by Melanie Finn
It occurred to Rose that she had imprisoned herself, like a Puritan in penance.
He would ask how she was, he would ask what she did, if she was married, if she had kids. They would circle each other, trying to smell the stories of their lives.
“I’m an accountant,” Rose heard herself. “Not what I expected to be. But it’s a good living.”
Correction. “Book-keeper. It’s a steady living.”
If he asked about Vermont, she’d explain she’d moved there with Bennett, as if it had been a lifestyle choice. And then, of course, the tragedy of his death, yes, it had been difficult, but she’d had Miranda to raise, Miranda had been her focus.
Everything had been Miranda. Every job, every second job, every dollar, every dime, watching her sleep, her hair splayed on the pillow and all the love Rose had stored up for her entire unloved life fell on that child. She’d stuffed Miranda full of love. She would have thrown her body across a bomb for Miranda.
In a way, she had, for Miranda never knew about their financial problems. Their poverty. The grinding quality of it — the grating. Like running a cheese grater back and forth over your knuckles. It was reflexive to look at every price tag, then pick the cheaper brand.
Rose tilted her face in the mirror, touched up her mascara. “I find the work interesting, actually. Making the numbers work.” What else? What else did Rose do? Walk in the woods. She should be grateful for dullness, dullness was a goal, an aim, in mid-life; because change was bad — change was cancer, the default of a mortgage, untreatable gum recession. Change was PI Di.
“I have a small book-keeping business,” she rehearsed. “Good business clients and a few private ones. And I can arrange my own schedule. I like to have time to go to my studio in the afternoons.” She waited a beat, then gave herself a deprecating smile, “Yes, I keep up with my art. Small showings mostly. But I did have one in Montreal recently.”
Rose realized she had actually been speaking out loud. And she was not alone. Another woman — young, beautiful in a pale blue silk sheath dress — emerged from one of the stalls in the cavernous marble bathroom. She washed her hands, careful to avoid the crazy talking-to-herself lady at the next sink. Basin, Rose corrected herself. She glanced again at the woman and felt immediately unclean. Wrinkles, dry skin, the little pad in her underwear in case she didn’t make it to the toilet on time. The W.C. And her shoes. So obviously not the same caliber as her fine, new clothes. The shoes were scuffed at the heel, frumpy. Suddenly, Rose hated her shoes, she raged with regret that she hadn’t bought a new pair. The fake black suede had looked fine in the dull light of her kitchen; but here they looked cheap, tatty, they were funeral shoes, and the one wear had done them in.
In contrast: this elegant, shining woman in her pale blue, the clean scent of the very rich. Her arms were firm, the skin like satin, lightly bronzed. Glowing. Look at the sapphire bracelet, worth many, many thousands, a sly link of them around her lovely narrow wrist. Delicate hands with pale peach gloss, a flickering of rings, a massive diamond. Look, oh look at her shoes: silver sling-backs with knots of pearls across the toes, Cinderella shoes.
Out she drifted, her elegant slippers floating her across the floor.
Well, Rose thought, she still pisses, she still had to wipe her ass.
Alone again with the mirror, Rose reappraised. No lipstick. It frayed in the lines above her mouth. She dabbed on more cream then a touch of lip balm. What might it be to live in a culture without the judgement of mirrors — a remote island, the deepest forest, where your only reflection was in water? How would that shift your sense of self as a woman? You’d not see yourself so directly, your age thrown back at you like a cream pie. Instead, you moved from tier to tier, respected for your age, or perhaps more honestly side-lined. What was that tribe that took you out and left you to be eaten by animals when you were no use anymore? No dying of hair or lifting of face, no Botox or filler. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren — for Christ’s sake, serious women and look at their blond hair! Did men actually believe a 70-year-old woman still had naturally blond hair? Nancy Pelosi. Brunette at 79. Grey, what would society make of them?
Rose tidied her hair. She’d spent money on it, a fawn color, and a layered cut that kept falling into her eyes. Setting out across the lobby, she wondered if she was overdressed for a hotel restaurant — the bored and lonely business diners. She wondered if she was overdressed for Chris. He’d see she’d tried too hard, he’d just be in jeans and a tee-shirt, making a statement about his casual success. Or: he’d see the dress and then he’d see the stupid shoes.
There was a private party in one of the banquet rooms. Wealthy people filtering in. A going away party. The woman in the blue silk dress was merging into the human traffic, lots of kiss-kiss and “Oh, hello!” Rose passed them, feeling a wave of heat come over her. Not now, fuck’s sake, she thought. Paused. Let the heat recede. Tried to smell herself surreptitiously, the sweat under the deodorant. All this fussing had made her ten minutes late.
The restaurant had high ceilings, the tall windows framed with red velvet drapes. Tables with white tablecloths, waiters in black. She scanned the room which was half full of diners.
“Rosie. Rosie.”
She turned toward the voice, but the strong evening light through the windows almost blinded her. To the right, she could just make out the silhouette of a middle-aged man coming toward her. She squinted, the backlight obscured his face and glinted off his glasses. His silhouette was lean. Closer in, she could see he was wearing a jacket and jeans, a white collared shirt, his hair had receded, his face slackened, there were lines around his dark eyes. He was taller than she remembered. “Hello across nearly four decades,” she said brightly.
He looked at her askance. “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong person.”
“Rosie!” she heard again, and quickly attuned to the voice.
A woman was waiting for her.
The woman stood, smiled. A great confusion came over Rose, as if someone had suddenly turned out the lights. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong Chris. Chrissie? Christine? Christina? Had there been one in high school? Not to be rude she smiled back, waved, began a stiff walk toward this Chris, her thighs rubbing, suddenly too tight in the skirt, compressed by the rubbery compression underpants. She was hobbled and she was freshly seared from the hot flash. All elegance fell from her, sloughed like dry skin, her shoes clomped and the right one was already grating against her heel.
Chris was smiling, a woman slightly older than herself, but well-manicured, a little too much make-up — though it was expertly applied. Chris was not pretty, Rose could tell she never had been, and the face, even accounting for age, she could not recall. Chris has obviously done well for herself, or married well. The cut of her clothes, the nice jewelry — a wonderful silver and turquoise necklace: Rose took it all in. The scent of perfume, of make-up. Nothing cheap.
The thought struck her: of course! This was Chris’s wife! Which was slightly irritating — not because Rose had imagined, at all, a romantic reconnection, but — to be honest — she had relished spending time with a man who had, many years ago, loved her. Now it would be a meal of chatting.
Smiling back, Rose approached to shake the woman’s hand. Close in like this, she realized there was something familiar about her. “Hi, I’m Rose.”
The wife smiled back, “I know. I’m Chris. Christianne. Now.”
Rose felt her face fall — the expression as a fact, the heavy, loosening skin of her face slip from the scaffold of her skull. Practically right off her head. She was gawping.
“I know it’s a shock.” The voice really too deep for a woman, but then older women spoke at a lower octave. The testosterone, apparently. “I made the change.”
The change. Which was what they used to call menopause. The Change. Ambushed by her own hostility, Rose thought: Well, Chris-tianne, your change is more than a few hot flashes and an inability to drink red wine.
“Have
a seat,” Christianne was saying, smiling. “Do you drink? I’ve a nice Sauvignon Blanc I’ve already started in on.”
“That would be very nice. Thank you.” Rose folded her limbs into a sitting position on the chair. She touched the cutlery, which was very shiny and clean. No globs of dried food. Miranda was always finding some tiny crusty bit on her spoon or in between the tines of the fork, her expressions of disgust and pity in dialectic battle; she was chronically unable to overlook these faults, these lapses of her mother’s.
“I’m sorry, I should have warned you,” Christianne began.
“No, it’s —”
“Fine that I’m a woman now?”
Like an app on Nick’s phone — you could add cat’s ears, you could change your nose, you could become the opposite gender with a single tap. Christianne put her hand on Rose’s wrist. Manicured, be-ringed with turquoise and silver; but still in the knuckles and the knob of the wrist bone, the hand of a man. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come. There’s really no polite way to say, ‘I’ve changed gender since you last saw me.’ People get freaked out. They run a mile.”
Rose said: “I’m not exactly who I was then, either.”
Christianne gave a grateful smile. The waiter appeared, brandishing menus, filling their glasses. Rose took a sip. Lovely, crisp. Bennett would have approved. She took another, bigger sip.
“You live in Santa Fe. I used to dream about Santa Fe.”
“Come and visit. I have a lovely house. In the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo’s. Plenty of room.”
“I had a thing about Georgia O’Keeffe. I was going to be an artist.”
“You were an artist.”
“I just had ideas —”
“You were very talented, Rosie. You didn’t keep up with it?”
“It wasn’t possible. I had a child to raise.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly.”
“That must have been difficult.”
Rose glanced at Christianne and wondered if she knew or could guess how difficult, or if the words were reflexive, and his — her — idea of difficulty had the hiring of a new nanny. Then Rose wondered if the hardness showed, and Christianne could see the wear on her face, she was a tire worn through to the tread. “I managed.”
“How is your grandmother?”
“Dead.”
Rose’s tone was unsentimental, and Christianne raised an eyebrow. Suddenly, Rose remembered the two of them spying on Gran through the kitchen window, Gran muttering to herself, putting the dishes away. And she and Chris had run away into the dark, laughing, free and feather-light, still capable of flight from that place, and Gran must have heard their laughter echoing back to her in reproach. The young don’t know, the young have no idea, they think they’ll get away with it.
“The other day I realized she was only 60 or so when I left Lowell, but she seemed ancient.”
“It’s happened, hasn’t it!” Christianne laughed. “When I went to get my flu shot last year, the kid at the pharmacy said he was sorry but I’d have to wait, and I asked why, and he told me that people over 65 need a different vaccine.”
“Ouch.”
“The really good thing about being old is that no one questions my gender. It’s of no interest or use to anyone.”
“At least you don’t have hot flashes.”
“Or periods. You know, I always wondered about that. What it felt like, having blood come out.”
“When did you — did you —” Rose began and meant to abandon the direction but Christianne immediately finished for her: “Have the chop?”
Rose wouldn’t have chosen those words.
“Would you like me to explain?” Christianne touched his hair — her hair, which was surprisingly thick and not obviously a wig. “So we can move past the elephant.”
Taking silence as affirmation, she went on: “It’s like a door that never quite fits the frame. No matter how hard you try or which carpenter you hire to make the adjustment. And over the years, with all the weather of life, that fit gets even worse and you realize, it’s the wrong door for the frame, completely wrong. It will never fit. Three divorces and I finally went to therapy thinking this was just a mid-life crisis, some bullshit that could be solved if I took testosterone pills or bought a new car.”
Christianne paused to sip her wine, her lipstick staining the glass. Her lips were surprisingly full, unnaturally full, Rose noted as she watched them move; so it wasn’t just the penis that had been tampered with.
“We got there slowly. There was the moment, the pivot, when I realized: it wasn’t that I wanted to be a woman. But I was a woman. Just not technically.”
“So,” Rose clung to her wine glass, curious about the technicality of being female. “Technically?”
“Technically. The boy bits, gone.”
“And —”
“Vagina. Yes. Hand-crafted in Denmark. And these, too.” Christianne made a gesture over her breasts. “Transgender people often want huge boobs. I wanted your size. Is that odd? Yours were the first I ever touched, they were perfect.”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, mine are!” Christianne gave them a gentle lift with her hands and then took up the menu. “Let’s order. Food for all this wine.”
Both of them retrieved their reading glasses from their handbags, and they had a little titter. The menu was almost indecipherable, years since Rose had looked at one, held one in a leather binding, rather than a single laminated page that listed pizza and poutine. Coulis? Radicchio? There were no prices, which made Rose nervous. Obviously, if you ate here you didn’t worry about the price of food or wine, you could afford whatever you wanted.
“I think the duck looks really promising,” Christianne said.
“I was just thinking that.”
Christianne lowered the menu. “One of the things, when I became a woman, I had to learn to speak like a woman, so I started listening to the way women talk. I realized women often preface their sentences with ‘I think’ or ‘I feel.’ Instead of just saying —” she deepened her voice, almost comically: “‘The duck looks promising,’ it has to be —” a high voice now: “‘I think the duck looks promising.’ As if we wait to be corrected, because our thoughts are not facts or our preferences need objective approval.”
Rose lowered her own voice, “Bring me the lamb.”
They laughed.
As they waited for the meal, they spoke in general terms, recapping years — Christianne had two children, one was a doctor, the other a teacher in a troubled inner-city school. Her third wife had not taken the transition well: “She thought she disgusted me, she thought it was all a lie, the years of marriage, but it wasn’t that at all. It was nothing to do with her. And that alienated her even more.” Chris had made a fortune in Silicon Valley, but hated it — the culture, the greed. “And it was certainly not somewhere I wanted to become this new Chris. People identify as liberal but they are actually very intolerant. So, I moved to Santa Fe and opened a gallery.” Christianne smiled. “I could do a show of your work.”
“That’s all gone now.” Rose waved her hand dismissively. The wine was going slightly to her head.
“Your art wasn’t a useless penis, Rosie. You got a full scholarship to Parsons, for God’s sake. I remember you had the spirit of a true artist.”
Had she? And how, exactly, had Chris seen this spirit, as they bumbled to Dairy Queen or Moorehouse Lane, two awkward outcasts in his mother’s Ford Fairmont?
Their food came, presented like a palette of color and texture. Rose felt her mouth water. Making sure she held fork and knife as she knew she should — rather than the sloppy manners of her long spinsterhood — Rose dabbed a small cut of the lamb in the jus d’ currant rouge. Flavor exploded. She rolled the meat from one side of her tongue to the other, it was so tender it was already dissolving. The pique of the currants, salt, pepper, butter, the gentlest tide of something spicier — a chili of some sort. Complementing this: a creamy
polenta and a tidy cupcake of collards.
“How is it?” Christianne enquired.
“Amazing. There’s no food like this where I live.”
“Something I can say for Santa Fe — incredible cuisine.”
Should this be their discussion then? Cuisine? Surely they couldn’t continue to talk about Chris swapping a penis for a vagina. Which — now that Rose was thinking about it — involved severing, wounding, gouging, stabbing, drilling into the flesh to make a hole, a tight, smooth hole. And what? Labia? They would be beautiful, small pale labia, of course, because the doctor would undoubtedly be a man; the labia of a young woman, a girl, even. Not the unwieldly flaps of a middle-aged woman.
“What sort of art do you have in your gallery?” Rose said. But she couldn’t help thinking: What happened to the penis and the balls? Were they left in a bag? In a landfill?
“Contemporary. A few really fantastic new artists. I amazed myself slightly by having an eye.”
The waiter refilled their glasses with the silvery wine. Rose made sure not to gulp. Christianne obviously drank wine like this every night.
“Tell me about Miranda.”
Rose spoke of the big house in Marblehead, the nanny, the demanding job. “She’s done it all herself.”
“Married?”
“No. PhD. CFO. IVF. Her life is these acronyms. Like Brownie badges.”
Christianne was alert to the churlishness.
“I just feel, sometimes, like her whole life is a reprimand to me,” Rose confessed.
“Is it?”
The answer was Of course not. Yet Rose found herself hanging limply between the words and the sentiment.