Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (28 page)

He was given to saying things like this now and again, particularly since he’d become part of the school’s Amnesty International chapter. He’d even gone on a trip to New York earlier in the fall in order to march around in front of the Chinese embassy, holding a sign that said,
SHAME ON CHINA! HUMAN RIGHTS NOW!

“Well, I’m very proud of you,” I said. “And you know, Zach, if you ever feel like—”

“Maddy,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder. “I know.”

I
LOOKED AT
S
PIKE
. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

The ventriloquist smiled. “I love you Jen-nay,” he said, in Mikey Splinters’s voice. He gave me a kiss, and all the hairs on my arm stood on end. Then he said, “Give me one second, okay?” He headed to the men’s room.

I waited for him at the bar. Mikey Splinters sat on the stool next to me, looking at me with his hungry, lascivious expression.
What do you think, Mikey?
I asked the dummy.
Is Spike going to be able to tell?

This was more than a minor concern. A lot of men would find it disconcerting if they learned that the woman they’d had sex with had once been male. You want to know how I know this? Because back when
I
was a man, if a woman I’d had sex with told me
she
used to be a man? I’d have found it disconcerting.

Maddy
, said the figure next to me at the bar.
You tell him the truth
.

I don’t think so
, I replied.
Not this time
.

It wasn’t as if Spike was going to be able to conclude anything from my anatomy, thanks for asking. Everything looked just like it was supposed to. I’d even seen several doctors for checkups since the exciting days of the big switcheroo, who did not know my history and could not tell. One of them wanted to know if I was pregnant.

Anyhow, between the surgery and the hormones, it was unlikely that Spike would be any the wiser simply on the basis of my appearance. But then, it wasn’t my appearance I was worried about. It was that I was a virgin, at age forty-four, an innocent, a wide-eyed thing who, since the transition, had somehow stumbled through the world protected from danger by little more than her own naïveté and a healthy portion of luck. What could I say if he asked me, as he inevitably would, if he was the best I’d ever had?

Hey. Let me outta here! Let me outta here!

Mikey Splinters gave me the eye. I thought about my family, about Deedie and the boys and the two black Labs. Our house in Maine. The tears my wife had cried when she realized that she was going to lose her husband, even if she got to keep me. For a while it seemed as if we’d
spent the better part of three years lying in our bed in Maine, one of us holding the other, as we wept and wept.

Mikey Splinters, sitting there with his gin and tonic, stared at me with his sad, blank face.

Please?
I asked him.
Just once?

But the dummy had nothing to say.

I grabbed my purse. Halfway back to my room I kicked the wall.
Goddamn it
. My shoe made a small dent in the wall, and I realized, as I looked at the hole, that there was another one just like it, only a few inches away from mine. Apparently I’d entered a world where people kicked the walls all the time.

I opened the door to my room and lay down on the bed alone and stared at the ceiling. This went on for a while until at last I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

I stared at the person reflected before me.
Laady
, I said.

W
E SAT THERE
in the former church, Deedie and me, Zach and Shannon. The conductor held his baton aloft. I looked at Sean and his halo of curls with a sense of wonder. I thought of my father, who had wanted to be a professional pianist in his youth. The week before Dad died he claimed he’d seen a specter dressed in tails come into his room and stand next to his bed.
Come away with me
, said the maestro. He reached toward my father with one skeletal hand.
And conduct my orchestra
.

I was afraid
, my father later told me, through his morphine haze. It was one of the last things he ever said.
Because I did not know the tune
.

Tears flickered in my eyes, and Deedie took my hand.
I love you, Jenny
, she whispered.

The conductor’s hand swept through the air, and the chamber filled with music.

*
This name has been changed. Later in this chapter, the name of the character “Spike” has been changed as well.

†
Or, in the case of a ventriloquist, three?

I was in
a hotel in New York when I found it first. This was winter of 2010—the boys now in eleventh and ninth grades, respectively, Deedie and I in our fifties. I was in the fancy hotel bathroom, in a shower with seven different showerheads and mood lighting and a cluster of votive candles. I had twinkly New Age music playing on the stereo, the kind Thomas Pynchon once described as
mindbarf
. If you’re going to find a tumor in your breast, this was a pretty good space for it.

I’d felt it before, during one of those monthly self-exams you’re supposed to do. Given the fact that I hadn’t had any breasts in the first place until I was forty, and given the fact that, compared to most women, anyhow, my estrogen level had been well below average until I reached the same age, the chances of my contracting breast cancer were less than that of other women I knew. So the first time I felt the lump I thought,
This? Oh, this must be nothing
.

Then I found it again. Every now and again I’d check it out and think,
This thing isn’t still here, is it?
Sometimes it seemed to disappear.

But there in the hotel, the hot steaming water surrounding me, I put my fingers right on it. It seemed larger.

I got out of the shower and turned off the twinkly music. Somehow it wasn’t relaxing me anymore.

I
STARTED PLAYING
rock ’n’ roll with a new band called Nasty Habits in January of 2011. I’d known the guitar player, Steve, from another
band, the Deadbeats. We started playing in a bar near my house, where they were the house band on Friday nights. We sounded good, and they even gave me a chance to play a Farfisa effect in a couple of Doors tunes, “Riders on the Storm” and “Light My Fire.” Fun. Over the years, I’d played with a half dozen other bands, and been thrown out of every one.
Sorry, Jenny
, they’d tell me, although they never sounded sorry.
It’s just not working out
.

As I played with Nasty Habits, popcorn popping in the popcorn machine, Boston Bruins slapping the puck around on the big bar television, I felt that thing still throbbing in my left breast. I’d called up my doctor when I got back from New York a month earlier, tried to get an appointment. I have a lump in my breast, I said. The receptionist at my doctor’s office said she couldn’t get me in to see her for a month. They finally slotted me in for an appointment at nine o’clock on a Friday morning, but they warned me I had to call in at eight that morning to confirm. They said that if I didn’t call them they’d give the appointment away. It was only fair to the doctor’s other patients, they said.

I said, “Did I mention that I have a lump in my breast?”

And so I waited for the appointment, week after week. It was a cold, snowy January in Maine. I kept the fires roaring in our woodstoves, and I shoveled the ice and snow off our front walk.

On the day of the appointment, a classic nor’easter screamed up the East Coast, taking down power lines, closing schools, blocking off roads. I got a call from the doctor’s office. “Sorry,” she said. “We’ll have to reschedule.”

I said, “When can we reschedule?”

The receptionist made a sad sound. “I’m sorry, Jennifer. We’re really booked. I think I could get to you in the last week of March.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” I said.
Last week of March
. My breast throbbed.

I hung up the phone and looked outside. Snow blew horizontally past the window, past the four-foot-long icicles hanging off our gutters.

I built up the fire and sat down to read Jennifer Egan’s
A Visit from the Goon Squad
in my rocking chair. I heard the ding from my computer that indicated there was fresh e-mail. So I put down the book
and checked it out. It was a letter from the rhythm guitarist in Nasty Habits.

Sorry, Jenny
, he wrote.
It’s just not working out
.

T
HEN THE HEADMASTER
called. “It’s about your son,” he said.

“What about him?”

“We’re asking that you remove Zach from the campus community. We’d like you to have him see a psychiatrist. If he gets a clean bill of health, we can talk about him returning to the school.”

“What’s this all about?” I asked. “Did he do something?”

“You’ll have to discuss that with him,” said the headmaster. “He’s posted something on his Facebook page. It gave me chills.”

“Wait,” I said, still trying to catch up with this conversation. “He’s being suspended? For something he put on Facebook?”

“It gave me chills,” said the headmaster.

Z
ACH HAD A FRIEND
we’ll call Pete. Pete was a sweet, ironic young man who wore his hair short and, like a lot of Maine kids, liked going hunting. He had put a photograph of himself on Facebook wearing camouflage and holding a toy gun. Zach thought it would be hilarious to put a caption below this photo. The caption was “Guns don’t kill people; I kill people.”

This was just about a month after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.

I drove to the school and picked Zach up and took him home. As we drove, he stared out at the snowy mountains of central Maine, the frozen lakes, the pine trees burdened with icicles.

“They’re acting like I’m a stranger,” he said. “I’ve been part of that school for three years now. I’m the head of Amnesty International. I’m part of the GSA. Everyone knows I’m a pacifist. And now I’m being thrown out of school for making one joke? On Facebook?”

Deedie and I started calling psychiatrists. Thanks to her deep
connections among the social work community in Maine, we were able to find a therapist qualified in counseling “student threats” within a day or so.

Unfortunately, Deedie was, at that same hour, heading down to Pennsylvania to escort my mother to her annual retreat in Florida. And so it fell to me to drag Zach to two consecutive days of therapy, each session lasting over four hours.

As Deedie headed for the airport, she hugged us all in turn. She was feeling the same ambivalence that I was, although it’s fair to say her exasperation with Zach was winning out over her anger at the school. Her last words as she left were, “What were you
thinking
?” a phrase so handy among parents of teenagers I sometimes thought we should get T-shirts made up bearing exactly these words.

That night, I turned off the lights and lay in bed. Ranger jumped up and lay down in Deedie’s spot, and moaned sympathetically. But I would not be consoled. I could only imagine Zach interviewing at colleges next summer and having to explain his suspension.
Yeah, like I posted on Facebook about this friend of mine who I said was going to shoot people. It was supposed to be funny
.

I woke up in the middle of the night and sat bolt upright in bed. Something had happened to my family that I could not fix. But then, this was hardly the first time this was true.

I
N THEORY
, D
EEDIE
was supposed to get my mother as far as Delray Beach in Florida, stay with her for a couple days, and then hand responsibility for her care over to a series of friends and cousins. My mother was ninety-four years old at this point, not that you would have thought she was a day over thirty-nine to judge from her buoyant nature. Plus, she had amazing skin; even now it was as soft and elastic as a pair of underpants.