by Celia Laskey
“That doesn’t answer my question,” the woman says, crossing her arms.
I sigh. “I guess my question back to you would be, have you ever actually heard of a black person claiming to feel white inside?”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate.” The woman shrugs and makes a faux-innocent face. She clearly thinks her question was clever as hell. “Playing devil’s advocate” is one of the phrases I’ve heard the most since being here.
I take another gulp of water and swallow down what I really want to say. “I think most of us can agree that a white person trapped inside a black body doesn’t really exist,” I respond. “We have no documented instances of that. Trans people definitely do exist. There are approximately seven hundred thousand of them in the United States. That’s the easiest answer I can give, without getting into the intricacies of neurobiological theory and identity.” The woman doesn’t look satisfied at all, but I doubt there’s anything else I can say to change her mind.
You came here of your own free will, I remind myself now and a hundred other times throughout the course of a day. When I was still living in Queens and working at an HIV/AIDS nonprofit, I got a call from a recruiter for AAA. She basically performed cunnilingus on my ego, saying my expertise was unmatched for someone my age and what an asset I would be to the task force. A promotion to director of education and training was the dangled carrot meant to distract me from the rest of it. I thought it couldn’t be that different from running training sessions in New York. Shirin and I had been talking about leaving the city for years—she’d started having anxiety attacks on the subway and I hadn’t gotten a decent night of sleep in a decade—but we couldn’t decide where to go. Someone else making the choice for us turned out to be the push we needed. Big Burr it was—at least for a couple of years.
After the Q&A, the woman comes over as I’m packing up my bag. Now that she’s standing, I notice she has a half-gray, half-brunette braid so long it brushes her thighs. People with hair that long are never normal.
“I get the sense that my questions frustrated you a bit,” she says.
“Transgender topics can be very confusing for some people.” I wrap my laptop charger cord around itself while picturing strangling her turtleneck-sweatered neck with it. “You’ll get there someday.”
“You’re not transgender, are you?” she asks.
“I don’t see why that’s relevant.”
“Well, you don’t look like you are. You look like a nice, normal girl.” My blond shoulder-length hair, small frame, and cherubic face have a way of fooling people into thinking my personality must match—tourists in New York would always ask me to take their photo, sure that I’d comply without stealing their phone.
I shove my laptop into my bag, my empty water bottle crunching underneath it. “Yup, a nice, normal girl who eats a ton of pussy.” I give the woman a hyperbolic smile before walking away, my heart thumping like I’ve just run up a hill.
* * *
• • •
BACK AT THE Acceptance Across America office, David paints over some spray-hate on the exterior of the building.
“What did it say this time?”
“GO HOME HOMOS,” says David, pulling the paint roller over the remaining OS. “How’d it go at the Q&A?” he asks, blowing air into his cupped, gloveless hands.
“It was great. Everyone asked really respectful questions and told me they learned so much and said they’re so glad we’re all here.”
He laughs. “Yeah, and I had an excellent cup of coffee at the Pancake House this morning.” David and I are the resident coffee snobs in the office, although I don’t think it’s snobby to expect a potable cup of coffee with some real cream, instead of single-serve nondairy creamers.
“I’ve started dreaming about coffee,” I say. “I pour the cream in and watch it turn the perfect dark caramel color, and just as I’m about to take a sip, I wake up. It’s worse than waking up mid-sex-dream.” A truck drives by blaring Blake Shelton, and I want to kill myself for knowing it’s Blake Shelton.
David laughs. “I know it’s not the same, but I brought some coffee flan into the office today, and it’s pretty delicious. Arturo taught me how to make it over the weekend.”
“You and Arturo are always in the kitchen these days. Warming up to each other, huh?” I grin.
“He still drives me completely nuts, but we’re finding some common ground, at least through our stomachs. It helps that Miguel and I have started taking those weekend trips to cities where good coffee and gay men are easier to find.” He winks as he finishes the last coat of paint and sets the roller in the tray.
“Oh, are you guys back on that train?”
He shrugs. “Only when we travel, which helps set boundaries.”
“Well, the next time you’re chasing tail, can you bring me back some decent coffee beans?”
He laughs and I head inside. Behind the front desk hangs a banner with our sad, too-literal logo on it: an American flag, but instead of red, white, and blue, it’s rainbow-colored. To the right of the desk, there’s a burgundy fainting couch and, unfittingly, a swoopy modern plastic chair. Beyond the sitting area, the office extends back into eight cubicles arranged two-by-two, like a short ice-cube tray. From Jamal’s cube, Salt-N-Pepa plays slightly louder than usual, since Karen is out for the day.
She’s been out a lot since Avery’s accident, first keeping vigil at the hospital and now driving Avery to countless physical therapy appointments in Dry Creek. The doctors still aren’t sure about Avery’s long-term prognosis, but Karen keeps mentioning articles she’s read about people whose doctors told them they’d never take another step, and lo and behold, they’re now dancing and running and climbing mountains. “She’ll walk again, I know she will,” Karen keeps repeating in this obsessive way, and everyone in the office nods and pats her arm while making doubtful eye contact with each other. I think she has to keep telling herself Avery will return to normal, otherwise she’ll feel too guilty about bringing Avery to Big Burr.
Zach has stopped coming around the AAA office, too. I get the sense that he and Avery aren’t really hanging out anymore, but neither of them will tell me why. I’m worried about him—one day I spotted him at the diner, curled into a booth by himself. He looked awful, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. I started walking over to him, but as soon as he saw me, he threw some cash on the table and ducked out the back. I went to his house the next day, aware that I was veering into what could be considered stalker territory, but I was hoping maybe he’d talk to me in private. He just yelled at me from behind the closed door to go away.
I sit down and open my PowerPoint for the LGBTQ Cultural Competency training I’m leading at Walmart later in the week. Fifty-three percent of LGBTQ employees nationwide feel they have to hide who they are at work. So whether or not you think so, you probably work with an LGBTQ person. Don’t make assumptions about your coworkers’ sexuality. Use inclusive words like “partner,” “significant other,” or “spouse.” Instead of making your best guess about someone’s gender identity, simply ask them, “What are your pronouns?” I add an image of gender-neutral name tags that say “Hello, my name is _________. My pronouns are __________.” I’ll print some and hand them out at the meeting so everyone can practice.
After finishing a few more slides, my hand wanders to my phone almost of its own accord and I start scrolling through Instagram. Jenna and Tiana, both red-lipped, pose with fancy cocktails at a subway-tiled bar. Keir’s posted a food selfie of a duck confit sandwich and a beer next to a movie stub for the new Coen brothers flick playing at the Nitehawk. Sawyer makes a faux-horrified face while standing in the never-ending line for First Fridays at MoMA.
I can’t believe that a year and a half ago these were the images of my life, too. My body aches with jealousy. My last few Instagrams were of a billboard that said WHISKEY: THE ROAD TO RUIN, a boomeran
g of an oil pump jack slowly lowering and raising its head like an exhausted bird pecking for seed, and a closed-down pawnshop on Main Street whose sign read, PAW, the N hanging upside down and askew.
* * *
• • •
AT HOME, SHIRIN sits at the dining room table, focused on her laptop. She’s in her uniform of plaid pajama pants and a stained gray sweatshirt, her curly hair piled in a chaotic bun on top of her head. Strewn around the table are a family-sized bag of potato chips, an apple core, a half-eaten container of yogurt, a coffee cup with brown, foamy watermarks inside, a granola bar wrapper, a Snickers wrapper, and an aerosol can of whipped cream.
“Thank god!” she says when I walk in the room. “A human!” Shirin is a web designer, and her company in New York agreed to let her work remotely so she could come to Kansas with me. Every day she descends a little deeper into cabin fever, or what I’ve taken to calling Kansas fever.
I give her a kiss. Her mouth has the tangy funk of unbrushed teeth. “Dare I ask how your day was?”
“Just more of the abyss.” She shrugs, pressing her pointer finger onto a chip crumb on the table. It sticks to her skin, and she brings the finger to her mouth.
I tell her for the umpteenth time, “I think you need to make a schedule for yourself, sweets. Like, showered and dressed by ten. A break in the afternoon for a walk, some fresh air. A little cleanup around the house at five.”
“I know.” She threads her fingers together and turns her palms outward, raising her arms above her head. “But every time I stand up I just sit back down again. It’s like the gravitational force of the earth is stronger here.”
I open the refrigerator. “You wanna go out to eat tonight?”
“Yes, I want to go to Barosa,” she says. Barosa is—was?—our favorite Italian place in Queens. “I want the arugula salad and the homemade taglierini with meat sauce and three glasses of Malbec.”
“Don’t make me cry,” I say. “We could try Giovanni’s again. Maybe it got better since the last time.” I pull up its Yelp page on my phone. “One person said it’ll make you feel like you’re in Italy.”
Shirin guffaws. “Oh, I’m sure that’s just how it’ll make me feel.”
* * *
• • •
ON THE WAY to Giovanni’s, we pass the remains of the Acceptance Across America billboard. The photo is so faded and frayed you can barely see the two women, much less discern that they were ever holding hands. A flash of white catches my eye near the top right corner—one of the red-tailed hawks who recently built a nest on the beams. The bird perches on the edge of its nest, its frowning beak in profile. A car is pulled over on the side of the road, the driver snapping pictures of the hawk with their phone. I can’t help but laugh at the irony: who ever thought the people of Big Burr would want a picture of our billboard? We’ve asked countless times to put up a new one, but the town claims they can’t remove what’s left of the billboard because of the hawks, which are a protected species under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. I had to look that up to make sure it was real. Soon there will be baby hawks, they say. I’m pretty sure they don’t give a shit about the birds, but I can only imagine how gleeful they were when they realized they had a legally sanctioned way to stymie us. It’s like the billboard has become a permanent taunt—or a warning. You’ll never win, so you might as well stop trying.
Inside the restaurant, gaudy oil paintings of cookie-cutter Italian scenes cover the walls: a gondolier paddles young lovers down a canal lined with pastel-colored houses; two glasses of red wine sit on a table at a cliffside restaurant overlooking the sea; bright pink bougainvillea spills over Greco-Roman columns. The host, an ancient man with a face like a bloodhound and a name tag that says CLYDE, eyes us suspiciously as we announce that there’s two of us for dinner. This happens everywhere we go in town—the look. Shirin gets it even when she’s alone, due to her tan skin and Iranian features.
“We’ve got a big party coming in tonight,” says the host. “Ray’s eightieth.” Like we’re supposed to know who Ray is. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get you girls in.”
I peer into the dining room, where there are multiple empty tables.
Seeing my skeptical look, he says, “We’re about to set up. All those tables will be pushed together.”
Heat suffuses my cheeks. I take a long, deep breath. Shirin gives me a look that says, It’s not worth it.
“So you don’t have a single two-top available, Clyde?”
He shakes his head. “Ray’s got a big family.”
Just then, Lizzie and her husband Derek walk in. Lizzie is my one Big Burrian friend, whom I met a year and a half ago during an LGBTQ-friendly training at the beef plant where she’s the manager. Afterward, she caught me crying in the bathroom. “I was just thinking about that Sarah McLachlan animal cruelty commercial,” I told her. She laughed and brought me to her office, where she had a bottle of Jameson stashed, and after two rounds I knew we’d be friends.
We exchange hugs and pleasantries, then I tell them we were just leaving. “The host won’t seat us because he’s either too homophobic, too racist, or both,” I say loudly.
“What the fuck?” Lizzie marches up to the front desk. “Hi, Clyde. Table for four, please.”
“I’m sorry, Lizzie. We’ve got a private party tonight. I already told them.” He cuts his eyes at me and Shirin.
Lizzie crosses her arms. “Is that true? You better not lie to me, Clyde.”
He leans in and lowers his voice, saying something I can’t hear.
Lizzie presses her lips together and shakes her head. “You know where you get your beef from, right? It would be a shame if you had to find another distributor.”
Clyde raises his shoulders in an almost-imperceptible shrug.
“Okay, then.” Lizzie turns on her heel and storms out, and the rest of us follow.
“What did he say to you?” I ask as we stand in the parking lot.
Lizzie rolls her eyes. “You could probably guess.”
I shove my hands under my armpits, trying to warm them up. “Would you really stop distributing to them?”
Lizzie looks at the ground. “I doubt the higher-ups would actually approve that. God, I can’t wait till I’m CEO and everyone has to do what I say.”
Derek shuffles his feet back and forth. “So, should we just go to Applebee’s?”
I look at Shirin and she makes a weary, resigned face. “Applebee’s it is,” I say.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT NIGHT we host a listening session at the public library. At the circulation desk, there’s a notice about a young adult book the library is refusing to carry due to its “mature themes,” “offensive language,” and “political viewpoint.” A photo of the book’s cover shows the close-up face of a teen whose gender and race is hard to pinpoint. Student artwork for a NASA project called “Reach for the Stars” hangs across the library walls. A small placard says that each piece of art is made out of fabric and will be wrapped around a large rocket replica. The fabric squares are supposed to depict the students’ hopes and fears about the future. Most of the kids seem to have interpreted the project literally, with stitched rockets shooting into space or aliens shaking hands with humans. Some have focused on platitudey statements like “Positivity is a universal language” or “Believe in peace”—they’ll make friends with E.T. but not the queers next door. One that must have been made by an older student shows an austere pink lake below sharp gray mountains. The sky above the mountains swirls with deeper pinks and blues. On the lake’s shore, an indeterminate silhouetted figure stands looking out over the water.
I set up donuts and coffee in the main event room, hoping the food will encourage people to open up. The listening session is basically an outlet for residents to vent about our presence; we don’t talk other than to say things like, “
I hear you,” “I can understand why that’s frustrating,” and “It’s so helpful to have your perspective.”
I start by asking how everyone is feeling. I’ve written some words on the chalkboard to help the group express specific emotions: on one side are words like frustrated, afraid, angry, discouraged. On the other side, words like hopeful, interested, excited, peaceful.
“I feel blamed,” Christine Peterson says, her voice shaking. “Blamed for being straight, like it’s somehow my fault and I should be ashamed. I can’t help that I was born that way.”
“I feel unsure of myself,” says someone else. “I keep second-guessing everything I say and do. I didn’t feel that way before you all showed up.”
“I feel interested,” says a teenage girl. “Like, the other day I asked my nephew if there were any girls at school he had a crush on, then I remembered that we should say, ‘Is there anyone you have a crush on,’ so it’s not gendered.”
After everyone has aired their feelings, Harley asks what we could be doing differently. The group says things like “It would just be nice if everything didn’t have to be so political.” “I don’t think my children should have to hear about gay issues at school.” “Why do gay people always have to be the victim?” “I just don’t understand the end goal of the task force, or the gay movement in general. You can get married now. What else do you want?”
At the end of the session, the townspeople seem unburdened. They laugh and take deep, easy breaths, their shoulders no longer scrunched up beneath their ears. I, on the other hand, feel like a soda that’s been vigorously shaken and all I want to do is pop the top. I follow Harley to the bathroom. There’s no all-gender restroom, so they have to use the women’s room—yet another thing we’re trying to change. I lean down and check the stalls for feet to make sure we’re alone. Then I let out all the urine and the words I’ve been holding in the whole session. “Did you see how many stale donuts everyone ate? And it was the saddest thing I’ve ever heard when John Wagner said he loves living here and wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. It’s like he has Stockholm syndrome. Not to mention when Christine Peterson said she can’t help that she was born straight, it was like, helloooooo, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you for decades! What a fucking hypocrite.” I bust out of the stall, feeling a little better, only to see braid lady from the Town Hall Q&A standing at the sink.