She's Not There Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “He’s gone now.”

  I did not know the word transsexual back then, and the word transgendered had not yet been invented. I had heard the word transvestite, of course, but it didn’t seem to apply to me. It sounded kind of creepy, like some kind of centipede or grub. In my mind I sometimes confused it with the words that described cave formations: What was it again—transvestites grew down from the top of the cave; transves-mites grew up from the bottom?

  But even if I had known the right definitions for these words, I am not sure it would have made much difference to me. Even now, a discussion of transgendered people frequently resembles nothing so much as a conversation about aliens. Do you think there really are transgendered people? Has the government known about them for years and kept the whole business secret? Where do they come from, and what do they want? Have they been secretly living among us for years?

  Although my understanding of exactly how much trouble I was in grew more specific over time, as I child I surely understood enough about my condition to know it was something I’d better keep private. By intuition I was certain that the thing I knew to be true was something others would find both impossible and hilarious. My conviction, by the way, had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female. Which is an odd belief for a person born male. It certainly had nothing to do with whether I was attracted to girls or boys. This last point was the one that, years later, would most frequently elude people, including the overeducated smarty-pants who constituted much of my inner circle. But being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being transgendered is about identity.

  What it’s emphatically not is a “lifestyle,” any more than being male or female is a lifestyle. When I imagine a person with a lifestyle, I see a millionaire playboy named Chip who likes to race yachts to Bimini, or an accountant, perhaps, who dresses up in a suit of armor on the weekends.

  Being transgendered isn’t like that. Gender is many things, but one thing it is surely not is a hobby. Being female is not something you do because it’s clever or postmodern, or because you’re a deluded, deranged narcissist.

  In the end, what it is, more than anything else, is a fact. It is the dilemma of the transsexual, though, that it is a fact that cannot possibly be understood without imagination.

  After I grew up and became female, people would often ask me, How did you know, when you were a child? How is it possible that you could believe, with such heartbroken conviction, something that, on the surface of it, seems so stupid? This question always baffled me, as I could hardly imagine what it would be like not to know what your gender was. It seemed obvious to me that this was something you understood intuitively, not on the basis of what was between your legs, but because of what you felt in your heart. Remember when you woke up this morning—I’d say to my female friends—and you knew you were female? That’s how I felt. That’s how I knew.

  Of course, knowing with such absolute certainty something that appeared to be both absurd and untrue made me, as we said in Pennsylvania, kind of mental. It was an absurdity I carried everywhere, a crushing burden, which was, simultaneously, invisible. Trying to make the best of things, trying to snap out of it, didn’t help, either. As time went on, that burden only grew heavier, and heavier, and heavier.

  The first time I remember trying to come up with some sort of solution to the being alive problem was about 1968, when I was staying in a summer house in Surf City, New Jersey. A hurricane was blowing up. My parents were away, watching my sister ride horses, and I was being tended by my dipsomaniac grandmother, Gammie, and her friend Hilda Watson, a tiny woman from North Yorkshire who was as deaf as a blacksmith’s anvil. Since it was nearly impossible for Hilda to hear even the loudest sounds, most of the time she sat in a chair wearing a startled expression; when she was aware she was being spoken to, she made a soft whooping noise, similar to the squeals of a guinea pig. Also there was my eccentric aunt Nora, who liked to make sock puppets as a gesture of love. One time she made me, out of one of my father’s black socks, an octopus with a mustache and a red top hat.

  On the day the hurricane hit, I had taken a walk underneath the boardwalk. It was as close to infinity as I could imagine under there, the row of pylons and boardwalk stretching as far as I could see. All around me were the echoes of the ocean and the howling wind and the seagulls and the rain, the smells of creosote and tar.

  I was “taking a big walk.” On the big walk I was going to try to solve whatever it was that was wrong with me. I walked down the dark tunnel of the place beneath the boardwalk, trying to figure out what the deal was with being alive. I knew I wasn’t a girl—by then it was clear that girls and I were different. And yet, clearly enough, I wasn’t a boy, either. What was I? What was going to happen to me if I didn’t stop wanting to be a girl all the time?

  That afternoon under the boardwalk, as the hurricane blew up, I tried to think about what I could do to solve the problem. This whole wanting-to-be-a-girl-all-the-time business was eating up a lot of my time. But what could a person do, if she wanted something impossible?

  I got as far as a fishing pier, and I left the tunnel of the below-the-boardwalk place and climbed out on the jetty next to the pier. Waves were already crashing up angrily against the rocks, and rain was starting to fall. The wind whipped my hair around. I sat on the farthest rock and looked out at the sea and watched the ocean for a long time.

  And then I thought, Maybe you could be cured by love.

  Even then I think I was aware of how corny this sounded. Still, I believed it to be true. If I was loved deeply enough by others, perhaps I would be content to stay a boy.

  I walked back to the apartment with this newfound awareness surrounding me like a caul. I would start with my grandmother. I opened the door to find Gammie and Mrs. Watson playing gin and drinking vodka. Gammie was describing the night of my father’s conception. “Best screwin’ I ever had!” she shouted. I stared at her.

  “What’s with you?” Gammie said.

  “Nothing,” I said. Mrs. Watson was listening to the Zombies on the AM radio. The song was “She’s Not There.”

  But it’s too late to say you’re sorry / How would I know, why should I care? . . .

  It was odd that Mrs. Watson—or any of these women—would be listening to the Zombies, as they were all classical music fans.

  “Why is Hilda listening to WFIL?” I asked, curious.

  “Sssh,” said Gammie. “She thinks it’s classical.”

  The disc jockey, Jerry Blavat—“the Geator with the Heater”— broke in. Surf City was being evacuated. Everyone was encouraged to get in their cars and head for higher ground. The hurricane would arrive by nightfall.

  “We have to leave here,” Aunt Nora said.

  “What?” said Gammie.

  “They’re evacuating the island,” my aunt repeated.

  “Oh, are you going to fall for that?” said Gammie. “Nora, you are like a scared chicken!”

  “They say we’re in danger,” Aunt Nora said.

  “Oh, shut up, Nora,” said Gammie. Outside, the wind howled against the windowpanes.

  “Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?” said Mrs. Watson, and adjusted her hearing aids, which suddenly blasted with feedback. She looked as though she’d just received an electric shock.

  My grandmother shouted to her deaf friend. “Nora says we should LEAVE. Like SCARED CHICKENS.”

  “We aren’t leaving?” Aunt Nora said, disappointed.

  “Cluck cluck cluck,” said Gammie.

  I just stood there, looking at my grandmother. I liked her enormous gaudy earrings and wondered how old I’d have to be before my parents would allow me to get my ears pierced. Then I remembered. I wasn’t going to be thinking that way anymore.

  “What’s with you?” said Gammie.

  “Nothing,” I said, and went to my room.

  I had brought with me to the seashore a magic kit I had been given for my birth
day. I sat cross-legged on the wooden floor and messed with it. There were all sorts of tricks to learn. There was the disappearing egg. Card tricks. A set of sponges that traveled through plastic cups.

  I sat there for an hour or so trying to get the disappearing egg to disappear. It seemed easy enough. You put the egg in the holder, then you covered it with the lid, said a few magic words, and lifted the top. With the proper amount of pressure, the egg would adhere to the ovoid lid and become hidden in its depths.

  But I couldn’t get the egg to cooperate. I broke the first one I tried and had to go out to the kitchen and get the carton of eggs out of the refrigerator, as well as paper towels to clean up the mess. I had to move stealthily in order not to be seen by Gammie, who, if she saw me stealing eggs, would insist that I come over and sit on her lap, where she would pinch my cheek and announce that I was “Gammie’s little apple.”

  I struggled with the disappearing egg for a long time. The problem was that the egg wouldn’t stick to the lid; it kept falling out and smashing on the floor, calling the credence of its disappearance into question. I tried lining the lid of the chamber with adhesive tape in order to make it stick, but this didn’t work, either.

  For a while I wondered if the problem was my magic words. I’d been using “Abracadabra.” The instruction manual invited the apprentice sorcerer to make up her own magic words, so I tried the trick with a variety of alternatives as well: “Presto change-o.” “Voilà.”

  And so on. I even tried being imperious with it: I COMMAND YOU TO DISAPPEAR.

  But it didn’t disappear.

  By ten o’clock that night, the wind was screaming outside. Rain hammered against the window. I lay on my back in bed. Gammie had forgotten dinner, which was fine with me, since when she did remember it would unquestionably be a big potful of chicken à la king. She loved to make chicken à la king, made it every time she baby-sat me. Since her full name was Ethel King Redding, I assumed they’d named it after her.

  Gammie, Hilda, and Aunt Nora were out in the living room, having this discussion:

  GAMMIE: Hilda, do you know where you’d GET (inhale, pause, exhale) if you went—directly—EAST—from Surf City?

  MRS. WATSON: Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?

  GAMMIE: EAST!

  AUNT NORA: I think we should leave. I think we’re in danger!

  GAMMIE: If you went EAST from Surf City, Hilda! Where do you think you’d get?

  MRS. WATSON: Hm. Whoop? Mm. England? Whoop? Is it England you’d get to?

  GAMMIE: SPAIN!

  MRS. WATSON: Oh, no, I don’t think it would be—

  GAMMIE: SPAIN!

  MRS. WATSON: Portugal? Perhaps Portugal? Whoop?

  GAMMIE: SPAIN! That is where you would wind up. SPAIN!

  I came out of my room and stood by the card table.

  Aunt Nora said, “I think we should leave. I’m afraid!”

  Gammie looked at her and rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to her, Jimmy. She’s just a chicken. A SCARED CHICKEN! Cluck cluck cluck.”

  “I think we should leave, too,” I said.

  “Oh, nonsense.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “If you think I’m driving back to Philadelphia in this pouring—”

  Aunt Nora took a look at me. She saw something.

  “I’ll drive,” she said.

  “Oh, you will not,” Gammie said. “Don’t be an imbecile.”

  “Whoop?” said Hilda.

  “We’re going to pack up and head home,” Aunt Nora shouted at Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson adjusted her hearing aids. They squelched. “There’s a hurricane.”

  Mrs. Watson nodded. “Entirely sensible,” she said.

  “You all go,” said Gammie. “I’m staying here.”

  “We’re all going,” said Aunt Nora. “Either you go, or you die,” she said. For a long moment, Aunt Nora and Gammie stared at each other.

  “Jimmy,” Gammie said at last. “Go get the vodka.”

  Years later, Gammie announced that when she died, she wanted to be a cadaver. She donated her body to Jefferson Medical School. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” she explained. She talked her friend Hilda into being a cadaver, too. It was something they did together. At the time, I was horrified by this, by the idea of my grandmother’s corpse being the private concern of a first-year medical student in Philadelphia, opening her up and holding her liver and her heart in his hands. Did he know, as he examined her innards, that this had been someone’s Gammie, someone who once danced on top of pianos, whose first husband nicknamed her “Stardust”?

  Now I’m less bothered by all this, though. Maybe she’s right, when you’re dead, you’re dead. I don’t know.

  I looked out the back of Gammie’s Dodge Seneca as Aunt Nora drove us into the storm. The boardwalk was visible as a dark shadow against the threatening sea.

  “You’re Gammie’s little apple,” Gammie said from the seat next to me, and pinched my cheek. The windshield wipers slapped against the storm. I looked at my grandmother’s earrings and at Mrs. Watson’s wedding ring. Thirty-three years later, after I became a woman, my mother gave me Mrs. Watson’s ring. Hilda and Gammie had been dead for thirteen years at that point. The ring has two big diamonds and eight little ones.

  “Whoop? Whoop? Whoop?”

  Aunt Nora looked at me in her rearview mirror. “It’s all right, Jimmy,” she said. “We’re going to be safe now.”

  After the Bath (Winter 1974)

  I had high hopes. My parents and sister had gone out. That left me alone in the place we called the Coffin House, built by Lemuel Coffin in 1890. It was just a few days before Christmas, and the war was over. This girl named Onion was coming over while my parents were gone. There were rumors about her.

  We’d been living in the Coffin House only for a couple of years now, and it still didn’t quite feel like home. The people who had lived in the house before us, the Hunts, had left quite a mark on the place. On the third floor, next to my room, there was one room that was kept locked. The ceiling was collapsing in the locked room. My parents used it as a storeroom. At night I’d lie in bed, waiting to hear footsteps on the other side of the wall, a door opening softly.

  My parents took down the wallpaper in their bedroom and found, beneath the paper, old poems written in pencil on the plaster. One of them was a woman’s lament for a man who had died. She’d signed her name: Mariah Coffin, 1912.

  There were other stories about the Coffin mansion. Mrs. DePalma, who lived across the street, claimed that the people who lived in the house before the Hunts had kept a sick aunt in a back bedroom. When she was little, Mrs. DePalma said, you could hear the woman’s fingernails scratching on the door at the top of the back stairs as she attempted to claw her way out. I’d been in that back bedroom, which didn’t have any heat, and there were indeed scratch marks on the door.

  Sometimes I’d go into the empty room next to mine and I’d put on some old dresses that hung in garment bags there. They smelled like mothballs. I’d stand around thinking, This is stupid, why am I doing this? and then think, Because I can’t not. Then I’d take the dresses off and go back to my room and think, You’re an idiot. Promise you’ll never do that again. Then I’d go back into the storeroom, try on a different one, and think, Idiot. I kept busy for hours that way—had, in fact, been keeping busy that way for years now. But no one knew.

  I’d had a car accident earlier that fall, on the first day of eleventh grade. I was showing my friend Bunting how to drive a stick, which he actually mastered relatively quickly. Unfortunately, a few miles down College Avenue in Haverford the car started fishtailing wildly, and within seconds it swung off the road, smashed into a fire hydrant, flipped over, soared off a small cliff, and disappeared into a ravine.

  Other than that, school was going pretty well. I was in Mr. Prescott’s Nineteenth-Century Poetry class, as well as one Mr. Meehan was teaching entitled The Individual Versus Society.

  Bunting and I got thrown out of t
he wreck. I flew through the air. As I did, I wondered, Okay, I’m about to find out if there is life after death—is there? Is there? There was a crash and a gong and many layered curtains that I passed through on my way out, each one finer and more delicate than the one before it.

  Suddenly I saw a dark blue form in the middle of a light blue field, and light was shining all around. A deep voice said, Son? Are you all right, son?

  And my first thought was, Cool! There is a God! Excellent!

  What this was, though, was a cop with a blue hat bending over me as I lay in the middle of the road on my back. I was looking up into the blue sky. My glasses had flown off in the collision, which was why everything was soft and blurry.

  Bunting was okay. He was standing next to a fire hydrant, which was erupting like the fountain in Logan Circle. My ear was falling off. “You’re going to the hospital,” the cop announced happily, as if I were going to the circus.

  Before I got into the ambulance, I insisted on climbing back down into the ravine to get my books out of the back of the Volkswagen. Coffin and Roleof’s The Major Poets was on the floor of the backseat. There was a little blood on the cover. Mr. Prescott was having us read “O Rose, Thou Art Sick!” for the next day.

  I’d arrived at early adolescence having inherited my mother’s buoyant optimism. In spite of the nearly constant sense that I was the wrong person, I was filled with a simultaneous hopefulness and cheer that most people found annoying. My mother had been levitated her whole life by a corklike faith in the goodness of people, by the belief that things would somehow “work themselves out.”