by Casey Plett
“Hey! You wanna buy some T3s?” said the guy.
(A wave of shock and panic completed its full trip through Wendy with the Hey.) “For real?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She paused. “How much?”
The woman broke off and the man moved closer. “A buck each.”
“Hm.”
Wendy, what are you doing? “Actually, no thanks,” she said. “Never mind.”
Then the guy tilted his head. “Hey,” he said. “Are you a fuckin’ man?”
Her vision closed on his face before she could breathe. “No.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m not! Fuck off!” The light was about to change and she walked backwards into the street.
“Don’t lie to me, bro!” the guy said angrily. Then he laughed, jolly and breezy, and turned to follow the woman.
Wendy calmly crossed the street looking behind her. She lifted her phone up and called her dad.
“Kid!” said Ben.
“Hey, Dad. How’s it going?”
“I’m fuckin’ fantastic, how are you? Where are you? Are you outside?”
“I’m walking home. Where are you?”
“Lying in bed. Watching porn. Eating Cheetos. Wondering why my dick’s always orange.”
“Eww! Fuck!” Wendy said, swivelling around. “Dad! Jesus!”
“Aw, come on, I’m kidding.”
“Eww!”
“What, you’ve heard me tell that joke.”
“Yeah, I know,” Wendy said desperately, “but—”
She looked around, realizing how loud she’d been. The only people nearby weren’t looking at her. If they had been, they’d only have seen a vibrating, wild-eyed girl twitching her head around.
She swallowed. “Okay. I’m just feeling sensitive right now,” she said. “I had a hard day.”
“Oh no, what’s up?” Ben’s voice quivered.
Wendy wished she could tell her dad, A man made me jerk him off last night. (Did he make her? Was Wendy making that up?) But what would her dad say to that?
“Well, anyway,” he eventually said. “The rickshaw thing’s going well. Not that you asked yesterday.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m already over it. But, yeah! We got the warehouse yesterday. It’s on Adelaide. In the Exchange.”
“Cool.” She thought about when he’d said, “You have such pretty eyes. I don’t know how we made someone with such pretty eyes.” Then she was on the stoop jerking the guy off again, and her mind and body went blank.
“Now, you know,” Ben’s voice came back to her, “we could probably set you up as a driver. I’ll bet you’d make a lot of money, good-lookin’ as you are.”
She was in front of her house, and the lights were on, yellow against the night. “There’s a thing happening at home, I’ll have to let you go.”
“Toodle-oo.”
“I love you.” She whispered it, her voice unrecognizable and wispy, soft and high again as opposed to her usual ex-smoker’s rasp, forcibly soft and high where it would stay now, for a few days, for the time she remembered it, for a little while.
In her room, she shut the curtain and dimmed her lamp and opened her laptop. One of the quiet cis roommates was listening to CBC.
Facebook said: What are you thinking?
She started to type what happened with the guy on the stoop. Then immediately thought of the people who’d post hearts or say call the police or that they were so sorry or that she shouldn’t drink so much and what if she took drinking off the table for a week, maybe two, or every variation on Ugh, what is wrong with people?!
Wendy shut her laptop and placed three melatonins under her tongue. While they dissolved she changed into her nightgown, then filled a pint glass, half whisky and half water. She stood by her dresser and methodically drank the whole glass down. Gulp, gulp, gulp, breathe, gulp, gulp, gulp, breathe, gulp. She pulled the blankets over her without turning off the light. Ten hours later, she woke up cold and in a sweat from dreams of—she raised a hand to her head—did she have any dreams?
The next day, Wendy wandered by Value Village on her lunch break and saw a team of Holdeman Mennonites lined up outside the front door. Each of them held a small non-descript box. She stared at them from across the street, perplexed, but none of them moved.
Wendy looked at her phone. Ernie still hadn’t read her text from yesterday.
She texted him an emoji of a beer stein and an ice cream cone. This one came back as, “read: 3:56 p.m.”
She stood over her phone for another minute, waiting, her hair fluttering in the wind. She walked over to the food court in the slush and purple light, her shadow long as a pickup truck.
Inside the mall, Wendy wondered about her grandfather again. Had he found others like him? Who’d he been looking for when Ben saw him at the bar? Did her grandfather ever think of abandoning his life?
Or maybe he wasn’t so silent. That was the kind of thing that could happen, but people just didn’t talk about. It wasn’t an out-and-out lie—Mennonites had trouble doing that—just an omission. She could even see her Oma admitting it if Wendy had known to question her. Like, Oh yes, yes, he used to go out to the city for the weekends, and I had ideas about what he did. Not a fun period. But I kept quiet and prayed to the Lord, and soon enough he asked His forgiveness. Like, that wasn’t completely impossible.
The temperature tumbled back to normal that night. Wendy was up for work early the next morning and the footstep-divots from the slush had frozen and the streets looked like the moon. As Wendy waited in the kitchen for her coffee, she saw an old woman on the sidewalk with two canes wobbling on the ice in the early dawn light, inching toward a cab.
11
Wendy had spent her childhood frightened and being hit by boys. Her dad began to teach her how to fight when she came home the first day of grade one with a bloody nose. He thought she ought to fight back. Wendy was big, but there were always more of the others. She never got hurt that bad, in the end, but she was afraid of these boys, always. Not that she and her dad lived in the roughest of neighbourhoods but—there were better.
It’d all stopped around high school when they’d moved south of the river (a third floor apartment in a well-kept house off Lilac and Corydon; Wendy’d loved that house), but the memory of that fear bubbling up in her bones was permanent.
She knew trans girls who described fears of suddenly being seen as a faggot, but Wendy’d heard the word since she was old enough to hit a baseball. It wasn’t that she was particularly feminine, but she was never exactly closeted either. She wanted dolls, sure, but she didn’t pine after them. She wanted to wear pink—but she liked black and grey too. Hand flips, voice lilts, a love of beautiful, pretty things—she was no more inherently femmy than any average scrappy girl with a weirdo poor single parent, but these clear traits still came out regularly, and no one failed to notice. Ever. Even at the new high school, where kids handled her brand of odd a little better, even when the response wasn’t abuse, everyone always noticed.
When she transitioned at twenty-two, that old bodily fear from childhood reawakened. She was living in a shitty room by the U of W and working at the music store up Portage. She was a year on lady pills when she moved in and was passing as cis for the first time. Guys would whistle and slap her ass with their jackets. Before this, she’d always been brave enough to tell boys to fuck off and throw fists when she had to, but passing as cis, she was suddenly demure and weak—how could she say anything back at them without them realizing the girl they were teasing was a man? Her dad had said, Aw, that’s just what guys do. Play along, and they won’t bother you. And, hey, look at you—you’re attractive! But the belligerent well of bluster that, for better or worse, Wendy’d always drawn on for strength was—it wasn’t the same anymore. She didn’t know how to talk about it.
And once, a tall man followed Wendy into her building and said, “You a transsexual? A guy told me you’re a transsexual! Y
ou a man or a woman?”
“What guy?” she’d said, but he repeated, “Are you a fuckin’ man?” He followed her inside, made a grab for her, demanded she let him suck her dick, and spit in her face before he left. He was definitely high on something (bath salts, maybe?). He yelled, “I will never die, bitch!” And she learned right then: You always had to be on your guard. It didn’t matter how often you passed, it could always be taken away. Always. She’d never be little, she’d never be fish. It could always be taken away.
The next day, one of the ass-slapping dudes screamed, “Hey! Turns out you’re a fuckin’ man, hey?” That group of guys on her block got meaner then. They never hurt her, per se. They’d mock-scream, “It’s a maaaaaaan! You think you fuckin’ fooled us?” They threw rocks at her, stuff like that. Someone threw a sandwich at her once from the top floor of the building next to hers. One night she was chased to her building and got in just in time. In retrospect, it wasn’t too different from escaping from a few torturing kids in grade school who were agnostic about hurting her physically but got deeper pleasure from messing with her brain. If you could freeze-frame the first second she came around the block, some of those boys would’ve looked glad to see her.
Now, bussing back from work, Wendy did not feel mad. She only felt tired and jumpy. And as she got off the bus and walked home, she called on some internal, gentle well of knowledge that shortly she wouldn’t be scared again, that her fear would congeal into scar tissue.
She tramped up the stairs to her house and changed into a nightgown. She made a vodka-diet-soda and drank in the rocking chair beside her bed, the nerves settling, like leaves floating down through her insides.
Wendy felt more normal by the weekend. Look, if she saw that dude again, she’d just sock him. Done. Sealed. He was a loser. Whoever that guy was, he was an evil fucking do-nothing loser who was probably some unloved poor drunk and a fucking dipshit. Whatever. Fuck him. He was a snivelling piece of cowardly shit, and if she saw him again she’d sock him, end of story. Maybe he was stronger than she thought, but she was still fucking bigger. Done. What more was there to think about. It’s not like anything really horrible went down in the end!
12
Sipping dreamily from a flask, slip-n-sliding her way down the sidewalk, Wendy walked home from work after eleven. The temp had been dropping for days, and now it was the first night of true inhuman cold, the kind of thirty-below-before-the-wind-chill air that seemed to leech pain straight from the nerves.
The sidewalk was still made of divots and moguls, steam issuing from every building, Pedestrians looked shrunken and soldered into themselves, void blobs of spaceman fabric.
Wendy was drunk and felt great and she was sick of taking the fucking bus.
She cut through Wolseley instead of staying on Portage. Who cared. She had all night. She thought she’d head to Cousin’s, but close to Westminster she ran into Eddie and Red.
“Eddie!”
“Heyyyyyy! Wendy!”
“Red!”
Red had asked Wendy on a date once. Eddie’d told her, Don’t even think about it. That big Icelandic fuck—he ain’t good to women. Eddie was in his forties, worked bar fronts and sidewalks for change and usually wasn’t here in the winter. Nothing had ever happened with Red; Wendy’d agreed to meet him one night—but then bailed. Another night that summer, she’d been chilling outside in the Village and one random guy’s face suddenly contorted and he said, Wait—are you a boy or a girl!? Red clapped the guy’s shoulder out of nowhere, and said Hey! Wendy’s cool! Wendy was grateful for that. Another night, she’d wandered down to Osborne and saw Eddie and Red with a bunch of kids, and she sat on the sidewalk, hanging out, and cops pulled up and wordlessly muscled Red into their car. Fifteen minutes later they came back and pushed him out. He was wincing and got up slowly. Someone lifted his shirt up, but the cops hadn’t left marks. Wendy’d made to touch Red, just softly, on his knee, to comfort him. Eddie shook his head and put a hand out, like a parent around a stove, and said No, no.
Now they were both here at the bus stop.
“What’re you doing here?” Wendy asked. “Thought you were in Vancouver.”
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” replied Eddie.
“You got a toonie?” said Red.
She gave one to him and they shared her flask.
“Let’s go to Osborne,” said Eddie. “There ain’t no fucking money here right now.”
“Let’s walk on the river,” Wendy suggested.
“Alright. Hey, you still driving?”
“I’ve never had a car,” said Wendy.
“I’m starting an auto shop outside of the city.”
They went down on the river and emptied her flask. “You wanna build a warming hut?” Eddie said to Red. “I saw it in the paper, they give you five thousand dollars if you come up with a good design and they put you here on the river. We can do something better than any of those fucks. You know how you keep heat in? You don’t let it out. It’s not fuckin’ rocket science.”
“I’m no good at that stuff,” said Wendy.
“Shit,” said Eddie, wheeling around as a guy passed them.
“Huh?”
“Ah, I thought that was this one motherfucker. Goes around bragging about little girls. Bullshit, I don’t stand for that shit. I ever see that guy, I’m punching his fuckin’ lights out.”
Her flask was completely empty. “You got kids?” said Eddie.
“I don’t.”
Eddie waved his hand. “I saw my boy today.”
They got off the river and up to Osborne, and Eddie and Red set up shop in front of the Toad. Wendy went in to see who was inside and have one drink before heading home.
She did fuck Eddie once. Coming out of Ozzy’s on a cool summer night, she’d made a stop at the vendor, and he was working the crowd outside. They got some king cans and went to drink by the dumpster with Red. Eddie said, Hey, c’mere, just let me talk to you for a sec. They walked down the back lane then across Confusion Corner, and he was saying, You don’t want to be with Red, that big fuck, he ain’t good to women, but suddenly Eddie was touching her all over her body. Man, I don’t know why I’m so attracted to you! he said. I don’t get why I like you, but you’re so beautiful! She’d giggled and lightly touched his arms and slouched into the side of a building. Eddie was a tiny guy. He put his hands on her shoulders then slid them down her acre of a chest and said Are they real? and when she said yes, he pressed her tits, not like a forty-year-old man with rawhide skin but with wonder, like a boy. She didn’t mind. He fucked her on a picnic table in the park behind Wild Planet, with her orange striped dress up and her dick flopping around in the wind. He said, Wait, I don’t want to come in you! and pulled out and—came on the grass, she guessed. She walked by there a few days later and looked as if maybe she could tell.
Raina was in the Toad, sitting with a girl Wendy didn’t know. They sat under a TV showing football and looked bored. Raina was eating fries.
Wendy sat on a stool, drinking a rum and Coke and watching them. Finally she texted Raina:
I can see uuuuu. You eat those friiiiiiessss
Raina took out her phone and examined it coldly. Wendy laughed. She got a text in a second: bathroom in 5
“Are you trying to bang that girl?” Wendy asked her from the stall.
“Lord, no. She’s a friend from work. And an uninteresting one, I’m afraid.”
“Ditch her!” said Wendy. She hiccupped. “Let’s go home and watch movies and cuddle. You’re not with—I mean is your lady—?”
“Genevieve is at her parents and just told me she went to bed. So I think that is an excellent idea.”
Outside, Eddie and Red were still working the exiting drunks. Wendy waved. Eddie bellowed “’Bye, Wendy!” Raina’s face tightened. She didn’t like men.
“Wendy-burger, how have you been? I feel like it’s been some time.”
“It has.”
“I’ve been oc
cupied with Genevieve and work. I’m sorry about that. And I do have a morning shift.” She rubbed her eyes with mittened hands, then took Wendy’s gloved right one, swinging their arms back and forth like schoolgirls.
“Seems like you like her a lot, hey?”
“Genevieve is wonderful,” Raina said shyly. “She is very, very good to me. I hope you two can spend some more time together.”
“Are you the first trans lady she’s dated?”
“No,” said Raina. “She dated a sister in uni. She’s also dated women on the spectrum. Which has been refreshing.”
“I bet,” said Wendy. “Well, hey, I’m happy for you. We should all hang out some time.”
“I would like that. But, really, how are you? You’ve seemed out of sorts the last couple days.”
Wendy still hadn’t told her about the guy on the stoop and didn’t want to. She felt pathetic and weak just thinking about it. She didn’t want to tell anyone. “I called Anna. The old woman who knew my grandpa.”
“Oh?”
“It turns out he was just gay.”
“Huh. Are you sure?”
“That’s what she said,” Wendy said. “My grandpa told her herself, supposedly.”
“I’m just thinking,” Raina said, “of the fact that many sisters throughout history didn’t understand the difference themselves. Particularly back then. I can’t imagine it would be different for Mennonites. Unless I’m mistaken.”
“You’re not,” said Wendy. They reached the bridge and were slammed with wind. “Why didn’t I think about that? I know that. Of course I know that.” But Raina couldn’t hear her.
“My surgery date got re-scheduled,” Raina said when they reached the other side of the bridge.
Wendy groaned and squeezed Raina’s hand. “Oh, not again, sweetie, what happened?”
“No,” said Raina. “It got moved up. I’m heading off January fourteenth now.”