Epilogue: Another Return

The street was dark, but not in the way she remembered. Curtains muted the light in the windows the way clouds veiled the daylight that afternoon—or the way drizzle and mist dissipated that day’s warmth, the first after two months when it seemed winter would never end.

She walked alone. Shadows skittered in the curtains like images in a silent movie. The tapping of her heels strummed echoes off steep stone stairs. The dark, heavy doors—smooth but not shiny—intensified the darkness that ended on a wide avenue with small shops that would remain open for another hour or two.

Her black wool jacket covered her to her hips, where it overlapped the black watch plaid skirt that sheathed her thighs down to her knees. Under it, black tights encased her legs. She was rather rawboned but, because she was taller than nearly all of the women who were shopping for bread, onions and yarn, she looked slender next to them. Also, her hair, waves in a hue between copper and brass, made her seem younger than they, in their brown and black wigs, though in fact some of their mothers were younger than her. Still, no one seemed to notice her. She felt relief for that.

She crossed the avenue to another street lined with rowhouses like the ones she’d just passed. It was Ash Wednesday, the first night of Lent. When she was a child, she and her classmates would go to church early in the morning, then cross the street to go to school with the charcoal-dust mark on their foreheads. But none of the women shopping on the avenue—or in in the neighborhood that night, in fact—had that mark. She hadn’t thought about it, or that season, in years, in decades. Seven weeks until Easter: a holiday on which, in years past, she and her family attended mass and, afterward, sat down to a meal that stretched through the afternoon and evening. After she’d left, after everyone else left or died—she might have lunch or dinner with friends on that day, though it meant no more to them, or her, than it did to the women on the avenue.

75. Crossing

Even today I’m thinking about jumping from one of those long bridges that spans those nooks of the ocean that’ve been misnamed as rivers and bays. There are a few, not very far from this block, and I could walk along their sides. I had to cross one of them to get here; I’ll have to cross it or another to leave. Crossing is just that: You’re not on one piece of land or the other, one state or the other; you’re on the bridge.

On one shore, you freeze, you’re hungry, somebody beats you; none of it changes. But you don’t know what’s on the other side, even if you’ve been there before. The streets on the side you know follow perfectly straight lines—or at least they seem to—to other streets, to avenues, to railroad tracks—you never realize they were abandoned—or to graveyards. On the other side, you don’t know where the streets, the alleys—Are there streets? Are there alleys?—will lead you. Even if you’ve been there before, you’re not sure of where you’re going.

The body the police identified by my former name was rolled on its head on a cellar floor under a house abandoned on a street that ends two and a half blocks from the street that cuts it off at the other end at a storefront of dirt and broken glass that separates rotted ties and rusty rails from the street. No one who doesn’t live on this street, or the street where it ends, has ever seen it. Or died on it: That’s one of the risks you run when you’re there. No escape—to what? Die here, don’t go to the other side. Or maybe you go, die, to the other side.

But there’s no going to the other side without crossing, without the bridge. A place where you’re not there or there. Almost every bridge big enough to take you away from this block has a sign, a marker, on it telling you when you’ve crossed from one town to the next, the county line, the state border, the national frontier. The line is completely arbitrary: You never see it; you never know you’ve crossed it until you see the sign. Still, you haven’t gotten to the other side; you’ve left because to get from the place to which you’ve come, you still have to cross.  (That’s why I think of jumping; that’s why I never will. ) There’s no coming back; there’s only going back. And on most bridges, you can’t do that without going to the other side first.

And you don’t know whether you can leave—actually, sometimes you know you can’t—once you’ve gotten there. You can’t follow the streets, the alleys, or even the wind, in the same way on the other side as you did in your old home. Nothing on the other side takes you in the same direction.

So the only certainty you have is that you’re on the bridge. But you can’t stay there—that’s not the purpose of a bridge. I remember reading that Paris grew into the great metropolis it’s become when the Pont Neuf—the first bridge in centuries to be constructed without houses on it—opened to the traffic of the time.

On the Pont Neuf, on the Brooklyn or Golden Gate or most other bridges, you can stop to look at the view, if you were ever impressed by such things. But you can’t stay, no matter how pretty or tall the buildings, no matter how softly the light shimmers on the water. You have to move along, from it, away, at some point. Then there’s the other side. Or the river, the bay, the ocean.

At least you always know which way the water flows: to the trench opening all around you, inside, at the bottom. The way it’s always gone. Not like the streets on the other side.

I think about jumping now, again, when I’m within sight of what I’d always hoped for. Only days from the operation, if all goes according to plan: I didn’t even know about the operation when I was living on this block. I knew only that I didn’t live in that body, with my former name: dead on this block. Or worse: dying, waiting to die, on this block.

Nearly every day I envisioned that body dropping form one of those bridges, dropping all the way to the bottom of the ocean. I wished there was another place, another body, for me—another time, even.

I left only because I knew the body on this block would kill me before…before I could…kill myself. Kill him. Die. Die on this block. Before this body, this block, this house, could take it—whatever it was—from me.

Yet I never knew what was on the other side of the street where the block ended. Or how I could get there, or if I ever would. But knowing what was there: That kept us here.

Mother always knew I’d go, but I don’t think she knew when. Or how. She also knew I wouldn’t come back because I couldn’t. But now I have no choice but to go.

74. You Make Me Live

Mother always said she could “no way, never” kill herself Only once in her life did she even think about suicide, she said.

About two years after Adam’s death, she realized her period was overdue by a couple of days. Then a couple more. Then more than a week. Finally, she called her mother and announced, “If I had a car, I’d drive it into a brick wall.”

When I came home from a day when I was supposed to’ve been at school, Grandma knew I hadn’t been there. Anticipating my question about mother, she abruptly declared, “She’s tired. She’s resting.” That same tone mother, the lady whose name I never knew and all the other adults in the neighborhood would use to pre-empt a probe.

I could only suppose that I’d had something to do with mother’s fatigue. She would never deny my suspicion, but years later—not long ago, during one of the last times we talked—she said that after seeing what her mother’d gone through and anticipating what I had yet to go through–not to mention her own struggles—she couldn’t bear the thought of bringing someone else into this world, onto this block.

She was younger, much younger than I am now. Still, even today, I see her then as old, or at least older and tireder than I’ve ever been. Or that she was old and tired in ways that I haven’t been, at least not yet.

But there’s still the operation, and whatever will come after it.

Mother’d had an operation. Grandma told me later; then, much later, mother told me she’d had her tubes tied. She probably couldn’t’ve explained it to me because she didn’t want to; when she told me, not long ago, what she’done, she didn’t need to.

As she recalled that time, I remembered the days, the weeks that led up to it: Mother crying that she didn’t know what to do with me, she didn’t know what she would do; she should’ve known this was coming, that it would be so difficult, that her life and mine could only get more difficult.

About the time mother told me this story, I heard about the childhood—if you can call it that—of someone I’d heard about but met only once. She died not long after our meeting.

Lucinda—Lucy—‘d been born in a male body that would get whatever blows her father had left in his fists after punching and slamming his wife into unconsciousness. Lucy’s mother, according to her friends, poured out two glasses of milk laced with rat poison. Before they drank, Lucy’s mother called the police and told them what she was about to do.

Two officers arrived to find Lucy’s mother’s body curled on the peeling tiles of the kitchen floor. Lucy—then known as Christopher—sat near her mother’s head, and clutched her stomach as a grayish-white pool spread around her feet.

After Lucy’d left her father’s beatings for the sullen streets and rotting piers near the city’s most (in)famous red-light district, cops fished the long, dark body of Evangeline, her first lover, from the water just off the piers she worked.

Lucy talked long and loud, without rage, until someone mentioned the coroner’s report on Evangeline. “Fuckin’ bullshit, “ she hissed. “No-body around me kuh-mits soo-ih-side. Noo-body!”

I’d been thinking about—no, envisioning—offing myself the day before, as I had nearly every day back then. I had no place to stay, no money and, it seemed, no way to make any. I wasn’t so pretty to begin with, and I was getting older, old—at least for that world. The hormones had begun to do their work, so I wasn’t getting any erections. But my penis was still there, and my ass and waist were still just about the same size.

Still, I could pass, most of the time—probably because I was fortunate enough not to have an Adam’s Apple. But I wondered how long I’d keep that up. Even though women weren’t doing double-takes when I used their bathrooms, some men did when I walked out the door.

I realize now that perhaps I didn’t have any friends, that maybe I never did. But still, it hurts as much—perhaps even more—when you can’t even hold onto the illusion of friendship. Or of love. I’d already lost Vivian when she thought I’d become too much of a girl. Lost Marabeth, too. And ,it seemed, the only ones who noticed, much less wanted, me were men I’d see at night.

You know you’re not just a recreational cross-dresser when you need to come out during the day, as the woman you are. When going to work—whatever it is—or to the store, to lunch, anyplace as someone other than the one as whom you identify becomes a crushing, deadening load. Even the air you inhale doesn’t enter your own lungs: It disappears down the neck of a cave into a hollow you’ll never see.

73. Dream

I’m wandering a maze of blocks, the shadows of daylight eclipsing the open-sided blocks at my sides. Glimpses of a town I’ve seen before, just outside. But I can’t go to them: I turn, around a column that juts out at angles from the wall beside it. Like Lego blocks constructed of clay-tile material painted in bright blues, oranges and yellows.

Nobody’s on the other side of the column. But I hear her voice—Vivian: “We’ve got to find the lake.” Inside the maze?

Another turn, around another column of the pottery Lego blocks, in green and red. Not here. Nothing’s here, nobody’s here. Her footsteps fade away. I glance upward. There’s a sign on one of the corridor walls. Viale Gruber. The last name of Rachel, one of Vivian’s closest female friends. “She’s the girl I’d marry if I were attracted to girls.” Why would they’ve named a street after her in this place?, I wondered.

I followed Rachel’s alleyway out of the maze, into a dusty piazza like the ones you see at noon on a summer day in the South of France or Italy. I know this town: the plaza, the houses, the dusty pastel light all belonged there. But not that maze—I didn’t remember it there. Of course, things change but I could never’ve imagined such a thing in that town.

I stand, right foot forward, my torso leaning but unable to move. Vivian sprinted up to me.

“We’ve gotta find it.” She gasped.

After she caught her breath, I pointed to an opening around the next wall. “Let’s go in there.”

White sign, blue letters: Esposizione.di Ogetti Egizi. Arrow pointing inside.

“Do you really wanna look at a bunch of bones,” Vivian huffed. “We’ve gotta find the lake!”

As far as I know, Vivian’s never been to France or Italy. Knowing her, I’d guess she still hasn’t gone there, even if she could. They simply were never places she wanted to visit.

Although I am glad I spent time in Toulouse, in France, I have never wanted, and still don’t want, to go to any place in particular. I have never fantasized about other places for the same reasons, really, I haven’t fantasized about sex: You don’t fantasize about what’s been forced on you. If you’re raped at a very young age, sex is not something to wonder about or hope for. And so it is when you’re connected to some place by something that is not of your doing. So even though I had no particular desire to travel, I knew I’d have to get away from this block. But I didn’t know where I’d go, much less how I’d get there.

But back to that maze. She didn’t want to go back in unless we were going to find the lake. Normally, I’d have to talk her out of going in, out of taking a chance. At least that’s how it seemed until she’d decided I’d become too much of a woman to suit her. “I just can’t go there,” she’d say. And I knew I couldn’t change her mind about that one.

Or about not wanting to see the bones, or about wanting only to see the lake. She had no interest in seeing the town, which was somewhat familiar to me, although I didn’t know why. There was, outside one of the Lego blocks, a turreted place I’d seen before—with or without Vivian? And the cathedral, in the texture of chalk and the colors of flint and rust after it’d absorbed sun, rain, wood smoke, more rain, cannon smoke, frosts, smoke from railroad engines , tanks and mustard gas, and the dissipating sunlight of October dusks. The cathedral’s stones imbedded it all; the lake Vivian wanted so much to see reflected it.

72. Fatigue

I’d love to make Mrs. Littington disappear. And the lady whose name I never knew, I never want to know. Get rid of all the others, the ones I’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place. What did they have to do with mother, with any of us?

I’ m so tired now. I’ve been tired for so long, I want to close a door and cry. But the tears won’t come now, even if I want them, because I don’t have the emotional energy, or even a space inside me, to allow anyone to see them. For crying in the presence of others is always an involuntary form of sharing, or at least diverting one’s attentions. Those activities require energies that I just don’t have right now.

Maybe it’s this day, and the hope that it will be my last on this block, that’s so drained me. But taking hormones does that to you, too.

The first time you take them, you’re expecting something to happen even though the doctor or whoever prescribes or gives them to you tells you nothing will, at least for a while. Two pills: one is white and has the texture but not the taste of an aspirin tablet. The other, small with a hard shell in a shade of candy-coated cow piss—which is pretty much what it tastes like. Not that I’ve tasted cow piss, candy-coated or otherwise.

After I took those pills every day for a couple of months, I couldn’t notice any difference. But Vivian did. She called me that day, ostensibly because she wanted to return something I couldn’t recall leaving at her house. It’d been a few months since she pronounced me “too much of a woman” for her tastes and broke up our relationship. She’d found a watch with a woven black leather band when she was cleaning, she said. And indeed she gave it to me when we met for supper in a Greek restaurant.

But there had to be another reason for her wanting to see me—I could hear it in her voice when she called. I couldn’t imagine her wanting sex with me again. So what, I wondered, did she want?

As I cut into the piece of chicken I ordered, I got my answer. She called my name—my old one. I looked up at her. “Something’s different about you.”

“What?”

She reached across the table and dabbed her fingertips on my left cheek, where she used to stroke. “It feels different.”

“How so?”

“It’s….softer.”

“Huh?”

“It really feels softer.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

All right, I said. I’ll confess something: I am taking hormones. Her face grew longer. “The doctor said my skin would get softer. But not this quickly.”

Then she asked me to stand up. “Wow! Your body’s changing.”

“How so?”

“None of your clothes fit you right.”

“I think I’ve gained a bit of weight.”

“Maybe you have. But it’s in your rear…and you’re growing boobs!”

I couldn’t notice those changes yet, I said. And I felt like I needed more sleep. “But,”she cut me off, “You don’t seem depressed.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not. I don’t even feel sad that much. Or even angry. Maybe…”

She cut me off again, “Maybe you accept things, or are resigned to them.”

“You could say that.”

She could. None of it surprised her. Before that night, I hadn’t told her I was taking hormones. And I don’t know who could or would’ve told her. But she asked me to supper so she could find out what I was like on hormones. Why else?

The old lady whose name I never knew is looking my way again. Who could or would’ve told her.

Make it tomorrow, please. I’m so tired. I want the operation, then some rest.