Stuck in the Middle with You Read online

  Man, that is so true!

  My transgender brethren and sistren are often not much more helpful. Even now, occasionally I meet trans people who say, Oh, I’m a woman too! I love to make cookies and play with dolls! To which I want to wearily respond: Jeez, if you want to play with dolls, play with dolls. You don’t need a vagina for that.

  Most of the time I just have to resign myself to the fact that this whole business is beyond comprehension for most straight people. If you’re not trans, you’re free from thinking about what gender you are in the same way that white people in America are generally free from having to think about what race they are.

  Back when I was a man, though, the gender business was something I fought against. The thought of going through transition and coming out, and launching into some sort of subversive identity—well, let’s just say it didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to be a revolutionary. A lot of the time, more than anything, I just wanted to be like everybody else.

  I still want that, sometimes.

  The women I knew in those days liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn’t know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman.

  Until I started going out with Deedie in my late twenties, my romances didn’t last. Because, let’s face it: I was keeping the basic fact of my identity camouflaged. How was I supposed to fall in love when I was so frequently lying? How was it possible to be vulnerable with someone from whom I was, at that same moment, in hiding?

  When it came time to give a lover the slip, the best strategy, as it turned out, was no breakup at all. I’d just stop answering the phone, or I wouldn’t hang around my girlfriend’s part of town. By the time we did run into each other, on the street, she’d be in the arms of some other guy, and what could I do? Give her a peck on the cheek, wish her well. Think about her earrings, wonder where I could get some like that.

  Tell her I was happy.

  AND THEN I RAN into Deedie again. The first time was at a funeral. The second, at a wedding. When we fell in love, I felt as if the thing I had always dreamed of had at last come true. Here, after all these years, was the woman who would make me content at last to stay a man. Is it really happening? Is this how it begins?

  A girl with a pearl earring stared at me with her liquid eyes. Klootzak! she said.

  THE FLAKES SWIRLED down from a dark sky as we made our way through the snows of Maine. I helped Deedie into the Jeep and fired up the engine. As I headed down the driveway I looked in the rearview mirror at the house to which we would not return unchanged. The last thing I’d done before closing the door was to pat Lucy on the head. She knew what was up. The dog made her disappointment abundantly clear. You people, she said. You don’t have a clue.

  The dog was right of course. We had hoped that she’d come around to the idea of children in time, but she never forgave us. A few years later, after we disassembled Zach’s crib and set up the big-boy bed in his room, Lucy christened the thing by climbing into it and taking a dump. She could have done this anywhere in the house, but she did it in the place where her message would not be misconstrued. You people. You stupid, clueless people. You see this? This is what you get.

  I drove through the storm toward the hospital. We lived then, as now, in the small village of Belgrade Lakes, a small finger of land between Great Pond to the east and Long Pond to the west. There is room on that finger for one small road, old New England houses on either side, and the lakes beyond that. There was a general store, a restaurant, a bar, and a deranged place called Outlaw Pizza that had a half-dozen mannequins in the parking lot. One of the mannequins was named the Woman with Nine Names. If you asked the owner, Dave, what the names were, he’d just shake his head. “I can’t tell you.”

  In the summer we would cruise across Long Pond in a boat, pick up pizzas at Outlaw and a six-pack of Shipyard from the general store, and head back home. Sometimes Deedie would cut the engine halfway back and we’d just float there in the summer sun.

  “Hey, Jim,” she might inquire. “How about we drink these beers?”

  But the lakes were frozen now, covered with ice-fishing shacks and the trails of snowmobiles. We drove past the cemetery with its crumbling brownstone markers crowned with skulls and willows, past the gravel pit, past the fields and farms and the little churches. We didn’t talk much in the car. We knew that something was beginning that was beyond our understanding. I turned on the radio. And there was Stealers Wheel, playing “a medley of their hit.”

  Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

  It was a good song for labor, “Stuck in the Middle with You.” It would have been better, maybe, if I didn’t also associate it with the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs.

  We arrived at the hospital and I walked my enormous and beautiful wife toward maternity. Nurses lowered her into a wheelchair. For a few steps I followed after, but then one of the nurses gave me a look. It was the same look that I had given Lucy, back when we left the house. You. You’re staying here. The nurse nodded toward the waiting room. There were half a dozen dads-to-be in there even at this hour. They were reading copies of Field & Stream, Men’s Health, People. One man, a big guy in a flannel shirt, looked up at me. Ah, he seemed to say. My brother.

  I turned to Deedie and hugged her. “I’ll be right here,” I said, trying to give her an E.T. voice, reaching forward with my finger.

  At this moment a contraction wracked my bride. “Ughhhhh,” she moaned as I touched her heart.

  “Seriously,” I said. “I’ll be right here.”

  “Ughhhhh.”

  “We should go,” said the nurse.

  I kissed her again, then watched her disappear behind the double doors. Then I walked into the waiting room and joined my newfound brethren.

  In the distance, I heard the voice of Deedie Finney, the girl I had first seen onstage beneath a sheet discussing breasts and penises with Boomer Dorsey. “Ugghhhh,” she said. “Uggghhh.”

  The big guy in the flannel handed me a copy of Sports Illustrated.

  “Magazine?” he said.

  HAD I TOLD Deedie about my history, you ask? Mentioned the whole run-down Joni Mitchell business? I had not.

  At the time I felt that this self had vanished at last, just as I had prayed it would, year after year. I’m cured of that, I thought, if I thought about it at all. The divided, screwed-up person that I used to be doesn’t matter. All that matters is the healed, whole man that I have become with her at last.

  Sometimes I thought about trying to tell her. But then I had never told anyone, outside of a couple of therapists. I hardly had the language to describe the things I had felt, the person I had been.

  And in short, I was afraid.

  If you ask Deedie about all this now, she says, “My marriage with Jenny was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.” I know what you’re thinking, and please. Sometimes I don’t get it either. But whenever I start up with the I suck business, she heaves a weary sigh and suggests I take up with a different line of thought. And maybe it’s worth noting that after almost twenty-five years, our marriage has lasted longer than that of anyone else we know whose husband didn’t have a sex change. Who knows? Maybe if more husbands became women, the divorce rate might be lower.

  Still, the burden of the secret that I did not disclose remains with me. It’s a hard thing to live with, the weight of having so profoundly hurt the person whom I love.

  I think when I was a man, I felt that I was protecting Deedie with my silence. I think this is something men do; they carry the weight of the world on their back and strive to complain about it as little as possible. There are ways in which I wish I still had that kind of silent courage. It’s about the only thing from my male life I’m nostalgic for—the ability to protect the ones I love sim
ply by keeping my mouth shut.

  The nurse reappeared in the waiting room after an hour or so, pushing Deedie in the wheelchair. “We’re sending you home,” she said. “She’s only two centimeters.”

  “That’s bad?” I said, trying to remember the details of the dilation process from our Lamaze class. It was all a jumble.

  “You come back tomorrow,” said the nurse. “You got a long way to go still.”

  What could I do, except stand up and push Deedie’s wheelchair back toward the exit? We felt a little embarrassed, Deirdre and I, like a pair of travelers who’d shown up at the airport a day early. As we drove back through the snow, back through Waterville and Oakland and Belgrade, she looked out the window.

  The world was silent and still.

  When we got home, Lucy was waiting for us. She wasn’t surprised we’d come home without a baby. She made no effort to hide her contempt. You, she said to me. You spent your twenties walking around Baltimore in a dress. And now you think you’re going to be a father? The dog shook her head. Unbelievable.

  Deedie settled herself into a rocking chair in our bedroom. Once this chair had belonged to her own mother. Now Deedie sat in it, rocking back and forth, reading a book as her labor progressed.

  “I’ll stay up with you,” I said.

  “It’s okay, Jim,” she said. “You should get your sleep.”

  “If you don’t get to sleep,” I said, “I don’t get to sleep.”

  Deedie smiled gently. “That’s nice,” she said.

  I walked toward the bathroom. On my way there I peeked into the room I had prepared as a nursery. In January I had stripped off the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, painted the walls, built the crib, even assembled the little airplane mobile that dangled from the ceiling. The room was silent, and I tried to imagine the life that would soon fill it, that would soon transform our lives. It was hard to get my mind around.

  I came back to the bedroom and got in bed, propped myself up with pillows. Unbelievably, I was reading a book by Robert Bly at the time, Iron John. A lot of the men I knew were reading it. It was very popular. It was Bly’s theory that men were an “experimental species.” Me, I thought the whole thing was kind of half-crazy, but then that didn’t make it untrue. From time to time I looked over at my wife. Her hand was on her belly, and she was looking out the window at the falling snow, illuminated by a light that shone on our back porch.

  Hours later, when I woke up with Iron John still open beside me on the bed, I found Deedie in the same position, as if she had not moved in all that time. She didn’t look like my wife, though; while I slept she seemed to have transformed into something celestial and otherworldly. One hand lay on her belly, the place where Zachary waited for us both. Deedie looked out at the snow, and then over at me, and then out at the world again, beautiful, gentle, eternal. The sun was rising in the meadow behind our house, casting dim light upon the unknown world.

  THERE WAS AN EPIDURAL, a cesarean. I stood by Deedie’s side as the operation proceeded, gazing upon the innards of my dear. Fallopian tubes! Ovaries! The uterus! Adipose tissue! I stroked Deedie’s hair, observed the freckles on her nose. There was a slice with a scalpel, and there was Zach, wearing the same expression he wears now when he has to do precalculus.

  He thought the world over, compared it to the place he had been. Then he began to weep.

  Deedie, hearing the sound of her newborn, said, “That’s amazing.”

  They had me clip the umbilical, a wholly symbolic act, since they’d already snipped it themselves.

  The nurses cleaned up the boy and brought him over to his mother. Deedie held Zach in her arms. She looked at him, then she looked at me.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Look at what we’ve gone and done. Just look.”

  LATER, WE COULDN’T believe they just let us leave the hospital with the baby. We walked past the nurses’ station as if we were getting away with something, as if we’d pulled off a bank job. We went out to the Jeep and locked the car seat containing the newborn in its bracket. Then we started up the car and drove toward home.

  When we got there, we found my old friend Zero making macaroni and cheese. He’d opened up the convertible couch on the first floor for Deedie to sleep in; the cesarean she’d endured had made climbing stairs unpleasant.

  “Look, Deedie,” said Zero. “I made you a whelping box.”

  Deedie laughed, but she was weak. Zachary started to cry. Before she even had her coat off, Deedie was on the couch, propped up by pillows, the baby at her breast. We turned on the television. The 1994 Winter Olympics were on—there was some whole scandal about one skater’s boyfriend clubbing another skater with a steel pipe. The name of the boyfriend was Gillooly.

  Zero looked at Deedie and then at me. “So,” he said. “How does it feel to be a daddy?”

  ACTUALLY, WHAT IT felt like most of the time was tired. Of the many conflicting emotions that define early parenthood, probably nothing is as all-encompassing as that sense of exhaustion. For a couple who had always enjoyed slow mornings and late nights, the biggest transition—at first, anyway—turned out not to be going from nonparents to parents, but going from sleepers to nonsleepers. The baby was up. The baby was down. Sometimes, when the baby was down, we’d start to worry. Had he been fed? Was he wet? Sometimes we’d wake him up when he was asleep, although now, years later, I can’t for the life of me imagine why we thought this was a good idea. The house was full of baby monitors, amplifying the breathing of the small creature in the upstairs nursery. As he slept, Deedie and I would nod off in our chairs or on the couch, or at our desks, until the first sound of discontent. Then it was like living in a firehouse with the alarm going off and all of the firemen sliding down the pole and leaping into their boots. If this happened during the night I’d be the one to drop into the nursery and fetch my sobbing heir, and bring him to Deedie. Then the boy would—as the saying goes—muckle on.

  Hours later, sometimes well past dawn, I’d wake up to find all three of us curled up in the bed together. Zachary lay on his back, snoozing contentedly; Deedie lay on her side, her leaking breasts falling abundantly onto the pillows, a blanket encircling us. I would reach over softly and put my arm around my wife and son. Protecting us, I believed, from whatever the world might hold.

  WAS I JEALOUS, you ask, of Deedie’s superhuman powers, now that she was a mother? As someone who had always identified as female—up until the moment I fell in love with her—did I feel left out, now that my love had experienced what may well be the defining moment in a woman’s life? Did I feel like Pete Best, you wonder, after the Beatles became the Beatles? Or like Art Garfunkel, perhaps, after Paul Simon released Graceland?

  I did not. Mostly, what I felt—besides sleepy—was incredibly lucky. The baby was healthy, and Deedie recovered from the trauma of birth fairly swiftly. If there were times when my sense of myself as female was slowly returning to me, I dismissed these thoughts by reminding myself that I had now made a promise, both to Deedie as well as to this newly minted son, and that it was up to me to stand between the ones I loved and the turmoil of the world. If that meant that there were times I felt a little disembodied, or haunted by some sort of cosmic melancholy, well, that was just too bad. There were all sorts of burdens to carry in the world, and if this one was mine there was more than a little solace in knowing how lucky I was nonetheless, how lucky we all were.

  I thought now and again of that character in Slaughterhouse-Five, the guy who kept saying, You think this is bad? This is nothing. There’s a lot worse than this.

  Anyway, it wasn’t maternity that I had yearned for. It was a sense of womanhood. Does that make me a hypocrite or a halfwit, to admit that I had dreamed of a woman’s body, and a woman’s life, and even the incredible gift of parenthood, without having any particular desire for pregnancy and menstrual cycles and breast-feeding? I am nervous about admitting this, for fear of suggesting that my quest for identity was opportunistic. Surely it does seem m
ore than a little facile to want all of the perks of womanhood without having to experience the drawbacks—the tedium of a period, the endless come-ons from boys, the swelling dreariness of pregnancy, which, the sisterhood notwithstanding, most women will tell you gets more than a little old after a while. I am fairly certain that admitting this exposes me as a fundamentally shallow person, someone who talks the talk but won’t walk the walk.

  And yet, I’ll say—with more than a little defensiveness—surely a woman cannot be defined solely as a person who has borne children, or who has a menstrual cycle, or who has nursed a child. As the years have gone on, I’ve come to accept that womanhood—like manhood—is a strangely flexible term. I’ve met “genetic” women who have a Y chromosome, who have a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome that makes their bodies unable to absorb the information that that Y chromosome contains. I’ve met women who were born without a uterus; I’ve met women who have exactly zero interest in babies or children, or, for that matter, Brad Pitt. All of these women, however, are unmistakably women, and were anyone to suggest otherwise it would seem ridiculous.

  And so I hope that if there is room in the wide spectrum of women’s experience for all of these different lives, surely there is room in it—somewhere—for me.

  That is, until I remember my Irish grandmother—“Gammie”—watching some television show with transsexuals on it, possibly Donahue, or The Dinah Shore Show. This was back in the seventies. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said, sucking on her Kent filter king, “those people aren’t women.”

  “They’re not?” I said. She, of course, had no idea that I was a woman just like the ones she was dismissing.

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “They have breasts,” I pointed out. “They have—you know. Vaginas.”