Nina Here Nor There

by Nick Krieger

  He and his girlfriend, Sarah, had just moved from Jackson Hole to a microscopic New Hampshire town for their first “real jobs,” as my mom put it. My brother worked in admissions and Sarah taught history at the local boarding school. Their new home, school property on the outskirts of campus, was pure New England farmhouse with white clapboard, shuttered windows, and a barn attached to their living quarters. The inside of their place was like a glorified dorm room, decorated with the same Bob Dylan and ski-racing posters, tapestries and Buddhist mandalas, collegiate sports photos and plaques that had graced the walls of our shared home three winters before—a living experience I treasured as the first time my brother and I were equals, our age-difference inconsequential, true friends.

  When I arrived, they were preparing to head out to the school’s “family dinner”—a biweekly formal affair. My brother, situationally forced to be in a clean-cut phase, had his Jewfro trimmed to stockbroker length and his long, thin face freshly shaven. With his broad shoulders and lean body, he looked handsome in his tie and blazer, yet too cookie cutter for my taste, blanched of personality, like he’d donned the uniform of well-bred man. For as much as I looked forward to spending time with him, I tended to forget about that initial moment of disappointment when I realized he was still enmeshed in the stodgy environment and culture that I’d escaped. “You look like Dad,” I said.

  “It’s ’cause these are his clothes.” He pulled up the loose slacks and buckled his belt a notch tighter. “Twice a week we have to do this shit.”

  Sarah was one of those naturally beautiful women, no makeup required, and a world-class athlete. About five years ago, when she’d first started dating my brother, he told me, “She’s just like you but less pissy,” which I discovered to be true, at least in the sporty ways. Instead of her usual jock wear, she had on a plain brown V-neck sweater and a modest patterned skirt. “How do you do it?” I asked. “Don’t the skirts kill you?”

  “I don’t mind wearing skirts,” Sarah said. “But these dinners are a bit much. We’re supposed to engage the kids in ‘meaningful conversations’ about world events.”

  “Fourteen-year-olds don’t want to talk about the Iraq War.” My brother loosened his tie slightly. “And after working all day, I don’t want to force them to, either.”

  “At least we get to sit together,” Sarah said. “They had to make an exception for us since we’re not married.”

  This academy, catering to kids who’d had some disciplinary problems or struggled in other schools, was even stricter with its rules than I’d expected. My brother had already warned me about the evening’s “skirts for girls” and “jacket and tie for boys” requirement, and I’d opted out, bringing my own food to prepare.

  “You’re lucky you don’t have to go to this dinner,” my brother said as I snapped a few photos of him with his arm wrapped around Sarah.

  After they ambled down the porch and the screen door slammed behind them, I poured out my bag of vegetables. I did feel lucky to skip the stuffy, uptight event; I’d always felt relieved to avoid formal affairs. I recalled the picture on my wall that had caught my eye the previous night, taken before my senior prom. In it, my three best friends are in their evening gowns, gloves, and costume jewelry, and I am in a baggy striped shirt and jeans. Guys had asked me to go and my friends had begged me, but envisioning myself in a prom dress was too horrific and actually wearing one impossible to bear. I kept my dress terror a secret because I believed what my mom, a woman who seemed disinterested in femininity but who desired to fit in nonetheless, had told me growing up: “Honey, wearing dresses is what girls do. It’s the respectable thing to do.”

  I found a knife in a drawer and chopped the zucchini, hitting the cutting board with rhythmic bangs. I sautéed the pile of pale green slivers with mushrooms and onion while my pasta boiled. Steam filled the kitchen and I opened the window to a damp fall breeze. Eating my dinner alone, I listened for the din of teenagers, their bursts of laughter, and felt my own loss and regret for all the fun I’d missed.

  The next morning in the cafeteria, while scooping Cheerios from the bulk bin into my bowl, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find the wild red hair and rebelling skin of an adolescent boy. “Tuck your shirt in,” he commanded.

  I quickly placed my bowl on the counter and pushed the bottom of my thrift store collared shirt into the top of my zip-off travel pants. I heard the laughter before I saw my brother at a nearby table, his open jaw vibrating in our familial guffaw. Sarah and the other faculty members at the table all stared at me with amused smiles on their faces.

  I placed my tray down on their table and my brother explained the joke: only boys had to tuck in their shirts. The awkward aftermath of being seen as a guy, which often included an effusive apology, trumped any feelings I may have had about this frequent experience. Usually these interactions, mostly in restrooms, were with strangers. Nobody I cared about was ever around to find the situation hilarious. “Hardee-har-har,” I mocked.

  I chomped on my cereal in a silent, building rage. This place charged $30,000 a year, thirty-thousand dollars to provide kids with support, opportunity, and special help. Is this what adults believed created honorable kids—peer policing so that chromosomes matched polo shirts? And what was so wrong, or so funny, about someone like me, dressed in boys’ clothes, being called out as a boy?

  My anger festered while my brother was at work. It rained hard all day, and I stayed inside, revising an excerpt about testosterone from my thesis—the entirety of which I planned to give to my brother—to submit for a writing contest. I barely gave him a second to grab a beer out of the fridge when he returned home before I continued our conversation from that morning. “You know, people think I’m a boy all the time,” I said.

  “I don’t see it.” He kicked off his trail runners, threw his legs onto the New York Giants blanket that covered the futon, and turned on the TV.

  “That I look like a boy. You don’t think so?” Trying to get his attention, I leaned forward in my wicker chair—one of the many pieces of furniture he had inherited from our family’s other country house, this one in the Hamptons. “Look at me,” I said.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  I thought the answer was obvious. I flattened my chest, kept my hair short, wore no jewelry, dressed entirely in unisex clothes, and had a naturally masculine body comportment—what more could be done? “I want you to acknowledge that I do look like a boy.”

  “Well, to me, you don’t.” He found the channel with the Rangers pregame before flipping through more channels and settling on women’s tennis for the interim before face-off.

  “Dude!” I said. “I drove six hours to visit you. You were gone all day. Do you want me to be here or do you want to watch TV?”

  “Sorry, I’m just trying to relax.”

  Whether it was our genetic makeup or our upbringing, we were both always trying to relax. Even as kids, when we were supposed to be doing something fun or interesting, there was a race, trophy, admission test, an expectation to work harder and achieve more. He probably had it bad at his first “real” job—the internal pressure found its way into everything.

  I asked him nicely to turn off the TV, promising him he could turn it back on when the game started, and he complied. When I was kind to him, he listened to me. I liked to believe that over the years, I’d earned his trust. In his struggles with “bad” grades (aka Bs), puberty, dating, and college essays, he’d always called me for help. I’d give him a pep talk, purposefully ignoring anything he could’ve done better by pointing out only the good, right, hopeful, and positive in whatever was happening. To hear him say, “Thanks, I feel better now,” made me feel better—we had the same self-judgment, fears, worries, and concerns. I saw so much of myself reflected in him. “What if I want to be a boy?” I said.

  “I don’t understand what you m
ean by that. I can’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be gay.”

  He splayed open his hand and focused on what was once a callus and was now his favorite spot to pick. Mine was my thumb. We had the same anxious tics, the same mannerisms and gestures, the same huge hands. Looking at his broad shoulders, powerful trap muscles, collarbone straight and hard, I could see myself inside his boy body. “It’s about being a boy,” I said. “This has nothing to do with being gay.”

  “To me, it’s the same thing. Maybe this makes sense in San Francisco, but I don’t live in your world. If you were sitting around with all my friends, watching a hockey game, you wouldn’t look like a boy, or be a boy, or whatever.”

  I thought of his friends from Jackson Hole, pounding cases of watery beer, talking about girls and sex in that ignorant “where’s the clit” way, insulting anyone wearing pink with a “fag” slur, pissing off the back porch out of laziness, and topping it off with a burping war. Many of them were nice guys, but I didn’t want to be one of them. I just thought I looked like them. “If I wanted to blend in with your friends, I could take testosterone. I’ve been doing research. This is what I write about.” My voice rose in frustration. “That’s all it takes, one hormone to be seen as a guy.”

  He looked at his palm again, about to pick.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  He squeezed his hand into a fist. “You know you’d break Dad’s heart.”

  “Are you fucking serious?” He’d broken our only rule, our one unspoken sibling code—protection from our parents. We gave to each other what our parents’ dreams for us prevented them from giving us—unconditional support. We took care of each other, or at least I took care of him. “You know what happened when I started dating Jennifer in college.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dad said it was like someone had taken a knife and cut his heart out,” I said, repeating his very words as if I could make my brother feel my burden.

  “I’m sorry. I know. Really, I shouldn’t have used Dad’s guilt shit on you.” My brother nodded his head aggressively in self-beration. “Look, it’s my issue,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to explain to my friends that my sister is now my brother. I don’t want to have to explain that. I know, it’s selfish, I know it is.”

  My appreciation for his honesty was dulled by his self-absorption, his ignorance of what I’d have to go through should I ever truly consider such a change.

  “But why do you have to write about this?” he asked. “Why can’t you write about traveling?”

  In his whine, I heard his embarrassment and desire for secrecy, an expression of my own self-consciousness and fear. “Anyone can write about traveling,” I said.

  “But why always the gay thing?”

  “It’s a gender thing!”

  “Why this?”

  The emotions surged, a tidal wave that hit so fast I didn’t feel it coming until my hands were shaking and my face was quivering. “So some day a sister won’t have to have this conversation with her brother,” I screamed and ran out of the room.

  In the bathroom, I turned on the water. I placed my hands on the counter and pressed forward toward the mirror. A boyish young woman stared back at me. I understood my brother’s confusion. Even in my world, in San Francisco, a boyish young woman meant gay. We prided ourselves on our ability to read people in this manner, our gaydar triggered by any effeminate man or butch woman. I stared into the mirror at my face, my body, my reflection, searching for something to tell me I was fundamentally different from all the other dykes I resembled. When I found nothing, I turned off the water. Back in the living room, the Rangers game had started.

  I returned to Jersey the following night, shortly after my father, a patent attorney, and my mother, an IT/network person who did things with computers she could never succinctly explain, arrived home from work. My mother was small and shrinking each year, or so she claimed, but what she lost in size she made up for with her huge presence. She was constantly whirling and had a mouth that fired like a machine gun. “Squash soup or bean salad for appetizer? How many shoots of asparagus? Quinoa hot or cold?” she shouted from the kitchen.

  Before my dad or I could choose a question and shout back an answer, my mom pounded into the living room, a feat to make so much noise in only slippers. “How come nobody’s answering me? What’s the matter with you?” Her abrasive New York accent was even more grating when she was irritated. “Do you want eggplant or not?”

  After thirty years of marriage, she didn’t need to ask my dad about his food preferences. He’d eat anything as long as there was hot sauce and a snack of matzo while he waited. “Whatever’s easiest for you,” he replied. A laidback guy with a warm charismatic smile and olive skin that made him appear Sephardic, he’d retained the attractiveness of his youth despite the receding hairline, bushy eyebrows, and paunch that fluctuated depending on how much my mom nagged him about it.

  “Honey?” my mom said to me.

  “How about bean salad and eggplant,” I said.

  “That’s it? What about quinoa? Asparagus? Do you want salad first?”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “You’re going to eat all that food?”

  “Mom, please. Any of it sounds good.” It’s not like she was cooking; she was only deciding which prepared gourmet food to microwave. “I’ll eat whatever you put on my plate.”

  “That’s just a lot of food,” she repeated.

  “If it’s that much, then don’t give it to me.”

  “You’re no help.” She pounded back into the kitchen.

  Half an hour with my parents and I had a headache. The jabbering, the circular conversations, the shouting across rooms, the noise was constant. Even the background TV, the clicking between every cable news and finance channel, was chaos. Feeling the return of the aggro, pissy New Yorker in me I’d forgotten all about, I was even more annoyed. “Dad, pick one show, or turn off the TV.”

  “Geez, tough crowd,” he said. That was one of his party jokes, an easy fallback around my mother and apparently me. My dad was an entertainer, social and affable, but also a closet introvert, a lone wolf who enjoyed going to the movies by himself and could go days with only books as company. We were similar in that way, and had so much in common, I shouldn’t have been concerned about finding something to talk about when he turned off the TV, but we’d already discussed the rainy weather in more detail than meteorologists.

  I considered the novel I was reading a possible topic, except the protagonist was a gay guy, and every movie or event I attended was with Ramona, whom I hated to bring up since my dad would only refer to my girlfriend as “my friend”—an insulting lack of acknowledgment, yet one I preferred to his previous woe-is-me melodrama—which made me partial to following our unofficial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the last decade. I faced the conversation-starter dilemma every three weeks or so when I owed him a phone call. Sometimes I’d luck out and have a hemorrhoid or minor physical ailment to get us going, and for a while I’d been able to fill the rest of the space complaining about my job.

  “Any chance your friend wants to hire you back at the bank?” my dad asked, breaking the silence. Compared to my mom, my dad could seem mute, but really he was just more efficient. He never wasted words. His questions were subtle, calculated, like chess moves.

  “I quit for a reason,” I said. “That job was killing my soul.”

  “I thought you left to finish your thesis.”

  I waited, hoping he might congratulate me on finishing, or ask what my thesis was about, or if he could read some of it, but he tended to ignore the parts of my life that mattered to me if they didn’t matter to him. The only responses worse than his deliberate silences and guilt-trips were his psychotic rants in which he’d spew spittle and steam about how quitting piano or dropping pre-med amount
ed to “throwing my life away.” He hadn’t gone on a tirade in many years, so I wondered why I still looked at the spot I’d been sitting in when he smashed the footrest after I chose to play on an extra basketball team instead of my only softball team. But mostly, I wondered what it would take for me to forgive him and let go of my anger.

  “I told you, Dad, every time we spoke for a year, how much I hated that job. You were there, right? Did you hear me?”

  “It’s a really good company,” he said.

  I’d explicitly and repeatedly told both my parents that leaving my job would allow me the space to forge a new path more in-line with my creative interests, investing in my writing would eventually open up new opportunities, and although the uncertainty scared me, I believed in myself and knew what was best for me. For the three months leading up to my final decision, they relentlessly picked away at it, made me second-guess myself with their ceaseless cynical interrogation: “Are you sure? What are you going to do? What if you can’t get another job?” Even after I gave notice, my dad kept asking if I’d pursued all the options, like taking a short break or working from home.

  Their inability to listen and support me while making a tough decision was so upsetting that I wrote them a letter, telling them how I wished they’d handled the situation. I wrote it entirely from their perspective, saying that as parents they only wanted what was best for me and were concerned that I was giving up a good job, but that they trusted me to make smart decisions for myself. My mom replied to my letter, “Honey! That’s exactly what I meant to say!” My dad never replied; as my mom explained later, I had offended him. I understood then that my mom could be taught to give me what I needed and my dad could not. He required a heavy hand.

  “I was miserable at that job,” I said to him. “I saved money. It’s over. And I don’t want to talk about it ever again.”