16. Exposure

Even if I hadn’t mother’s funeral to attend, this day’d’ve seemed different from any other I spent on this block. Of course, there’s the fact that I came on my own and I expect to be gone again very soon. Also, my mother was, to my knowledge, the last person I knew who remained on this block. The others are dead –or somewhere else, which is really the same as being on this block.

This day, at least as much of it as I’ve seen, is much warmer than any fall day I can remember on this block. But I can’t remove any clothing. On unseasonably warm days at this time year, my mother made me keep my coat on no matter how much I complained about the heat. In this funeral parlor, it’s a musty kind of heat, like what you feel in some washrooms. Still, I can’t take off anything. Some of that has to do with being in the funeral hall, of course: Sometimes you have to respect protocol. And everyone else here is a woman around my mother’s age, so I don’t have the kind of fear I’ve had when I’m trapped inside four walls with a bunch of men. But even if it were acceptable, I couldn’t take anything off, just yet.

I’m just not ready. These days, I’m almost never addresses as anything but “Ma’am” or “Lady”—or “Miss” on good days—but every once in a while someone detects, in a way the French call au pif, the traces of the person I’m leaving behind. For now, I can only cover them up. It seems that’s what I was always doing: When I was living on this block, I always had to cover myself up. On unseasonably warm days at this time year, my mother made me keep my coat on no matter how much I complained about the heat. I realize now that she had the right idea.

I may not understand much; perhaps I still don’t and never will. But I know when I’m being looked at, stared over, scoped out: I can feel it on my skin. Whenever someone’s contemplated, for more than an instant, a sexual assault or any other kind of violence on me, a film slithers under my skin and slips away from me. Others talk about the “pins and needles,” but the feeling I get in my skin scares me much more because I have less control over it and it’s a much more certain and ominious signal than any other bodily sensation I’ve had. When that film slips away from my skin, I know I’m a victim or about to become one.

Someone—one of the last sexual partners I took, or who took me, before I began my transition—told me her childhood bedroom didn’t have a door on it. Even after she started attending the local art college, her mother and father watched her while she dressed, supposedly to be sure she left the house “looking like a proper lady.” She wasn’t allowed out of the house unless she was wearing a skirt and blouse or a “becoming” dress. “You have to think about your reputation,” her mother insisted.

And think about her reputation she—and the other students and her professors—did. “Hey, you’re not in Catholic school,” they’d yell. A shipping—actually, trucking—executive’s daughter finally gave her a frayed, patched pair of blue jeans , a man’s shirt embroidered with a paisley in shades of red and green, and a T-shirt that exhorted, “Ban The Bra!” Then someone decided the patent flats had to go, and a pair of high-topped basketball sneakers, in her size, appeared by her drawing table.

She never could’ve brought the clothes or sneakers to her parents house, much less put them on there. Lucky for her, lockers lined the hallways of the terminal where she got off the bus she took from her parent’s corner. And they were a short walk from the long cubical stalls of the women’s bathroom, where the walls burst with the smell of sweat and menstrual blood held for too long and of cigarette butts stomped out on the floor. But at least she could close—and lock!—the steel door of the stall. All she worried about—at least for a while—was who’d see her when she got off the bus and out of the bathroom. Finally, one day she realized that none of the men—they were all men—who took that same bus with her every morning were anybody her parents knew. They came to the city just after dawn, like her, and went back to their town in the evening. During the hours of her and those men’s departures and arrivals, her father was driving to or from the rusty railyard at the other end of town. Once he got there, he went into a bathroom, locked the door and changed into a blue work shirt and permanently stained gray overalls. At the end of the day, he returned to the lavatory, locked the door behind him, took off his work clothes and took a shower before putting on slacks, a button-down shirt and a tie.

She never told me the names of her parents, or their town, or the name of the city where she took her drawing and painting classes. She didn’t tell me much at all, and I was trying to tell her even less. But what to say–or whether to say it—would, as it would turn out, be one of my lesser worries.

I’d no idea of what she might’ve wanted. I knew—thought, anyway—that whatever it was, she wanted it from a woman. The way my hair—at that time, a wig—fell against my cheek, the cut of the black skirt that seemed to be knitted around my hips (mainly because of the padding I wore in my briefs)—she always complimented me on such things. And my nails—for once, I managed not to smear or streak the coloring, not even on my toes. For once, amazingly enough, no part of my body was too big—not even my feet, in strappy stiletto sandals—or too small. And I didn’t have to worry about such things as long as…

..As long as she didn’t start taking off my clothes. Well, some of them anyway: I’d shaved all the hair off my body. Since she was nearly as flat-chested as I was (I had just begun to take hormones.), I figured—hoped—she might not notice, at least until she got to the half-slip under my skirt. Opaque black: She couldn’t see anything under it, so I hoped she wouldn’t notice anything before she fell asleep. Which I hoped would be soon, since she’d had some strong red wine in her. Then again, so did I.

Luckily—or so it seemed at the time—she wasn’t looking for the kind of girl who just lays back and waits. When she touched me, I roiled, slid, pushed, tumbled: anything to divert her for another moment. My writhings and wrigglings excited her even more with each moment. How could I—or she, we—know I’d behave exactly the way every girl wants her submissive to behave? That was something I didn’t understand until I was well into my metamorphosis. The dominantrixes I’ve known were never happy merely to tie me up and leave me motionless.

How could I’ve known that not struggling, not fighting back against the boys—including the middle-aged ones who’ve paid to fuck me—would keep me alive long enough to escape from them, from it, from this place, for a time anyway? Once they’ve got your clothes off, you’ve got no defense, anyway.

But for the art-school woman—Why can’t I remember her name now?—as long as I had something on, she—and I—could struggle. I’d wanted her to want the femme (though feminine, not quite female) being I’d presented to her. She pursed her. I panicked: What if…All I could do was tire her out, let her fall asleep—in her submissive’s arms.

Which is where I found her the following day. She sweated, but I shivered. Of course..a bra, a padded brief and a half-slip don’t cover much. But I couldn’t pull the top sheet or blanket over me, over us. I kissed her forehead, slid my chest from under her blonde bob and pulled my clothes off her dresser. I left; her eyes clenched.

Once outside, I felt even colder than I had before I’d gotten dressed. True, it wasn’t a warm day and my jacket came barely to the waistband of my skirt. And I wasn’t wearing stockings. But the sun burned through a light film of haze; maybe the sun had expended all of its heat on that task.

Today certainly seems warmer than that day. True, I’m dressed more modestly, in a black dress and heavy opaque hose—what a woman might be expected to wear at this time of year for occasions like this one. Yet, at the same time, I still worry that they—or perhaps even mother—will see through. Especially mother, who kept me in the kitchen and covered me. I don’t believe in ever-afters, or anything beyond what I’ve seen and see now. But I still wonder: Does she see me? Or did she, through all those years we talked over the phone?