SO I MIGHT be a laughable boy-girl rag doll, but I come from wealth and this Residence displeases. My bedroom displeases. It’s basic and tasteless in the dullest way possible, it’s a college dorm room for a thirtieth-year senior and the air smells like the spray women use when they want their vaginas to smell like fresh hotel rooms. I look and leave.
The dining room is low-ceilinged and wide, with a sagging chandelier that makes the taller women nervous even though no one actually brushes against it. Women are everywhere. Most can be divided into one of two groups: Old Sads (penniless heiresses, divorcées, elderly grandes dames too proudly With It for nursing homes—can’t imagine Ms. Lanphear tolerating any sundowning here) vs. Baby Twerps (interns, momma’s girls, interns, assistants, interns, and even though I’m still in high school I was born older than all of them). I am given a tray with fish in a creepy sauce that looks like egg whites.
At a table containing one representative of each type, I deliver my cover story.
“Yay,” says the Asian girl, a Baby Twerp. “You’re going to love it here.” She goes on, “It’s so nice to have everything taken care of for you. I could never go back to having roommates. My last place, I won’t get into it now, but they were all insane. They ate my food even when I covered the containers with masking tape that I’d written on to say, Please if you have any decency you will stay away from my food, and guess who didn’t have any decency—everyone! Everyone didn’t have any decency. One of the roommates was a dominatrix who always brought customers back, and another had this idée fixe that he was a werewolf and kept telling us that we had to tie him up during the full moon or else he’d hurt someone, so finally the dominatrix did because she could do knots, and when we came to get him in the morning, he had jizzed all over his stomach! We never understood how he got out of his pants and underwear. Maybe he really was a werewolf! Wait—how old are you?”
“Nineteen,” I say. Lie made possible by these sponsors: coffee-tinted eyebags; huge rack.
“I didn’t want to say ‘jizzed’ to anyone under the age of eighteen.”
Old Sad says, “It’s easier here for the young. My husband and I are separated for the moment. This is affordable and convenient. But does someone my age really need a curfew?”
“The food is awesome!”
“The food is occasionally acceptable. Today it’s awful. We live in a homeless shelter of femininity.”
“You know, you’ve said that before. You’ve said that to, like, three people. I was there.”
Old Sad turns to me. “There’s a long waiting list to get in. The turnover rate is low. It is the stasis.” She sighs, and Baby Twerp laughs, spits up on her bib, etc.
Old Sad is named Francine and Baby Twerp is Mari. They have reserved the lounge in order to watch a movie, and I accept when they invite me along since at least we won’t have to talk. Before and after us, women file into the lounge. Some I can imagine on any city street—the interns. Some could not exist any place but here — the tremulous freaks in seedy finery, wool and silk that has aged poorly. Women sit on couches or at the tables around the edges of the room and play cards, drink wine, read books with covers that show pieces of other women: the eyes or the mouth or the torso, never the nose.
“What’s the movie?” asks Mari.
“Don’t Look Now.”
“Don’t what?”
“It’s an elegant psychological thriller featuring one of the greatest sex scenes in cinematic history. I saw it in the theater, you know. I snuck in with my sister’s husband. I was just ten years old.”
“Francine! That’s messed up,” says Mari. “I never like the movies you choose. I’m going to drink three or four more glasses of wine.”
Both Mari and Francine drink steadily through the movie, and the skin around Mari’s eyes soon deepens into an alarming hot pink, like the makeup on a Chinese opera singer. She starts talking before the movie actually ends. “It’s like these days, movies for modern audiences have to be scarier, since, you know? Right?” The drunker Mari gets, the more she begins sentences that prove to be too much for her and relies on others to finish them. Francine’s face is serene and spacious, with a lot of eyelid and a high, medieval hairline. The drinking makes her even quieter and imparts to her a mournful Eeyore glamor.
Oh, to be able to leave right now, to run out the door.… I shift uncomfortably in my seat. Tiny underwear has insinuated itself into my asscrack. My grandmother, the creep—who buys a thong for their granddaughter?
Mari yawns. It is true dark now. No one else is left in the lounge, and we turn off the TV and the lights behind us. The hallway is poorly illuminated with those lamps that look like candles. We pass a door inset with a little window. The light is off but I can make out a set of stairs inside. I can almost see something else in there, too. Someone gliding down the stairs? I stop and stretch my neck toward the door, but Francine wraps a thin white hand around my upper arm. Her skin is cold, and I start.
“I didn’t know there was a basement level,” I say. I shake her off.
“Not exactly,” says Mari.
“You’ll see many doors in this place,” Francine says. “My advice is this: if you don’t know what the door is for, don’t open it. It’s of no use to you.”
“Lots of redundant…shit in this place. The builders must have been totally high,” says Mari.
I say, “There sure is a lot of idiotic superstitious thinking in this place.”
“No need to be a dick, young lady,” says Francine.
I bristle but try to control myself. My voice, when it finally emerges, is hatefully thin and shaky. “First I hear someone goes around knocking on all the doors at night—fine, really mature and very hilarious—then you tell me I should just stay away from doors in general?”
Together we ascend the main staircase, its stairs elf-sized and stingy.
“Oh, the knooooock,” Mari says. “Very camp, right? I feel like it’s in service of an image, like we’re some funny gothic lady house and it impresses the reporters whenever they do a trend piece on these types of residences once a decade.” She adds in a less embroidered voice: “Except we’re not allowed to tell reporters about the knock. Also, I think the people who run this place have their own weird ways of exerting control, like winnowing down the herd because they want to get a higher turnover rate. So they make these arbitrary rules that you have to follow, and if you don’t, well, you…you know?”
“That’s incredibly stupid.”
Mari giggles. “Intense much? It could be worse. Like my last landlord.… Trust me, a little knocking at night is nothing. It’s just the management trying to show you how much power they have over you. Fight the power! Or possibly it’s the pipes. I wear earplugs.”
“So you said that if you do open the door, you get kicked out?”
“Beats me. I assume that’s what would happen.”
“Why doesn’t someone just open the door and see what happens?”
Mari scrunches her face into a lopsided piratical squint and slaps me on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “Why don’t you open the door? Easy for you to say. Go ahead, I dare you.” Her eyeballs glow pink.
“I don’t believe there is a knock.”
Mari laughs very hard at this. “Yeah, bro,” she booms, deepening her voice into a frat-boy parody. “I thought so. Look at you, talking big about breaking rules.”
Francine watches sleepily, tolerantly.
I STRETCH OUT in my spinster bed, feeling itchy. More dresses tomorrow, more shaving, two years of shaving stretching ahead of me until I am free again.
But what good will it do? My body is already printed and stamped—perhaps given more time…I’m cursed. Yet again I despair of my ineluctably female body, every line a circle, so ridiculously like those starter bodies drawn in introductory art classes. I had no christening, no grand celebration of my entrance into the world, but I still imagine that my real parents messed with the wrong person, and this person,
a woman with mystical powers, stormed into this highly imaginary great ball uninvited and pronounced that their boy would be born a girl:
And he shall be the girliest girl in all the land! And he shall be round of face and round of bosom and round of hip and round in a bunch of other places besides, and he shall get his period the earliest out of all the girls in his class!
About seven months ago, I ordered hormones online from a Mexican pharmacy, and being an unsupervised minor who was eager to get this Man Show on the road, I may have overdone it. The hair growth was immediately dramatic. My voice began to deepen. I had high hopes for my neck, my thighs, my clit to harden and expand as if they were stem cells that could become anything else.
How they found me out: I threw a chair in the school dining hall.
And he shall feel endless, unceasing rage.
My prep school made the phone call to the Non-Parents that it had been aching to make for quite a while: 1) your daughter has an intentional mustache; 2) your daughter is an asshole; and 3) your daughter: well, we just don’t know what to do with her. Do you? After searching my room, the Non-Parents knew.
Jamaica!
The curse. My true identity hidden. Buried. Suffocated like a baby in the cradle.
My real father I barely remember; he died years before my mother did. My real mother is getting hazy, but I am comforted by the fact that I can at least remember her ears clearly. They stuck out so far one couldn’t help but imagine what it was like to bite them, the crunch the cartilage would make between one’s teeth. (No? Just me?) I stared at them the way babies stare at beautiful faces—the ears glowed in the sun, illuminated fuzz haloed, even though she was no saint, just a petty woman who once gave me the silent treatment for two days when I was three.
But she was the last person around who absolutely had to love me. Then she died and her husband married a new woman, and they had a bunch of kids—some IVF multiples in the mix—in quick succession and then turned to me and I felt it, this weird animal genetic hostility. This…and what are you still doing here? If they hadn’t found me so distasteful, they might have eaten me alive to be rid of me.
One doesn’t have to be one hundred percent genetically unrelated to one’s children to hate what they are, but it helps. I like to think that my real parents would have been more accepting, or at least realized that whatever I was, it came from them, and taken pains to appear open-minded and cosmopolitan. I wish I knew. They were gone before it got hard. The Non-Parents had to deal with the hard parts and the Non-Parents did not have to blame themselves at all, so the Non-Parents regarded me as if I had been hatched from an egg, one of an unfamiliar shape and color; Non-Parents were angry and blank; Non-Parents had to think of their Real Children™; Non-Parents went directly to the nuclear option.
Had I really hatched from an egg? Was this egg hexed? Was this egg unsexed, my sex hexed?
Something creaks out in the hallway. Knock. Knock knock, knock. The knocking finds a rhythm. Knock! Knock! I lift my head from the pillow.
Here it is.
Why not open the door? It’s only a door. It’s only a rule. If I get all mystical and astrological and spooky, I’ll be just like them. This is just going to be like a sorority initiation. Yes, I’m the latest sister, the newest one of all. I slide out of bed and approach.
Knock, knock, knock.
One foot from the door and I stop with my arm outstretched. From this position at this distance, I sense something behind the door. But though I strain, I can go no farther. The air around the door thrums. The door bulges; for a moment the wood is soft as skin. I try again but cannot force myself to touch the door. Knockknockknock! it goes now, insistent as if something knows that I am close to the door and my feet scuttle back and I plummet butt-first into bed and bury my face in the pillow. I whisper, Stupid. This is a stupid house. Stupid games in a stupid place; I won’t let it touch me.
There is one final knock, now shy and rather sweet, as if to make one last coy effort to draw me toward it. Then no more.
EACH DAY THE Residence empties out; the Residence fills up. On weekday mornings, the bathrooms are hopping, so many women getting ready for the day that the whole building feels like the inside of a shower, the moist air heavy with the everyperfume that results from the mixture of everyone’s daily toilette. Good Christ, do women love to slather.
I have to do it, too. I have to put on the makeup. I have to wear the only clothes given to me—all blouses, skirts, and dresses, both sleazy and demure. After, I go down to Ms. Lanphear’s office so she can look me over and send a daily report to my grandmother. Afterward, I do not go out. I am not allowed out until I earn the right to be out. It is unclear how I earn this right. I think I am being as Totally Ultimate Girl as I can be, but clearly I have further to go, always the goalposts move, always my voice could lilt higher at the ends of sentences and my steps be lighter.
Other residents lie and misrepresent. It’s not only me. There’s a girl who looks like a baby, a wide child face on a tall, stalky body, neck like E.T. She’s a model. We eye each other in the hallways in mutual recognition that the other is fifteen or sixteen years old and one hundred percent against the rules, but never speak. A man comes and visits, a handsome older man who is completely bald. He’s supposed to be a manager or uncle, but I have seen them in a beau parlor together, he holding her bare foot like it was a hand. I swear I heard a baby crying inside someone’s room a while ago, though I can’t imagine a bigger rule to break.
Once, alone in my room, I tried arranging my hair and shading a dirtstache onto my upper lip. It’s so real sad, so not handsome at all, that I vow to never try it again. I have never had the body I wanted, not ever. But there was a time—it feels so long ago now—when I had been closer to it.
Most days I sit with Francine in the lounge while she works. She’s a copyeditor for a women’s website, with headlines like Ten Cloche Hats You Can Take to the Beach and Is Your Left Asscheek Mentally Ill? I study for the GED, which my grandmother had insisted upon so long as I was under her protection. This burns me. No one here knows that I was one of the top students at my school, my extreeeemely foncy ponts school. My good mind, my sharp, mean mind, allowed them to overlook my hairy anger for just a bit longer than they wanted. I think about the overconfident preppy fuckhead I should have been, enjoying every kind of privilege that existed. I’d wear boat shoes without irony and rub my buff stomach a lot without thinking. So straight I’m gay, so gay I’m straight—because it’s boys I like, though I don’t like them to like me the way they have done so far. Because every roll of my die has to add complications.
Francine lends me books when studying for the GED cramps me with dullness. “For now, you are a very smart person,” she says. “If you do not nurture your mind, your smarts will curdle into mere cleverness. You’ll use it as a stance against the world, but you won’t really be thinking.”
“Whatever, Francine.” I’m not really listening.
“Please do not whatever me,” she says.
“Thanks, Francine.”
“That’s right,” she says. Then her face crumples. She quickly covers it with her hands. I look down at my books and try to disappear. Behind her hands, Francine is exhaling and inhaling, hard and deliberate.
“You okay?” I finally mutter.
She uncovers only her mouth. Her lips poke out, fish-like, bird-beak-like, between her fingers. “My divorce was finalized.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her fish-bird mouth kept moving. She told me that she had many problems. That she was not ambitious enough, that she was too gloomy, that she was too old and strange-looking, that she was not able to have children. All of it was true and all of it was what her ex-husband had told her, except for the old and strange-looking part. “His girlfriend is almost the same age as me. She has children, though. As for strange-looking, or any of the rest, I cannot say.”
“Screw that guy,” I say.
“I’m not ready for y
ou to speak ill of him. You don’t even know him. And I miss him so much,” Francine’s mouth said. “I miss him, and I miss our books, and the leather boots I left behind, and the espresso machine. And now this is it. This is where I’ll stay, forever.”
“Oh,” I say, uncomfortable, “that’s not true. It’s just temporary.”
Francine finally uncovers her face, which looks newborn, all sweaty and pink. “You’re a baby. I thought you might be able to stay your time and leave. But you’re in the same fix as the rest of us, aren’t you?”
“I am absolutely nothing like the rest of you.”
She takes my hand in her sweaty one, gazes at me wide-eyed. Get your crazy face out of my face, I think, but I don’t say anything. I stare back at her. If she can see what I am, past the body and the makeup and the dress, if she can see that I am not a woman and I don’t belong here, I will forgive her for everything.
See me, I think. I am still in here. See me.
Francine doesn’t say anything. She shakes her head, and I slacken with disappointment. Instead she pulls me down the hallway to the doorway, the one she warned me away from on my first night.
“Open it,” she says. I glare at her.
“Fuck off,” I say, trying to be casual. The truth is that I do not want to open that door. The truth is that I can barely control myself from rearing back like a horse, keeping my eyes still even though they want to wobble and roll in their sockets so they do not see inside the door. Beyond the little window, though, it’s dark. Nothing moves inside.
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 33