by Casey Plett
“Well!” Anna let out a long sigh. Wendy wasn’t sure if she’d buy it or if it was all too weird and sinful for a woman like her in the first place, but she just said, “I’m old.”
“I’d like to know more about Henry,” said Wendy gently. “Maybe other people in the family wouldn’t. But I cared about him very much, and I would like to know.”
“Oh,” Anna said, as if surprised. “Well. I suppose I … Nice that someone wants to know more about him. Henry.”
“Perhaps I could come up and have a coffee with you sometime?” Wendy said. “I’m happy to talk on the phone, certainly, but it would be nice to meet you and hear more about the family.” This she hadn’t planned on saying and she suddenly thought, Premeditated lies. “I don’t mean to impose.”
“No, no,” said Anna. “Sure. Couldn’t. See why not. I don’t have a husband anymore. So I’m very free.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Wendy.
“That was a joke.”
“Ah.”
“He’s dead,” Anna added.
“Ah. Well, that’s funny,” said Wendy. She clapped a hand over her forehead. Jesus Christ, Wendy. There was more silence. “Anna, can I ask you something?” she said. “Did Henry have a name he preferred?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Did my Opa have a name. Like a gir—”
The word caught on her insides in a way it hadn’t for a long time.
“An—alternative name,” she said. “Maybe not a masculine name.”
“No,” said Anna, sounding confused. “He liked Henry. To my understanding. Thought it was a healthy name. Strong sounding. Wanted Ben to have his name, you know. Aganetha. Objected.”
“Now that’s interesting,” Wendy said, more to herself than to Anna.
“I’m sorry?”
“Interesting he’d want to pass on his name. Or just not even choose a different name.”
“Why? He was old.”
“Well, wouldn’t he want a girl’s name if he wanted to be a girl?”
“Good heavens!”
“Huh?”
“Ohmyword. Oh. My word. That is.” A long silence. “Where would you get that idea?”
“What? Well, you!” Wendy said. A sob of frustration came out of nowhere. “You told me! You told me he was like—” Shit. “Like Tulip,” said Wendy. “You told me he was like Tulip.”
“I know Marvin—uh, Tulip, I know he has a—a—a—a taste for men. All I meant. But that. What you say. No, never. No.”
Wendy sat with the phone in her hand. “You know what, never mind,” she said. “Forget it. Sorry I called back. Never mind any of this.”
“Hm, but just a second. I—” said Anna.
“I have to go,” said Wendy. Her body was vibrating. “You know how to get—you can call me. You know, good luck with everything.”
“Well, but.”
Wendy waited.
“Be nice to talk about him,” Anna said desperately. “With someone.”
“Okay,” Wendy said flatly. “I have to go to work now.”
“Perhaps I’ll call you another time.”
“Goodbye.”
“God’s blessings.”
“Later.”
The next day Wendy woke up at noon, but it was one-thirty when she got out of bed. It was her half-shift day; nothing to do until five. She made a big pot of coffee and got into a good mood. She turned her phone off and turned up loud poppy music and began to clean her room. She was singing and sweeping and tossing clothes and bottles into piles.
Looking out the window, she saw a guy sitting in his sunroom in the building across the lane. He sat on a couch wearing his coat, surrounded by stacks of blue plastic school chairs. It didn’t seem like he was doing anything. It looked to Wendy like the funniest thing. An ache of something happy welled up in her chest, and she stared at him, grinning like a moron.
Eventually he saw Wendy and waved. She waved back. She got more coffee and added whisky this time. It was three o’clock. She realized she was still in her nightgown. Why on earth was someone out in their sunroom in the winter?
She had the next day off and woke to sounds of Raina and her girlfriend in the living room.
“Hey, sports fans.” Wendy lumbered up with a coffee, rubbing her face.
“Good morning,” said Raina. “I’m afraid Genevieve and I didn’t know if you were waking soon, so we ate all the breakfast already.” They were both wearing pyjamas and loose-fitting T-shirts.
“No one’s getting hurt,” said Wendy. She waved jauntily at the girlfriend. “We haven’t met yet? I’m Wendy.”
“Hello.”
Raina began to clear the dishes.
“You home tonight?” said Wendy.
“Not sure,” said Raina. “If I am, we should have a rickey. Or two.”
“Or three,” said Wendy. “You kid. You make those real drinks, you keep me young.”
“Yes, well,” demurred Raina, “the one woman who did not partake the other night went on to punch holes in the wall, so I suppose that says something, doesn’t it.”
The girlfriend snorted involuntarily, with eyes wide.
“You haven’t met Sophie yet, have you, my love?” said Raina.
“No.”
“Well, that must change.”
“Yeah,” said Wendy, pulling her ponytail tight. “Does that ever.” The girlfriend tried to look happy about this.
Sophie herself called as Wendy was getting dressed. “I need to drive to the shop to get wipers. Mine broke. So could you possibly come with me?”
Her voice was so fucking sweet and melodious.
“Why do you need me to come, Sophie?”
“I can’t see.”
“What do you mean, you can’t see?” said Wendy, zipping up her skirt. “It’s not snowing.”
“Yeah, but when I drive, all the water gets kicked up. I need someone to look out the window and reach out and wipe the windshield.”
“It got that warm?”
“Look outside, dude.”
Wendy opened her curtain to a lake of melting crystal. A car sped through the lane and washed the building across the way. “Jesus,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s like ten degrees out. It’s nuts.”
“Sophie, that’s—why don’t you take the bus?”
“I don’t like buses.”
“Kinda inconvenient.”
Silence. Wendy put a hand to her face. “Sorry. Yeah, I’ll come with you.”
“I’m cat sitting for Lila, I’m not far.”
She walked south to Lila’s place and got in Sophie’s car. Sophie was right—the melt kicked up on her windshield the second she moved.
The parts store was at the other end of downtown. At every intersection they reached out to wipe off the windshield. A middle-aged guy in a sedan laughed his head off. They waved and laughed back. It wasn’t unfriendly.
Wendy’d thought she’d tell Sophie the new stuff about Anna and her grandpa. But every time she opened her mouth, she said something else.
They went for pizza across the street, and a guy said, “Damn, ladies!” A boy Wendy knew from high school rollerbladed past the window.
“Heard from Lila you’re taking medroxyprogesterone,” said Sophie.
“Yep.”
“How is it?”
“Making me less depressed, I think. I didn’t expect that.”
“No kidding.”
It was true. “Yup.”
“Never heard that before about progesterone.”
Wendy shrugged. “Hormones are weird. No one really knows what they do anyway.”
“Okay, but you said less depressed. Do you mean happier?”
Wendy was sometimes annoyed by questions like this. But she sucked on her pop and thought about it. “I think so,” she said finally. “I’ve been calmer, I guess. Does calmer count?”
“I suppose. What about your boobs, what’d they do?”
“Bigger. Rounder.”
<
br /> “That’s great. I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Fuck you.”
“Aw, that’s not what I meant—I’m just saying, I couldn’t know.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re wearing a fucking coat, dude!”
Sophie swiped at her phone as they finished eating. She said, “There’s that trans march meeting next month. I guess they’re gonna try to have one in Pride this year.”
“What’s the trans march like?” said Wendy. “We’ve never had one. Well, I guess you know that.”
“You just show up and go,” said Sophie. “It’s not like the parade. I’ve been in a couple; they’re fun. It’s nice to see us all together.”
They finished their food, and Sophie morosely stared out the window. “I wish I’d known you,” she said, “back in the day. I didn’t know any trans women growing up here. Not a single one.”
“It would’ve been nice to know you too,” said Wendy.
“You wouldn’t have liked me,” Sophie blurted out. “I was so different. I was such a timid thing. I was so quiet and proper. Naïve.”
Wendy nodded. “Babe,” she said, “go back a decade, we were probably all different.”
Sophie’s eyes were still vacant. “You’ve done sex work, right? Do I remember that right?”
“Yeah,” said Wendy. “You?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm.”
“Why do you ask?” Wendy said. Her eyes darted from Sophie’s to outside. “Did you work the street?”
“No,” Sophie said. “Well, once. But no.”
“I only did incalls myself,” said Wendy. “My old place on Spence. Couple houses from where I lived as a kid—that was kinda weird.” She was silent. “Why, what’s going on?”
“Thinking on the fuckin’ therapy I had to do,” Sophie said. “Oh-my-god-does-this-make-me-gay—all that.”
“Sure.”
“I was all Whipping Girl about it for a bit,” Sophie said. “You know: ‘Of course you’re not gay.’ No guy who likes trans girls is gay. You don’t want hairy dudes; you want us as girly as possible.”
“Heels and lipstick and cock.”
“Yep. And that’s all true, there’s no question,” she went on. “Of course, those guys are straight; of course, even the liberal ones are homophobic in ways they don’t understand. Of course, there’s something ugly in their brains that won’t let them be. That’s still what most of me wants to say now: ‘Boy, listen, you love girls. You just like girls with clitties big enough to fuck you. You love girls.’ If only they would be good to us as girls. You know what I’m talking about.”
“That I do,” Wendy said.
“I used to be gung ho about that. Now, that’s about what ninety-five percent of me thinks.”
“And the other five percent?”
“‘I don’t fuckin’ know, man. You tell me—you’re the one with my dick up your ass.’”
Later, Wendy went to a benefit concert in the old United Church of Christ. Two young women and one young man played music in front of the choir loft. One had a guitar face-up in her lap, one had a keyboard, the other had some kind of stringed thing. Sometimes the music sounded beautiful and sometimes it sounded awful. It would be gorgeous and haunting, then tinny and weird.
The church was so huge and empty even though fifty people had shown up. Wendy sat up in the balcony at the back, hugging her knees to her chest with her boots off and coat and scarves piled next to her.
Her grandparents’ church was maybe a quarter this size. Henry’d told her how it used to be that men sat on one side, women on the other. That had stopped not too long before. “For the better, I should make clear,” he’d wheezed. “Don’t want to give the wrong idea.”
“Why would I get the wrong idea?” little Wendy had said. “Men and women should sit together. Men and women are the same, aren’t they?” And he responded with something about how he and Wendy and her Oma all got to sit in church together now, and wasn’t that a treat. This memory came to Wendy suddenly; she hadn’t thought about it in years.
Home tonight? she texted Raina on the way out.
Am over at Genevieve’s. She is upset with me I’m afraid. I said something very admittedly insensitive and unacceptable. I miss you though.
She stared coldly at her phone, then typed, Yeah. Miss you too. Love you.
When she got home, shuddering and watery from freezing rain, she went right up to her room and opened the second photo album she’d taken from her Oma’s house, the one from the early eighties. But Henry wasn’t in it. Not in a single picture. Everything else was in place—Ben in his early twenties, Ben and his brothers with various degrees of moustache in front of a Christmas tree, Oma baking with a sardonic look at the camera. But no Henry.
Wendy stayed up long into the night looking through every picture again and again, in her bed, in her nightgown, with a glass of whisky by her side. But she hadn’t missed anything. And her grandma loved taking pictures. Barring some truly weird explanation, her grandfather just hadn’t been around.
The only clue was one picture where a large blue men’s shirt was barely visible to the side, hanging on the doorknob of her grandparents’ bedroom. Unusual in itself; her Oma was the kind of housewife up at eight every morning, tidying and vacuuming.
She looked through the third album, which dated from 1993, the year before he died. Henry was in that one. But Wendy knew that; she was in it too. She’d been eight. She spent a lot of time at the house that year; they’d almost transferred her to a country school. It’d been one of her dad’s less stable periods. Her grandpa’d been weak and on his way out even then, but very, very sweet to her. He took her to the gravel pits a lot. He said he liked the quiet. Wendy liked being with him. He would say to Wendy, “Your father loves you. He is imperfect, and he has done many wrong things.”
He would say: “His love is greater than his faults.”
He would say: “Love is not attached to our human foibles because if we are truly loving, it comes from God. Love withstands our sins; love is higher than all the … crud we might inflict on those we love. Your father needs to beg forgiveness for his sins to you and to the Lord. But that is a separate thing from the fact that he loves you. And he will always love you. That is how love works.” He repeated variations of this a lot.
To many kids—many adults too, she supposed—it’d all be total bullshit. But in Wendy’s case, it was true. Those were the right words for her father’s love, and when she was younger she believed them with all her heart. This got her into trouble later on.
She liked those old boy pictures of her too. She’d made a cute kid, lanky with a bowl cut and a stupid huge grin.
Wendy’d been devastated when her Opa died. But when she came out as an adult—Thank God, she’d thought, thank God he’s not around for this. Who knows how he would’ve dealt? Wendy treasured that she could keep his memory clean and undisturbed.
Which, she reflected now, was maybe a stupid thought in the end. Considering.
I’m going to find out about you, she thought, closing the album and going to sleep. I’m sorry I didn’t take you more seriously. I’ll find you, I promise.
9
You want to go for dinner tonight? she texted Ben the next day.
Why wouldn’t I, he said. Let’s go to Saffron’s.
She went home after work and got lost in a stupid Facebook argument—Sophie had gotten into it over some cis lesbian posting about vaginas.
Wendy typed a thought then deleted it. Lila showed up on the thread and started getting into it too. Wendy sat so long thinking about what to say, then saying nothing, that she was late to meet her dad.
“So this stuff with my brothers is getting tough,” her dad said as they sat down.
“What’s going on?”
“Eh. My mum left me a bigger share of the dough than they got, and they—don’t like that.”
“They make so much more money than you! Can they do a
nything about it? Wills are law, aren’t they?”
“They can contest it,” Ben said grimly. He shook his head and his toque went crooked on his grey nest of hair. “Which would drag it out. And I’m kinda counting on that money. I signed the papers on this rickshaw investment.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was kidding. Not about the investment, that’s gonna be just baller.”
“Baller,” said Wendy.
A waitress came by. “Can I get you folks some drinks?”
“Two Kokanees,” said her dad, then turned to Wendy. “Yeah?”
“I don’t always like beer by myself, but I always like beer with you.”
He nodded at the waitress. “Two Kokanees.” The waitress looked confused. “It’s my daughter, I’m being a good influence,” he said. She laughed and left.
“Dad,” said Wendy, taking off her toque and running her hands all the way through her hair. “Who’s doing this to you?”
“Bah! Mostly Al. He’s just hurting. He was pretty close to Mum. It’s not just about money. It never is.”
“But that’s terrible,” Wendy said. “Like, that’s shitty, fuck-you-forever territory. It’s fuck-you-forever territory as far as I’m concerned. Like, I don’t want to ever talk to him again, Father!”
Her dad put his hand out and said, “People need your love the most when they deserve it the least.”
“Oh, bullshit!” snarled Wendy.
“Nope, I’m absolutely serious. People need your love the most when they deserve it the least.”
Wendy turned her head and put a hand through her hair again. “’Kay.”
“You’re gonna figure that out more as you get older, you know.” Her dad nodded.
“Sure,” she said calmly.
She had to ask about her grandpa but she didn’t know how.
After they ordered she said, “Hey, Dad, what was your grandfather like?”
“My grandpa! My Opa!” said Ben.