Stuck in the Middle with You Read online

  I had two brilliant and resilient sons, each of them with amazing and fabulous hair.

  Quite frankly, there wasn’t a whole lot left on my to-do list. Other than sit back in wonder and see what happens next.

  “I hate that,” said Grenadine softly. “I hate it, that people change.”

  I WAS A FATHER for six years, a mother for ten, and for a time in between I was both, or neither, like some parental version of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo. Of course, as parents go, I was a rather feminine father; for that matter I suppose I’m a masculine mother. When I was their father I showed my boys how to make a good tomato sauce, how to fold a napkin, how to iron a dress shirt; as their mother I’ve shown them how to split wood with a maul. Whether this means I’ve had one parenting style or two, I am not entirely certain. I can assure you I am not a perfect parent and will be glad to review the long list of my mistakes. But in dealing with a parent who subverts a lot of expectations about gender, I hope my sons have learned to be more flexible and openhearted than many of their peers with traditionally gendered parents.

  I would like to think that this has been a gift to them and not a curse. It is my hope that having a father who became a woman has made my two remarkable boys, in turn, into better men.

  Zach learned to shave when he was two years old, by watching me. He says that this is one of his primary memories of me as a man—the morning ritual of the razor and the hot steam from the basin. Zach stood upon a stool so that he could see his face in the bathroom mirror. I used to coat his young, pink cheeks with Gillette Foamy, and then give him a razor with the protective shield still on the blade. As I shaved my face, Zach would shave his. He’d mimic the contortions I’d make with my face in order to keep my skin taut. And he’d shave his own face in the same order I shaved mine—cheeks first, then the neck, then the chin, mustache last.

  We stood there before the mirror, the two of us. I wiped the steam away from the top half of the mirror so I could see myself; Zach wiped a smaller hole away for himself at the bottom. Our expressions were so serious as we shaved, as men’s faces always are as they undertake this business, as if we are not shaving, but staring out across the bridge of our intergalactic star destroyers.

  Afterward, we’d towel down our faces, removing the residual froth and smacking our smooth cheeks lightly with an air of manly satisfaction. “There,” he’d say. “I’m clean as a whistle!”

  Where he got that phrase I can’t tell you. He didn’t get it from me.

  That Christmas, Deedie bought Zach his own pretend shaving kit, complete with a plastic razor. When he opened this gift, though, he immediately burst into tears. “What?” said Deedie, discouraged that what had seemed like the perfect gift had gone so wrong.

  “I don’t want a baby razor,” Zach wept, looking at me for backup. “I want a real one!”

  Twelve years later, when Zach began to shave for real, he did it with an electric razor, one of those contraptions with the “floating heads.” I didn’t show him how to do it, although I tried. But he stopped me as he headed into the bathroom, and said, “Maddy. I got it from here.” A moment later, the door closed, and I sat down in the kitchen and listened to the faint buzzing sound coming through the wall.

  I didn’t learn how to shave from my father either. Which turns out, I think, not to be so strange. One of the things about manhood I learned from my father is that it’s a solitary experience, a land of silences and understatements, a place where a lot of important things have to be learned alone. Whereas womanhood, a lot of the time, is a thing you get to share.

  I remember going for a bra fitting once and the saleswoman just waltzing right into my changing room in the midst of things to “check the fit.” When she entered the room I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t prepared for anyone to barge in while—what’s the phrase?—my cups runneth over. But in seeing my astonishment, the saleswoman just laughed. Oh, honey, please, she said. We’re all women here.

  “How was it?” I asked Zach when he emerged from the bathroom, stroking his face. I was all set to have a big conversation about the experience. Shaving for the first time! A huge rite of passage! Do you remember, my sweet boy, when you were two, and we used to stand before the mirror together, staring through the clouds of steam? I imagined the two of us sitting down for a moment, in order to take the measure of our rapidly passing lives.

  “It was fine,” said Zach, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. I recognized that tone. It said, it was what it was and it wasn’t all that interesting, and do we have to talk about it as if it was? Not everything in the world, my son was trying to tell me, is worthy of analysis and sentimentality.

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to be hurt. Zach shook his head and bent down next to me.

  “Really,” he said. “It was fine.” He gave me a hug, to make up for his silence, and I hugged him back, and my cheek brushed against his.

  Smooth.

  “I DON’T KNOW,” Grenadine was saying as we waited for the next round of competition to start. “I don’t think everybody has to stay the same forever. I just don’t see why I have to stay stuck, when he’s not who I married.”

  This was, of course, the question that obsessed me. The previous week, Deedie and I had sat in the audience at Kents Hill’s theater and watched as our younger son Sean stepped into a spotlight and recited sonnet 116.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove:

  O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wandering bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  Sitting there in the audience, I admit that tears had rolled down my cheeks. For one thing, surely no other family had found alteration as had ours, nor any wife been so ever-fixed in her adoration for the one she loved as Deedie had been for me. For another, Sean looked so grown-up on the stage, his wild hair lit by stage lights.

  Deedie saw me wipe away the tears. “Dear God,” she muttered. “Here we go again.”

  “How did your husband change?” I asked Grenadine, and thought, I should be charging for this.

  “He’s so angry all the time. He comes home all wound up from the war. Then he won’t talk about it. He broods and broods. Then he signs up again. While Ethan and I keep on getting older without him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “How am I supposed to show Ethan how to be a man?” she asked. “How am I supposed to teach him that?”

  “You can teach him right from wrong,” I said. “You can teach him how to be kind.”

  Grenadine looked at me as if I were from another planet, as if learning how to be kind wasn’t the thing she was worrying about.

  “I’m just afraid that Ethan is going to wind up like his father,” said Grenadine.

  “Like him how?”

  “Like, he’s going to leave me. And I’ll never see him again.” She laughed bitterly. “The less his father is around,” she said, “the more Ethan winds up like him.”

  “There are all kinds of men in the world,” I said to Grenadine. “You can teach Ethan to be different.”

  The referee was talking to Zach on the mat below us. Zach had put down The Lord of the Rings and was now twisting his long hair behind him and lowering his helmet over his head.

  Grenadine turned to me as if I were her last friend on earth. “How?” she said.

  Below us, Ethan stepped onto the piste. Of course it was Ethan Zach would be facing next. In one corner, a goofy young hippie with his heart on his sleeve; in the other, the young marine, with his deadly flèche and heartrending scream.

  Grenadine said it again, more urgently this time: “How?”

  It was a good question.

  Our sons faced each other and bowed. “En garde,” said the ref, and then th
e young men drew their swords.

  * This name, along with some other identifying information, has been changed.

  On a Cold February night in 1994, Deedie and I were watching Brideshead Revisited on the television in our little house in Maine. She was absolutely pregnant, her hands at rest on the vast Matterhorn of her belly. Snow was coming down outside, and our dinner dishes—now mostly empty—were sitting on the coffee table before us. I was a man then. I had made leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary. On the side there had been new potatoes tossed with olive oil and kosher salt and fresh mint.

  It is fair to say we had no idea what the world before us might contain. We had seen plenty of our friends transform into parents by this time, and to be honest we hadn’t been thrilled by most of the metamorphoses. Not only was it clear that our former companions were a lot more interested in their squirming offspring than they were in Deedie and me—their friends of many years—but they seemed like they’d transformed into people less interesting than the ones we’d first befriended. Our friends—radicals and satirists, the kind of people you could have over for a martini and a model rocket launch—now seemed bland, exhausted, and unforgivably self-involved.

  As we lost one set of lifelong friends after another to the state of parenthood, we joked that they were like the townspeople we frequently saw in science fiction movies, the ones whose minds are taken over by the aliens, who counsel their dwindling still-human friends by saying, Don’t fight it. They’re smarter than we are. It’s good.

  Deedie and I were determined that we would be different kinds of parents. I think we imagined that having children would be a little bit like having Labrador retrievers. Sure, we’d train them, teach them to read and drive a car and fetch, but we’d still be unmistakably ourselves—artists, Democrats, rocketeers. After all, we hadn’t embarked upon this adventure in order to become strangers. We had embarked upon it as an act of love.

  As the snow drifted down outside that night, we were watching the scene in Brideshead in which young Charles Ryder first goes over to the rooms of the eccentric Sebastian Flyte. Middle-class Charles has never seen anything in his life like Sebastian or his friends. But I was in search of love in those days, Charles says, and I went full of curiosity and the faint unrecognized apprehension that here at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that great city.

  “Uh-oh,” said Deedie.

  On the screen before us, Charles looked at a large bowl of plover’s eggs gathered in a bowl at the center of an ornate table.

  “What’s ‘uh-oh’?” I said. I picked up the remote and hit the pause button.

  “I think,” said Deedie, “my water just broke.”

  I still remember the silence in the house that followed these words. Our dog Lucy, half golden retriever, half beagle, raised her head bitterly and gave us a hard look. Outside, the snow was still drifting down quietly.

  What possible response can any man give to the woman he loves in the wake of such a phrase?

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess we should go to the hospital then.”

  My eyes fell to the screen, and to our paused movie, where Charles Ryder’s hand was frozen, inches from the bowl of plover’s eggs.

  Deedie took my hand. “Is it really happening?” she said. “Is this how it begins?”

  I put my arms around her and kissed my love upon on the cheek. Sure, I wanted to say. It begins like this.

  But this was not the truth. Whatever was happening to us, whatever journey we were on, had begun a long time ago.

  I FIRST LAID eyes on Deedie back in college. She was onstage in a production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. In the play she was dating this other guy who I knew named Boomer Dorsey. Boomer was one of the college’s hot young actors. I’d seen him as Gloucester in Richard III a few weeks earlier, in a production marred only by the fact that the actor playing Richmond had the unfortunate combination of a speech impediment and an accent from deepest Brooklyn, which transformed the word lords into something that sounded like “wawds,” thus:

  RICHMOND: Cwy mercy wawds and watchful gentlemen,

  That you have tane a tawdy swuggard here!

  LORDS: How have you slept, my lord?

  RICHMOND: Swept? The sweetest sweep, an faiwest boding dweams!

  That evah entered in a dwowsy head,

  Have I since yaw departchaw had, my wawds!

  The Mamet was a lot better. Boomer—who years later opened up his own pretty damned great Irish bar on the Upper West Side—was playing the part of a blowhard named Danny. But I wasn’t paying any attention to Boomer Dorsey. My eyes were fixed upon this woman playing the part of Deborah. I could see her green eyes sparkle from the third row. Checked the program. Deirdre Finney, she was called. Named for Derdriu, the Irish Queen of Sorrows.

  Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.

  Actually, I know that the line between love at first sight and creepy stalker is probably finer than anyone would like to admit. But I can honestly say that from the moment I first saw Deirdre, when I was twenty years old, I felt as if something had changed, as if I’d been living all my life in a dark room and someone had suddenly turned on all the lights.

  Late in the play, Boomer and Deirdre—I later learned her nickname was Deedie—were lying in bed together naked. A single sheet covered their bodies.

  DEBORAH: What does it feel like to have a penis?

  DANNY: Strange. Very strange and wonderful.

  DEBORAH: Do you miss having tits?

  DANNY: To be completely frank with you, that is the stupidest question I ever heard. What man in his right mind would want tits?

  DEBORAH: You’re right, of course.

  Sitting there in the dark theater, I had to agree. I didn’t want tits, not at that moment anyhow. What I wanted at that moment, more than anything else, was to be Deedie’s boyfriend.

  I GOT MY WISH of course, but it would be nine years before I got it. In the meantime, I had to date—and then run away from—Rose, and Dora, and Felicity, and a host of others. I’d go out with these girls for a while, even live with them in some cases, but at all times the ghost of my female self shadowed me, as it had since childhood, asking me how much longer I intended to deny the truth about the nature of my character.

  And at the moment this question arose, as it always did, sooner or later, there was nothing to do but break up. With one girlfriend, Allison, I went home one day and just erased myself. It was the kind thing to do, I thought. I’d been living with her in New York for three years, but we’d been losing steam. Quite frankly, I’d gone off to grad school in Baltimore partly so I could get away from her without having to have some whole big fight about it. The relationship had become like one of those balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade that starts leaking helium and the next thing you know Superman’s collapsed on top of the guys holding the strings.

  I did love her, though, for a little while anyhow. That was the thing: I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love would cure me. That if only I were loved deeply enough by someone else, I would be content to stay a man. It wouldn’t be my authentic life, but it would be all right. It was better, in any case, than coming out as transsexual, taking hormones, and having some gruesome operation and walking around like Herman Munster. An authentic life wasn’t very appealing. And so I allowed myself to be lifted off the ground by the levitating properties of romantic love. It was a nice effect.

  Of course, nobody really gets cured by love, but transsexuals are hardly the only people who believe romance will lead them outside of themselves. You can’t fault a person for hoping that love will make her into someone else, someone better. The world is full of false hopes, most of them dumber than the hope of being transformed by love.

  After my first year at Jo
hns Hopkins, it was clear enough Allison and I weren’t getting back together. I spent a lot of time in grad school sitting in my apartment with the door locked and the shades drawn, wearing a wig that made me look like a run-down Joni Mitchell. Thus arrayed, I sat in my leather chair and read Borges and Poe and worked on a novel entitled The Invisible Woman. Eventually I told Allison I was coming up to New York to get my stuff and she said, fine, whatever. It wasn’t a surprise to her by that time. I drove to Manhattan in my Volkswagen Golf and loaded the last of my things into the hatchback while Allison was at work. There wasn’t much—some posters, a box of books, an autoharp. Then I put her apartment back the way it used to look before I’d moved in, three years before. She’d had a print of the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer over the fireplace, but I’d taken it down. That girl always gave me the creeps.

  After I put Allison’s stereo back where it used to be, after I took my books off the shelves, the last thing I did was to put the Vermeer back above the fireplace. The girl in the painting looked at me with her accusing, liquid eyes, and said, Klootzak! In Dutch this more or less means “asshole.” She said it again as I left the keys on the kitchen table and then closed the door of the apartment for the last time.

  Klootzak!

  IT WAS TEMPTING, of course, to try to put it all into words. Usually people assume that the reason you wanted to change genders was because deep down you hated yourself, or that you were actually gay and just didn’t know it, or that you couldn’t figure out a way of being feminine in the culture while still being a man. None of that has anything to do with it, though, not that this prevents people who’ve never suffered from this admittedly peculiar condition from writing jargon-filled books about it. Critic Judith Butler describes my heartache this way: If there is a sexual domain that is excluded from the Symbolic and can potentially expose the Symbolic as hegemonic rather than totalizing in its reach, it must be possible to locate this excluded domain either within or outside that economy and to strategize its intervention in terms of the placement!