Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  I wonder what my brother thinks of his big sister, who is effectively a boy. Does it confuse him? Does he care? Is he embarrassed?

  My brother is a delicate, beautiful boy. His skin is darker than mine; his hair and big eyes are brown. He is all bones but he’s proportionately built, a healthy kid. He is quiet and loving, which makes me want to take him in my arms and protect him. We pantomime folding him into my suitcase many times.

  Pop and Rita fight about everything. She is a tightly wound coil always finding a reason to have an outburst and direct her dragon breath at our pop. Elio and I walk ahead of them through the sweaty streets, my arm around his shoulder, his around my waist, saying the only words we mutually understand—brother, sister—and smiling at each other. I hug him a lot and pick him up as much as possible.

  It’s a weird thing, this idea of being a family suddenly, thrust together on a vacation when none of us really knows each other. Pop hasn’t visited Elio since he was five, so they seem fairly disconnected, too, although Elio is ecstatic about the visit. Pop swings him around and entertains his mind with stories and drawing sessions, which my brother is particularly talented at. I know that feeling, kid, the blissful love you feel for this magical man. I know. I’m just sorry for the hole it’s gonna create in you for the rest of your life.

  POP AND I GO BACK to our quaint German town and by Christmas I’m fluent enough to correct his German, which I do eagerly. I like to show off.

  We hang out in the theater a lot and he introduces me to the people in the makeup department, who I ask to make a goatee and mustache for me. They find a wig with hair a similar auburn color to mine and make my dream facial hair. They give me a tiny bottle of wig glue and I carefully apply it all in the theater bathroom.

  Walking around as I want to be is almost too wonderful to handle. I wish so badly it was permanent.

  Then the unexpected happens. I get blindsided by a feeling I’ve never had before. It burns, it tingles, it makes me sweat and feel weak in the knees. I get stupid, shy, unsure of my actions. I start bumbling, dropping things. I’m off my game in a major way. I get a crush, a huge one.

  It’s the Greek girl in my class, Vikki. She’s sixteen, a Goth from Athens, with a sheet of straight black hair, skintight jeans, and black platform boots. I don’t even see it coming, but suddenly I’m a mess when she comes into the room. I find myself wanting to sit closer to her to smell her shampoo.

  Her family owns the Greek restaurant on the corner of our block, so I finally work up the gumption to offer to walk her home. I suggest that her brother come along, just in case she thinks it’s weird. She is blasé about it, but she doesn’t refuse. I regale them with my best New York stories all the way across town, and by the time we turn the corner to our street, I am hopelessly at the mercy of her every hair flip and blink. My heart beats to get that next tiny giggle out of her.

  I’m red-faced, sweating and giddy when I get home. I burst in the door and Julia gets the brunt of my gush. She’s thrilled. We sit at the kitchen table brainstorming on how to rope her in, although it will take me weeks to actually say the word crush.

  It makes going to school thrilling. I put more effort into my homework so I can impress her with my brain, and all my jokes are for her benefit. What’s going on soon becomes apparent, and some of the Albanian kids make cracks about it. This scares the shit out of me, because, I realize, if everyone finds out I’m a girl, Vikki might be disgusted, and the boys might kick my ass.

  One day, I’m coming up the stairs from lunch headed back to class when I feel something wet hit the top of my inner thigh inside my boxers. I am horrified and confused.

  Going to the bathroom is still a nightmare, but this is too urgent and weird not to just do it. I barge into a stall and pull my pants down and pee. The toilet fills with blood.

  Holy shit! I didn’t even think about that!

  I sit there for a while, marinating in my discomfort with my own body. I have absolutely no relationship to it whatsoever, it’s just a kind of inconvenient vessel for my thoughts and words. I get around in it, I play ball in it, I dance in it, but I don’t feel particularly connected to it in any way. I don’t think of myself as having a vagina, even though I know it’s there, but now here we are and blood is coming out of it, and my throbbing little boobs are telling me I am most definitely, at least biologically, a girl. Ugh. I hate it.

  Confused, I bolt straight out of the building into the brisk fall day without my coat and waddle home.

  My pop is there, futzing around in the kitchen. I linger in the hallway, trying to figure out how to approach this.

  He comes out holding a tea towel and sees me standing there, frozen.

  “Hey. What’re you doing home? You okay?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t really know how to tell you this . . .”

  He looks at me with apprehensive confusion and waits. The silence dries the air out like hay.

  “Um . . . I . . . got a visitor.”

  “You what?”

  “I . . . well . . . . it’s a girl thing.”

  “Oh! Oh shit! For the first time? Um . . . shit! Well . . . Jules has torpedoes in the bathroom . . .”

  Torpedoes. Nice, Dad. I’m horrified. I waddle to the bathroom, leaving him blushing in the hall, and close the door. I kick off my shoes, get rid of my soiled pants and boxers and scrounge around the counter. I find them stacked up in a glass. They’re size Super Plus, whatever that means. They look massive.

  I peel the plastic off one and, sitting on the side of the tub, try to ascertain where I’m supposed to stick it.

  “Dad! I’m supposed to . . . put this thing inside of me?”

  “Yep! That’s the idea!”

  At least I know we’re both dying inside. I really need him to help me out right now, but I get the sense that this could be a woman-only thing, which might be the first time that line has ever been drawn in my head in my whole life.

  “Where’s Julia?”

  “She’s at work!”

  I poke around with the tip, which comes up bloody, but nothing feels like an entryway that’s going to open. There’s one spot where it seems like maybe it could go, but it hurts like hell when I try to force it. Fuck. I need help.

  I wrap a towel around my waist and go into the hall, careful to close the door behind me so he can’t see the massacre that is my bottoms lying on the floor.

  We are both too embarrassed to look at each other, so he yells from the kitchen: “Did you get it sorted?”

  “Nope! What the hell do I do? Those torpedoes are massive.”

  “Ummm . . . have you thought about calling your mom? I think this might be more her arena.”

  Jesus, the thought never crossed my mind, but I guess that would be a good idea. I pick up the phone, one hand holding my towel, and dial her number. It’s early enough that she’ll be home. She picks up on the sixth ring.

  “Hello??”

  “Ma. It’s me. I need your help.”

  “What’s up, my bud?”

  “I, uh . . . I got a new visitor.”

  “Huh? A visitor? From where?”

  “From the land of being a girl?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, kitty?”

  “I’m talking about . . . I’m saying . . . a monthly visitor . . .”

  “What? Who is visiting you?”

  “There’s blood, Ma, in my pants, for chrissake.”

  “Ohhhhhh! Yeah . . . okay? So what?”

  “So! I need your help!”

  “With what?”

  “I have no idea what to do, Ma! Pop said to use one of Julia’s torpedoes, but they’re insanely huge. It hurts to put them up there, I can’t do that. What the fuck do I do?”

  “Huh. Are those the only ones you got?”

  “Yeah, I think so. They’re the only ones I saw.”

  “Well, you go in the bathroom, you take some toilet paper, roll it up into a real tight little roll, and you shove it up there.”


  “Wha— For real?”

  “Yeah. That’s how yer ma has been doin’ it for years!”

  This doesn’t work for shit. I try it, but first of all, it’s hard to push around, second, it feels like it’s leaking, and third, it’s impossible to get out. So I go back to the mirror and contemplate the giant torpedoes. I’ve got to make this work.

  I limp back to school with a crooked stranger inside my body, feeling like I’ve been microchipped by my womanhood. It’s hard to sit, but I get through the day.

  MY MOOD OUTSIDE THE CRUSH SHIFTS, becoming dark and angry. Pop is less patient in asking me to do my chores. I’m not cooperative with him and Julia. I don’t feel that I should have to earn my right to a roof with my own father. He starts to think that I’m intentionally sabotaging their relationship, though it’s not true, but when Julia starts bossing me around I lose my shit. I scream at her with a rage she didn’t cause, telling her she’s not my mother and not to get it fucking twisted.

  Her face goes scarlet, holding in the furious storm of angry things she wants to say to me. She wants to call me ungrateful, a brat, an asshole. I want to tell them that this is my fucking birthright, to be with my fucking dad, in a safe, warm room, and I shouldn’t have to do anything to earn it. Where the fuck were they when the fridge was turned off and I was stealing food to live?

  The fights get more and more frequent, and Poppa’s behavior gets more and more erratic. When the dancers come over for dinner parties, they all sit around the living room passing joints back and forth. I observe this and the change it produces in my poppa.

  Some days he comes home from work elated and buzzing. I can hear him whistling as he rides up the street, locks his bike, and sails up the steps. He will burst in, singing about going to the circus the next day. I’ll go with him on this trip, getting excited and making plans. He’ll put on some music and clean the whole house, top to bottom. Then he’ll lie down at eight o’clock and pass out until the morning.

  The next day he’ll have no memory of any plans for the circus and say I always accuse him of making false promises. I swear, up and down, but he says I’m crazy and to stop making up absolutes. This will drive me wild with frustration.

  By the summer, Julia and I aren’t talking. I’ve told Poppa I want him to stop smoking weed, but he just waves me off. The dream has collapsed with Pop and her. I thought I was finally coming into a family, a home where the love is unconditional. But something keeps my poppa and me divided, something intangible, and my disappointment in him taints all of our conversations. We can’t discuss anything without it ending in my tears, built up over so many years of hoping.

  Julia is caught in the middle, but instead of removing herself from a relationship I feel has nothing to do with her, she inserts her infuriating opinions in the moments I most want to be left alone.

  This unfortunate brew leads to constant fighting, so I start to spend most of my time at Barbara’s, hanging out with her and Leo, or down by the river, painting on legal graffiti walls. I sleep over at Barbara’s often, and find it so weird when I wake up to no missed calls on my tiny Nokia, as though I am not missed or being kept track of. Things with Poppa are great when Julia’s not around, and as long as we stay out of the house, so I guess it makes sense that he’s not eager to get me back there. I know he loves me, it’s just a real touchy situation.

  Vikki and her brother come over to watch a movie one night when Poppa and Julia are out, but I am absolutely petrified of being too close to her. If she found out my secret she’d think I was a freak, so I sit on the other side of the couch, obsessing over what she’d say if somebody told her I was a girl. Would she think back on this as a super creepy date? Maybe her brother being there is a buffer for my shame.

  I can’t handle the stress, so I distance myself from her as the summer goes on, which teaches me a few things about ignoring girls and reverse psychology, but I start having an earth-shifting thought: When I switch schools in the fall, what if I tell them I’m a girl?

  This sits in me like a brick for a few days. I’ve never lived a day since I was six years old without the perpetual hassle of gender discussion, so I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Glorious relief, probably.

  Biking home one day, I spontaneously decide to just do it. My pop comes around the corner, riding to work, like a sign that I need to affirm my decision out loud.

  “Dad . . . I have something to tell you.”

  “Okay . . . What’s up, bugs?”

  “I think I want to be a girl again.”

  “Wow! Okay . . . cool!”

  We both look at and through each other, lost in thinking about what that would actually mean.

  “It’s good timing, with switching schools and all that . . .”

  “That’s what I was thinking!”

  “Yeah, seems smart.”

  “But, Pop, I want to grow my hair out before I start wearing girls’ clothes. I don’t want to look like a boy dressed as a girl.”

  He shakes his head back and forth like he’s whipping water off his face, confused and amazed at the same time by what a weirdo I am. He loves it.

  “Cool! Okay!”

  “Can I just keep the front short like a boy while I grow out the back?”

  He laughs.

  “Boy in the front, girl in the back? No! That’s just called a mullet.”

  “Ewwwww!”

  We stand there, in the middle of the street, laughing.

  “Wow. Are you gonna wear, like, skirts and stuff?”

  “I dunno . . . sure, I guess.”

  “Wowwwww. That’s gonna be crazy! Oh well, I’m not losing a son, I suppose, I’m gaining a daughter.”

  AND JUST LIKE THAT, it’s done.

  Chapter 32

  Barbara’s

  Karlsruhe, Germany, Christmas Eve 1998

  BARBARA’S GOT TWO CATS. WHEN SHE LEAVES TOWN I GO over and feed them. She shows me a tiny room upstairs in her loft that’s under the bottom corner of the slanted ceiling. There are no windows, it used to be a grow room for her friend’s weed, so there’s a little glass case and not much else. She says it can be my space if I want some privacy. I am deeply grateful.

  I stick some books in there and a camping lamp. You can barely sit up at the highest point, and you have to crawl out through a hole in the drywall, but it’s mine. There isn’t a day I don’t get into a fight with Pop or Julia, so Leo and I hang out and play, and when he’s real well behaved he gets to come into my room with me and I’ll read to him from my books.

  Pop’s weird weed highs have gotten more extreme as the weather has gotten colder. He’s out of his gourd about the new piece they’re working on at the theater, and he’s got pretty much no time for me. He’s made a billion drawings and they’re all over the house and his studio.

  We sit down to dinner in their living room on Christmas Eve. It’s Pop, Julia, Barbara, Leo, and two of the dancers who are Julia’s favorites.

  Julia makes some comment about how I should be setting the table, which dampens my mood. I’m pissed she would come out of the gate like that, and I want to leave.

  At some point in the night, I snap at her, which gets my poppa pissed off, so he tells me to cut the shit. This makes me feel betrayed, so I lay into him for being a shitty dad with no loyalty. This makes him stare at me like I’m the devil, his eyeballs bulging with exhaustion. Julia gets all fired up and can’t stay in her seat. She stands next to the table and starts laying into me about what an ingrate I am, how unacceptable my behavior is, and how I need to learn some manners and to do what I’m told.

  This is fucking embarrassing, so I scoot my chair back, tell her to go fuck herself, and storm into my room, slamming the door and locking it behind me. She starts banging on it, screaming about how I better open it up, how she doesn’t want me locking the door in her house, how it’s her fucking door. This makes me want to jump out the window. It’s like my ma all over again. No locks, no closed doors. Fuck no. I
’m not a child anymore. I’m fuckin’ outta there.

  I hear her stomping around to the other door, so I grab my coat and run out the first one, letting her chase her own tail, and bolt into the hall.

  I hear her screaming behind me, and then my poppa yelling at her to leave it alone, which only makes her start crying and scream back at him that he’s ganging up on her.

  This must be some waiting room for hell. Out of the frying pan and into the seminormalized, everything-looks-fine-on-the-outside, inner circle of fireballs. Suburban domestic batshit.

  I take the stairs two at a time and throw the door open to the snowy night, but Julia is hot on my heels, screeching at me to stop walking away from her, to have some respect. I spit nasty words at her over my shoulder, telling her to fuck off and leave me alone.

  She makes a grab at my coat, but I wriggle out of it. I’m in the snow in my shirtsleeves and overalls, but the adrenaline of the situation has my blood running hot.

  I bolt into the street, but before I can get all the way across, I feel her tug on the back of my overalls. Her nails scratch my back as she grabs me, and she throws me down on the hood of a parked car. She is a creature transformed by stress.

  I yell at her to get the fuck off me, but she climbs on top of my body and puts her beet-red face in mine.

  In a higher pitch than I’ve ever heard a human voice go, she screams at me that I better get my shit together and stop acting like an asshole. She’s the only person who has ever really loved me, and she’s the only person who ever will.

  Then I know her marbles have scattered. I shove her shoulders and scream back at her to get the fuck off me or I’m gonna punch her in the fucking face. She taunts me back, and I realize she’s nailing her own coffin. This shit is so bananas, there will be no way for her to save face with my pop now, and the dancers can all hear us through the windows. She’s sealing her own deal.

  “Fuck you,” I spit. “You’re a nasty person. Get the fuck off me.”

  Something in my tone registers, or maybe she realizes she’s pinning a fourteen-year-old to the hood of an icy car on Christmas Eve, screaming two inches from her face, and she lets up just enough for me to wriggle out from under her.