Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  There was a date or two for coffee or to the city gardens during the day, but with the small children coming along with me, I felt too burdened to enjoy myself. I had work to do in the evenings after all, cooking and serving and getting clothes ironed for the next day. The best I could hope for was to spend the day with another mother friend with babies and cook and clean together, even though we were sweet on each other. When this mother friend and I developed an affection, our husbands found it a little charming, and they remarked over a communal dinner that we girls seemed entertained. I remember one evening, after we had made our husbands a sumptuous tortilla soup, we carried the babies to a bedroom together to nurse them to sleep. In the dark, we held hands. I caressed her face, and her smooth chin was like silk. Did the touch fill her soul with light and warmth the way it did mine? Was this soul like mine? Moments like this, my soul magnified. I could close my eyes and savor, until the babies were asleep, and we could try to slip away from their dimpled arms, which would grasp for us again if we got up too quickly. Between visits with the other wife, I read Anaïs Nin’s novel, Ladders to Fire, and I watched queer period drama, like the WWII love story between the wife of a German officer and a Jewish lesbian, Aimée and Jaguar.

  One night I was scrolling through social media when I saw an advertisement for a queerlesque variety show at the local lesbian bar. My god, what could that even be? I asked my friend if I could borrow ten dollars from her to go to the show. (My thirty-five-dollars-a-month personal allowance was long gone through due to my gardening hobby.) My husband gave me permission to go. When I put the children to bed, I changed into a short, sequined dress and heels, something I had almost no occasion to do. It was so strange to be alone in the car at night! But I was a feminist now, and I should be. I turned the music up loud.

  There was an upstairs theater with heavy red-velvet curtains. The room was completely packed. Many of the women were dressed up like pinup models and covered in vintage flash tattoos of birds and nude women. These pompadoured and pin-curled and victory-rolled femmes linked their arms with androgynous . . . boyfriends? Butches? I wasn’t sure. I’d learned the word genderqueer before that night; I’d seen photos of androgynous folks who played with fluid gender expression; I knew some were trans, and some weren’t. And they inspired my imagination. I felt a spark. I even told my husband over dinner, “I must be genderqueer, too,” to which he had nodded and changed the subject.

  At that moment in the theater, I found a stool at the back, by myself, and felt cast into another world—like I had walked through a portal. Beautiful drag queens read their original poetry. Voluptuous women sang torch songs. A red-haired emcee lit candles for someone in the community who had been lost. The community, she pronounced in her speech. The words echoed in me as someone passed me a candle to light.

  And then she walked on stage. The colored lights above her shone through a gauzy-blue antique nightgown with lace around the neck. I had never seen anyone so visually striking. Through the veil of the cloth, I could see outlines of her skin beneath, which looked tender and femininely soft but strong, even from the distance. Her dark hair in finger waves reminded me of Jaguar, from the movie. It was like stepping into the films I had only watched alone. She was tall, close to seven feet in her towering heels, with huge green eyes and full lips. Everything about her was on a grand scale—yet she appeared, to me, so vulnerable.

  The piano stage left was hers. She sat down on the lone stool and told us she would sing a song she had just written, “Here’s to Me.” It was melancholy and touching, catchy and funny. She sang about being a transgender woman and feeling so alone:

  Here’s to sitting and crying alone in the hall over not really filling that dress out at all

  Here’s to raising my wrist, having never been kissed.

  Here’s to being eleven feet tall.

  Here’s to kneeling and praying along without saying a word about what I believed

  Here’s to answering questions with constant denial

  Here’s to wearing my heart on my sleeve—

  The crowd cheered and whooped, even more when she came out again in a corset to play the accordion, then the upright bass, stepping her foot on the pedal of the hi-hat cymbal like a one-person theater of music.

  I told my husband every detail about the night, especially about Ashley, the performer, until he said, “Stop talking.” It was too late for the religious teachings to control me. I held onto the vision from the night before. Whatever God there could be loves this woman, I thought, and anyone who could say that’s wrong doesn’t know anything about the universe. There is something more, something beautiful, and I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.

  I yielded to the obsession of thinking about her and disregarded any distant worries about salvation, temptation, Satan. If I could just see her again, I thought. I found her profile online and discovered more shows coming up. I splurged without permission: twenty dollars to see her perform in a Cirque du Burlesque at a historic theater. There would be acrobats on aerial silks and burlesque stars. I found a photo of her singing in the theater posted by a local photographer, and I asked if I could buy a poster. My favorite local singer, I told myself. But I was already in love with her.

  I had responsibilities—a husband to keep happy for my own preservation, children to care for, a home to maintain. I had only just started working outside the home as a first grade teacher. Over a dinner of pot pies, James got quieter, then asked me to bring him a tray in his office alone. James, I reasoned, I am not going to run off into the sunset with anyone.

  After that, he started taking more meals alone in his office.

  As the children rolled and tickled around the bed past their sleep time, I wrote to her. “I do not know if you date women, or if you date married women, but I would like to date you. Would you like to go out?” And within minutes, to my astonishment, there was a reply. She said at first no, she didn’t date anyone and hadn’t for eleven years—not since high school. And she was transgender, she wrote, expecting that I would be concerned with that.

  As soon as I got those babies to bed—and bedtime could not come fast enough—I wrote to her again, offering friendship, telling her that wherever she was—I was feeling grandiose—I would like to be, in whatever capacity she could share. And I told her that I was genderqueer, a kind of transgender, so maybe we had something in common? She wrote to me that she didn’t know a lot of people and had been something of a shut-in for many years until so recently, and she would love to go out. What was there to lose, anyway? We decided on a walk through the city gardens. My husband was irritated about having to take care of the children in the middle of a Sunday morning, but I rushed out the door.

  Following that morning, Ashley and I were nearly inseparable. For all the queer love stories I had watched and read about, that first date was more. On an iron bench in the gardens, we shared stories about our lives. I tried not to talk too much so that I would have more time to learn about her. But still, the chemistry was palpable. I tried to imagine what it would be like not to have shame about liking women. We were each so curious about the other. When she spoke to me, her hand would so casually touch me, as if it were nothing. To me, she was skipping rocks over a still pond, and the waves shook rings over me. When we left, I thanked her for being generous with her time, and if this would be our only meeting, I was so grateful for it. I smiled, closed lipped, and she looked horrified. “Oh no,” she laughed, “Let’s see each other many times.” She then invited me to live readings by queer people in the community the next day.

  She introduced me to what felt like a hundred fascinating artists, writers, musicians, and dancers. Before long, Ashley was having dinner with us four or five nights a week. She woke up in the guest bedroom with a four-year-old finger painting her leg. A two-year-old dropped a coconut macaroon on her pillow and dashed out of the room.

  Over time, my husband and I each built, or rebuilt, notions of private faith apart from the Church.
On our own, we explored personal visions of a faith with room to find more of our own answers. Certainly, when James became interested in dating, I supported him and encouraged him to explore. Unlike me, however, he didn’t burn with eagerness to tell stories about who he saw. Being naturally more private, much remained and still remains a mystery to me. He never had much to say about me being genderqueer or wanting to pursue gender transition visibly. He would sigh and change the subject.

  One day, my husband put his foot down. “This is too much,” he said. “Which day of the week will you see Ashley?” At that moment, she knocked on the door. So, I had invited her to drop by again for a cup of tea on her way into the city, or perhaps coming here was out of the way, but was it really so bad if she was stopping by just so briefly? And she did need to drop off this small item she had borrowed? I smiled weakly at him and invited her in. Oh, that face. When we were together, I felt like I could touch a soul like mine. “No, come on,” my husband reminded me in front of her, “say good-bye and doll up, because we have our own date tonight.” It was a tense moment. I nodded dutifully and went to the bedroom to begin browsing clothing for a Mexican food dinner date without the children. During our prior date, we had strained conversation and commented too much on the enchiladas.

  “Doll up,” I whispered to myself, as tears welled in my eyes. The edges of my dresses seemed like sandpaper and fiberglass on my fingertips. I caught a glimpse of Ashley staring at me from just past the doorway.

  She was studying me and put together all the pieces, faster than I did. I dolled up for him, for the church, for our parents. Sometimes, I did it for me, but mostly, I did it for approval. But in her gaze, I knew she saw something; we shared something about gender and who we were.

  “Why do you love me?” she asked, feeling the mounting tension in our lives.

  I paused.

  “I found a novel at a sale once. I haven’t even read it. But the title, the title is you, to me.”

  “What was the book called?”

  “At the Root of This Longing.”

  Tears began to blur her eyeliner. She held me in the bedroom before I got dressed for the date—with my husband. As I looked up at her before exiting my room, tears rolled down her blushed cheeks and into my eyes, like something out of a dark fairy tale. I wound her dark curls around my hands. We kissed, lingering, slow, like there would never be enough time in all creation.

  I loved my husband, too. Looking back, the love I had with him had been so stilted by the roles taught to us in the church, and we were so burdened by parenting young that our youthful love was fraught with responsibilities and stress. What we could have been to each other never developed. What if we had not set out in marriage thinking I had to submit to his authority—and what if he hadn’t believed it was his responsibility? The allowances, permissions, visions of the father as head of the household crumbled away without sermons about the necessity of that dynamic. Over time, most of the power dynamic did shift, but not quickly enough. Every now and then, something would pass that Ashley would notice. Every time James and I fell into old habits, like me serving and clearing his plate at dinner, or depositing my paycheck right into his account, it stood out as bizarre. No, even without the Catholic faith, tradition intruded. Love for Ashley wasn’t enough to undo all of the ingrained patterns with my husband.

  One night, James walked into the living room when Ashley and I were up late laughing on the couch together, when—we thought—everyone in the family was asleep. We kissed and touched, pausing to smile and talk.

  “Where do you want to be buried one day?” I asked her conversationally, curled into the spoon of her body.

  “Bury me in you,” she replied.

  Yet, there was James, a few feet away, in the shadows. How long had he been watching? His slumped shoulders of disappointment erased my smile, and my throat tightened. I felt a prickly heat of shame to see realization pass over his face. Part of me was ashamed I had made my husband unhappy.

  “You are not this happy with me,” he said the following day. “It’s time for me to go.”

  I begged him to stay. I wasn’t ready. I clung to some dream of happiness we had shared years ago, as teenagers wanting a family. Things had changed. I wanted, against reality, for us to all be able to live together as a family. Maybe I could have him and Ashley in a family, and I wouldn’t have to give anyone up? In Dear John, I Love Jane, one of the writers had a husband who stayed close to them and moved only a block away! In such denial, I toured a rental house a block away, sure he must still love me—and a separation isn’t a divorce, right? But, to marry Ashley was such a thing beyond dreaming—I indulged the daydream even if I thought I might not ever get to have such a wish come true.

  These days, I looked so different from the year I first met her. My hair was all cut off, and a child in passing remarked to me that I used to look so much like a princess and now so much like a cowboy. When I started insisting that my husband call me Johnny like my new friends did in the queer community, he finally said, “It’s all too much,” and with bitterness, “After all these changes, what’s next?”

  On Mother’s Day, he left permanently.

  On Mother’s Day, Ashley and I searched our souls for why we needed each other more than anything in the world—for our very survival. Ashley planted a blossoming redbud tree with me in our backyard, to represent her promise to mother the children with me. I searched for the meaning of Mother’s Day, when I’d started cringing at being called a mother and knew viscerally that female pronouns and names were not right for me. Ashley understood my gender evolution almost without words. I wish this could have been a time to celebrate a new beginning together, but I was inconsolable. I was resentful of the glares we got in town when we were dropping the kids off, and crestfallen about slurs, and my parents’ refusal to answer the phone when I called.

  When we discovered my divorce was more than we could afford, that James had filed a suit for sole custody of our children, and that the court and CPS had questions about “a man dressed as a woman in the house with the children,” we felt near completely crushed. But one of the few things that kept us going were songs. Ashley knew many of the old hymns from being the daughter of a church organist, and we sang together in harmony. Any old songs, really. The music healed me, as much as her presence. Genderqueer—and then I started using the word transgender more often for myself, too. As my voice changed, we kept singing.

  We made a little name for ourselves singing duets and harmonies in queer bars and shows. We became a big part of the community, which had once been only a dream to me. We met hundreds, even thousands, of the queer people in the city, all stretched so thin, but coming out to support each other and cheer and throw a few dollars. Community and music nourished us, and as we gained strength, we gave back all we could to begin speaking and writing, to help others.

  I don’t look much like a woman at all, anymore. I’m ready to share the sides of myself no one else could see—except for Ashley that day in my bedroom when it hurt so much to put on makeup for a date—when she saw those worlds within worlds. The children call us both by our first names now at home—Johnny and Ashley. They hear us talk about gender often enough that they understand and follow our lead: You have to listen to what your soul needs, children. It’s sometimes a small voice, but it’s there.

  We don’t use the word lesbian, although some people used it to describe us when we got married. News crews arrived, alleging ours was a loophole lesbian marriage before same-sex marriage was legal in Texas. These days, words like gay and lesbian don’t seem enough for us. On the street, some people call us a slur for men, others a slur for women. But in the queer community, we are loved.

  It feels like a dare to have a teaching career now in Texas, fully in the public eye as a queer transgender family. I tried at first to keep it under wraps, but I couldn’t stop going out with Ashley to speak at meetings, conferences, and do the work to help more people in the community. Ev
entually, my face was on the front of the newspaper, along with the huge words Transgender Battle. If anyone hadn’t known, they did after that. I used to think that being myself would mean I could never be a teacher, but I think it makes me a better teacher. I know what it means to overcome expectations, to be told who and what you can be in this world, to find the courage to resist and keep asking for what you need.

  Ashley and I remember the pain of feeling isolated and alone, and we want to make our home and our work a space for people to find each other. With the change in political climate coming, we are adjusting our sails to help the community stay close and in mutual support.

  When we touch, the story of men and women in discrete categories sounds like a game someone else is playing—a game we both had to play for our survival, long ago. But when we are alone, I know I am with a soul like mine. I may call her she, and she may call me he, but we are safe. We are the same kind. One of our friends laughed that we like to sit on the fence of gender together, with our legs hanging off opposite sides. But we look at each other.

  Four years together now, she pours me a little glass of wine after we make our way through bus pickups and homework and tuck our kids into bed. She’s the one special soul who sang Here’s to Me in that blue gown and caught what some ineffable part of me needed to grow.

  “Why do you love me?” she asks, “after all you’ve given away and changed?”

  “You’re still at the root of all this longing,” I toast her. “Here’s to us.”

  Spring Weddings, Australian Style