Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (27 page)

The waitress fawned over him. At first I thought she was putting on a show, but as the evening went on it was clear enough that this young woman thought my son was cute. It was hard for me to remember that, at sixteen years of age, other people saw Zach for what he was—a young man—rather then what I saw, which was the person he had been: a four-year-old weeping when the lemurs in the Cork city zoo had stolen his ice cream.

He had a steak. I drank a glass of red wine.

“Maddy,” Zach said, “can I ask you about something?”

“Sure,” I said. My heartbeat quickened slightly.

“What do you do—” he asked. “If the person that you love … doesn’t love you?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. I wanted to tell him,
Well, you just love them anyway. No one can take that away from you
. But I wasn’t at all sure it was the right advice.

“Are you in love with someone, Zach?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

Hppy Nnnh Yr!

“Have you told her?” I paused. “It is a girl, isn’t it?”

Zach nodded.

“Because if you’re ever attracted to a boy, you know that would be just fine. Your mother and I will love you and support you no matter—”

“Maddy,” said Zach, with just a hint of exhaustion. “I know.”

“And it’s okay if you’re trans, too,” I said, although to be honest, this was more of a statement of general principle rather than an actual commitment. The last thing I wanted either of my sons to be was transgender. And this was not because I wouldn’t stand with them, and love and support them throughout whatever journey fate demanded of them. But I knew better than anybody what a hard life it was. Even in the best-case scenario—which by many people’s measure, mine was—it was a condition replete with miseries. I hoped my children would not be trans in the same way that my own parents had hoped I would not become a writer.

“She doesn’t know,” said Zach. “She’s in love with someone else.”

“Is this a girl I know?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not sure she even knows who I am.”

“Who is this other person she’s in love with?” I asked.

“Some random guy,” said Zach with contempt.

I felt a strange anger for this girl, this creature who could look over all of the men in the world and somehow give her love to someone other than my son.

The waitress came over. “How’s your steak, sir?”

“It’s really good, thank you,” said the young man. He turned to look me in the eyes again. “So what do I do? Do I just keep waiting for her, forever? Or do I try to forget what I feel?”

My throat closed up again. I thought back to my early twenties, when I had lived in New York City and shared an apartment with another young writer named Charlie Kaufman. Years later he became a revered filmmaker, the writer of, among other things, a movie called
Adaptation
. In that film, Nicolas Cage turns to his twin and says, “You are what you love, not what loves you.”

I remembered Charlie and his girlfriend back in the day, the three of us going out to close down bars in Morningside Heights after long evenings pounding our respective typewriters. Eventually Charlie had moved out of the apartment we shared and moved in with his girlfriend in an apartment way uptown. That had left me living in our apartment
on 108th Street by myself, occasionally sitting on the radiator by the window, wearing a pair of pearl earrings.

“You are what you love, Zach,” I said to my son. “Not what loves you.”

Zachary thought this over. He looked at the waitress, who was now pouring the wine for another couple at a table across the room.

“What does that even mean?” he said.

“It means you love the people that you love, Zach,” I said. “Sometimes it means you hurt.”

A few years before I took my son to dinner, I was a long way from home, doing a story for a magazine. I pulled my rental car into the lot of a hotel in Kentucky. I was ready for bed. As the clerk handed me my room key, I noticed a sign:
WELCOME NATIONAL VENTRILOQUISTS’ ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
.

Oh for God’s sake
, I thought.

“Lady,” said a high-pitched voice.

I turned to my right. There in the lobby was a good-looking young man with short hair, twinkling eyes. “Hey, lady, hey, laaady!” said his dummy.

I turned back to the man at the front desk. “Ventriloquists’ convention?” I said.

He nodded back at me, with a subtle roll of his eyes, like, Sweet weeping Jesus, don’t get me started.

“Laaady!”

The dummy stuck his tongue out at me. I didn’t even know they had tongues, dummies.

I was exhausted from the road. I’d spent the day looking at covered bridges. One of them had been built by my great-great-uncle. His name was Elmer.

“You want to get out of here?” said the dummy, and it wasn’t bad advice, considering what followed. The figure cast a glance at the guy whose hand was up his neck. “This guy’s a real drag.”

There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s
All the Pretty Horses
where
one cowboy says to another,
I’m goin to tell you somethin, cousin. Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I’d made before it
.

I could have kept my mouth shut at this moment, taken my bag and headed up to my room.

Instead, I said, “What’s your dummy’s name?”

“Spike,” said the dummy.

“No, I mean—the other dummy.” Spike smiled, and as he smiled I realized: The ventriloquist is cute. “This here,” he said, “is Mikey Splinters.”

Mikey spun his head all the way around, like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
. He wiggled his ears.

“So,” Spike asked, “where’s
your
dummy?”

I stood there for a moment, unexpectedly tongue-tied. All at once, it struck me as a damned good question.

A
T THE TIME
I stumbled into the ventriloquists’ convention, I was a forty-four-year-old woman who’d never had sex with a man. I’d had sex
as
a man, of course, but as it turns out, that’s hardly the same thing. I was curious about men, though. Wouldn’t you be? I had lots of friends who’d say things to me like,
Jenny, you just spent twenty thousand dollars on a new sports car. Now you’re going to just leave it in the garage?

The Drawbridge Inn—site of the ventriloquists’ convention—had a nice bar down in the basement. There, at eleven that night, I could have been found drinking a pint of Guinness. It was a big place, with a disco dance floor and a wide-screen TV in the corner. I was about halfway through my second pint when the voice spoke to me again.

“Lady. Hey, lady.”

I looked over. There they were.

“Hey,” said I.

“Hey, lady,” said the dummy. “What’s your name?”

“Jenny?”

I love you, Jen-nay
, said a voice that appeared to be coming out of a trunk on the floor. For a moment I was confused.

“We call that the
muffle voice
,” said Spike. His dummy got the bartender’s attention.

“Get her another round,” the dummy said magnanimously. “Get everyone another round!”

“Who’s in the trunk?” I asked. From the box on the floor the voice came again.
Let me outta here. Hey! Let me outta here!

“Yeah,” said Mikey Splinters, giving Spike a hard look. “Who
is
in the trunk?”

There were a lot of guys sitting at the bar with dummies in their laps. Some of the dummies were talking to each other. On the dance floor were a half a dozen people dancing with their figures. It was a strange sight, both touching and pathetic.

As I watched the ventriloquists dancing, though, it was hard for me not to view them as distant relations. Back when I was a guy, there’d been plenty of times when I’d felt a little like a ventriloquist’s dummy myself. For forty years I’d been at the controls of an unwieldy figure, rolling my eyes and sticking out my tongue and raising my eyebrows. Sometimes I spoke in a funny voice. You had to admit there were times when I had been very entertaining.

Spike took the puppet off his hand. He gave me a look that Mikey Splinters could not duplicate. “So, Jenny,” he said. “You want to dance?”

I said, “Sure.”

And so Spike the ventriloquist and I found ourselves on the dance floor, swaying to a slow song. I felt something that I’d never felt until I was forty—the scratch of a man’s stubbly face against my smooth cheek. The weird thing is how natural it all seemed to me, as if I’d been dancing backward all my life.

“I don’t think I’ve ever danced with a girl so tall before,” said Spike, and it was true. I towered over him.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing wrong with being tall,” he said. “There’s more of you to enjoy.”

While all of this was going on, I had not forgotten my sons or my
wife, back in Maine. I didn’t particularly want to have an affair, or a one-night stand, in a motel full of ventriloquists. But did I really want to live my entire life without ever having sex with a guy—not even once? A stupid thought went through my head, a thought that I knew was wrong, but I thought it anyway:
Maybe I’d never be wholly female until I’d experienced what it was like to have sex with a man. I’d come this far on the journey
, I thought—
shouldn’t I go the final six inches?
^†

It took no time at all to counter these ridiculous thoughts with common sense—that womanhood comes from within, not from your relations with others. If Betty Friedan had taught me anything, it’s that who I am in the world is for me to define, not the men I’m with.

Still, Spike was cute. There was no getting around that.

“What do you say, Jenny?” he asked at last. “You want to get out of here, head up to my room for a while?”

As I considered the question, I looked again at all the other couples around us—men and women, some of them clutching puppets, some of them dancing alone.

I don’t know. What would you have done, if you were me? If you were a forty-four-year-old virgin, would you have slept with him, just the one time?

On the wide-screen TV in the corner I noticed that they were playing the old Beatles movie
A Hard Day’s Night
, the scene where John Lennon encounters the showgirl, backstage, who says,
You don’t look like John Lennon at all
.

Lennon sighed and walked away. As he walked, he muttered.
She looks more like him than I do
.

When I was a man, there were times, with my long hair and round wire-rimmed glasses, that I looked a little like John Lennon.

“Well?” said Spike. “What do you say, Jenny? Do you want to do it?”

I’
D BEEN DRIVING
home with Sean. He was just about to turn fifteen. He had a funny expression on his face.

“What?” I said.

“I had a conversation after morning meeting today,” he said.

“With whom?”

“Shannon,” he said.

Shannon was a friend of his who lived not far from the school. She and Sean had the top two GPAs in the freshman class. They had spent much of the fall Skyping together, reviewing their notes for biology, preparing for their tests in Western Civilization.

“What was this conversation about?”

“Well,” said Sean, “Robbie came up to me after morning meeting and told me, ‘Dude. It’s time to step up your game.’ ”

“It’s time to what?”

Sean didn’t go into details. “Step up my game,” he said. “So I went up to Shannon, and I asked her if she wanted to go out with me.”

We drove toward home in silence for a moment.

“And?” I said.

“And what?” said Sean, and he gave me that mysterious smile of his again.

“And what did she say?”

At this moment, a huge grin broke out all over my son’s face. “She said yes.”

I nodded. “Sean Boylan,” I said. “I am so proud of you. You—” I wasn’t quite sure how to put it.

Sean nodded. “I stepped up my game.”

S
EAN’S STEPPING
up his game was a delight, of course, and not least because Deedie and I were already crazy about Shannon. She was thoughtful, smart, and elfin.

Zach, however, was perhaps just slightly unsettled by it. For one thing, it irked him that his younger brother had landed a girlfriend before he had. For another, it wasn’t clear to Zach what the nature of Sean’s relationship was. “When they’re together, Maddy?” he said, with disbelief. “I think they study.”

Studying probably wasn’t all they were doing. At various moments
Deedie and I tried to have the Big Talk with Sean. The irony of having teenagers, of course, is that at the exact moment they need to know the things that you alone can tell them, they have reached a moment in their lives when you, as their parent, are the only person they cannot get this information from. There were plenty of dinners when Deedie or I would turn to Sean and say, “You know, speaking of bodies—”

Sean would raise his hands to his ears until we stopped talking. Then he’d lower them and say, in a tone of voice that was less reassuring than he intended, “Mommy. Maddy. I got this.”

“But you need to know how to—”

“Mommy,” Sean said firmly. “I said I got this.”

The advent of Shannon in our lives, I admit, helped put my mind at ease regarding at least one important question. I had wondered what effect having a transgender parent—not to mention having two loving parents who weren’t particularly physically intimate with each other—would have on my sons. Would they, obliquely following our example, be afraid of falling in love?

A few days later, Zach told me some news of his own. “I joined the GSA,” he said.

“What’s the GSA?”

He couldn’t believe I didn’t know this. “The Gay-Straight Alliance?”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s great.” I was driving him home. Sean wasn’t there. He was over at Shannon’s. “I guess I should ask you—does that mean you’re interested in guys?”

Zach looked at me as if I were crazy. “No, Maddy,” he said. “I’m an ally. I’m trying to work for justice.”