Nina Here Nor There

by Nick Krieger

  “Okay, okay. Forget I brought it up,” he said, offended yet again.

  “Dinner’s ready!” my mom shouted.

  The three of us sat at the same wooden table we’d had my entire life, a square, unbalanced without my brother, that formed the cornerstone of the Krieger Covenant. It had been our one household rule to eat dinner together because, according to my mom, that’s what defined a family. This daily event also required my brother and me to answer any and all questions asked about us. In exchange for adhering to this simple procedure, my parents acted, and would continue to act, as a financial safety net forever should we need them. The auxiliary to the agreement, more habit than rule, was that we all shoveled our dinner into our mouths, as if racing to clear our plates, which tonight occurred in under three minutes.

  “You haven’t changed at all,” my mom said. “You still eat too much. Are you going to work that off at the gym with me?”

  My mom was the only person who thought calling me fat was an enticement to hang out with her. Which made me the only person who found that endearing. “If you’re lucky,” I said.

  “Well, you just think about what you want to do for bonding time.”

  This “bonding time” was a staple of spending time with my mom. It entailed an activity alone together and culminated in a Q&A session for which she’d pick a topic related to my abnormalcy, like being gay or not wanting to birth children. She’d ask uncomfortable questions and try not to cry at the answers while I’d do my best to be thankful that we were having a difficult conversation instead of a fight, which between us was as common as breathing.

  For the next two days while my parents were at work, I revised my contest submission and enjoyed the solitude in their absence. In the evenings, my dad watched the nightly news, and I sat with him because I knew how much joy it brought him to simply be in the same room with me. We shot the shit or kept quiet, which allowed him to project the version of me he kept in his head without the rude interruption of my actual self, and allowed me to hold on to our tranquil stalemate as the best connection I could have with my dad. Then we’d all go out to dinner, where my mom was liable to embarrass me with her rude tone toward the staff, as if the hostess meant to make us wait or purposefully seated us in a “bad” location, and I’d try to be mad at her but would only feel sad that she felt so constantly wronged.

  On Friday, my last day before flying out to Scotland, my mom took the day off work. I decided on a shopping trip to the mall for bonding time, but regretted this choice when the fighting started less than two miles from the house. She had an upcoming wedding to attend and wanted to know if I’d help, or at least sit with her, while she searched for a dress.

  Even before I opened my mouth, I knew I was being an asshole. “Would you ask Eric to go with you for a dress?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not,” she said, as we passed the arched gates and ivy-laced stone buildings of the local university. “I just thought it’d be a nice thing for you to do with your mother.”

  We drove alongside the bright green fairways of a golf club that was supposedly classier than the club where my parents belonged. I wished I’d chosen to play nine holes with her or hit a few buckets at the driving range. We both preferred any sport over shopping. “Don’t ask me to do something you wouldn’t ask Eric to do,” I said.

  “Because it would be so much for you to do one thing for me.” She kept her eyes on the road, her lower jaw jutted out, her whole mouth tense.

  I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep calm. “Not. This. Thing.”

  “Not this, not that. Any excuse to be selfish. You don’t want to do me a favor, fine. But don’t make excuses, like you’re offended to sit in a store and watch me try on dresses.”

  “Just because I’m your daughter doesn’t mean I should be expected to go dress shopping with you. Would you ask Eric to go with you?” I repeated.

  She turned into the mall parking lot and halted at the first stop sign. “I don’t know. But if I asked, he would.”

  My mom was right. And if I were my brother, I would too. But I wasn’t him. I was her daughter. “I hate dresses!” I said.

  “You didn’t hate your bat mitzvah dress,” she countered. “You scooped that right up.”

  “That’s ’cause it looked like a T-shirt!” I yelled. “And it had a mock turtleneck!”

  I was completely astonished. How far removed could she have possibly been from my childhood to think that I liked that dress? Or rather, how much had I kept to myself, trying to please her and do the respectable thing. I started to spew incoherently about female expectations and assumptions and my mom battled back until we were so far from our starting point that silence was the only recourse.

  She turned off the ignition. “So, are we going in?”

  I nodded.

  I’m not sure if we apologized; sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t.

  The mall was a bust. I’d forgotten that in chain stores, men’s smalls were too large and women’s clothes always had one fatal flaw, be it a swooping neckline, pastel color, extra-short sleeves, or feminine contour. My mom bought me white athletic socks, running shoes, and boxers, all of which even she found boring. “That’s all you want,” she said. “You’re no fun.” Then I remembered that Jess had recommended the untapered button-down shirts, a standard men’s style, sold at Brooks Brothers in women’s sizes.

  We found the store at another nearby mall. The saleswoman greeted us with pursed lips. With a sweater tied around her neck, just below her pearls, she was ready for croquet and caviar. Her eyes probed me from my dirty sneakers to my ragged T-shirt to my unkempt hair. Had I been alone, I would’ve left, but with my mom and her credibility trailing, I walked to the back of the store and found the untapered shirts. I tried on a few in the dressing room and came out to show my mom a yellow checkered one that I liked. She nodded her approval. “What are you wearing underneath?” she asked. “Is that a sports bra?”

  I’d been wearing the more comfortable Frog Bras around the house, but shopping required a binder. Seeing even a slight round of my chest underneath a shirt would deter me from buying it. “Something like that.” I walked into the dressing room and closed the door.

  I hit the children’s section on the boys’ side next, where I flipped through a stack of plain white button-downs, mumbling to myself about what size to try. With each shirt neatly pinned and folded with tissue paper, I wanted to avoid making a mess for the saleswoman who already disliked me. My mom called her over and asked what boys’ size would be the same as a women’s 6.

  “There is no same,” the saleswoman said. You could kill a rock with her glare.

  Duh, I thought—boys’ shirts are longer and narrower, the shoulders broader, the sleeves shorter—just give me a starting point.

  “Fine,” my mom said to her, using the harsh tone she reserved for people in the service industry, but this time it didn’t mortify me. “If there is no same, what’s the closest?”

  The saleswoman looked like she might toss off her sweater shawl and throw down. I had no doubt my mom would kick her ass. The saleswoman pulled out a crisply folded size 20 from the stack and walked away. My mom handed it to me. In a fleeting moment of appreciation, I almost asked if she still wanted me to go with her for a dress.

  Instead, we went to a bookstore and soon returned home with several bags. I showed my dad the items, hiding the boxers as my mom recommended, and thanked him for everything with a kiss on the cheek. His beam of happiness triggered that pit in my stomach, the feeling I tried to repress that our relationship was a sham we were holding on to by the edges of a hundred dollar bill.

  My mother kept me company while I packed for my flight the next morning. She sat quietly on my bed, which meant the Q&A session was about to start. I continued to fold the clothes covering my carpet.

  “Can I read so
me of your writing?” she asked.

  My mom was loosely aware of the subject matter, that it pertained to my gender and sexuality. “I’m not sure you want to,” I replied, grateful that at least she’d asked.

  “Do you really want me to go through the recycling bin after you leave?”

  I tried not to let my smile out. She was so predictable, which was why I’d packed all of my early drafts to discard at the airport—leaving behind a few random out-of-context pages about testosterone would’ve been dangerous. “There’s nothing in there,” I said.

  I contemplated giving her my thesis, which I’d decided not to leave with my brother, but even with context, the topics would be hard for her to handle, and I was out of energy, too depleted to even consider helping her through the experience.

  “Is that really what you want?” my mom asked. “For me to die without getting to know you?”

  Even for my mother, playing the death card was a bit over the top. I pulled the two hundred pages out of the bottom of my backpack. “Here.” I skidded the stack across the carpet. It hit the base of my bed. The papers fanned out, held together, just barely, by a clip in the corner.

  The one person who did make it through my thesis was Ramona. She read it and responded while I was in Scotland on a trip that might have been fun had I not missed her so much. A couple days in, I discovered what I could only imagine nontraveler types must feel like abroad: far from home, disinterested, and critical. There was no Loch Ness monster, the vegetarian haggis was missing a little something, the men wore skirts, everyone spoke English and yet I couldn’t understand a word—all of this would’ve been fascinating to me if I’d cared about anything besides taking pictures of rock sculptures I built for Ramona. I’d traveled across the country, and then across the ocean, halfway across the world, but everything I wanted was waiting for me in San Francisco. Her response to my thesis came in an e-mail, four words offered after reading sixty thousand of mine, but they were the only ones I needed.

  Ramona wrote: “I got your back.”

  Nine. Roots

  I hibernated for the winter with Ramona and practiced my boyfriend skills—cuddling, spooning, listening, boning. Without a job to delineate the day of the week, nothing other than rain to separate the months, and a location that only shifted rooms within Ramona’s house, everything blended together for me during those nesting months. Even our discussions merged, as if they were part of one large conversation that shaped my boyhood.

  It began with a Duraflame log burning in the fireplace, and Ramona lying on the couch with her head in my lap. I could feel her neck tense up as she told me about the argument she’d had with one of our former classmates after helping her move into her new apartment. The whole time, our classmate had made comments like, “We need a man for this,” which Ramona considered backward thinking from the older woman and feminist she admired. “Then . . . she told me she’s not a feminist,” Ramona said.

  I ran my hand over her strained forehead, debating whether to speak. For an activist, Ramona was not self-righteous, and I counted on her lack of judgment over my moral flaws to give me the room to work through old ways of thinking that I wanted to retire. “I’m not sure I’d call myself a feminist either,” I said, tentatively.

  Ramona shot out of my lap. “What?!” she cried. “How are you not a feminist?!”

  “I don’t want to be a man-hater,” I whined. “And I can’t stand people assuming I’m a feminist just because I look like a woman.” I told her about the prochoice fund-raiser for which an A-gay had asked me to read one of my humor essays as part of the entertainment. The money was to fight a restrictive ballot measure calling for parental notification and in her request, my friend implied that even as lesbians, safe from the accidental knock-up, reproductive rights were still “our issue.” This was a couple weeks before my pool party breakthrough, and I hadn’t acquired the language to express or even understand why I’d been so hurt and offended. I agreed to read at the event even though I wished my friend had meant “our issue” as a society, not “our issue” as women—something that once I could articulate later, I did tell her.

  Ramona tugged on her upper lip until I finished. My story must have calmed her down because she spoke in an even, relaxed tone. “Feminism just means political, social, and economic equality for women,” she said. “How can anyone be against equality?”

  “In that case I’m definitely a feminist,” I said, as all of my defensive resistance crumbled. The word that had given me anxiety to utter all of a sudden felt empowering to speak. And it wasn’t only Ramona’s definition, but my relief in separating myself from women that allowed me to stand behind the cause. I thought of how Jess had said, “Politically, I am a woman.” I wasn’t, couldn’t be, it was too painful to link myself to women with a “to be” verb; it was a matter of semantics, but also identity; I was politically and completely all for women.

  Over the course of several talks, I admitted everything to Ramona that I’d been too embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid to tell Jess during our kitchen conversations: Until reading transgender books, I had envisioned “social justice” as Judge Wapner from The People’s Court presiding over a keg party, and I hadn’t even heard the term male privilege until Jess ranted about it. Jess and Ramona must have at least touched on these subjects in college, where I’d taken almost exclusively science, math, economics, and other precareer path courses.

  That was just one of the many excuses and explanations I used for my ignorance. I was also white, raised without any monetary concerns (other than my mom’s irrational fears), and American, all of which came with so much privilege heaped upon privilege that I couldn’t see out from all my privilege to notice that men could have even more privilege than me. In my family, my parents were equals. I’d grown up believing my mom was as successful, accomplished, and well paid as my dad. But my world view had been very personal, self-involved, and failed to consider institutionalized bias, the systems set up to benefit a specific group, the foundational patriarchy of our culture.

  My understanding of male privilege acted as a gateway to exploring all sorts of privileges and how they played into each other, like my extreme class privilege—the advantages too numerous and grand to list—and my cisgender privilege that had been slowly eroding—the privilege to use a restroom without a “wrong bathroom” comment or a call for security, to put on whatever clothes I wanted in the middle of a women’s locker room without the harassment of strangers, and to walk the streets outside of an urban center without the threat of being killed for confusing others with my gender variance—the catch-all I’d begun to favor to describe myself for its scientific, almost taxonomical undertone. Gender fluid was another amorphous term implying movement, but that one was too hipster for me. Regardless of the identity word of the week, anything outside of woman or man allowed me to plot myself onto the map of existence. From this point my consciousness could expand.

  The concepts Ramona and I discussed were as obvious as water and air to her, but they elicited in me a newfound care for the struggles of all people. It was through the lens of my own otherness that I began to see queerness as something that extended far beyond sexuality and gender, tattoos and dyed hair; for me, it was a state of mind that came with the experience of being the odd, ignored, or devalued one in a society and culture that functioned as if some people’s needs were less important than others. It now made sense to me that Ramona had belonged to so many groups on her college campus—the human rights group, the animal rights group, the student rights group, the gay group, and the women’s group (which she cofounded)—“our issues” were all connected.

  It may have taken me a while to be a feminist on the streets, but even before sex had become a big part of my life, I’d considered myself a feminist in the sheets. In bed, I believed in equal opportunity. If a boy could have a cock, then there was no reason a girl couldn’t have one
too. Still, Ramona’s was a complete surprise. On a dreary, gray afternoon with the rain pattering down on the skylight, she stood in the center of her room and dropped her robe. From her nylon harness, a slender, pink dildo stuck out. It was more like a fashion accessory to match pumps and a bracelet than a penis. “You have a lady dick!” I blurted out.

  A deep laugh emerged from her belly. She nodded. “Pretty much. She’s called Raquel.” Ramona slumped her shoulders, shrinking bashfully, before crawling under the bed covers with me. “I’m not really sure what we’re gonna do with her,” she said.

  “We could sword fight,” I replied. “Raquel the Lady Dick versus Isaac the Bandit.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We’re not sword fighting.”

  It was hot that my girlfriend had a dick, even though cracking jokes was easier than figuring out what to do with her new toy. I considered letting her do me the old-fashioned way, but I envisioned my body as so physically different from hers that to use it in the exact same way would only highlight our similarities. I feared that this would cause me, and maybe her, to see me as a woman. I felt like apologizing for not being an equal opportunist after all. “I’m not sure I can do front hole,” I said.

  Ramona was silent, her face slack.

  “We can at least try,” I said. “Or . . .” I rolled over and pushed my ass into her, banging it against her lady dick.

  She sighed. I turned to see heaviness settle into her eyes. “What?”

  “I don’t love front hole,” she said. “It reminds me of that pamphlet. Those guys were gross.”

  I’d picked up the term from a safer sex guide at a local gay bar. Most of the people in the pamphlet were very large, very hairy men decked out in leather, the downside of using BDSM material for education. The upside was the respect for the boundaries of trans men, some of whom liked penetration in this “front hole” as long as it was called something that made them comfortable. I admired these guys for transgressing the stereotypical male sex role, connected with their desire to be fucked, and envied them for maximizing their sexual potential. The go-getter in me wanted to enjoy more than just my teeny weeny. Here I had the coolest body part imaginable, a hole that delivered orgasms and babies—it seemed like such a waste to squander it, and a failing on my part to let the stifling framework of gender win, when holes and poles didn’t always have to be so loaded, and could just be erogenous zones.