Being Emily (29 page)

In the car on the way back to Liberty, Dad didn’t say much, but what he said gave me an idea about what he and Natalie’s mom had been talking about in the kitchen.

“You didn’t tell me Natalie used to be a boy,” he said.

“No,” I said. “She’s just a regular girl now. That’s how she wants people to see her. She doesn’t go around with a big ‘T’ on her chest.”

“T?” he asked.

“For transsexual.”

“I wouldn’t have known,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if he was going down Mom’s well-worn track about how I’d make an ugly woman, or if he was trying to say something else. When we got home I made sure I thanked him a couple times for taking me to the doctor.

School starting brought a welcome relief to the whole family. Despite the high temperatures of the summer, the house had been emotionally cold as a tomb since June. I dove into my classes with fervor, and started going over to Claire’s most nights after school, except for the dreaded Wednesdays when I still had to see crazy Dr. Webber. He’d been taking lots of notes during my visits of late, and I started to feel paranoid. I had to figure out a way to stop seeing him, but for most of September I was content just to have my regular life back, except without as much lying and pretending as I’d had to do a year ago.

I fantasized about telling my swim coach the real reason I was quitting the team. I imagined walking into his office and saying, “Actually, here’s the truth. I’m a transsexual woman and I’m going to start growing breasts this year, so I can’t swim with the guys
any more
.” Unfortunately, the second part of that imagined scenario involved him outing me to the whole school, so I never went with that plan. Instead I pointed out that I wasn’t in the top half of the team and said that I needed to focus on schoolwork and earning money for college. He argued against it, but I was tenacious.

I didn’t know if I could refuse to go to Dr. Webber without Mom trying to cut off my supply of hormones, but I had to try. After Claire and I brainstormed over the weekend, I cornered Mom in her tiny office after dinner on Sunday.

I tried to sound as plaintive as possible, and not demanding. “Mom, I really don’t want to go to Dr. Webber anymore, he gives me the creeps.”

“That was the deal,” she said. “You get to see your doctor, but you have to see mine too.”

I sat on the edge of her desk. “When we have appointments and you’re not there, he spends the whole time asking about my sexual fantasies,” I said. “It’s gross.”

Now she turned in her chair to look at me. “Are you lying to me, Christopher?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I mean, you know I can’t stand him, but if that was it, I could keep going I suppose. He makes me feel disgusting. He wants to talk about masturbation and stuff. It’s nasty. And then he takes lots and lots of notes. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do with them. Can we just find another doctor? You can pick one who wants to change me, just not a…you know, a gross one.”

She sighed. “I don’t know why you persist in this delusion about womanhood,” she said. “What do you think it’s going to solve? Do you think your life would be easier as a woman?”

I sagged against the desk, holding myself up with my arms. After months of this, even the first few lines of my mother’s argument made me feel as if I’d gone three days without sleeping. “It’s not going to make my life easier,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

“Then why?” she asked.

“Because I
am
a woman,” I said simply. “That’s all. What would you do if you’d grown up as a boy?”

“I’d be a boy,” she said. “I wouldn’t be myself. That’s the point,
Chris,
people don’t go from one to the other. You’re not a woman. You don’t act like a woman, you don’t think like a woman. I’m afraid you’re just going to turn out to be a freak, and you’ll never get what you’re really looking for.”

Normally, I would have fought with her and insisted that I am a woman and therefore I think like one and so on. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the mellow weekend I’d had, or the hormones I was taking, or being able to be honest to more people than I ever had before, but I didn’t feel angry at her like I usually did. I could start to understand that she honestly wanted me to be happy and she just didn’t see how all this could work.

“I’m afraid of that too,” I admitted. “I’m afraid I’ll get through all this and I won’t look or
sound like
a woman.”

“Then why do it?” she asked plaintively.

“Because being treated like a guy all the time, having to pretend I am a guy, I’m lying to everyone. It destroys me. I would rather fail at being myself than succeed at being someone I’m not.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand it, and I’m still going to look for another way out for you.”

“But not Dr. Webber?”

“No,” she said. “Not him. But you’re still going to church at least twice a month.”

I enjoyed church with Claire explaining it all to me, but I knew I had to pretend it was a chore. “Ugh, Mom,” I said and sighed heavily.
“Fine.
If I have to.”

I thought the talk went well, and I was elated to have the weight of Dr. Webber off me, but Mom’s comment about me not thinking like a woman haunted me. Was it possible that even though I felt female inside, my growing up as boy had changed me forever?
Would I never fit in anywhere except for the transgender community?
Although I found support there, I couldn’t imagine living my whole life inside those boundaries.

I asked Claire about it, and she quickly pried out of me the details of the entire conversation with my mother. Then she almost fell out of her chair laughing. We were sitting alone at the end of a long table in the cafeteria talking in whispers. We’d arranged our lunch periods together this year. I think that our highly visible joy at being together was the only factor that kept the other kids at school from deciding I was gay.

“Why are you laughing?” I demanded.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “In the middle of a conversation in which you got out of seeing Dr. Webber by insinuating that he has a sexual interest in you, your mother suggests you don’t think like a woman. I don’t know what girl manual your mom got, but that’s in the first five pages of mine. That’s totally a girl trick. No self-respecting straight teen guy would suggest some man was leering at him to get his way.”

I said in my best Valley Girl impression, “So, I’m, like, totally a girl.”

“You’re certainly more of a girl than I am,” she said. “You actually like makeup.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re like an eleven-year-old worried that you’re never going to get your period. Chill out.”

I made myself sigh and look down at my plate and frown.

“What?” she asked with a hint of real concern.

“You’re right, I am afraid I’m never going to get my period,” I said.

***

The strangest thing happened a few days after Christmas. Mom was going through another phase of not really talking to me, and Claire had gotten her acceptance letter to that university in Iowa with the really good writing program. It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be together after next summer, so I was just bummed. She said she’d always be my best friend, but I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do without her. I didn’t have the money to go to a really good school and if I did have the money, I’d spend it on surgery anyway, so I figured I’d go to a community college for a two-year degree and then transfer to the University of Minnesota for the last two years. By then I planned to be living as a woman full time.

But that remained a long way off and so my Christmas was bleak. Claire went to visit her dad, and I was stuck in the house with Mom glaring at me every time I did something girlish and with Dad wrapped up in his cars.

Two days after Christmas while I was slumped on the couch trying to be interested in the television, Dad opened the door to the garage and said, “Come here.”

I got up and followed him into his workshop that was, as usual, littered with tools and car parts. He picked a small, badly gift-wrapped box off his worktable and tossed it at me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Late Christmas present,” he said. “Open it.”

I did. It was a small box with a set of car keys. “Dad, I already have a car.”

Standing next to me, he turned me toward the 1977 Ford Thunderbird he’d been working on. It was still a bit of a monstrosity, but, as he often boasted, for something he’d picked up for twenty-five hundred bucks, who could complain. It had good lines and with the right paint job it would look slick.

“Now you have two,” he said.

“What am I going to do with two cars?”

“Sell one of ’
em
. What do you think you can get for the Chevy?”

I felt my jaw loosening, wanting to drop open. “Sixteen,” I said with effort.
“Maybe seventeen grand.”

“Good,” he said. “There you go.”

“For school?”
I asked, still not quite believing my ears.

“For whatever you want. I don’t need to know what you use it for.”

Was he suggesting I use it to pay for surgery?

“Dad—?”
I started.

He turned to face me fully. “Look Chris, I don’t understand this stuff you’re into. It makes no sense to me. All I know is that you’ve been angry and sad damn near your whole life, and now you’re happy. I want you to stay that way. You do whatever you need. And if I hurt you when you were little…well, I’m sorry.”

I started crying. I couldn’t talk.

He threw an arm over my shoulders and tightened it once. “Jesus Christ,” he said roughly.

After a minute he dropped his arm and walked across the workshop to his latest project. “What do you think I can get for this shit?” he yelled back to me. “It’s shot to hell.”

I wiped my face and walked over to where he was standing. “It’s worth something,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”

He didn’t bring the topic up again, but I spent more time over that holiday working on the cars with him and a couple times I could have sworn he’d stopped calling me “son” and started calling me “hon.”

***

I kept my head down through most of the winter, and toward the end of it, Mom seemed to have relaxed. She might have thought I was growing out of my “transsexual phase” as she once put it, because I had resolved not to bring it up until I could move out of the house.

One evening in late January Claire and I were having dinner in front of her TV. Claire’s mom was now seriously dating the man she’d started seeing the previous summer and as a result was out late a couple nights a week. Whenever Claire saw such a night coming, she made sure I came over and let me wear whatever I wanted. I was in the
Banana Republic
pants Natalie had picked out and a knit sweater Claire got me for Christmas.

“Hey,” she said on a commercial and muted the TV. “Know what today is?”

“Did I miss an anniversary?”

“Only of the night you came out to me.”

“Wow.”

“Thanks,” she said.
“For trusting me and all that.”

I just pulled her close. One year since I’d come out to her and my family, and I’d met all sorts of friends in the Cities. I had a therapist and a plan. Not too shabby.

“Are you getting weepy?” Claire asked from my shoulder. “Don’t cry on me. You are such a girl.”

“Me? You’re the one wearing eye shadow to watch TV.”

“You put it on me.”

We gaped at each other in mock horror and then fell together laughing.

“Seeing you have to fight for all this,” she said. “It makes me appreciate more what I have.”

I kissed the top of her head. “Glad I could help.”

“Yeah, my mom says you’re a good influence. She loves you,” she said, laughing. Then she paused and I could feel her warm breath fluttering over my collarbone. “I love you,” she said.