She's Not There Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Part 1

  Mr. Fun Hog (December 2001)

  Hurricane Ethel (Late Summer 1968)

  After the Bath (Winter 1974)

  The Failures of Milk

  Come Down in Time (Spring 1979)

  Monkey Orphanage (Spring 1982)

  House of Mystery (Summer 1987)

  Part 2

  Bright Star (1988–1999)

  The Troubles (Cork, Ireland, 1998–1999)

  The Ice Storm (Winter 2000)

  Wibbly Wobbly (Summer 2000)

  Boygirl (Winter 2000–2001)

  Part 3

  “They Aren’t Like Jellyfish at All”

  Some Pig (Fall 2001)

  Persons Such as Themselves (Fall 2001)

  Drunken Noodles - (January 2002)

  Part 4

  The Yankee-Doodle Girl

  Conundra, or The Sick Arab

  Explosive Bolts

  I.

  II.

  The Death of Houdini (Late Summer 2002)

  The New Equator

  Afterword: Imagining Jenny by Richard Russo

  Notes

  A READER’S COMPANION TO She’s Not There

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Katie Finney

  (1948 –2002)

  Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I would only leave it alone.

  —HUCK FINN

  PRAISE FOR She’s Not There AND Jennifer Finney Boylan

  “This surprisingly buoyant memoir about a sex-change operation is a frank and funny tale about gender, friendship, family, and love.”

  —Sara Nelson, Glamour

  “Boylan’s description of femininity, as James becomes Jenny, is fascinating and often hilarious.”

  —Washington Post

  “Her thoughtful approach to her own tale succeeds in bringing to life the seemingly impossible dilemma of the transsexual . . . Fortunately for her readers, Boylan has a very active imagination.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “In addition to being a complete delight, this book should make us all question what we mean when we use the words love, marriage, and friendship. Jennifer Finney Boylan is a great gift to womanhood.”

  —Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy

  “[A] candid and exuberantly funny memoir of self-actualization . . . In simple and direct language, Boylan describes an extraordinary metamorphosis. A superb primer for understanding the transgender impulse, She’s Not There feels at once liberating and regretful, embracing honesty in all its messy forms.”

  —The Onion

  “Intelligent and funny . . . this unusual memoir [is], first and foremost, one amazing tale . . . Boylan has a gift for transporting the reader, even one who has never felt this particular sort of gender claustrophobia, to a place where it can be imagined. . . . True and courageous.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Honest and humorous . . . her quest for identity gets to the heart of what it means to love and be loved.”

  —Lifetime magazine

  “Poignant yet often comical . . . a remarkable story that straddles the seam between humor and tragedy.”

  —Associated Press

  “The best, most satisfying reading experience is a serendipitous coming together of reader, writer, and book on an almost visceral level. When it happens, there is a kind of ‘click,’ an emotional engagement that enriches the whole undertaking and makes the reader feel somehow privileged. Boylan is a gifted storyteller . . . sustained by zany humor, a fine sense of the absurd, and an optimism that seems to defy all odds.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “In writing as sheer as stockings, artful without artifice, she explains the process of becoming Jennifer . . . Serious, real, funny. Told so disarmingly that it’s strong enough to defang a taboo.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “What makes the book so appealing is Boylan’s honesty, optimistic but never cloying tone and wry humor . . . the reader comes away with a sense of wonder and hope.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “Boylan’s well-written and informative book is a worthy contribution to the body of work on this subject.”

  —Booklist

  Part 1

  Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1974. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “The milk didn’t work.”

  Mr. Fun Hog (December 2001)

  There they were, two young women standing by the side of the road with their thumbs out. They weren’t warmly dressed, considering that it was December, in Maine. One of them had green hair. They looked to me as if they were in trouble, or about to be. I pulled over, thinking, Better me than someone else. The world was full of characters.

  “Can you take us to Augusta, ma’am? The Middle Road?” said the one whose hair was not green.

  “Yes, of course, I’m going right past there,” I said. “Climb in.”

  Soon they were in the car and we were driving west. The smell of pot wafted from the women, and I thought about the fact that my purse was on the floor in the back next to Green Hair.

  “Wow, lady,” said the girl next to me, looking at all the equipment in the minivan. “You sure have a lot of stuff. What is that, a guitar?”

  “Synthesizer,” I said. “I was playing at a Christmas party at the Samoset Resort last night. I was sitting in with the Roy Hudson Band.”

  “Whoa, I know them,” said Green Hair, suddenly impressed. “You play with them? They’re great. The Roy Hudsons used to play at Colby when I went there.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror to get a better look at her. Something in her voice was familiar. “You used to go to Colby College?” I said. I was about to say, I’m chair of the English Department there, but hesitated.

  “Yeah,” she said. “A couple semesters, a long time ago. Couldn’t hack it.”

  It was possible, although not certain, that Green Hair was named Ashley LaPierre, who’d been a student of mine back when I was a man. Looking at her now, all I could think was, Wow, she’s really changed.

  The class Ashley had been in was Love, Literature, and Imagination , the introduction to fiction, poetry, and drama for nonmajors. I loved teaching that course and sometimes did it as a great big lecture class where I stood at the front of the room and sang. We read a wide range of stuff, most of it having to do with people trying to find the courage to do something impossible. We talked a lot about the journey of the mythic hero, about the slaying of dragons and the attainment of illumination.

  I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I’d go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk.

  Ashley LaPierre had dropped out of Colby in the middle of that semester, which broke my heart. I remembered she’d been a fine writer, though, shining in both my class and Richard Russo’s fiction workshop.

  Now, six or seven years later, Ashley—assuming it was she— didn’t seem to recognize me, which wasn’t a surprise, seeing as how I didn’t use to be female. I was wearing blue jeans and a coral knit sweater. My long blond hair fell just above my breasts.

  “So what are you girls up to?” I asked.

  “We was walking into Augusta,” said the one next to me. “Pickin’ up this pit bull.”

  “I’m Jennifer, by the way,” I said.

  “Stacey Brown.” The other girl didn’t introduce herself. Stacey punched in my lighter.

  I wa
nted to say something about how we didn’t allow smoking in our family, but I decided not to. The car was full of amplifiers and sound modules and monitors anyway, and I’d just spent a night playing songs like “Hey Bartender” and “Mustang Sally” for a bunch of tattooed millworkers. It didn’t seem like the time to start lecturing these girls on the dangers of nicotine.

  “You live around here?” I asked. Ashley was looking out the window.

  “We live on a farm,” said Stacey. “We got five cats, three hens, one rooster.”

  “Any eggs?”

  “Nothin’,” said Stacey.

  The lighter clicked out and she lit up a cigarette from a pack of generic smokes.

  “So you live out there by yourself?”

  “Yeah,” said Stacey. “Since our boyfriends went to jail.”

  I looked at Ashley in the rearview mirror. She smiled for a moment, as if at some happy memory. The smile accentuated her apple cheeks, her bright, shining eyes.

  “Who owns the pit bull?” I asked.

  “We don’t know, some guy who calls himself Speed Racer. He’s got a brown trailer. We saw the dog advertised in Uncle Henry’s. We been thinking about getting a pit bull for a long time.”

  The smile faded from Ashley’s face.

  One day Ashley LaPierre had come into the office I shared with Russo to talk about a paper she was trying to write on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She was wearing gigantic black boots with clunky heels. Her eyes fell upon a poster of the Marx Brothers on the wall above the file cabinet. “Who are those guys?” she asked.

  “The Marx Brothers,” I said. “Groucho, Chico, Harpo. You’ve never heard of them?”

  She shrugged. “Nah. Anyway. This poem? Prufrock’s Love Song?” She spoke with that feminine-inflected voice that makes every statement sound like a question. Occasionally I brought the symbolism of this inflection to my students’ attention, especially when I asked for their names and they answered me as if they weren’t sure what they were. Megan? Heather? Ashley? “Say your names as if you are proud of them,” I’d urge my students. “Your identity is not a question.”

  Now that I was female, that same inflection often snuck into my own voice, a fact that both amazed and infuriated me. Hello? I’m Jenny Boylan?

  “Yes,” I’d said to Ashley. “We talked about it in class.” I’d been sitting at my desk chair, next to my computer. I’d been wearing Dockers and a tweed jacket, a blue Oxford shirt, and a brown tie. It seemed like a long time ago. I had a mop of brownish blond hair and small round wire-rim glasses, a fountain pen, stubble.

  “See, that’s the thing,” Ashley said. “The way that opens, Let’s get out of here, the both of us, while . . . whatever . . .”

  “‘Let us go then, you and I, / While the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a—’”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ashley said. “See, in class we were talking about how, like, that’s him talking to this girl, right? Only I don’t see it that way at all.”

  “No?” I said. “Well, how do you read it?”

  “I think he’s standing in front of a mirror,” she said. “And it’s like he’s this person cut in half, you know, it’s like he’s got this half of him that everybody thinks is cool, like he’s Mister Fun Hog, but in fact he’s totally scared of everything. It’s like he’s got this person he’s invented and then there’s this other person who’s really him and he’s trying to talk to this other person, trying to, like, convince him to get the hell out of there.”

  I nodded. “So you feel that J. Alfred Prufrock is torn in half?”

  She looked at me as if I hadn’t read the poem. “The fuck yes,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  I nodded again. “I do.” I was having a hard time concentrating. “So is he crazy?”

  “Crazy?” Ashley said. “Hell no. Everybody feels like that. Don’t they?”

  We drove toward Augusta in silence. Every now and then I’d ask a question or make some clever observation, but mostly I just let things stay quiet. Back when I was a boy, I’d hitchhiked lots of times, and there was nothing worse, sometimes, than a driver who was determined to make you talk.

  We got to Middle Road in Augusta, and I drove down the street first one way, then another—but there was no brown trailer. “Are you sure it was Middle Road?”

  “Middle Street,” said Ashley.

  “Do you have directions?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Stacey. “It’s like you go down this road and then there’s some sort of intersection or something?”

  We let this sink in.

  “Why don’t we call?” I said, and pulled in to a Mobil station. Stacey looked at me, embarrassed. “Here,” I said, pulling a quarter out of the cup holder. “My treat.”

  As Stacey went off to the pay phone, I sat in the car with Ashley. I suddenly had this unbearable urge to turn around and say, Ashley, it’s me, Professor Boylan. Remember? I’m, like, a woman now? I had this sense that, for the first time, there wasn’t some kind of invisible wall between us, that for the first time I could actually be known by her. But that wasn’t true. There were all sorts of walls between us, even now.

  I turned on the radio. A chorus of voices singing in a cathedral. Thomas Tallis’s 40-Part Motet.

  Stacey came back to the car. “Okay, I got it,” she said.

  I headed out into traffic. “What do we do?” I said.

  “You go, like, along some way, and then there’s some kind of, like, turn or something, and then there’s some other road?”

  I nodded.

  I had a hunch where Middle Street was, and we drove through Augusta, Maine’s hard-bitten capital, toward Belgrade.

  Two little girls were playing in the front yard of a row house.

  “Go on, play, little girls,” said Ashley. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  “Yeah,” said Stacey. “They don’t even know the shit they’re in.”

  “You got kids, Jenny?” Ashley said.

  “Yes, two boys. They’re seven and five.”

  “You have ’em by cesarean?” she asked. This wasn’t the question I was expecting.

  “Don’t ask her that,” said Stacey. “Jesus, like it’s any of your business.”

  “I just think it’s interesting,” said Ashley. “All my friends are cesareans, all of them. Don’t you think that means something? It’s like, all cesareans have this thing about them?”

  “I wasn’t cesarean,” said Stacey.

  “Actually, the thing cesareans have? You don’t have it.”

  “My boys were C-sections, actually,” I said, although I didn’t want to mention that I wasn’t the one who’d actually gone through labor. “And I was one, too.”

  “I knew it!” said Ashley. “I’m psychic!”

  “Psycho, you mean,” said Stacey.

  “Lucky you, having boys,” said Ashley. “You don’t have to worry about all the shit.”

  “Yeah, well, boys have other things they have to worry about,” I said.

  “As if,” said Ashley.

  I drove down Middle Street and hoped, in a way, that I wouldn’t be able to find the trailer. It was already clear that a pit bull was the very last thing these girls needed in their lives, that it was the only thing I could think of that might make their lives any worse than they were already.

  I had to get up to Colby by early afternoon, to meet the Russos for dinner, then introduce Richard at the reading he was giving at the college that night. His new book, Empire Falls, had come out the previous summer, and the Colby reading was ostensibly the last stop on the year’s long reading tour.

  I was looking forward to introducing Russo that evening. It would be my first official reintroduction to the college community since I’d switched from regular to Diet Coke. I knew the reading would be packed, too, the room likely to be filled with a few hundred people. It would definitely be an occasion. To make it stranger, everyone knew that Rick had been my closest friend
back when I was a man. As a writer—and as a man—Russo was something of a tough guy. Having his best friend turn into a woman hadn’t struck him as a great idea at the time.

  I pulled up in front of a brown trailer. A pit bull was chained to a tree.

  “This looks like the place,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Stacey, getting out of the van. Ashley was still staring out the window. Stacey took a few steps toward the trailer, then looked back at us. “Lee?” she said, irritated.

  “Coming,” said Lee, and opened her door. I thought, Is that what she calls herself now, Lee? I still wasn’t sure it was even the girl I had known.

  Before she put her feet on the ground, Lee said, “Listen, Jennifer?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you mind coming along with us?” She looked up at the trailer. “In case this guy is sketchy?”

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said.

  As it turned out, the trailer was way sketchy. Four busted-up cars sat on cinder blocks. An old red truck was pulled up next to the back door. On the back windows were two decals. The first one said, SHOW US YOUR TITS!

  The second one, in Gothic script, read, YOUR COLLEGE SUCKS.

  Stacey knocked on the door and waited. No one answered. She knocked again.

  The pit bull came over, snarling and bouncing and wagging. “Aww,” Lee said. “Pretty girl.”

  I had no idea whom she was referring to. It didn’t appear to apply to anyone present. Then she knelt and started petting the pit bull, which in turn licked her face. “Pretty girl,” she said again.

  Stacey kept knocking on the back door of the trailer. I looked around the yard, which was all mud. There was garbage and rusted pieces of metal and broken auto parts in every direction.

  “I guess he ain’t home,” said Stacey.

  She came over to where we were standing and looked at the dog. “Wow,” she said. “She’s great.”

  Lee looked up. “What do you think?” she said. “You think we should just take her?”

  We all thought about it. The guy was giving the dog away, after all. Still, it seemed odd that he wouldn’t be here, especially after Stacey had just called him on the phone. Was it possible we were at the wrong house? If we just took the dog, it was entirely possible we’d wind up getting arrested for dog larceny. These girls seemed to be exactly the kinds of characters to whom such things happened.