by Rachel Gold
“It’s not crucial yet,” Claire said. “But when I graduate this spring, I’ll be living here all the time and Em shouldn’t have to put up with my crazy hours.”
“You’re already up here most weekends and all the holidays,” Emily pointed out.
Claire slipped an arm around her waist and Emily put an arm over her shoulders in a sideways hug. Tucker felt the sharp burn of envy at their easy closeness and it made her wonder if there was any place that would be far enough to run away from her memories of Lindy and the ruin of their relationship.
“Where are we staying?” she asked to pull herself back to the present.
“There’s only one bed in the guest room, but we also have an air mattress so you don’t have to share,” Claire said.
After putting their bags in the guest room, Tucker and Ella came out to sit in the living room in front of the Christmas tree that brushed the ceiling. A little black cat slept on the tree skirt between two wrapped boxes.
“If you don’t mind my saying, you two would make a cute couple,” Claire said.
“Don’t pressure them,” Emily scolded her.
Tucker looked over at Ella, feeling the heat in her cheeks.
“I know,” Ella said. “But I’m seeing this really sweet guy right now and I’m not sure where I’m going to fall on the orientation spectrum. Did you always know?” That last was directed at Emily.
“I always liked girls,” she said. “That can make it harder to transition, but I think the world needs more lesbians.” She laughed. “Actually the two things just aren’t related for me. And who knows, it could turn out that I’m just Claire-sexual. I dated a few women in college, but nobody really compares to her.”
“Oh hush,” Claire said. “You know I’m fickle and bitchy and temperamental and you only stick with me because I edit your writing and co-mother your cat.”
“Some people aren’t as certain about their sexual orientation, trans or cis,” Emily said, grinning at Claire. “And I hear that occasionally in the woods if you sit really quietly you can spot a bisexual.”
Ella laughed. “That sounds like me, except for the quiet part. I like everyone. But Tucker was taken for a while and Shen’s great.”
“You should start at the beginning and tell the whole story,” Claire said. “And let me get a notepad in case I want to take notes. This has the makings of a great novel, since no one would believe it as nonfiction.”
Tucker started the story, Ella filled in details when she faltered, and the telling of it kept everyone up well past midnight.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ella
Emily and Claire had planned a solstice housewarming on that Saturday so people could have their own family Christmas celebrations. They set up a buffet table on the side of the dining room but no formal table because there simply wasn’t room. Tucker ran to the store with Emily for a list of last-minute items while Claire and I set up the living room and dining room with a bunch of folding chairs.
I’d been watching Tucker, how her shoulders were more relaxed, how she’d stopped walking around like someone who’d been punched in the gut, how eager she was to go out shopping with Emily and see the city—and it scared me. I wanted her to be happy, but I didn’t want to go back to a university where I’d just come out at the top of my lungs and not have her there with me. I didn’t know how to stop her from just running away from Lindy and everything.
The event started in the late afternoon and Emily’s parents were the first to arrive, having driven in from Liberty with her brother Mike. They seemed so normal midwestern that I felt like I must have seen them on a TV show at some point. Emily’s dad was a hair shorter than she was but her brother was already her height and looked like he wasn’t done growing. He was at that awkward mid-teens stage where his efforts to grow facial hair gave him a faint, patchy goatee. They brought two casseroles and Emily’s mom went into the kitchen with her to help enact the reheating and serving plan.
Claire’s mother and her boyfriend arrived next. In her mother, I could see what a middle-aged Claire would look like without the heavy eye makeup. She had fine crow’s feet around her eyes and reddish brown hair. The boyfriend was a little heavy, looked friendly, and seemed very relieved that he could go stand next to Emily’s dad and talk about sports.
Two friends from around town arrived: a well-dressed guy named Gabe and his even more fashionable friend Paige. They brought drinks and once those were settled in the kitchen, Gabe set about plugging his iPod into the stereo speakers to play a funky, retro rock holiday mix. I wandered over to him.
“How do you know Claire and Emily?” I asked.
“Emily and I went to the same group for a bit,” he said. “You?”
“I came with Tucker, she’s been friends with them for a while. Is it weird being the straight guy in the group?” I asked.
He gave me a considering look. “Not with so many pretty girls around,” he said. Then he added, “I met Emily in a trans youth group, you know.”
“Oh, I thought it was like a writing group or something.”
“Nah, can’t write to save my life. I’m a DJ.”
“That’s cool. I am too.”
“A DJ?” he looked dubious.
“Trans,” I said.
“Huh.”
We stared at each other. I thought about Nico and all the people who couldn’t or didn’t want to pass as one gender or the other. What a strange world where half the time we couldn’t pick each other out in a crowd and yet so many people I met still thought trans folks were only the stereotypes they saw on TV.
The bell rang again and Emily and Claire’s friend Natalie arrived with her mother and older sister and a huge turkey under foil that had to be immediately transported into the kitchen and fussed over by Emily’s mother. By then Emily and Tucker were back from the store and the apartment was packed with people talking and pushing past each other with table settings and dishes.
* * *
After we filled our plates and sat down around the dining room and living room, Claire said a simple, elegant grace and everyone got to eating. I wished Vivien could see this. I wondered what she was doing for Thanksgiving. Was she in the bosom of the anti-trans feminist sisterhood? What did that look like? A bunch of angry women sitting around a table saying a grace that began with “Fuck the patriarchy?”
That wasn’t fair of me. She was probably with a group of good friends and family spanning two or three generations, not unlike this one. Hers probably had fewer trans women, but who could say. Maybe she had a cousin or a relative’s partner who just wasn’t out to her.
I sat on a folding chair between Tucker and Natalie, who spent most of the meal having an animated discussion of employment law, bathrooms and transgender rights. Natalie was pre-law and Tucker now knew a surprising amount about the legal issues surrounding bathrooms.
“What do you think?” Natalie asked me mid-conversation. She caught me off guard as I was listening to the tunes from Gabe’s mix.
“I’m pretty sure Tucker knows more about being a transsexual woman than I do,” I said and they both laughed.
Claire and Emily were at the short end of the dining room, what would have been the head of the table if there was one, with Emily’s mother on her other side and Natalie’s mother next to her. I’d read Emily’s book and they sort of looked like they could be those parents, but her mother smiled a lot more than I expected; she and Natalie’s mother seemed to have lots to talk about and when I caught snippets of their conversation I was surprised that it was about house remodeling and not about their daughters.
Gabe was on the couch, with Paige on one side of him and Emily’s brother Mike on the other side. Mike clearly had a huge crush on Paige and was trying to impress her by saying something smart about music; he was totally out of his depth with Gabe. Emily’s father had pulled his chair up to the side by Mike and was eating silently until the song playing from Gabe’s iPod switched over and then his he
ad came up and he looked at Gabe.
“That Paul Simon?” he asked. ‘“Loves Me Like a Rock?’”
“It is.” Gabe’s face was momentarily wary until Emily’s dad’s mouth twisted up into an appreciative grin.
“I was nine years old when that came out,” he said. “My favorite damned song that whole year and most of the next.”
“What replaced it?” Gabe asked and then they were off and talking about songs of th e ’70s with a speed and passion that I couldn’t follow.
All the conversations reminded me of holidays at my house. I was eager to get home again and to have Shen with me and have him meet everyone. He seemed to like being the quiet one in the eye of the conversational storm, so I hoped it wouldn’t be too intimidating.
When everyone was done eating, I helped with the dishes and then wandered back through the living room, looking for a conversation to drop into. I ended up gazing at the ornaments on the tree and staring out the front window at the snowy park across the street.
“You’re standing under the mistletoe,” Tucker said from beside me.
I turned, put my hands on her cheeks and kissed her quickly.
“Come back to school with me,” I said.
“My flight’s not for a week,” she reminded me.
“Next semester. Please, tell me you’ll still be there.”
“Ella,” she said, and sighed.
“I know you’re thinking about staying here,” I told her.
“It’s that obvious, huh? The game has been great and the rallying, but I just don’t want to spend every day wondering if I’m going to run into Lindy, or trying to avoid any class that Vivien TAs.”
“What would you do?” I asked.
“Move up here and get a job fixing snowblowers,” she said. “Just get away from everything. Apply to some other schools.”
I saw the doubt in her eyes. We were still standing together under the mistletoe, so I pulled her close and hugged her for a long time. I didn’t know what to tell her to make it all right again. What I really wanted to say was: “I don’t want to be there without you,” but that didn’t seem fair. How could I kiss her and ask her to come back into a shitty environment just for me when I was seeing someone else? What did I have to offer now?
* * *
I left Tucker in Minneapolis and flew back to Ohio two days before Christmas. I hoped that more time away would do Tucker good, but I was ready to get home and see my family. I love the holidays with them. Dad gets sillier than usual, Amy comes home from school and we usually sit around watching sappy movies and talking about cool stuff. Although I’d invited Shen, all the way back from Minneapolis I worried about what it would be like to have him there. Would he think my family was crazy? Would they find his quiet manner off-putting? Would Amy ask us some really embarrassing question about whether we were having sex yet or not and if so how it went? Okay, not that last one because she had a pretty fair sense of decorum, but still I could imagine so many things going wrong.
Shen caught the bus down from Cleveland and Dad and I went to pick him up because Mom was cleaning for company, which always seemed futile to me because we were just going to mess the place up again. He looked darling standing on the bus platform with his suitcase, his bright knit cap and his long, dark, winter coat. He introduced himself quite formally to Dad, which was the only sign that he felt as nervous as I did.
When we got home, Mom toured him around the house and showed him the air mattress in the library where he’d sleep. She apologized for it a few times, but with Amy and me both home, there weren’t any extra bedrooms and Mom wasn’t about to let him sleep in my room.
We usually did a big meal for Christmas Eve and each opened a present from someone else, then had a smaller family meal of leftovers on Christmas and sat around watching a movie together. As usual, Mom brought home anyone from the university who didn’t have somewhere else to go. We had Nico’s family again and this time she invited a few Chinese grad students. I suspected that was for Shen’s benefit.
Dinner table conversation was wide-ranging. At one point, Nico’s mom asked Shen what was the current state of the one-child per family policy in China.
“It’s still enforced in many cities,” he said. “It’s not an ideal solution, but I understand its implementation. When I was young, I badly wanted a brother, but now that I live with Johnny, I see that my childish wishes were misplaced.”
I laughed but at least half of the table didn’t understand that he was joking.
“Brothers are overrated,” Amy said. “Now if you got to have a sister, that would be something.”
“Yes, then Ella would not have to teach me how to dress so late in life,” Shen replied.
“If we really want effective population control, we’re going to have to educate more of the world’s women,” Mom said. “That and improved healthcare are two of the factors that have the most impact in birth rates.”
“Educating more women would take care of most of the world’s ills, as I understand it,” Dad said. “I think men should just take a backseat for the next two thousand years.”
“I don’t know, Dad, you’re talking about billions of men who’d suddenly have to become comfortable with a new way of doing things. They’d have to deal with communication and alliance-building and prettier civic spaces.”
“I’m in for that last one!” he said.
“The gate of the mystic female is called the root of Heaven and Earth,” Shen said, then added, “The Tao Te Ching.”
Dad raised his wineglass. “To the mystic female,” he said. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
We all toasted and fell into small side conversations. Later, cuddling with Shen on the couch in the den, I asked him, “Are you just trying to get access to my gate of the mystic female?”
“Without a doubt,” he said. Then he chuckled and kissed me. “But it’s not what you think I think it is.”
I had to ponder that for a long time.
* * *
Tucker didn’t have to say anything more for me to know she still didn’t want to come back to Ohio. Her texts got farther apart the closer we got to her flight home. I made sure that I was forwarding all of the new scores for the Kind 2 B Cruel game and the creative ways players were coming up with to get points for their teams. I wanted her to see that the campus she came back to could be a welcoming place, even though I couldn’t get rid of Vivien or Lindy for her.
I sent her photos from a campaign that one team did to change the gender signs on the bathrooms all over campus. One set of signs now said “innies” and “outies.” Another said: “danglers” and “hot pockets.”
Yet another set changed it to “skirts” and “pants.” And in that same building there was a set of restrooms that replaced the stock image of a person in a skirt with an exact copy of that icon that looked like C3PO from Star Wars and the distinction was “humans” and “AIs.”
Up one more floor the icons had been replaced with pictures of Spock and Captain Kirk in which Kirk was yelling and Spock looked as cool as always. The signs read: “logic” and “emotion.” I suspected Johnny and Shen did that one.
The administration and probably some of the mean girls were tearing down the signs as fast as they went up, but the players were great about taking photos of the signs and posting them on the game site so that everyone involved could enjoy their creativity.
Tucker responded to my photo messages with a few of her own. She sent me a pic of a fresh snowfall in the park across from Claire and Emily’s apartment, and one of a waterfall surrounded by icy branches. They looked cold but beautiful.
When are you coming back to campus? I texted her.
Sunday night. I fly in Thurs., work at the shop all weekend.
I had trouble believing a small hardware store had that much work to do the weekend after New Year’s. I texted back, Still worried about Lindy? I’ll make sure we have a team available if you want to come back earlier.
<
br /> Yeah, of course, but the shop’s putting two snowblowers aside for me. You don’t need to have folks to watch over me. Unless they need the points.
Lol, everyone wants more points.
I tried to stay lighthearted in the texts and other updates, but the fact that she’d already talked to the shop where she worked on weekends and asked them to let her work on snowblowers felt like a very bad sign.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tucker
Tucker made it back to the school late Sunday night with just enough time to catch up with Ella before they both wandered off to bed. She was glad to have an escort to her classes that first week. As soon as she’d set foot on Freytag again, she’d started looking over her shoulder for Lindy. But now the escort also felt claustrophobic. She didn’t want to be the student everyone was looking at and talking about, at least not for this reason.
She thought about what Vivien had said in class, about wasting resources, and she was starting to feel some truth in that. These players in the Kind 2 B Cruel game could be spending their time on something more important than walking her around campus.
A week into the new semester, the Dean of Students called Tucker and Ella in for a meeting. They were shown into her office as soon as they arrived. Dean Chilvers invited them to sit and closed the door. She was a stocky woman with rust-brown hair kept short and curling randomly. Tucker was surprised to see her office shelves crammed with sports memorabilia and trophies from Freytag and other schools, for team sports and a few that looked like solo events. She couldn’t tell if they were the dean’s or from her kids or maybe students she knew.
The dean sat behind her desk and let them introduce themselves before she said, “Help me understand what’s going on. I’ve got a real mess here. I’m seeing groups of students in university logo gear moving around the campus, staging small protests. I have two complaints here from Ms. Tucker, but as I understand it the protests are about anti-transsexual sentiments and the student who is transsexual is Ms. Ramsey?”