Some Strange Music Draws Me In

by Griffin Hansbury

“You’re not better than me,” she hissed, taking the curves too fast. “All that Emily Dickinson bullshit. All those books you read. You think you’re so goddamn smart.”

Reading back over my life, through the sharpened lens of today, I see these incidents differently than I did then. Psychoanalysis has words for this. In German it’s Nachträglichkeit, “afterwardsness,” and in French it’s après-coup, a re-transcription of the past. Something you thought was nothing, you later understand was really something. The soil washes away and the bodies rise to the surface. If I hadn’t buried Melanie, would Melanie have buried me?

“I’m not such a kid,” I said. “I’ve had sex,” though I was not sure that what I’d experienced, either in the barn with the Harvard boy or in the woods with Jules, qualified as actual sex. Embarrassed, frustrated, I held my breath, let myself sink, and watched the flashes of fish in the shifting light. Sylvia’s white legs like towers of alabaster. I turned away, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of my gaze, and looked out to the murky green darkness in the yawning center of the pond, where the bodies of girls were sunk. Staring into the gloom, I sensed the tortured spirit of the girl they didn’t find. It gave me a shiver that sent me crashing to the surface where I saw Sylvia swimming away, cutting foamy laps with her strong limbs. I floated on my back, arms spread, ears muffled with pond water. There were bodies and there were parts, and the two didn’t always match. Those bodies and parts interacted with other bodies and parts, and those didn’t always match either. To make matters more complicated, there were also souls, or energies, that could be influenced by the changing body, like when Jan Morris went from forceful to yielding. So what was I? And did everyone think about sex this way? It was too much to untangle. Even the mystical waters of Walden could not set it straight.

It sounded like she was saying what adults were always saying, that my life was a cakewalk, when every day felt like marching barefoot on hot coals. I get to live? Couldn’t she see I barely existed?

“You can’t do that,” Sylvia said, accelerating through town. “Do what?” “You can’t be silent in those situations.”

Over the years, I kept trying. To have. To be. There were a few relationships that evolved and collapsed, with lesbians who wanted women and straight women who wanted men, momentary lovers for whom I was not enough of either one and too much of the other. I tried a few men, but they could not see me as anything but a temporary solution to their own ambivalence. Finally, at forty, I resolved to accept my lovelessness. Contrary to the suggestion of a therapist, I am not one of those transsexuals who rejects anyone who would love a transsexual, a variation on the old Groucho Marx joke. I am, however, aware that I sabotage myself. I have forever had a sense that my love is a calamity, like those tourists overwhelming Walden, and it’s best kept contained. After all, the first time I let it out, in that summer of 1984, it made a terrible mess.

but my mother’s irritation unsettled me. Whenever she was in a bad mood, I believed it was because of me. She could see inside me, where my thoughts roamed

There’s a strange desolation to a ringing phone in an empty house.

She used the women’s restroom, like she’d done many times, only this time the cops grabbed her on the way out, hands still wet from the sink, yanked behind her back and cuffed. They charged her with indecent exposure and loitering for “the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense.” She did not do these things, but this is how they punish trans women for being trans in public, for peeing where they don’t want you to pee.

Now I felt her tracing my future, the form I would one day take. She was not the only one who could see the secret in my body. Strangers saw and called me names for it. Children saw and threw rocks at it. My mother saw and pretended not to, called it graceless, an awkward phase. When Jules saw it, she wanted its mouth on her mouth, but then pushed it away. Sylvia was the only one who did not recoil or strike. Imagine what that is like, to have just one person in your life who does not behold your truest self with fear or disgust. It’s the most wonderful and terrible thing. That person delivers you, brings you into being, as she reveals, at the same time, how alone you really are.

Dakota is light-years ahead of me, wielding all the language I did not have at her age. She has pansexual, demigirl, non-binary. She has cisgender, the word I didn’t have until my forties, naming a concept I could not properly think until my life was half over. Dakota has the language necessary to think herself into being at an age when I had nothing. I hope this means she will have more love than I ever did.

Married or dead. My mother’s two choices. She wanted more for me, a different life, but not too different. In that moment in the kitchen, I became the other, the witch, the worm that spoils the crop. I became destroyable, if only for the duration of my mother’s madness, when she fell out of herself and stopped seeing me as her child. This happens sometimes when ordinary people come face-to-face with a person who loosens the gender boundaries of the body. They go crazy, the ground beneath them giving way. If such a fracture could split me from my mother and put the wish for murder in her mouth, what chance did Sylvia have against the hysteria of that town?

Maybe it was better, as a girl in that world, to dream yourself into the killer instead of the killed.

My birthday had come and gone. There was no party and no cake, but I told myself it didn’t matter because I was another year closer to adulthood and escape.

In one memory, I would tell her, I am four years old. I know this because I’m at my aunt Shirley’s house in Florida and she only lived in that house the year I was four. There are hibiscus flowers and saw palmettos in the yard and I am running barefoot across the rough, scratchy Florida grass, playing a game like tag with my cousin Kenny and the two girls who live next door. When they catch him, the girls cover Kenny in kisses, something they don’t do when they catch me. I understand, for the first time, that I am not a boy. I didn’t quite know it before and now I do. It is not a happy awakening. I go running to the other side of the house, where I sit on the steps and cry. When my aunt appears in the doorway and asks what’s wrong, I know enough to say: Nothing. The Nothing stays inside me, accumulating shame, taking the shape of impossible longing. Years go by. I learn how to leave my body. I forget what I know about myself. Now and then, quietly, it makes itself felt.

For years, I worked to snuff her out, dissolving her down to tissue paper, so I would not have to remember what it felt like to love and then lose her, all because my love took the wrong shape. I buried her. But the buried never really stay down.

I have since wondered why she even bothered with me. The conclusion I keep coming to is that she bothered because we were the only ones of our kind in that place, two impossible objects drawn together, trying to will each other into existence.

When the beer makes me burp, I hear my mother’s burp. No one tells you this will happen, that after your mother dies you will continue to hear her voice in your own burps, an uncelebrated inheritance.

“Let’s not start. It’s been a long night. Let’s try and have a nice time.” There is nothing nice about this time. I have just bailed my sister out of jail. The glaciers are melting and fascism is rising. My mother is dead and Amazon is putting a fulfillment center on the garden where her ashes rest, where the weeds have taken over, because I have stopped pulling weeds, because why bother.

I wanted to imagine my friend settling in a meadow full of fountain grass and flower, something that would have softened the impact, but Jules’ death was as hard as her life, so maybe it’s right just the way it is. You cannot change the endings of things.

I spent my high school Saturdays smoking clove cigarettes and reading the New Yorker magazine because I wanted to be sophisticated. The new tables are clean and white, but it’s not so different. Except no one is smoking and everyone is looking at a smartphone. One addiction traded for another.

“I don’t doubt the reality of their gender identities,” she says. “It’s just so different from my experience. They’re not especially dysphoric. They want choices. I support them, absolutely, but in my uncharitable moments, I blame capitalism for everyone wanting their own special gender. It’s like ordering at Starbucks, you know?”

“Oh my god,” she says, grabbing my arm. “Have you been they’d yet? It happened to me last week. I was giving my Trans 101 talk to a group of social workers, and a cis woman, one of those super-woke white knights, you know the type, just assumed I go by they/them. My whole life I had to deal with getting he’d and now, after decades of difficult, not to mention expensive, gender work, I’m getting they’d? It’s a new kind of mis-pronouning.” She sits back with a sigh, exhausted from it all, but then laughs and says, “Do you know what we sound like? A couple of cranky old trannies.”

“Careful,” I whisper. “You’re not allowed to say the T-word anymore. The kids will roast you on Twitter.” “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’ve been a tranny since these kids’ parents were shitting their diapers. I’ll call myself whatever I want.”

“You were what? Thirteen, fourteen years old? Kids do stupid things. Our brains don’t finish developing until we’re twenty-five. You didn’t cause the fire. You weren’t that powerful.”

“We made it,” she says, taking my hand. “We got away. That’s enough.”