As far as I can tell, being a woman means not being able to go back. Some have relationships—mothers, sisters, friends; almost always other women—for their entire lives. And sometimes they reminisce, whether about the cute boy in the coffee shop, the days spent with mothers and grandmothers, the children who’ve left. But these fleeting visions of the past don’t become dwelling places, note even for those rouged old women who wear their old dancing shoes and spend their days trotting from their rooms to coffee shops they’ve seen every day for thirty years. You can find women like that in almost any city, marooned in space but, contrary to appearances, not in time.
It always has amazed me that men can tell each other the same stories, over and over again. About the Thanksgiving football game thirty years ago. Or the cheerleader known, however briefly, before she moved on, even if only to another young man and a house one neighborhood over from the one in which she grew up. Men will live with those fantasies of the past before it changed into the current reality. There was always that pass caught, grasped for life even when they couldn’t run anymore, not even for their lives.
Run for your life! I don’t think any man, anywhere, understands what that really means. They’re usually talking about a fast-paced trot, or occasionally a sprint, to keep frangible property, body parts or even more fragile egos intact. Even when he’s at war, in a street fight or some other physical altercation, he’s running, not for his life, but rather to evade the brutal forces of other men. Then there is not life: he has not run for that: he is a survivor. No, not even that, really.
He’s run from a force—which is to say, himself. Now of course if I ever saw a grenade or someone with an equally deadly weapon headed in my direction, I’d run, too, probably, whether or not I could escape. And I won’t pretend that there was no danger.
But I know this: Even after my therapy and surgery are complete, even when the transformation is finished, or at least in a new stage, I still won’t ever have to run for my life, or any life. More women have died, or have been made seriously, chronically or terminally sick, by giving birth or doing all those tasks that keep babies and children—and sometimes even siblings, lovers and husbands—alive than men have succumbed to all the wars, job-related accidents, street crime and car crashes combined.
They can talk about war, tell war stories; they can tell and write all their memoirs about fox hunting or whatever feats of daring procrastination they performed in those Edens that endure only in the retelling of faded memories.
Hey, they’ve even got organizations and institutions to enshrine all those exaggerated, elongated reminisces—returns to their own minds, that is. What’re the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the alumni associations of schools and colleges—or the colleges and schools themselves—all about, anyway? Everyone’s a hero, triumphant over someone who’s not there anymore, or someone or something that never was.
I’ve known, or at least met, women who’ve been in war, as nurses, doctors and even infantry soldiers. When they talk about such experiences—and they do so far less often than men who had them and even less than the men who didn’t—they talk about the suffering, whether their own or someone else’s, and the efforts to keep themselves and others alive.
Raven-haired Daisy Proudfoot—I never did ask which tribe her family came from—‘d been in An Khe about the same time as my cousin Dennis went and never came back. I was never sure of whether she’d rescued people or tried to patch them up or put them back together. I only knew she’d been in a MASH unit of some sort. In fact, she never talked about what she did there. If she’d talk at all, she’d only tell me who lived, who died and which ones she’d heard about since. Sometimes she’d talk about the things that blew up under, above or behind her. Or the others who were there or the children, the infants she saw. I have to admit, whenever anyone talks about combat, it all sounds the same to me, no matter who’s telling it. I never remember the details. But I do remember how, when she did talk about the war, she’d talk about anybody or anything but her.
Now I’ve been told—and I’ve been told that Hemingway’s said—that soldiers, among other soldiers, talk about being scared or bored most of the time they were in battle. I wouldn’t know for sure. There was an uncle or some man very early in my life—I don’t even remember his name now—who used to tell stories of his own heroism. And two other men—Were they friends or brothers? —used to tell theirs. Of course, neither mother nor I could tell for sure whether their stories were true, though I knew somehow she didn’t believe them—especially the uncle. She never tried to convince me one way or the other, though, or for that matter to talk me into or out of any idea—which I never had anyway—of going into the military.
She never tried to convince me, as those men and others did, that I needed to run at, hit or pounce on another boy’s or man’s body for titles, bragging rights or anything they called “respect.” No account of playing- or battle-fields impressed me (which, I realized much later, was one of the many reasons I had so much difficulty with school), and she never repeated any of them to me.
Now I know why—I’m at her funeral now, the last one one I’ll have to attend for anybody from this block. And why it’s been years since I’ve seen anybody, dead or alive, from or on this block. Sometimes I wish she’d told me that athleticism and heroism—actually, jock- and ego-ism—wouldn’t be necessary, that the real run and real fights for life would come much later, after most of the boys were gone or dead. Maybe she didn’t know—though how could she not?–that all their exploits, all their aggrandizements, would mean nothing, to me or in any scheme of life that’s presented itself to me. I only wish that she, or someone, could’ve told me—or better yet, shown me—that when I’d had to walk through or around all the men who swaggered with the threat of homicidal harassment through school halls or down this block..
How could she not know that to survive the day is one thing, but that you’ve got to fight and run harder, faster and longer for life—yours or anyone else’s. Which, I guess is what people mean when they capitalize the L in life.
Here’s something I do remember. One night when I was about twelve I told her I was tired. From what, I can’t remember. Maybe I felt like a child whose mother was about to put or send him to bed even though he didn’t want to go. I wanted to rest my head on my hands, on a table, on anything that would support it. But not to bed: that would be so much more final, so authoritative. When I put my head down or my feet up, I could open my eyes, open a story book, walk around when I felt ready. But when I went to bed, I couldn’t get up until it was time. Whenever you do something when it’s time, you don’t get to decide when or whether it’s time.
I think my mother understood that much anyway: that I wasn’t suffering from fatigue, or even boredom. I was still living by a child’s clock. And so when I told her I was tired—the only word I’d heard before that even came close to describing the way I felt—she intoned, “You don’t know what tired is.”
One thing about her: She never said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” or “You’re too young to understand.” She’d only say that I didn’t know one thing—“tired”—or another. Sometimes I’d find out fairly soon that she was right. Other times I’d have to wait. And there are still things I haven’t understood, and maybe never will. Like—Here’s one I can think of right now—“You don’t respect anybody or anything more than you respect your own body.” Sounds good, and she wasn’t a philosopher or anything like that. But what did she mean? Will I find out after I have the operation? Maybe I understand a little bit now: Ever since I started taking hormones, I feel cold—yes, physically, right to the bone—in places like the funeral home.
Memories And Those Who Stayed 