Revenge of the Paste Eaters (26 page)
In the beginning my Beloved and I discussed the possibilities of sharing a home. We considered marking off certain areas to be “cat-free.” At this time I lived in Jackson, she lived in Three Rivers, and the hour-and-a-half drive between the two had become tiresome. As a sort of trial run we decided—for reasons having nothing to do with allergies or cat maintenance—to spend about an hour or so alone in my bedroom, cat-free. Having already discovered the joys of trying to leap off a waterbed swiftly and gracefully in order to detach the cat from the flaming candle toasting his belly hair, we opted for a little alone time.
We closed the bedroom door.
The door popped right back open like the knob was attached to a rubber band and an indignant red tabby marched into the room, looked me square in the eye, and said, “Did you realize someone
closed the door
?” And he looked askance at my Beloved.
I escorted him outside, shut the door, and propped her sixty-pound suitcase against it.
We smiled triumphantly at each other. We were alone.
And we remained alone for a good hour and a half.
Perhaps the longest hour and a half either of us have ever spent, but . . .
First a small gold paw snaked under the door and dug around for something to hang on to.
Then he spoke to me.
Then he cried.
Then he expressed anger, outrage, humiliation, heartbreak, betrayal, and brokenheartedness.
Then he took up doorknob boxing.
I have no idea what doorknob boxing looks like from Babycakes’ side of the door: all I know was it was an old knob and it was not all that firmly established in its hole, and as a result as the cat boxed with the knob the whole door quivered and rattled and begged for mercy. A platoon of marines charging up the stairs in full combat gear could not have made any more noise. A herd of firemen ramming the door with a battering ram would not have been more distracting. I swear the house began to shake in sympathy.
It took him an hour and a half of hammering, but he managed to move a sixty-pound suitcase and an eight-foot door with the sheer strength of his will. He got the door open a quarter of an inch, and then, as cats do, he flattened himself to the width of a sheet of paper and willed himself into the room. We played
Here, let me put my cold, wet little nose in your ear.
We played
I’m so happy to see you/where have you been/did you know someone tried to keep me out of here?
We played
Stomp on the human/knead the head of the human/lick the nose of the human.
The long and arduous task of breaking through the door had him stoked with adrenaline, and for most of the night he stalked and purred and nuzzled. If he was under the covers he needed immediately to be out, if he was out he needed immediately to burrow in. He was like a toddler on speed; he was overcome with boundless and inexhaustible love and energy. He loved me, he loved my Beloved, he loved every square inch of the room from which he had recently and rudely been exiled.
It was a long night. The cat stomped, while my Beloved sniffled and sneezed and kept saying, “I really think I’m getting better, really—I used to be a
lot
more allergic than this . . .”
The day I met her I lived an hour and a half away and I lived with four cats. At the age of eighteen Jasmine said to me, “
I’m old and I’m tired and I hurt all of the time, and you’re never home anymore anyway,”
and she laid down and quietly died. Gypsy, who was eleven, suffered health problems that prevented her from suviving our inevitable move. Neurotic Nick, the closet cat, moved with Babycakes and me, but he never made the transition emotionally, and two years later—then eleven himself—he transitioned right on to the big closet in the sky.
The cat who was three years old when I met my Beloved—the cat I brought home because I had three cats who hated to cuddle, the cat who sets aside most of his nights for passionate cuddling, not caring that I’d rather sleep—that cat is now twelve. A healthy, robust cat still in his prime. He is a character, with more than one personality trait that not just anyone would be willing to live with. My friends all love to hear about him, but so far no one has agreed to give him a new home.
Within a few weeks of the doorknob-boxing incident, my Beloved’s mother moved in with her. I transferred my job across the state and bought a house for Babycakes two blocks from where they live. So her mother lives with my Beloved and my cat waits patiently for me to come home, and when people ask I say, “She’s allergic to my cat and her mother needs serenity.” We discuss other solutions, explore other options, but—today—this is the solution we live with.
i am sitting here
in my computer room on the last day of my vacation because the single strongest driving force behind my creativity is procrastination. In the background, over and over, I am listening to Wynonna Judd belt out the old Foreigner tune “I Want to Know What Love Is.” I might tell you that even if it weren’t true just to aggravate Wy, bless her homophobic little heart. I am experiencing a little personal kinship with Wynonna just this moment. I thought I had come so far.
First of all, I have never quite extinguished that adolescent drive to be cool. I am pretty much resigned to the unlikelihood of my inner coolness showing through at this late date, but now—exactly as in junior high—I feel compelled to keep my visible uncoolness at an absolute minimum. Some people embrace their freedom as social outcasts and go on to write
South Park
: I have always hovered along the edges of the In Crowd, never really expecting acceptance so much as perhaps momentary acknowledgment. I live to be showered with the brief and inconsequential attentions of the Socially Chosen. My perceptions of who is cool have changed radically over the past fifty-odd years, but my desire to be one of them has never completely gone away.
For the most part I live in two spheres: the realm of my own personal and professional life, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. For me Festival is six days a year when all of the old rules are thrown away. There are, of course, new rules in their place, but I have never had much reason to question those. Festival has always been about tearing down preconceived notions I brought to the land. I have suffered over nudity, open drug use, minor issues of race . . . Each year on the way to Festival we drive past the trans camp, and each year the issue of transgendered womyn flares up and dies down. My closest connection to the struggles of the transgendered has been a postcard someone gave me at the gate.
The first question we ask about a newborn is exactly what it has always been: Is it a boy or a girl? Why do we need to know that? Do we hold boys differently? Do we have different expectations when a male baby cries? I understand that babies are pretty much a blank slate and in the absence of personality, their sex, height, and weight are about the only conversational topics they have to offer . . . Still, try holding a generic baby in your arms without knowing his/her sex. I did it once. When his mother told me he was a boy I realized I had assumed she was a girl—and someone started moving furniture around in my head. My whole attitude toward that baby changed, and while I cannot tell you what the change was, it was necessary and fundamental.
I went to college during the late sixties, early seventies. Everyone had long hair. Everyone dressed like they bought their clothes at the Mission. I wore jeans and an old army jacket all the way through school. About half the store clerks and gas station attendants I met called me “Sir.” Ours was an androgynous era, an era that challenged sexism, racism, preassigned sexual roles. Gay dances were held on my campus and were advertised widely enough that even I knew about them. I was curious and I wanted to go (watch the queers) but I could never find anyone to go with me (to protect me from aggressive lesbians). The opportunity to open my eyes and see life through a new light was all around me, words and possibly even ideas seeping into my unconsciousness, but I watched it all through the thick glaze of culture shock.
I embraced feminism because the traditional female role I had been raised around bored me and it was a kick to be around bright, intelligent women who told me it was okay to hate ironing. Once I realized the traditional female role of cooking, cleaning, and having kids was not a mandatory life choice, most of my gender-identity issues cleared right up. I got a job driving a forklift where I could still wear jeans, and it was another five years before the whole issue of why I was unhappy living in Straightville became an issue again.
When I embraced lesbianism I embraced with it a few philosophical misapplications I have been unlearning ever since. Essentially, I gave myself permission to believe that men and Christians are bad. This was incredibly freeing, since most of my conflicts in the world where I lived were with one or the other, but then I met a man I actually liked, and then another, and then I met a Christian man with an ugly gift for calling me on my unenlightened generalizations.
I have pictured my life as that of a flower slowly but steadily unfolding to the beauty and complexity of the universe of ideas.
And then I met a trans. (Isn’t that cute? Wouldn’t you like to just take me out to the water tank and hold my head under? I met a person who is or was or has been at some point in the process of gender reassignment. She is also very bright, immensely patient, funny, and about four times as well-read as I will ever be, but you’ll have to come back to get me because I’m stuck back on
I met a trans . . .
)
I may have to tape my right eyebrow in place: it keeps jumping up into my forehead of its own accord. In (and out of) the company of my new friend I have spent hours challenging not even sexual roles per se, but those subtle, nonverbal cues we give each other that define our sexuality, our intentions, our personal identity to people we have just met. What is it, exactly, that women do when they meet another woman that says,
I am like you.
I’ll be frank here—just walking around loose in the world, I can’t tell a lesbian from a straight woman, and some young people I can’t tell male from female. I have a gay male friend who is the daughter my mother hoped I’d be, I have gay male friends who call their partner “she” . . . You would think that at some point I would just give up the Midwestern down-home-on-the-farm men do the yardwork, women keep the house bullshit and just accept people as people.
I can’t. I have to tear my eyes away or I will watch everything she says, every hand motion, every smoothing of her skirt, every picking up of her fork . . . What
is
that?
Excuse me, but I’m the femininity police . . .
It’s enough to send me running back to check my flannel collection.
Part of my mind keeps asking me,
Why is this a struggle at all?
She says she’s a woman: she’s a woman. What special sacred temple do you think she’s breaking into anyway?
Because she’s not really a woman.
After years of battling over the whole notion of a “real man,” do I now have to go back and tilt swords at the windmill of the “real woman”? What internalized set of rules qualifies me—of all people—to be the gatekeeper?
NO FAUX WOMEN ALLOWED HERE.
I’d be lucky if they let me in.
The standard male/female assumptions do not fully accommodate my personality, never mind someone born physically one sex and emotionally another. More importantly, they cannot possibly accommodate my friend’s life.
My
sexuality is not that simple: Should I assume that, like me when I threw out all men and Christians with my heterosexuality, she has rejected all things masculine? That there was never anything about being a boy, or being perceived as a boy, that she liked? There is no boy-trained thought process left, there is nowhere any essential part of her self that is anything but female? None of us are all feminine or all masculine. As a child I never wanted to be a girl, but it never once occurred to me to tell anyone I was anything else. However grudgingly, I did all of the things that little girls do. I cannot help but believe my childhood was fundamentally different from that of someone born male and believing his sexuality is just outright wrong—if only because I was born female and she was born male. Because we were held differently as babies.
Knowing how woefully ignorant this must seem, part of me wants to touch my friend lightly on the shoulder and say, “I understand the appeal, I really do—but trust me, if I had had a choice, I would not be a woman. You have no idea the restrictions you are introducing into your life . . .” As if someone born in the wrong body would be clueless about such issues. Perhaps what I am confronting, dealing ostensibly with my new friend, is my own ambivalent attitudes about gender. Or—whoa!—maybe it’s that old
You say what?
knee-jerk reaction to radicals:
If I had a choice
, I would not be a woman.
Perhaps what my friend is saying to me, simply by being, is,
You had a choice. You always had a choice. Your choice was to adapt. My choice was to change the situation.
Harrumph.
Transgendered people existed in Native American cultures, where they were respected and often considered healers. They were called “two-spirits.” If we are indeed the whole sum of our life experience, I find “two-spirits” easier to deal with than “trans” or “male-to-female” or “female-to-male.” My friend always refers to herself as “she,” but I understand not all transgendered people treasure such consistency. And why should they? Their lives have been mostly potluck—why should those of us who interact with them get off easy?
I have not reached a single conclusion anywhere in this. I do not want to embarrass my new friend, who has been very kind to me. I have never been a person who embraces a new idea until I discover it printed on the grille of an oncoming truck, while my friend has shown courage and the willingness to remain open in situations that are all but incomprehensible to me. I do not know her well enough to sit down and say, “Okay, I have some questions,” nor do I assume it is her responsibility to educate me.