Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (15 page)

“I don’t care what you want,” I explained, raising the child into the air and walking with him out into the hall.

“What’s going on?” asked Deedie.

“Just trying to go out the fucking door is all,” I replied.

“I hate you, Daddy,” said Sean. “I hate you!”

“Jim,” said Deedie. “Stop.”

“I’m just going out the door with my son wearing his actual goddamned pants,” I explained.

“I hate you, Daddy! I hate you!”

“Jim, please,” said Deedie. She reached for the child.

“I’ve got him,” I said, and walked out the front door still carrying the screaming boy. I opened the back door of the Opel and stuffed Sean into his car seat. Then I lowered the restraining straps over the child’s head and shoulders and clicked the buckle between Sean’s kicking legs. He writhed and wriggled like a condemned man in an electric chair. “I’m sorry it’s like this,” I said. “But you’re a bad boy.”

“I’m not a bad boy! You’re a bad daddy! I hate you!” The tears rolled down Sean’s face like rain.

I looked at my son with fury. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” I said. Then I slammed the car door.

I walked back inside. Zach looked up at me in fear. “What happened? Where is Baby Sean?”

“I locked him in his car seat,” I said.

“Why?” said Zach. “Why?”

“Because,” I said. “I’m teaching him a lesson.”

Maybe it’s no surprise that, in the wake of my decision to start sharing my secret with Deedie, I was a more terrible person rather than a more tranquil one. I had hoped that by cross-dressing openly once in a
while, I’d be able to shed the burden of secrecy and to obtain a kind of equilibrium between my various selves. But instead, sitting there after-hours by the peat fire in our living room in Cork, wearing a Coldwater Creek skirt and a wig that still made me look like Joni Mitchell, I only felt stupid and embarrassed. I was mortified by the strangeness of it all, even as Deedie sat by my side. I wondered what possible explanation I could offer if the boys woke up.
Who’s Joni Mitchell, Daddy?
Worst of all, I knew that the thing I felt inside could not be expressed with clothes. To be honest, clothes weren’t really all that interesting to me; they’re still not. All they were was a means of making the thing I felt on the inside visible. But it was the thing inside that haunted me.

By the time we got to school that day, the tears were rolling down my face as well as Sean’s. I pulled into the Montessori parking lot and I unbuckled Sean from his car seat and I held him in my arms. “I’m so sorry, Sean,” I said. “You’re not a bad boy. You’re a very good boy, and I love you.”

I remembered the time my father had accidentally burned me with the soldering iron while trying to fix my flying saucer.
I’d never hurt you, Jim. I’m so sorry
.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY NIGHTS
, Deedie and I would head down to the Gables pub on Douglas Street and listen to the session. We sat on stools, drinking our pints of Murphy’s and Beamish, as some of the finest musicians in the world sat in the corner, waving their fiddle bows around, playing banjos and guitars and bouzoukis and the Irish box. We befriended a guy named Johnny Neville, who played in a band called North Cregg. During the break he’d talk to us about his family. Johnny had two boys about the same age as our sons.

“Who’s taking care of the kids while you’re out here playing?” Deedie asked.

Johnny nodded. “That would be,” he said, “my good wife.”

He and his friend Christy Leahy played a wide range of old tunes, a lot of it in the Sliabh Luachra tradition, but there were a few original songs as well. There was one of Johnny’s that always made my throat
close up, a ballad about his abusive, alcoholic father. It was called “The Wobblin’ Man.”

You’d wind him up and let him go
,

And watch him wobble to and fro
.

As I listened to this tune, my eyes shone with tears. But they did not fall. Deedie reached out and clasped my hand. “Are you all right, Jim?” she asked.

I said that I was fine.

O
NE DAY, WHEN
I picked Zach up at the Montessori School, I found him sobbing uncontrollably. “What happened?” I asked his teacher.

“Ah well, you know,” she said. “He’s had a bit of a disappointment.”

As we drove back to the apartment, through the crazy narrow streets of Cork, I tried to get the details from him. Apparently there’d been some sort of race. Which he’d lost.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said to the six-year-old.

“Whenever I race you or Mommy, I always win,” he said, deep in his misery.

“Well,” I said, “maybe we’re not as fast as the Irish.”

“I thought I was as fast as a cheetah!” he said.

“You are fast,” I noted. “You just weren’t the fastest!”

He sobbed some more.

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” I said.

He looked up at me. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“The weeping. You lost a race, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“It is for me,” he said.

“Maybe you think that now,” I said. “But there’s worse things in the world than losing a race. You should save your tears.”

“Why?” asked Zach. “Am I going to run out?”

There were a couple of things I wanted to explain to my son. One of them was that, no, you’ll never run out of tears. At the same time, tears weren’t something you let fall indiscriminately. You wanted to
save them for when you needed them. That was my theory at the time, anyhow.

“No, Zach,” I said. “You won’t run out of tears. It’s just that there are times when it’s good to hold things in.”

“Why would I hold things in?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Because that’s how you protect people,” I said. “It’s one of the ways boys protect girls. It’s like you put that sadness in a box, and you bury it in the ground.”

Zach looked out the window. His tears had stopped. “I should protect Mommy, you mean?” he said. “By putting my tears in the ground?”

We were almost home. Through the open windows of the Opel I could hear the bells of St. Anne’s ringing through the air. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, a scream rent the air. Zach and Sean both came running into the living room. “What happened?” said Deedie, leaping to her feet.

Zach held up his hand. Deep tooth marks were sunk into the meat of his thumb.

“Sean bit me!” he said. He was sobbing.

“I didn’t!” said Sean.

“Seannie,” said Deedie. “Look at Zach’s hand! Look at what you did!”

“I didn’t bite him!” said Sean. He was holding his friend Big Pig in one hand. Sean had a council of porcine advisers, including Big Pig, Little Pig, and Irish Pig.

“Everyone makes a mistake once in a while,” said Deedie, casting a glance in my direction. “But we don’t lie to each other in our family.”

Now Sean was crying. “I’m not a liar!” he shouted. Deedie picked him up and walked down the hall to his room. Seannie had kind of a grim room in the apartment, a damp, mildewy chamber just shy of growing mushrooms.

“Time out for you,” said Deedie.

I picked up Zach and held him in my lap. “I’m sorry I’m crying,” he said. “I wanted to protect Mommy. But it hurts too much.”

“It’s all right, son,” I said. From down the hall, I heard the sound of Seannie wailing. His door closed as Deedie left him in there to consider his recent mistakes.

Ten years later, Zach confessed to me that Sean had been telling the truth in this encounter. What had happened, in fact, was that in order to frame his brother, Zach had bitten himself.

D
EEDIE AND
I were having dinner at the table in our apartment in Cork. She’d taken a leave from her job as a social worker for the year and spent her days working out at the Brookfield Health Club and shopping at the city’s English Market, a “farmers’ market” several blocks long. There were loaves of Irish soda bread, pink salmon laid out on ice, bottles of sweet cream and honey.

She poured out a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and we clinked glasses. The boys were asleep.

“Are ye all right then?” I said. This was a phrase we heard each day at the English Market, the Irish equivalent of “Can I help you?”

“Brilliant,” said Deedie. She’d made salmon and green beans. It had been raining outside, but now the sun was out. Everything shone with rain.

“Seriously,” I said. “Are we having a good year?”

Deedie nodded. “I think I’m as happy as I’ve ever been,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I thought I’d be homesick, but I’m not. Not much, anyhow.”

Deedie sipped her wine. “Home will be there when we get back,” she said. “In the meantime, there’s all this salmon.”

I looked at my wife. After ten years of marriage, she was as beautiful as when we married. I was not sure the same could be said of me.

“And you don’t mind—the gender stuff?” I said restlessly.

“That,” said Deedie. “Whatever. I’m not crazy about it, but you’re happy, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, all right then,” she said.

She ate some salmon. From outside, the sound of tires on the wet road made a sound like a shush.

The doorbell rang.

I put my glass down, but I missed the edge of the table. The goblet shattered on the floor.

As I walked toward the front door, I stepped on a small sliver of glass. I felt it disappear deep into the flesh of my heel.

I opened the door. There stood a deliveryman, holding a huge bouquet of roses. They were from my mother.
I’m sending these for no reason at all
, read the card.
Except to remind you both that you are loved
.

A
WEEK LATER
, I went to Amsterdam by myself. I brought a suitcase of female gear, checked into the American Hotel on the Leidseplein, and did the presto change-o. After a few hours I stepped out onto the streets of the city, in a black skirt and a light blue top. No one looked at me twice. Was this because I was so undetectable as a female? Or because, when all was said and done, what I looked like turned out to be of far less consequence to the world than I had anticipated?

I walked around Vondelpark and considered the swans, visited the Rijksmuseum and stared at paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer. They didn’t have
Girl with a Pearl Earring
, but it was just as well. I didn’t need to be called
klootzak
anymore. I knew how to say this in English.

As I walked around the city, I was aware that my foot hurt. That tiny sliver of glass in my heel appeared to be sinking deeper and deeper. I pretended that I couldn’t feel it. When I failed at this, I simply hoped the sliver would work its way out on its own in time, although I’m not sure anything else in the world had ever behaved in that fashion, at least not in my experience.

At the end of the day I found myself in the Anne Frank house on the Prinsengracht.

I climbed the small staircase up to the hidden annex, walked through the passageway hidden by the bookcase, crept through those
tiny rooms full of such longing and horror. There weren’t a lot of other tourists in the house that day. And so it was that I found myself dressed in drag, alone in Anne Frank’s bedroom.

There was her tiny bed, the photographs of Hollywood movie stars from sixty years ago still pasted to the wall. A sheet of Plexiglas protected the photographs from the fingers of tourists.

I stood there frozen, imagining the young girl passing her days here, waiting to be set free. There was a window on one wall. Birds were singing.

In spite of the room’s aching sadness, it was still a teenager’s room. It made me think, for a second, of the room I had lived in when I was sixteen, a chamber with two different secret panels—one for my bong, one for my bras and earrings and my copy of
The Feminine Mystique
. Next to my bed, instead of a photograph of Joan Crawford, there had been a photograph of the surface of Mars. I used to lie in bed and look at the planet, imagine what it would be like to live there.

I thought about Anne Frank, driven into hiding by Nazis. The glass in my heel ached.

What about you, Jenny?
I asked myself.
Is this really how you’re going to live?

I fled from the girl’s bedroom, went down the stairs, and fought my way in a blind panic out into the streets of Amsterdam. I rushed in my heels to the Prinsengracht canal and stood there in self-loathing and despair, looking down at the dank green water.

I have made up my mind
, Anne Frank wrote,
to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments
.

I saw two hippies coming down the street, American college boys with backpacks. I remembered the first time I had come to Amsterdam, back with my friend Doober, the summer between high school and college. I remembered asking him one morning, “Don’t you want to see the Anne Frank house?”

“I don’t know, man,” said Doober. “Sounds like kind of a bummer.”

The hippies passed me by. One of them cast a curious look in my
direction, as if embarrassed just to walk by this strange distraught woman. It had to be admitted that he looked not unlike myself, when I was a young thing, with his long hair and leering eyes. I wondered if he was thinking the thing that I had thought at the lighthouse in Sanibel, that time I’d looked at the jogging woman who so strangely resembled me. Did he see, as he gazed upon me, how we all resemble each other? How any of us could be brother and sister? Or both?

“
Entschuldigen, Fraulein
,” he said, pausing. “
Sie sind verletzt?
”

Excuse me, miss. Are you hurt?

“Mir geht es gut,”
I said. I wondered if he could tell the truth about me from my voice. “
Es ist ganz nichts
.” I’m fine. It’s nothing.

The boys loped onward. A few meters farther down the street, they laughed. I wasn’t sure about what exactly, but I had a guess.