Then will come middle school, makeup, shoplifting, and puberty—not necessarily in that order—and the first time she screams “IHATEYOURFRIGGINGUTS!” and really, truly means it.
Then the first time she asks to borrow the car, though by then it’ll be some sort of teleportation device that runs on renewable resources of squirrel urine and Starbucks coffee-cup sleeves.
Then will come her prom and her first kiss at the front door, while I flick the patio lights on and off, yelling, “GET IN THE HOUSE!!!” which will lead to her screaming “IHATEYOURFRIGGINGUTS!” for the second (and far from last) time.
Still deeper into our futurescape I go . . . jumping ahead a few more years to the husband and me (I’ve aged pretty gracefully, might I add) now dropping her off at college. It’s a decent midsize school that’s a bargain at a hundred thousand dollars.* She’ll live in a fun, lively coed dorm where she’ll have a whole bunch of first-time experiences that I hope to God I never, ever hear about.
Then we’ll meet her first “serious” boyfriend. I’ll think he’s wonderful and will knit him four ski sweaters, only to be brokenhearted when they have a friendly breakup two weeks later. Six months down the line I’ll meet Number 2; this time I’ll try to keep my distance but will find myself growing fond of this kid who brings me flowers and calls me “Mrs. C.” Him I’ll only knit two sweaters, but again it won’t work out, and again I’ll take the breakup hardest of all.
Then somewhere around Number 15, this one will stick (good thing, because otherwise I might have made good on my threat to shackle him to me). He’s a good person who loves her and tolerates her weird parents, and after a respectable amount of time we’ll throw them a big, overpriced wedding at some exotic destination—like Hawaii, or maybe Jupiter, especially if they’re offering group discounts.
Deeper still I go, further into the future . . .
Now we’re with the daughter and the son-in-law and their children—our grandchildren: two boys and one manly little girl who call us “Paw-Paw” and “Mee-Maw,” and they’ll adore us, though the littlest one will be afraid to hug me because of the steel-belted-strength whisker that grows out of the mole on my chin, but I’ll win her over when I show her how I can make it dance.
I’ll love those children so deeply it’ll be a challenge not to squeeze them until their eyes pop out. They’ll grow to be good kids who share just enough of our good qualities and none of the bad ones—though the granddaughter will test her mom/the daughter in ways that will amuse me to no end.*
And then one day I’ll awaken to see their faces—all of them—at my bedside, looking down at me with love, telling me, “Go to the light, Grandma . . . Go to the light!”
And as their soft, loving voices echo in my ears, I close my eyes and rise into that big bright light, and all sound fades away and I become one with the cosmos and am filled with a sense of wonder and love and fulfillment and so many beautiful feelings and I am just a vapor now or maybe a liquid or a cosmic plasma, I’m not sure what happens at that altitude . . .
And then the fantasy melts away, and I am back on the playground. My eyes are wide open, staring at the bright-blue sky, and gushing like the falls of Niagara.
I am not ready for the light.
I am not ready for this day.
I am not ready for her to grow up and out and away from me.
My head is a mess of feelings and images and emotions and impressions—it’s like someone threw a tantrum at a gift shop and dumped the Hallmark-card rack to the floor, scattering the sappy feelings all over the place.
Now I am full-on ugly crying. My vision is blurry, my face hot with tears. I wipe the tears away, but no matter how hard I rub, one of my eyes will not clear. I’m blind . . . Dear, God, I’ve cried so hard, I’ve broken my eye . . . MY EYE!!
A hand grabs my shoulder—it’s the husband. He holds me as I sob, stroking my hair and whispering, “It’s okay. She has her sunblock.” And he pats my leg, which is where he finds the contact lens that I’ve simply cried out and is stuck to my jeans.
Turns out I’m not blind. I’m just another weepy parent.
I grab the balled-up napkin from the bottom of my purse and dry my soaking-wet face. My husband gives me a hug and a smile and then gently informs me that I have a candy wrapper stuck to my cheek.
On the way home we walk past our daughter’s new classroom. I peek through the window and see her sitting on the carpet, listening as her teacher teaches them the “Good Morning” song.
The child’s face is so vulnerable and eager, her expression one of total openness. Then her eyes shift as she notices me there. She gives me a wave and a nervous smile. It’s then that I remember that she’s still got a ways to go.
And, apparently, so do I.
*Like those fake buckteeth with braces that fitted you so perfectly and that you wore the first time you met your husband’s high school friends, and for twenty incredible minutes they actually believed they were real; and then your four-year-old had to go and try them on the dog, and when you saw how they’d been obliterated and covered in dog saliva, you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from crying, and you’ve spent the last year trying to replace them, but you’ll never find another pair like them, may they rest in peace.
*Please see Chapters 1–24.
*Per semester.
*As per Appendix B, for example.
APPENDIX A
I AM MY FATHER’S SON
Cue the sappy music and a cheap, watery fade-to-flash-back effect.
October 10, 1985. It’s the night of my eighteenth birthday. Eighteen, the age at which one may become legally hammered in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
My best friend, Deb, and I are standing outside the Palomino (a local bar famous for having the only working mechanical bull in western Canada), and I am dressed for eighties-style action: skin-tight black angora sweater dress, red leather stiletto shoes, and a wide red belt that hangs from my hips and converges at my groinial region in a not-so-subtle V. My hair is permed, feathered, and teased in a gravity-bashing style to which several cans of mousse have given their lives, and I am holding a burgundy pleather clutch purse that is filled with the finest drugstore cosmetics that money can buy.
This, I think, will be a night to remember, but not because I plan on joining the ranks of the hammered. Like most people who grew up on the prairies, I was getting blitzed on wine coolers in seventh grade, so the idea of spending this night getting drunk isn’t especially appealing (also, I don’t want to risk getting vomit on the angora—it’s very hard to clean). No, this night is not about alcohol. It is about me and womanhood, and the public intersection of the two. Because while I was not born with testicles, or a tiny penis that some shaky-handed doctor accidentally exploded and then hastily converted into a makeshift vagina during a circumcision-gone-wrong; even though I was born a human girl-child with shockingly average female genitalia, I was raised as a boy.
Perhaps it was because my parents were pot-smoking, antiestablishment types who didn’t believe in “gender,” or maybe it was simply that after seven years of raising sons, by the time I showed up, they decided, “Screw it. Let’s just stick with what we know.” Whatever their reasons, it was clear my parents had no intention of indulging my second X chromosome.
If this were an audiovisual presentation, I would take you through the following slide show of my boyhood:
•There I am at age three, wearing my brothers’ hand-me-down underwear, the Y-front opening of which will confound and confuse me for years to come.
•Here’s me and my dad; I’m eight. We’re enjoying a daddy-daughter moment in which he is teaching me a card game he has invented. This game is based on “Go Fish,” only it is called “Go Fuck Yourself.” He has just asked if I have any threes, and I am smiling proudly as I reply, “No, Dad . . . Go fuck yourself.”
•That’s me running shirtless through the neighborhood long past what should have been allowed, and there’s my mom,
too busy making macramé plant hangers to notice.
•Me and my dad again. He is looking at me with an expression of confusion and disbelief; that’s because I’ve just asked him if I can take ballet lessons. He will answer my question with his own, “Why the hell would you want to prance around in airy-fairy tights?” and will suggest that I take judo instead.
•And there I am with my brothers. Here they are dangling loogies over my head; there, jamming rancid sweat socks in my face; that’s a good one—one of them is giving me an Indian rope burn, while the other farts into my screaming mouth.
•The next one is me ratting out my brothers to my dad, who is taking a hit off a joint while telling us to “piss off and work it out.”
So that’s the following photo and every one after that: me flailing my arms like a spastic windmill, throwing wild, ineffectual punches at my brothers’ respective balls.
Based on my very unscientific polling methods (i.e., having asked most of the men I’ve ever slept with, dated, or married), it appears that my childhood was fairly standard by most men’s experiences. Which is probably why it never occurred to me that my daily existence was different from that of anyone else I knew.
Until the day that I began to develop teeny-tiny breasts and a teeny-tiny shoplifting habit to match. For it was on that day that I strolled into Woolworths and stole a pair of magnetic earrings that I traded to another preteen thief for a freshly lifted training bra. I smuggled the lacy contraband into the house and locked myself in the bathroom, feeling like a cross-dresser as I tore off my shirt and wrapped the front-clasping garment over my mosquito-bite boobs. I don’t quite know how to explain what I felt, except to say that it was a religious experience, like something out of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but if the coat was actually a 32AA Playtex bra.
And thus began my life as a girl.
From that moment I took it upon myself to learn the ways of womanhood, with a self-taught curriculum that included such lessons as “How to Wear (and Stuff) a Stolen Bra,” “The Mystical Powers of Mascara,” and “The Subtle Art of Getting Felt Up.” Over the next few years I transcended the family plot to turn me into a boy and transformed myself from a scrappy little dude into a wily, willowy woman.
Which is what I am when I find myself on the night of my eighteenth birthday, in line at the Palomino, so drenched in femininity that no one would confuse me with the boy I once was, a boy whose only ambition in life was to pee her name in the snow (though sadly, all I ever managed to spell was “oooo”).
I proudly flash my license to the Beefy Bouncer at the door and then enter the promised land. As I order a virgin daiquiri I marvel at the sight of men and women flashing smiles and cleavage at each other in an ear-splitting, eye-melting blend of music, laughter, and acid-washed clothing.
Deb and I squeeze ourselves onto the crowded dance floor, where we join our age-of-majority brethren, jerking and bobbing to the hits of Huey Lewis, Wham! and De-Barge. After an hour or so, Deb parts the sweaty waters of lumbering dancers, while I fetch our purses from the bar and follow her downstairs to the ladies’ bathroom.
As Deb steps into a stall to pee, I take a spot at the mirror and begin violently flipping my hair forward and back, forward and back, prepping it for the can-full of mousse I’m about to force into it. On an upswing I notice a woman enter the bathroom, her XL frame packed into an XS tank top that reads “METALLICA: Metal Up Your Ass.” I detect an unsettling expression on her face, one that I instantly recognize as drug-induced, perhaps angel dust or PCP (neither of which I really know anything about except for what I’d learned from Meredith Baxter-Birney on various after-school specials).
I don’t have much time to think before Crazy-Eyes lunges toward me, grabs my burgundy pleather clutch purse off the sink, and tries to run. That purse contains my most valued possessions: my grape Bonne Bell lip gloss, my bottle of Obsession knock-off perfume, my eyelash curler, and my favorite can of styling mousse.
Instinctively, I grab the end of the clutch and . . . clutch it. Crazy-Eyes snarls and says, “Give me that purse.” To which I respond, “No.” To which she responds by putting one arm behind my back and the rest of me in a very tight choke hold.
I try to scream, apparently unaware that one needs a working windpipe to do that. I stomp my feet, drilling red stiletto heels into her ankles, but my attacker doesn’t even flinch. Deb, hearing the frantic tap-dancing sounds I’m making on the tile floor, comes to my aid, jabbing her well-manicured fingernails into the beast’s arm. No reaction. Evidently, Crazy-Eyes intends to choke the life out of me, and not even acrylic nail tips are going to stop her.
As I feel my consciousness begin to slip away, two things occur to me: one, that the lasting memory of my eighteenth birthday will be of being mugged and choked out in the basement bathroom of a honky-tonk bar; and two, that because I’m sober, I won’t even have the luxury of forgetting it. And then something else occurs to me: a sense of fury and indignation that I haven’t felt in years, not since my brothers wrapped a postwrestling-tournament jockstrap around my face and tied it in a knot so complex it took me twenty minutes to escape.
Suddenly, my fear and panic are replaced with white-hot rage. I wrest my left arm free and flail blindly, reaching for whatever I can grab, the first thing a hank of frizzy blonde hair. With all my strength I pull the attacker’s face into view, ball my right hand into a fist, and throw the hardest punch I can muster. But unlike the countless feeble shots I’d aimed at my brothers’ balls over the years, this one connects squarely with a BAM in the center of my would-be killer’s face. She stumbles back, hits the wall, and goes down.
As I lean against the sink to catch my breath, the door opens. It’s the Beefy Bouncer, wearing a smug smile that ranks 9.5 on the Douchebag Scale. “All right, ladies, let’s break up the catfight,” he drawls.
Choking back tears, I say, “She . . . jumped me and . . . tried to . . . steal my purse!” My attacker mumbles, “No, she tried to steal my purse.” “That’s a lie!” I croak. “She’s clearly inebriated, and quite likely stoned on PCP . . . and I am a designated driver!”
The bouncer asks to see my burgundy pleather clutch purse. He opens it, pulls out the wallet, and asks, “Is this yours”? I look, and with an almost audible clang my sphincter slams shut as I reply, “No, it is not.”
Because it is not.
“So which one of you is ‘Crystal-Anne Shymkiw’?” he asks, though the answer is fairly obvious: it’s the Metallica fan writhing on the floor, though the swollen bloody nose on her face doesn’t quite match the version in her driver’s license photo.
I try to convince the bouncer of the hilarious! misunderstanding! that has taken place, then chase it down with an earnest apology to Miss Shymkiw, a.k.a. the Crazy-Eyed victim, for evidently having confused her burgundy pleather clutch purse with my burgundy pleather clutch purse, still located on the upstairs bar. “Can you believe we both have such bad taste?!” I joke. But she does not laugh and finds it all so unhilarious that she insists on pressing charges against me for theft and battery. Winnipeg’s Finest are summoned, statements are taken, and in a lucky turn of events the cops proclaim this the funniest call they’ve had all week (“like an episode of Three’s Company, eh!”), and they convince Ms. Shymkiw to drop all charges.
It’s about one in the morning when I am dropped off at my parents’ house. My neck is red, my voice is hoarse, my hand is bruised and throbbing. I am ragged and shaken and most of all mortified by what has happened. I drag myself into the kitchen, where my parents are enjoying a midnight munchies snack of Fig Newtons slathered with cream cheese.* When my mom asks if I had “fun” on my birthday, I lie down on the linoleum floor, then shut my eyes and open my mouth to let the story of this night spill out.
My dad asks if the other woman was badly hurt. I tell him no, but that I’d probably have to pay to get her blood-spattered Metallica shirt dry-cleaned. He nods thoughtfully. “So, in other words, you got
her good,” he says, then smiles, pumps a fist in the air, and shouts, “FAR FUCKING OUT!”
And so it was. Far fucking out, that is. Sure, I’d inadvertently committed “assault with intent to rob,” but more important I’d defended myself in a barroom brawl and made my stoned dad proud in the process. His fist pump carried more than just cream-cheesy goodness that night; it gave me a grasp on my family’s attempts to make me the third son. It is also the reason I say with true pride that the day I turned eighteen was the day I became a man.
*Delicious, BTW.
APPENDIX B
AN UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION THAT MY DAUGHTER WILL HAVE WITH HER TEENAGE DAUGHTER SOMETIME IN THE FUTURISTIC FUTURE
I need you to log out right now.
Don’t lie. I can tell by your head movements that you’re scanning the Intelliboard embedded in your retina. Log out NOW. We need to discuss what happened while you were alone in the pod today.
“Nothing?” Perhaps you’d like to take a look at what the NanoCam recorded? Siri, please play 3D NanoCam segment stamped fourteen o’clock, Earth standard time.
Now there you are walking into the kitchen . . . oh, and who is that? I don’t recognize your “guest,” but I’m sure he’s just here to “help you with your homework”—
Shhhh, keep watching. It’s about to get interesting . . .
Now I don’t know if you caught what you said there, so I’ll pull up the captioning. “Are you as hot as I am, Steve?” And there’s the part where you start taking off your exogarments—aaaaaand there you are, just as naked as you were the day we brought you home from the lab!
Why are you looking away? We were just getting to the good part, where you push him up against the iFooderator and . . . my Google in Heaven, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?? Wait, don’t answer that, I know what you were thinking, because I have the transcripts from your Telepath-o-log! “16:45 p.m., April 15, 2058: ‘MOM WOULD BLOW A NANOGASKET IF SHE KNEW ABOUT THIS. HA. HA. HA.’”
How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Page 17