Being Emily (7 page)

“I’m Doctor Dean Webber,” he said. “Thanks for bringing Chris in to see me.”

He shook Mom’s hand and then mine. His hand was strong and dry, but really smooth and I slipped out of it mid-shake.

“Thank you for fitting us into the schedule,” Mom said.

He nodded to her. “I’ll have him back to you in an hour.”

Dr. Webber showed me into his office, which was big enough for a long couch, a couple of comfy chairs, a few folding chairs and a clunky coffee table. I sat down on the couch.

“Hi, Chris,” he said, as if we hadn’t just met in the lobby. “Your mother tells me you’re not very happy.”

I shrugged. He hadn’t done much to sway me one way or the other to liking him or disliking him, but I erred on the side of caution.

“If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me what’s going on with you. It’s not unusual for boys your age to struggle with anger and sometimes depression. Your mother is worried about you, and I’d like us to have productive visits here. What you say to me is confidential.”

Right, I thought, my ass. I had the distinct impression that it was confidential as long as it fit within his expectations. There was no way I was going to tell him the truth and trust him not to talk to my parents.

“I don’t know what to say,” I told him.

“Why don’t we start with a small test,” he said.

He handed me a clipboard with the usual depression questions that were on tests like this all over the Internet. Did I have a loss of appetite? Was I having trouble sleeping? Did I think about suicide? I answered it, putting in some positives and fudging the other answers toward the middle.

He looked at it for a few minutes, nodding. “What about anger?” he asked. “Do you have a lot of anger?”

Yeah, I wanted to tell him, but it’s because of all the fucking testosterone that my mutant gonads are shooting into my bloodstream. “I suppose,” I said. “I don’t yell and stuff, but I can get pretty mad.”

“What makes you angry?” he asked.

“My brother’s a pest. Some of my teachers are pretty stupid.” Oh, and did I mention that I’m stuck in the wrong body 24/7 and people keep treating me like someone I’m not?

“What about your father?”

His question cut through my thinking. Why did he want to know about Dad?

“Dad’s okay,” I said, picking at the round border at the edge of the couch arm. “He’s a regular dad, you know. He’s not home a lot these days, now that he has the building job.”

“Has he ever hit you?” he asked.

I was on to his line of questioning. He thought I was all depressed and pissed off because I was abused and sublimating my anger at my father. I debated whether it would work to use the word “sublimating” out loud to him, but then he’d probably say I was transferring my anger at my father on to him. I’d read plenty of psychology books while trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

“No, not really.
He whipped me a few times when I was misbehaving, when I was a kid,” I told him, all of which was actually true. It’s important when hiding something big to tell as many small, distracting truths as possible.

Dr. Webber rubbed his chin, which would have looked very distinguished except that his face was too square and smooth to really pull it off without looking self-mocking. “And what were you doing to misbehave?”

Wearing a dress
, I thought. “I was going through my parents’ stuff,” I said. “I was eight, and I was curious. I think he had his porn stash in there or something.” I went on spinning a story that was as close to the truth as possible without actually revealing the important details.

I went into my mom’s closet a lot as a kid. I loved the way her clothes felt. I’d rub her dresses against my cheeks and sometimes I’d fall asleep in there. My parents thought it was cute. I guess they thought I was comforted by her smell, or the close darkness of the closet, both of which were true, but what I loved most was dreaming of the day when I would grow up and get to wear clothes like that.

One afternoon when they were out and the babysitter was watching TV, I figured I’d try some of them on, in practice for that far-off day when they’d be mine. In my kid’s logic I’d already given up on changing my name as a way to change sex, but I still figured that when we grew up,
Mikey
would get all of Dad’s stuff and I’d get all of Mom’s stuff and when I got to wear her clothes for real, I’d become the woman I was supposed to be.

Dad caught me in one of Mom’s summer dresses and that was the end of that fantasy. I stayed out of the closet from then on, but not because of the beating. What really scared me was the way Dad stayed quiet the whole time. The few other times he’d spanked me in the past, he’d talked through the whole thing, telling me what I did wrong and how he was sorry to have to spank me but it was for my own good and so on. This time he didn’t say a word, and I knew I’d done something so awful he couldn’t talk about it.

I told Dr. Webber that I was making a real mess in their room and didn’t mention dresses. He nodded and made understanding sounds. I kept an eye on the clock and kept talking.

I was trying to draw these stories out as long as possible and fill up the hour. I told him about another time Dad gave me a whipping for stealing some of his tools and burying them out back of the house. Actually the tools were mine. Dad gave me a toolbox for my tenth birthday and I was trying to get rid of it, but that story sounded close enough. Dr. Webber kept asking for more details about how I felt, what I remembered Dad saying, and I paused as long as I could before answering, pretending to scour my memory for details about each one. The minutes ticked by.

At the end of the hour, Dr. Webber shook my hand and said we’d see each other again next week.

I got into the car and looked out the window, trying not to feel like I’d been kicked in the gut. Saturday, I told
myself, that
would make it all worthwhile.

“Mom, can I take Claire to the city on Saturday for a movie?” I asked.

I planned to go whether or not Claire would come with me, but saying that I wanted to take Claire made the trip sound less suspicious. If Claire didn’t want to come, she’d probably cover for me. Or if she wasn’t talking to me, at least she wouldn’t be around for my mom to ask how she liked the movie.

“At night?”

“No, a matinee.
We’ll be back by eight.”

“All right,” she said.

I let out the breath I’d been holding. One more day of school and then the blessed weekend would be here and Minneapolis and Natalie. I really wanted Claire to come with me.

CLAIRE

She paced across the living room and into her bedroom and back to the living room again. Then she tried to stop. Then she paced again. Chris had gone to the shrink today, and she wanted to know what he’d said and how it went. If there was some psychological way for him to fix Chris’s problem, she hoped he’d listen to it. Chris could be stubborn when he made up his mind on something, which was actually pretty rare.

When the phone on the end table rang, she lunged for it. It was Chris’s number on caller ID.

“How was Dr. No?” she asked, recasting the psychologist as the villain from the first James Bond movie.

Chris laughed, but it was a sharp sound. “As well as you’d expect.”

“How’s that?”

“Lousy. He’s no good. There’s no way he’s going to help.” His voice was a low monotone.

“Come on, you don’t know until you try,” she suggested, trying not to let her disappointment show in her voice. Life would be so much simpler if this was something Chris could solve in therapy.

“He just wanted me to talk about how angry I am and if Dad ever beat me. He thinks I’m an abused kid with a bunch of pent- up rage.”

“You are kind of angry,” Claire ventured. He didn’t show it often, but there were times she could feel Chris’s body vibrate with tightly held frustration.

“Yeah,” he said. “But now you know why.”

“True.” She sighed.

She wondered if she could get her mom to send her to a therapist for a bit. Maybe she could find one who did know what to do about a teen who thought they were transsexual. Even just having someone confidentially to talk to felt like a good idea, but then she’d have to talk about her own life too and her feelings about her father leaving and all of that. She didn’t want to go digging around in there until it was time to write her memoir.

“Hey.” Chris’s voice brightened. “Want to go to a movie in Minneapolis on Saturday?”

“Why not just go to one out here?” Claire loved going into the Cities for any reason, but she didn’t want to show her excitement too soon. Since she was always the one pushing for a field trip, the fact that Chris brought it up meant that he had something planned, and she wanted to know what that was before she got her hopes up.

“We’re meeting a friend. From my support group online,” he said.

“A transsexual?
Really?”

“Claire!”

“What?” She tried to sound innocent, though she was a little embarrassed by her own outburst. Still, she’d never met a real transsexual before and she was curious.

“That’s kind of…reductive,” Chris said. “We’re more than a one-word label, you know, and I think Natalie would rather be called a girl.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.”
She paused and wondered if she should apologize more, or if that was enough. “Okay, movie on Saturday.”

They hung up and she stood and looked at the phone as if it was going to ring again and answer all the questions still chasing each other around her brain.

Chris talked about everything so naturally: being a girl, meeting another transsexual girl in the Cities, but it felt so alien to Claire and vaguely disgusting. She tried to imagine Chris with long hair and breasts and in her mind it looked so wrong.

Mom was out in the living room watching TV, so Claire dropped onto the couch with her. She’d learned long ago that if she maintained a certain amount of Mom-time every week, she could get away with just about anything. Her mom acted younger than Chris’s parents, even though she was a little bit older, and often Claire felt like she had more of a big sister than a parent. That bugged her in junior high when life was tougher and she wanted a parent she could ask for help, but now she appreciated how she had so much more freedom than other kids at her school.

“I’m going to the city with Chris on Saturday,” she said.

“Are you having sex with him?” Mom asked.

“Whoa, where’d that come from? No,” she protested.

“Honestly, Claire, I want you to tell me if you are.”

For a moment she considered what would happen if she said “Mom, he thinks he’s a girl” but Chris would kill her.

“No, Mom, we’re not having sex. We fool around and stuff, but I don’t want to get pregnant or
anything, that
would be a real mess. Besides, I might turn out to be a lesbian.”

Mom rolled her eyes. “I swear, Claire, you make this stuff up just to torment me.”

“I thought that was my job,” Claire replied automatically, but she was thinking about how her mom had no idea what a person could be tormented with. She wanted to be supportive of Chris, but she couldn’t shake the nagging concern that he wasn’t right, that all this stuff about
transsexualism
was wrong.

“Oh, I’ve seen this one before,” Mom said, and Claire looked up as she switched the channel from
Law & Order
to
Law & Order: SVU
. Pretty much either of them could turn on the TV at any time and there would be some
Law & Order
show on. Mom could go for months sitting on the couch every evening watching crime shows, and then suddenly she’d decide she was ready to date again and be out almost every night of the week socializing with the women from work and trying to meet a decent man. Claire’s money was on that happening in April this year.

Although the crime shows always followed the same
pattern, that
felt more comforting than boring. The contents of the stories were sensational enough that Claire found she could always watch one, so she settled back on the couch, glad to have something to take her mind off Chris.