by Nick Krieger
“Good morning, Nina,” she said upon recovery, sounding pleasant as ever.
Coming from Bec, my name rang like chimes, melodious and pretty. My jaw hardened and I offered a solid nod. “Morning,” I said. I noticed her faded chest scars fleetingly, as I still always did upon first glance, with a brief thought about what was there once and was no longer.
“You’re welcome to join us. There’s more than enough bacon to go around.” Bec looked like she needed all the protein she could get. With her reedy body and smooth hairless chest, she seemed forever on the cusp of male puberty.
“Thanks, but I don’t really eat meat,” I said. “And I’m kind of addicted to cereal.”
Bec disappeared into the other room. I grabbed the three boxes of cereal I wanted to mix and pulled my soymilk out of the refrigerator. When I saw Bec’s new addition to our fridge photo gallery, I froze. There were already two high school photos up, one of Melissa in bright red lipstick and a Victorian costume dress, the other a senior class photo of her friend Monster—hair permed and lip gloss, blush, and eye makeup applied with a butter knife—both ironic nods to the past, a photographic graveyard of girly history.
Bec’s prom picture topped the others in shock value. Her evening gown showed off a ravishing feminine figure, dipping down her breastbone to reveal her cleavage. She probably considered her powdered white face and dark ghoulish lips goth at the time, but I was so used to the current Bec that she appeared to be done up in women’s drag. I felt a twinge of pain for the kid in the photo, or maybe it was a cringe at the thought of myself in such a dress, an outcome I’d escaped by skipping all formal school dances.
As I sat down at the table with my bowl of cereal, the Bec I recognized returned. She had donned Erin’s floral dressing gown, still rather drag-like, but with the front loose and open she revealed another colorful tattoo where cleavage had once been. She got both pans on the stove going. Soon the smell of sautéing onions and bacon grease stirred the rest of the house.
Melissa had barely wiped the sleep out of her eyes when she and Bec began trading stories and recollections from the previous night. They entertained me with a dramatic reenactment of Jess flirting big-daddy style with a girl who may or may not have been of legal drinking age, and acted out a fight between a couple I knew.
When Melissa and I left to pick up coffee, she continued her play-by-play of the night. She spoke for a few nonstop minutes about Bec, using Bec’s name repeatedly. “Bec danced on a table . . . a girl untied Bec’s shoe . . . Bec bent down and the girl grabbed Bec . . .”
I stopped listening to the story and focused only on grammar and syntax, amazed at what sounded like a tongue twister, all so Melissa could avoid referring to Bec with a pronoun. She used to do the same thing with Pony, the person who lived in my room before me, and I once made the mistake of asking her whether Pony was a he or a she. Melissa had looked at me like I was nuts. “Pony is a pony,” she said. Her answer made more sense once I met this fluid and nimble, scruffy person, whom I immediately pictured bending down to toddlers everywhere to sweetly offer pony rides. Pony did look and act as much like a pony as anything else I could name.
I wanted to ask the right way this time, and I was pretty sure now that a person couldn’t be a pronoun. “So, I have a question for you,” I said. A few cars whizzed by as Melissa and I waited at the light at the neighborhood’s main intersection. “Does Bec go by ‘he’ or ‘she’? I hear people use both.”
“I just call Bec, Bec,” she said. “But if you want to know, you should ask Bec.”
Disappointed, I’d wanted a definitive answer. Referring to Bec as “he” felt intuitively right, but there were so many rules that linked biology and language, birth sex and pronouns. If Bec intended to override these rules like Greg did, wouldn’t she at least adopt a man’s name? It felt too absurd for me to refer to a “Rebecca” as “he.”
“Let’s go,” Melissa said, ushering me to cross. The countdown toward Don’t Walk had already begun. I picked up the pace. On the other side of the street, a swath of light broke through two apartment buildings, casting an unnatural glow onto the sidewalk.
“Who do you think is more butch?” I blurted out. “Me or Jess?”
Melissa turned her head to me, squinting into the light. “More butch?”
“Come on, you know what I mean.”
Melissa laughed hoarsely. “Where is this coming from?” She sounded amused and maybe like she felt bad for me.
I told her about the gender spectrum that had been on my mind ever since Jess had dropped it into one of our conversations. I wasn’t sure how Jess defined the two poles, and she only focused on the masculine side, but it had a linear order that went Melissa, me, Jess, Bec, and Greg.
Melissa exploded in laughter. “If you get sucked into Jess’s world, you’re in big trouble. Sometimes I wonder what goes on in that head of Jess’s.”
“So, your place in the gender spectrum doesn’t bother you?”
“Nope.”
I looked into her blue eyes, her tight red curls framing a face that strangers “ma’am”-ed most of the time and “sir”-ed some of the time—just like Jess and me. I envied her for not caring about pronouns and spectrums. I couldn’t compete with Greg, who considered himself a man, and I couldn’t compete with Bec; she was too big, broad, tall, and flat chested, too physically masculine, even when wearing a floral dressing gown. But I couldn’t stand the thought of being on the more feminine or womanly side of Jess. “So really, who’s more butch?”
I could see the bulldog sign on the coffee shop and the blue and yellow equal sign on the neighboring Human Rights Campaign store when Melissa stopped short and turned to face me. “Nina,” she said, her eyes holding both compassion and concern. “You are unique.”
It sounded like a euphemism, like calling someone “special.” I bowed my head and looked down at my feet, trying to take in her affirmation in that group therapy way. “Like how I’m wearing athletic sandals with socks?” I said. “And sweatpants? In public?”
Melissa clapped her hands together like a kindergarten teacher. “Exactly.”
The only other person I knew who would wear gray athletic sweatpants, socks, and soccer sandals in public was my brother. He liked to throw on a sweatshirt too and call the whole outfit a sweatsedo instead of a tuxedo. He wasn’t butch at all. He didn’t need the word; he was just a guy.
I spotted my favorite local character on the other side of the street walking his lapdog. His long wavy hair flowed down to his ass, and his chest hair sprouted out the sides of his white tank top. He wore leather underwear and leather boots, as he always did on the weekends. I nudged Melissa. “I’m definitely more butch than him, right?”
Melissa cracked up and walked into the coffee shop, leaving me behind with the echo of her laughter. I watched Gay Thor disappear down the block. I was becoming accustomed to the oddities in the Castro, and yet I understood nothing about my place.
A couple weekends later, Saturday afternoon found Jess and me trying to read quietly in the living room. Although we never went to social events together, we had developed a friendship inside our home. We bonded most deeply over our agreement that Erin was a piss-poor roommate. She trailed thongs, latex underwear, and glitter around like breadcrumbs, regularly left her ancient space heater on as if trying to burn down the place, and paid rent according to her own schedule. This afternoon, Erin was chatting loudly into her cell phone as she clomped from room to room, repeatedly opening doors and then slamming them.
Jess lowered her Vanity Fair magazine and ran her hand over her head, pulling back her temples along with her black and gray-flecked spikes. She mouthed something I read as, “You gotta be kidding me.” I broke into a smile. After a year of required readings by Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez, and other nonfiction writers, I was so happy to have only independent writing wo
rk over the summer and the time to “pleasure read” a novel like The Virgin Suicides that even the maelstrom of Erin couldn’t bother me.
Sweeping into the living room, Erin plopped into the tattered arm chair and kicked out legs as long as Kansas onto the ottoman. For her burlesque performance later, a blond wig covered her platinum hair and she’d layered herself with a sheer corset, bodice, and evening gown. She inhaled all the air in the room and sighed. “My ex-girlfriend is transitioning,” she announced. Her long false eyelashes batted anxiously.
I wasn’t sure if it was my recently heightened awareness, the way looking up a word in the dictionary makes it all of a sudden seem to appear everywhere, but it seemed like the reports of name changes, transitions, and top-surgery benefits were constant. Erin was enmeshed in the trans world, but she was also one step removed from the trans guys themselves, so I felt like I didn’t have to worry as much about saying the wrong thing and offending her. Seizing the opportunity to hear her perspective, I sat up, placed my open paperback on the armrest of the couch, and egged her on. “Are you surprised she’s transitioning?” I asked.
Erin spoke with some frustration about this ex, and I could tell her venting had more to do with their relationship issues and the shock of any Big News than the content in particular. “I’m not really surprised,” Erin finally said. “She always hated her body.”
I had yet to meet a woman without body image issues. Either her ass was too flat or her ass was too round, her nose too big or her lips too small, her skin tone too light or her areolas too dark. My biggest gripes were my inner tube waist and my excessive body hair, if only because I had to shave constantly to avoid braiding jokes. “Don’t we all?”
“I don’t,” Erin said. I looked at her, taking in the costume that she would soon remove on stage while dancing before a large crowd of people. The thought of taking off my clothes, with or without music, alone in my room was enough for me to want to put on a jacket.
“What’s going on?” I asked. I’d been eavesdropping so much that comments like another butch bites the dust and last butch standing were no longer original. “Why are so many dykes doing this?”
Erin wiped underneath her eyes for stray makeup. “I think there’s pressure to fit in.”
I started to nod, picturing the cliques of trans guys huddled together inseparably at parties and bars, making me think they were passing around the Kool-Aid, when Jess clunked the brick of her magazine onto the antique trunk we used as a coffee table. “I’m not trying to fit in,” she said, with an edge to her voice.
“I’m just saying, I think that whatever you are—boi, butch, andro, FTM . . .”
“Do we have to use labels?” Jess cut in.
Using her arms to raise herself, Erin sat up in her chair. “Look, I don’t like labels either,” she said, a bit defensively.
I resisted my temptation to make a wisecrack about the new “no label” identity. I understood that nobody wanted to be stamped and pigeonholed by others, but labels were also words used to communicate. I thought of Erin as a “high femme,” simply as a way of saying that she owned more shoes than I owned books and that her suitcase for a long weekend required a porter. I wished Erin had finished her list. I wanted to know what meanings those other words could hold.
“It’s just getting tough for me,” Erin said. “I never thought so much about my chest before.” She leaned forward, and without much of a rack to hold up her evening gown, the top drooped like an empty bag. “But now that I’m around so many women who hate their tits, I’m all, ‘Glue. Them. To. Me.’ ” She enunciated each word, grasping at her absence.
I too had never before thought much about my chest beyond abstract thoughts of a reduction, but ever since the breast guillotine had gone up like a billboard, it was impossible to avoid what was going on around me.
“You make it sound like all this transitioning is a trend,” Jess said. “This, here, San Francisco, it’s the only safe space for transitioning, top surgery, any of it.”
Erin rose and crossed into the connected kitchen to fill up a glass of water. Walking back, her heels bit into the wood floor. “Well, I’d like to meet a butch who said she let her girlfriend play with her tits last night.”
I flipped my baseball cap bill backward and recrossed my legs. “Do all butches really hate their tits?” I asked.
“Probably not,” Erin said as she sat back down. She sipped her water. “Just the ones I tend to date.”
And just all the ones I heard about, I thought.
“Well, nobody touches mine!” Jess said, tugging on her T-shirt in agitation. “I’m completely dissociated from my tits. They are not part of me. I don’t use them for anything.”
I stared at Jess, stunned by the force of her statement. In the handful of conversations we’d had about Greg and Bec, she’d never banged the gavel of her feelings so unequivocally. The power of her tone, the frustration underneath, prevented me from calling “bullshit” on her. Yet how could Jess, or anyone, feel disconnected to a body part? It was a conceptual and intellectual riddle that hurt my brain.
An awkward silence hung in the room until eventually Jess rose and went into the bathroom. I thought back to one of my early weeks in the house, Jess standing in front of the bathroom mirror, towel wrapped around her waist, the door wide open. She put in her contact lenses, rubbed lotion onto her face, and applied Crew Fiber to her hair, all the while engaging me in a conversation as if she didn’t notice her breasts just flopping around, trailing her as if on time delay, like a poorly dubbed movie in which mouths move but the speech doesn’t match up.
At first I pretended not to notice Jess’s breasts when she went about her routine. Then I must have actually stopped noticing them. Somewhere along the way, I too started wrapping my towel around my waist after a shower, although I always kept the door to the bathroom closed, not nearly as bold as Jess. Most of what I knew about being a woman, from towel wrapping to bra shopping, came from blindly following my mother or my teammates in the locker room.
But now, living in this house, I had stumbled upon an entire underworld of new information. What those around me had learned from their friends and lovers and gender studies classes in school was foreign to me. I lacked the language that others had acquired through osmosis and theory. Without the words, the ideas—even my experiences themselves, or my understanding of them—had been inaccessible. I felt insatiable and ignorant. “Do you know why Bec had surgery?” I asked Erin, eager to continue the conversation after Jess had left.
She spoke in a lulling cadence, as if telling me a bedtime story. She said Bec had been a rambunctious child who liked to do cartwheels, run around shirtless, and climb trees, all monkey-like and unencumbered. Then puberty came along and changed Bec’s body, prevented Bec from doing all those beloved activities.
Erin stopped, as if realizing she didn’t have Bec’s story right, or it wasn’t hers to tell. “You know, you should probably ask Bec about this yourself,” she said. “He’s very open and would totally talk to you.”
I could only imagine how many times Bec had already explained herself to friends, family, and coworkers. Now me, Curious George over here, wanted to know about her body and gender—the most personal and intimate details of her life. I didn’t even know Bec’s last name or which pronoun to use for her. Unless I was prepared to share with her my own feelings about my breasts, I had no right to ask about hers just because they had been removed. And we weren’t close enough friends for chest comparisons, or for me to let on how much I compared mine to hers, from where I stood in the corner, watching.
Three. Binding
I could’ve called what I was doing in the downstairs laundry area “window shopping,” but really I was snooping. While transferring Jess’s clothes from the dryer to her wicker basket to make space for my own, I rooted through her pile in search of her n
ew Title Nine Frog Bra. My soccer playing A-gays raved about the NASA-like engineering that made this sports bra the most functional one on the market, and, used to doubling-up during workouts, I was eager to find a single one that could hold my chest in place. I was also mildly curious about its supposed off-label use, gleaned from overheard conversations—binding. I imagined that was the intent when a few weeks after Jess’s declaration of independence from her breasts, Erin gave her one as a gift.
I’d begun poking around the laundry room the second I moved into the house, jumping on my first opportunity to acquaint myself with men’s underwear. I’d hold up Jess’s “skivvies” or “manties,” as she called them, and try to picture them on me. It’s how I learned about the various brands and styles—the contour pouch, Y-front, bikini brief. With my unofficial sanction for women to wear men’s underwear, I went on a shopping spree. I soon discovered Jess and I had different tastes—she owned pink briefs and leopard-spotted silk ones and I preferred Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs or plaid boxer shorts.
I didn’t see the new sports bra in Jess’s load and returned upstairs to find her folding clean clothing, an activity so rare that she sometimes slept entwined in a mound of fresh laundry on her bed. I hovered in the entry of her room, sparsely furnished with only a bed, antique bureau, bookshelf that held more reference than reading books, and wooden file cabinet that served as a nightstand. I leaned casually into her doorframe, and asked nonchalantly if she liked the Frog Bra.
Jess fanned out a white undershirt and creased it at the sleeves. “Not really,” she said. “It holds my chest too high.”
“I’m thinking about getting one,” I said. “I hear they’re pretty good for working out.”
Jess pulled the bra from the cloth cubby in her closet and tossed it underhand to me. “You’re welcome to try it.”