“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said in her best Angelina voice. “I just play one on TV.”
He laughed, doing an impression of someone who isn’t worried anymore, and she chimed in, letting the performance catch them both, while the audience who watched from the other side of their imaginary stage melted into applause, and cheers, and laughter.
The Voice of Edith
Edith from upstairs was recording a podcast this week. The whole building knew it, because she taped neon-pink notes to everyone’s door with the time and date repeated in her loopy-sexy handwriting, asking for quiet. The show had a dumb name that I could never remember. It took an hour, at least. During that arbitrary hour, which always seemed to come at the least convenient time of day, Edith camped out in the laundry room with her headphones on and talked about the Pixies.
Katz and I, who split the shitty, low-ceilinged studio in the basement, could hear every word. This time it was a Sunday night, seven p.m., which was usually my prime time for last-minute laundry. I paced across my half of the apartment while the voice of Edith ululated through the heating duct. She sang and noted to herself where to dub in music or follow up with an interview question. Her laugh was high and artificial. She sounded like one of the waterbirds that crowded the waterfront and shit on the railings of the historic paddleboats.
“Chill,” Katz commanded. She passed me a bowl.
This did not change, at all, the speed of time for me. I nudged my laundry pile closer to the door and leaned on the wall. My head was right under the duct—Edith came through loud and clear.
She kept saying the word trans; that one was easy to make out. I looked at Katz. “What do you think she’s saying?”
Katz shrugged. “It’s her podcast. She’s saying trans.”
“But do you think she’s saying good things?”
Katz, who was trans, looked up from her Gameboy. “Whatever she says, it’s not going to be less than an hour. Cool your jets.”
“I wonder who she’s talking to.”
“She.”
* * *
Katz was about to stop being Richie when I met her—Richie was the name on the lease for the basement apartment. We connected through a Facebook group for friends living with friends. Housing was almost impossible to find, I’d just started a new job downtown in the Portland Police building, and the Craigslist rental section made me feel as though I was taking a guided tour of my own funeral. Katz offered a private section of the huge basement room for four hundred and fifty dollars, plus half of Internet and utilities, queer-friendly, 420-friendly. The building was a block off Broadway, close to the bus lines. We met in person for the first time at the Peet’s Coffee on 15th. Katz got there first.
“I’m transitioning,” she said. “I am a she.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Have you ever lived with a trans person?”
I looked down, ashamed. I had not. I knew that my lack of experience made me deficient, like, as a feminist. “I don’t have a problem,” I muttered.
“I need a roommate so that I can afford the transition.”
“Surgery?”
Katz scoffed. Her disdain made her beautiful to me. Her teeth were gapped in the front, and her lips parted over them in an impeccable punk rock sneer. “That’s for rich bitches,” she said. “I just want my body to get out of its own way.”
She didn’t ask me about my pronouns or preferences or make any comment about my perceived level of allyship and queerness. My sister had come out last year; it would have been awkward to chime in and say, Me too. So I stayed the way I was. Maybe Katz thought that my appearance spoke for itself. She saw me as an ally, and I didn’t try to claim a bigger space than that.
We lived together just fine. Every time I paid rent, I patted myself on the back for helping Katz get a little closer to personal integration.
After that initial meeting, Katz never mentioned her identity, and it was apparent that the role I’d fantasized about—confidante, trans ally, best friend, hand-holder, gender demystifier—wasn’t mine to play. Katz wanted to play video games, smoke weed, and leave for work on time. She was so normal. I thought I had a highly attuned sensitivity to identity and gender, but Katz threw me off. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant, trans-ness, and I was primed ideologically to be protective of Katz in every way. But Katz, it seemed, didn’t need protecting. Katz was fine. I was the weirdo.
Outside the apartment, though, nobody could tell that I didn’t belong. I was a perfect fit for the forensics team, my new boss Jeff said, because I was completely inoffensive.
“I hope that doesn’t offend you,” he said, as a joke.
I shrugged and tried to smile. I needed the job, and after all he wasn’t wrong. I was boring. Average height, average weight, brown eyes, brown hair, average number of freckles, two years of community college, where I got average grades. I was so boring that they didn’t bother to drug-test me. So boring that security waved me through the metal detector even when I forgot my ID badge. So boring that one of my former bosses, who’d employed me for eight years, forgot who I was when I called to ask if I could list him as a professional reference.
I could afford rent, and that was about it. I made minimum wage plus ten cents. Average.
The only interesting thing I’d ever done was live with Katz. I didn’t mention her at all in my interview, although Jeff made a point of saying that Portland Police was an inclusive employer, which was code for Gays welcome, not that anyone would assume you’re gay. So at least he saw me, even if no one else did. The nature of my job made my identity irrelevant. I was a filing clerk, the only one on my team. I spent eight hours a day in a refrigerated room sorting films and entering data into an ancient desktop computer they called Sweeney Todd.
The pictures and numbers were sickening, to say the least. One of the interview questions was, “Have you or a loved one ever been the victim of a sexual assault?” Looking at the photos and lab notes, I understood why they screened out applicants who were survivors. Forty hours a week of this stuff would be immensely triggering. Nothing had ever even happened to me, and I had nightmares for the entire six-week training period. After a couple of months, I acclimated, but I still wished somebody would ask me at least once if I was okay.
It was a relief to step away from old Sweeney during my breaks, stretch, and warm my hands on a Styrofoam cup of free coffee. Sometimes there were treats in the break room, and I ate as many as I could and smuggled a few to eat while I hid in a bathroom stall. Food wasn’t allowed in the data room. Crumbs attracted ants.
* * *
“Have you ever met Edith in person?” I asked Katz.
“I’m on Level Nine.”
I fidgeted and went into the tiny kitchen area: a two-burner stove, Katz’s butcher block, a utility sink where someone used to clean their paintbrushes, as you could tell by the dry splotches of house colors on the porcelain. I started to heat the water for tea, enough for two. Edith was still going. Being a little stoned was the worst on podcast days, because I felt I was caught in the infinite loop of Edith’s voice and that she’d probably just go on talking about every conceivable aspect of alt-rock forever and ever and my laundry would pile up and stink and I wouldn’t have anything to wear to work if I left the apartment at all and Katz would move up, Mario World after Mario World, and only I would be frozen in time, waiting for the water to boil, waiting for silence.
I guess I was more of a Talking Heads person, when you got down to it.
I stared into the pot—we didn’t have a kettle—and watched the tiny bubbles start to form, like pearls, on the stainless steel.
“You want tea, Katz?” I asked, just to hear someone else’s voice, someone other than Edith.
“Level Nine, Dana.”
If I served Katz her tea, was I conforming to gender roles? Had Katz ever had ma
le privilege and did she retain any of it as she transitioned? In my heart, I was jealous of her. She had the power to decide her gender expression and, as she changed, she stayed fluid in a way that I didn’t. On top of that, she didn’t have to explain herself or process anything with me. I was unessential to her transition and, aside from my monthly rent payments, I didn’t feel that I fit into the story at all.
“What if she wanted to talk to you? Would you do it?”
Katz put the Gameboy down and took the mug of tea. “Who?”
“Edith.”
“Why would I?” She stared at me. Her eyes were an uncanny, milky green. Katz was perpetually single, which was another thing I didn’t understand about her. She got prettier every day.
I shrugged. “I’m stoned. I don’t know.”
“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.”
She made it sound like a joke, but her stare was hard, glassy.
“I just worry that Edith is putting the wrong ideas out there. You know? About trans stuff.”
“No, you’re worried that you won’t have time to do your laundry.”
I was first to look away. Did that mean I was the one who was wrong? I wanted Katz to be on my team, two against Edith, but instead I felt small and alone. We slept in the same room, with our respective beds at opposite corners shielded by paper screens and our bookshelves. Yet I never felt I could win Katz over. I wanted her to see how good I was for her—what an amazing support person, so woke, the best advocate.
“I should just switch days,” I said, lamely. “That would take the drama out of it.”
“Edith and I used to date. Now we just work together.” Katz said. She picked up the Gameboy. “She’s fine on the trans thing.”
In a world where I wasn’t kind of stoned and constrained by my fetishistic relationship to time and space, I could walk right into that laundry room and start my wash, if I wanted to. I had my roll of quarters for the machines. The dryer was the worst, and only warmed my clothes into a soggy, humid bolus. Katz had taken Edith’s note off the front of our door and stuck it on the inside. The pink paper kept catching my eye.
“You went out with Edith?”
“Yeah, for about a year. I met her at the call center. We liked each other’s voices.”
I didn’t ask, Why didn’t you tell me. Why should Katz tell me anything? I felt my face get hot.
“When did you break up?”
“Right before you moved in. She lived here, actually. This is her couch.”
We were sitting on Edith’s couch. The nubby velvet, bald in places, was the color of a melting orange snow cone. I shifted my weight off its arm. Maybe they’d fucked on this couch. In the four months I’d lived with Katz, making those monthly payments into her transitional hormone fund, it hadn’t really occurred to me to think about her sex life.
“Why didn’t she take it with her?”
“It didn’t fit up the stairs. She’s a minimalist, anyway. She’s all about giving things up.”
I wondered what Katz saw in her, if Katz was still hung up on her ex, if Edith was a regular girl or a trans girl, if Edith was prettier than me. “Do you listen to the podcast?”
Katz snorted. “Same as you. Every week, broadcast live from the laundry room. I know more about the Pixies than is healthy or safe.”
I didn’t wait, this time. I backed into the laundry room with my arms full of dirty clothes and quarters in my pocket and dumped the whole load on the floor in front of the washing machine without even looking in the direction of Edith’s omnipresent, piercing voice. I pulled the washer door open, stuffed in my clothes without sorting them, and slammed it shut. Each quarter I loaded like a bullet into the coin slots.
I kept my soap on the communal shelf over the machines—even though someone used it and the bottle was way lighter than it should have been. The plastic door over the soap trap clattered shut. Edith’s voice did not waver; she carried on as though I wasn’t even there. Clunk, ka-chunk. The water started. Would this be just white noise on her recording? What was the other person saying, the other half of her interview? I put both hands on the cold metal of the washer and leaned against it. I closed my eyes. It was a twenty-five-minute cycle with the extra rinse. With my stomach full of bile, I started to hum a song I didn’t know.
“Didn’t you get my note?”
I turned and looked down at the source of the voice—at Edith, the person known as Edith, who was sitting cross-legged on the laundry room floor with her huge recording headphones pushed down around her neck. She was the opposite of Katz, full and busty and sweating through her tank top. Her hair was a mass of curls, shaved on one side, the same brilliant, unnatural pink as her Post-Its. Her eyebrows were drawn with purple pencil, and a silver stud dotted her upper lip. She looked like a bitch. She was definitely not boring.
“It’s a work night,” I said.
“I wasn’t finished.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well.”
When I came back to switch my clothes into the dryer, she was gone. No note, even though I expected one, or maybe to find the wet laundry dumped on the floor. But she left no sign, resentful or not. Her microphone and the soft meditation cushion she used were cleared out. The only sounds were someone upstairs flushing a toilet and the counter on the washing machine ticking down from the spin cycle. I shoved my quarters into the coin acceptor. The dryer’s white noise ate up the sound around me, pressed against my ears, and turned everything into cotton that turned over and over. Chewing.
* * *
Monday morning, I sat in my clean clothes in the coffee shop where I met Katz the first time. I had time to sit for a minute before the bus. Coffee cost one dollar and forty-five cents, which I pinched from my jar of laundry quarters on rainy mornings. Not getting wet on the way to work was getting expensive. Although nobody seemed to notice me, I still had to adhere to a very strict dress code. You couldn’t show tattoos, color your hair outside the L’Oreal spectrum, cuff your slacks, wear novelty socks or jeans, or display any piercings aside from one plain stud in each ear. Only women were allowed to wear jewelry, aside from a wedding ring. You couldn’t look “unkempt or slovenly,” either, the employee handbook said. Spit polish. We worked in a police station, after all.
If you broke one of these rules or showed up more than ten minutes late, you were given a warning. Two warnings and you could be fired on the spot. A clean shirt, without stains, missing buttons, or yellow half-moons under the arms, was essential. I inspected my laundry every week, hoping that I could put off buying new clothes until the next pay period. The number of things I had that were actually work-appropriate dwindled, lost to hot days (sweat), cold days (mud), and rainy days (both). I just had to be careful. If I gave up doing laundry and buying my own coffee, it would still take me over a month to save enough money to get a good shirt from a thrift store. I looked in free boxes, but I had a fear of bedbugs. Plus, it seemed wrong to take things that were left out for poor people when I was working and had a place to live.
In the cafe, I was surrounded by couples who hadn’t gotten tired of each other yet. Their voices were bird-chatter nonsense that kept catching my ear.
A woman impersonated a mutual friend, “a graduate from the Milwaukee School of Art and Design,” while her boyfriend sniggered. A man described throwing a glass of water into a freezing night and how the liquid was solid before it hit the ground. And they were all talking about the housing crisis: five people to a place; new spaces for subletters; a house that burned and killed someone who was in a hastily constructed money trap under the stairs; the rising rents. But they were all couples who worked. The only other person sitting alone there, a woman in a hand-knit hat, ate what I assumed was lettuce from a takeout box that had “lettuce” written on it in black magic marker. I drank my coffee and thought that all I had was Katz and Katz’s goodwill, which did not seem especial
ly reliable.
Drinking coffee the consistency of apple juice, I looked around for the clock, accidentally making eye contact with the lettuce-eating woman. It was 7:30 in the morning.
This was not where I’d wanted to be when I set out. I made it to the bus on time but as I was getting out my ID to show my pass, I fumbled my coffee cup. Its plastic lid popped off. I felt the liquid soak through my clean shirt.
I didn’t have time to get off the bus, go back, and change. If I even had a clean one. I had to choose: punctuality or dress code? I couldn’t have both. My shirt was soaked in coffee. My last white shirt.
I rode one stop and pulled the request cord. I walked the extra six blocks back to the apartment with my arms crossed over my chest as though I was cold, even though this was spring, warm enough for a skirt without tights.
I inserted my key and felt that the door was already unlocked—the pins didn’t click back when I turned the key, and the latch, when I pushed on the metal plate, wasn’t all the way fastened either. I’d never come home in the middle of Katz’s work day. Maybe she’d left it open during a trip upstairs to check the mail or for some small domestic chore I didn’t get to deduce because, as I leaned into the room with my free hand already fumbling with my shirt buttons, I saw the patch of fur between Katz’s legs: a dark sunflower partially obscured by the fingers of Edith, white as worms, which led to Edith’s pale arm and her naked breasts, to the barbell in her nipple which glinted like the stud in her lip, which, as she perceived me, peeled back in a sneer or a smile, I couldn’t tell which, and maybe I wasn’t meant to know, because Katz lifted her head from its gorgeous repose against the cushions of the sofa that I’d always suspected was a site of Edith’s pleasure, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “Dana, what the fuck?”
She did not close her legs. I froze, trying to fixate on the exposed pipes on the ceiling. “I need to change,” I said. I couldn’t make myself say I was sorry. I scuttled to my corner of the studio—its open floor plan suddenly too horribly open—and hid behind the bookcase I used as a privacy screen. I stripped off my stained shirt and dropped it and then stood there shivering, staring at the folded pile of clothes in the milk crate I used as a dresser. I couldn’t force myself to choose one; I couldn’t think about colors, or even time, which slithered past me, making me later and later for my shift at work. My ears were trained on the entwined forms of Katz and Edith, listening for the subtle movements of their bodies, their murmurs and whispers, the sofa’s creak as they slowly uncoupled. Then, a sigh, and the door closing. The shirt I selected was blue, with Western-style flowers embroidered on the collar. It was not work-appropriate, but it was the only one I had left. I went back into the living room. My heart trembled.
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