by Nick Krieger
“It’s kind of like a girdle.” She sounded relieved.
“Yeah. Totally. I guess you could say that.” I felt accomplished, like I’d just shown a kid that there were no monsters under her bed, but before I could rejoice, my mom returned to her usual self. “Most women would do anything for a larger chest and my daughter wants a smaller one,” she complained.
And what is so bad about that, I wanted to say. But instead of launching a fight, I strapped my iPod to my shoulder and put in my earphones. Once out the door, I started to jog. I picked up my pace to get out of the resort, onto a side road bordering a vineyard. I ran hard until I was sweating and could no longer think about anything, even my chest, the weight that all my exercise could never shed.
The next morning, my mother introduced me to Pilates reformer machines, contraptions that used elastic bands for resistance, and we sat side by side, following an instructor in strength-building exercises. My mom threw the same maniacal energy into her workouts as she did her jabbering, and, a lifelong athlete, she was now a senior-citizen jock, a physical specimen of lean muscle, an inspiration. After class, I had a massage, a treat my parents often successfully dangled before me so I’d join them on their luxury trips. At night, we ate at a sushi restaurant, pounding the pieces of nigiri and sashimi as if they were potato chips, while we took turns being the butt of each other’s jokes.
For the next two days we continued the merriment of a typical Krieger vacation. Always a little oblivious in our fancy surroundings, at wineries we stuck our noses too far into the wine glasses, and in restaurants we donned makeshift napkin bibs to protect from the dangers of sauce spray. On bike rides to town, my mom and I sped ahead of my dad, trash talking as we passed him. When my dad and I needed a break from my mom verbalizing all her thoughts, we sat on the wicker furniture outside the cottage and read.
On Friday, our last day, I snuck out in the morning for an early jog. I followed a quiet road, the mountains around me socked in by a dense fog that lifted as I ran through the valley. It was hot by the time I returned to the room, where my parents had left me a note. I changed into my bathing suit and T-shirt and found them in the pool, surrounded by dozens of chaise lounges, all empty but theirs. The grounds were deserted, the atmosphere so tranquil I could hear every droplet of water land, each splash, from where I sat, watching them in the shallow end.
My dad dipped underwater, letting my mom climb onto his back and hook her hands around his shoulders. He pushed off the wall, propelling them forward, the ruffles on her skirt rippling as he tugged her along with a strong breaststroke. After a few seconds, he rose enough for her head to break the surface, and she took in air through her gaping smile. He remained underwater for the length of the pool, holding his breath, a skill he’d developed as a high school swimmer. At the far wall, my mom requested “again,” prodding him into another aquatic donkey ride.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. My parents had a private game, a couple activity. I thought back to the times when their divorce seemed like an imminent possibility. My father would storm around, his eyes a squinty torrent of rage as he ranted about how some decision I’d made would ruin my life. Like a husband who blames his wife for not producing a son, my dad seemed to blame my mom for my inability to meet his expectations. But once I left the house, their relationship improved. Now, attached to each other in the pool like two wizened turtles silently copulating, their behavior even seemed eerily romantic. There was happiness between them, independent of me. Perhaps it had been there all along, and I’d been too consumed by my own guilt to notice.
Soon, my dad was standing by my side, dripping onto the concrete, drying himself with a large towel. He reached over for the business section of the New York Times. His eyes lingered on my legs. “You don’t shave anymore?”
The golf cap he’d donned was so doofy, his bushy eyebrows a mess. I tried to invoke my brother’s advice. Just let Dad be, I told myself. But there was disdain in his question, the same one he’d asked me last year, and we’d already been through, “You don’t wear earrings anymore?” the year before, and “Are you ever going to grow your hair again?” the year before that. I couldn’t let him be. I wasn’t my brother. My dad wanted different answers to the questions he asked my brother about his job or activity choices; he wanted a different answer from me as to how I expressed myself as a person. “It sure looks like I don’t shave,” I said.
Just then my mom stuck her head, hair askew, red goggle rings around her eyes, over the edge of the pool, and I jumped at her invitation to leave my dad for the hot tub. Five minutes later, after my mom and I had both escaped from the near boiling water to sit on the ledge, I could feel her eyes on my faded black Frog Bra. I braced myself for round two of bonding time. “How come you don’t wear a bathing suit?” my mom asked.
“I am wearing a bathing suit,” I said.
“A real bathing suit?”
“It is real. These are boy’s swim trunks.” If I hadn’t loved the sun on my bare skin, I would’ve worn a wetsuit to the pool. “How come your bathing suit has ruffles?”
“It’s what old people wear.”
Steam floated up off the water, clouding the air between us.
“Do you want to be a boy?” she asked.
We had been building toward this very moment from the near catastrophe upon my parents’ arrival. I was relieved she had brought the issue into the open, at least between the two of us. But what could I say? My mom didn’t understand the words and identities I’d uncovered—genderqueer, gender variant, gender fluid, trans-masculine—nothing existed to her between or beyond girl and boy, and I didn’t fully relate to either anymore. I thought to tell her about my body, that right then I could feel an energetic sensation in my chest, as if my breasts were lifting off of me, like helium balloons trying to float away. But I was reminded of Jess, the very first time he’d said he felt “disconnected” to his tits, how ludicrous that sounded. I went with the simplest answer in my arsenal, making the only distinction she might possibly understand, that between experience and self-image. “It’s not that I want to be a boy. It’s that when I look in the mirror, I expect to see a boy,” I said.
“Yeah, well, when I look in the mirror I expect to see less wrinkles and smaller thighs.” She focused on the gurgling water, the tiny torrential eddies. “I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”
Had I not lived in my own body every second of every day, my answer would not have made sense to me either. “Mom, you and I are different people. You don’t have to understand.”
She wiped the hair out of her face and the guns of her biceps flared. Through her bathing suit, I could see the six-pack of her abs, taut as guitar strings, the strength that she used to muscle through that which defied force. “But I want to understand,” she said.
I reminded her that she once couldn’t understand me being gay. She dismissed the point, said that wasn’t a big deal. But it had been huge. The only reason we could have this conversation now was because both of us had grown in the past ten years, over these long slow bonding sessions that always depleted the last reserves of my patience, which hit empty this time when she asked if I was the boy in a gay relationship.
“If anything, I’m a boy, not the boy,” I said, failing to elaborate that this would make any relationship with a girl not gay at all. Now, if I were to get with a boy, that would be very, very gay. But explaining my existence in her absolute terms was impossible. I called the conversation quits and left for the steam room, where she let me be alone, safe from her scrutiny.
On the drive back to San Francisco, we visited a few more wineries. At each stop, I climbed out of the backseat, watched my mom pound her samples, passed on my own to avoid a midday buzz that would only leave me sleepy and cranky, and crammed myself back into the pod again. My mom claimed tastings didn’t make her feel “high,” her word for intoxicated, but by the
time we’d made it out of wine country, she was talking in double time without pause.
“Your friend we met the other night, Sandra,” my mom said. “She has a lot of tattoos.”
“And?” I replied, stretching out my cramped legs sideways on the seat next to me.
“And I guess I don’t understand why anyone would do that.”
I rolled down the small piece of glass that passed for my window. The air outside was as stale and hot as the air inside. We were barely moving, stuck in traffic. “I like her tattoos,” I said.
“Sandra was very nice,” my mom said. “I guess I’m just wondering if you have any normal friends?”
Anticipating the fight neither of us had the energy for, I flipped around in my seat, fidgeting for an out. The leather back, ramrod and stiff, pressed into my spinal column, closing in like a medieval death chamber. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know, people with similar values.”
“You mean values like compassion, kindness, empathy?” I said to the back of her head.
My mother craned her neck to face me. “Just people like us.”
“Like us?”
“You know, that do things like us.”
As I obnoxiously brought up my one friend who played golf, the GPS, in the voice of a female robot, announced the directions for our next turn. My dad veered off the congested main road and cut underneath the highway. The GPS instructed us to turn right. I saw a closed on-ramp on the right. My internal voice of caution instructed me to abort the conversation. “What does that even mean, normal?” I asked. “White, straight, no visible tattoos or piercings?”
“Why did you ask, if you know what I mean?” my mom snapped.
Because I needed to be one hundred percent sure that everything I’d once aspired to be was based on your definition, not mine, I thought, before I spouted off names, listing my friends along with their marks of shame—eyebrow ring, shoulder tattoo, black, Latina, bisexual. Even my friends who fit her bill had some weird-ass habits, like buying ancient medical devices on eBay or making gory movies by bloodying children’s dolls. “Who is normal?” I asked.
My dad, following the directions on the GPS, circled back around to the same closed on-ramp.
“I guess I was just thinking of your brother’s friends,” my mom said.
His friends were athletic, attractive, intelligent white guys. They reminded me of my A-gays and the social circle I’d fallen into by rote, transposing mainstream to gaystream as if being palatable and assimilative would’ve kept me as close to normal as possible, close enough to follow the golden path my parents had laid out for me. I liked massages, high-end resorts, and sesame-encrusted ahi tuna, but not at the cost. I wouldn’t have begrudged my parents their luxuries and their golf, the hard-earned rewards that were unimaginable to them as kids, if, somewhere in this class upgrade, they’d kept a space for me to comfortably express myself. But they hadn’t, so I picked on the one trait that tied my parents to my brother’s friends. “Oh, you mean wealthy.”
“Rich? You don’t know anything about it! What, you think we’re rich?” My mom turned into a wounded bear, clawing back at the attacker she’d just treated to three very expensive days. “You’re the one that’s rich,” she shouted. Following a Merlot-inspired logic, she spat out numbers, using my hourly rate to estimate my salary, shocked as she did the math. “You’re rich,” she said. “You’re the one that’s rich.”
She had the gist of my earnings, even though her calculations were slightly off, failing to account for my four-day work week, my own negotiation based on my preference for time over money, and my regular school loan payments. I lived more cheaply than she could’ve imagined, and had been hoarding my money since landing the travel dot-com gig. I had more than enough to go on a trip, not a short two-week vacation like Scotland, but a backpacking adventure in Asia, Central America, or Africa. That’s what I’d always done—saved, picked a budget travel location, and disappeared for months on end. But this time my “travel fund” was earmarked for the journey I wasn’t ready to make, the one that would separate me completely from people like us, who didn’t have top surgery, even though we were the only ones who could afford it.
“Can somebody please help me,” my dad begged. We were at the same closed on-ramp again.
My mom jabbed her finger at the GPS keypad, finding another route. I stared out the window in silence, until we were on the highway. The wind circulated through the crack in the window. “What, you’re not talking to me now?” my mom said. “You’re mad at me?”
“I’m not mad.” I tilted my head against the glass. “I’m just sad.”
On day seven, the final night, at my request we ate dinner at a gourmet vegetarian restaurant. In the theater district, at the bottom of a hotel, the place had a gloomy, fine-dining-for-business-travelers atmosphere. Even though neither of my parents were hardcore carnivores, watching them hold their menus for so long concerned me.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked my dad. His cheeks were sunburned, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. He’d had a long afternoon chasing my mom around the city, and he nodded amenably, closing his menu as the waiter arrived.
“So, let me get this straight,” my dad said to the waiter. “There are no hidden hamburgers? No code word for chicken?” His charm trickled out, lacking its usual vigor. He mustered a weak smile before ordering hand-cut frites.
“You ordered french fries!” my mom yelled, chastising him with a few shakes of her head. She then proceeded to ask the waiter about every ingredient on the menu. “What’s vegan sour cream?” she asked.
“It’s a white nut-based sauce, sour in flavor.”
“Veggie sausage?”
“Spicy seitan. It’s wheat gluten.”
“Tempeh?”
“Soy based. A cousin of tofu.”
For me, reading the menu was like scanning the crowd at a queer bar—the possibilities endlessly enticing. But listening to my mom try to translate this new food language into something she understood, watching my father too tired to try and order french fries, made me regret bringing them to this restaurant. Whether they enjoyed their food or not, they vacuumed up all three of their courses, licking the last pools of sauce off the empty plates with their forks.
“Are you glad we’re leaving?” my mom asked once my dad excused himself to the bathroom. I shook my head, refusing to take her bait. “Well, we love it out here,” she continued. “This was so fun, honey. Maybe next time we’ll go to Sonoma.”
It had been a great visit, I thought to myself—seven days with my parents and only one real fight. I’d tried harder than usual to avoid confrontation, as if I knew it would be our last time together and I wanted to preserve the memory.
“It’s hard when your kids live so far away.” My mom lifted her glasses to wipe away a tear, reminding me of visiting days at sleepaway camp when I’d break into hysterics, begging her not to leave me. “I know, Mom, I know.” She wrapped her muscular pipe cleaner of an arm around me and pulled me close, recoiling when my dad returned.
Under the table, my dad handed me “the wad”—the name my brother and I had come up with for a chunk of cash so thick we could never tell how many twenties were in there until we counted later. My dad had been handing us the good-bye wad for as long as we could remember. Usually he’d say, “I hope this helps a little,” and it always did, even now that I supported myself. I told my dad I was finally going to get a winter jacket, something I’d been too frugal to buy myself, with his gift. Through his fatigue, he broke into his benevolent smile, the one I strived to emulate.
At the front door, I hugged them both again. Before leaving, my dad placed his hand on my shoulder. His parting words came out gently. “I hope this is just a phase,” he said, holding my gaze with his tender, tired eyes. “I want my little girl ba
ck.”
Eleven. The New World
Before I could catch my breath from my parents’ visit, or process my dad’s last words, he sent me a follow-up e-mail. Reading it in my cubicle at work, I felt like we were still standing in the dismal entrance of that restaurant-hotel, my dad not yet finished with his closing remarks. My mom must have told him what I’d said in the hot tub because he was basically begging me not to do something drastic or catastrophic. Knowing my father, I had to assume he meant an operation, a possibility now so real to him, he’d gone into panic mode.
In his letter, his vision of me, shared with the great pride of a father, made me feel ill, the word woman alone turning my breakfast cereal to a carb lump in my stomach. Despite his anguished, affectionate tone, certain phrases, synonymous with the ones raged upon me as a kid, hit the spot that had never healed, linking my fury and pain in the tears dripping from my eyes. His belief that I was throwing away my chance of happiness was the antithesis of how I experienced my own evolution.
The sporty girl with the long ponytail and small hoop earrings had faded many years ago, and now, confronted with my frantic father trying to bring her back, I was certain there was nothing left to our wasted relationship but his torment, my guilt, and a fight over ownership of my body, image, and identity. I reread his e-mail over and over in a state of catatonic sorrow until I finally noticed my wet keyboard, the fluorescent lights, coworkers all around me, and I fled the office.
Later that night, when I’d calmed down some, I printed out his e-mail and read it repeatedly, as if trying to take into my bones what I knew to be true in my head. The “operation” incident, his good-bye plea, this letter making a case for his image of me—the barrage of his fatherhood with all its beloved intent would be relentless if I replied, a pickax gradually chipping away at me.