In One Person (72 page)

“He calls me Tampon, or sometimes just George—not Gee. Needless to say, never Georgia,” the kid said, smiling.

“Tampon is pretty terrible,” I told the girl.

“Actually, I prefer it to George,” Gee told me. “You know, Mr. A.,
you
could probably direct
The Tempest,
couldn’t you—if you wanted to? That way, we could put Shakespeare onstage.”

No one had ever called me Mr. A.; I must have liked it. I’d already decided that if Gee wanted to be a girl this badly, she had to be one. I wanted to direct
The Tempest,
too.

“Hey, Tampon!” someone called.

“Let’s have a word with the football players,” I told Gee. We went over to their table; they instantly stopped eating. They saw the tragic-looking mess of a boy—the transgender wannabe, as they probably thought of him—and they saw me, a sixty-five-year-old man, whom they might have mistaken for a faculty member (I soon would be). After all, I looked way too old to be Gee’s father.

“This is Gee—that’s her name. Remember it,” I said to them. They didn’t respond. “Which of you called Gee ‘Tampon’?” I asked them; there was no response to my question, either. (Fucking bullies; most of them are cowards.)

“If someone mistakes you for a tampon, Gee—whose fault is it, if you don’t speak up about it?” I asked the girl, who still looked like a boy.

“That would be my fault,” Gee said.

“What’s her name?” I asked the football players.

All but one of them called out, “Gee!” The one who hadn’t spoken, the biggest one, was eating again; he was looking at his food, not at me, when I spoke to him.

“What’s her name?” I asked again; he pointed to his mouth, which was full.

“I’ll wait,” I told him.

“He’s
not
on the faculty,” the big football player said to his teammates, when he’d swallowed his food. “He’s just a writer who lives in town. He’s some old gay guy who lives here, and he went to school here. He can’t tell us what to do—he’s not on the faculty.”

“What’s her name?” I asked him.

“Douche Bag?” the football player asked me; he was smiling now—so were the other football players.

“You see why I’m ‘pretty angry,’ as you say, Gee?” I asked the fourteen-year-old. “Is this the guy who calls you Tampon?”

“Yes—that’s him,” Gee said.

The football player, the one who knew who I was, had stood up from the table; he was a very big kid, maybe four inches taller than I am, and easily twenty or thirty pounds heavier.

“Get lost, you old fag,” the big kid said to me. I thought it would be better if I could get him to say the
fag
word to Gee. I knew I would have the fucker then; the dress code may have relaxed at Favorite River, but there were other rules in place—rules that didn’t exist when I’d been a student. You couldn’t get thrown out of Favorite River for saying
tampon
or
douche bag,
but the
fag
word was in the category of hate. (Like the
nigger
word and the
kike
word, the
fag
word could get you in trouble.)

“Fucking
football
players,” I heard Gee say; it was something Herm Hoyt used to say. (Wrestlers are rather contemptuous about how tough football players
think
they are.) That young transgender-in-progress must have been reading my mind!

“What did you say, you little fag?” the big kid said. He took a cheap shot at Gee—he smacked the heel of his hand into the fourteen-year-old’s face. It must have hurt her, but I saw that Gee wasn’t going to back down; her nose was starting to bleed when I stepped between them.

“That’s enough,” I said to the big kid, but he bumped me with his chest. I saw the right hook coming, and took the punch on my left forearm—the way Jim
Somebody
had shown me, down that fourth-floor hall in the boxing room at the NYAC. The football player was a little surprised when I reached up and caught the back of his neck in a collar-tie. He pushed back against me, hard; he was a heavy kid, and he leaned all his weight on me—just what you want your opponent to do, if you have a halfway-decent duck-under.

The dining-hall floor was a lot harder than a wrestling mat, and the big kid landed awkwardly, with all his weight (and most of mine) on one shoulder. I was pretty sure he’d separated that shoulder, or he had broken his collarbone—or both. At the time, he was just lying on the floor, trying not to move that shoulder or his upper arm.

“Fucking
football
players,” Gee repeated, this time to the whole table of them. They could see her nose was bleeding more.

“For the fourth time, what’s her name?” I asked the big kid lying on the floor.

“Gee,” the douche-bag, tampon guy said. It turned out that he was a PG—a nineteen-year-old postgraduate who’d been admitted to Favorite River to play football. Either the separated shoulder or the broken collarbone would cause him to miss the rest of the football season. The academy didn’t expel him for the
fag
word, but he was put on probation. (Both Gee and I had hoped that her nose was broken, but it wasn’t.) The PG would be thrown out of school the following spring for using the
dyke
word, in reference to a girl who wouldn’t sleep with him.

When I agreed to teach part-time at Favorite River, I said I would do so only on the condition that the academy make an effort to educate new students, especially the older PGs, on the subject of the liberal culture at Favorite River—I meant, of course, in regard to our acceptance of sexual diversity.

But there in the dining hall, on that September day in 2007, I didn’t have anything more of an
educative
nature to say to the football players.

My new protégée, Gee, however, had more to say to those jocks, who were still sitting at their table. “I’m going to become a girl,” she told them bravely. “One day, I’ll be Georgia. But, for now, I’m just Gee, and you can see me as Caliban in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
.”

“Perhaps it will be a winter-term play,” I cautioned the football players, not that I expected any of them to come see it. I just thought that I might need that long to get the kids ready; all the students in Richard’s Shakespeare class were freshmen. I would open auditions to the entire school, but I feared that the kids who would be most interested in the play were (like Gee) only freshmen.

“There’s one more thing,” my protégée said to the football players. Her nose was streaming blood, but I could tell Gee was happy about that. “Mr. A. is
not
an old
gay
guy—he’s an old
bi
guy. You got that?”

I was impressed that the football players nodded. Well, okay, not the big one on the dining-hall floor; he was just lying there, not moving. I only regret that Miss Frost and Coach Hoyt didn’t see me hit that duck-under. If I do say so myself, it was a pretty good duck-under—my one move.

All that had happened three years ago, when Gee was just a freshman. You should have seen Gee at the start of her senior year, in the fall term of 2010—at seventeen, that girl was a knockout. Gee would turn eighteen her senior year; she would graduate, on schedule, with the Class of 2011. All I’m saying is, you should have seen her when she was a senior. Mrs. Hadley and Richard were right: Gee was special.

That fall term of 2010, we were in rehearsals for what Richard called “the fall Shakespeare.” We would be performing
Romeo and Juliet
in that most edgy time—the brief bit of school that remains between the Thanksgiving break and Christmas vacation.

As a teacher, I can tell you that’s a terrible time: The kids are woefully distracted, they have exams, they have papers due—and, to make it worse, the fall sports have been replaced by the winter ones. There is much that’s new, but a lot that’s old; everyone has a cough, and tempers are short.

The Drama Club at Favorite River had last put on
Romeo and Juliet
in the winter of ’85, which was twenty-five years ago. I still remembered what Larry had said to Richard about casting a boy as Juliet. (Larry thought Shakespeare would have
loved
the idea!) But Richard had asked, “Where do I find a boy with the balls to play Juliet?” Not even Lawrence Upton could find an answer for that.

Now I knew a boy with the balls to play Juliet. I had Gee, and—
as a girl
—Gee was just about perfect. At seventeen, Gee still actually had
balls, too. She’d begun the extensive psychological examinations—the counseling and psychotherapy—necessary for young people who are serious about gender reassignment. I don’t believe that her beard had yet been removed by the process of electrolysis; Gee may not have been old enough for electrolysis, but I don’t really know. I
do
know that, with her parents’ and her doctor’s approval, Gee was receiving injections of female hormones; if she stayed committed to her sex change, she would have to continue to take those hormones for the rest of her life. (I had no doubt that Gee, soon to be
Georgia,
Montgomery would stay committed.)

What was it Elaine once said, about the possibility of
Kittredge
playing Juliet? It wouldn’t have worked, we agreed. “Juliet is nothing if she’s not
sincere,
” Elaine had said.

Boy, did I ever have a Juliet who was
sincere
! Gee had always had balls, but now she had breasts—small but very pretty ones—and her hair had acquired a new luster. My, how her eyelashes had grown! Gee’s skin had become softer, and the acne was altogether gone; her hips had spread, though she’d actually lost weight since her freshman year—her hips were already womanly, if not yet curvaceous.

What’s more important, the whole community at Favorite River Academy knew who (and what) Gee Montgomery was. Sure, there were still a few jocks who hadn’t entirely accepted how sexually
diverse
a school we were trying to be. There will always be a few troglodytes.

Larry would have been proud of me, I thought. In a word, it might have surprised Larry to see how
involved
I was. Political activism didn’t come naturally to me, but I was at least a
little
active politically. I’d traveled to some college campuses in our state. I’d spoken to the LGBT groups at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. I’d supported the same-sex marriage bill, which the Vermont State Senate passed into law—over the veto of our Republican governor, a troglodyte.

Larry would have laughed to see me supporting gay marriage, because Larry knew what I thought of
any
marriage. “Old Mr. Monogamy,” Larry would have teased me. But gay marriage is what the gay and bi kids want, and I support those kids.

“I see a future hero in you!” Grandpa Harry had told me. I wouldn’t go that far, but I hope Miss Frost might have approved of me. In my own way, I was
protecting
someone—I’d protected Gee. I was a worthwhile person in Gee’s life. Maybe Miss Frost would have liked me for that.

This was my life at age sixty-eight. I was a part-time English teacher at my old school, Favorite River Academy; I also directed the Drama Club there. I was a writer, and an occasional political activist—on the side of LGBT groups, everywhere. Oh, forgive me; the language, I know, keeps changing.

A very young teacher at Favorite River told me it was no longer appropriate (or inclusive enough) to say LGBT—it was supposed to be LGBT
Q
.

“What is the fucking
Q
for?” I asked the teacher. “
Quarrelsome,
perhaps?”

“No, Bill,” the teacher said.
“Questioning.”

“Oh.”

“I remember you at the
questioning
phase, Billy,” Martha Hadley told me. Ah, well—yes, I remember me at that phase, too. I’m okay about saying LGBTQ; at my age, I just have trouble remembering the frigging
Q
!

Mrs. Hadley lives in the Facility now. She’s ninety, and Richard visits her every day. I visit Martha twice a week—at the same time I visit Uncle Bob. At ninety-three, the Racquet Man is doing surprisingly well—that is, physically. Bob’s memory isn’t all it was, but that’s a good fella’s failing. Sometimes, Bob even forgets that Gerry and her California girlfriend—the one who’s as old as I am—were married in Vermont this year.

It was a June 2010 wedding; we had it at my house on River Street. Both Mrs. Hadley and Uncle Bob were there—Martha in a wheelchair. The Racquet Man was pushing Mrs. Hadley around.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take over pushing the wheelchair, Bob?” Richard and I and Elaine kept asking.

“What makes you think I’m
pushing
it?” the Racquet Man asked us. “I’m just
leaning
on it!”