A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (15 page)

 

 

David's brother, sister-in-law, their two daughters, and a few other friends arrive, which means a whole new crop of people to compliment. “I like your shoes! I like your thick hair! I like your ... ability to let me like you!” I say.

The teenage daughters do the exact same thing Jack did when he came in—they pull their own plugs and shut off. The rest of the adults stand around catching up with each other, I guess since they haven't had a chance to do that since the car ride together.

I feel like an outsider. But I'm supposed to be an insider. I'm here with my family. But it's not my family. I feel guilty even using the word “family” because it might be considered an insult to the original family.

I attempt to keep clinging to Grandpa George, but I get the feeling he's done with me. After we've whooped at all his best fabulous-gay-man lines together, we have to actually have a conversation. I start to tell him how my lesbian friend Karen is in Nigeria shooting a documentary, and he looks at me like I just used very bad manners—like mentioning the poor starving children to the Queen.

I decide to try hanging out with David again. I need my “What are you feeeeeling?” fix. I like to ask him this question every ten minutes or so, and the amazing thing about David is that he always answers—sincerely and for hours, if necessary.

I walk in at the exact moment that David is telling one of the attractive blonde family friends, “I'd have sex with you ... no problem,” in the form of him handing her a butter dish and actually saying, “Oh, thank you. It's like you're anticipating my every move.”

I continue right out the other door, making sure David sees me and knows that I've heard him make his indecent proposal. He runs after me and I turn around and wish him a Joyeux Noël by spitting, “Don't touch me! I'm not kidding. Don't fucking touch me.”

He grapples with me in the hallway, trying to kiss my cheek. “Lauren, I have to keep cooking!” he says. “Don't be like this!”

“Be like what?” I yell. I pull away, almost knocking over a Ming vase in the process, and go join the other adults who are now talking in hushed tones in the dining room.

Someone is saying, “She was one of the most selfless and giving people I've ever known. Really.”

“Hey, are you guys talking about—” I almost say “me” but realizing the joke is not okay, I stop myself. Instead I lower my voice and say, “Hannah?”

They are.

Seeing an opening for family bonding, I continue. “You know, we have this mug that was Hannah's that I refuse to use. David hands it to me sometimes, but I just can't. It's just so her—the style of it, the feel it. Plus I'm so paranoid I might break it. Oh my god, if I broke that mug. When I first moved in I wouldn't even wash it.”

Thinking things are getting a little heavy, I change course. “Of course that was a while ago. Now I'm using it to pound nails in the wall!”

The group's eyes turn in unison toward the room where Jack is watching TV.

“Let's keep our voices down,” George says.

 

 

I want to leave—just walk home. Maybe walk all the way home to Indianapolis, to see my mom and dad and have a
real
Christmas. One where we eat cream cheese stuffed into cream cheese. Where we sit and watch the cats pee on the Christmas tree. My sister will scream at her son, “STOP HITTING
YOURSELF!” and my other sister will fight with me about putting her eight-year-old on Prozac. They will get angry at my big-city, liberal ways and I will refuse to eat salami. Then Mom will get a migraine, and Dad will apologize for loving his new grandson—the one who is hitting himself—more than he ever loved us. And we will forgive him because he's sweet and old now. And, of course, because it's Christmas.

 

 

But I'm here. What am I doing here? David and I are a mess. We're not even alike. He's so domestic—I'm a barfly compared to him. He and Hannah had a mature relationship, a marriage, a son. I had a marriage once too, but it was mostly my husband and me hanging out in bars. I can't start all over again with a family that has had so much pain. It will always be heavy and sad and dreary and serious and ... and then I see the teenage girls sitting on the couch. My potential future step-nieces. I'm so happy to see girls. Girls like to talk and complain. And laugh. And judge. My people.

Both of them are beautiful and young and tough. Their faces are totally impassive—completely stoic and bored. But just because we'll probably never be actual step-relatives doesn't mean I can't reach out.

“Hey, what's going on with you guys?” I ask.

“Okay,” Lizzie says. “I want to go down to the basement to look at Grandpa's record collection, but Allison is freaked out by basements.”

“Why are you freaked out by basements?” I ask. Which launches Allison into a monologue.

She stares vaguely toward the window the entire time she's talking, as if she's gone blind. “Okay. A good friend of a friend of mine—and this story really is true—okay? Well, she was with her babysitter and they were in the basement. They wanted to play this game—like a board game—but there was this clown statue in the way.”

I interrupt. “A clown statue?”

She continues, looking a bit confused by my confusion. “Yeah. A clown statue. So the babysitter called the parents and was like, ‘Hey, it's the babysitter—we want to play this game but the clown statue is in the way. Is it okay if we move it?'”

I try to interrupt again, but I can't get my words out because I'm laughing. Allison stares at the wall like an irritated blind teenager and waits for me to stop laughing before she continues.

“Anyway, she said, ‘Is it okay if we move it?' and the parents were like, ‘Clown statue?!? What clown statue?!? GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!!' Okay? So it turned out that this homeless midget was living in their basement and he dressed up like a clown so the kids wouldn't be scared. The kids would come up from the basement and be like, ‘We were playing with the clown,' and the parents would say, ‘Oh, that's nice,' because they thought it was just like an imaginary friend. And whenever an adult would walk by, he'd just freeze—like a statue. That's why I hate basements.”

By this point I am laughing so hard I can't physically laugh hard enough. I stand up and walk around to get some oxygen. The teenagers are staring at me like I'm crazy—like they have no idea why I'm laughing, like I'm sick for laughing at the tragic story. Which makes me laugh harder.

“What is so funny?” Lizzie asks. “Why are you laughing? It's true!” She's clearly insulted by my lack of sympathy for what her friend's family went through.

 

 

Before I can answer, dinner is served. Giddy from the joy that the cousins brought me, I enjoy every bite of the feast served on the Queen's golden dishes.

David is thrilled that I am no longer having an anxiety attack and also that the ham is both salty and appropriately sweet. Gay Grandpa George is thrilled that his son is not only gorgeous but helped him save money on catering. And Jack is thrilled to tell his cousins about a friend who had his stomach pumped after getting food poisoning at the Olive Garden from the eight different kinds of sperm that were discovered in the Alfredo sauce.

Much to the relief of all the cousins present, there were no cream-based sauces on our Christmas table.

 

 

As soon as we get in the car I tell David and Jack the clown story, which they eat up like George's gourmet fruitcake (which was thankfully nothing like a fruitcake but more like
a rum cake and awfully good). Initially Jack is insulted that we are laughing at his cousins' painful story—he doesn't get why it's so funny. But eventually, after I retell it five or six times, he gets it and he starts giggling so much he even forgets to demand that we put the Wu-Tang Clan back on.

We laugh at the idea of the children coming up from the basement telling their parents that they were “playing with the little clown down below,” and at the probability of a babysitter checking in with parents before moving a clown statue. We dissect the premise that a homeless little person living in a basement would decide to dress like a clown to appear more like a harmless statue. (
Whatever his survival dictated,
we decide.) We discuss the issue of why midgets, or “little people,” are still used as punch lines and how we all hate that cliché, but that somehow, in this case, well, it works.

 

 

So at long last I have a cherished Christmas tradition—a precious gift that keeps on giving well beyond the actual holiday:

Jack says, “Clown statue,” and David says, “What clown statue?” And I scream, “GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!!!” Then we do it again until the laughter dies down and I start worrying about where we'll spend Easter.

A
t some point during the seventh grade I realized my dream of a modeling career was never going to materialize. Models—even plus-sized ones—are required to have a certain grace and relaxed ease shining from their symmetrically pleasing facial features. While my eyes were both the same size, they always seemed uneasy, harboring a perpetual look of, “What the hell is happening?” I couldn't help it—the shock of dealing with other people always registered on my face.

When I first saw the painting
The Scream,
I'd wondered if Edvard Munch had gone to my high school in Indianapolis.

The only other kids who shared this look of permanent bewilderment were the foreign-exchange students. Of course their excuse was that they didn't speak the language, but I related to their confused expressions, which seemed to ask, “What am I doing here and what is wrong with these people?”

Though I enjoyed a rich dating life with my fellow Hoosiers—dating the first gay soprano in the history of our high school's show choir, as well as other accomplished closeted homosexuals—I decided to reject all suitors of Midwestern descent.

Instead, I loved every scruffy Lars and pale, frail Henri who came through our school. Dipping their strange brown crackers into Oma's rabbit-bladder soup from ye olde country, they were like magical beings from a magical land called “anywhere but here.” They might be butt ugly, with badly cut bangs, but I didn't care. I loved them all.

My fantasy was that in another country a heartier gal like myself would be more appreciated—not just for her fortitude to withstand famine but for her strong thighs, which could help clear the stumps from the field when it was time for planting. In case the Clydesdale needed a break.

In the lunchroom I would try to position myself with my best side—the side of my hair where the perm actually “took”—facing the lonely foreign boys, in order to capture their hearts with my loud laugh and hearty appetite. I interspersed my outbursts with moments of total silence during which I'd grow pensive and stare at the ketchup bottle. Then I'd grab my notebook and start sketching, hoping that this would inspire a foreign friend to grab his sketchbook and sketch me.

“Your beauty is very, how do you say, uhhh, misunderstood?” he would say. “In my country, blue eye shadow worn all the way into the eyebrows is the luxury of movie stars and prostitutes.”

The problem with my fantasy was that the host family members guarded the foreign exchange students as if they were brand-new Game Boys.

The one time I tried to get to know the Swedish exchange student, his new American sister told me to not to come any closer because of my perfume. She explained that in his village, perfume was used to kill the rodents and scare away evil spirits and my smell was upsetting him.

By the end of my senior year the closest I'd come to contact with a real, live foreigner was David Bowie's
Let's Dance
album, which I held in my arms like a teddy bear when I slept.

Two years later, I found myself in the European hotbed of the Midwest—the Ellis Island of the Kentuckiana border—Bloomington, Indiana, where I was taking classes at Indiana University.

My friend Emily called to ask if she could give my number to a guy in her directing class who was looking for actresses for his final directing project—an experimental theater scene where I'd be playing the role of a piece of crumpled paper.

Emily and I had both been in community theater productions during high school, and she knew that I'd stepped away from the theater to get a degree in feminist filmmaking while cocktail waitressing at a local sports bar famous for its Thursday night “Best Butt and Legs” contests. The bar was known for hiring only babes, which I found completely offensive until they offered me a job.

“I don't know his last name,” Emily said. “Everyone just calls him ‘Hans, the guy from Holland.'”

Hans from Holland sounded like exactly whom I'd come to college to meet, meaning someone completely opposite from the guys I'd met in the sports bar, who would ask me things like, “Why does only one of your nipples get hard? Is it inverted?” And the natural follow-up question, “Could you put an M&M in there and then pop it out so my buddy can try to catch it in his mouth?”

When Hans called me, he had a very different question.

“What is your greatest fear?” he asked. “I want you to think about that before our first rehearsal.”

Not only did he ask me the best question ever, he asked it with a Dutch accent, which I'd never heard before. It was so unlike how I'd imagined. The predominant influence on his English was the Queen, so he spoke with a very un-American, proper accent, with hints of what I guessed were Dutch influences. T's and th's were pronounced like d's. A Dutch accent sounded like Jeremy Irons with a speech impediment.