by Rachel Gold
The screen door whooshed open and shut. Aisha scooted to the treehouse’s open wall, eyes going wide as she peered down. I crawled over to where I could join her, hopefully without being seen. As expected, Pops stood at the grille in a light blue, short sleeved button up shirt, buttoned all the way up. Milo reclined in the patio’s one deck chair, in a faded red flannel shirt and loose gray pants. Reading glasses perched on her nose as her finger slowly tapped letters on her tablet.
Brock and Mom had come onto the back deck and stood by its railing. Mom wore a heavy sweater, like the calendar date was more real than the weather, and had her hair back in a messy bun. Brock’s gray tank top with the skinny straps was supposed to show off his muscles and make it seem like he didn’t give a crap about fashion. He asked Mom or Milo to buy them for him by the dozen, just like Pops’ button-downs.
“Let’s see,” Milo said. “Nonbinary can be used for anyone whose gender isn’t exclusively male or female.”
Brock sneered with his lips and his voice as he asked, “How do they know if a person’s male and female? Do they have only one boob? Or is it like two boobs and a wang?”
That got him laughing so hard he had to catch himself with his palms on the deck railing. And Mom laughed too, resting one hand on Brock’s shoulder for support. Pops turned away, tinkering with the propane tank, so I couldn’t see his face. Milo’s was in profile, facing the deck, lips pressed tight. Did they wonder how they’d ended up with my mom as their kid? Because I sure wondered how she got me as hers.
Mom said, “We’ve been talking about that nonbinary trend at work because they’re making a unisex restroom. It’s the new thing. I don’t understand why people can’t be happy the way God made them. It’s so complicated. It’s like people will do anything to be special.”
Yeah, because gender was totally a fashion trend. I so wanted to spend half my life trying to figure out how my body felt and what that meant. And I super wanted to talk about my boobs with everyone, like, all the time.
I wished everyone would stop looking at my body as if it meant so much about me because it didn’t. And I very badly wanted to stop feeling wrong so I could kiss Aisha again.
Mom went on, saying, “Kids come in and it’s like everyone has to be their own special snowflake and make up a word that’s just for them. Demigirl? What is that?”
Milo frowned thoughtfully. “At a guess, a person who feels somewhat like a girl but not entirely. I knew Greek and Latin prefixes would come in handy someday.” She tapped on her tablet. “Yep, I’m on track: someone who identifies partly as a girl or woman.”
“You can’t be part woman,” Mom insisted.
“Sure you can. Hell, I had my ovaries out a few years ago, I’m not even sure how much woman I am at this point,” Milo said.
“Pops!” Mom yelped and looked to him for help. “You can’t agree!”
He shrugged. “Same Milo, that’s all I care about. Not like we were going to use those ovaries again. Did a good enough job the first few times, I’d say.”
I was somewhere between “I love my grandparents so much” and “Oh holy crap why are my grandparents talking about ovaries?” I tried to focus on that first one.
“If I date a girl, I want to know she’s a girl,” Brock said.
I gave Aisha the “I’m dying here” look, wondering if we could make a run for her house. Aisha shook her head and motioned for me to stay back from the visible part of the treehouse with the open wall.
She snorted, loud enough for Brock to look and see her. “You in no danger,” she called. “No nonbinary person’s gonna ask you out. Your loss.”
“Oh yeah, California,” he called back up to her. “Your home state’s crawling with hot nonbinary people?”
“Matter of fact it is, Hometown. That’s why we got one of the country’s first legally nonbinary folks.”
Milo did that thing where she leaned back in her seat and the room, or yard, settled around her. She said, “A woman I used to work with told me that in her tribe, and she was Shoshone from out west, there were five genders.”
“How can you have five?” Mom asked.
“I’m going to guess same way you have two. Gender is a social construct.”
“Nah, that makes no sense,” Brock said. “There’s only two kinds of people. It’s obvious. Me and Pops are men, the rest of you are all women. That’s just how it is. Some people can, like, carry babies, that’s a real thing.”
“And some people are left-handed, that’s a real thing, but there are cultures who made left-handed people worse than right-handed, and some where left-handed people are wise or special. The fact that some people can carry babies only means they can carry babies, not that they’re great parents or super nurturing or even want to carry babies. Plus women who don’t have kids, and women who don’t have ovaries, we still consider women—because woman is a social role with less of a foundation in biology than you might think.”
“You can’t argue that biology isn’t real,” Mom declared. “Animals are male and female and that’s that.”
Milo laughed. “Remember that time your brother Joey’s clownfish turned female and we had to decide if her name was still Nemo?”
“So what if a few kinds of fish are weird,” Mom argued, voice going sharp. From my spot in the shadows, I saw her glance up at the treehouse. She had to know I was up here because she said, “Humans are men and women and we’re born that way and I don’t want kids getting these ideas that they can make up whatever they want. If Kaz decided she was a dog, we’d never go along with that.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and hunched around them. Like I didn’t know the difference between being a dog or a person. How my body felt wasn’t up to me, or I’d have picked a body that went easily with Aisha’s.
“People and cultures are very diverse and now the law is catching up,” Milo said. “That’s not idle fantasy.”
I scooted farther into the depths of the treehouse and uncurled my arms long enough to put them around Wolvie, even though she smelled like a rawhide sewer.
My brain kept replaying Brocks words: “… only one boob? Or is it like two boobs and a wang?”
What I wanted wasn’t real. People could transition from one gender to another, but there were two, or maybe three, except those third people were weird. I had ovaries and boobs and to most people that meant “woman” and I could invent some fancy third gender and they’d maybe humor me, but I couldn’t have this body in the world, not the one I woke up with and dreamed with.
I couldn’t have a body that felt like more than one body, that shifted and changed and didn’t settle into a gender for more than a few days. I must be making it up, wanting attention like Mom said.
Aisha curled her fingers around my arm, holding on to me, but I pulled away.
“Don’t,” I whispered. No one should touch me. I felt monstrous.
“They’re wrong,” she told me.
I pressed my face into Wolvie’s thick neck fur, too sad to cry, wanting to believe her.
Maybe I could focus on getting Aisha what she needed. Maybe I wasn’t the hero of this story or even the sidekick, just one of those nameless, red-shirt extras. If Aisha got her dreams, at least me not having mine wouldn’t suck as much.
Chapter Five
October 2016
We didn’t talk about gender again. Not that night at dinner. Not the next days or weeks. I stayed out of the house by walking a lot of dogs; Wolvie always calmed down the hyper ones, me included (not that I was a dog, just sometimes I wished).
In my room late one night, I asked Wolvie, “Do you guys have binary gender? Most of you are spayed and neutered, so how does that even work?”
Sitting, she cocked her head, one ear flopping over, and contemplated me for a long time with her deep brown eyes, probably wondering if the Great Dog Consortium could trust a human with its deepest secrets.
“It’s scent-based, isn’t it?” I asked. “And super complicated
but also quite flexible?”
She sighed and hopped onto my bed, putting her head on her paws, like: Dammit, cat’s in the bag now.
“It’s out of the bag,” I said.
A light snort from her suggested that I should not lecture her about cat metaphors. The cat was definitely in the bag, because a cat out of a bag wasn’t nearly as interesting or potentially dangerous. Probably three or four cats were in that metaphorical bag, but she knew better than to go anywhere near it. I didn’t.
* * *
When we were kids, me and Brock played together a ton, being less than two years apart. I snagged his old clothes as often as Mom would let me. Kids thought I was his little brother. Even when he started junior high and I was in fifth grade, he didn’t blow me off. After Dad left when I was six and Mom lost it for a while—working all the time, too tired to cook or clean or sometimes talk when she got home—it had been me and Brock against the world.
I couldn’t figure out the exact point in time when that had changed. Back when he was a string bean of an eleven year old and I was nine, Brock’s favorite game had been pretending we were a rock band. He’d do dramatic makeup and put on a cape because he was our over-the-top lead singer, and I’d put on nail polish and pantomime drums. I still think nail polish looks badass on anyone regardless of gender.
He’d always known I wasn’t exactly a girl, so his comment on the deck bit deep and kept biting. I finally volunteered to run errands with him, planning to ask him what he really thought about gender and trans people and me.
We borrowed Milo and Pops’ car, which we could use for school or errands now that Brock was seventeen and had a year of practice driving. Brock got into the driver’s side with an annoyed sigh. Compared to Mom’s Mazda, the Toyota was an energy-efficient turtle. And pristine! You could lose an entire outfit in Mom’s back seat, but if we left even a gum wrapper in here, Milo would be on us.
Brock drove us to the bike store and the pet store and the gaming store in South Saint Paul that was twenty minutes away but still the closest place with comic books. The whole time, I didn’t ask him anything serious. I wanted to hang out like we used to.
Plus I’d been thinking about how maybe we’d been closer before I’d started eighth grade, maybe the distance was because I’d been spending all my time with Aisha. That gave me two questions I didn’t want to ask him: “Why are you being an ass about gender?” And, “Do you have a problem with Aisha?”
Way too many cats in those bags.
I left the rock station playing loud and figured I’d talk to Milo about this first. But in the neighborhood by the gaming store, pulling up to a stop sign, there was a black family on bikes: mom, dad, three kids, the littlest on the back of the dad’s bike in one of those booster seats.
They stopped on the corner and watched us. Brock sat there, waved impatiently, said, “Go already! What’s the hold up?”
The dad watched Brock. He was a lot skinnier than Aisha’s dad and had more hair. When he glanced at me, I gave him a nod. He looked at Brock and back at me, not moving.
“Just drive,” I told Brock.
He grumbled and hit the accelerator too hard. I put my fingers on the window, wishing I could turn around, go back and apologize.
“They take up so much space all the time,” Brock was saying. “Walking in the street, going slow, making us wait like that, why?”
He wasn’t honestly asking, but I answered anyway. “He was afraid.”
“I’ve had my license for over a year.” He said it fast, huffing.
“Because we’re white.”
“That’s stupid.”
“No, it’s real. Most white people here don’t look out for black people like they do for other whites. He’s got to protect his kids extra because we’re the ones who are being stupid.”
“Aisha tell you that?” He said it with a sneer.
“I read it, fuckwit. Some of it. And figured it out. I have eyes. She doesn’t have to tell me everything, I can see for myself.”
Like when I went out with Mom or Brock, or both of them, they barely looked at people of color. Mom would glance up and smile if we passed a white person and maybe also if they were Asian. We had a big Hmong population in our neighborhood and Mom was always super polite to them. But walk by a stranger with medium brown skin or darker and Mom looked away or down, at her phone, at her purse, anyplace else.
And Mom got startled when I didn’t. Last spring in the grocery store parking lot, a young woman let her cart get away from her on the down slope. She ran a few steps to catch it, smirking to herself. I’d been watching, because the moving cart caught my eye, so I grinned. She grinned back.
I told her, “Nice catch.”
She said, “Thanks.”
That was it, but Mom stared at me all big-eyed, as if I didn’t say hi to strangers pretty often. I did, especially if they had a dog.
But this woman had deep brown skin so I’d broken the code. I’d say it was a code nobody clued me into, but I knew exactly what it was. I’d been absorbing it without thinking since I was tiny: Don’t look at black people, don’t talk to them, definitely don’t joke with them. There’s something wrong and shameful and you need to keep quiet and look away.
Part of that was true: wrong and shameful things had been done. But they’d been done by people who looked like me, so maybe it was on me to close the gap, make things better as best I could.
How to tell all this to Brock? We were on the highway back home and I had about fifteen minutes for all the thoughts and questions in my brain.
“What? You think I’m racist?” Brock asked, all up in himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “So am I. It’s in our brains and in the world around us. Racism doesn’t have to be on purpose. We grew up in it. It’s like speaking English. Nobody gave us a choice when we were little, but now we’ve got a choice.”
“Right,” he snorted. “They have a lot of choices too and they don’t make good ones. They have the same chance anybody has, they just don’t work as hard because of their cultures.”
I wanted to yell at him. Instead I clenched my teeth. I wanted him to understand how this whole thing worked and sometimes I still didn’t understand enough myself.
“Brock, what do you think we’d have done without Milo and Pops?”
He drove silently for miles. He didn’t have to answer; we’d talked about this when we were smaller. During the two years after Dad left, we were always one step away from losing our home. Dad used to have money, but he and Mom spent a lot of it on a house near the city. Milo declared it “too much house.” After he left, Mom refused to sell it. The first year, we thought he was coming back. The second year, Mom stayed locked in a fight with everyone, trying to prove she could manage on her own.
Brock even told me that when he was ten, he’d walked by the homeless shelter a few times, checking it out in case we had to go there. When I’d been eight and trying not to get beat up at school, he was thinking about where we’d sleep if we didn’t have a home.
Part of the reason we hadn’t lost the house was that Milo had been giving Mom money the whole time. I found that out after we moved in with Milo and Pops, just before I turned nine, because Milo talked to Mom about being able to spend some of that money on better clothes now that they weren’t keeping two houses going.
So Brock didn’t have to answer about what we’d have done without Milo’s money. We both knew life would’ve been immensely harder.
I turned down the radio and asked, “What’d Milo’s dad do for work?”
“Cop,” he answered.
“And his dad?”
“Iron Range,” he said, back to huffy and impatient, because this was not family trivia night.
“How’d he get there from Poland?” I asked and then answered my own question. “The family came over together because they could pay for passage.”
We’d heard the story often, how my great-great-grandfather’s little brother almost didn�
�t make it on the ship because they didn’t have enough to pay his way, but his mother had given up some jewelry so they could come across together.
Brock said, “But that’s my point, our family worked for everything we have.”
“Across generations. What if Milo’s grandfather had been taken away from the family, made into a slave, brought to the States with no one, and then, when the slaves were free, couldn’t get any decent work because no one was hiring blacks? What if he only made enough to get by, didn’t have enough to pass on to his kids? And then those kids grew up and still couldn’t make as much as white people?”
He grumbled, but I turned half toward him, seatbelt tugging at my shoulder.
I asked, “What if Milo didn’t have enough money in the family to finish high school and had to take jobs? If she hadn’t gone to college? She might not have gotten a good post office job. Plus her dad left her some money and that’s money that’s taking care of us today. What we did with slavery, we took people away from home and family, from their resources and support. And even after slavery, we kept them poor.”
“I didn’t do that. Our family didn’t.”
“We benefitted from it,” I said.
“We didn’t take anything from them. And that was a long time ago.”
“We didn’t have to live out of a shelter because of money and opportunities passed down in our family,” I said. “Not because we work hard. You can’t take that away from a whole group of people and act like it’s their fault.”
“You’re not going to make me feel guilty,” he said and launched into a rant about immigrants taking jobs away from Americans.
“Asshole,” I said and turned up the radio.
We said a few more things to each other after that—loudly, over the rock music—the kind we’d never dare say around Milo. By the time we got home, we weren’t talking.
I’d seen Aisha’s family photo album, including where her family tree got ragged and bare. On her mom’s side of the family, it ended at six generations. It just ended.
Milo’s sister was super into genealogy and had done that side of the family back to the late 1700s and knew exactly what town in Poland they were from. And honestly, I didn’t care that much about it, but it was there if I ever did care.