She's Not There (16 page)

I undertook, during this period, the writing of a supposedly amusing magazine piece making use of my superpowers. What I had in mind was to perform certain gender-pungent rituals in society, several weeks apart, first as James and then as Jenny, and to then compare the experiences. I wanted to apply for a job, for instance, first as man and then as a woman, and see which one of me would get the offer and whether the starting salary would be different. I thought of spending an evening sitting at a bar with Russo and going in the following night as Jenny with Grace. I considered going to a formal shop, getting fitted for a bridal gown, then a week later being measured for a tux. I was full of ideas.

I actually got as far as three of these exercises—buying a car, shopping for a handgun, and purchasing a pair of blue jeans at the Gap. I wrote the story and showed it to a few editors, all of whom loved it and wanted to know when it would be available. I said I wanted to wait until I officially “came out” and became Jenny full-time, probably in the summer of 2001. (By that time, however, I put the article in a drawer; it seemed by then too playful and sarcastic, as if being a woman were all just a clever game for me. The piece didn't seem to reflect the sorrow of the journey, and its joys seemed superficial.)

My experiences in writing the piece were perhaps predictable, but I found them amazing, at least I did at the time. For instance, when I went to the Nissan dealer as Jenny, the salesman showed me the most expensive car on the lot, the Maxima, and talked up the cup holders and the illuminated speedometer. A week later, he tried to sell James a midrange car, the Altima, and his focus now was on the platinum-tipped spark plugs. The punch line, although inevitable, was still remarkable, I thought: The deal they offered me as a man was a thousand dollars better than the one they'd offered Jenny.

The gun shop part of the article didn't really work, since I didn't know anything about guns and couldn't bring myself to go back there a second time as a man. The owner of the store, though, a nice man in Winslow, Maine, tried to sell me something called the “Chief's Special.” He said the two good things about the gun were 1) that it had no safety, and 2) that it was “double-acting.” This didn't make much of an impression on me, though; the only thing I knew that was double-acting was baking powder.

Buying the jeans at the Gap was more sobering to me as a soon-to-be-former man than it was to my female editors. What I found in the Gap was what most women know already—that buying clothes is complicated. As a man, of course, you simply made the choice between regular or relaxed fit, told the salesman the measure of your in-seam and waist, and were then led to a huge wall of pants in your size, all of which you knew would fit just fine, even if you never tried them on. As a woman, I found that there were six different styles of jean, from “boot cut” to “reverse,” and that the sizes bore no relation to any known system of measure.

The jean that fit me best at the Gap was the “reverse,” which I thought was appropriate. I was right between a ten and a twelve and spent some time neurotically trying to tell myself I could get by in the tens. They're perfectly comfortable if I don't sit down, I thought. How much time do I actually spend sitting, anyway? If I buy the tens, it will be an incentive to lose weight.

I recognized the insanity of this kind of talk, recognized it from the lives of the women I knew, and as I moved into this territory I realized, not for the first time, that all of the cruel expectations that society puts upon women—and that so many women put upon themselves—were now falling on my shoulders. I had seen so many transsexuals who felt that being a woman was the same as being a
girl,
and the lives they lived post-transition seemed to be those of completely unapologetic prefeminists. So many “former” transsexuals, although now ostensibly female, spoke in odd falsettos, teetered around on heels, and demanded that doors be held open for them. Again and again, I told myself,
you're going to incredible e fort to become a woman,
Jenny; don't surrender your common sense in the bargain.

No issue was as hard to resolve as the issues around food. My weight was stable, and at five feet eleven, I was healthy, tall, and slender. Yet whenever I went out for lunch, I would hear myself ordering diet soda or asking for the spinach salad. I bought a scale and started weighing myself constantly. I'd say,
If only I could lose five pounds.
I bought Slim-Fast and had thick, gloopy milkshakes for lunch instead of food.

It was madness, and it was exactly the kind of madness that I found least appealing in the lives of the women I knew. Yet the culture had its hooks in me, like it or not. In no time at all I'd internalized many of the things I'd spent years imploring my students to fight against. I worried that I was too fat. I apologized when someone else stepped on my foot, as if it were my fault. My sentences often ended with a question, as if I were unsure of myself. All of these changes transpired without any conscious thought, and if I became aware of them, I felt ashamed.

Partially, I think what I wanted was to
belong.
If being female— to others, at any rate—seemed to include self-doubt, insecurity, and anorexia, then some part of me felt,
Okay, well, let's do all that, then.

Later, when I tried to let some of this go, there were some who saw me as “less female”—like when I ordered the barbecued baby back ribs for lunch instead of a salad and a diet soda. Why shouldn't a woman eat real food for lunch, I wondered, instead of the pretend kind?

I realized, as Jimmy Durante used to say, that “them's the conditions what prevails,” but it didn't sit well with me. There were times when it was as if I were trying to prove I was truly female by oppressing
myself.

Luke and I were reading a book about Eskimos. “What would you do, Mommy,” asked the Inuit child, “if I turned into a walrus?”

“I would be afraid,” said the mother. “But I would still love you.”

“What would you do, Mommy,” asked the child, “if I turned into a polar bear?”

“Then I would be really afraid,” said the mother. “But I would still love you.”

It was kind of a cross between
Nanook of the North
and
The Velveteen Rabbit.
When we finished reading the book, I asked Luke, “Okay, let me ask you this one. What would you do, Lukey, if I turned into a woman?”

He looked unsure. “I would . . . still love you?”

“Would you?” I said.

He thought it over. “Sure,” he said. “You'd still be you, wouldn't you?”

“Uh-huh.” We sat together on the couch for a while.

“Have you noticed that I've been looking more and more like a girl over the last year?” I said.

“Some of my friends think you
are
a girl,” he said.

“That must be hard for you,” I said.

“Not really. I just tell them, ‘That's my daddy.'”

“Lukey, I need to talk to you about something. I have a condition, it's like when a person's sick, that makes me feel like a girl on the inside, even though I'm a boy on the outside. Does that make any sense to you, that a person's insides and outsides wouldn't match?”

“Sure,” he said. “I know what that's like.”

“So I'm taking some medicine that is slowly making my outsides more and more like a girl. After a while, I'm going to totally be a girl. I know that might make you sad, but it's what I need to do.”

Luke gave me a big hug. “I won't be sad,” he said. “You said you'd still be you.”

I hugged him back. “It's a very complicated thing, this condition I have. You probably don't want to know everything about it now. But you should know I'm not going away, and that you didn't cause this. And that I will always love you. That's never going to change.”

“I know,” he said. He picked up another book off the table. “Can you read me another story now?”

“How about if I sing you a song, one of my old songs, from Ireland?”

He crinkled up his nose. “How about another story?”

I kept a low profile at Colby that year—which was odd, because at the college I had always been one of the most visible and vocal members of the faculty. Many of my colleagues were still certain that I was fatally ill or bearing some kind of terrible secret sorrow. Later, another teacher told me, “You looked as if you were being slowly crushed in a vise.”

The president of the senior class called me up one night and said, “Congratulations, Professor Boylan. You've been chosen as the Professor of the Year.”

Terrific, I thought. Turns out the best way to get Professor of the Year was to have a sex change. I hoped it wouldn't start a trend.

I had to give a speech as Professor of the Year, a big lecture in the student union, filled with students and faculty and the president of the college. I began my lecture by showing Groucho Marx playing Professor Wagstaff, president of Huxley College, in the movie
Horse
Feathers.
As I spoke to the school, I got all choked up. It was an incredible honor, and I feared that when they learned the truth, they would feel I had let them down. As I stood before the audience, my breasts ached beneath my shirt.

“Whatever it is,”
Groucho sang to the trustees,
“I'm against it! /
And even when you've changed it or condensed it, / I'm against it!”

One day Luke said,“We need to come up with a better name for you than Daddy, if you're going to be a girl.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, what name do you think would work? You know, I use the name Jenny when I'm a girl.”

“Jenny!” Luke said, bursting into laughter. “That sounds like the name of a little old lady!”

Trying not to be hurt, I said, “Okay, well, what else can you think of?”

Luke thought about it for a moment, then said, “How about Maddy? You know, like half Mommy and half Daddy?”

I just sat there amazed at the versatility and ingeniousness of children. Patrick, at this point, chimed in, “Or Dommy.”

The name Dommy made them all laugh some more. And I said, “You can call me Maddy if you want to.”

They started calling me Maddy then and there and within a month or two had changed pronouns as well.

I shifted genders so slowly and so gently around my children that when I finally appeared before them for the first time wearing a skirt and makeup, they hardly noticed the difference. On this occasion I had spent the day at the lake working, then went down to Freeport to do some shopping. I came home late in the afternoon to find that the baby-sitter (who had also been briefed on the situation) already had them in the tub. I walked into the bathroom to say hi to my children, and Luke looked up at me and said, “Hey.”

And I said, “Hey what?”

And he said, “You're not wearing your glasses.”

I said, “Hi, Paddy,” waiting for him to give me his reaction.

“Maddy!” said Patrick, annoyed. He was holding a little plastic submarine.

“What?” I said.

“We're
trying
to play a
game
here?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

In the spring, Grace and I went out to breakfast one morning, with me as Jenny. It was a rough, up north kind of place with truckers in flannel making up most of the population. Grace and I didn't feel very comfortable, and guys kept stealing looks at us, and at me. Was I being read as male? Was I just being checked out? Did they think the two of us were lesbians? It was impossible to tell what was going on, but it gave us the willies.

The next morning, we went out to a different place. This time I went as a male. We both felt a lot more comfortable this time. It was a relief to be a normal, heterosexual couple again.

At the end of the meal, the waitress came over. “Hi,” she said. “Can I get you ladies any more coffee?”

It was as good a sign as any that the period of boygirl was coming to a close.

The following weekend, Grace went to visit her sister and brought the boys with her. I went over to the Russos in Camden for dinner, and we sat out on their deck drinking wine. I was over there “as” Jenny, which by that time simply meant that I was wearing a skirt instead of jeans. We did what we always did, told stories and drank wine, but something in the air seemed melancholy. It felt as if we were working harder at something that used to seem effortless.

At one point Rick told me that some of the friends we had in common were relieved that Grace's spirits seemed to have improved.

“She seems good,” Rick said. “She seems better than she's seemed all year. I mean, last year at this time, it was like she was carrying a load of bricks. But now she's laughing again. She's engaged, she seems like her old self.”

“Yeah, she's kind of come back to life,” I said. “I think around Christmas, maybe, she realized she was just going to have to take control over what was happening to her, and to the family. Since then it's like she's back from the dead. She's talked to the boys, she's talked to a lot of our friends, she even explains and defends me in some conversations with people.”

“That's amazing, when you think about it,” Russo said. “Considering how much she hates what's happening.”

“It is amazing,” I said.

“She is a strong woman,” said Rick.

Barbara Russo, who was sitting beside Rick, said quietly, “I think she's the strongest woman I know.”

“After you, Barb,” I said. “I don't envy the woman who has to put up with Russo twenty-four hours a day.”

Barb nodded. “It's made me tough,” she said, smiling.

Rick filled my wineglass. “Maybe you knew how strong Grace was when you got married, Boylan. Maybe you chose her because you knew you'd need someone strong.”