatever you call it, malfeasance? So now I got all these bills comin' in, and the next thing you know my stupid mother dies, so I had to go all the way up to Montreal to listen to them go blah blah blah over
her
dead ass, then I come back here and I'm thinking about this chick I used to go out with, Melanie, so I start—”

“You're saying your mother died?” says Andrea.

“What? Yeah, yeah, she's dead. The asshole.”

“That must be hard, Trudy,” says Andrea.

Victoria reaches out and pats Trudy on the thigh. “It's okay,” Victoria says.

“I'm glad she's dead,” says Trudy. “Total fuckwad.”

“Let it out,”Victoria says.

“Shit for brains,” says Trudy.

“It's hard to let go,” says Andrea.

“Anyway, so I start wondering about Melanie, whom I haven't, like, seen for six months, ever since I decided,
Fuck her!—
you know. Have I talked about Melanie before, and her girlfriend Donna?”

We all look at one another. Quite frankly, we can't really remember what Trudy has told us and what she hasn't told us. Each month we get a lot of new information. Me, I'm still back trying to process the news about her former boss, Larry, getting his computer thrown out the window of the paper plate factory.

“Maybe you could refresh us,” says Andrea.

“Okay,” says Trudy. “So Melanie was this chick I met when I worked at Arby's. She worked the fryer, I was doing the drive-up window, we used to get off work and go out to Scooters, just close it down?”

Scooters is the name of a marginal bar in Skowhegan, Maine, a town that was also the hometown of Margaret Chase Smith, although my guess is that she never went into Scooters, and if she did, it was just the one time.

“So I got involved in this three-way with Melanie. Her and Donna, they used to have me come back to their place, and Donna would watch us while we fuck, or
I'd
watch them while
they
fuck, or sometimes I'd fuck Donna while Melanie videotaped it, then we'd
all
watch. But Donna was totally, like, fucked in the head, and she kept telling Melanie she'd couldn't see me, or then sometimes she could, but only if Donna was there, and meanwhile, she's coming in for lunches at Arby's and basically sitting there watching us to see if we're doing it while she's making curly fries. So finally I say, Fuck this! and I'm out of there, then Melanie calls me from the hospital a week later, she'd tried to kill herself by leaving the car on in the garage, instead she kills Donna's dog, Freckles. Donna's all pissed off, so she's like, Melanie, you can't live here anymore, and Melanie is like, Fine, whatever! So now Melanie doesn't have a place to live, except I'm like, Do I want to get involved with her at all? But she crashes at my place for a week, and then Donna shows up and just says, Mel, get in the car, and I'm like, Wait, Melanie, don't listen to her, but Melanie just gets her shit and they drive off and I'm left there going, Fuck the both of them, I'm just not talking to them anymore.”

“Wait a minute,” says Ted. “Did this Melanie know you were transgendered?”

“Oh sure,” says Trudy. “She was cool with it.”

Ted nods. “Just askin'.”

“So that was this summer. And I'd been doing fine except that I miss Melanie now and again, it's like I never connected to anyone like that before. I mean, it's pretty spooky, like I mean, I never felt like that, ever. I mean, I don't believe in love at first sight and all that crap, but I mean the two of us were just like,
whoa.
It felt like missing part of my fuckin' arm, not seeing her. So after I got back from Mom's funeral I decided I'd do this Internet search for her, and the next thing you know I'm looking at her fuckin'
obituary
from the
Bangor Daily
News.
She'd killed herself two weeks after I saw her last, hung herself in her attic.”

At this moment I think about pointing out the difference between “hanged” and “hung” but then decided to let it go. There are times when grammar is unimportant, and this is probably one of them.

“Oh, Trudy,” says Andrea. “That's hard.”

“And I just cried and cried. I mean, what did she go and do that for? I just thought it was all my fault, like I could have saved her if I'd been there.”

“You can't think that way,” says Ted. “People do all sorts of stupid-ass things. You can't stop them.”

“But the thing is, we used to talk about suicide all the time, and she just goes and does it, leaves me behind. I mean, fuck her!”

“I'm sorry,” says Victoria.

“So now I'm thinking, basically, of killing myself. I've been giving it a lot of thought. I can tell you exactly the right way to do it. And let me tell you one thing, rope is not the way to do it. That's a totally stupid way to go.”

“What is the way to do it?” says Milly.

“Helium,” says Trudy. “As it turns out. One big canister of that shit costs you about thirty, forty bucks, and it's very effective. You need about two hundred balloons' worth, and you're done. It's very peaceful.”

“Wait,” I say. “You've got to fill up two hundred balloons' worth?” I'm picturing Trudy inhaling two hundred balloons of helium, one after the other, and while she is dying, talking in a voice like Minnie Mouse's.
Good-bye, cruel world. Good-bye, Donald. Good-bye, Goofy. I'm like, Fuck you, Mickey!

“Well, it's better if you hook yourself up to an oxygen mask, you know, that way you just get the continuous effect of it.”

“It sounds like you've really researched this,” says Andrea, sounding alarmed.

“Oh yeah. I'm basically thinking I'm going to do it any day now. Once I get my life in order.”

“I can't believe we're talking about this,” I say.

“What can't you believe?” says Trudy.

“That you're talking about killing yourself, and we're all just sitting around listening to this. You can't kill yourself.”

“Sure she can,” says Ted.

“Thank you, Ted,” says Trudy.

“I mean, if she does it, she's an asshole, but she can do it. I mean, she doesn't need your fuckin' permission, Jenny.”

Andrea says, “I think what Jenny is saying—”

“Let Jenny speak for herself,” says Victoria.

“I'm just saying,” I continue. “Listen. When I was about twenty-seven years old, I took this long drive up to Nova Scotia, all by myself. My father had just died. I felt totally alone in the world, like I would never know what it was like to be happy. I thought that being a woman was something that was just impossible, that I'd rather die than have to face that. And I drove all the way up there and I stood by this cliff and I kind of played this game, leaning into the wind, just seeing how far I could lean out into the void before being blown back into the world.”

I've got all their attention now. Usually I'm the well-adjusted member of the group. It's a trait that makes me stick out.

“So what happened, Jenny?” says Trudy.

“So I leaned forward, preparing to fall, and then at the last second this big gust of wind knocked me backward, and I thought I felt this presence of . . . I don't know . . .”

“Aw, don't tell me you heard Jesus or some lame-o shit like that,” says Ted.

“I don't know what I heard,” I say, remembering lying there on the soft moss, looking up into the blue sky.
Son? Are you all right, son?

“But I knew I wanted to live,” I say. “And I left there and I drove all the way home. And on the way back I met Grace, whose love changed my life. And everything that has happened to me since then has made me grateful to be alive, in spite of being transgendered, in spite of carrying this insane secret, in spite of all the sadness that my coming out is now bringing to the people I love, I am still grateful for this life, and for the time that I've lived since I didn't jump off that cliff.”

“Jumping off of a cliff isn't a good way to do it,” Trudy says thoughtfully. “A
lot
of people get blown back up.” She seems unmoved.

“Listen,” I say. “What would you say to your friend if she were here now?”

Trudy thinks about it. “I don't know,” she says. “I guess I'd tell her I wished she didn't kill herself.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Trudy shrugs, looks uncomfortable. “Listen, you all shouldn't get all bent out of shape about this. Hell, I never thought I'd live
this
long.”

“Trudy, I'm trying to tell you that twenty-three is not old. I know it seems incredibly old to you, but it's not. Your life is really just beginning.”

She looks at me, unconvinced.

“Listen,” I say. “When I was twenty-six, I went to a therapist who told me I was a transsexual, that I needed to start finding the courage to be a woman. And all I could think of was, The hell with you, I don't want to find the courage to be a woman, I want the courage to
not
be one. I think sometimes that hearing about other people's stories, their own triumphs over sadness or whatever, does us exactly no good. For me, anyway, stories of how other people learned to want to live, or how they came out as women, or whatever, always just depressed me. I wanted to say, Well, fuck you, I'm so glad you worked things out for you, but your story doesn't help me at all, because I'm me and not you.”

And now, to my shame, I am starting to cry, and cry hard. It is amazing to me that Trudy, who wants to commit suicide, is sitting there with a shit-eating grin, while I, who love life and am so grateful for all my blessings, am sitting cross-legged on the floor, weeping. I mean, I barely even know Trudy. Why I'm all broken up in tears about her, I can't say. But of course, I think to myself, We're not crying about Trudy, are we?

“It's okay, Jenny,” says Victoria, who comes over and sits next to me and pats my thigh. “It's okay.”

“It's hard, isn't it?” says Andrea.