by Casey Plett
“Sure. So tell me about Ernie.”
“Ernie?” she said, strangely confused for a second. “Oh—right, Ernie. Haven’t heard from him yet.” Wendy filled Lila in about the whole night, leaving out the part about the pictures of Ernie’s kid.
“Bummer, girl.”
“Yeah. Well. Thanks for asking.”
They were silent for a second, then Lila offered, “There’ll be more d.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Sometimes Wendy liked to imagine herself in a red dress on a grassy hill in the summer, and she liked to imagine arms both rough and soft surrounding her and lips kissing her hair. She liked to think of wind blowing. She liked to think of him as about her height because even in her dreams, she couldn’t conceive of him taller. She liked to imagine being at home and him doing things for her. She would sit in the kitchen while he cooked and he would make her laugh and show her movies and she would drink in the bed, drink on the couch, loving him, waking up mornings to pills and coffee he would put beside her bed. She did want to live, she did, she just didn’t want to live that long, and she didn’t want to take care of anybody, anybody anybody anybody.
That night, she walked to the Vendome to meet her dad—there’d been arguments about her Oma’s will. “I ain’t trying to involve you,” he’d said. “This is stuff between me and my brothers. I just kinda need your opinion if’n you don’t mind.”
On her walk, two guys began to follow her. They were old and small.
One said, “Hey, beautiful! Do you like cats?”
Without turning around, she said yeah.
The other asked, “Are you a cat lady?” They were drunk and cheery and their coats looked like mushed olives.
“No!” Wendy laughed, her hair whipping around in a gust of wind. “I’m not a cat lady.”
“Why not? Why aren’t you a cat lady?”
“I dunno!” she said over her shoulder. They were still following her, but they weren’t keeping up well.
“I’ll get straight to the point,” one shouted. “I’m into anal!”
She turned around without stopping and gave them a thumbs up. Then they went away.
Some days, Wendy thought she’d programmed herself to deal with sketchy guys by just trying to be nice and sweet. One day she realized: That’s what she’d been doing. She’d freeze her anger and play the big, dumb, innocent-faced, long-haired white prairie girl. And apart from any strategy or mechanism, she did believe in being nice and sweet. She wanted so desperately and genuinely to believe in sweetness. She wanted to be kind. She missed the idea that she could be kind to everyone.
Wendy had always been irritable and snipey by nature, and as a teenager especially had tried to tame her brusqueness. She had tried hard, really hard, to be a Quiet Nice Boy back then. She had thought of Henry, actually, as her guide in memory. She would never be as gentle as him, but she tried. And in a lot of ways, playing Nice Boy had worked, and some days she wanted that world back.
Hanging outside the Vendome later, dreamy-drunk and bumming a cigarette and looking in the empty windows of a building across the way, a baby-faced young guy came up and put his arms around her. He was beefy and sallow and wearing only a black T-shirt and black jeans despite the cold. He wordlessly put his arms around her and touched her like an old lover. And she let him because she was drunk too, and his touch felt nice and warm and she liked his face and she was already feeling calm and pleasant, at peace.
Then he jumped back like he’d been burned. “Are you a guy!?” he said.
She exhaled, an old and broken autopilot kicking in. “No!” she said. Then, snap decision—“What you’re asking is if I’m trans,” she said. “I’m not a guy. I’m trans.”
And suddenly she was speaking kindly. She wanted to be kind to him, like her role had suddenly warped and now she was an aunt with a bratty child. “Just remember that, okay?” she said sweetly. “That’s the word. I’m not a guy. I’m just trans.”
And she put a sweet look on her face and made to go in.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey! I’m not a fucking guy!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you, I’m not a fucking guy!” And now Wendy was mad again, fully blind-mad, sudden and raging as the wind.
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!!”
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “Fuck! You! Mother! Fucker! Do you wanna fucking go! What do you fucking think, huh?! With me? Huh!? Fuck you fuck you fuck you—”
A friend of the guy’s appeared and quietly led him away. She went back in. And then she calmed down quickly. She laughed and chatted with her dad like nothing had happened. Ben was playing VLTs and Wendy said keep the twos and he got a full house.
“Nice job, girl!” He reached up with his enormous hands and tousled her hair. “You’re always such good luck. I should get you in more with our rickshaw business, you’re so fucking smart. Shit, I’m in a great fucking mood!” he said.
And in that moment, so was she. She really was. She didn’t feel mad at all. All that despair and anger died like an unplugged screen. Minutes after the fact, she’d almost forgot it happened. It made her wonder in a bad way.
7
Wendy texted Lila: so yesterday? I’m in. Lila called Wendy five minutes later.
“I just texted her,” Lila said. “You can go over tomorrow. She lives close to you. I’ll text you the address. And, uh, girl?”
“What.”
“She’s a drug dealer.”
“Obviously she’s a fucking drug dealer,” said Wendy.
“Yeah, but that’s like what she does,” Lila said impatiently.
“Okay. So what’s the problem?”
“Her main thing is jib.”
Wendy shuddered. “I don’t like that stuff.”
“I know, man. That’s why I told you.”
“I really don’t like that stuff.”
“Do you still want to go?” said Lila. “I could go for you. If it’s too—”
“You’re breaking up. Wait, where are you?”
“My mom and I are going to see my auntie. We just stopped for gas. I can go for you when I come back, it’s only a few days,” said Lila. There was a murmur in the background, then Lila faintly saying, “I’m talking to Wendy.”
A scuffling sound on the phone. “Hi, Wendy!”
“Hi, Renata,” Wendy yelled.
Lila’s mom worked at the sexual health clinic on Broadway. She was a tall Métis woman who wore long, flowing dresses. Once, Wendy was at the clinic for condoms, and Renata came round the corner as Wendy was stuffing a paper bag full to the top. After an awkward beat, Renata’d gestured deadpan to the vending machine across the hall and said, “All that and a bag of chips,” then laughed her head off. Wendy liked her. Lila liked her more now than she used to.
“So,” Lila said as she got back on the phone. “Am I getting you weirdo cowboy hormones or not?”
“I’ll suck it up. Go big or go home, right?”
“Your boobs agree,” Lila’s voice crackled. Wendy laughed at that.
That night in her dreams she had a dick again. She was running through a field with an erection and there was a girl trailing behind her. Suddenly they slammed through a door, and they were safe from the men chasing them. Then Wendy took the girl’s head and she fucked her face, she fucked her face hard and fast and hard and fast and harderfasterharderfasterharderfasterharderfaster and the girl loved it and was begging for more and then people began to notice and watch. They screamed at Wendy to fuck her even harder and when she did her soft hairless cock felt drugs-electric pleasure in the girl’s mouth and the girl gripped Wendy like murder, left bloodlines on her ass.
She woke up with a jerk of her feet and the sound of wind, tree branches skittering at the sides of the house. Instantly she felt for the hole in her crotch, pressed at the little bundle of muscle and nerves on her pelvis where they put the head of her dick. S
he flipped around and pressed her face and crotch into the bedding as hard as she could.
Then she sat up, scratching her hands. She reached for the bottle beside her bed and drank from it deeply, breathed out, let her muscles relax and loosen. It only occurred to Wendy then, randomly and eerily, that she still hadn’t looked at the other photo albums she’d taken from her grandmother’s house. Not now, she thought.
The dealer responded to Wendy’s text in the afternoon. Go to back of building, she said. Tell me when ur here. Wendy’d already forgotten her damn name.
She walked over and peered up at the wooden back stairs. She hadn’t bought drugs in a long time.
Wendy tapped on her phone, and a door on the third floor opened instantly. A woman in a sweater and jeans waved. She left the door open as Wendy walked up even though it was one of the first days of real, serious cold.
The dealer was small with waxy-pale skin, in her mid-thirties with curly hair. The door opened to a living room. There was a big blue carpet and pink and red velvet-flocked wallpaper and two ashtrays on the counter. And a small mini-blowtorch on a coffee table. There was a mix of cigarette smoke and an awful, metallic, Windex-y tang.
Wendy sat and took out a bottle of cucumber-scented lotion and rubbed it on her arms and face and took a breath from her hands. The woman was digging in a drawer.
“You know Lila well?” said Wendy.
“No. My girlfriend does,” said the woman. “She’s the one told me you were looking for stuff. I don’t like having people over,” she added. “I usually make people wait in the back lane. But this is a different kind of call. And I like trannies.”
“Me too,” said Wendy.
The woman let out a huge, shaking laugh. “‘Me too!’ Christ.”
She sat down with a plastic bag that clacked and pulled out a big bottle of Walmart brand vitamin D. She opened it up and offered it to Wendy.
Inside were small sheets of pills in foil. There were ten pills each and the sheet was clearly labelled in tiny font.
Medroxyprogesterone Acetate Tablets IP
MEPRATE ®
Each uncoated tablet contains:
Medroxyprogesterone Acetate IP 10 mg
(Micronized)
SCHEDULE ‘H’ DRUG
WARNING: To be sold by retail on the prescription of a Registered Medical Practitioner only
MFD 02/2014
EXP. 01/2017
Dosage: As directed by the physician. Store in a cool, dry and dark place.
Colour: Lake Brilliant Blue
“This might be a one-time thing,” said the woman. “I’m not gonna get more soon.” She coughed. “It’d be cool if you bought a lot of it. I don’t know who else will want it.”
Wendy looked up. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure either.” She looked through the other sheets in the bottle. “How much do you have?”
“Shit, let’s see …”
The woman screwed up her eyes and let out airy breaths as she counted. “I have sixty of those sheets and I’m pricing them at ten dollars each.”
Wendy smiled to herself. She had random but genuinely fond memories of drug dealers doing math. “A dollar a pill,” she said.
“That’s so cheap, don’t even try.”
“And if I bought a lot a lot?” said Wendy. She could probably unload it on other girls if it didn’t work for her.
A door opened and closed behind them. Wendy shifted to see the silhouette of a man cross to a washroom in the dark. The woman tossed her head. “Depends.”
Wendy had four hundred dollars in her pocket, most of her savings. “What if I took half of everything you have.”
“Then we’ll make it two hundred and fifty,” she said, distractedly tapping on her phone.
Wendy paid her and received three of the vitamin bottles. “If you still got them in a month, I might buy more.”
“Mmm.”
Wendy swallowed one of the pills, then checked that the sheets were all the same in each bottle before leaving the apartment to a blast of deliciously clean freezing air. It was a strange feeling to get new hormones again, eight years after the first ones. Got em. she texted Lila. Am I starting transition plus?
Wendy went straight home, changed, threw her dirty clothes and underwear in a garbage bag, and barrelled through sudden horizontal snow to the laundromat. That guy she’d tried to sleep with was at the counter again—
Taj? His name was Taj.
Wendy chuckled. “Hey, friend,” she said, breezing past him. He startled behind her and mumbled something back. She threw in her clothes and coat and put the water on hot.
Then suddenly she remembered: Ernie. He hadn’t called. It’d been a few days, yet she’d forgotten there might have been another possibility. It was like she’d expected it.
Lila responded to her text: you are super trans now congratulations!! Wendy decided to text Ernie, then re-remembered she also never got his number.
Right.
She moodily wiped a finger over her blank phone.
Taj came over. “Hi there,” he said nervously.
The buzz of a text again. Lila: Fag.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Wendy said icily, “do I know you?”
8
Two days later, as Wendy clocked out of work, there was a voicemail from Anna on her phone. She apologized for missing Wendy’s call.
She’d been in hospital. But feeling much better. Wendy could call back tomorrow. If Wendy liked. Anytime.
When Wendy got home, she found out she only had a shot of rye left. And the LC was already closed.
The vendor was open, but she didn’t want beer—she usually didn’t like drinking beer alone—and tonight especially for some reason, it sounded gross. She liked the clean, utilitarian immediacy of hard liquor and water.
Also she was broke. Payday was tomorrow.
Wendy put her hands to her face. Could she pilfer some of Raina’s? Just ask her? Borrow some money? But how pathetic was that, how—
“Fucking dummy,” she whispered to herself.
She changed into her nightgown and moisturized up and down her body, giving her skin fragrance and light. She massaged her nipples. They were tender, pleasantly so, already fragile and hurting again. She hadn’t expected the new hormones to work so quickly. It felt nice. Her chest felt healthy, something organic with life. Wendy closed her eyes and held her breasts, breathed in the scent of her soft, lush-smelling skin.
It’s okay, she thought to herself. You could use a night without, you know.
She turned on an episode of Angel and settled into bed, arms above the covers, her hair rivulets down her sides.
Wendy was afraid at first, but soon she just felt sleepy all on her own. Calm. Not restless. The surge of anger she’d expected fizzled and dissipated before it began. She felt peaceful. She wondered if she’d feel more rested in the morning.
Halfway into the episode she remembered—she actually had some Feeney’s. She used it in her coffee some mornings and kept it in the kitchen, so she’d forgotten about it. She got it and lay back down in bed, but the cap was stuck and her fingers were smooth from the lotion.
She wrapped the bottom of her nightgown around the cap and then a Kleenex on top of it, but it was still stuck. “Damn it,” she said to no one.
Wendy sat up with her feet on the floor and put the bottle between her legs, doubled over like she was driving a fist into her stomach.
When she eventually got it open, it instantly tasted creamy and sweet and her head felt drunk with an immediate fullness, a fullness-drunk she hadn’t known for—how long? It felt childlike; the decadence was obliterating. It was different than any other night of drinking Wendy’d had in recent memory. It was wonderful. She fell asleep feeling hazy and warm, cuddled and soft and beautiful.
“Did you speak to Henry’s sister?” Anna said the next morning. Her clipped, accented you sounded more like a yuh.
“Sort of,” Wendy said, her head full of static and her stoma
ch achy (she rarely drank anything sweet). “She didn’t want to talk to me. But she didn’t seem surprised either.”
“Hm.”
“Did she call you?” asked Wendy.
“No.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Heh. Many things,” Anna said.
“I see.”
Wendy twisted a piece of hair around a finger. She sat on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, sliding her feet in and out of her slippers.
“You talked about letters the other day,” she said after a silence.
“Yes, I did.”
“What do they say?”
“Various. Desires. And things.”
“Oh?”
“Yup.”
There was a longer silence.
“Hard to talk about over the phone,” Anna said.
Not a straight answer to save their fuckin’ life. An old rant of her dad’s bubbled into Wendy’s mind. But she felt calm. It had only recently occurred to her—the burden this woman was carrying. Sophie’d been right. And Wendy felt a little ashamed about it.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t mean to press you.”
“Oh. Well,” Anna said instantly. Then she added, “Wendy, I have forgotten. what’s your—surname?”
“Reimer.”
“So you married in.”
“No, I’m just another Reimer.”
“But you also said. You were a grandchild.” Silence. “I think I’m mixed up.”
Wendy had planned this out beforehand. “My mother is not around anymore. And Ben’s family didn’t like her. But Ben took to me. He’s more a father to me than anyone else has been and always was as I grew up. It’s complicated. But Ben’s the only real family I have, and I did know Henry briefly, when I was a child. Aganetha and I did not get along, but I was at her funeral. It is complicated. I’m sorry I couldn’t say this when we first spoke, Anna. My own past is strange and not a very completely happy tale. I hope you know I thought the world of Henry, and I want to hear what you have to say.”