59. Exile’s Children

I didn’t leave this block because I felt stifled or tortured. Nor did I go with any mission or calling, or even any sort of ambition beyond staying alive. And I wanted that because, as the saying goes, “What’s the alternative?” I still don’t have the answer.

Long before I knew I would undergo the transformation I’m about to culminate, I knew I couldn’t stay. Even before I learned about the hormones, the surgeries and the people who submitted to them, I knew that some part of me wouldn’t survive the move from here. Yet it was necessary for survival—mine, at any rate. And, I realize now, the reason mother never begged me to come back was that she knew, too. She always expected I’d return, however briefly.

Somehow she survived this place—until now, anyway. I’m not sure she would’ve had she left. But she had no reason—or at least not the same one I had—to get out of here. A mother, a single mother, like many others here—most of whom were here before her—there’s never been any shame in that here, at least not among the women. The nuns were a different story. “You didn’t have a father. You’ll never become a man,” Sister Elizabeth yelled at me in a room full of kids who would’ve snickered had she not slashed the air with her long wooden ruler. And she wasn’t the only one who reminded me—actually, who reminded the other kids, I didn’t need it—of my family situation.

It was probably all I had in common with other kids on this block. There were a couple of others in Sister Elizabeth’s class that day. One—Howard—laughed, for which Sister Elizabeth slapped him. But the other, Louisa Parker, slid her pale oval face into her long angular hands so I could see only her shaggy dark hair.

They’re gone, too. Howard ended up in the army. Whether he joined or was sentenced to it, no one’s exactly sure. He ended up in some place in the Middle East—some place where all you see are men—and never returned. No one ever said why. And Louisa—all I know is that someone saw her on a street in New Orleans, or in some other city besides this one. Why she left this block, I don’t know. Can’t say I can’t blame her because I don’t know whether she had to leave. She probably did: It’s the only way I know of that anybody goes from here.

56. Identification

At least I haven’t seen any cops. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I did. Could they make a positive ID of me? They couldn’t with that body in the basement; how could they identify a living person? Especially if that person’s changed since the police started searching?

Not that they have any reason for stopping or questioning me. Not really. Then again, the cops, especially the ones around here, know how to extract confessions from mouths that never had to hold secrets. Vivian used to talk about the “highway blues,” when an officer could tail you, pull up alongside you and pull you over even though you hadn’t gone over the speed limit or in the wrong lane, and somehow you’d do something—you couldn’t deny it—and the officer would write a summons. Really, officer, I didn’t kill anyone. Especially not mother. Of course not. I hadn’t even been on the block at the time she died—or when the body in the basement gave up its last. Everybody—at least the woman whose name I never knew—knows that. I hadn’t been here in years. How many? Well, gee, officer, I’m not quite sure. So much has happened and well, you know how time flies.

But they’re not here now. Just me, Mrs. Litttington, the woman whose name I never knew—and mother’s body, in the casket.

55. Before Tomorrow

Today. Just today. I just have to get through this day in one piece. It’s the only way anybody’s ever lived on this block and it’s the only mode of life I’ve known since I left.

I can’t say whether anything’ll change after tomorrow. I know that I’ll never come back to this block again. It’s not a choice: I have no choice. Not that I’ve ever wanted to return. But I have no such choice in any event. Never did, probably never will.

Just today. Tomorrow, if it goes the way I foresee it, we bury mother. Hopefully, nothing’ll complicate maters until then. Mrs. Littington and the woman whose name I never knew glance in my direction, but neither speaks to me. Maybe they talk to each other when I’m out of sight, but I don’t recall that they had much, if anything, to say to do with each other when we were on this block. Their only connection was mother, and I’ve no idea of how much they talked about each other to her.

I’m not even sure that Mrs.L. and the lady recognize each other now, although—somehow not surprisingly—Mrs. L. seems not to’ve aged beyond a few gray flecks in her darker-than-chestnut hair. The edges of her hair that frame her forehead, temples and ears have softer, wavier edges than those of the sharper cut she wore when she lived on this block—but somehow even that seems not to’ve changed much, either. For that matter, the lady whose name I never knew doesn’t seem much older than I recall her, either; but her loose and dry skin always made her seem older than mother, or most of the other people on this block. Then again, I’d just barely passed puberty the last time I saw her. All the adults—which is to say the women—on this block seemed like fixtures that’d always been there.

Every once in a while, she catches my gaze. Maybe she won’t ask questions. That’s the unwritten—That goes without saying!—code of this block. Then again, she never needed to ask questions, or so it seemed.

Another code is not to tell, at least not so the person who’s being told about knows. Would she? Could she? Who was it who told me, “Them that know don’t tell; but them who tell don’t know”? What did thatt person know? What does she know? What—who—would she tell? Being on this block, still, she had to’ve heard about the body in the cellar. The one with my name—my former name—on it. And my date of birth. But not my date of death. Surely she had to’ve known better than to believe that version of the end of a life. On this block, who’d’ve remained, by that time, who’d’ve had any reason to kill me? The men—the boys—were all gone by then. Including me.

Who, then, ‘d’ve gone through the trouble of striking him on the head hard enough to knock him to the ground, but not hard enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness. Who’d’ve been anygry, obsessive or whatever enough to tie him by his hands and feet and tape his mouth while his eyes were shut? To peel the too-tight black pants and bikini brief away from his hairy midsection? Or—when he regained consciousness and grunted because he couldn’t beg for mercy—took a sawtoothed switchblade and gnarled at the base of his scrotum and removed an organ which to this day has not been found? And finally pulled—actually, slid and slogged—the briefs and pants back over the bloody crotch, hooked the waist tab and zipped the fly shut just as red heat began to ooze through them?

Could she’ve known t he answers, or enough to question what I –or the man whose body was identified as mine—would’ve been doing anywhere near this block at that time? As far as she knew—or so I thought—I was long gone, and possibly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what mother told her. Or if she said nothing at all, except that I don’t think that lady’d’ve let her.

Hopefully, she won’t ask any more questions—or talk any more—about him or me, or to me—before this day is over, before I can leave for good, like mother, tomorrow.

One more day and mother finally gets to rest. And I’ll be able to continue—and hopefully complete—my transformation.

53. Winter

Some things I’ll never understand. Others, they won’t—not Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew—understand. Including the one thing I’m still trying to explain to myself.

The way Adam died. The story we all heard, the one that’s listed in the reports, is suicide. Found with head in oven, gas turned on. Still cold in the apartment, cold as it was outside. And clear, with stars as bright as the strings of lights glinting on cables of the bridge you can see across the cemetery from this block.

He’d’ve seen that bridge from his window, as I could from mother’s room, on such a night: the sky even clearer than the glass that separated me—and him—from it. It’s so clear on such a night, whipped by the early winter winds that come before a storm. Two nights before Christmas, eight before the end of the year.

Buried, gone before New Year’s Day. Then the stoop where he sat, where he gave me little bottles of soda as he sighed, coughed and sometimes talked, that stoop disappeared under snow—the heaviest this block had ever seen, according to the weather reports. For days, for weeks, the snow lay stubbornly, not yielding to footprints.

Nobody came or went. Far as anybody knew, nobody—not another person, or even a cat or a dog—lived there. I don’t remember anyone exiting or leaving that house and I’m not sure anyone sat on that stoop when I wasn’t there with Adam.

Haven’t seen anybody on that stoop today, either. From what I’ve heard, people don’t do that anymore—in fact, nobody stops for very long on this block. Most of the time, the sidewalk’s vacant. When anybody walks, she doesn’t stop until she’s inside her house or off this block, headed to wherever else she’s going.

From what I hear, nobody’s sat or stood on that stoop since the last time I saw Adam. After the snow cleared, after the ice melted and the shadows that precede evenings were swept into extra minutes, then hours, of light at the end of the day, the bricks of that stoop and that house crinkled and started to come apart at the cement seams that held them together like stitches of winter coats at the end of the season, when the weather’s still cold enough to wear them but there’s enough light to show how worn they are. Someone came over to look at them, mark them. Then other men accompanied him, chipping, scraping and painting. I don’t know who those men were—nobody said, and Adam didn’t have any relatives anybody knew about—but they were there, it seemed, the first day the weather broke. In almost no time, they smothered the flaking red bricks with a sticky shine in the color of chewing gum.

41. The Yellow Gown

I—the funeral director, really—chose the soft yellow gown in which she was dressed when the women of our block and I saw her for the last time. I told the makeup artist that she always liked loose but neat fabrics that could drape, but not billow, on or away from her skin, depending on whether she’d been lying down or standing up. The crepe de chine fabric was finer and softer than anything I’d ever seen her wear. But I don’t think it would’ve upset her, if she could’ve known she was dressed in it.

But the color was—perfect! Though the woman who dressed and made my mother up was probably my age or younger. But looking at the way my mother was dressed and made up, I’d’ve thought the stylist/hairdresser had accompanied the girl who’d become my mother when, for the first time, my mother bought a dress: a soft, drapey frock in the color of August afternoon light or sunflowers. Mom’d saved her allowance—literally, what she was allowed to keep after she handed her mother the pay envelope from the shoe factory where she worked in the office. Having to save and wait frustrated her, she said, but it turned out for the best: the dress fit her perfectly, she said, for she’d grown two inches and hadn’t gained any weight.

But I can only imagine that color on my mother. Hardly anybody looks good in any shade of yellow and I, no matter how I’ve changed, couldn’t help but to look like fruit that’d over-ripened in the cindery haze of a malarial swamp. Mother’s skin, a bit earthier than mine, and her brown eyes coulldn’t’ve done that hue any more than justice than it could’ve done for her. But in the one photograph I ever saw—in black and white—of her in that lovely dress, there was a tension miising that she seemed to carry even as a very young girl. Could’ve been something about that dress, I guess. I don’t know, I’ll never know, about that color, though.

I’d never seen that color–I’d known it only from my mother’s descriptions—until I saw her in repose. That tension, gone again—before the other women of our block. I hadn’t seen that color, that look, certainly not on her, until then; haven’t seen it since. And it was the only time I saw her in a gown. She didn’t have photographs, at least none that I know of, of her wedding or any other formal occasion. Since she didn’t graduate from high school, or even junior high, I doubt she went to a prom.

In fact, the only occasion of her life marked by any ritual, besides her death, was her birth. I guess she wore a gown then, as I did. (She showed me the photos.) But then again, who knows: She entered this world in her mother’s house, only two and a half street blocks—forty-one doors—from the funeral parlor. Down the street, turn right, go four avenue blocks and there’s the window I peeked out of the night they pulled Adam out of the house across the street from ours, his head out of the oven. They wrapped a gown around him in the hospital, just as they did the one and only time I had to stay. A gown at the time of my birth, and then, in that room, as sterile and odorless as the funeral parlor, but colder.

That gown, which barely covered my crotch, was made, it seemed, for an eleven-year-old girl. I still don’t know how long they made my mother’s final dressing gown: The casket’d been open only down to her breasts; below that, the linen-colored silk lining dissolved into a shadow. Somehow I get the feeling Adam’d never been covered quite enough until the medics pulled the sheet over his head as he lay stretched on the gurney on which he made the trip from the hospital to the morgue.

Maybe some people never get to be gowned; they don’t get the chance to have their bodies covered but not confined: protected from the cold, but not prevented from gathering the shadows of trees together to allow light to pass through. Some people may get to wear such a gown when they are named; others—only women—when they take on someone else’s name; and a few people, like my mother, at the end of their lives. A garment under which their energies—their echoes and reflections—are gathered. But one which still allows the arms and legs to move, even when the newborn, the enjoined, the recently-deceased, cannot or do not want to touch anyone.

Besides mother, the only other person on this block I’ve seen in a gown was Mrs. Littington. And hers wasn’t like any of the others: only slightly too long to be a cape or poncho but too short and not bulky enough to be a kaftan, only the caps of sleeves circled her forearms. As a kid, I thought it was some French costume they didn’t tell us about in social studies class; now, as far as I know, she might’ve made it or had it made.

Sometimes some other woman—who wasn’t at the funeral—would appear at Mrs. Littington’s front door or by one of the windows. She was the only person I’d ever seen who shared Mrs. Littington’s facial shape: all angles and refractions of olive bark and chestnuts baked by centuries of sun and wind. But the other woman’s—I was never sure of her relation to anyone, or role in that house—basic, earthy tones and sturdy shape hadn’t transmuted, as Mrs. Littington’s had, into a statue of shadows, each in her own reflection, or rather, refraction through time. But this is not to say she was timeless.

That is to say Mrs. Littington, before any of us met her, was not the person we knew, and she changed again after she left this block. She was just like that. On the hand, the other woman was always that, wherever she went, which is to say, wherever the Littingtons lived. She wasn’t of this block, but she was of its equivalent, in Toulon or some other place. Wherever it was, it was this block.

Which, of course, is the reason no one made any attempt to speak to her. The only one less trustworthy, or worthy in any other way, than someone who leaves this block is someone who comes from its mirror image in some other town, some other country, some other world. They’re always too dark, too coarse, too uppity, too something. So they survive they way anyone else does in the moment they’re about to enter after that uncertain and hostile moment they’ll always think of as the present—protected or at least covered up. We enter, or exit, in a gown, and don’t trust anyone who hasn’t entered our lives in that way.

32. What They Say

Something’s making sense now. Actually, a few things, all of them having to do with why I left this block and won’t come back—at least I don’t expect to—once I’ve buried mother.

I’m seeing now they’re all related—or at least I can explain them in the same way I never expected this. I think I understand now why I don’t watch TV or read newspapers or magazines, or why I hardly ever read novels. And why I don’t think I could ever develop a taste for opera, or most theatre. True, I’ve been to only one opera: something about a girl who kills herself when her parents forbid her from seeing the boy she thinks she’s in love with.

And I’ve been to a few plays, of which I now remember only two: The Tempest and Macbeth. They’re the only plays I’ve ever really liked, and I’ve read them a few times even though I never learned how when I was in school. But the productions I saw of those two Shakespeare plays got them wrong in the same ways most teachers do. One made Lady Macbeth into Cruella de Ville without the 101 Dalmations; the other showed Caliban as a slave (and Prospero as a slave master) with frilly collars. As for Lady Macbeth, there had to be something more than wanting her husband to become king so she could enjoy the spoils to her if she stopped herself from killing the king when she had the chance because he, in his sleep, reminded her of her father. The production I saw left that scene out! And Caliban—I mean, what can I say for a character who is trapped in the wrong body, who says, “You have taught me language, and the profit on’t is, I can curse”? You learn, you get an education, you understand, you explain, and what does it get you? There’s no escape, my friend, as Adam would say. No escape from this block, from my mind, from my bones. In the production I saw, that line sounded great; so did his “The Isle Is Full of Noises” speech. Yet—maybe this was the actor’s fault—it didn’t sound right coming from him, as it does when you read the play.

The other plays I’ve seen, I don’t remember at all, not even how I came to see them. Someone might tell me that it’s unfair, based only on those plays and that one opera, to write off all the others.

Which isn’t what I’m doing. I simply have no need for any of the others, or for newspapers, magazines or TV. (When I hear “TV,” I think of what many people think I am and will be until my surgery is complete.) And, for the same reason—I realize this just now—I’ve never had any affinity for children or anyone much younger, chronologically or emotionally, than me. This, of course, rules out almost any male I’ve ever met and most folks who fancy themselves as artists.

And my explanation, I’ve just come up with it. It’s something Adam might’ve told me if I’d been a bit—actually, quite a bit—older. It’s something mother might’ve told me if she could’ve expressed it. Then again, she couldn’t’ve, unless she’d gotten off this block. Here it is: A fish, even one who’s learned to talk, could never tell you it’s in water. Take the fish out of its element and it dies. But to tell anybody where you’ve lived, or what you’ve lived in, you have to get away from it.

And what I just realized now—The reason why I’ve never tried to describe mother, Adam, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew or any of the other people who lived on this block, who stayed, who left, who were driven away, is this: Tragedy is romantic only when you’re not going through it. The dead can’t aggrandize their sacrifices or mourn their mistakes. People who never knew there were any other paths besides the ones they followed can’t trouble themselves over the turns they took; women who know only bearing and rearing children, and men who know only how to beat, leave or forget them never tell stories—not their own or anyone else’s. Some may simply tell people they know, which is not really the same thing.

So I don’t need—or want—those contrived tragedies about star-crossed young lovers. If Adam’d made movies, Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t’ve been one of them any more than the boys who fight each other , beat the other boys who couldn’t fight them, harassed and raped the girls—and me—could’ve come up with another West Side Story. One was more than this world ever need; I say the same for Sophie’s Choice or anything that’s been written, sung, acted or made about people dying in flash of glory and youth. Even the least intelligent women I’ve met know better than that; almost no man does, or can. Adam was one of the few exceptions I’ve ever known—perhaps the only one.

Now I realize why cemeteries don’t disturb me—why, in fact, I feel more comfortable in them than almost anywhere else. And why one was the first place I visited when I got back to this block, and was in fact the only place I could’ve gone to before I came to the funeral parlor, the only other place to which I could’ve come back on this block. No one can inflate, deflate or conflate, much less exaggerate, the bones inside the boxes there. The dry ground is blistered with white slabs etched with the years, the dates of births and deaths of the ones who’ve become them when there was nobody to remember their names. Some bear crosses, others the Magden David; most of them, in the final hours before they turned to numbers and months in limestone, professed—if they hadn’t already—faith in God, Yahweh, Allah, Ha’Shem or one of the other 99 names of the being who remembered the one thing they took from the cradle to the casket: what their mothers called them. Everything else—including the lives to which they gave birth of from which they took one additional breath—decomposes before their bones. And they had only names: their own and one of the ones in which I—and sometimes they—never learned to believe.

And once I bury my mother—when I leave this block for the last time, I expect—I’ll have no more reason to use the name she (Or was it the man who fathered me?) gave me or the one her father left her with.

The graveyard at the end of the block furthest from my mother’s place was the one place where I knew I wouldn’t see or hear misconceptions, distortions or outright lies. Or so I thought until I saw a tombstone with these dates, August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992, under a name—whose? I’d heard it before; it was even mentioned when people spoke about me or my mother. My first name—my old one—no middle name (like me) but not the same surname mother and I shared.

The date of death: the last day I spent on this block. Cold and rainy; there were always days like that just before the summer officially arrived but after a heat wave that came too early for the season. I was on this block and nobody—except for one person, who wasn’t my mother—knew about it. At leas I don’t think mother knew: She never mentioned it.

But the birth date: Where did that come from? It didn’t belong to anybody I knew—too late to’ve been mother’s, much less Adam’s. And it’s more than two years before Adam’s death, the date of which I never could forget: December 23, 1969.

I recall some of these times: the summer when it seemed that all the boys that were too old for high school but too young for just about anything else disappeared from this block. And another man, whom I’d seen before, appeared. He wanted something—I didn’t know what—from mother, which I didn’t think she gave. And I was glad about that.

Mother’d never tell me who he was. She’d only snap, “You’re asking too many questions!” When he wasn’t staring at mother, he was gazing at me, especially at parts of my body I couldn’t understand why he wanted to see. Why did he peek through the peephole when I peed? Or stand by the bathroom door while I changed from my school uniform into dungarees?

One drizzly overcast afternoon, he’d somehow gotten in the house. I don’t remember hearing a knock, a ring or him arguing with mother. I heard the door click. Usually, it meant mother, but somehow I knew that day it wasn’t.

Before I could scream, he clamped his hand over my mouth and unbuttoned my jeans. “Tell your mother and I’ll kill you!” he rasped.

And on that last day on this block—the one mother doesn’t know about, I over to the cellar of a house just down the block from the one where mother and I lived. People my mother once knew were no longer living there, nor was anybody else. When he was inside, I crept down to dust and a ray of haze that entered the broken glass of the portal.

“Freeze!” He did.

“Don’t turn around. “ He didn’t.

“Put your hands behind your head!’

“Don’t say a word.”

31. The Providers

People’ve always accused me of not being thankful. Maybe they’re right. Some—sometimes the same people—have said that I’m grateful when other people aren’t.

So will I ever change? About those things, probably not. The hormones haven’t affected me so; I doubt that the surgery will. But at least I can say that I don’t feel guilty over the ones who accuse me of not being thankful and I’m not going to exalt the ones who realize that I’m grateful.

I still think of Thanksgiving: a time when people are supposed to give thanks….for what? For the food on the table? And whom do people thank? God, or whomever they worship. The Almighty Father: That was one of the names God had when I was growing up. Why should they thank a father for giving them something to eat? What kind of father wouldn’t?

The ones on this block, that’s what kind. Actually, they don’t deny physical nourishment. My father didn’t. Like him, they disappear; sometimes they die: In any event, one way or another, they’re not there for the women or children. Even the ones who don’t go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back usually fail to provide sustenance—as opposed to belly-filling—for their children and wives.

And everyone grows up starving—the women cluck and the children peep until they realize that it’s useless; it won’t fill, much less fulfill, them.

In TV, in the movies, there are families where the father stays and the children are nourished, body and spirit, and the woman lives under his wing: under its shadow and protection. And they’re all thankful to him, whether they’re saying grace or whether he’s paying admission to enter the various realms of fantasy.

And the fathers who lead their charges, their wards, their concubines in prayer—To whom do they give thanks? To whoever signs their paychecks—or gives a loan or a gift—so they can buy food? They never thank themselves for working as hard as they do. Someone always says it’s the fathers who work hard. No doubt many do. But we never get to see the women running, lifting, bending, scrubbing, cooking or exerting themselves in everyday tasks. So tell me, who provides what for whom in those families?

But what they never say—because they didn’t know , because whoever puts the words in their mouths didn’t—is that they aren’t thankful to their mother, the one who brings them into this world, because they can’t be. They can only be grateful for that, and for the other events over which they have no control. For example, someone who can actually help them, and does, may appear in their lives. For that they should be grateful.

Yes, I’m relieved, in a way, that I’m about to bury my mother. But of course, I’ll be grateful that she existed, even when I didn’t care whether I would the next day.

29. Their Stories

I’ve never been much of a storyteller. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because I’ve never had any tales to tell or simply that I don’t have the gift of gab, or whatever it takes.

Seems that the ones who can weave tales are the people—usually men—who can find a moral , a lesson or some kind of point in something—usually in their childhood—that happened to them. They somehow get the idea that it’s going to matter to someone else, somewhere in the world.

Truth of the matter is that people are born, people suffer and people die and other people forget, or never notice. Women—most, anyway—bring the beings—or the lives, I’m not sure—into this world to begin all those endless, repetitive fantasies, all those experiences that tumble, like pebbles from cliffs, into chasms of forgetfulness that close in all around them.

Men look for rhyme or reason, as if the universe is some kind of orderly machine or a chant that marches in time. People, at least on this block do the same things again and again.

28. J’accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block: all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,” “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now: it’s been how long? Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here. Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here. With or without a man. Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her. No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here. Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears. The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh. But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another. My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze: It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily. Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her: whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins. Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other. She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved: her supple touch. I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains: I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so. That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind. Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven. I’d always known that. There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not. After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after. No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man. Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met? I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else.

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch. There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women. And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it: only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window? Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then: the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small. The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed. Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her. Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want. The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man. They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends.

27. Time

Now that I’m coming closer to my surgery, I realize that I am probably not going to become a better, wiser or more capable person, ever. I’ve also been released from the illusion that I hate men. These days, they just don’t figure much into my life. I could even say, perhaps, that I have no need for them. The funny thing is that they’ll have even less need for me, as a woman, than they did in my male existence.

Those guys—the ones who fucked me when they saw me in a dress—won’t come near me after my surgery, any more than they’d do it with any woman who’s not a wife, or perhaps a sister. Actually, most of them would lose interest in me soon even if I were to keep my male apparatus intact: I’m getting to be too old for their tastes.

Actually, I’ve felt too old for most people for a quite a while now. If I am, I don’t mind. Mrs. Littington seems not to’ve noticed me at all, and that woman whose name I never knew squinted in my direction as if I were somehow familiar, but she wasn’t quite know how. Or does she? Then maybe I’ve become another of her secrets like the ones she kept with my mother, or that mother had with her.

There’re some things that bind people more closely than the secrets they tell each other: the true secrets; that is to say, the intimate knowledge that they both know but never speak of. Now I know why mother never begged me to come back, not even in her last days. I think she always knew I wasn’t another boy, another man, from this block.

They’d had no need of me, or I of them. And I think mother didn’t need to see me as I was, as I was becoming, as I am about to become. In any moment, there is only what I am and what she is and whatever anybody else may be. And the moment passes; I pass; I’m passing. So was she; so she is.

What would she’d’ve known about me had she seen me through the years that have just passed? What do people know about those whom they see regularly? Hobbies? Fact is, I’ve never had any. Or favorite TV shows, or favorites of much of anything else. None of that stuff matters, anyway. You can have in common with another person, usually a man (if you’re a man), the most banal compulsions—namely, the collecting of objects and the emotions and connotations attached to them, from one’s own or someone else’s past.

That’s the reason I don’t save things. Well, that and the fact that I haven’t stayed in one place long enough to store them. But the first bras, the first pumps, sandals and skirts I acquired have no sentimental value for me. In fact, I don’t even remember what color they were or what, if anything, I paid for them. I needed them, or something like them, and they were the best—which is to say all—I could get. Some things wore out; some stopped fitting and other things I just couldn’t stand anymore. The time for change inevitably comes, and it’s all you can do if you expect to stay alive.

So it is with becoming a woman. The male aspects of my body’ve outlived whatever usefulness they had: they never protected me, and I’m not going to use them to propogate. So I’m going to change, and I’ve been changing the chemistry of my body to prepare for my surgery.

And mother doesn’t need for me to be a man any more than I do. Or so it seems.