Stephanie A. Smith

MighTy

Back during the late summer of eighty-five, when I was about to leave Berkeley for good, everything was big: big hair, big eyeglasses, women’s shoulder-pads out to here mimicking the styles of the forties, and death was big in the headlines, although there was, at last, a reliable blood-test and the Red Cross was going to use it. An older acquaintance of mine, an epidemiologist, rolled his eyes and shook his head. He’d been saying for months on end that a sexually transmitted virus doesn’t care who you did it with, or when, or how; if you’re human, you’re a target. Not that anyone in the Reagan Administration ever listened to him, or to anyone like him.

Meanwhile, Route 66 was being decommissioned, which irked my grandfather, who’d asked, “how can a road, which is still there, be written out of existence?” He’d driven the Mother Road 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica with Liza, not long after the Big War, which is what he’d always called WWII, even thought he’d only served in the first one. Mom took me on that same trip, right after Dad left. I think she’d intended to stay in funky, exclusive, home-to-Hollywood-stars Santa Monica, beside the Pacific, even if it meant we’d live in the car or on the streets, but that didn’t happen. We came, we stayed for a bit, and then made our way back to New Jersey.

Fifteen and trapped in close quarters with my divorced and still-bewildered-by-that-fact mother, driving cross-country to get as far away from my father as possible, barring a plane ticket—Mom was both too broke and too afraid to fly, so that hadn’t ever been an option—that trip was agony. Mom was drinking hard, so sometimes she let me drive but then got upset and would take the wheel back because a. I didn’t have a learner’s permit yet and b. I was the better driver. Mom was worried about a. and pissed about b. For my part, I was wretched. I was Julia, no matter or how I dressed, how I felt inside, or whom I might mislead by my sartorial choices. I was Julia. I didn’t want to be Julia.

So, on my very first visit to the landmark named the Blue Whale, which is bigger than any house and five times uglier than anything you can imagine, I was Julia and the Blue Whale brand new, handmade by the man who owned the Oklahoma property, or, more to the point, the man who owned the pond that the thing serviced as a water-slide. American roads feature strange stuff, like that endless South of the Border crap on I-95, but of all the weird Americana I’ve seen, the Blue Whale takes the cake with its eye-piercingly blue body, open, smiling-like-a-maniac, gigantic jaws, flipper waterslides, and a string of portholes where a single blowhole should’ve been. All I could do was stare at it in disbelief and say to my mother, “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Mom peered through the windshield and muttered, “My God, I think I’ve seen that thingamajig before.”

I frowned. “How? On a postcard?”

She shook her head. “After a few. Let’s go take a good look.”

But I refused to get out of the car. I had my limits. I was not going to ogle a monstrosity that ruined a nice little pond. Not my idea of fun, not back then, and not in eighty-five either, but I was about to drive on the no-longer-official-Route 66 Mother Road once more, so I was going to see the Blue Whale because somehow it was still there even if, by the grace of “T,” I was no longer altogether a girl. I’d started hormone therapy, and the big alterations I longed to see had not begun; I was also nervous about charging into anything like a full-bore transition. Testosterone is a game-changer, and it can produce overwhelming emotional side-effects, but at that point I’d had only four shots, and I couldn’t yet afford, both fiscally and psychically, top surgery. But “T” is powerful. I could feel myself responding. I was aggressive, horny, and short-tempered. I’d started to dream about presenting in public as a man, and being accepted as one, by other men and by the women I desired. But not quite yet, and not around anyone except for Mom, who was dealing with it. She’d always wanted a boy and had mourned the loss of my cannibalized twin who might have been a boy. I wasn’t responsible, natural chimeras are nature’s little trick, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty, so much so that I needed recover that lost zygote. I’d become the ‘me’ I was supposed to have been in the first place. I’d never been comfortable with things feminine, except for my Easy-Bake Oven; my favorite toys had been a set of wooden blocks, a stuffed bear, and any kind of ship, whether bound for the bathtub or for the stars.

I wasn’t ready to talk about any of this with anyone else except my mother, my therapist, and my doctor. Not an easy conversational segue, “oh, by the way I’m a chimera and in gender transition, how about you?” My friend and roommate Audrey Bradshaw, with whom I’d been sharing an apartment for almost a year, had no clue as to why I was getting so anxious about our late-summer drive cross-country.

“It’ll be an adventure,” she chided me. “Why are you being such a baby?”

“I hate moving.”

“Who doesn’t? But we’re going to Boston for good reasons.”

She was right: she was getting married, and I was about to start a Ph.D. in Engineering at M.I.T. It was cheaper to drive than to fly, and I didn’t want to sell my car. But good reasons didn’t stop me from feeling odd about being on Route 66 again, this time with Audrey, as tall and graceful as a sandhill crane. I told myself it was the “T,” taking over the spectrum of my emotions. But it wasn’t just the hormone. I’d become attracted to Audrey, who would be married that fall. I was to be one of the bridesmaids. By the time I realized what I felt for Audie had gone far past affection, that I desired her, big time and in the worst kind of way, the trip had been planned, hotel rooms booked, camping gear purchased. Oh, yes, it was going to be something of an adventure—an adventure in more self-restraint and deception, a maddening detour down the by-now-all-too-familiar lane of self-denial, oh, yes, an adventure indeed.

Our first day out was sunny and clear, easy driving since we made sure to leave after rush hour was over. “Goodbye San Francisco,” I said aloud as I swung the car out onto the highway. The Bay Area had been a haven and hell. Most people there let be, they didn’t ask questions or wonder about my boyishness, which was a relief; but I also had too many gay friends who’d already died or were on the death-row of HIV/AIDS. Things were gruesome, even if medical science was on the way to some relief from the grim reaper. And then there was the fact that I’d gotten into M.I.T. for engineering, still no mean feat for a woman back then. As my mother would’ve said: when a door shuts, a window opens, or something along those lines. I guessed Audrey was also pre-occupied by similar thoughts about windows of change and doors into the future, about her fiancé, and the wedding because we didn’t say much to one another until we hit Monterey, when she turned to me and declared, “maybe we should go back?”

“You’ve got cold feet?”

“No. I’m not sure. Oh, hell.” She fiddled with the rock of a diamond on her finger. Her fiancé, Thomas, was her first boyfriend; he had an impeccable East Coast pedigree, a trust fund, a legacy degree from Yale and political ambitions. She had aspired to become his wife. I didn’t think Audrey had ever considered any other route forward.

“Not sure about what?” I asked. “Marriage? Tom? Both? You’ve not said a peep, like ever, about being unsure. I thought you two were in love.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Tom’s fine, it’s not Tom. I can handle Tom.”

I grinned. “You sure can.”

She laughed but it was more like a wan chuckle and then she pulled her long legs up onto the seat and wound her arms around her knees. I almost choked watching her out of the side of my eye.

“Never mind,” she said. “Drive on.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, tipping an invisible cap.

And things went well from there, until right before the Big Blue Whale appeared, like a nasty wart on the horizon. Perhaps I should’ve taken more notice of how, after we crossed the border and left California behind, Audrey had become more and more silent, replying to my attempts to be sociable with either one word or one-liners, and maybe I did notice but didn’t want to inquire, I was too involved with keeping my banter light, my rising lust under wraps and desperation at bay. I was sick to my stomach with desire, and I couldn’t even masturbate, not with Audrey right there next to me, either in the other hotel bed or, worse, in our sleeping bags; the tent wasn’t generous and since we’d agreed to stop at as many campsites as possible, cancelling hotel bookings when we could to save on cash, I would lay there in the dark, feeling the weight of her body close by, which made it impossible to sleep. I wanted to rip off my clothing and crawl over next to her, kiss her, pant out my hunger, touch every part of her I could get my hands on. By the time we hit the Oklahoma border, I was running on empty, which was in a way, good. I was getting too tired to even contemplate acting out on my gnawing lust. She was lovely, we were good together, we had fun and sure it could’ve been even better if…which is where I’d have to stop myself.

“Let’s go to a hotel tonight, okay?” I said somewhere near Tulsa, towards late afternoon. “Do you mind?”

“Okay.”

That was how most of our conversations went. If we had been on this self-same road trip today, we would’ve been glued to our cellphones avoiding each other. But cellular phones back then were expensive bricks; neither of us had or wanted one. The minute after we checked in to the motel, Audrey bee-lined it to a pay phone in the lobby, and closed the door, which was odd because there was a phone in the room, wasn’t there? Oh, well. I took our luggage upstairs and threw myself on a bed. In two minutes, I was out. When I woke, it was pitch. I sat up, turned on a light. No Audrey. Her duffle bag and mine were both still where I dropped them…I checked the clock…three hours ago. It was gone past seven.

“Audie?” I called, thinking she might be in the bathroom.

Nothing. Yawning, I got up, peeked in the empty bathroom. Then, I went downstairs. There were a few people at the bar, and a couple eating dinner, but no Audrey. I went back upstairs and decided to splurge on room service because I was ravenous but didn’t feel like being in public by myself and besides, there was a wet bar in the room. I got a bucket of ice, and when the burger arrived, stripped to my skivvies, and poured a bourbon. Between the burn of the bourbon and the comfort of a bacon-burger, I was drowsy by nine and wriggled back into bed, thinking Audrey had her own key, and she’d show up.

And she did, but not until breakfast. I was sitting in a booth worrying my butt off about her and putting hot-sauce on an omelet when she slid into the seat across from me.

I put the hot sauce down and eyed her quizzically.

“Good morning,” she said, folding her hands.

“I guess so. Where have you been?”

“Out and about.”

“All night?”

She pouted. “I got busy.”

“Doing what? Giving Tom a run for his money? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“That’s not funny,” she said and slid out of the booth. “I’ve had my breakfast, so I’m ready to get on the road, whenever you’re done.”

I stared up at her. “Audie, I was worried sick when I woke up this morning. Where were you last night?”

“None of your business. I’m going to get my stuff. Meet you at the car.”

And then she waltzed off, leaving me baffled and the omelet, cold.

When we hit Tulsa, Audrey’s behavior shifted. She’d be silent for a few minutes, then chatter on about next to nothing, as if the silence needed cancelling out, swinging back and forth as if she’d become a bipolar conversationalist. And then she started smoking, a habit she’d almost had never indulged in while we’d shared an apartment.

When the Blue Whale was less than twenty minutes away, I said in something like total desperation, “we have to stop and see it.”

“See what?”

“The Blue Whale.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want to stop,” she protested, blowing out a stream of smoke, inhaling another drag.

I shrugged. “Changed my mind. I want to send Mom a postcard. She’ll get a kick out of it, because I wouldn’t get out of the car back when I was still a girl, and we came out West for the first time.”

“Still a girl.”

“Yeah, like fourteen, fifteen years old.”

Audrey nodded, stubbing out her cigarette. “You sure don’t act like a girl.”

My stomach froze as my heart sped up, but I forced myself not to react. “No? I’m a tomboy, always have been. You know this,” I said without looking at her. I could tell she was staring at the side of my face.

‘Thank god,’ I thought, ‘no significant facial hair.’ Yet. But it would happen. So why not start by confiding in Audrey? Truth: I wasn’t ready to deal with my changing self. Despite my desires, I wasn’t willing to face what could happen if I tried to confide in her. I was afraid she’d freak out like my college roommate Alison had, years before. Audrey was a woman from the right side of the middle of the road, engaged to a soon-to-be pillar of an increasingly conservative Republican society, ready to take her place as a Washington maven. Next to Audrey, I was a punk. No fancy family pedigree to brag on, with a few strong friendships and zero interest in marriage, children, or a two-car split-level lifestyle. Sure, at that very moment, I wanted Audrey, but what would I do after we…if we…? I had no clue, about how to shape my life as a man. This much, however, I did know: if Audrey wanted anything, she wanted to be a wife. Tom’s wife.

“Thar’ she blows,” she said, as the weird and towering iron fish hove into view. “’Hast thou seen the white whale?’”

“I hope you’re not suggesting I’m like Captain Ahab.”

“I am. Remember, I’ve seen you teach.”

“Oh, come on, I’m no monomaniac.”

“No. But you can be magnetic.”

There was the perfect word for what I’d been feeling, a magnetic attraction. I did look over at her then, but all I said was, “is that a compliment?”

“Kind of.”

“Meaning?”

She said nothing as I pulled into the Blue Whale parking lot, thinking about the teenage girl who’d stopped at this self-same park with her despairing mother, more than a decade ago. Back then, I’d folded my arms, crossed my legs, and stayed put in the front seat of our battered sedan, while Mom got out to walk around. Even though the whale was god-awful ugly, and Mom did agree with me on that score, she was also impressed because one man had put in the time and effort, by himself, with his own money and two hands, to build it. He’d worked in a zoo, he loved animals, he loved nature, he’d wanted others to share his passion, and to give his wife a gift she’d not soon forget.

“How Henry David Thoreau-like,” Mom had noted, “how so very American.”

Given that my father had been named Henry David, after the same American naturalist, I thought the comparison apt.

When Audrey and I got out of the car to take a closer look that day, I can’t say that I shared my mother’s thoughts about the man’s Thoreauvian ingenuity, but I did empathize with the scale and determination such a project represented. I was embarked upon a body project to alter myself, and my project would take time, dedication, and effort. I wasn’t even sure that I would succeed, or even what success would look like. Not yet. I was still more a kid than an adult. Yet I also knew with dead certainty that I was not a woman and never would be; if in my mind’s eye, all I could see in the rear-view mirror was that mixed-up teenager trapped in a car with her half-crazed mother, saddled with annoying breasts and an out-sized desire to be her own twin, I was also not going back there. I would go forward to become the man I knew I was meant to have been.

Audrey’d vanished again. I bought some souvenirs and headed to the car. When my friend rematerialized, she got in the front seat, lit up another cigarette, and we drove onward, in silence. That night we camped in the Mark Twain National Forest outside of St. Louis, a gorgeous and under-utilized national treasure, with a twinkling river and abundant campsites. Because Audrey’s on-again, off-again chatter, and her smoking, and all the driving had worn me out, I fell asleep fast. When I woke, it was dawn; Audrey was sleeping, so I wriggled back into my jeans and went for a walk. I don’t know why; I didn’t want to be near my friend anymore. The feeling was mutual. I walked to walk it all off. I saw a doe with a fawn by the riverside and the air was so clear and fresh it was like breathing in a kind of otherworld ether, of mulch and pine and mud—it cleared out the stale tobacco from my lungs.

When I got back to our campsite, Audrey was packing. I started to make myself breakfast and then found that what was left of the loaf of bread was a crust, a hollowed-out cylinder of crust. Audrey—it had to have been—had eaten out the soft middle of the loaf and had left a half-bullet-shaped bread shell. I had never seen anything like it; I picked up the shell of a loaf and went over to her.

“I’m guessing a mouse didn’t do this?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I was hungry.”

“Seriously?”

She glowered at me. “Is there a problem?”

“With my breakfast, yeah. Otherwise, I don’t know. You tell me.”

She grabbed the shell, stomped over to a wastebasket, tossed it, and said, “satisfied?”

“By what? You didn’t need to throw it away.”

“You weren’t going to eat it, were you?”

“No.”

“Okay. I got rid of it. We can always get more.”

How would you have dealt with this situation?

Something had gone wrong, but Audrey wasn’t sharing and had no intention of sharing. We were on a road trip, in the middle of a national forest, miles and miles from anything like a town, let alone a city. There was nothing to do but pack the car and keep going, although now I thought I might just be on the road with a lunatic. How Audrey could go from being my friend and the lodestone of my desire to a bread-chomping monster in several hundred miles, I didn’t know but the bread-shell incident was scary. As we packed the car, I tried to conceal all the sharp implements I could think of, which consisted of my grandfather’s old Army jackknife, a Swiss-Army arsenal, and a lone screwdriver. Still, I thought it prudent to hide them all: who knew what Audrey would do next?

I shouldn’t have worried. The minute we hit Chicago, Audrey was history. She left a note on the dashboard after I’d gone to get us some McDonald’s coffee, which tends to be fresh because the turnover is so high. The note said “good-bye. Took a train.”

Ah. On the one hand, I was relieved; on the other hand, I was still jacked up on desire, although I could now continue by myself and deal with it. The prospect of being alone bothered me far less than being around someone whom I desired but could never touch, and who could also eat her way through the middle of a loaf of bread and not think doing so was odd. I wanted answers, but I wanted my sanity. I couldn’t fathom what could induce a woman whom I’d known for over a year as a level-headed friend to act like an irrational three-year-old.

For years, that trip remained a mystery. I told Mom about it. Her comment was ‘good riddance to bad rubbish, you don’t need that kind of trouble.’ And then I put it out of my head, my heart, my life. I felt battered and baffled for a long time afterwards because on top of the mystery, I missed her. As friends, we’d had fun together, she’d been a sweet and caring person—until the bread-shell incident—and she was lovely. Just lovely. I didn’t hear from Audrey about anything. I found myself grateful to be excused from the torment of being a bridesmaid because by the time the wedding date rolled around, my voice had dropped an octave and my Adam’s apple was noticeable. I had the five o’clock shady beginnings of a beard, and perhaps enough confidence to act on any desire I might still feel for her—awkward at a wedding and besides the very idea of being dressed in a puffy-sleeved, purple, or pink froth with high heels dyed to match was not a welcome thought.

Years went by. I changed: my name, my identity. I took my Ph.D., got into robotics, started a company, became successful, grew an actual beard, shaved it off, grew it back, and had several surgeries, not phalloplasty. I’d dream about it and with such realism that I’d wake up astonished it hadn’t happened already, and so wistful about it I’d do some more research, I’d look up clinics. And chicken out.

By the time I heard from Audrey again, I’d erased her, the whole bread-shell incident, and the yearning pain of that dreadful summer. Until the package arrived. I found it on my desk, hand-marked ‘confidential.’ Inside I found several unused and yellowing postcards of the Blue Whale, an old map, folded badly—we could never figure out how to get it flat again—a few brittle matchbooks from other sites along 66, some curling old Polaroid snap shots and a very long, hand-written letter; she started off by calling my attention to the fact that people didn’t take the time to write letters anymore, but what she had to tell me called for that sort of intimacy, the intimacy of pen and paper and time and effort. She felt I deserved an explanation, because all those many years ago, on the very eve of her marriage to a man she did love—and still loved—being with me, in hotels, motels and a tent, that close, hour after hour, had shaken her, upset her assurance, her sense of self. She’d fallen in love with me and feeling that way toward another woman made her think she might be losing her mind. She’d never had ‘leanings’ of that sort, had she? She wasn’t a lesbian, was she? How the hell could she tell Tom something like that? She couldn’t. Then again, she’d never been attracted to another woman, like ever. What was going on? Jesus Christ, she was about to get married. How could she admit, believe, understand, handle, swallow or otherwise work her way around what was happening to her? Was her whole life’s plan crumbling?

By the time I ate out the middle of the bread, I was truly desperate, desperate to touch you and desperate to get as far away from you as I could. Remember the night before the bread thing? How I pulled a disappearing act? Yeah. I slept in the back seat of the car. And even now, I turn to soft comfort food, bread, soft pretzels, mac and cheese, when I’m anxious. The center of the loaf was the only thing I could think of to eat way out there in Mark Twain’s National Forest to get me through that horrible night. Even all these years later the thought of that night makes me break out in a cold sweat because I was contemplating suicide, of throwing myself into the river. But I did love Tom. Between the thought of him and the bread, I kept myself in one piece. I know that sounds crazy, but the bread comforted me enough that I fell asleep.

I sat back and laid the three-page, agonized hand-penned confession on my desk. It was a shock to know, so many, many years later, that she’d felt as desperate about me as I had about her, and that neither of us was willing to risk a single word to the other. Instead, we’d suffered and kept silent. I interlaced my fingers, put my head in the cradle of my hands and leaned back in my chair, feeling a big blue wave of sadness for what we could never have shared back then, and had dared not speak aloud. Only now, this late in life, separated by geography and time and any number of choices, could the unspoken truth be told. How unjust we’d been to ourselves! And yet we’d been, young and fumbling, still unscathed, and untutored by the scarring test of time, and by that other mighty force, that complex temptation called love.

Stephanie A. Smith took her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley and is now a Professor of English at UF, where she teaches both literature and creative writing. She is the author of two books of criticism, Conceived By Liberty (Cornell UP 1995) and Household Words (Minnesota UP, 2006); and of the novels Asteroidea (Adelaide Books, 2020) The Warpaint Trilogy: Warpaint, Baby Rocket, Content Burns  (Thames River Press, 2012-14); Other Nature (TOR/1995-7) The-Boy-Who-Was-Thrown-Away and Snow-Eyes (Athenaeum/DAW 1985/87); her short stories have appeared in New Letters, Asimov’s and SF&F; creative non-fiction and scholarly essays in journals such as differences, American Literature, and Genre.  

Read more about Stephanie and her work at stephanieasmith.net
Twitter: @StephanieASmit6