Being Emily (5 page)

After a little more looking she found an actual website with photos of men who’d become women. Some of them looked funny, their noses or jaws were too big, but a lot of them looked really good and a bunch of them actually looked prettier than most of the women teachers at their school. A few were models or actresses, and some were scientists and doctors and stuff.

But she didn’t want Chris to be a woman. She liked him as Chris, maybe a Chris who wasn’t sad as he was now, but still the guy she knew. It made her feel sick to think about any guy turning into a woman, let alone her boyfriend. There were men and there were women and you couldn’t just go from one to the other.

It just seemed unnatural. But when she’d started to wonder if she was attracted to girls as well as boys, she heard plenty from people who found that unnatural when to her it only made sense to like whomever she liked and not bother about what kind of person they were. Was it any different with Chris?

Sure it was
, the back of her mind said.
We’re talking about changing his whole body. You just like to experiment, but he wants to turn into a woman. Guys don’t just turn into
girls,
the world isn’t set up that way.

Claire couldn’t even understand how it could be done medically and wasn’t sure she wanted to. In the articles online, there were references to surgery and often multiple surgeries. How could it be right to change like that if it involved all that medical intervention? Didn’t that point to the unnatural craziness of it all? Who needed to take a perfectly good working body and turn it into something else?

And even more importantly, why would God create a world in which women could be born as men and vice versa?

She turned off the computer and sat on her bed. “God?” she asked in a whisper. “What were you thinking? Why would you make people transsexual?”

She talked to God a lot and sometimes God answered—or maybe God always answered and sometimes she was too boneheaded to figure it out. She’d been raised Lutheran, like just about everyone in these parts, but her relationship with God came from her earliest memories of Sunday school when she remembered Jesus as the kindest, wisest man in the whole world. At times she could feel Him near her.

She went to church sometimes, but she didn’t always feel God there. More often she attended an open Bible study held after the regular service. She didn’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but she did believe it was a divinely inspired text and a way to engage in a relationship with God. Maybe it was because she loved words in all their forms that it was easiest for her to feel God’s presence when she read the Bible or even in the words of poets and writers.

Pulling her worn Bible off the shelf by her bed, she let it open where it wanted. Her eyes fell to a verse toward the end of the Book of Job after Job loses his family and his health and all his money. He cries out to God for a reason for all the bad things that have happened to him.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks Job. “Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know!”

What was that supposed to mean? She read it again and tried to remember what the Bible study leader said when they studied Job. In the end of the story, Job actually gets to speak to God—if she remembered right, it was the last time God spoke directly to a human being before the birth of Jesus. That was a really big deal. The whole Book of Job was about testing the depth of Job’s faith, just as this situation with Chris tested her faith in God’s design. Job got to hear God answer his questions and came out of the situation with renewed faith.

While Job suffered, his friends blamed all his misfortunes on him and were basically jerks to him. That was the other
lesson
Claire remembered learning about this book. Job was a story about compassion.

If she could sum up what God was telling her, it was that some hard things that happened to people were beyond her understanding. What God made for the joy of creation, that was God’s work, and if that included men who turned into women and women who turned into men, who was she to argue? Was she there when God created the world? No. Did she help to determine its measurements? No.

Her work was to have faith and not be a blaming jerk like Job’s friends. No matter how upset she felt, Chris didn’t deserve to have her take it out on him.

In the next verses, God asks Job if he knows what the foundation of the earth was laid upon, “or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

She loved that image of the world being created and the sons of God shouting for joy. The world was made for joy. Did that include transsexuals? She didn’t understand how it could, but maybe she didn’t have to. Plenty of people in the world were going to be awful to Chris if he kept going down this path, and she didn’t need to be one of them.

But Chris also asked if this meant they were going to split up. Not being a jerk to him was one thing but being his girlfriend was a lot more than that and she just didn’t know if she still could. If he started to change his body like that, how could she still be attracted to him?

The small, quiet alarm beside my pillow chirped once and was silent, but that was enough to wake me. I wanted to run over to Claire’s house and ask her again if she was going to split up with me, but it was four a.m.

Avoiding the creaky part in the middle of my bedroom floor, I got up and slid the bolt on my door to the locked position. I’d installed the sliding bolt last summer and Dad let me keep it. He realized that I could only lock it when I was inside the room and contented
himself
in knowing he and Mom could still search for drugs, or whatever they looked for, when I wasn’t home. He probably thought I’d put it on so I could masturbate without Mom walking in on me. Dad thinks like that. I wasn’t going to argue as long as I had some measure of safety for what I really wanted to do.

When I’d come in from school that afternoon, I carried my backpack in and up to my room, along with a nondescript black nylon gym bag. No one paid any attention to it, of course, which was the point. I’d thought all this through to the nth degree, and the bag was not only beneath notice but it bore a luggage tag on it which had Claire’s name and address.

At least up until I’d come out to her the day before, Claire wouldn’t mind me using her name on the bag in order to throw my parents off the track of a secret; she was pretty sneaky herself and had taught me a few tricks about hiding files on my computer. Luckily I had the kind of parents who hardly knew how to turn the thing on, unlike Claire’s mom, who had probably installed two kinds of cyber-snoop software to protect her one precious daughter from sexual predators online. Claire came over and used my computer whenever she had something “of a delicate nature” that she needed to research, and paid me back in tips about how to keep my parents in the dark.

The duffel bag had her name on it because inside it was a pair of girls’ jeans, a long skirt, two sweaters, a cute hat, underpants and two bras. None of them were anywhere near Claire’s size, but if they looked in the bag, my parents would never consider any possibility beyond the obvious explanation that the outfits belonged to Claire. Plus they had no idea that she hated hats.

I unzipped the bag and then habitually paused to listen.
Silence.
More silence.
Chirping bugs outside, neighbor dog barking, distant sound of a car and the rapid thud of my pounding heart.

I shucked my pajamas. The next few minutes were the best and worst of my whole day: the worst because I felt like such a
freak,
and the best because I slowly became visible. I went from being a charcoal outline of a person to being a flesh and blood human being, my skin filled from the inside out as I arrived into my body and my life.

I put on the underpants and the skirt. Because I was into competitive swimming, I had an excuse to shave my arms and legs—plus it got Dad off my back about doing something I could letter in—but mostly it was the smooth skin of the swimmers that caught my attention. If they’d told me before my sophomore year that they shaved for meets, I’d have been swimming my whole school career.

I put on the bra and hooked it, filling the cups with cotton balls, because they were easy to have around, and I found it impossible to actually stuff a bra with socks the way girls did in books. Then I pulled on the short-sleeved sweater with the scalloped neck that was my favorite and set the hat on my head, tilted back.

The inside of my closet door had a mirror that I could easily avoid in the mornings, but now I opened it and looked at myself in the darkness. Subtle light from the moon filtered in through my
unshaded
windows and mixed with the light of my computer monitor. I preferred that to the bright overhead light that would reveal too many of the rough details of my face. In this dreamy light I felt whole.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t really think about what you are; you just are. Some of my happiest times were when I was four and five. We lived in a different town then, across the street from a blond girl named Heather whose mom would bring her over to play with me in the basement all afternoon. Heather’s mom often marveled that I was such a quiet kid, so thoughtful, and that I played so gently with her daughter. It seemed natural to me. We’d sit in the middle of the basement playroom that my dad had set up, and she’d show me her dolls and we’d dress them up in the other dolls’ clothes and drive them around in the cars I’d gotten for my birthdays or build them houses out of the empty boxes Dad brought home for me to play in.

“Isn’t he such a sweet boy,” Heather’s mom said one afternoon. “He’s made a house for the dolls.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, but I started to feel that something bad had happened and I didn’t know what it was.

I ran into the laundry room and hid until Heather and her mom had gone. From then on, I was on the lookout, trying to figure out what had happened to make Heather’s mom talk about me like I was a boy.

When I went to first grade, the problem started to become clear to me. The teacher wanted the girls to line up on one side of the door and the boys to line up on the other side. I lined up with the girls and she told me to get in the other line.

“I’m not a boy!” I told her.

She knelt down and took me by the shoulders. “Are you afraid of the other boys?” she asked. “Did they do something to you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a girl.”

She laughed, right in my face, her breath dark and earthy. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re playing a game with me, aren’t you? You’re pretending to be a girl today, but I know you’re a boy. Do you know how I know?”

I shook my head.

“Because of your name, Christopher.
That’s a boy’s name, so you get in line with the other boys.”

I got into line with the boys. She had said one thing I understood: “pretending.” Something had gone wrong with the world and I had to pretend to be a boy until I could figure out how to fix it. I knew how to pretend.

When Mom came to pick me up, I asked if I could have another name. At six, I thought that maybe if I changed my name I could be a girl.

“Why don’t you like your name?” she asked.

“It’s a boy’s name,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, obviously not getting it. “It’s a good name for a boy. Your grandfather was named Christopher.”

“I want a girl’s name,” I said.

She stopped the car and looked at me. She looked at me for so long that another car started honking behind us. Then she let out a long breath.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes Chris is also a girl’s name. It can be short for Christine.”

I beamed. I don’t know what prompted my mom to say that, but it was one of the best things she’d ever said to me. The teacher was
wrong,
I did have a girl’s name. I was going to be all right. Ever since then I’ve heard my name as “Chris, short for Christine.”

Of course it turned out the name wasn’t really the core issue, and Mom didn’t stop Dad from giving me a good whipping when he found me in her dresses a couple of years later.

My body is the problem. It’s hard to tell people that you’re a girl when everything physical screams “guy.” Even in the semi-darkness, my reflection in the mirror had these broad shoulders and no waist. I inherited my mom’s thick lips, but my eyebrows look like Cro-Magnon man. They’d probably look better if I could pluck them, but I’m not too old to get a good whipping from Dad, so I leave them shaggy. I can still see his face, the grim set of his lips and how quiet his voice sounded when he told me when I was eight to take off the dress while he pulled his belt free from its loops. I think we both felt ashamed afterward, but for very different reasons. I never wanted to be the kind of kid my Dad would have to whip, so I retreated into my dreams and stayed away from girls’ clothes until this year when I was sure I could wear them in secret.