by Rachel Gold
It was so relaxing to be back in a space where I felt completely safe that I ended up going to bed early and sleeping for nine hours. Then it was off to the woods with Dad to kick through the leaves before it was time to catch the bus back to campus.
Chapter Twelve
Tucker
Now that Tucker was angry at Vivien, the focus for the paper for the Women’s & Gender Studies class came easily. She wrote about bathrooms and locker rooms and the importance of making facilities safe for trans women.
She turned in the paper on Tuesday and invited Lindy out to an official dinner at a restaurant to celebrate. She’d set aside enough of her money from her hardware store job to be able to treat and picked the modern Italian place that Lindy liked at the end of the strip of restaurants near campus. They ordered a huge portion of spaghetti with mussels, clams and calamari. Tucker wished she could also get them a bottle of wine, but they were too close to campus for her to use her fake ID. Everyone here was on the lookout for underaged students trying to buy booze. She had to remember to make a run with Cal to get beer for his house party week after next.
“This is great,” Tucker said midway through her first plate of pasta. “Thanks for coming with me.”
“Silly, why wouldn’t I?” Lindy asked.
“You’ve been so busy.”
Last weekend, Tucker had been on her own because Lindy was concentrating on the paper she had to write for midterm. It was an extra quiet weekend because Ella had gone home and stayed over at her folks’ house on Saturday night. In the middle of all that quiet, Tucker wondered if Lindy had overhead Ella talking about her plans and that’s why she didn’t try to monopolize Tucker, but that had seemed overly paranoid.
Lindy had started a few arguments by saying that Tucker was spending too much time with Ella. Tucker protested that it was a nonissue because she was dating Lindy exclusively and Ella was just her roommate, but she felt a stirring of guilt anyway because she knew if Lindy wasn’t in the picture, she’d be asking Ella out.
“I was busy for the first part of the weekend,” Lindy said. “Until this happened.”
She held out her thumb to show the thick bandage wrapping it.
“I thought that happened Sunday evening,” Tucker said.
“Saturday,” Lindy corrected. “It was so chilly I had to move the old fan to get the window to shut.”
“It was pretty cold,” Tucker said, but inside her mind she was scrambling to remember the order of events over the weekend. She remembered calling Lindy on Saturday around noon and Lindy saying she was busy and planned to just focus on work. She didn’t hear from her again until she called late Sunday to see how she was, at which point she thought Lindy had said she hurt herself that afternoon in the kitchen.
Tucker took a few slow bites of pasta, but the flavors were going dull in her mouth.
“I thought you cut it in the kitchen,” she said.
“What?”
“When I called Sunday you said you hurt your thumb in the kitchen and had to go to the campus medical center. You’d just gotten back.”
Lindy looked at her for a long moment and then tore off a piece of garlic bread and held it without biting into it.
“Oh, I cut it on the fan on Saturday but I just tossed together a bandage because I didn’t feel like leaving my place, but on Sunday in the kitchen I banged it good and it opened up and started bleeding again so I thought I should get it looked at. They wanted to give me stitches, but I told them to just tape it up.”
“That makes sense,” Tucker said, but it didn’t.
It was theoretically possible. So close to possible, in fact, that it stood out as a well-crafted lie. She filed it away to think about later when she was alone and Lindy wasn’t watching her face.
“Did you pick out a movie for tonight?” Tucker asked.
“I thought we could start this really great Japanese anime series from the late eighties. It’s supposed to have some lesbian subtext.”
“Sounds awesome, what’s the premise?”
Tucker let Lindy talk about the series and its influences; she let the sound of Lindy’s words wash over her without really listening to their meaning.
When they finished dinner, Tucker paid and then they walked back to Lindy’s apartment. They made it through the first two episodes of the series before Lindy announced, “Vivien was surprised you didn’t tell her you’re not really trans.”
She got up to refill their glasses of herbal iced tea. Despite the casual tone she’d used, Tucker felt angry.
“I didn’t because she was a jerk about it. The minute she thought I was a trans woman she got all icy.”
“She has good connections in the academic community and I really need her help to get into grad school, so please don’t piss her off,” Lindy said.
“I’m not trying to piss her off,” Tucker said and then reconsidered the truth of that statement. “Look, if she’s not cool with trans women, that’s just really weird for a feminist.”
“No it isn’t. Some feminists think trans women are just men willing to do anything to invade women’s space.”
“You don’t think that,” Tucker said.
Silence.
“Do you?”
“Well, I agree with Germaine Greer when she says that sex change surgery is a really conservative act because it shapes people to fit the gender roles created by our culture. And I also agree that just because a guy puts on makeup and a dress, that doesn’t make him a woman,” Lindy said.
She put the newly filled glasses on the table and tucked herself into the corner of the couch so that she was facing Tucker directly, but she didn’t look at Tucker’s face as she talked. Her gaze wandered across the coffee table and to the TV and back to the table.
Lindy went on, “Being a woman happens because you get born with a female body and you get raised as a girl and you have to deal with all the shit that happens to girls—and then you grow up to be a woman and have to deal with all the shit that happens to women. Someone who was born with a male body and spent a bunch of years having male privilege and then is sick of it or whatever, they can’t just turn into a woman, no matter how many surgeries they have.”
“Wow, you really don’t understand transsexualism,” was all that Tucker could say to that.
“I can understand it without agreeing with it,” Lindy said. She stretched her right arm along the back of the couch, bending her elbow enough that her hand rested near Tucker’s. She started playing with the thick seam of Tucker’s sweatshirt cuff.
“That sounds like what a lot of people say about gays and lesbians.”
“Being a lesbian doesn’t make me infringe on anyone else’s space. Transsexuals want to have everything women do.”
“Only if they’re trans women,” Tucker said. Lindy didn’t get it. She didn’t seem to understand that transsexual women were women and so asking to have what any other woman had wasn’t an unreasonable request.
Plus, she probably wasn’t even thinking about the trans men who tended to have a somewhat easier time transitioning into socially accepted male roles, probably because everyone took it for granted that some women would want to be men and couldn’t figure out why some men would want to be women. It didn’t occur to them that “want” wasn’t the issue. But even if it was, why should that be so hard to accept?
“You think there’s some army of trans women just waiting to invade your women-only space?” Tucker said.
“You’re dramatizing again,” Lindy responded. “I’m just trying to tell you how Vivien and a bunch of feminists see things. Don’t get mad at me.”
“I’m sorry, I think that’s stupid.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion, but could you keep it out of my academic career?”
Lindy’s fingers plucked harder at Tucker’s sweatshirt seam and she wanted to move her arm away but was afraid she’d offend Lindy.
“But you met Emily when we went to WisCon. Are you really ready to sa
y she’s not a woman?” Tucker asked.
“She’s not a woman the way you and I are.”
“But by that logic lots of women aren’t the same…I’m not the same kind of woman that you are. I grew up in a different place with widely divergent economic circumstances. By that measure, Emily and I are more alike than you and me since we both come from small towns and working-class families.”
“You’re trying to muddy the issue. You know there are elements of womanhood that cut across culture and affluence.”
“Like what?” Tucker asked.
“Like being the target of male predation,” Lindy said. “No matter where you grow up, men think they can have access to you whenever they want, however they want.”
Her index finger wrapped itself in the fabric of Tucker’s cuff and twisted tight enough to slow the blood flowing into Tucker’s hand. She barely noticed the thick feeling as blood pooled in her fingers because she was so caught up in the argument.
“Really? I think I’ve heard of some egalitarian native cultures. Does that mean the female-bodied people in those cultures aren’t women?” Tucker asked.
“Well, if they moved here, they’d face the same discrimination and harassment and predation that we do and men don’t,” Lindy said.
“So if instead of moving from another culture they moved to being a woman through hormones and surgery, if they’re subject to all the effects of being perceived as a woman in our culture, then they’re a woman?”
The heat and pressure in her fingers from the closed loop of fabric around her wrist was becoming unbearable. She reached over to move Lindy’s hand away from her cuff. Lindy caught Tucker’s hand in a tight grip, but she let go of the sweatshirt. The release of tension made her hand flash hot and then cold as the blood rushed up and down her arm.
“That’s not right, because he wouldn’t have grown up female,” Lindy said.
“What about this: if a girl is born and her family makes her grow up as boy because they wanted a boy and then she finally gets away from them and starts living as woman, then is she not a woman because everyone treated her like a boy growing up?”
“She’s a woman,” Lindy said and dropped her grip on Tucker’s hand. “But what if there’s a guy who really fetishizes womanhood. What if he’s really turned on by the idea of being a lesbian and he goes through everything to change his body so he can have that fantasy. Would you want to have sex with him?”
It sounded like a mean-spirited question to Tucker, but she had to stop and consider it anyway. If such a person existed and they really were male inside, would she have any interest in them? Not really. She wasn’t interested in men, no matter what they looked like, and she was interested in women but it didn’t matter how they’d come to be women. What mattered was how they knew themselves. She’d met a number of transsexual women during that whole Pride weekend who were very attractive to her and, just like with cisgendered women, their look figured into it, but the main part of the attraction came from what she felt they were like as people.
Heck, she’d have considered asking Emily out if she and Claire weren’t an item and if Tucker hadn’t been with Lindy already.
“If there really was a man in a lesbian body, I wouldn’t want to have sex with him,” Tucker said. “But in my experience trans women are women and some of them are damn fine, and I don’t mean only physically.”
“Well, why don’t we go find one and see how into her you are then.”
Lindy got up from the couch abruptly and walked into the kitchen. She paused when she got there and looked around like she wasn’t sure what she’d gone in there to get.
“Now you’re just being mean,” Tucker called after her.
“Am I? Maybe that’s why you’ve been spending less time with me. Maybe you really want a transsexual girlfriend.”
“You told me not to come around this weekend,” Tucker said. She got up from the couch but didn’t know if she should go over to Lindy or not. Lindy was standing by the sink with a dishtowel in her hands.
“That was Saturday morning,” she said. “You didn’t even come check on me when I cut the shit out of my thumb.”
“You didn’t tell me until Sunday!”
“You could have checked on me,” Lindy insisted.
“I did! That’s why I was calling on Sunday. And you told me not to bother coming over, that everything was okay,” Tucker reminded her.
“You sounded like you had other things on your mind anyway.”
“I didn’t,” Tucker said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Tucker grabbed her jacket from the back of the couch. She didn’t even know what to say. Lindy was being impossible and she wanted to get away from her and think about everything that was said that evening. She didn’t wait for Lindy to respond, she just walked quickly to the door and down the stairs.
Lindy called to her when she was nearly to the ground, but she didn’t stop. They’d been together all of nine months and it was time to figure out where she really stood with this relationship.
* * *
Tucker knocked on Ella’s door but got no answer. She was probably studying or playing games with Shen and Johnny. Tucker sat in her desk chair and idly twirled it left and right. She turned to her computer and opened a file she had hidden deep inside a series of directories. It was her journal and lately the last page had become a list:
Said she was working all day, then referenced a movie she watched.
Said she went out to get Chinese food and then saw a traffic accident and forgot to pick up the food, but her car hadn’t moved from where she’d been parked the day before.
Accused me of messing with her research papers but they didn’t look touched at all.
Has been talking to Vivien about me: has she been telling her stories?
She added:
Said she cut her thumb in the kitchen on Sunday, then that she’d cut it on the fan on Saturday. Said she was working all weekend, but she wasn’t.
She needed to talk to someone. The easiest course of action would be to just walk over to the Union and see who was holding court at the table. Cal and Tesh were both great listeners, if you could get Tesh away from Summer, who liked to offer advice every few sentences. Plus if Tucker went to the Union and Lindy showed up to pound on her door and alternately apologize and yell at her, she wouldn’t have to hear it. She grabbed her bag and headed for the back stairs out of the dorm.
To her surprise when she walked into the Union, Ella was at the table with Cal, Tesh and Summer. As she walked up to the table, Ella looked up and caught her eyes with that level celadon gaze that Tucker couldn’t dodge.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Can I talk to you alone?”
“Ooh,” Summer said and Tesh smacked her arm.
Ella ignored them and got up from the bench. “Our rooms?”
“Somewhere else,” Tucker said.
Ella seemed to understand that meant Tucker was trying to avoid Lindy. She nodded once and said, “I know a place, but it’s a little cold.”
“I don’t mind.”
They left the Union and walked across campus to the math and science dorm. Tucker had been here once with Ella to play games in the common room, but it wasn’t her scene. Ella took her up the central stairway but they didn’t stop at the third floor, they went up another flight of stairs and came to a short platform in front of a door marked “Roof Access—Locked.” Someone had tossed a pair of old, cracked, black vinyl beanbag chairs on the platform. Ella settled into one and patted the other.
“We might get interrupted by couples wanting to make out,” she said. “But other than that, it’s totally private. The acoustics are awful, so if you talk quietly people using the stairs can’t hear you.”
“How do you know about this place? I’ve been hanging around campus since last winter and I didn’t know it was here.”
“It’s where the gamer guys bring th
eir dates,” Ella told her. “Johnny and Shen showed me, in case we play a strategy game in this dorm. They didn’t want someone else getting the jump on me.”
“Or they were trying to get the jump on you.”
Tucker settled into the other beanbag chair and felt it try to mold itself to her backside as much as its ancient and cold vinyl allowed. Bundled into her coat, with the chair cradling her, she was warm enough. In the dead of winter it would be too cold to be comfortable, but for now it was just right for a private conversation.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked.
“I don’t know what to do about Lindy and I’m starting to wonder if I should break up with her,” Tucker said and was surprised that her voice sounded completely steady. She watched Ella’s face for a shocked response but didn’t see one. Ella tipped her head a little to the right and looked thoughtful.
“I’ve been worried,” she said. “I hear you argue a lot and you seem stressed out about her.”
“I am,” Tucker admitted. “I really like her and in some ways we’re great together, but it’s been getting weird. I don’t know if it’s the start of the school year and her being all stressed about writing another paper to present or if it’s me saying I’m trans and…not so much what’s happened to me but her fears about how it reflects on her.”
Tucker filled her lungs up and blew out a big breath of air that hung in front of her face like a weak gray ghost before dispersing.
“We went out to dinner tonight to celebrate me finally getting that monster paper off for Gender Studies and I think she lied to me and it wasn’t even anything important. She’d cut her thumb and she told me it happened Sunday but then she said Saturday. She’s been doing that a lot lately and she acts like she doesn’t even know she did it. Like she’ll tell me she was working all day and then tell me about the movies she watched.”
“Is she on something? Or maybe there’s a medication she’s supposed to be taking that she’s skipping?”
“No idea. You don’t think I’m crazy?”