Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (32 page)

Now I sat in his chair as my mother drifted through time and space. There were footsteps as someone came down the stairs. For a moment I half expected to see my father in his bathrobe.
How are you, old man?

Instead, there was my son. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m sad, Zachy,” I said. “I’m just so sad.”

He gave me a good, long hug. “I know,” he said.

I blew some air through my cheeks. “I am glad that you are with me, Sam,” I said. “Here at the end of all things.”

“Mr. Gandalf told me not to let you out of my sight,” my son replied, right on cue. “And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.”

I
TALKED TO
Deedie on the phone. She and Sean arranged to fly down to Philadelphia in order to say good-bye. Then the two of them and Zach would get in our car and drive back to Maine. I would wait with Mom. My sister was on her way from the UK. Time was running swiftly now.

As we waited for Deedie and Sean to arrive, Zach began to sketch out his college admissions essay, sitting in the library of the old house.

This is what he wrote:

Oprah Winfrey asked me what my family was like.

It’s 2001, and I was seven years old. We were sitting around the dining room table. I looked over at my father and said, “We can’t really call you ‘Daddy’ any more now, can we?” She said, “No. I don’t suppose you can.” She was a year into her transition. “But you could call me Jenny. That’s the name I’m using now that I’m female.” I laughed. “Jenny?” I said. “That sounds like the name of a girl donkey.” “Well,” she said. “What would you like to call me?” I thought about this for a moment. “What about—Maddy?” I said. “That’s half mommy and half daddy—Maddy.” I sat back in my chair, satisfied with my work. My younger brother, five at that point, sat up in his chair and said, “Or Dommy.” We all laughed at this.

It’s 2008, and I was fourteen years old. It was the day before I started my first year of high school. I was nervous, not just because this was high school, but because I’d finally left the public school I’d been attending for nine years. Would I be able to handle all the work? Would I have friends? Maddy sensed that I was worried, and told me to come down to the dock. We live on a lake in Maine, in a small town called Belgrade. We walked down to the dock in silence, and sat in the Adirondack chairs by the water. Together we gazed upward at the vast mystery of space. Stars twinkled in the sky; the Milky Way was just barely visible. A few clouds drifted across the almost-full moon. There
were no human noises; we heard the chirping of crickets, the hooting of great horned owls, the long mournful call of loons. We sat there looking at the sky and at the water for what seemed like a long time. Although not a word had been exchanged, I felt like things were going to be fine. We walked back to the house together.

It’s 2011, and I’m seventeen. It was a beautiful summer day. The family had decided to go to our favorite local tavern, The Village Inn, across the lake. It was the first time that our family had been together for what seemed like a long time—my brother had been at music camp for the last three weeks, and I a camp counselor for eight. My mother was sitting next to my brother, and Maddy was in the stern with a smile on her face. As my brother took the wheel and guided our slow aluminum boat across the lake, the sun reflected off the water of Long Pond and illuminated the four of us, each one contented by the presence of the others.

It’s 2010, and Oprah was having a “Most Memorable Guests” Special. “So Zach,” Oprah asked, “what’s your family like?”

I smiled. “My family is good,” I said.

S
EAN SAT BY
his grandmother’s side. She was very sensible with him. Mom wanted to know all about the pieces he was playing at summer music camp.

“It’s Handel, and Vivaldi,” said Sean. “And Grieg.”

“Grieg, what pieces by Grieg?”

“
In the Hall of the Mountain King
,” said Sean.

My mother started singing it, softly and slowly at first, then more loudly and swiftly. It was alarming to watch her singing it. “Dee-dee, dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee.”

“Mrs. Boylan,” said Monica, “we don’t want you to get riled up now.”

Mom relented. “Oh,” she said. “I used to think that was the scariest music in the world.”

Sean took this in. “It’s fun to play, though,” he said.

Hildegarde thought this over. “Is it?” she asked.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, just before dawn, the boys and Deedie prepared to head back to Maine. Mom was still asleep.

“We love you, Hildegarde,” Deedie whispered. She had known my mother for twenty-four years; her own mother had died when Deedie was twenty-four. Sean looked at her, his lips tight. Zach’s eyes shone.

“I appreciate you understanding about my staying here,” I said to the boys. “I’m glad you’re okay about my having to spend time with her now.”

“It’s all right, Maddy,” said Zach. “Someday, you’ll be the one who’s all old and feeble. And then it’ll be my turn, to stay with you.”

It was a nice thing to say.

I stood in the doorway and watched as the three of them piled into the van and headed down the driveway. There was a flash of headlights against the neighbor’s house, the sound of tires shushing against the wet street, and then they were gone.

For a moment I stood there, listening to the silence. I thought about how many times I had passed out of these doors, on my way to some adventure. I remembered climbing into the Oldsmobile Omega at dawn on the first of September 1976, the car packed full with my steamer trunk, a pair of stereo speakers, a coffeepot, all of the things I’d use in my freshman dorm room at Wesleyan. As I walked out to the car, I saw Orion rising in the sky above the cherry tree.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the

My parents came outside. Dad was jangling his car keys. One of his arms was around my mother’s waist.

“Okay, old man,” he said. “You ready?’

L
OTS OF THINGS
happened after that. My sister arrived, and we spent a week sitting by my mother’s bed. We had been estranged, the two of us, ever since I came out as trans, but without putting the details of our truce into words, we put our differences aside. It was only the second time in eleven years that we had been in the same room together. The first time hadn’t gone so well.

Mom switched over to German for long stretches, then she fell silent. One day, she just cried softly, without using words. Then she closed her eyes. A few days later, I was sitting by her side, holding her hand, when all at once she said:

“Oh!”

It was as if, after ninety-four years, something had finally taken her completely by surprise.

I turned to Monica. “Get my sister,” I said.

A second later, the two of us were sitting on either side of Mom’s bed, each of us holding her hand. My sister ran her fingers through my mother’s hair.

“Good-bye, Mom,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“We’re both here,” I whispered. “We’re together. It’s going to be all right.”

Mom took another little gasp, once again surprised by something she had not foreseen. Then she didn’t breathe anymore.

I
N THE DAYS
that followed, neighbors and friends came over with station wagons filled with corned beef. My nieces and nephews arrived from England. They were such smart and beautiful young men and women. Oh, how I wished that I had known them for the last decade, and that they had known their cousins. Zach and Sean hung out with them, a little nervous. All six of them went out to the swimming pool.

Zach was a little reluctant to take off his shirt. “I’m the only cousin who isn’t buff,” he said regretfully.

Later, my sister and I walked arm in arm across a cemetery, holding an urn in our hands. We placed orchids in the tomb.

At the memorial service a few days later, Deedie read a poem my mother had chosen for the occasion. My sister delivered the eulogy. I did not speak, but I did sit down at the piano and play “Träumerei” from Schumann’s
Scenes from Childhood
. She had always loved that song. In German, the title means “Dreaming.”

Later that night, Sean somehow convinced everyone to go to a Japanese
teppanyaki
house. The adults drank sake. The cousins caught pieces of shrimp tossed adroitly into their mouths. We all sat there in a new and unfamiliar world, watching smoke puff from the cone of an onion-ring volcano.

Nine months later, Zach directed
Our Town
. He cast his own brother as Simon Stimson, the troubled choirmaster who takes his life. There in the graveyard, my younger son looked out at the living and said, “That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”

Deedie and I sat next to each other, holding hands, softly sobbing. It was just as I’d promised my son the summer before: All the adults were weeping out their brains. Interestingly, a couple seats over from me was a person whom I could not immediately read as male or female, as mother or father. I’d never seen him or her before.

I looked back at the stage. The Stage Manager said, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

When the play was over, there was a brief moment, as the house was plunged into darkness and all the adults sat there crying. Then the lights came on, and our children were alive again. They stood there, bowing and grinning, as they basked in the applause of their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between.

The cast called out for their director to join them on the stage, and there was Zach, standing before the crowd.

It was just a few hours before his eighteenth birthday. I thought about the night he was born, all those years before. Snow faintly falling. Charles Ryder reaching forward to touch a plover’s egg.
Uh-oh
.

The audience cheered. Zach smiled. His eyes searched the house for his parents. It took a moment, but he found us in time.

M
Y MOTHER HAD DIED
on the fifth of July. The night before this, Independence Day, my sister and I sat together on the back porch of the old house, drinking white wine in the dark, together again after all the lost years.

“I always thought this house would last forever,” I said, looking up at the ramshackle mansion. “No matter where I lived, or what happened to me, I always knew it was here. Like the mother ship. I could always come home.”

“I know, Jenny,” she said. “Now, after all this time, this whole world is about to go
psshhhhh
.”

I sighed. She was right. Everything was about to go
psshhhhh
.

“I don’t know that I’ll be coming back to America anymore,” she said softly. “After she’s gone. There isn’t any reason to, anymore. There’s nothing for me here.”

In the next room, my mother lay quietly dreaming. Where did she go, that last night of her life? What did she see, as she slowly traveled farther away from shore? Did she see her own father, standing by the sea with his nine fingers? Did she tell him she was sorry that they’d left him on Hart Island?

That’s all right
, he said.
I’m sorry I wasn’t around, when you were so small
.

Something went boom. We could not quite see the fireworks, but we could see the sky flickering blue, and green, and white. A neighbor’s dog was barking. The sky flickered.

We sat there in the dark, my sister and I. I could smell the fragrance of the newly mown lawn. From the quiet street I heard the laughter of
children. Two small figures ran down the side street, sparklers in their hands. It was a great night for them, the stuff of dreams.