We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  So the web browser refreshed and Jasper invited me to the prison reform group, and afterwards we made out in the parking lot. Then the barista asked me on a date, and the owner of the record store, and the teenage boy who bagged my groceries. I was asked on so many dates, and sometimes I would even be on a date and get asked on another one. At some point, they always asked me how Denise was, if I’d heard from Denise. When I said no, they would smile, and maybe try to see how many fingers they could put in my mouth.

  When I was twelve, my Italian grandpa took me to his Knights of Columbus Hall—they were offering ballroom dance lessons for grandchildren of members. I was the first grandchild to arrive, and I remember the way the other grandfathers smiled when they looked at me; at the time, I didn’t interpret it as pervy. The room was warm and blue with cigar smoke. My grandpa lit a cigarette as he set the needle on the record player, while the other men spread into a circle. I danced with one man in the centre, and I felt like I was coasting on ice, my feet barely touching the floor. And then I was passed to another man, and then another, spinning and spinning, until I’d danced with everyone in the room.

  A little over a year after the breakup, I ran into Del at the grocery. He seemed to be deciding between oranges based on their heft, one in each hand, and greeted me warmly. I responded in kind and was so amazed that I didn’t feel a twinge of fear, and that Del didn’t seem to either.

  Del’s band had been on tour for a while, and now they were finally settled back in town. They’d actually made some money, so he was able to take time off for things like determining an orange’s merit by its weight.

  “I wish this were how it could always be,” Del said, tossing an orange into his cart. “I feel like the person I’m supposed to be.” He gave me a very dignified and respectful glance up and then down. “You’re looking like a fox.”

  Del meant literally. I had just died my hair carrot red with some brown stripes along the sides, and I had styled it in a mix of spiky and long. In addition to my fur shrug, I was wearing black pleather leggings and boots that I’d painted to look like back paws. I looked down and adjusted my fur.

  “I haven’t talked to Denise for a while.”

  Del didn’t say anything. He picked up a mango and sniffed it.

  “I was wondering if they moved out of town or something.”

  “Look, he’s probably going to be pissed at me, but go ahead and tell him that I did this.”

  The pronoun shift would have usually been a familiar indication of what was going on—I heard this all the time in community—but in the moment, I’d forgotten all my politics, was completely daft. Del reached into his pocket, took out an old receipt, and wrote down an address.

  “He’s been trying to be private about things. He goes by Dane now.”

  I looked at the address. Dane was living in the country, at the edge of town, which seemed unsafe to me.

  “He wanted to tell you, but he wasn’t ready yet.”

  “Does anyone else know?” I asked.

  Del pressed his lips together. I thought of my grandpa’s lips on his cigarette as he moved the record player’s arm.

  “Yeah.” He lowered his head briefly, and then reversed that movement and lengthened his spine to his full height. I’ve come to recognize this as the action a progressive person makes before trying to reason with you.

  “To his credit, he really got mad at folks when he found out they were asking you where he was, which was partly why he moved to the country. His thinking was if this community was just gonna act like any small town, he didn’t want to be part of it.”

  “They were making fun of me?”

  “They were being assholes.”

  I pictured the men spinning me in the meeting hall but replaced them with the faces of my genderqueer dates, laughing at me, gnawing on this secret while they slid a hand up my thigh.

  “He has a new number, too. Let me text it to you.” I watched Del’s fingers slide across the screen of his phone like they were moving through heavy cream. I squeezed a mango so hard I put my thumb in it. I buried it beneath the others.

  I went outside to a pay phone and dialled the number, knowing he wouldn’t pick up the unknown number. The voice mail clicked on, and even though his voice had a deeper drill-whine to it, I could still make out the familiar, tender cadence.

  “Dane’s not here, but Dane wants to know what’s up. Dane wants to take care of your needs.”

  I hung up. The last part of the message made me think of him dating other people and it was like no time had passed and I hadn’t fucked everyone. I felt sick. How to explain the thought of someone not wanting you anymore? How to describe someone erasing you with the same pencil that drew you, leaving only your paws?

  —

  The house looked nicer than I expected. There was a vegetable garden out front growing our tomato plants and a row of collard greens. A swing hung on the porch, and there was a tool shed at the side of the house where a wheelbarrow rested against the frame. I pictured him on his own on Sunday mornings, happily wheeling compost or dirt or weeds around, wearing thick gardening gloves. He must have loved the day he purchased that wheelbarrow.

  I walked onto the steps quietly. There was no way he could hear me. I’d worn sneakers and jeans. The only thing mildly spectacular about my appearance was a brass belt buckle with the silhouettes of two horses. My hair was limp at my shoulders. He’d have to at least level with me if I wasn’t dressed like an object.

  He opened the door before I knocked. He wore slacks and a dress shirt; the sleeves were rolled up, but he wore a tie. His hair was still buzzed and the skin on his face looked a little rougher, a little dry from shaving. I was looking for things, the shifting. He was beautiful.

  “What a great outfit,” I said.

  “Thanks. I’m technically at work.” He looked at me carefully, and I couldn’t place myself in his gaze like I used to.

  “I recognized your footsteps,” he said. We didn’t hug each other, though I wanted to and felt a frustrated, capitalist, sense of longing that translated to anger.

  “You must love your wheelbarrow,” I said.

  He stepped out to look around the house. He was barefoot and smelled like perfume. “That’s my landlord’s.”

  “Do you ever use it?”

  “Maybe eventually—I’m still healing.” He rubbed at the corners of his chest. I couldn’t help myself—I looked. His shirt was thin and there was nothing to bind him underneath.

  “When did all of this start?”

  “You know better than to ask that,” he said. “Well, at least some context?”

  “Do you want to sit on the swing?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I get nauseous on those.”

  “Let’s sit in the doorway.” The entry was narrow and it felt strange to have any part of my body pressed up against his. I felt his heat and I wanted him like we had never broken up or undergone ninety days, let alone a year, of no contact. If this was a great experiment, I had failed.

  “I got a prescription for hormones the week before we broke up. Took my first shot the night I left. I got this great remote programming job, so I’ve been able to pay for everything. I had surgery three months ago. Del went with me. A couple folks pitched in. I still have to send thank-you notes.”

  I rubbed at my eyes like I might cry. I felt a swirl of panic inside me.

  “I want to ask why you didn’t tell me, but I’m afraid you’re going to say that it isn’t my business, or that it’s not mine to ask about, or some other kind of stoic bullshit.” I covered my mouth the way my mother had.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just needed to make this decision on my own and not discuss the act of making it. Not process it.”

  “Have you been dating anyone?” I asked. I expected another femme to come walking out of the house wearing an apron, a pie in each hand.

  “Yes.”

  “I can smell her perfume,” I said.

  He turne
d his head and looked at me for a long moment, and I wanted to push his face away, but I was afraid to touch him.

  “That’s mine,” he said. “Essential oils. I’m not really into femmes anymore.” He gestured to me; it may have been inadvertent, but he still did it. I watched him catch what he’d done. He started playing with the hand that did it.

  “I’m more into being with someone masculine, like something equal. It all changed really fast.” He reached down and hooked onto his big toes. “I think it’s good that you’ve been dating, though,” he said.

  “Everyone’s been making fun of me.”

  “They weren’t making fun of you exactly. They were testing to see what you knew so they didn’t say anything I didn’t want them to. They were just trying to be mindful of what I was going through.”

  “Because you’re masculine and worth more than me?” I snapped at him.

  “Look at where I’m living. Don’t pretend like you don’t know what could happen to me. I just don’t want anyone else’s opinion on how to do this. Sometimes I crave it, but I kind of want to do my own thing and not hear from anyone about what this is supposed to look like, how I’m supposed to act, how other people should act around me. I just want to garden and work this job.”

  I exhaled and there was a whistle. I coughed and tried to breathe through my mouth.

  “You can breathe through your nose. I missed that whistle.”

  My nose let out a high, sharp whinny, and I wished it hadn’t accommodated him like that.

  “Are you suddenly nice now?”

  “Probably not,” he said, and he looked me straight in the eye. “But I’m happier in a lot of ways.”

  “From the transition or not being with me?” As soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t.

  “Probably both,” he said.

  I stood up and walked calmly over to his garden. I looked at the happy, tall plants and rested my hand on one of the tomatoes. I wasn’t sure whether to leave or stay, when I felt the plant kind of pulse under my hand. I looked at it and it trembled, probably because my hand was trembling, but I felt this phrase in my brain—Take me—and it wasn’t coming from me. I felt something like permission when I pulled off the tomato, heavy and green in my hand. I took a bite of it and looked at Dane—he didn’t move. I undid the twine from the support and pulled the plant from the ground. The dirt fell away easily, as it had when he pulled this plant from our garden. I laid it down. I pulled out the next plant. And the next. I finished eating the large tomato, and then pulled out a cherry tomato plant and held it up in the air—freshly out of the ground, a sacrifice, its roots dangling. I stared at Dane while I reached for a tomato, plucked it off, and put it in my mouth. The tart acid exploded and I felt my eyes squint, but I didn’t stop looking at him. I ate all four of the small tomatoes—each one felt like a bite of power—and then dropped the plant to the ground. Dane still didn’t move. I couldn’t believe he could sit there like that and not even stand up, not give me any kind of reaction, some sense that he was feeling something.

  That was when I undid my buckle and squatted in his garden. I focused my breathing and fixed my eyes somewhere past Dane, who, finally, stood up.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I grunted and grit my teeth. I pushed. Wind whistled out of me. I reached back and spread my cheeks apart, trying to coax out the small pellet I knew was lurking in there. He took long fast steps towards me, but he just looked at me and then my ass, his weight shifting. I could see him measuring whether he should push me over, whether that was a cruel thing to do. I wiggled back and forth and the turd fell to the ground with barely a whisper. It was small and dry. I pulled up my jeans and kicked my legs back, spreading the scent, or covering it with dirt, the way a fox might. My nose whistled. Dane looked into my eyes and I saw that his were brown. It was like I hadn’t noticed until that moment because I’d been so focused on what was behind them. Maybe now I saw him seeing me, or maybe I was finally seeing him.

  “That wasn’t okay,” he finally said.

  “I know.” I finished buckling my belt. “Report me to the queer board of directors. Get me demoted to lesbian.”

  “The lesbians wouldn’t take you,” he said. “You shit in people’s gardens and wear real fur.”

  “Only when it’s used,” I said.

  He knelt down and covered the turd with dirt, his hands moving carefully, as if it were a seed. But even planting feels like a burial.

  His voice got appropriately soft. “All we had in common was that we liked how wild-looking you could get. It was like dating an animal, and for a while that was perfect because it made me feel like an animal, and what does an animal care about gender? You really performed, and I wanted to do that, too. But I couldn’t figure out how to perform and be with you. I didn’t want it to be playful. I wanted it to be serious. I think I’m a very serious person and might want a husband and an MBA or something.”

  A truck turned down the road, the first vehicle since I’d arrived, and crawled slowly past us. The man raised his hand and we raised ours back. He watched us in his rear-view mirror, making sure there was no cause for trouble.

  “I know the queer board will vote me out for that,” he said.

  “More likely the rest of the world will vote you in,” I said.

  If I hadn’t shit in his garden, maybe I would have tried to plead the point that we just hadn’t discovered what we had in common, but here we were, on the brink of it. And if he let me live in that house with him, I would make pies all day and he could fuck me at night, when he was done with capitalism, and I’d call him “my man,” or I’d wear a suit and buy a dick and show up like a hookup, and we could flip that house together and open up a record shop in a part of town that didn’t need a record shop. We could perform gender with such extreme attention to detail that every heterosexual would see us and not feel straight enough, or every gay man from New York would see us and want to buy property here immediately.

  But I did shit in his garden, and it revealed some things to me: that I was an animal in his eyes even before that, and that the world would bend away from me even if I wanted to bend towards the world.

  So instead, I knelt down, too, and said: “I’m glad you made the decisions you needed to.”

  He lowered his head and I lowered mine. For this one moment, it appeared as if we were bowed, equally for once, towards each other.

  the painting on

  Bedford Ave.

  On August 14, 2003, I decided to put my roommate’s painting out on the curb. My girlfriend, Tracy, and I weren’t living together, but I was living in an apartment on Bedford Ave. with two of her friends from college. Tracy got me in when my last roommate situation ended horrifically: a bout of bedbugs, a robbery, and my roommate eating all my cream cheese and not fessing up to it. Tracy’s ex-girlfriend had finally moved out of the apartment on Bedford and my moving in there meant she would get to hang out with those friends more regularly again. I should have seen that she was dooming me to some kind of pattern of hers, but I was only twenty-four, of middle-class stock, and hadn’t yet learned how the system is rigged, or that people have a tendency to fuck up in a specific way, over and over, repeating with varying degrees of severity the same goddamn problem, the same goddamn habit.

  I aspired to be a poet and, after a treacherous job search, settled into work at an organic market for most of the week and at a theatre in Flushing, Queens, where I wrote thank-you letters to donors in an office they’d fashioned out of the electrical closet for the other two days. There was one moment when I thought my New York time had come—the world shifting in preparation for something to truly happen—at a party where a former professor introduced me to the poetry editor of the New Yorker, one of those not-for-profit-for-life lesbians with lavish hats who, as we shook hands, looked me up and down and said, “I like your handshake.”

  By the end of the night, she’d given me her card and told me to come in on Monday and she would
see about setting me up as a fact-checker. But when I showed up, she wasn’t in the office, and though I followed up by email, I never heard from her again.

  My roommates, Tamara and Dev, were artists: the former a dancer, the latter a writer and dabbler in oil paints who mostly made a living writing occasional short articles for hip online blogs and established conservative newspapers. Dev’s parents very obviously supported her between gigs, so this made it easy to criticize and resent her, especially when, because her bedroom was the smallest, she paid less rent than the rest of us. This didn’t add up, as she had taken over a substantial part of the living room as her office. It seemed to me that we should each contribute $583.33, rather than Tamara and I both having to pay $650, but this was the way things were long before I arrived on the scene.

  This “new guy” status meant that I was put in the strange centre room that had no windows except for one desperate six-by-twelve-inch slit up near the ceiling that, if I climbed up a ladder, revealed a view of three concrete walls. I got one of those alarm clocks that mimics the sun by slowly getting brighter and brighter as the time to wake up draws near, but all that did was create the appearance that I had slept with the light on, a depressing result that meant I started each day feeling unhinged and like I had no control over my life.

  Though I did technically have control over my life then, I was inept at enacting that control and oblivious to all the ways I was supported despite my floundering. And while Tracy, Dev, and I got into deep, self-pitying white-girl conversations questioning what we were supposed to be doing, Tamara never participated or looked moved. She was born in Brooklyn to Haitian immigrants, and her parents weren’t into her being a professional dancer. At one dinner, when I asked her what she thought and why she was being so quiet—I’d assumed she was just thinking about other things and wanted to draw her out—she sat up, slung her arm over the back of her chair, and smiled at me the way you do at a baby.

  “Who cares what I’m supposed to be doing? I don’t have time to think about that. The rest of the world is busy enough trying to make that decision for me anyway. Struggling to be a dancer is the least of my problems,” she said. Then her face became more serious, more tired. “Steph, if I’m gonna do this, I have to make it work.”