17

Cold River, Maine

There was a hole in our front yard as I walked up to the house from the dock. A pile of dirt was next to the hole, and a shovel was stuck in the pile. One of the septic-tank trucks was parked just off of the turnaround for the driveway, and a hose ran from the truck, across the front yard, and into the hole.

If I understood things properly, Falcon and Caeden, having been to Madison and back with the truck, had decided—their enjoyment somehow still being incomplete—to suck out our own tank. I guess it was better than shooting heroin.

“Boys?” I shouted. There was no answer.

I turned my back on the house. There, through the trees, was the path that led down to the lake. I could see our dock and the Red Wedding tied up against it. In the distance, as always, was the hush of water pouring over the falls and vaporizing on the rocks. Jake had said that he wanted to be alone for a while, and now, I presumed, he was sitting on the bench overlooking the falls, thinking about his pledge to always love me. Jake is no philosopher, but I knew he was probably considering, even at this moment, the question of exactly who it was he’d made that promise to.

The vows we’d made, all those years ago, were to love, honor, and obey. At the time, we’d had a lot of feisty conversation about these, especially that word obey, with all its creepy antifeminist undertones. And yet, as it turned out, loving, honoring, and even occasionally obeying had not been the tricky part.

The tricky part was thee.

How much could the person you love change, and still remain the same person to whom you’d made your promise? We don’t expect our lovers to remain the same over the course of a long relationship. In fact, if you’re married at sixty-five to the same person you married when you were twenty, your marriage has probably failed. But there are changes, over time, that spell doom for a marriage, although exactly what these are, and to what degree, varies from couple to couple. For some people, vast changes over time make no difference to the fundamental sense of devotion one soul has for another. But for others, relatively small changes can push things to the breaking point: gaining or losing weight, gaining or losing faith, gaining or losing wealth. How does any relationship survive in the end, when change is the only constant?

“Hi, Mrs. Falcon!” said a voice, and I turned to see Caeden standing next to the hole in the ground. The shovel was now over one of his shoulders.

“Hi, Caeden,” I said.

“This is my favorite shovel!” Caeden shouted. It had never occurred to me, that a person could have a favorite shovel, but then Caeden, with his exuberant, joyful buoyancy, seemed to have a favorite everything.

“Have you boys had dinner?”

“Yeah, we nuked up some Hot Pockets!” said Caeden.

“Where’s Falcon?”

“I’m down here, Ma!” said the voice of my son. I looked around but I did not see him.

“Falcon?” I said. “Where are you?”

His head popped out of the septic tank. “I’m here,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “Down in the hole.”

Caeden took a spadeful of dirt and shoveled it onto Falcon’s head. “Dude,” said Falcon. “Quit it!” Caeden threw some more dirt at him, and laughed, and then Falcon climbed out of the hole, and tackled Caeden, and the two of them fell into the dirt pile and started wrestling.

“Boys,” I shouted at them, but either they didn’t hear me, or (more likely) my pleas were of exactly zero interest to them. They had sucked out a septic tank all by themselves. One of them had climbed into the tank. The other had shoveled earth onto his head. Now they were wrestling in dirt. It was twilight on a day in late summer. They had everything they could want.

“I want you to wash before you come inside,” I shouted at them as I walked toward the porch. “Falcon! Caeden! I mean it! Go jump in the lake!”

They stopped wrestling for a second, looked at me, then each other, then leaped to their feet, and began running toward the water’s edge. “Okay, Ma!” shouted Falcon. “Okay, Mrs. Falcon!” shouted Caeden. The young men disappeared through the pine trees. As I reached the porch, I heard two splashes, first one, then the other.

When I got inside, Gollum was sitting mournfully next to his dish. Gollum, he said.

“Oh, you poor thing,” I said, and picked up the dish and carried it out to the mudroom, where I keep the bag of kibble. I gave him two scoops and then came back into the kitchen and put it on the floor. Gollum looked at me thankfully, then lowered his sad gray face into the dish.

Now he was crunching.

The kitchen was a complete ruin, especially considering that the boys had only microwaved some Hot Pockets. But they’d done more than this, apparently, during the hours while Jake and I were (1) enjoying rock-and-roll music in a chicken barn, and (2) having the conversation that might have ended our marriage. There was an empty plastic bag of tortilla chips and a skillet in the sink in which scrambled eggs had been fried. The bowl they’d scrambled the eggs in was piled in the sink as well, and the butter and the egg carton and a spatula and two dirty plates were scattered across the countertop. I looked at this mess, and thought about cleaning it up, then thought better of it. I’d have them clean it up themselves, after they got the lid back on the septic tank and covered up the hole with the dirt and retracted the hose and got the truck off the lawn. As one does.

This is my favorite shovel.

Gollum had finished his dinner, and now he was looking at me with hope. “Okay, come on,” I said, and we went out to the porch. “Let’s take a walk.”

The dog’s ears perked up and he scampered around the deck until he found a tennis ball. Then he came back to me, and the two of us, mistress and hound, walked off the porch and into the sunset.

Our house is on a dirt road that gets almost no traffic, so I didn’t bother with a leash. Plus, Gollum is so old that if a car does come, it’s pretty easy for me to just grab him by the collar. My main concern is just to keep him from falling over. In that way he’s not so unlike other individuals I might mention.

I stepped over the hose from the truck that still was spooled out in the front yard. Out in the lake, Caeden and Falcon were splashing. I could hear their voices, shouting, falling. And always, like a low roar in the distance, the sound of water going over the falls. I couldn’t see my husband, but I knew he was still sitting there, still trying to figure out the unanswerable, unavoidable question of thee. My heart went out to him.

Because if I wasn’t who he thought I was, then maybe he wasn’t who he thought he was either.

“Come on,” I said, and whistled. The dog looked at me in mortal despair. “Gollum,” I said.

As we walked along the road together, the old dog and me, I thought about the bar called Outlaws in Key West. That’s where I’d landed after taking my leave of Casey in 1987.

Gollum squatted down to take a dump, but his old legs were so frail that he was trembling. It’s hard when you get old. Everything’s a production.

A year after my surreal farewell to Casey in Woodlawn Cemetery, I was pouring out margaritas, wearing a halter top, and wearing my hair up in a bun. I don’t know why I wound up there, although maybe something in me thought that, since my last voyage as a man had taken me to the far north, perhaps my female future might begin in the sun-drenched south. My parents had taken me to Key West for a vacation once, a long time ago, before my father died, and for all the obvious reasons, I had never forgotten Outlaws, where we had lunch one day. They had female impersonators there.

Looking back, it now seems to me like I’d discovered something like the French Resistance. In those days the only way to find your way forward was by trial and error, trying every door until you found the low gate in the garden wall—the one that led, against all odds, to the secret world.

Of course, “female impersonator” was the last phrase I’d have used to describe myself. For one, the thing I’d been impersonating all these years was maleness; my womanhood was a fixed certainty I had carried within my heart at all times. For another, I had exactly zero interest in drag or performance, although I made plenty of friends who were fine with that language. But speaking just for me, I didn’t want to create some sort of illusionary self. I was in search of my own.

What I wanted, even at the beginning, was to become myself, to have the reality of my heart reflected in the body in which I dwelled. And so I waited tables at Outlaws, or poured out drinks behind the bar. I lived with another one of the MtFs, a girl named Myla. She was a lot further along than me. She did a lot of sex work, like most of the women I knew in what I came to think of as the resistance. Almost surely I would have wound up in the same place, if Casey hadn’t given me all that cash. It was only the generosity of my friend that stood between me and a much more dangerous place.

It was Myla who connected me to Dr. Schecter, an endocrinologist with wild, crazy hair, like Einstein. Schecter prescribed progesterone and Premarin, connected me to an electrologist named Sandra who worked on all the girls in that Key West clique. By Easter of ’88, I was well on my way. “I knew you had it in you, Judith,” Myla said to me after I began to morph. My second adolescence, as if one were not bad enough.

I heard someone say once that if you start hormones in your twenties, you generally revert to the shape of most of the women in your family, minus one cup size. My mother, and both my grandmothers, had been large-busted, big-hipped women, so I don’t know, maybe I had the genes for it. But there I was, at age thirty, going through puberty. The area around my nipples got sore. I needed a bra within six months. I needed a good one before the year was out. I let my hair grow long, and after a while went to an actual salon. That made a difference too. Sandra zapped my beard, pore by agonizing, horrible pore. I experienced a thing called fat migration, which meant that the fat on my body moved away from my belly and my neck and took up residence on my hips. One day, about two years after I’d landed in Key West, I caught a glimpse of this pretty young woman in a window on the street. When I realized that I was looking at my own reflection, I stopped there, stunned. I thought of an old line of Groucho Marx’s. Outside of the improvement, you’ll never notice the difference.

A friend of Myla’s got me the driver’s license of a girl named Cassandra Horton, who’d died in a car accident. She looked a little like me. All Myla said was, I got somebody who works in the ER. She had somebody in the ER; she had somebody everywhere. I used Cassandra Horton’s ID to get my other papers. For a couple weeks everyone at Outlaws called me Cassandra, and I went with that, thinking that maybe I’d get used to it. But Cassandra always felt like an alias, whereas Judith—well, that just felt like me, even though it was a name I had never spoken out loud. I got my driver’s license changed without showing anyone a birth certificate, which technically they weren’t supposed to do, not in 1989—but they did it. Somehow, I slipped past the gates. I got myself to Thailand. There were surgeons in the United States, of course, but even with the plane fare, it was cheaper to go overseas. That was where most of the girls I knew from Florida had done it—those who did it at all, although plenty of those women did not.

For me, the whole thing was like a dream. I stepped off the plane and they put a lei around my neck.

Two weeks later I was on my way home, although in some ways, now that my body matched my soul, I had already arrived at the place I’d been dreaming of, one way or another, for most of my life.

It’s worth saying that no one does this anymore, or almost no one—the flight into anonymity, the assumption of a new identity, and most of all, of course, the histrionic fake suicide, which even by the fairly high standards of melodrama for trans people, I think represents a particularly narcissistic high-water mark. I think of Caeden, coming out in sixth grade, transitioning before seventh. Being trans, of course, is hardly a road to safety these days, and depending on race and class it can still be almost as hard a journey as it once was for me. But at least it’s something that people have heard of, and many people have begun to understand. Back in my twenties, there were times when I feared I was the only one of me in the world, that the entire condition was something I’d invented out of sheer loneliness.

I had no idea back then that the world was full of people just like me, that the process of coming out and going through what is now called “transition” would become an increasingly well-worn path, a trail marked by blazes that in years ahead others—including young Caeden—would find waiting for them. But back then, all I knew of other people like me was what I had seen on television—a few curiosities on talk shows like Donahue or The Jerry Springer Show. Trans women back then were always portrayed as wildly exotic freaks of nature, and the idea that we were simply one more variety of human, a variation occurring with far more frequency than anyone imagined, was not yet part of contemporary discourse. I knew that there were other people like me in the world, but before I arrived in Florida I had no idea how to find my way to the trailhead. That such a transition could eventually come to be something less culturally scandalous and farfetched seemed inconceivable to me then. I don’t know. Maybe to some people it still seems inconceivable.

Sometimes it exhausts me though, when people say they can’t imagine what such a thing must be like, as if the dream of becoming someone else is a fantasy unique to transgender men and women. But surely the idea that one might slip away unseen and take up another life is nearly universal. Is there anything more fundamentally human than the desire to live in another world, as someone other than our own earthbound selves?

I had, of course, felt myself to be female from my earliest memories, although I lacked for many years a language for describing the difference that I felt. When I was very young the difference between men and women was itself unclear to me. But in time I came to understand the feeling that I had, to give a name to it, and almost at the same time came to realize exactly how strange and unusual that sensation was, to others at least. As I lay my head on my pillow at night I would pray, alternately, for two contradictory things—one, that I would wake in the morning miraculously transformed to female, or two, that I would rise from my bed with the desire to be female just as miraculously quelled.

I hoped, as I grew older, that a great love would take me out of myself and make me content to stay a boy. I think it’s very human, the hope that an all-encompassing love will change us into someone else, someone better. That this hope usually turns out to be false makes it no less human; the world is full of hopes far more unlikely than being transformed by love.

Ironically, it had been my female spirit, I think, that women found so alluring in me, and which made me so attractive to a certain kind of vulnerable, thoughtful girl, especially the kind that I met at college. Rachel Steinberg was not the last girl to find me infuriatingly passive, in spite of her best efforts at hurling herself at my impenetrable walls. I could love her, which of course I did, but it was also impossible to be with her—or anyone—as long as I knew I was lying to her. Plus, I had a softness in my heart for boys—not that I could imagine being with them, or anyone, for that matter, while I was still in that male body. It seemed to me as if my life was just a series of unbearable, unanswerable questions.

When I think about my drive up to Boston in ’87—what I now think of as Quentin’s Last Voyage—it makes me cringe. I thank God Rachel had the good sense to turn me down, not that there was much chance of her accepting my proposal, given all the abundant evidence that I’d kind of lost my mind. Still, something in me hoped that I’d be able to tell her the truth about the nature of my soul, and that it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But of course it would have. Straight women love a feminine sensibility in a man, but that love only goes up to, and unfortunately does not quite pass, the fact of his being an actual woman.

For a long time I waited, assuming that the new name and the social security card I’d gotten from Myla would inevitably lead to charges of fraud and jail, but no knock ever came. I moved to Maine, where I filed my taxes, where I got a job as a reporter for the Mid-Maine Morning Arsenal. Later, I freelanced for Condé Nast, and for all intents and purposes the person I had been was dead and gone.

Trans people used to call this “going stealth,” and for a long time it was the standard way of going about transition. You were supposed to do the switcheroo, then move someplace where no one knew you, and start life over, without a soul knowing who you had been. Among mental-health-care providers—the few who thought that the troubles of people like me were worth their time—it was the recommended course of action, as if the idea of being sundered from everyone you had ever known, as if lying about your own past, was a path to wholeness. The age of the Internet, as well as the slight movement in the culture toward compassion for the whole spectrum of LGBT people, has made “going stealth” a rarity. Given the digital footprints that we all leave behind now, it’s very hard for anyone to effectively erase her past. Sometimes I think I must be the last trans woman on Earth who went stealth, but then who knows? I could be surrounded by fellow travelers to whom I am invisible, just as they are to me.

I felt joy at having leaped the divide, in those early years. But no one can live without a past, and that sense of having been stripped of history weighed on me heavily sometimes. I was a woman without a girlhood, a person who had to improvise wildly whenever questions about my past arose. I got pretty good with the story, so I could tell a consistent narrative. But I mourned the past. I missed my mother. I missed Casey, and Rachel. I missed, even in all of its squalid, eccentric sadness, my youth.

I had always imagined that if only I could live as my actual self, that life itself would be its own reward, and provide solace for anything I had had to give up. And that was mostly true. But then, late-winter days in Hallowell, Maine, walking up Front Street, with the frozen river off to my right, the wind howling over the ice, I’d get into a state. Sometimes I’d get back to my house overlooking the Kennebec, and I’d drink vodka and listen to John Coltrane records and watch the ice floes.

One night, I did a short Internet search for Casey, found his restaurant, Cannonball’s, down in South Philly. I called the number, and he answered. Casey, I said, before my throat closed up. In the background I heard the sound of people talking, glasses tinkling.

Hello? he said. Do you want to make a reservation?

I didn’t say a word, just sat there listening.

Hello? said Casey again. Is anybody there?

We were heading back to the house now, Gollum and me. I was hoping when we got back, Jake would be sitting on the porch, waiting for me. I was hoping that he’d have figured things out, and that as I approached him he would spread his arms. I knew that he loved me, and that his devotion ran pretty deep. Still, I suspected it might take a long time for him to come to terms, and why not? It took me almost thirty years.

It’s funny that Caeden had said that thing about the shovel, because I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about this very issue. Of course, the reason Caeden loves the shovel is because Jake told the boys one day how he loves the shovel, for the very reason that it will “last forever.” “I’ve had this shovel twenty years now,” he said. “I’ve replaced the handle twice and the blade three times.”

Yeah, great shovel. It’ll last forever.

The boys loved this story, and I’ve since heard them tell it to other boys when they come over and throw Jake’s tools all over the yard. Part of what the boys love is the absurd sense of it. But the reason it gets my attention is that it’s almost a word-for-word embodiment of a philosophical dilemma known as the Ship of Theseus. A shorter version of the koan is called Abe Lincoln’s Ax. In the short version, a museum keeps Lincoln’s beloved ax behind glass. “The ax was passed from Lincoln’s father down to his son,” the docent says. “Since Lincoln owned it, the axe head has been replaced twice, and the handle four times.” Virtually every museum I’ve ever been to has some version of this—the reproduction furniture meant to suggest what such-and-such a room might have looked like at some other point in history. In Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, the room where the Declaration was signed is filled with eighteenth-century desks, from exactly the same period as when the founders wrote the Constitution—although not, in fact, the very same desks. In Rome, the Keats house has lovingly re-created the room where the poet died, in a bedroom overlooking the Spanish Stairs, although of course it’s not the same bed in which Keats died: since the young man died of tuberculosis, everything in the house was taken out and burned, even before Keats was in the ground.

But it’s a different matter to say that Abe Lincoln’s ax is the same ax, when its original essence has been removed and replaced so many times. By what logic can anyone say it’s the same ax? By what logic is Caeden still using the same shovel that Jake bought twenty years ago?

The longer—and not a whole lot more boring—story provides an answer. Theseus, the great warrior maze-doer and Minotaur-slayer, had a ship, and upon this he sailed the seas. But as time went by, he fixed it up as things broke down. One year, he replaced the mast; another he changed the sails; still later pieces of the deck as they warped and splintered. But—in the story at least—someone is saving all of these pieces as they’re removed, and assembling them one by one. So that after twenty years a second ship has been built, with all the original masts and sails and planks. Now there are two ships, one made out of all the original pieces, and the other, the one with all the new parts, which Theseus has been sailing. And the question is, which is the true ship of Theseus?

I was wondering how Jake would answer, if I told him this story and asked him this question. Gollum and I arrived back at the house, and I poked my head in. From downstairs I could hear the sounds of the Xbox. My son and his friend were blowing things up in some other dimension.

I let Gollum off the leash, then filled his water bowl. The dog took a few halfhearted laps, then stumbled to the bottom of the stairs, and looked up. I knew he wanted to make the climb and get into our bed, but it seemed like such a long, hard journey. My heart went out to the dog because, of course, I knew exactly how he felt.

“Come on,” I said, and I helped Gollum up the stairs. Mostly it was just a matter of getting him started. I lifted him by the collar and pushed on his hindquarters, and then Gollum was making a Herculean effort to ascend. When we reached the top, I followed him as he stumbled through the hallway and into our bedroom, where he stood by the bed and groaned. “Okay,” I said. “Good boy.” I lifted the dog up and got him settled. His head was on my husband’s pillow.

My husband, I thought. Outside it was nearly dark. I could hear the water falling.

I descended the stairs and walked back outside and into the woods. The path to our dock forks about halfway to the water, and I took the turn to the right. Among these trees it is not easy to see, but I hoped that on the way back I’d have Jake with me. He had a small flashlight on his key ring, and on the return journey, he might use this to light our way.

But I don’t think there will be a return journey, Mr. Frodo.

He was right where I thought he’d be, sitting on a bench by the falls, leaning forward, watching the water. His hands were folded on his knees.

“Well?” I said. “Have you made up your mind yet?”

He turned halfway around to look at me over his shoulder.

“What’d they used to call you?” he said.

“That’s what you want to know? Of all the questions you’ve got, that’s where you want to start?”

“I don’t think it’s a bad question,” he said, and turned to look at the waterfall again. There was a fence before us, separating the bluff upon which we sat from the drop-off. To our right was the long ridge along the gorge; to our left were the falls and the placid lake beyond. The moon shone down upon the still water. Mist drifted through the air.

“My name was Quentin,” I said.

“Quentin?” he said, as if this was the final insult. “Seriously?”

I sat down next to him on the bench.

“Jake—” I said.

“No, don’t start,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“What don’t you want to hear?” I said.

“Any of it. I can’t stand it. I feel like grape jelly is gonna come out of my ears.”

“You think I shouldn’t have told you?” I said. “Would you have been better off not knowing?”

“I don’t know!” Jake shouted. “I don’t know.”

“We agreed when we got married we’d keep some things about our earlier lives secret. We said it would be better that way.”

“Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of, like, maybe you’d been in the circus or something. Not—”

“It was like being in the circus,” I said. “Every fucking day.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s not such a big thing, you know, the world’s changed. Look at Falcon’s pal, Caeden. He’s all right.”

“They left the truck out,” I said. “The cover’s off our tank. The hose is in the front yard.”

Jake sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon.”

We sat there and listened to the water pour down upon the rocks. We sat there for a long time, not talking.

“I’m the same person,” I said to him at last, and put my hand on his.

He looked at me, wounded. As if he didn’t want to hurt me.

“In what way exactly is that true?” he said. And took away his hand.

“Listen,” I said. “I want to tell you something. Have you ever heard the story of Abe Lincoln’s ax?”

“The what?”

“Okay,” I said. “So there’s a museum. And behind glass they have this ax that belonged to Abe Lincoln. And the docent goes, ‘This is Abe Lincoln’s ax. The handle’s been replaced two times, and the blade—’ ”

“Judy, I don’t want to hear about Abe Lincoln’s fucking ax right now.”

“I’m trying to explain something.”

“You’ve explained enough,” he said. “It’s not the gender thing, I mean, well, no it is the gender thing, but the gender thing isn’t the point. The point is the lying. Every time I’ve looked at you for the last fifteen years you’ve been lying to me.”

“I haven’t lied to you once,” I said. “Stop it. The lie was the time before.”

“The lie was in your silence,” said Jake.

“You said you didn’t want to know about my past!” I shouted. “We said we weren’t going to talk about it, that we were going to accept each other as we are!”

“Yeah, well there’s past,” said Jake. “And there’s past.”

“The person you’re all upset about,” I told him, “doesn’t exist. He disappeared off a cliff in 1987.”

“Yeah, so you said. You actually what—staged your own death or something?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“So wait, there are people in the world who knew you—back in the day—who thought you’d died, people who had to grieve you? Friends, family? Parents? You have parents, Judy?”

“My mother,” I said.

“Your mother,” he said firmly. “Burying her—son. Who wasn’t even dead. You put her through that?” He shook his head. “Boy, you just keep getting more and more entertaining, don’t you honey.”

“I didn’t know how else to do it,” I said. “I had to find my way. I didn’t know how to go about it.”

“Yeah, so I guess faking your own death would be kind of the fallback position,” he said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, okay, next time I come out as trans I’ll do a whole lot better job,” I said. “Thanks to this conversation.”

“But you didn’t come out,” he said, and he looked at me. “That’s the thing. You just lied.”

“I’m telling you now,” I said. “That was the point.”

“Wow,” said Jake. “Nick of time.”

“Jake,” I said, and I took his hand again. “Am I not me?”

He looked at me and tears shimmered in his eyes.

And at this moment his plectron radio went off, the sound of a sharp alarm piercing the night. He picked it off his belt. “Carrigan,” he said.

“Five-alarm blaze,” said the dispatcher. “Cold River, downtown.”

“On my way,” Jake said, and leaped to his feet.

“Gotta go check out a fire,” he said.

“Jake,” I said. “Am I not me?”

He looked at me, his eyes still wet. Then he put his Red Sox cap back on his head and ran away. In a moment he was lost in the dark trees.

His truck rushed up the hill. I stared into the woods for a little while, then walked toward the falls. There below me, the water pounded against the pink rocks.