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  I stared at Arizona. Smelled pears mixed with salt air. I stepped off the curb and plodded after the surge of people heading back to work, Janis Joplin singing in my head.

  THE TRAVAILS OF PRINCESS STEPHEN by Jane Lindskold

  The dress had been in the family for longer than anyone remembered, for so long that no one quite recalled for whom the dress originally had been made.

  It was commonly referred to as “great-grandmother’s wedding dress.” But as the generations passed, and the dress was handed on with more or less formality, the question of just how many “greats” should be inserted before “grandmother” was a point subject to occasional lazy discussion.

  The problem was that no matter how many faded wedding photos were dug out of dusty boxes, no matter how many dingy paintings showing the dress being worn for this wedding or that a hundred years ago, or even two or three hundred years ago, the dress itself argued against the possibility of its age.

  Taken from its storage chest, shaken out, arrayed on a stand, the dress was as good as new. Better, even, for new fabrics don’t preserve in their folds the faint scents of roses and lilies, fragrant echoes of dozens of bridal bouquets. New dresses are not adorned with crisp, but not in the least scratchy tulle, embroidered with intricate hand-made lace set with minute beads that give back the light with the fire of genuine diamonds. New dresses may evoke the classic, but this dress-full-skirted with a daring but not vulgar bodice- was the wedding dress dreamed of by every bride since days when brides began wearing white and transforming themselves into princesses, if only for a single, special day.

  For those sentimental brides who decided to wear mother’s or grandmother’s gown, the choice was often accompanied by bitter disappointment. When the treasured heirloom wedding dress was removed from storage, many a bride-to-be discovered that pure white had faded to ivory, or worse, turned sour yellow. Stitches had worked their way loose. Hems were too short or too long. Beading had unraveled. Waistlines must be loosened or tightened up. Buttons needed replacement. Bows needed pressing. Trains showed evidence of trampling. Veils and the tiaras that held them in place had gone missing.

  None of this ever happened to the bride who decided to be wed in great-grandmother’s wedding dress. The dress was not worn for every family wedding, or even in every generation, since fashion is as fickle as love. However, when a bride-to-be was inspired to wear great-grandmother’s wedding dress, and she opened the old cedar-lined trunk in which it was stored, she would find that the dress had held up remarkably well. She would also discover that it fit her beautifully. This oddity was excused as being proof that physical form and personal taste runs in families.

  Nothing else. Surely nothing else.

  Stephanie had begun life as Stephen.

  He hadn’t meant to become Stephanie, not full-time at least, but one thing had led to another. There had been the job-shortage after the dot-com bust. Stephen had heard that there was a really good post available with a very solid company but that the company was in trouble with the equal opportunity people and planned to hire a woman. They couldn’t say so, of course, not without starting all sorts of reverse discrimination nastiness, but the fix was on.

  So Stephanie, still Stephen at that point, had decided that one good fix deserved another. He’d apply for the job representing himself as a woman. Then, if he got an interview or, even better, if he got offered the job, he’d follow through right until the inevitable discovery that he was a man. Then he’d have his new employers in a bind. They could either offer him the job or face an interesting discrimination suit. He bet they’d offer him the job.

  Up to this point, Stephen had been indulging in a bit of self-deception, concentrating on how much he needed the job, ignoring why he thought he’d have even a slight chance of being mistaken for a woman. Now, as he opened various closets and dresser drawers and pulled out a wide variety of attire, he allowed himself to face the headiness of his deception. The honest truth was that Stephen had indulged himself by dressing in women’s clothing for the greater part of his life.

  Stephen’s first appearance as a girl had been the Halloween when he was eight. There had been a contest for the best disguise, and Stephen had set his heart on winning. He immediately ruled out rubber masks and the like. Too cheesy, too easy. After weighing and discarding numerous options, he fastened on the idea of going as a girl about his own age, a girl dressed up as a princess. That way his costume would have two levels. Everyone would look at him and try to figure out who was the girl dressed as Cinderella. They’d never guess it was a boy dressed as a girl dressed as Cinderella. At the culmination of the evening, he’d reveal himself and win.

  Stephen’s dad had died in a car crash when Stephen was two. His mother, who doted on him, thought the idea incredibly clever-so clever that she didn’t think about how strange it was that just at the age when boys are starting to use “girl” as the greatest imaginable insult, her son would want to dress as one. On the night of the party, she helped him into his Cinderella costume and did his make-up.

  No one guessed, and Stephen won the grand prize-an enormous jack-o-lantern filled with candy. He also won the nickname “Princess Stephanie.” Stephen supposed the name should have bothered him more, but the truth was, it didn’t.

  Right before Christmas that year, he bloodied the nose of a boy who teased him a bit too much. The budding bully, horrified at what “the princess” had done, didn’t tell his parents exactly how he’d gotten blood all over his shirt. He just said “another boy” had punched his nose in a fair fight. His parents, proud of their son’s manliness in refusing to rat out a chum, didn’t push.

  After that, no one doubted that Princess Stephanie could stand up for himself. By spring of that school year, the joke was fading, and by the time the class merged with several others in junior high, no one remembered about Stephen’s turn as Princess Stephanie. No one but Stephen. He remembered. More importantly, he remembered how right that Cinderella dress had felt. He remembered how he had enjoyed feeling beautiful and confident. He remembered his pleasure when he had overheard a few of the fathers say, “That little girl is going to be a looker,” and things like that.

  His pleasure was so intense that he never confessed it to anyone. Behind the closed doors of his bedroom he would dress up in the costume until he started splitting out the seams. He borrowed some of his mother’s dresses when she was out at work, but no matter how carefully he hung them up, she noticed. Luckily, for Stephen, she thought he’d been after something else stored in that closet and only cautioned him to be more careful.

  In junior high, Stephen joined the theater club, but the male parts he played only convinced him that he wasn’t simply interested in dressing up. He skulked in the back of the theater when the director was coaching the girls-most of whom wore a dress about twice a year-how to move in skirts and high heels. If anyone noticed, they either praised him for his devotion to theater arts, or, more usually, figured he had a crush on one of the girls in the cast.

  Stephen continued acting through high school, but he dropped it in college, when he would have had to be a theater major to get more than a walk-on role. By then it didn’t matter. He had learned what he needed. He knew the secret tricks of make-up and hairstyling. He’d garnered some tips for dealing with excess hair. He could walk in three inch heels or a long skirt without tripping.

  He’d learned something else that would have bothered him more except that just about everyone he knew had some confusion regarding either sex or gender identity-if not both. He’d learned that although he was not attracted to women, he was not attracted to gay men either. He preferred men who liked women, not men who liked men. That made having a love life rather difficult for Stephen, because the only people to whom he was seriously attracted were solidly heterosexual males.

  Stephen’s mother died from breast cancer a few months after proudly attending Stephen’s graduation from college, so there was no one to pressure him to date or
settle down. He took a job in a city where he knew no one and began to experiment. At work he was Stephen, but a few nights a week he would transform himself into Stephanie, and go out on the town.

  He refined his techniques to perfection. Stephen did not attire himself as some flamboyant drag queen but instead transformed himself into the young woman he felt that, but for an accident of nature, he would have been. Stephanie dressed well, but not extravagantly or outrageously. She was demure, maybe even a little old-fashioned, preferring skirts and dresses to more casual clothing. This aura of respectability, combined with the cubicles in most lady’s rooms, meant that Stephen had a lot less trouble with maintaining his masquerade than a woman would have had in a similar situation.

  His natural physique made the transition even easier. Where Stephen was skinny and androgynous, with the addition of a little padding, Stephanie was willowy, slim, and wholly feminine. Naturally fair-haired, Stephen’s beard-growth was so light that he could go three days without shaving, though he never did, of course. His chest was flat, but naked of hair, saving him the horrors of waxing such a large area. Happily, pony-tails were not uncommon among men in his profession, so he could wear his hair long enough to give Stephanie plenty to work with.

  There were a few close calls, especially during the first year or so, but nothing Stephanie couldn’t handle, especially since he had taken care to study aikido and other of the more defensive martial arts. The occasional man who got aggressive found his prey gracefully slipping away and was usually so embarrassed by his failure to hold on to such a slip of a girl that he would be the last to draw attention to it.

  Stephen reviewed these events as he began to pack Stephanie’s suitcase. The interview was in another city. Because of airport security regulations, he’d need to travel as Stephen, but once he got to his destination he could change. It was a blessing that no one could meet him at the gate.

  Another new trend would work in his favor. Most large airports now had several restrooms meant for the use of handicapped travelers. They were private, unisex, and large enough to accommodate at least two people. Stephen could slip into one of these, change, and walk out as Stephanie.

  His plan worked beautifully. Stephanie was met by Elaine, a personnel manager for her prospective employer. After Stephanie checked into her hotel and freshened up, she met Elaine for drinks. Conversation stayed general and pleasant, even when they met several other members of the company for dinner. The next morning, Stephanie toured the facility, and there were more meals with possible coworkers. By the time she was due to fly out a few days later, she had an offer, had countered, and a middle ground had been met that left them all quite pleased.

  “We’ll do a lot of the preliminary paperwork through email,” said the personnel liaison on the way back to the airport. “I’m so pleased you’ve agreed to work here. Are you sure you won’t mind relocating?

  Stephanie smiled. “Not in the least. I actually like colder weather.”

  It’s so much easier, she thought, to masquerade as a woman when no one expects you to wear sleeveless dresses, or show up at a company picnic in shorts and a tank top.

  But for all Stephanie’s smug contentment with the new arrangement, Stephen expected things to fall apart any moment. He already had false ID, correct in every detail but that his first name was Stephanie, rather than Stephen. He used these blithely and waited for IRS paperwork or a reference check to trip him up.

  Apparently, though, no one checked his references. He had one tense moment when Elaine in Personnel told him that some tax form had come addressed to “Stephen.” Then she laughed.

  “I let it go. We know better than most how confused computers can get. What’s important is that your social security number matched, so there’ll be no problems with the IRS.”

  Most of Stephen’s work friends had vanished when their mutual employer had gone under. Stephanie’s social contacts were, by necessity, permitted only a certain amount of intimacy. She told them she was moving to take a new job, received congratulations, and knew she was forgotten almost before she was out the door.

  Her new life began. Stephen was so completely forgotten that Stephanie occasionally was startled when hygienic necessity reminded her that she was not a young woman. She researched the various surgeries for transgendering, but she shied away from the procedures, squeamish about the physical truncation and large amounts of hormone therapy involved in such an extreme step.

  Stephanie came to feel about Stephen’s parts in the same way other people did about freckles or moles or other physical anomalies. They were something she had to deal with, but not really her. What mattered was that she was now a woman socially, and, at least superficially, physically. She was past the age when sex was the first thing on her mind, and she had gone so long without it that she missed intimacy more.

  Everything was grand. Everything was wonderful. That is, until she met Donald Baxter and fell in love.

  Don loved Stephanie, too, that was the tough part. He was as much interested in a pretty girl as any man. A swift glance at his trousers when they’d been cuddling in front of the television gave that away, but he respected her restraint.

  “I think it’s sweet you want to wait,” he said repeatedly.

  Stephanie thought that, if anything, the tantalizing novelty of her “nothing below the neck” rule kept bringing Don back, rather than driving him away.

  They dated for eighteen months before the moment Stephanie had been anticipating, and yet dreading, came. Donald proposed.

  He did it right, too, privately, over a romantic dinner in one of their favorite restaurants, the expensive one they saved for special occasions. The ring was marvelous, too. He’d remembered that she thought the more usual diamonds cold. Somewhere he had found an old-fashioned pink diamond. Stephanie reached toward its cobwebby beauty almost on reflex, and heard Don saying, “You’ll have me then? How about a June wedding?”

  What could she say? She wanted Don almost more than she could bear, but if she told him about Stephen, she’d lose Don. Still, didn’t love deserve truth? She drew in a deep breath.

  “Don, I want you to know how happy and honored I am, but there’s something I need to tell you, something about who I was before I came here.”

  He reached across the table and cradled her hand in his.

  “Darling, I don’t care who you were before. You’re the one I love now. Nothing will change that, I promise. I’ve often wondered if your restraint in… well, certain matters, meant that you’d had some painful experiences in the past. I don’t want you to dredge them up, not now, not ever.”

  Stephanie tried again, “But, Don, you don’t really know me.”

  “I know enough. You’re kind and sweet, but you’re also intelligent and witty. You’re my best friend and my darling. Nothing would make me happier than to have you as my lover and my wife.”

  He slid the pink diamond in its platinum setting on her finger. It fit perfectly, and looked splendid.

  “Don, I…”

  Stephanie was going to tell him, but then a beaming waiter, obviously cued to wait for the ring to go on her finger, came hurrying up with a bottle of very expensive champagne and a silver tray holding her favorite dark chocolate truffles. She couldn’t embarrass Don when he’d done so much to make everything perfect, not in front of all these people.

  She’d tell him later. She’d must tell him, sooner rather than later. Otherwise the embarrassment would be all the more acute.

  But somehow the right time never came. First his parents threw them a big engagement party. Then wedding plans seemed to take on a life of their own. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have time to themselves, but somehow telling Don that Stephanie was “really” a “Stephen” while they were driving to listen to a band that might play at the reception or to taste samples of wedding cake or to interview a caterer didn’t seem exactly proper.

  And when she was alone, Stephanie had to admit she was enjoying all the fus
s and excitement. Don was one of three brothers, and his mother was thrilled to lavish on Stephanie all the enthusiasm she would have given to a daughter. Since Stephanie’s own parents were both dead, and Stephanie had no family of her own, Don’s mother didn’t even need to worry about taking some other mother’s place. She could feel good about her generosity, and Stephanie couldn’t bring herself to put out the light excitement had lit in that fine lady’s eyes.

  The wedding dress was a problem. After all, fittings and measurings were semipublic events. Stephanie couldn’t have deceived a dressmaker for a moment. She hesitated.

  “I could probably do quite fine with something off the rack,” she said. “I’m a pretty standard size.”

  Don’s mom smiled. “If expense is what you’re thinking about, Stephanie, don’t let it worry you for a moment. I know you and Don have insisted on paying for most of the wedding expenses yourself, but you’re as close to a daughter as I’m likely to get. I’d love to buy you your dress. Don’s dad agrees, too. I’ve even talked to a dressmaker I know, and she’s free the day after tomorrow.”

  Stephanie’s heart thudded in panic. She had to tell Don. He’d never forgive her-if he ever would anyhow-if he learned the truth from his shocked mother and a scandalized dressmaker. But Don was out of town on business and wouldn’t be back for a week.

  She couldn’t tell him something like this over the phone-even if he’d listen. He was so committed to his position as the courtly gentleman who cared nothing for his beloved’s past that he’d skillfully blocked her every attempt to broach the subject. She suspected that even if she said, “I’m a man, dammit!” He wouldn’t understand.

  Forget about dropping her pants. Ever since their engagement, Don had been careful, even overly so, about respecting her “above the neck” rule, so much so that they rarely spent more than a few minutes where they weren’t chaperoned by at least a waiter or a semipublic situation. Stephanie knew why Don was doing this. He was showing her that getting engaged hadn’t been an excuse for pushing her into premarital sex, but as much as she loved him all the more for his courtesy and kindness, there were times she could have punched him.