Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  ∞

  It was a delightful day. In the morning, Georgia had spent some time outside in her garden in the company of her cats. Together they had dug in the sweet dirt, Georgia uprooting stray weeds from around her rose bushes, Ginger, Nutmeg, and Aspic rolling and scutting their heads against the small pebbles in the tea garden. Georgia had copied it from a visit to Golden Gate park last year. She made a mental note to buy a gardening book that would show her what else she might try next, now that the roses were finally on their feet.

  About noon, Georgia stopped and fixed herself some excellent raspberry-mint iced tea she had purchased from the market right around the corner. She sat in the brown wing-backed chair, her head against a crocheted doily made by her mother years ago, and nodded at the parade of young folks trooping in and out of the living room. She had four young women of varying ages who boarded with her. Two were out of town, and two were setting up instruments in the unused garage in the back. Only one was in the band, but the other was the business manager. Some of the other band members were also helping out.

  The one who liked to be called Zeke had small, dark eyes and a mane of very large black hair, some pieces of which were dyed a deep but discernable emerald green tipped with dark blue. She emerged from the shed, came through the kitchen’s back door, and flopped down on the couch in the living room on the corner near Georgia, panting.

  “Have some iced tea, Zeke,” said Georgia.

  “Do believe I will,” said Zeke amiably. “Care for a refill, Miz Samson?”

  Zeke spirited the nearly-empty glass away with grace while the rest of her moved with big, bold swinging movements that looked careless.

  Both settled comfortably again, Zeke said, “Thanks for letting us use the garage, Miz Samson.”

  “Oh, it’s Georgia, please. You’re welcome, my dear.” Georgia took a long sip from her iced tea. She couldn’t keep her mind from their last chat, in which Zeke had confided that her band’s name was King Twat. Georgia had been embarrassed by May’s, er, Zeke’s explanation of her last name, King, as a corrupted variation on Ching, also known as Chin, depending upon which dialect you spoke. Georgia had been all tongue-tied, not knowing whether she should say that her best girlfriend had exactly the same name for exactly the same reasons. Oh well. Let this dear young woman think with the arrogance of youth that she was the first to have discovered everything.

  “And how are the gender spies and cultural provocateurs doing?” said Georgia, referring to King Twat’s motto. By squinting her eyes a little, she could just make out today’s t-shirt. It was a head the shape of an oval, accentuated by a Van Dyke beard and hollow cheekbones, looking suspiciously like the bard of Avon—but in fact, it spouted like a whale. Heavy gothic type below the disembodied head read I Have a Boner to Pick With Freud. People did have their opinions these days.

  “Rippin’, just rippin’,” said Zeke, making up what she thought sounded slangy. Georgia took this to mean that King Twat was doing well.

  Georgia lifted her glasses to her face out of habit, knowing full well she had better distance vision than near vision. Of course they weren’t of any use. “I notice you have a ring….” Georgia pointed to her nose.

  “Yeah, it’s new. I got it for tonight’s show. Do you like it?” Zeke wanted to know.

  “Pretty,” Georgia said truthfully. “Is it gold? With a gemstone?” Georgia wanted to know in turn.

  Zeke nodded shyly. “I couldn’t afford a diamond, so I had an Austrian crystal set into it instead.”

  “Was it any more painful than having your ear done?” Georgia asked.

  “No, not at all,” Zeke said,” although the genitals and nipples are actually quite painful.” She added, almost as an afterthought, “I have friends who’ve had nipples and clits pierced.”

  “Oh my,” said Georgia, knowing she sounded every one of her eighty seven years.

  ∞

  Later that day, Georgia thought back to their conversation as she rode the bus to Lake Merritt, the stale buns meant for ducks clutched in an old breadbag on her lap. Who could I tell about my penis? she thought, the pastel Victorians whizzing past her. Would Zeke be able to help me? She seemed like such a level-headed, open-minded person. So matter-of-fact about people’s bodies. Later that morning Georgia had discovered that she did still have a vagina, which was of immeasurable relief. But throughout the day, her mind constantly came back to one idea, which was to get herself altered so that she urinated through a nice neat opening without a lot of extra flesh.

  She had of course experimented with her new penis, seeing if she could direct the stream with laser-point accuracy (to her disappointment, she couldn’t)—even giving it a few tugs to see if the orgasms were any different, but the inside-out feeling of pulsations travelling down and away from her to the tip of her penis and out the end left her feeling blank and spent instead of newly charged and with a tender elasticity focused inside. Of course one felt alert and refreshed after sex; blood circulated quite nicely once it had made a pass through the clitoris, bringing oxygen to the brain and pleasant muscle tone all over. She found she vastly preferred to feel focused instead of dopey and sleepy; perhaps this was only her experience with her penis, she concluded, and not necessarily connected to the sensations brought on by the condition of having a penis.

  The bus hissed to a stop and Georgia headed past Children’s Fairyland to the bird sanctuary on the lake. With her was a thermos stowed in a canvas bag that held more iced tea: lemon-mint this time. Yes, she thought, the semen had been interesting; she had even tasted some from her fingertips, there in her bathroom, but she had never been keen on the taste of anyone’s sperm and saw no reason why her own would be an exception. It wasn’t a dislike founded on prudishness, she thought, but a preference for sweet things that really kept her from savoring the salty fluid, a preference for sweet things probably the result of spending much time in the South. Why, she liked her iced teas fixed Southern-style, with several heaping tablespoons of sugar that never quite dissolved on the bottom of the pitcher.

  Georgia shifted the canvas bag so that the large water-bottle that held the iced tea wasn’t directly on top of her sandwich. She walked briskly along the goose-spackled sidewalk leading to the bird sanctuary, avoiding the large greenish-black splodges, past the children’s maze consisting of a hedge a half a foot high, and rounded the bend to her favorite park bench.

  She had just set her canvas bag down on the bench and was preparing to take off her sweater when a four or five year old child who had been running in large, loopy figure eights ran away from his mother, up the path to Georgia, and made several big circles around her and the park bench. He was laughing and shutting his eyes every now and then, daring himself to run a few steps blindly. Georgia stood still, clapping and laughing with the boy. He surprised her by gurgling with pleasure and mounting the park bench, launching himself along the length of the seat, hurdling over Georgia’s bag while his mother called to him to stop, and finally flinging himself off the end of the bench against Georgia’s soft body.

  She felt this slightly sweaty child’s body thud against hers; her arms curved to catch him, and she distinctly registered a small “oomph” as a sharp, bony part of the child landed square on her testicles, sending shock waves she had never felt before into her spine. The mother, an angular, careless creature herself, had slowed down the moment she saw that her boy had a soft place to land from his flight. She kept calling her son’s name ineffectually.

  The child slid down from Georgia’s arms, with Georgia doubled over him, gasping slightly. He saw a new game forming and dodged his mother by using Georgia’s body as a bunker.

  “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!” he shrieked, making machine gun motions to go with the noises.

  “That’s enough, Willy, leave the nice lady alone,” said the mother. She held her hand out to him.

  “I think your mama wants you, son,” said Georgia, relieved.

  The child looked up at her with
achingly candid affection. He put his arms around her hips and pressed himself to her in a farewell hug, the side of his head mashing the unfamiliar mass. Georgia winced again; the child looked up at her with alarm and confusion. The bodies of women he assumed to be like his mama’s, indeed, treated like his mama’s to nestle in or climb as he saw fit; he never thought they would be remotely like his own. He knew not to hug daddy in certain ways—why then did this old woman hold her body so as to protect her privates from him in the way other men did? This was too confusing. He dashed to his mother in genuine consternation.

  His mother said, “Don’t worry, Willy, I won’t hit you for being bad if you promise me to never do it again.” He clung to her, mute, his ear pressed to her body, which felt normal and smooth. To Georgia the mother said complacently, “Boys will be boys,” which was not at all the apology Georgia was expecting.

  ∞

  But would boys be only and always boys? wondered Georgia. She cast pieces of bread out to the greedy geese gathered at her feet. She’d been sitting at this park bench for several minutes now, mulling over the encounter with the boy, long gone, who had clearly found her monstrous. This disturbed her even more than the fact that there were badly behaved children out there who needed curbing. She hadn’t considered herself a monster, because she hadn’t felt who she was today was any different from who she had been yesterday, or all the days before that.

  Georgia drank some more iced tea. She felt she really ought to entertain the idea that she might have a penis for the rest of her life, which she hadn’t up to this point. She supposed she had just assumed that it had appeared one day and would be gone the next. Georgia saw that this was wishful thinking, and that she had better reconcile herself to holding herself differently. Right now, for instance, her bladder felt full, but one of her testicles felt a bit uncomfortably twisted. Georgia truly had no idea how it had assumed that awkward position. She hadn’t sat oddly, she didn’t think; it was just that she had parts which now slid around unpredictably. A breast would never move so that it was lodged under one’s armpit, for example.

  In the stall, she arranged her bag on the hook behind the door and settled comfortably on the seat to relieve herself of the iced tea. I must be pissing fit to flood a small town, she thought. At that, she reflexively tightened her muscles (and noted the delayed response) at the sudden uncomfortable thought: er, was the water level in the bowl rising? She hadn’t ever been sympathetic to men standing and pissing—had thought there was really no good reason they couldn’t sit in comfort like women and have a moment of personal reflection at least once a day—but it occurred to her that water levels were…unpredictable, to say the least. The idea disgusted her, but also gave her another idea. She had been altogether too unadventurous with this new appendage, she thought. Georgia was glad she had drunk as much tea as she had. She gave the toilet a decisive flush and smiled to herself all the way to the bus stop.

  ∞

  Her plastic water bottle now refilled with caffeinated orange pekoe iced tea and lying on top of a book in a cloth grocery bag, Georgia set out to see how the other half lived. She put her hand in her trouser pocket. For about ten dollars, she had been able to buy a good quality, summerweight two-piece suit, singlebreasted, and a starched white dress shirt from a secondhand shop on the way home. In her bedroom, while trying everything on, she had discovered the wonderful convenience of an inner breast pocket sewn into the lining of the suit jacket and wondered aloud why women’s clothes were not similarly appointed. Was it because women were supposed to avoid the implication that they touched, however accidentally, their own breasts? In that case, just who did one’s breasts belong to, if not oneself?

  At first, she thought she really ought to stick her whole arm, up to the elbow, into the pocket, if at all possible. Putting her arm into the silky black hole had caused the rip in the pocket to gape. It was just as well; there seemed to be a piece of paper in there, anyway. Drawing her hand out took a little maneuvering, because one corner or the other of the postcard kept catching on the narrow slash of satin. How like a little gift, Georgia thought, threading the last bit of bright pink embroidery floss onto her needle because she was out of black thread. She set the postcard aside, and when the last stitch was in, she clipped the thread close to the knot.

  Putting on her reading glasses, she saw that the discolored scrap of cardboard had on one side a picture of a lone flowering tree in a field of green. The flowers had once been white but were now yellow due to the postcard’s age. Turning the card around, she saw that there was no message or identifying information of the scene on the front. She tucked the old postcard in between the glass and the frame of her dressed mirror and, slipping the jacket on, stepped back to finish surveying herself.

  Luckily, she had remained rather slim—in fact, her thigh was about as big around as a can of creamed corn. The starched shirt stood away from her modestly flat chest, safety pins had taken care of the extra sleeve lengths, and the suit’s pantlegs had required very few alterations. The rest hadn’t been difficult: she seldom wore makeup. She had managed to make it to the gate that separated her yard from the sidewalk when Zeke, heading home, spotted her and made her stop.

  “Georgia,” Zeke had said, catching her gently on the arm, “I think you’re missing a hat.”

  “My hat?” Georgia said, puzzled at first.

  “Wait here, I’ve got just the thing,” said Zeke, jogging past Georgia up the walk and into the house. She returned with a dark brown hat to go with Georgia’s chocolate-brown suit. It had a fold in its crown and a very small brim, with a band of medium-width grosgrain ribbon knotted discretely around the base of the crown.

  “See, your hair is just a little too long on the top and sides to be gentlemanly,” said Zeke. “You wet it to slick it back and parted it, didn’t you?”

  Georgia nodded. “Is it starting to dry and curl back?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Zeke.

  Georgia smoothed her fast-drying curls with one hand, jerked her hand away, and jammed the fedora on her head quickly with the other. “Good thinking,” she said, flicking the brim of the hat in a one-handed salute to Zeke and then settling the hat more securely on her head. “I’ll return it to you as soon as I’m back from—”

  “—Gender-spying?” Zeke grinned. “Keep it as long as you want.”

  So for the remainder of the day, Georgia resolved to gender-spy by urinating in as many different men’s bathrooms all over San Francisco that she could think of. Lots of times she was thwarted by the unisex toilets in many bookstores, movie theaters, and a particular coin-operated laundries-slash-café, where the toilets were labeled Readers and Writers. Fortunately, however, she had plenty of iced tea.

  The cloth bag the iced tea container was in was something of a problem. Georgia hadn’t thought to bring her purse to experiment with a suit-hat-handbag combination, though this being San Francisco, it would have been hard to shock in many neighborhoods. But she found that she hadn’t given adequate consideration to exactly what kind of satchels nearly-ninety year old men would have commonly carried, and the cloth grocery bag was really dissatisfactory because there weren’t convenient fixtures to hang the thing from in men’s lavatories, nor were there many clean spots on the floor near one’s feet.

  In fact, Georgia had been astonished to learn that many men hadn’t mastered basic habits of hygiene when it came to relieving themselves. Georgia counted exactly three men out of about fifty that she had observed that day who washed their hands after using the urinals, not including herself. She hoped, in vain, that none of them worked in food services. An equally alarmingly small number of men seemed inclined to wash their hands after exiting the stalls. This seemed to be what one might expect from grubby nine year olds, she thought. At least fifty percent of the women she had observed over the course of her life (with the low-grade social sensor that many women like herself seemed to share) washed their hands no matter what they had done. And she considered t
hose barely acceptable statistics. So unlike what she had heard of Singapore, where they had a law fining you if you didn’t flush the toilet after you were done using it. Georgia thought enforcement of that law might be a bit of a strain on one’s notions of privacy, but she had to admit that there was something to the spirit of the law that appealed to her.

  But these men! It was unbelievable what she had observed. One fellow at the Exploratorium men’s lavatory had been staring into space at the urinal and dribbled a bit onto his shoe before he was quite finished. Another man Georgia had caught rearranging himself absentmindedly through his pants after having walked a full three feet away from the door of the restroom, back into the second-to-last circle of hell that was the street level of San Francisco Centre. Georgia wondered, what, did he think he was invisible? Why did men feel free to rearrange themselves so openly, yet discreetly? Wasn’t that a contradiction? And at the Castro movie theater, she heard rather than saw someone come in and use a sink in the row of sinks along the wall behind her, as all the urinals were taken. At least he washed his hands, she noted—or should he have used the same sink? she wondered on second thought.

  By far the most interesting experience Georgia registered was the time she caught the man next to her observing her. Here was another (another?) older man, one who had a craggy, stern face. Her stream faltered, then stopped altogether when it became clear that her neighbor’s eye movements kept darting downward. She felt a miserable warm flush creeping up the back of her neck that wouldn’t stop until it reached her tingling scalp. This whole business of glimpsing and being glimpsed was something she had had great difficulty mastering. Georgia, of course, was not used to grasping the most of details in her side vision as the other men were. She was, after all, there to see what she could see, but without letting on, and now this man was eyeing her rather openly.

  What’s wrong? she wanted to shout. What could you possibly be staring at?