Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (20 page)

[
There is an unexpected pause here as both Edward’s eyes and JFB’s mist up
.]

JFB:
I think there is—well. [
Clears throat
]

EA:
There is no one to tell you who you are except yourself.

JFB:
Knowing who your parents are doesn’t necessarily provide the answer, Edward.

EA:
No. No. Because a lot of people have to abandon all the things that they’re supposed to be and their entire upbringing if that’s not who they are.

JFB:
There was a moment when you said, “All right. I’m leaving.” And you packed a bag and you left.

EA:
It was a wonderful feeling of liberation that I could get on with the business of being who I was. I knew what I was giving up. I wasn’t crazy. I knew I was giving up wealth and comfort and all of that stuff, but I’d gotten my education. I’d gotten what I needed. Enough to spend the next ten years undoing a lot of stuff and finding out totally who I needed to be.

JFB:
Did you ever know what your parents’ reaction to your work was? The Albees?

EA:
The father, no. I never found out anything about his reaction to anything. I know that the mother would refer to me as “my son, the playwright.”

But I don’t think she was ever sympathetic to the work. No, it was not the kind of theater that she thought one should be seeing. Theater is not to make you happy, but escape. No engagement. All escape.

JFB:
What was her idea of a great night on the town?

EA:
Oh, a wonderful musical.

JFB:
George M. Cohan. [
Laughs
]

EA:
Are you completely satisfied with where you are and who you are?

JFB:
What? Am I satisfied? You mean completely?

EA:
Mm.

JFB:
On a good day.

EA:
And the bad days?

JFB:
The bad days I guess I feel lingering guilt at having made the lives of the people that I love more complicated.

EA:
If life is not complex what’s the point of living it?

JFB:
You were blessed with a long relationship with Jonathan Thomas. What would have happened if you had adopted children?

EA:
Never occurred to us.

JFB:
Never on the radar?

EA:
Never for a second.

JFB:
Because?

EA:
I thought that I was having kids by writing plays.

JFB:
Humor me. If you’d had a child, who would he have been? Or she?

EA:
I would have forced them to be as individual as I could possibly have forced them to be.

JFB:
How would you have done that?

EA:
I’m pretty good at seeing and hearing bullshit. I think I would have been saying, “Come off it. Come off it.”

JFB:
What would his or her name have been?

EA:
I have no idea.

JFB:
I know you have no idea. Would it have been Edward Jr.?

EA:
I think I would have rather had a son than a daughter.

JFB:
Why?

EA:
’Cause I’m gay. I relate much more to guys.

JFB:
Other than teaching him not to tolerate bullshit—which, by the way, that was my goal, too, and it’s actually a bigger job than it sounds—what else would you have liked to have taught your son?

EA:
That when you get to the end of it you should be okay with the fact that you dealt pretty honorably with yourself and other people and didn’t compromise too much.

JFB:
Is it fair to say that in your plays, couples are frequently dissatisfied with the state of their marriages?

EA:
They both change or one of them changes and the other doesn’t.

JFB:
Don’t start with me.

EA:
Every relationship has its duration.

JFB:
A thing I took from Thurber is that it just seems as if every form of love, heterosexual love anyway, seems at some point to lead to bedlam.

EA:
Well, gay relationships rarely go on for a long time untroubled, too, you know.

JFB:
I was thinking about your play
The Goat
, which is a play that I saw in the heart of my own transition. [
It’s a play about a man who sacrifices his marriage because he falls head over heels in love with a goat named Sylvia
.] When I left the theater, I think you’ll be pleased to know, I left the theater that night and I went back to my hotel and I wept—

EA:
Good for you.

JFB:
No, good for you. I took it very personally.

EA:
You wept for me?

JFB:
No, I wept for me. I’m not worried about you, Edward.

EA:
[
Chuckles
]

JFB:
No, I thought, Oh my God, that’s me. That I’m someone whose passion is so unseemly that I’m just bringing chaos wherever I go. Although in a way, I guess our story ended differently in that it was as if Deedie in the end said to me, “Okay, we’ll make room for the goat.”

EA:
Don’t you have to be ruthless if you’re going to become who you need to be? Don’t you have to be ruthless?

JFB:
Yeah, I think so. I think so. Although I think for me to become who I needed to be also required taking as much of my former self with me as possible.

EA:
No, you have to be ruthless in response to other people’s reaction.

JFB:
I guess. Although maybe I’m less ruthless than you are.

EA:
Let me get you some green tea.

JFB:
Okay. Shall I follow you in?

[
We walk through the loft, past its paintings and primitive sculptures, into the kitchen, where Edward starts looking through the cupboards
.]

EA:
Do I have any green tea? Here’s some green tea. Do you like green tea?

JFB:
Yes, please.

[
There is a long interval as the water boils and we speak of Easter Island, which we visited within weeks of each other in 2005, and which made a lasting impression on us both. We talk about going back there together for Edward’s eighty-fifth birthday in 2013
.]

EA:
Do you take anything in your tea?

JFB:
No, I think I’ll take it just like this. What are you looking for?

EA:
I was looking for my sugar substitute. The Equal.

JFB:
Edward, you have no equal.

EA:
Yes, I do.

JFB:
Oh, that’s nice of you to say.

EA:
A little bit.

[
We walk back into the loft and sit back down on the couch together
.]

EA:
How does your older boy handle the problem of you with friends?

JFB:
Oddly there has never been a problem with me.

EA:
Interesting.

JFB:
I say, “Well, how can that be?” He says, “Our generation doesn’t worry about the things that your generation worried about. Plus, we don’t sit around talking about our parents.”

I think that to some degree they are protected by my being so public and by being a visible voice in the country for people like me, like us. Sometimes what kids can taunt each other with is secrets. “Oh, did you know that Zach’s father is now a girl?” What can people say, except “Yeah, everybody knows that.”

[
A rushing sound comes from outside
.]

EA:
Is that rain?

JFB:
That is rain. It’s quite a rain.

EA:
Oh my goodness. I didn’t know whether the air-conditioning had suddenly come on. It’s rain. Good.

JFB:
Edward, I met you two months before my father died in 1986. Much later, I learned that you and he were born about two months apart in 1928. While you didn’t have any children with Jonathan or anybody else that I know of, you do have children, in the way that students do become the sons and daughters of their teachers. And one of those students, of course, was me. So the good news is, you do have a son. The bad news is that she’s a woman. [
Laughter
]

EA:
Oh, I don’t know. Not too many guys can claim that.

JFB:
So what is the difference between motherhood and fatherhood?

EA:
It’s two things, of course. What the kids have been instructed to expect. What they understand a mother to be and a father to be. But it’s also how really differently you feel having been a male parent and now being a female parent. So much of it has to do with what we are instructed and how we’re instructed to behave as certain things.

JFB:
There was a time when I thought, I am not only the luckiest but, like Tiresias, the wisest, because I’ve lived as a man and I’ve lived as a woman. Now, though, sometimes I think my experience as a man was not like that of any of the men that I know and my experience as a woman is not like that of many other women that I know.

[
We drink our tea, and Edward looks at his collection of paintings and sculpture
.]

JFB:
Is there a painting here that makes you think about parents and children?

EA:
About parents and children. No. [
Laughter
]

JFB:
What about the Chagall?

EA:
Well. That’s his sister, yeah. But I don’t think in those terms.

You’re making me think about things that I haven’t thought about from your point of view. Do you know one thing I’ve never thought? What it would be like to be straight. I’ve never thought about that. I was so accepting of being gay. It was my first awareness of who I was; I never even thought about it.

[
We listen to the rain for a while. Edward speaks about a play he has recently abandoned
.]

JFB:
What’s the play?

EA:
It was called “Laying an Egg.” It’s about a forty-seven-year-old woman who’s been trying to get pregnant for a very, very long time and keeps having miscarriages and her brother’s wife keeps dropping kids every three weeks and everyone thinks she’s too old to have a kid now. It’d be very dangerous for her and the kid will be damaged and all the rest of it.

So, she finds a Bulgarian doctor who’s giving her all sorts of interesting
medicines and she gets pregnant. The way the play was going, at a certain point in the pregnancy they could no longer find the fetus because it was encased in something very much like an egg.

JFB:
Hm. And at the end of act 1—

EA:
Well, that was the end of act 2.

Do you and your wife still live together?

JFB:
Do we—? We do.

EA:
Who are you to her? Are you still her husband?

JFB:
I am her wife.

EA:
She made the transfer?

JFB:
Yeah. Sometimes I’m her spouse or partner. Less frequently I’m her wife, but I’m never her husband.

EA:
Hm. What does that indicate? A loss there of some sort?

JFB:
Well, she has lost a husband, but she’s got me.

EA:
Yeah.

[
A pause
]

JFB:
Oh look. The rain has stopped.

EA:
Yes, that was huge. Huge and brief. But fun.

BARBARA SPIEGEL

© Barbara Spiegel

I was concerned about her future. If she was going to be a dwarf, then there was no problem. Whereas now she was going to be different than us. I know how society can be
.

Barbara Spiegel
is the director for District 1 of the Little People of America, which encompasses all of New England. I went to visit her at her home in South Portland, Maine, on a beautiful day in September. She is the mother of three children, Alexandra, Irina, and Talia. I knocked on her door and she answered—a four-foot-two-inch-tall woman in a tiedyed T-shirt. As we spoke, thirteen-month-old Talia (like all of Barbara’s children, an achondroplastic dwarf) crawled around merrily on the floor.