A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body

by Lauren Weedman

  But the eHarmony story was one that I myself also thought was funny.

  “I had a one-night stand with a guy I met on eHarmony and it was kinda hilarious,” I had said to David.

  The look on his face told me that he did not believe this situation could be hilarious, but I continued.

  “According to eHarmony, this guy was my perfect match. You know how that site makes you do hours of psychological profiling to meet your perfect match?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and staring into his coffee cup.

  “Well, they do. And I did it, just for fun. And the one perfect match they found for me was this guy who was an ex-child star and our one deep connection was that we both liked ‘watching TV’!”

  I paused here because this was where people usually liked to laugh.

  “Go ahead,” David told his coffee cup.

  “Oh, okay. So we met for drinks at 11:00 p.m. on a Wednesday night in Hollywood, which is already just so ... inappropriate!” I laughed this time so if he was feeling unsure he could just copy what I was doing.

  He didn’t laugh. Nor did he smile. “That is sort of inappropriate,” he said.

  Jeez, sorry Pastor David, I thought. But knowing every pastor secretly liked a good sex story, I pushed onward.

  “We ended up basically fighting all night about gun control. He loved guns. But it was kind of fun to fight—it was flirty-fighty. So we ended the night at his house, making out on his American flag blanket while Kenny Rogers played on the stereo.”

  At that point David was staring at me with his head cocked to the side, like the RCA dog. He looked concerned. Perhaps worried for my safety.

  “I’m okay,” I reassured him. Suddenly I felt like I was doing my “share” at a sex addict support group. I considered shutting up.

  “Go ahead,” David said.

  The tone of his voice did not say go ahead. It said, “Please stop.”

  But I continued because I do what I’m told, and plus the best part of the story was coming up—the part where he was sure to laugh.

  “Okay, this is the best part. During sex he tells me to pull his hair. Hard. And I try to but I can’t get a grip because he’s got so much hair gel in it. So I’m grabbing a handful, then sliding off, wiping my hands on his pillows, and starting again. At one point he grabbed my hair, and I was like, ‘No-no-no—’”

  God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, I thought, like the look of total discomfort on David’s face.

  “That’s quite a story,” he said. “He sounds horrible.”

  At the time, I thought I could never be with a man who didn’t see the humor in the lowest, most shameful moments of my life. But I was trapped in a car with such a man, sliding deeper and deeper down into the heart of Mexico. I felt like I was being kidnapped.

  “You didn’t even think my eHarmony ex-child star hair-pulling story was funny,” I said, continuing our what-is-funny debate. “Everybody loves that one!”

  “You know, not everything is funny,” David said. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pretended to be interested in what the road signs said.

  The quiet that filled the car for the next three hours made me want to cry. I realized this was what it was like to be old. You drove in the car and enjoyed the silence. You sat quietly and waited to die.

  I was about two seconds away from slapping my hands against the passenger window as cars passed, mouthing, “Help me! Help me!”

  The longer I stared out into the desert, the more I felt like I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. I felt like an old lady, asking, “What happened? Where did everything go?” I missed the old drugstore and all my neighborhood friends. There had been no drugstore and I emailed my old neighbors all the time, but suddenly I missed everything. Even the not-so-great things.

  My marriage was over—I was officially divorced. And now I was with this person and I had no idea who he was and no one to ask for character references since neither one of us had any friends or extended family in Baja (unless it turned out this was where my ex-husband had disappeared to).

  Maybe I was just dehydrated, but suddenly I was overwhelmed with loneliness and started to cry. I turned my head toward the window. David didn’t notice my tears because he was focused on a stand by the side of the road.

  “Ice cream!” he said excitedly. “I bet they have good stuff.” He pulled the car over to get himself a double scoop.

  I passed, but added, “Ask if they have tequila flavor.”

  David, completely sincere, told me he would and took off. I used the moment alone to dry up. Soon he ran back to the car and beat on my window.

  “This is the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’m not kidding! Oh, Lauren, you have to get some!”

  With that he returned to eating his ice cream among the families and dogs gathered around the stand. He looked like Bobo the Clown, bouncing and pointing at his ice cream cone every few minutes. The children found him delightful. The adults did too. Apparently they had never seen a gringo so excited about an ice cream cone. I hadn’t either.

  I wanted a beer, badly. But of course David didn’t drink, a fact I had learned way back during that first meeting when we were both newly available.

  Noticing the copious amounts of coffee he was consuming, I had said, “Geez, you sucked that down like a twelve-stepper.”

  “What kind of stepper?” he’d asked, like it was a country-western dance.

  “A twelve-stepper,” I said. “Alcoholics Anonymous? They’re famous for going to meetings and jacking themselves up on coffee because it’s the only high they have left, besides nicotine and porno. And gambling. And video games.”

  I’d kept adding addictions, thinking one would make him laugh, but when I got to diet pills, he interrupted.

  “Addiction kills and those meetings save people’s lives on a daily basis,” he said.

  Bobo came bouncing toward the car again and said, “Lauren, if you don’t get a cone you will regret this for the rest of your life.”

  I suspected that wouldn’t be the decision I’d regret.

  Two hours later, we’d passed a man on the side of the road sitting atop a cooler full of sliced mangos, wearing a cowboy hat adorned with hanging plastic mangos. We’d also passed town after town, which at first glance I’d declare “an adorable abandoned village” only to realize that there were throngs of people competing for groceries inside the tiny cinder-block buildings.

  Upon seeing the sign announcing our turnoff, David started yelling.

  “Hey! Here we go! All right!”

  He was as happy as I’d seen him since the ice cream.

  “Look at that! I found it!” he exclaimed, turning into the motel parking lot. Once he’d shut off the engine, he apologized for being so intense during the trip. “I was just worried about missing our turnoff for the motel,” he said.

  Which meant he’d been searching for that turnoff since we left Los Angeles, eleven hours ago.

  Years before, when David’s wife was ill, Martha had told me that while Hannah had accepted the fact that she was going to die, the one thing she could never accept was that she was leaving her husband and her son. When I heard that, I’d had the strongest pang—a feeling of, “I’ll take them. Give them to me.”

  In the years immediately following, every time I ran into David I’d remember that pang and wish that I were closer friends with him and Jack. At that point, my thoughts weren’t romantic, I simply longed to be a close friend of his. So if he ever felt too sad he could call me and hear about my life and feel better about himself. It was a gift I liked to give many of my beloved friends.

  Standing in the motel parking lot, I felt like revealing this to him so he could know how much spending time with him truly meant to me. But it just seemed way too heavy—way too, “The Lord sent me ... please clear out a drawer. I’m moving in.”

  The cabins were arranged in a tight semicircle overlooki
ng what was either the ocean or a giant lake (I would have asked David which, but I didn’t want to lose his attention to navigational concerns again). A few lights shone from inside the rooms, but it was mostly dark and quiet. The scene was set for either a cute little Mexican getaway or a horror movie. While I tried to decide which, a small dog that had been dyed pink and then gone for a roll in cow manure ran up to us. Soon after, another tiny, mangy dog came yapping forward. Both started sniffing and scratching at our bags.

  Jay hadn’t warned me that I’d need to practice Spanish for “Get your shit-covered dog out of my purse.” The sight of these odd little expatriate dogs—who had clearly come to Baja so they could “let go” and lose themselves to their manure-rolling addictions—made scary Mexican roadblocks seem like a mere fly in the salsa.

  Finally the dogs’ owner, a large drunk man with a huge taut belly, approached and showed us to our cabin. He, too, looked like he’d escaped America in order to roll around in shit (and tequila), free from America’s stereotyping labels, like “mean-abusive drunkard.”

  Our room looked like an Eastern Bloc hostel, circa 1976. It housed five single beds and nothing on the walls except smears of dirt down by the floor where it appeared the dogs enjoyed scratching their backs. I made a mental note to buy a four-cent sombrero and put it up, for a little splash. The bathroom looked like a jail bathroom—cement bricks and stark lighting and a used bar of soap stuck on the shower floor.

  David apologized that it wasn’t more posh.

  We sat on the edge of one of the five beds in silence, not knowing what to do next. I felt too scared to make conversation. I might have post-traumatic stress disorder from the car ride.

  After what seemed like forever, he said, “Lauren, I have to talk to you.”

  My mind raced with all the things he might be about to tell me. “I’ve been paid by the reality TV show, Nobody Loves a Fatty, to date you, and here’s the thing: I fell in love with you despite the odds. But I’ve already accepted the money for the show and need you to sign a release. Also, I’m gay, which I just realized at the ice cream stand.”

  Or maybe he was going to confess I just wasn’t his type. Years before, when I was still married, he’d told me that he liked Catherine Deneuve types. It had annoyed me at the time, partly because I didn’t think it was particularly brave of him to go out on a limb and find the most beautiful woman in the world attractive, but also because it meant I had to take myself off his consideration list. (Which I shouldn’t have been on anyway, what with the husband and all.)

  Later, when I’d asked him if he’d found his Catherine Deneuve yet, he denied that he’d ever said it.

  “What? I’m not a huge Catherine Deneuve fan,” he said. “Where did you get that? Actually I don’t like her at all.” He said it like he was ready to fight about it.

  “Geez, you don’t have to punch her in the face to prove your point,” I said. “I mean, come on, she’s a human being, just like you and me—well, more you than me—doing the best she knows how at any given moment. Cut her some slack!”

  We both had laughed. And while I was hee-hawing away, I remembered that sometimes I get a double chin when I laugh. So I turned my head to the side and immediately worried about his view of my Bucky Beaver overbite.

  “I don’t go for Catherine Deneuve types,” he continued. “Most of my girlfriends have been mixed race. My wife was half Korean. Mostly I like strong women.” He reached those hands of his (which at the time I thought of longingly as “Lauren’s future breast warmers”) across the table and grabbed my biceps—my guns. He squeezed.

  “Wow, yeah,” he said. “Look at those arms—you’ve got great, strong arms.”

  I worried that he was one of those guys who just went for the arms. I wondered if I should have worn my sleeveless burqa.

  “You know, I’ve always felt like I’m a black lesbian woman trapped in a straight white man’s body,” he said, after releasing me.

  I guess he was trying to let me know that just in case I was a strapping lesbian lady he could still be attracted to me. I’d take what I could get.

  But in the Mexican cabin I realized I wanted much more. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t get myself to look into David’s teary brown eyes.

  He started in. “The reason I didn’t laugh at the story you told about the Internet hair-pulling guy was because I don’t think it’s funny. It’s hard for me to hear those stories because since the moment I saw you in that coffee shop, I knew that I could fall very much in love with you. And I have.”

  I couldn’t think of any jokes, so I was forced to listen.

  “When I hear some of your stories they make me sad,” he said. “Like you did things that you maybe didn’t want to and are trying to make it into some hilarious anecdote now. But I can imagine that a lot of those situations were not exactly the highlights of your lifetime. I don’t know. I just—like I said—I love you.”

  I couldn’t recall anyone ever showing me that kind of concern—not even my therapist, to whom I was paying good money. The trip itself had already been breaking me down and now it felt like my chest had been blasted open. Not in the gory war movie way, but more like a fully exposed, “I feel so close to you ... oh my god, I’ve never felt so close to another human being ... I love you, but where the hell are we?” way.

  After standing and hugging for what might have been an hour we left the room in search of burritos.

  The restaurant the hotel owner recommended was run by another expatriate—a bloated alcoholic from Oregon. We were the only two customers in the place. He disappeared into the kitchen for long stretches of time, leaving David and me to sit and stare at each other.

  I found myself thinking, “Now what? Another relationship?” It seemed so exciting, yet exhausting too. The look on David’s face told me that he was perhaps having the exact same fears. I was going to make a joke to lighten the mood (“This will be great until one of us dies or goes crazy and drives off into the desert”), but I was interrupted by the sudden appearance of our swaying waiter, who had salsa stains down the front of his white T-shirt. He asked if we’d like dessert.

  My assumption was that David would turn it down, since nothing could possibly beat the ice cream ecstasy from that afternoon. But I was wrong. He started bouncing like Bobo again.

  “Yeah! I love the ice cream down here,” he said.

  “But what if it’s not the same kind,” I cautioned. “It might be not as good.”

  I was trying to prepare him—I didn’t want him to be disappointed—but David’s faith was strong.

  “Or it might be even better,” he said. He ordered a scoop of tamarind, which the waiter warned was the one flavor that most Americans couldn’t handle.

  “I want to try it. I’m not scared,” David told him.

  I reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “Me too,” I said, suddenly feeling so swept away by the poetry of love that I was unashamed of likening our relationship to ice cream.

  As the waiter walked into the kitchen he yelled over his shoulder, “Maybe you love it, maybe you throw up. You never know.”

  It was a little grainy, but we didn’t throw up. In fact, we declared it Baja’s best-kept secret and ordered second scoops.

  DIARY OF A JOURNAL READER

  Friday, 9:05 a.m.: I shaved my lady moustache (ladystache) off with Gay Jay’s gay razor (it’s a gay razor because it’s his razor and he’s gay), and now I have man-stubble on my upper lip. Then to make it just a tiny bit sexier, I broke out where I shaved. So now I have an acne moustache. I should have left it alone. Like I do with the beard. The Korean ladies at the nail place were right. “You too much hair. You do moustache and arms and chin and back and neck. Please. Too much hair, lady-man.”

  Sunday, 10:00 a.m.: I keep telling my new sexy boyfriend how disgusting I feel. I give him all the reasons why. It’s like when I used to stand and grab big handfuls of fat and show Mathew how gross I was. Then I’d cry and sob in the sh
ower that I was too fat to live. I’d make jokes at parties about how I felt like a giant mattress that my ex would lie on. He’d just lie there on “mama” and I’d flip him over when he got tired of lying on his stomach. I’d also throw in a few jokes about trying to trick him into oral sex by pouring Jameson all over my crotch or getting a giant arrow tattooed on my stomach pointing down. Then we’d go home and I’d stand there—the monstrous mustachioed mattress—shaming him for not having sex with me.

  I’ve learned some very hard lessons from the divorce. But I’m different now. I’m loving David—well. Better than I’ve ever loved someone before. I don’t want to fuck this one up because he is the man of my dreams. I don’t want to lose him.

  Sunday, 3:45 p.m.: I read David’s journal. He keeps this journal of fears and resentments that he writes in all the time. Whenever he grabs that gray notebook and stomps off to the couch I know that he’s got some fears and resentments ... perhaps about the joke I just made about being really good at blow jobs at the gym. I’m always telling him he doesn’t get my sense of humor and he’s always telling me it would help if my jokes were actually funny, not just ways of telling him how everyone—dogs, women, and children—wants to have sex with me the minute I’m not with him.

  Anyway, all I had to do was look at his journal and I would get this huge adrenaline rush because I was sure it was full of entries like, “I have fear I’m gonna keep fucking that girl in my yoga class,” or, “I have fear that Lauren will keep getting fatter and I can’t break up with her because she’ll be devastated to learn that she really is too fat for me,” or, “I have fear that I’m dating Lauren because she is like a man and I what I really want is a man.”