by Jane Juska
It took me an embarrassingly long time and the women’s movement to stop wishing I had been born a boy and, short of that, wanting to hang out with boys. Boys, it seemed to me as I was growing up, took pleasure in being boys: They were unself-conscious about their bodies, they laughed and flung themselves about, they were bold and sometimes daring, initiating sexual encounters—or not—as they chose. Being a boy seemed far less complicated than being a girl, and a lot less scary. Had I been pressed to explain myself, I might have had to admit that I didn’t really want to be a boy, but I wanted to be anything—a boy, a rabbit, a turnip—other than a girl. Girls were rejected, boys weren’t. Girls had to be pretty, boys didn’t. Girls agreed to be made love to by one boy, her husband; boys had sex whenever they felt like it with an infinite number of girls who were not nice.
Had I been forced to take a final exam on the differences between boys and girls, I would have flunked, for of course lots of boys get rejected, make love to only one woman, are more successful in life if they’re tall and handsome, and are just as complicated as women. But in the fifties in midwestern America there were no courses to sign up for, and the girls around me seemed very happy being girls, so how was I to find out anything? I certainly couldn’t ask my mother. I was forced to fall back on what I knew: I wasn’t pretty, so I had better behave as if I had no interest in making out or making love or getting married. I would be safe, then, from the rejection that surely would have befallen me otherwise, especially if I let a boy, even my husband, have his way with me and he found out I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. I knew from my reading of bodice rippers that a husband could order me to get undressed, and there I’d be, on my honeymoon, without a stitch on, and he would hate me. Being a girl was just too risky.
But dammit, no matter how short I cut my hair, how too-small I bought my bras, and how much I swore, I stayed a girl, not by choice but by default. And then when my boyfriend in Berkeley diddled me just before he threw up in my shoes, I out and out had to admit that I liked it, the diddling, that is. I liked his rough hands all over me and his tumescent member in me (I had read that somewhere, and knew that saying “penis” was bad); and, finally, I did what most girls of my generation did: I got married. To the wrong man, who taught me to be ashamed of my desire and who made it clear that he preferred the bathroom alone to bed with me. It would take psychoanalysis to rid me of shame, to convince me that desire was normal and that doing something about it was not evil. So I did something about it.
Except here I am, seventy-one and sober, most of the time, and all the people who used to pay attention to me on my birthday—my parents, my aunts and uncles, even most of my cousins—are dead. There are lots of ways to be unaccompanied: One of them is to live a long time and watch as, one by one, the people who made up your life fall by the wayside, leaving you standing in the middle of the road wondering where everybody went. So here I am: my own birthday girl. What fun. And where are the boys?
They are not far away, for the next day, Monday, will find one of them on my answering machine. “Please call Dr. Favor’s office tomorrow morning between eight-thirty and eleven.” Who? Instantly I conjure up a scene in a hospital emergency room, to which everyone I had ever loved had been taken following a massive accident. Why did I have to wait practically a whole day? And a sleepless night.
Eight-thirty A.M. sharp I phone. “Please hold.” After what seems a lifetime, what sounds like a doctor’s voice says, “Jane? Jane Juska? The author?” Oh, what is this? I sigh with relief; my loved ones are not dead after all. I answer yes, and Dr. Favor says, “What can I do to entice you to come to our book club?” Hell, a bunch of married couples who want to see what a septuagenarian sex maniac looks like. I mumble something about being very busy. He says, “Your book is our current selection.” Holy cow, they didn’t even wait for the paperback, they bought it in hardcover! My tone grows warmer, yet I continue to demur. “We’re a group of men from different walks of life—lawyers, doctors, even a writer.” All men? “We will do the cooking and ensure fine wines.” Hey! When and where? “Thursday, seven-thirty, my house. I’ll send a map.”
Maybe, finally, I will get a date. That’s really why I’m going. Maybe, even, I will do what my mother wanted me to do: marry a doctor. Or a lawyer. Or even a writer. Nah, not a writer. They don’t make any money. Wonder how one even got into this group of rich guys. In my mind I have made them all rich and good-looking and single: Why else would they be reading A Round-Heeled Woman? They are probably younger than I am, everybody is, but they know my age and everything else about me, and so what, they’re inviting me so I can look them over and pick out a couple for the future. It’s about time. Dr. Favor e-mails me directions to his house, adding, “I thought I was the only person in the world who remembered the Weather Girls.” He is referring to the mention I made in my book of one of their songs. Gosh, maybe Dr. Favor will be the one. Look what we have in common.
Thursday morning one of my eyes opened, the other one didn’t. My head weighed at least fifty pounds, and when I got my eyelid unstuck from itself, I could see in the mirror that the eye itself was a fiery red. I went back to bed and at noon, no better, called Dr. Favor’s office to apologize for my absence that evening. “Omigod,” he said, “you’ve got to be kidding! You’ve got to come.” I explained that I couldn’t see out of one eye. He was not impressed. “You’ve got to come,” he repeated. “There’s a guy flying in from Nebraska just to meet you.” I shared with him that my head was booming. “He’s on the plane now!” I pressed: My eye was a flaming red. “I’m an ophthalmologist,” he countered. “I’ll bring drops.”
So I went. I dragged myself into my red jacket and black pants and I went. Even through half an eye I could see that oh boy, we’re in rich people’s land now. No rentals in this neighborhood. The houses were big and set back on manicured lawns, and the house of Dr. Favor was old and big and once Victorian but made new and comfortable and charming by lots of money and good taste. So was Dr. Favor comfortable and charming and only twenty years younger than I and just as nice as he could be. In his kitchen eight or nine men cooked away while Dr. Favor dropped medicine into my eye, commenting as he did on the wonderful blue that my eye would become once again when the conjunctivitis—pinkeye—went away. “Surely you’re wearing contacts,” he said. “Your eyes are so beautifully blue.” “Gee,” I heard one of the men whisper, “and he’s not even driving her home.” I felt better.
Dinner—salmon, wild rice, chardonnay, spinach salad—around the table is very nice, about ten of us, including the guy from Nebraska. “We’re not like women’s book groups,” they tell me. “We don’t plan ahead, we don’t assign dishes according to the first letter of your last name.” Everyone laughs. “We just bring what we feel like cooking.” This would explain the platter of spaghetti and meatballs that now appears in the center of the table. It is delicious, a perfect follow-up to the salmon and precursor to the brownies and lemon curd brought home from a recent visit to the British Isles.
For a time there is talk of skiing and second homes and children at Dartmouth or would it be Brown, and I am fading. My headache beats a tattoo inside my temporal lobes, my right eye is throbbing, and my pants are tight around my waist; of course, I ate all that food. I want to go home. Then they turn to my book. As it turns out, the man who flew in from Nebraska did not go to all this trouble just to meet me; he is here on business, had read the book back in Nebraska at the behest of his girlfriend, and thought how much he would enjoy telling her about our meeting. For a bit I am angry with the good Dr. Favor, but the good humor of everybody here is irresistible; almost everybody—the internist, the gynecologist, the attorney, the radiologist—has read the book and admired it. Then the surgeon says, “I have done a lot of work on transsexuals. Interestingly, many of them now in their fifties tell me they don’t know what all the fuss was about when they first came to me, that all this interest in sex is overrated.” He moves quickly to a rhetori
cal question: “Wouldn’t you agree? Don’t you think that desire decreases with age?” Well, here’s one who hasn’t read my book, that’s for sure. I murmur something about “Not in my experience, though I can’t speak for a large number of either men or women.” On no evidence whatsoever I sense that he’s talking about himself or perhaps his wife; or maybe he just wants to prove me wrong, his experience far outweighing mine. Maybe he wants to dispel the notion that I might have some expertise in a field in which I do not belong. I will never know because just then the specter of wifedom enters the room. Mrs. Favor, she is arrived.
Mrs. Favor, dressed all in black, pencil-thin, is right out of New York’s East Eighties. I have seen her and her doubles walking up Madison Avenue, the initials of designers on bags and shoes and capes and umbrellas proclaiming their owners’ fine taste and money, to make it come alive to those of us less fortunate who, really now, have no business being uptown anyway. Mrs. Favor, her face white, her lips bright red, her hair black and skimmed back into a chignon, seats herself at the far side of the enormous island that sits in the middle of this enormous kitchen. Although this is clearly her kitchen and the host her husband, no one says hello, no one acknowledges her presence. This must be an unwritten rule of this book club: Men Only. Mrs. Favor, in compliance, went somewhere and has come home early. From the look on her face, she has no use for this rule; either that or wherever she went was not kind to her. She looks mad.
Well, my eye is less puffy, I have been wined and dined by all these nice men; they have complimented me on my courage, agreed that often courage and foolishness go hand in hand, expressed their appreciation for my book and for my company, so Mrs. Favor does not intimidate me. She does not introduce herself to me and I don’t introduce myself to her. Now we’re even.
The evening is drawing to a close and I am downing lemon curd like a native of Gloucestershire, when Dr. Favor says, “Before you go, will you read my favorite part of the book?” Oh god, he’s going to make me read some sex part, with his wife sitting not ten yards away, looking like Morticia stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon. I point lamely at my eye, but there’s no fooling an ophthalmologist. “I’ll put more drops in before you leave,” he says. “I didn’t bring my book,” I say. He hands me my book open to the last page, where he has bracketed a paragraph, and in this very large and very quiet room, ten men and me around the table, Drusilla Vanilla on the far side of the moon, I read:
“Life just keeps coming at you. Make no mistake, it’s out to get you, and in the end it will. But every so often, you can catch a piece of it and make it do what you want it to, at least for a little while. You’ve got to stay alert, though. Heads up so you won’t get caught off base, though if you do, what the hell, it’s not the ninth inning, until it is.”
I gotta remember that.
I GREW UP in a family of surgeons. My father was a surgeon, as was his father and his father before him and his father’s brother and his first cousin. I cannot imagine my father treating transsexuals or, even if he did, talking about it. But the aloofness, the confidence in his professional expertise, the cool rationality of tonight’s surgeon were my father’s, too, and my uncle’s and my grandfather’s. I imagine that cutting into someone’s body requires all that; I certainly hope my own surgeon will be confident and a little bit superior and supremely rational; somebody else can do the bedside manner. Tonight’s surgeon did not scare me as, too often, though always unintentionally, my father did. As with the other men present, tonight’s surgeon was an improvement over the men of my generation, just as in some ways I am an improvement over myself as I was back then. Tonight’s company of men saw me as a curiosity, I’m sure, but also as a specimen worth examining, and in the end, because I brought a bit of confidence and picked up on their good humor, we all got along happily, sitting around a big round table, laughing and drinking like pals.
So what if I went home alone.
CHAPTER 19
the last lamplighter
It all seemed to me incredibly romantic and exciting.
Even the dingiest dive seemed magical to me.
—STEPHEN FOTHERGILL in his memoir, The Last Lamplighter
MY FRIEND JO’S house is for sale. It was a perfect house for her; it is a perfect house for me. I want to live there, not that I could fill her shoes let alone her house. But even without Jo it has a warmth and a comfort made just for me. I would have to learn to garden and I would, I would, so that all Jo’s efforts would not rot out there in her very own fenced-in backyard, totally private, all hers. And her bookcases I could fill so quickly and with the books that Jo loved, the same books I love, and what does it matter if I don’t have any furniture? I will give a housewarming party or a shower, and everybody will bring something to sit on or eat off or sleep in. Jo’s house has a study and a real dining room and a dishwasher and a disposal in the big eat-in kitchen and—in the basement—a washer and a dryer. It’s only a few blocks from where I live now, which means I could still walk to the movies and the library and the doctor’s office and the drugstore. In addition it is one block away from the best grocery store in the entire world: The Star Market.
The Star has been where it is forever. One man owns it and operates it with the help of a few high school kids whose faces are illuminated by high IQs and sunny dispositions. A few years ago the Star hit tough times, and, as a money-saver, the owner turned off the lights of the outdoor sign, which looks a bit like an art deco movie marquee. Good heavens, could the Star actually go out of business? Well, the neighborhood got together and put that sign back to work, and the store got back on its feet and so did the owner, and now, just as it was years and years ago, if you forget to bring enough money, you can bring what you owe next time, or you can charge the whole thing, and if you do, you make out the charge slip.
One day another customer, a resident of the neighborhood, and I stood on the sidewalk outside the Star. We were talking about—guess what—real estate, and the man leaned down and said, “Just remember, it’s important not to move too far away from the Star.” Good advice, but advice is cheap, houses aren’t. Maybe the neighborhood will get together and turn my lights back on, but no. As prices of homes continue to rise, the people who live in them now and have for twenty years could never afford to buy their own homes. “We could sell and make many thousands of dollars, but where would we go? We could move to Utah, we could afford Wyoming, but then we’d have to live there.” Our realtor neighbor tells us that Berkeley is a niche market and our neighborhood a niche neighborhood. Translation: Everybody wants to live here. I hate the free market.
So how much will Jo’s house cost? It hasn’t gone on the market yet; maybe it won’t; maybe Jo’s daughter will move into it, maybe maybe maybe . . . And then I am called to London to publicize the paperback edition of the book. My friends and neighbors, who are sick to death of my constant lament over looking for a home—I am sounding more and more like an Irish dirge, “Find me a hooome”—will keep an eye on Jo’s house as it gains a new owner. Oh, let it be me!
My London publisher is trying to kill me. She has put me up at her club, which is very nice of her and which is even in the guidebook: the Groucho Club. It is in Soho, which is also in the guidebook. What is not in the guidebook is that my room is on the top floor (fourth) and there is no elevator. For the first time ever I feel like saying, Hey! I’m seventy-one years old! I can’t climb all these stairs! But I do climb them, and I don’t complain because, after all, I am here as a septuagenarian sex symbol.
I am sounding like my great-uncle, who described all his travels, every one of his many trips, according to accommodations—how good or bad they were—and if the trains were on time and whether or not he had an outside or an inside stateroom. The rest of the details he left to the thousands of photographs he took, all of them of flowers. No matter where he went, flowers were in bloom, though maybe he timed his travels to coincide with blossom time. No matter, for always, because we were polite childr
en, my brothers and sister and I, we sifted through all those pictures, exclaiming as we went: “Gee, Uncle Clarence, here’s another red one!” And my brother would say, “Hey, here’s a great big red one!” and then he’d laugh because he’d said something dirty, which none of the rest of us got.
I learned how not to travel from my great-uncle. I never complain about my accommodations (see above) or whether my flight is delayed, and I never ever take photographs of flowers; in fact, I almost always leave my camera at home; a very smart friend once pointed out that a camera interferes with the immediacy of things. Travel light and never make the kids back home look at your souvenirs.
I first went to London in 1955, the trip a graduation present from my parents, though my dad, stingy as ever, actually made me get a job the previous summer to help pay for it. Can you believe it? Each of us—five of my friends, not one of them having been forced untimely into the workplace by an adamantine parent—got together one thousand dollars, an enormous sum, and off we went right after graduation to Europe, where we stayed until Thanksgiving—almost six months—when we got cold and hungry or when, in my case, I wrote my father asking for a little more money so I could stay a little longer, and received, by return mail, an airplane ticket. Honestly, Dad.