Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (18 page)

I
T TOOK LESS
time than we had feared for our family to begin to seem normal to us again. I was in charge of waking everyone up and making breakfast and straightening the house and getting the boys to practice their instruments: Seannie on French horn, Zach on the three-quarter-size tuba. Deedie was in charge of dinner and shepherding the boys through their homework and coaching Seannie’s soccer travel team. After a time, Deedie and I even began to seem familiar to each other again, and the things that had changed in me seemed, incredibly, less important to Deedie than the things that had remained the same.

In the fall we picked apples. In the winter we skied and sat around the fireplace in our living room afterward, drinking hot chocolate. In summer we fished on Long Pond, and Zach landed one giant large-mouth bass after another. Most of the time we forgot that there was anything extraordinary about our family. Were we really so strange?

Even though we seemed to have made the leap across the inscrutable chasm of gender in one piece, a nagging, unsettling question would return to me, usually at night when I found myself awake in the wee hours. What kind of men would my children become, I wondered, having been raised by a father who became a woman?

I’d hear the sound of the grandmother clock ticking downstairs as I lay awake in the dark. I’d think about my own precarious boyhood and wonder how I was going to help my sons become themselves. I’d hear a voice in my heart demanding an answer to the same question my harshest critics had asked of me: What about the children? the voice said. What about the boys?

O
N A SUMMER
afternoon in 1967—the Summer of Love—I drove a Sears riding mower back to my parents’ garage in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, and parked it between the blue and white ’64 Pontiac on the one side and the green ’58 Buick on the other. Then I pulled the throttle to the off position, and the engine slowly died. I sat there on the tractor for a moment, still feeling the inertia of the blades spinning
beneath me. The garage was full of the smell of gasoline, of freshly mown grass. Then I walked into the house and opened the refrigerator and stood there for a while feeling the cold air drifting around my neck and my bare grass-stained legs. I reached in and pulled out a tall green bottle of Wink, poured it into a glass my father got at the Esso station, the same one that promised to put a tiger in your tank. On my way back outside, I grabbed a Ring Ding. It went well with Wink.

Nick Strachman and his older brother were playing baseball in the block beyond our house. The ball made a sharp socking sound as it landed in Nick’s mitt. Years later, Lou opened up a clothing store for men, out on West Chester Pike, but it didn’t stay open long. As for Nick, he wound up as a purveyor of frozen steaks. Thirty-five years after we’d been in elementary school together, he called me up one Sunday out of the blue, from Nebraska, wanting to know if I’d be interested in buying a side of beef.

From my mother’s bedroom I heard the soft tinkling of a music box. There was a small ballerina figurine in her jewelry box that pirouetted and danced to the music when the box was opened. When no one was home, sometimes I went into my parents’ bedroom, and wound up the music box, and watched that ballerina dance to the weird, sad music. That distant music now meant that my mother had opened her jewelry box, that she was taking off her earrings and laying them next to her necklaces and pins.

Beyond a line of trees Dr. DeWees was running his mower in his backyard, and the sound of the blades echoed in the hollow. Suddenly, there was a sharp crashing sound, and a moment after that the tractor’s engine died; and then there was the sound of Dr. DeWees cussing out the rock that had gotten jammed in the blades. The cussing continued for a while, as Dr. DeWees addressed himself to the rock and then the tractor.

I was drinking Wink.

A copy of Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
was lying facedown on the back step. I’d had to write a theme about it for school, on what Atticus Finch meant when he said, “You never really know a man until you walk around in his heels.” His shoes, I mean. At school we’d kept
talking about Atticus, but that wasn’t the character I was interested in; I was much more concerned with Boo Radley. More than anything else I wanted, like Scout, to let him out, even though I knew it was impossible. Hey, I’d say to him. Hey, Boo.

My father was building a wall in the side yard. There was a
chunk
as he hit the slate with his hammer. Then he pulled the stone over to the wall and found the right place for it. There was a soft flinty snick as he struck his butane lighter and lit up an L&M Filter. On his transistor radio was the sound of the Phillies game, the boys playing over in old Connie Mack Stadium, the sound of the distant crowd roaring as Jim Bunning hit a grounder to second.

It was a boyhood, and it was mine, and it was typical, with the exception of the business inside my heart.

My mother stood on the threshold of the front door and rang a copper cowbell. The sound of that bell—clanky and slightly obnoxious—had the ability to reach my sister and me, wherever we were, and get us to drop whatever it was we were doing and run toward home. On this day, I simply stood up and walked around from the back porch to the front yard, where my mother stood. My sister, who’d been out in the woods, walked up the driveway toward us, in no particular hurry.

My boyhood, like others, ended over a period of years. Even the melodramatic and salacious event of gender reassignment didn’t represent the moment it all finally ceased, assuming that there even was such a moment. Sure, you could conjure such a moment up, if you wanted—say, the day I dropped out of Boy Scouts because I was tired of the angry ex-marine scoutmaster lining us up for inspection every Wednesday night and yelling at us, telling us we were all soft, that we were weaklings. Or maybe you could say it all ended when my parents packed up the Oldsmobile Omega and drove me and my Grateful Dead albums the five hours north to Wesleyan, in the fall of 1976. Maybe you could nominate the day of my first kiss, or the day I met Deedie Finney, or the day I got married, or the day my first child was born. There are many such days marking the end of a boyhood, you could argue.

But most of the time I think that the boy that I was is still with me,
in spite of the woman’s life that is now mine. I hear that boy’s voice when I tell a joke or raise my voice to sing some filthy song I picked up in Cork. I feel his loneliness, sometimes, when I hear children in our neighborhood in Maine, calling to each other, as twilight falls at the end of a day in summer. And sometimes, if I hear the clanking, toneless ringing of a cowbell, I’m still tempted to get up from where I’m sitting and start running through the grass toward home.

T
HIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
, in the late afternoon of an October day, I went for a bike ride on the golf course with my boys. At ten, Zach was emotional, buoyant, a child who liked to sneak up behind people and hug them. His brother, Seannie, was the exact opposite—quiet, sturdy, private. Seannie still had his training wheels on but could outpedal both his brother and me. On one occasion he skidded off the path and bounced right off a large boulder. Without a pause, he looked up at me and said, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.”

I felt proud of my children as they biked on ahead of me, up the gentle slope of the path that circumnavigated the fifteenth green. We’d been out on the course now for almost an hour. With their mops of blond hair, the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old zoomed ahead of me, and as I watched the bikes ascend the hill I could only feel pride and wonder. They were turning out all right, my kids, in spite of everything. Like everyone else, I watched them for signs of trauma, but so far there was nothing that distinguished them from their classmates in the third and fifth grades.

The wind blew in my hair, and I paused for a moment to catch my breath. I thought about Deedie back at the house, making a rub for a slab of barbecued ribs we hoped to be devouring later that day. We had all come so far as a family, and yet in some ways things had not changed at all. My heart, and Deedie’s heart—in Russo’s phrase—still “inclined toward the other,” and for the most part that which made us similar to other families seemed a whole lot more important than that which made us different.

I saw my children ascending the hill, two blond boys on bikes,
racing each other to the crest. The sound of their laughter came to me from a distance.

I got back on my bike and followed them up the hill. It took a while for me to catch up with them. They were waiting for me at the water tank by the sixteenth tee. Seannie had leaned his bike against a bench and was filling a cone-shaped cup from one of the water barrels that was stationed around the course. Zach was waiting in line behind his brother, holding a cone cup in his hand.

“You know what I could do with a cup like this?” I said to Zach.

“What?”

“Well, if I ran a string of elastic through it, and cut a small hole in the bottom, you could use it as a beak for your costume.”

Zach thought this over. “Really?” he said cautiously.

The griffin costume that Zach had settled on for Halloween had been the cause of unending discontent. I had purchased a set of wings in Camden when I went over to see Russo the weekend previous, but Zach wasn’t thrilled about them. “They look like angel wings,” he’d said grumpily. “Not griffin wings.” I understood his dissatisfaction. To be mistaken for an angel when what you are aiming for is griffin is not a small thing.

Then I’d found a lion costume at a local flea market. I figured, you take a lion costume, you put wings on the back of it, you got yourself a griffin. Zach thought otherwise. “It’s a baby costume,” he said, looking at the lion in dismay. “I’m not wearing it.”

“Okay, well, you solve the problem,” I said.

“I don’t know where to get a griffin costume!” he said. “I’m just a kid, I don’t have any money.”

But these water cups from the golf course gave me a new idea. I could make a griffin beak out of one and attach it to Zach’s nose with elastic. Then I could sew a tail onto a pair of his yellow pants. It might work. At any rate, the important thing to bear in mind about a Maine Halloween is that no matter what kids dress up as, they always wind up buried beneath heavy coats and mittens and hats anyway, since by the end of October, winter is beginning to move in, and sometimes we even have snow.

I stuffed a water cup in my fleece jacket, thinking,
I’m going to make a griffin beak out of a cone-shaped water cup I’m stealing from the golf course!
Zach clicked his helmet back on. “I’m going to go on ahead,” he said.

I looked at the steep hill before us. There was a small bridge without a guardrail at the bottom. A ravine filled with boulders and a small stream ran beneath the bridge. Sometimes the boys and I followed the stream from our house, through the woods, and onto the course, and hid beneath the bridge.

“You wait at the bottom of the hill,” I said. “Seannie and I will be along in a second.”

We would be back at the house in a minute, I thought. I could almost see our house through the trees at the back of the hole on the other side of the ravine. We’d be inside in twenty minutes, and I’d make a fire in the fireplace, and perhaps I’d try to make a griffin beak out of a water cup. I imagined the taste of the ribs Deedie was making, the meat with the vinegar and cumin and molasses and salt.

Zach biked on ahead. Seannie drank from his cup, then snapped on his helmet. His bike with the training wheels was blue. He called it “Shooting Blue Moon.”

From the ravine I heard a soft snap, like a tree branch falling.

Seannie and I sailed down the hill. We both kept our brakes on; the rear tire of Seannie’s bike locked and smoked against the pavement as we skidded downward. We stopped at the bottom of the hill, halfway across the bridge, and looked up at the ridge before us. Sunlight was sparkling off the trees, and fleetingly I actually thought,
If I could relive a half hour of my life over again, it would be this moment, the boys and me together in this amazing soft light
.

But it was at that moment that I realized that Zach was not waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, as I’d asked.

Neither was he up at the ridge before us. Could he have biked on up the hill and gone home already? It seemed impossible.

From the ravine I heard a soft cry. I looked to my left. Zach’s bicycle lay against a rock, mangled, the front half crushed like aluminum foil. The child was nowhere near it.

I dropped my bike to the ground and ran across the bridge, then down into the ravine. There were shoulder-high thistles and brambles I had to crush past in order to get to the stream. “Zach?” I shouted. “Zach?”

The boy was lying on his back a few yards from the stream. His eyes were closed. I called to him, and his eyelids fluttered halfway open, and for just a second he seemed like he recognized me, as if I were someone he had known a long, long time ago.

I lifted him in my arms, and I drove him to the hospital. It was the same hospital in which he had been born. I remembered the night Zach had come into the world—the cold snow coming down all around, the sound of Stealers Wheel on the car stereo, the dads in the waiting room with their copies of
Sports Illustrated
.

It was a whole lifetime ago, by which I mean just a few seconds.

The doctors put Zach on a gurney. As they wheeled him away, he whispered to me, “Don’t worry, Maddy. I’m going to be good as new!”

My throat closed up as he disappeared behind a set of swinging doors.
My boy
, I thought.
I’ve lost my boy
.

A nurse handed me a clipboard filled with forms. “So,” she said. “You’re his mother?”