She's Not There

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  The burden that had been mine alone for all these years was now Grace’s, and in the weeks that followed she walked through her days broken and crushed.

  I had spent most of my life hearing the refrain of our culture, which says that truth is always better than lies, that we shouldn’t have secrets, that the truth will set us free.

  Now that I had told the truth, I felt anything but free. Every time I looked at my family, I thought, Remind me again what’s so terrible about mendacity.

  Of course, our lives continued, in spite of the atom bomb that had gone off in our midst. Luke continued to board the bus for first grade each day, and Patrick was taken over to day care several mornings a week. We would all get home at the end of the day, and the boys would eat macaroni and cheese and get their baths, and Grace or I would make dinner and we’d sit down and eat it while the children watched Rugrats on television.

  I made salmon on the grill, marinated in jerk sauce. Actually, jerk sauce began to feel like the house brand.

  “So how are you doing?” The children were watching television in the sunroom.

  “Oh, I’m terrific,” Grace said. She drank her Chardonnay. “Never better.”

  “Have you been thinking any more about . . . you know, the issues?”

  Something in the next room broke into hundreds of pieces.

  “What was that?” Grace shouted.

  “Nothing,” Luke and Patrick said in unison.

  “I mean,” I continued, “I’m trying to think about the issues. . . .”

  Grace’s eyes filled with tears. “Jim, what do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to know if you’re, like—”

  “Stop it,” said Luke. “Mommy! Patrick’s annoying me!”

  “Luke,” I shouted. “Patrick. If you can’t play nice together, I’m going to have to separate you.”

  Grace looked down at her salmon. “I feel like you’re on a runaway train,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you see this Dr. Strange, this maniac, for like six weeks, and all of a sudden it’s like, that’s it, you’re going to—”

  “Luuuuke,” Patrick said angrily. “I’m warning you! Don’t make me BITE you!”

  “THERE’S NO BITING!” I shouted.

  Grace sipped her wine.

  “I’m not on a runaway train,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about this stuff for years, for decades. I’ve tried negotiating with it every way I can think of. I have to do something now, or I’m going to go crazy.”

  “Well, I haven’t been thinking about it for decades. I’ve been thinking about it for what seems like five minutes.”

  “Ow!” Luke yelled. He came running to the table. “Daddy, Patrick bit me!”

  “I’m sorry, Luke. But did you do anything to make him bite you?”

  “He said he was going to bite you,” Grace said.

  “He was annoying me!”

  Patrick came into the room. “Paddy,” Grace said, “we don’t bite people in our family.” She looked at me. “No matter how much we want to.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s not how we express ourselves. Not if we can help it.”

  “I want a cheese stick,” said Patrick.

  “Okay,” Grace said.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, and went to the refrigerator.

  Grace finished her wine. Luke went back into the sunroom. Patrick grabbed the cheese stick as if it were the Olympic torch and ran as fast as he could toward the television.

  “What do you think we should do, Grace?” I said.

  “We?” she said. “What do you mean, we?”

  “I want to include you in this,” I said. “I want for this to be something that we do together.”

  “Together? How is it going to be something we do together?”

  “I don’t know. By sharing what we’re going through—or . . .”

  Grace didn’t say anything. “Can I get you anything?” I said. “While I’m up?”

  Grace wiped her eyes. “I want what I had,” she said.

  In mid-March I drove over to Russo’s house. His family was out. He knew something was up; he’d seen the looks on our faces that winter, and I’d warned him by phone I needed to talk.

  “Sounds ominous,” he said.

  “It is.”

  On the drive over to Camden, I listened to Bob Dylan in the car, “Visions of Joanna”: We sit here stranded, though we all do our best to deny it. . . .

  I didn’t know how Rick was going to take the news. I knew I could count on his loyalty, but for that matter he was loyal to Grace, too. He had always put his own family first, and I couldn’t imagine him condoning anything that would place my family at risk.

  It was possible, I thought as I drove toward Russo’s house, that he wasn’t going to want to know me anymore.

  He opened a bottle of wine. We sat in his living room for a while as I tried to muster the courage to say the words I needed to say. It was terrible. I sat there in mortal anguish, trying to gather the necessary momentum.

  I talked about Colby, about my latest novel, about some friends of ours, each of us knowing I was only trying to warm myself up to say something impossible.

  “Okay, Russo,” I said at last. “Listen. You know that you are just about the best friend I’ve ever had, right?”

  “Boylan,” he said, “can I just tell you, don’t worry. Whatever it is, I’m with you, all right?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you should let me say what I need to say first.” “You didn’t murder anyone, did you?” said Russo.

  “No.”

  “I mean, it’s okay if you did. I just want to know what I’m in for.”

  “Russo?” I said. “Shut up.”

  He nodded. “All right.”

  “Rick, I’m closer to you than anyone, except for Grace. And over the years, we’ve shared all kinds of great adventures.”

  He nodded. “We have.”

  “Except that there is one thing about me that you don’t know. Because I’ve kept it secret from you.” I paused. I could hear the clock in the next room ticking.

  “It’s hard for me to tell you now because I fear I’ll lose your friendship, you’ll think I’m just some circus freak.”

  I felt as if I were pulling back the string of a bow.

  “But the thing that you don’t know about me is that I’m transgendered. I’m a transsexual. I’ve identified as female since I was a child. My sense of having a woman’s spirit has almost never left me. The only time it ever vanished was when I fell in love with Grace, and when that happened I felt that what I had always hoped for was true, that I’d at last been cured by love.”

  I paused to catch my breath. Rick was absolutely motionless.

  “Except that I haven’t been cured. And now I’m faced with the impossible task of trying to balance my own need to be female with my desire to protect and support the woman that I love.”

  I paused.

  Very quietly Rick said, “Jesus, Jim.”

  “Wait, let me finish,” I said. “There’s a lot of things I need to explain, so just let me get this all out, okay?”

  “Okay, but before you say anything else, let me just say this, all right? You’re my best friend, Boylan, and as it turns out, I don’t make that many friends.” He leaned forward. “What you need to know is, you will always be my friend. If you’re going to be a woman, well, Jesus. You’ll be my friend as a woman.”

  Tears came to my eyes.

  Russo shook his head. “Jesus, Jim,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I told him the rest of the story. It took a long time.

  Russo opened another bottle of wine. We drank it.

  “You know what, Jim,” he said after a while. “The thing is, if you were living a life on your own, it would be different. I mean, I think I’d still be pretty much taken aback, but I still think I’d be all right with this. But your life is not
only your own, and it seems that while you are going to get a chance to be happy—I must say you always seemed happy before—Grace isn’t going to get that chance. I’ll be all right, I guess, with the idea of your decision. But I think I’m going to have a hard time with the consequences of that decision.”

  “It’s not a decision,” I said. “It’s just something that is. It’s more like an erosion than a decision.”

  Rick shrugged. “I’m not sure I understand that.”

  “I’m not sure I understand it, either.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Boylan. You know I’ll follow you wherever you need me to go. But I’ll tell you one thing. You’re asking me to accept a fundamental change in the one person in the world of whom I could honestly say, ‘I wish he would change nothing.’”

  “I guess that’s a compliment,” I said.

  Russo shrugged. “It used to be.”

  A few weeks later, Grace and I drove down to Portland for the weekend, with me as Jenny. I wore a floral skirt, a linen top, and an eggshell cardigan. We had a baby-sitter for the night, and the plan was that we’d drive down to Freeport, do some shopping, then stay at a hotel in the city and go out to dinner. We’d come home the next day. The theory was that it would do us both good to spend some extended time together—for Grace to get used to being with me as a woman, and for me to get used to being with her, and for both of us to see what it was like to be out in the world as a couple in this new form.

  As we arrived in a crowded restaurant for lunch and waited for our table, Grace was stricken by the fear that someone was going to come up and punch me in the nose.

  My fear, of course, was that the person punching my nose would be Grace.

  After lunch, we walked around the Old Port of Portland and went shopping at some stores, including a children’s clothing outlet, where Grace called to me across the store, “Jim! Jim!”The sales clerk looked at me and smiled with pained politeness.

  Being unveiled thus did not diminish my awe at being out in the world at last. My heart pounded and my head felt light. Everything struck me with total amazement, as if I were walking on the earth for the first time.

  When we got back to the hotel there was a message on the answering machine. It was the baby-sitter.

  “Jim, Grace? Listen, we’re at the emergency room. Patrick’s had a fall. He was running around the house naked after he got out of the bathtub, and he fell on a heat register and cut his chin. He’s going to be all right, but he needs to get stitches. It’s, uh—midnight now, and they say they’ll be able to get to us around one-thirty, maybe two A. M. We’re all fine, but I just wanted you to know what was going on. Don’t worry, we’re all okay!”

  Grace sighed, looked over at her husband, who was wearing a Coldwater Creek skirt and a twin set, and began to cry. “I want you back,” she said softly. “Oh God, Jim, I just want you back.”

  I came over to the bed and embraced her. It felt strange, though. After all these years together, I was becoming something unfamiliar.

  Wibbly Wobbly (Summer 2000)

  Dr. Peabody, the endocrinologist, wasn’t what I was expecting. I don’t know what I was expecting, except perhaps the talking dog from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. “Greetings, everyone, Peabody here.”

  Instead he was a sharp, tired man with a bald head and a bristly mustache. He wore a bow tie.

  “James,” he said, “have a seat.”

  His desk was piled high with papers. It was hard to see him behind the mountains of stacked-up books, medical charts, and faxes.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  So I did. I talked about growing up, about my experiences as a transgendered person, about teaching at Colby, about my marriage with Grace and my children.

  “Have you resolved the issues around your marriage?” he asked.

  “We’re working on it.”

  “And your job, at Colby? Do you expect you’ll be able to keep it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think it will be a big shock at work but that eventually people will get over it. I think a college is a pretty good place for transition, though. We do talk a lot about issues of diversity and inclusion there.”

  “Mm-hm,” he said. He fingered his mustache. “Okay, let’s take a look at you.”

  We went into his examination room, where he examined things I wasn’t even sure you could examine, with instruments I did not know existed. He weighed me: 150 pounds. He measured my height: five feet eleven inches. He felt my chest and squeezed my nipples. He dug around in my gut to consider the topography of my liver and kidneys and bladder.

  “Okay,” he said. “Put your clothes back on and come back to my office.”

  I got dressed and then sat down again.

  “You’re in very good health,” he said. “I’m going to want to take a new set of metabolic panels on you, though—a chem twelve, lipid levels, and an endocrine workup. But I don’t see that there will be any problems.”

  He thumped the eraser end of a pencil on his desk.

  “So, do you want to get started, then?” he said.

  Everything seemed very quiet. His voice echoed in my heart.

  “Okay,” I said in a small voice.

  He wrote out a prescription: “Let’s begin with .3 milligrams of Premarin, for three weeks. Then we’ll increase it to .625, for four weeks. Then up to .9, for a month, then 1.25 for a month, and finally to 2.5 a month after that. We’ll stay with the 2.5, and then we’ll do another round of levels and see what kinds of results you’re getting.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You should know that estrogens work very slowly, over a period of years. But basically, at age forty-two, you’re going to go through female adolescence.” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “I’m just glad it’s you and not me,” he said.

  “What will the hormones do?” I asked.

  “Well, everyone reacts differently. Even genetic women experience them differently. As a rule of thumb, we know that most people like you come to resemble the body shape of their mothers and sisters. But of course, even within one family, women are all shapes and sizes. So in the end, we don’t really have any idea what kinds of results you’re going to get.

  “But hormones are powerful, and any changes in your endocrine system are going to have to be done slowly and with care. You know that you have an increased risk now of breast cancer, and of pulmonary thrombosis. I want you to get good exercise and do breast self-exams. You know how to do a breast exam?”

  I said I’d learn.

  He looked out the window. “You need to know that this is all kind of unknown territory to me,” he said. “I’ve had other transgendered patients. But it’s not the reason you go into endocrine science. I’m sorry if I’m not an expert. If you want an expert, you should probably go down to Boston.” He shrugged. “Or New York.”

  “I’m comfortable with you as my doctor,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. He wrote out all the prescriptions. “Here you go,” he said. “Good luck.”

  I shook his hand. “Come back in six months,” he said. “And we’ll see what we’ve got.”

  I got in the car and drove south. The prescriptions sat on the car seat next to me. So, do you want to get started, then?

  I drove home in silence, my heart pounding. I stopped at True’s Pharmacy on the way to the lake, and they put together the prescription and said, “Here you go, Mr. Boylan.” The pills were green.

  I went to the lake and sat on the dock with a Bass Ale and watched the sunset on the water. I felt frightened and alone, and I missed Grace.

  I drank the beer and listened to the loons calling on the lake.

  Grace pulled up in the Jeep, and I ran up to the house to be with her. She came in the house bearing gifts. It was my birthday.

  “What do you have there?” she asked me. I was still carrying the pills.

  “The hormones,” I said. “He just wrote me out a
prescription.”

  Grace nodded as if this were no surprise, then said, “Open the card.”

  The birthday card had a rainbow on the front. Inside she had written these words: “Here’s to forty-two years of joy and struggle, conflict and resolution, dreams and possibilities. And with love for all that’s yet to come. Happy Birthday, Grace.”

  I read these words and began to weep. Grace held me in her arms.

  The next present was a group of “meditation stones.” Although in general I was much too sarcastic to be taken in by something as new age as this, once again I was reduced to tears.

  The stones were each engraved with a different word. The five words Grace had chosen were CLARITY, GRACE, SERENITY, HARMONY, and ACCEPTANCE.

  Then she said, “I was going to get you earrings, but our favorite hippie store was closed.”

  She gave me a fine bottle of champagne, and together we walked through the woods down to the water and sat on Adirondack chairs on the dock. I told her about my meeting with Dr. Peabody. She was a little surprised I seemed so blown away. “After all,” she said, the bitterness and loss clear in her voice, “you’re just following the script you came up with back in January.”

  We ate salsa and chips and listened to loons and watched a hawk circling high above the water.

  Then I opened the bottle of Premarin and shook out one oblong green pill, put it in my mouth, clinked glasses with Grace, and swallowed it with a mouthful of champagne.

  Estrogen tasted bittersweet.

  We finished the bottle of champagne between the two of us, then went out to dinner by the Kennebec River. I had a spicy gumbo. Grace had sea bass. We ate pie for dessert.

  In the morning I woke up with my head pounding. I got out of bed and took another pill and let Grace sleep and made the children breakfast.

  Within a few days I began to feel a strange buzz. My skin was sensitive. I imagined that I could feel the ridges on my fingertips. A sense of warmth pulsed inside me.

  The line between male and female turns out to be rather fine. Although we imagine our genders as firm and fixed, in fact they are as malleable as a sand castle.