Nina Here Nor There

by Nick Krieger

  I always went to the bathroom early in the class and looked at myself, unable to remember the time before every mirror stole my attention. As my practice of yoga led me to connect more with feelings inside my body, the distance to my reflection increased until all I could see in my tank top was a stranger with breasts staring back at me. Each time I’d ask myself, Can you live like this? The more classes I attended in a week, the more visits I made to the bathroom. My obsession with my self-image had grown so strong, it was no longer my chest I was referring to, but my endless focus on my reflection, my extreme searching for something intangible, when I asked: Can you live like this?

  My greatest fear after my breakup was that I’d revert to being an intimacy-phobe, unable to maintain a steady physical relationship with anyone for another seven years. But now that I had a new vocabulary to express and understand myself, getting involved with women was easy once I put down my Deepak Chopra to look for them. About two months out, I found an alternative online dating site and attempted to write a profile worthy of virtual flowers that explained without invoking gender theory that I was neither woman nor man, but rather a dude prone to bad PMS.

  Through this site, I ended up going out with just one person, Linda, an intelligent, attractive uber-Jew who unfortunately talked more than my mother. We dated for three weeks, and her words upon our split, that perhaps I was only looking for post breakup sex, were, in hindsight, entirely accurate. We slept together enough times for me to prove how comfortable I was with my physical discomfort. I was able to tell Linda how to touch and talk about my body, a skill that I now realized was called “communication” and was rather useful, regardless of a person’s gender.

  Although binding was newish to Linda, in the periphery of her awareness, from my profile she had at least some sense of what she was getting into with me, whereas Jill, a writer I met through a friend, did not. Jill sent me frustrating texts like, “Girl, you’ve got it going on.” I told her that girl words were a no-no, as was using “Nina” while fucking, which she accidentally did once, the first time my name truly upset me. Startled by the name that called up an image and identity so far from my current, crucial self-perception, I shut down completely, my connection to my body and to her lost as I reflexively reverted to my old autopilot mode. It took three weeks of awkward moments and explanatory conversations for Jill to see me as I saw myself, and it was a bittersweet end when she said it had taken her a long time to be comfortable, proud, and out as a lesbian and she didn’t want to date a guy.

  Single and slutting about the city, I wore my binder everywhere. Having it on was a matter of personal confidence, but it also served as a clue, a litmus test, or a segue into the public service announcement portion of a hookup. I had no idea what my binder would elicit when I took Tessa, a plain yet pretty brunette, home from a lesbian party. We’d been making out in my bed for a while, her shirt and bra off, when I told her I was wearing too many layers. In front of my dresser, I removed my long-sleeved shirt and the T-shirt on over it. Then, I grasped my binder from the bottom and stripped it off. I inhaled deeper than I had all day, letting my lungs fully expand, forgetting for a moment that Tessa was there.

  “Why do you wear that?” she whispered.

  “I’m just not comfortable having breasts,” I replied, relieved to see her understanding nod, a sweetness that hadn’t emerged in our shallow flirtations.

  In a fresh T-shirt, I got back into bed, and from my position underneath her, on my back where gravity worked its flattening magic, my shirt started to slip up above my belly button. I let it go, riding up, wanting to feel her skin against mine. When Tessa noticed my rising shirt, her entire face turned sympathetic. I considered telling her about the rulebook—there were ways to make my chest work, I just couldn’t move, or watch, or do anything that might cause me to notice my breasts. But with her compassionate eyes lingering upon me, I wanted to burn the rulebook. As Tessa gently tugged my shirt back down, I heard an answer to my all-consuming question. I probably could live like this, but why was I fighting so hard to?

  Ten. The Good-Bye Wad

  By the time September rolled around, I was finally feeling stable and solid after my breakup, mentally and physically grounded from four months of yoga, running, a steady paycheck, and the support group that was our home at Heartbreak Hotel. I also had some bonus confidence from my newfound success with casual dating. The San Francisco summer hit right on schedule, bringing blue skies, sun, and the few nights a year with temperatures high enough to wear shorts. If ever a time was perfect for my parents to visit me, this was it.

  And I had been waiting for almost nine years; their one visit during that stretch was the previous December, a mere forty-eight-hour stopover on their way home from Palm Springs. My mom had come to San Francisco a few times alone, and although the reasons for my dad’s absences went undiscussed between me and him, I considered it part of our “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, extended to include my home city, my home, all of me and my life. In the one conversation I’d had with my mom about their lack of visits, she’d claimed that San Francisco wasn’t a top vacation destination for them—why come to me when they could ski in Jackson Hole or golf in Bermuda? I wanted to believe my mom, and had some reason to, because when they flew through in December and recognized the possibilities for fun presented by Zagat’s and wine country, they immediately planned this big trip for the following fall, a full week, including a few days in Calistoga.

  With constant noise, mindless chatter, and perpetual mother-daughter bickering, seven days was the anxiety-provoking equivalent of seven dog years with my parents. I counted on the refuge of my work cubicle for a couple days, and the assistance of my relatives. My dad’s first cousin, Sherri, lived in a beautiful apartment with a panoramic view of both bridges, where my parents would stay, and her “separated-but-on-amicable-terms” husband, Ted, would help entertain them. Recent transplants from Arizona, Ted and Sherri were another draw for my parents. It was a coincidence that their daughter Perry—an older cousin I’d met only three times before—and her husband were hosting a Jewish naming ceremony for their newborn, or what I thought of as a girl version of a bris, on the afternoon of my parents’ arrival.

  I met my parents at Perry’s house, in the hills not far from my own home, and spotted them hunched over the spread of catered Middle Eastern food. It had been nine months since I’d last seen them, and even from across the room they appeared to have aged, or at least looked their age, early sixties, reminding me of my brother’s last-minute survival advice: think of them as cute old people, an elderly couple, someone else’s grandparents. Between the lines I heard: just let them be.

  When my mom saw me, she broke into a smile so explosive, it nearly launched off her face. She hugged me before my dad opened his arms and I slipped into the padded pocket of his body. Pulling back, he held me with his eyes, buoyant with love. The intensity was too much, like staring at the sun. I glanced away, missing the flash of change, but my eyes returned to find his eyebrows crested into flints of concern, his cheeks bulging with fire. A shudder of terror ran through me. “Did you have an operation?!” he said.

  I quickly scanned the room. We were surrounded by people, relatives, the safety of others; he couldn’t make a scene. I relaxed a notch, came back to myself, to him, and noticed the harsh glare of his eyes locked on my binder-flattened chest.

  “No, no. They’re, um . . .” I stuttered in shock. My dad couldn’t know about top surgery, could he? “You can’t see. But they’re there,” I continued to stumble, my tone placating. His cheeks relaxed and the heat drained from his eyes. “They’re there,” I reiterated. “I lost some weight.”

  My mom stepped forward, the effort to recover her joyful smile apparent. “You look great, honey.”

  I was still reeling inside. I knew my clothes were significantly baggier, but I’d had no idea my appearance had changed so drama
tically.

  “The thinnest you’ve ever looked,” my mom said. “Even here.” She grabbed my love handles. “Staying away from those bagels?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Just exercising.”

  She wanted to know how much weight I’d lost. Uncertain myself, I refused to tell my mother, who in the heat of a fight once dared me to be anorexic, my guess of ten to fifteen pounds.

  My dad caressed my cheek with the back of his hand. I forced out a kind smile in return before escaping to the bar, a card table covered with a white tablecloth. I scanned the ice buckets for hard booze to calm the blood careening through my veins, but it was a beer and wine affair. I went with the red.

  The caterer cocked her head. “Are you old enough to drink, young man?”

  “Old enough and then some,” I replied.

  She poured my drink without hesitation, and without the usual “sorry, ma’am” apology, typical once I revealed the pitch of my voice. Now, I wondered how much I had changed, if it was more than dropping weight. I thought back to my brief get-together with Zippy the previous month, after a separation too long to quantify. While complimenting me on my slimmer appearance, she’d alluded to something deeper. She said it was as if I was willing my chest away.

  Whether external or internal, something had shifted enough to make my father believe I’d had an “operation.” He must have meant a “sex-change operation”—a term I considered obsolete and misleading. But sex-change operation or top surgery, I was now certain of what I’d suspected, that after all the disappointments I’d handed my father over the years, nothing would be worse than a flat-chested daughter. I drank half my glass of wine in two gulps.

  When I returned to my parents, they were talking to Sherri, a good-natured, glamorous woman who along with her sister had grown up on the same apartment floor as my dad’s family, sharing a party line with my dad and his sister. This was back on the Lower East Side, where money was scarce, city college was the only option, and the goal was to end up better off than their parents—a raging success all around, so much so that when my dad once drove me past what had been my grandfather’s jewelry store, I had a hard time comprehending the burnt out Krieger sign as a root to my life. From my birth, the only real questions were whether to start me with tennis or squash, piano or saxophone, and which Ivy League school I’d eventually attend.

  Sherri greeted me warmly, same as she had two years before when I arrived at her house for dinner and we’d first reconnected. “Nice to meet you,” Sherri had said, humorously acknowledging fifteen years without a major family event to bring us together. A reunion of sorts, the special occasion was Robin, my dad’s sister, in town for a visit. Over brisket and brussels sprouts I listened quietly as the adults (which I still considered them to be, even though I was now one too) reminisced about their childhood. They gushed over my dad, praising his protection and care of them as young girls, claiming everybody loved him, which was still true. His kindness and charisma were his most defining traits, and I’d inherited all of mine from him.

  Despite the dripping nostalgic sentiment, hearing about my dad, his humbleness, generosity, and his past, a subject he rarely touched aside from his mother’s multiple sclerosis, caused me to tear up at the dinner table. Moved by the greatness of my father, my rush of affection seeped into a deep sadness over the skeleton of our relationship, the gay obstacle we’d never overcome.

  In recent years, I’d tried to convince myself that his initial devastation must have passed, that I was holding on too tight to comments he’d made when I was in my early twenties, like, “I can love you without loving everything about you.” But Robin had brought her first girlfriend to that reunion dinner, their serious lesbian relationship something my dad had completely failed to mention to me. That night, Robin told me that in our entire family, my dad was the only one who wasn’t entirely supportive of her relationship—she didn’t know why. Once his sister couldn’t elicit a sense of acceptance from him, I gave up hoping he’d moved forward, or believing he was capable of it.

  At the front of the living room, the ceremony began. With her husband and rabbi beside her, Perry held the baby girl. I disconnected once the Baruch Atta Adonai business started, my heritage still something that made me uneasy. Far from religious, my immediate family read the Chanukah blessings off the candle box, and I’d memorized my haftarah from an audio tape to have a bat mitzvah only because I wanted to be like all the other kids in my private NYC school and summer camp.

  I’d been shaped by a cultural Judaism, defined by obnoxiously extravagant parties for thirteen-year-olds, pressure to reach a very high bar of achievement, skiing on Christmas Day, and the regular sounds of a few lawyers engaged in an intellectual circle jerk about the Way Things Are. And I will never forget the stories and images of mass graves, crematoriums, and gas chambers, shown and told to me at an age way too young to know about such horrors. As I grew older, I found it unsettling that the adults who had burnt the plight of our ancestors into me appeared to have such myopia that they couldn’t see, or care enough as I wanted them to, that people other than Jews suffered, that discrimination and violence against many groups, including gays like me, still happened all the time.

  I focused on the sleeping baby girl and imagined all of the expectations the people in this room would saddle her with, or those she’d place upon herself, the difference between the two in my own life now imperceptible to me—it had started so early, without a ceremony but with my name. I was named after Norman, my mother’s only sibling, hit by a car and killed on his way to dinner with his wife, the incident that incited my conception a couple months later. In the story I told myself about who my mother was, how she came to be, it was first the loss of her father, an unhealthy gambling man who had a heart attack at the race track when she was in college, and then her older brother, a legendary basketball player and her hero, gone when she was my age, thirty, that had made a lonely, fighting survivor out of her.

  I received my middle name, “Beth,” from my paternal grandmother, Belle, who passed away shortly before I was born. The story I held on to about my father was built around his mother and his childhood lost, caring for her, pushing her wheelchair, feeding and carrying her as she slowly degenerated from multiple sclerosis.

  Often Jews pass on only the first letter in the names of the dead, and I held the honor of my relatives in the N and B, even though what was buried inside them went to my core. In the story I created about myself, I’d been born out of the greatest traumas of my parents’ lives, as if their tragedies had been built into my constitution, and my purpose on this earth was to save them from grief and loss.

  The rest of the San Francisco portion of my parents’ visit went smoothly. The true test came with the challenge of confined spaces, our three-day trip to Calistoga. Sherri lent us her Lexus hardtop convertible, which had a backseat made for airplane carry-on luggage, not a human being like myself. It was too small for three people but asking my parents to pay for a rental car when offered a free black sports car would’ve been incomprehensible. If they’d asked me to get in the trunk and promised breathing holes, I would’ve obliged. It might’ve been more comfortable.

  After three spine-destroying hours, we arrived at our resort, where our room was a freestanding cottage with a patio of wicker furniture, beach cruiser bikes parked in front, and views of the mountains. My dad disappeared with a Denis Johnson novel, and my mom grabbed my hand to explore the resort village and spa facilities. On our tour, she enthusiastically rated each amenity—showers constructed of exotic stones, eucalyptus-scented steam rooms, cucumber-infused water—as “good,” “bad,” or “stupid” features. It was entertaining and easy to be around my mom when she focused her judgment on something other than me, and although I could care less whether a shower had one or eleven showerheads, I enjoyed sharing her excitement.

  We made our dinner reservations through the conci
erge, who also provided me with a four-mile jogging route. Back in the room, I pulled my running shorts and sports bra out of my ripped athletic bag, conscious of the rare silence. My mom sat on the edge of the bed, picking at the skin around her thumb. “What’s the thing you wear underneath your shirt?” she asked.

  I hovered above my bag, not at all surprised by her question, only that she’d dug into the Q&A so soon after our arrival. “It’s called a binder,” I said.

  “You wear it to look flat?” Her tone was nonconfrontational, fearful rather than defensive.

  I wished I hadn’t given her my thesis last year, felt guilty about leaving her with material clearly too painful for her to get through alone. But now that I was more secure, certain that for as long as I had breasts I would have binders, I could either start educating my mom or face perpetual inquisition.

  “Yes,” I said, and turning on my sweetest pedagogic voice, I added, “Do you want to see it?”

  She shook her head weakly. “No, honey, I don’t think so.”

  I carried my running clothes into the marble bathroom and changed over the cushioned bench. When I returned, my mom was still perched on the edge of the bed. “Why do you want to look flat?” she asked, her curiosity palpable.

  “It makes me feel more comfortable.”

  She stared into her lap, focused on her interlocked fingers, a trick we both used to avoid picking. “Where do you get them?”

  “A website.” I leaned down to put the jeans and binder I’d removed back into my bag. “Are you sure you don’t want to see? I can show it to you.” I took her lack of response as an indication to continue. “It’s just a tank top,” I said. I pulled the binder from my bag and held it up. “See, it’s like a stretchy tank top.”