Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

Steph is at the bar down the street,

I did not expect a pov change!!! Plot twist!!!

The main thing that’s for sure is that Maria borrowing the car for a night is going to turn into borrowing the car for, like, a week, where she’s going to have some weird and epic adventure that doesn’t really make sense to anyone who isn’t her. By the end of it Maria will feel like she’s really accomplished something and like everything is different now, like she’s figured out her shit. Only nothing will change. Some version of this has happened every autumn for the last three years and Maria, of course, has no idea that it’s a pattern.

Oh my god do my friends know this about me? Oh my god do I not know this about me?

Her quote unquote punk rock ethics are vague and privileged holdovers from the straight white boy outsider stance she took for the first chunk of her life and they’ve never been challenged or put to any kind of test.

While it’s been obvious for years that she’s been faking her orgasms,

Lololol

Steph thinks: I need to read The Ethical Slut again and then not date anyone for five years.

Sometimes it seems like being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria. Like she’s got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her, and with that shell there she can’t move. Probably what Maria needs more than anything is for something pretty bad but not catastrophic to happen to her. Maybe this breakup can be that thing, but probably not. It sounds like Maria’s already spinning it into an opportunity for self-mythologizing instead of for learning or growth or whatever.

Maria will be funny and kind and hot and all the things that make you fall in love with her and maybe her new girlfriend will call her on it, the moment she starts to shrink into herself and disappear, the moment she starts phoning it in.

Outside the window at the front of the bar it’s hard to tell if it’s mist or rain and she’s certain her dumb girlfriend—her dumb ex-girlfriend—is getting soaked and feeling lonely and romantic about it.

Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed herself for it. Other kids could stomp around and punch each other and sleep at night, but she was this self-conscious mess who liked books a lot because sometimes people in books seemed as bewildered by the world and themselves as she was. She was never a little kid who could get a puppy and be happy about it. If you’d given her a puppy, she would immediately have started worrying about what if she trained it wrong, what if it ran away. She would already be sad that it would die.

reminds me of how in 3rd grade I decided I could never be a doctor because I wouldn't be able to handle the guilt of losing a patient on the operating table

Maria had forgotten that they were kind of in a fight.

but it’s weird how even though he feels numb about pretty much everything else in his life he can’t quite get accustomed to his shitty apartment.

But she’s right to be mad: there is something wrong with him.

He has no idea what the fuck it is, but he does need to figure it out if he’s ever going to have a normal human relationship.

The plan was to smoke till there was no air left in the bathroom. To smoke till he could see through time. To smoke till he figured his shit out.

scrawny

'the insinuation of an eating disorder'

He doesn’t make the bed. He rarely even really untangles the sheets before sleeping in them.

if I start thinking about sentimental value I’m just going to lose my shit about everything everywhere anyway so I might as well just not give a fuck and keep burning it.

He thinks about brushing his hair. He thinks about Marcia Brady, Rachel from Friends, Zooey Deschanel, but he doesn’t even know where the brush is and he probably didn’t even wash his hair. Dave Grohl. Robert Plant.

He has no idea what he looks like.

he can never get to sleep before one or two,

laid out so Spartanly for a computer, movies and sleeping. He wakes up his computer and types in his password. As if this shitty night was ever going to end any other way.

Nicole is aware that her boyfriend is kind of strange. Or not even strange, exactly, but distant, or not all the way present, or something.

He’s always been a space cadet like that, even when they were little.

The joke about James in third grade was that he ate his own boogers. The kind of weird joke, in retrospect, in fifth was that he slept in a bed made of his own boogers.

He’s still exactly the same little kid he always was, drinking by himself at a party, inspiring rumors that he’s gay.

Dots started connecting: the righteous fury about having to wear a dress to church when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.

"dots" = gender identity coalescing. struggle vs patriarchy key to formation of womanhood.

She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn’t work.

oof, I've been in this transition-to-queer relationship too many times

Like, noticed noticed: hair to his shoulders, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy,

He was checked out from the start, pretty much. He just seemed bewildered, although he did ask to listen to the tape she made him while they were driving. But he didn’t try to kiss her or anything,

Sometimes she just wants to burn his face down because of how checked out he is, and it makes her want to push him, force him to make a decision. Any decision. Like, she knows that he has really strong opinions about movies, but not because he’d ever tell her about them. Mostly she knows because sometimes he writes about them

How can you be so disinterested but so willful at the same time?

She wanted to have sex and to have that sex make her feel better, and make him feel better, to bring them closer together, to reset stuff, the way sex is supposed to do.

Like, being a pervert would probably even be easier if he was gay, right, and didn’t have to worry about liking girls just in a totally impossible way.

Well there are a lot of imaginary girls who are into that on the internet, but they’re just wish fulfillment, dudes making the worlds they wish they lived in and putting them online. Like World of Warcraft

You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, woman trapped in the body of a man, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan. He’s just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.

Whatever the fuck is wrong with him, it isn’t that he’s a transvestite. He has no idea how to wear a dress. But when he had his own apartment, everything would change. He thought he’d be able to order dresses off the internet, and then have them in his apartment and then wear them whenever he wanted.

He was going to need to be able to afford not to have a roommate, so he wouldn’t even have to just dress up in his room.

Like, not transition. After all, most women in the real world don’t even wear dresses much. He wasn’t transsexual. He just wanted dresses.

Plus, having a girlfriend, it’s not that far off from having a bunch of dresses.

now I can be a Man. Which actually felt kind of gross.

You can’t just go online and order a dress. You have to know what size you are. You have to measure yourself. But how do you measure yourself?

he spent the week after he ordered it, which he did in the middle of the night, a cold sweat click of the Buy Now button, panicking that it was going to be shipped in a box labeled ‘dress’ and left out in front of the door of his apartment. It wasn’t though. Just a plain brown box in front of his door after work one day.

The dress in his head was cute, and made him look like he had a waist.

he didn’t even get turned on when he tried it on. He had expected to. The whole point of actually getting his first dress was to satisfy this impulse that was supposed to be all sexual.

but eventually he got into it and felt probably dumber than he had ever felt. There was tons of room and drape in the hips, and his stomach, even though it barely even exists, bulged out against the front of the dress. He realized that he hadn’t known what he’d expected to feel when he tried this dress on, but it certainly wasn’t this emptiness verging on boredom butting up against wanting to die.

Do I have a fetish that you can’t even do in real life, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?

In a David Lynch movie it wouldn’t even be clear what happened next but you would know it was something.

Every single day I go through an unstonedening and fucking hate my life and my job and my house and my girlfriend and everyone and everything that I can see.

Maria Griffiths comes strutting up the aisle of the Wal-Mart looking out of place as hell, like she’s made of long red hair and layers of clothing.