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She let out a small, astonished cry. Her twenty thousand silkworms, sensitive to human emotion, stopped spinning cocoons.
She wore her black hair in long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not delicate like a little girl’s but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver’s tail.
The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved’s hair.
“Whoever named it morning sickness was a man,” Lina declared. “He was just home in the morning to notice.” The nausea kept no schedule; it owned no watch.
Pregnancy made her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized.
“I don’t remember what I was thinking that night,” Desdemona said later while washing the dishes. “I do,” said Lina. “Third one from the right. With the red hair.”
She opens her prepacked suitcase, feeling among nightgown and slippers for her worry beads. Amber like congealed honey, cracked by heat, they’ve gotten her through massacres, a refugee march, and a burning city, and she clicks them as the taxi rattles over the dark streets, trying to outrace her contractions . . .
He went down to the river and stood among the dry-docked boats. German shepherds, chained in ice-whitened yards, snarled at him.
He took his fatherly delights while at the same time he remained a man apart.
It was Sunday afternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from the sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking.
The air smells of Tootsie Pops and perfume and of the cigarette the usher is smoking in the lobby.
“That’s my girl,” Milton crowed on the way home. “Pissed on a priest.”
As one does the return of sun after winter, I stood still and accepted the warm glow of possibility, of feeling right in the company of this small, oddly fierce person with the inky hair and the lovely, unemphasized body.
Lefty would wash the windows and, five minutes later, my brother and I would come along, leaning on the glass and leaving fingerprints. And seeing them, our tall, mute grandfather, who in another life might have been a professor but in this one was holding a wet rag and bucket, only smiled and washed the windows all over again.
Her father was about to have a heart attack, and my memories of her now are tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn’t quite befallen her at the time.
The air is stuffy in the way only air at school can be stuffy.
black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books.
The smell of the beeswax was strong, pleasant. The atmosphere was like a Turkish bath without the heat, a lazy, draped feeling to everything, steam curling off pots of wax.
This was what she was good at: appearing before people. Stepping out and standing there and speaking. She was just beginning to realize it then. What I was witnessing was a self discovering the self it could be.
I was only feigning squeamishness. In actuality I wouldn’t have minded sharing the Object’s toothbrush. I wouldn’t have minded being the Object’s toothbrush.
I kept my mind off gynecology by losing myself in the back rub. It wasn’t hard. Her honey- or apricot-colored back tapered at the waist in a way mine didn’t. There were white spots here and there, anti-freckles. Wherever I rubbed, her skin flushed. I was aware of the blood underneath, coursing and draining. Her underarms were rough like a cat’s tongue. Below them the sides of her breasts swelled out, flattened against the mattress.
I could feel everything. The shocking wetness of his mouth. The whiskery feel of his lips. His barging tongue. Certain flavors, too, the beer, the dope, a lingering breath mint, and beneath all that the actual, animal taste of a boy’s mouth.
He made little sounds. I put my arms around him, appalled and moved by his thinness. He was even skinnier than I was.
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
I was thinking that this was what I’d always wanted. I was realizing that I wasn’t the only faker around. I was wondering what would happen if someone discovered what we were doing. I was thinking that it was all very complicated and would only get more so.
“Nothing much, just playing backgammon . . . with Callie . . . He’s making his stupid film . . . I can’t, we’re supposed to have dinner soon . . . I don’t know, maybe later . . . I’m sort of tired, actually.” Suddenly she wheeled around to face me. With effort I looked up. The Object pointed at the phone and then, opening her mouth wide, stuck her finger down her throat. My heart brimmed.
It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
Muscles? Not much to speak of. No hips either, no waist. A dinner plate of a girl. The low-Cal special.
The following Thursday morning was hot. It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
Normally the most expressive thing about my mother’s face was the gap between her front teeth. When she was listening to me, Tessie’s tongue often pressed against that divot, that gate. This was the signal of her attention.
Luce put his hand on the small of my back. Men have an annoying way of doing that. They touch your back as though there’s a handle there, and direct you where they want you to go.
As Milton and Tessie prepared to see Dr. Luce, a hot foam was rising in their stomachs.
In the nights, while she lay in bed waiting for the tranquilizers to take effect, she often put her hand to her navel, like a fisherman checking his line. It seemed to Tessie that she felt something. Faint vibrations reached her. From these she could tell that I was still alive, though far away, hungry, and possibly unwell. All this came in a kind of singing along the invisible cord, a singing such as whales do, crying out to one another in the deep.
Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away.
The blight eased the pain of my father’s death, making it seem like a general state of affairs. At least the city didn’t mock my grief by being sparkling or winsome.
I couldn’t become a man without becoming The Man. Even if I didn’t want to.
I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave
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My body was reacting to the sight of home. Happy sparks were shooting off inside me. It was a canine feeling, full of eager love, and dumb to tragedy.
After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.