Nevada (8 page)

16.

She gets to work clear-headed, but she’s starting to feel tired already. She’s excited that she’s resolved to break up with Steph. It’s like her head has been plugged up for so long that she didn’t even realize it was plugged up, and then she coughed really hard, or wasabi went up her nose, and suddenly she could hear. She kind of wants to call Steph right now but it’s a dumb idea.

She’s chaining up her bike when Kieran inevitably apparates.

I killed my father, he says in the dead-eyed monotone that means he’s doing Kathy Acker.

Yes sure whatever fine sure whatever, Maria says back. She doesn’t even feel like brushing him off.

What up yo, he asks.

I’m breaking up with Steph, she says, before she realizes she’s saying it. Oops.

Dude, he says. He stops bouncing.

Maria’s not sure what to say.

Um, she says.

Dude, we were fucking with you, he says. I didn’t fuck your girlfriend.

What.

Steph was pissed at you, he says, because she says whenever she tries to talk to you... aah, fuck, he says. He starts bouncing again. Dude, you need to talk to your girlfriend, this is not my conversation to have with you. Fucking shit, breaking up with her. Call your girlfriend.

It’s nine
AM
though. Maria’s been up for a bunch of hours, she’s had what, four epiphanies and two breakfasts, and she’s got to go into work. She can’t call Steph for at least an hour, an hour and a half. Kieran has bounced off and she’s left wondering what the fuck she is doing. Is she still breaking up with Steph? She didn’t decide to break up with Steph because Steph fucked Kieran. She realized she needed to be single for entirely different reasons. But that soaring feeling of release she had two hours ago, it’s gone. Now it’s a scraping feeling. Gross.

She punches her punch card and goes inside. Nods to the managers near the doors. Finds herself helping an old man who’s looking for a book on some kind of airplane piloting, except he can barely walk or speak clearly enough to hear. He probably shouldn’t be flying planes, so it’s lucky that there’s no way in hell this book is in the store. Mostly, he probably wants somebody to talk to, and Maria needs something to occupy her mind, so they traipse all over the store, up and down stairs, slowly because he leans on a cane, looking for this book they don’t have. It is like a Beckett play or something. It would be great if this were a Hans Christian Anderson story and he was a magic fairy grandfather, tapped her in the face with his cane at the end of this adventure and then, ping, she knew what the fuck was going on with Steph, but it doesn’t happen.

He comes in every two months or so. Maria kind of loves him, actually, even though nobody else in the store wants anything to do with him. He is always looking for a book that nobody’s ever heard of, without an
ISBN
, which isn’t even on the rare book sites online. Maria humors him for forty-five minutes and then he gives her some weird Italian candy or, for some reason, a crumbly old biscotti. They’ve been doing this for as long as she’s been at the store, which is awkward, because he seems not to have noticed that she transitioned. He still calls her by a name that nobody else in the world is allowed to call her. He will stomp into the store, she will be wearing a dress and showing cleavage, and he will yell, Mister Griffiths! Who knows why it’s charming instead of infuriating, but it’s kind of nice.

So they walk around. It’s nice to have a pattern to fall into when you just found out that your girlfriend, who is not a practical joke person, just totally faked you out about boning your half-annoying, half-amazing coworker.

After Maria’s old man friend leaves, time stops and she can’t think of anything to do with her hands. She texts Steph: Lunch?

Steph texts back very quickly: Totally. Burritos?

Of course.

17.

Right after college, Maria tried to be an adult. She stumbled into a job at an insurance company. At the time she wasn’t presenting as queer at all, she wouldn’t even have known how. She painted her nails sometimes though, this otherwise normal bro, with like, shaggy hair and coral nails. People would actually ask what was wrong with her, too. Why would you do that, they’d ask, and then she’d try to imply that it was because she liked rocknroll or something.

So, when she gets to Burritoville, Steph’s already there, with her spiky hair and pinstripe slacks. It’s kind of a funny combination—all of a sudden she is this power lesbian. She’s been dressing this way for a while now but Maria hasn’t stepped back and noticed until now. She looks like a stranger, like someone from another department at that long-gone insurance company in Pennsylvania.

Maria sits down across from Steph at the table. Steph’s face isn’t giving anything away, but the fact that neither of them is being affectionate certainly is. They’ve been dating for years. They’ve been greeting each other with kisses for a long time.

Hey, Maria says.

Hey, Steph says back.

Nobody says anything for a minute and then Steph is like, I didn’t fuck Kieran.

I heard, Maria says.

That fucker, Steph says.

Maria goes, I didn’t even know that you knew him, past, like, y’know, Oh I recognize you, or whatever.

Yeah, Steph says. We met on Myspace, started hanging out. You and I don’t talk, Maria, so I didn’t get to tell you that we’d been hanging out.

She’s points her fork at Maria but not in an unkind way.

It would be so awkward for Maria to get up and order food right now.

She can feel herself shutting off. Already. What the fuck, defense mechanisms, just once it would be cool to be able to stay present when something happens, but nope. It’s like now Maria is watching Steph from a distance. From above. Astral bodies.

We’ve hung out a few times, Steph says. We didn’t even kiss, but I was talking about you, and how hard it is to get through to you, close to you, to figure out where your feelings are, but the only way I know how to do it any more is to wait for you to write about it on your stupid blog.

Steph has always hated Maria’s blog.

Then Maria is all the way gone and out of the conversation. The word blog. Maybe Maria can’t deal with criticism or maybe when Steph gets attacky she gets defensive which means shut-offy. Who knows. Steph is explaining about how she and Kieran became friends online, how they exchanged a bunch of Myspace messages, she ended up coming clean about feeling stifled in their relationship, that she didn’t know how to get through to Maria any more. This is all true, Maria’s watching Steph say these things, but it’s not like they’re getting into her head; it’s like being stuck in a state of perma-meta. Maria kind of wishes she could videotape what Steph is saying and take it in later, one sentence at a time, pausing it whenever she starts to dissociate.

Steph explains that Kieran thought she should do something brash, provoke a response, get Maria present and then talk about their relationship and how, once the courtship phase ended, Maria’d had her face in a book way more often than in Steph’s cunt, but Maria’s thinking: well, living in meta-analytical space is a coping mechanism, isn’t it? When I was little, I internalized that I wasn’t a girl, and couldn’t be a girl. Not even like my parents beat gender normativity into me, the way the repression therapists recommend you do to trans kids nowadays. Just more, like, y’know, you learn from the television that a man in a dress is a hilarious, funny thing, and that he is still a man, even if he is wearing a dress, and nothing can change that, and nothing can change the fact that it’s funny. Or you have an uncle who sees that you are wearing jelly bracelets, when you are six or seven years old, so he goes, Wow, my nephew, wearing girl jewelry, in a barely even mocking tone you internalize to mean: Not Okay. Being present in her body meant feeling things like: My gender is wrong, and My body feels weird, and My mind feels like it’s being ground into the concrete by how bad I need to fix that.

She’s so far gone into her own head, she only barely catches Steph asking: Are you even here now?

I am, Maria says. Kind of. There’s a lot going on in my head, and I can’t process this whole thing at once.

All I’m saying, Steph sighs, is that I didn’t even mean to act like I fucked Kieran. He was just being an asshole on the Internet, taking up so much space and attention even in the virtual email computer thing, saying like, Tell her you fucked me! That’ll wake her up! But then we were at brunch and your eyes were so far away, I was thinking how they’re always so far away lately, how much I miss you—how I can barely get you to come back even when I’m fucking you—and I got mad, decided to provoke you. I’m sorry I lied, but I really don’t know what to do.

Her voice catches and her eyes well up.

She asks: Is this salvageable, do you think?

I don’t know, Maria answers, frantically trying to come up with something else to say. Her mind feels like the empty room in that Metallica video. Something snaps. Just be honest.

I don’t know, she says again, but I’ll tell you where I am with it. I rode to work that day, thinking about it. I went home thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about what we’re going to do. Steph relaxes visibly, relieved that Maria is working on this. But I’ve been thinking about my bike. You know I love my bike. I’ve just been thinking, I don’t think my bike is just this thing that sits outside the bookstore rusting, or inside the kitchen, rusting. That bike is, like, the only way I know to really be in touch with my life, with the world outside myself. It sounds totally hippie, but Steph, all I ever want to do is ride my bike, and there’s a reason for that. I think I’m only happy when I’m alone.

Which was the wrong thing to say, or at least the wrong way to put that. Though maybe there is no good way to say I’m only happy when I’m alone. Steph’s teary eyes spill over.

Maria says, I didn’t mean that that way. I just mean, I’m barely here in my life, and I need to figure out what’s not working.

Everybody feels that way! Steph yells. Then she drags her index fingers along the bottoms of her eyes, blows her nose, slurps from her empty soda.

Everybody does, it’s not just you, she says.

I know, Maria says. I just... I’ve been thinking about trans stuff, like, all the time, and I don’t feel like I can talk to anybody about it, because I totally fucking hate everybody else who’s trans, and I don’t want to deal with it. You know this story, Steph, I’ve told you about how I can’t figure out a model for my life, my body, anything.

Maria’s talking out loud about being trans in a burrito restaurant, which hasn’t happened in a while. Her steam runs out and she slumps.

God, I don’t know what to tell you, she says. Maybe I need to be in therapy, or go to that support group again.

Maybe therapy, Steph says. That support group never helped. And what am I supposed to do? Just wait for you to be okay? You’re telling me things now but definitely not in a way that lets me in. Still.

Maria sighs. Okay. Let’s talk about it tonight at home, okay?

Okay, Steph says.

Maria was supposed to be back at work fifteen minutes ago, but whatever. She can do whatever the fuck she wants, apparently, and nothing truly bad will ever happen.

Steph gets in her car—Maria can’t believe Steph just finds parking and pays meters, here in Manhattan, every single day—and drives off. She doesn’t hug or kiss or even look at Maria. They are in limbo.

Maria didn’t actually get any food the whole time they were at Burritoville, and she’s not hungry, but her blood sugar will drop through the ground and she’ll get panicky, depressed and anxious if she doesn’t eat anything. She gets a bagel on the way back. Sesame seeds, sun-dried tomato tofu cream cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, salt, and pepper.

18.

All afternoon, her hands shake. Her chest feels heavy and she kind of feels like she could sob at any goddam moment. It sucks. She’s like, why don’t I have these responses when I’m actually, like, face-to-face with her? I mean I kind of know what is wrong with me, but seriously, what is wrong with me? It’s so easy just to check out and leave your body. This is like an abuse thing, isn’t it? Abuse survivors dissociate like this? As far as Maria knows she was never abused, but maybe repressing and policing yourself so hard for so long before transitioning can look like abuse, function like abuse. It sounds all dramatic but the funny thing about it is how undramatic it is when it’s you doing it to yourself. It’s just a thing you do. She thinks about looking into what abuse survivors can do to dissociate less so she can maybe adapt that to her own life but mostly she spends the afternoon running through the conversation she’s going to have with Steph tonight.

She’ll be honest regardless of whether anybody gets hurt, which is hard when you’ve spent your whole life like, I don’t care if I get hurt, if this repression hurts me, I just can’t transition and hurt my mom that way, or I can’t upset my father’s standing in our quiet little community that way. It is second nature, or maybe just her nature, for Maria to put other people ahead of herself. Coming out as trans was the first change she ever actually made to my own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against that grain because she felt like she’d die if she didn’t.

She figured out that she needed to transition because she’d been going to work, coming home, drinking whiskey and reading, every day, week in and week out, until one evening she watched the sun go down behind the Statue of Liberty out her fifth-floor window in Sunset Park and realized she hadn’t left the house all day. Then she was on her bed crying and fixating on the idea that this wasn’t a life, she was living something that wasn’t even a life, that she was putting even more work into hiding from being trans than actually transitioning would take. She cried herself out, poured another glass of straight, cheap whiskey—you don’t just stop—and figured out how to get into a support group. She was like, this is New York fucking City, there has got to be so much support for trans women. If it’s anywhere, it’s here.