Amy Bloom: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

In her own mirror Jane now looks odd to herself. Maybe she’s morphing; her feet look funny, her shoulders seem as wide as Marcella’s, and there is a dark downy space where her hairline seems to be receding. Maybe she’ll cross over before Jess does, except she’ll look like Don Knotts and Jess will look like one of Calvin Klein’s young men. She would like to take Jess shopping before the surgery. If Jess goes for a western look, she could wear cowboy boots and gain a couple of inches without resorting to lifts.

Jane goes through the line in the caf, musing. Low-fat carrot-raisin muffin, girl food. Cheese Danish, boy food. Coffee, black, boy food. Tea, girl food. Bottled water, tough call. Bagel, also gender-neutral. Another mother from the support group sits down across from Jane. Jane remembers that her name is Sheila and she is an accountant from Santa Fe, but she cannot call up the child’s face or name. Sheila pours three packets of Equal into her coffee. “I had breast cancer, you know. I don’t have a left breast. It must be someone’s idea of a bad joke. These girls lop them off. We try to keep ours.”

Jane says, “Well, for them, it’s like their breasts are tumors. For them, I just don’t think their breasts ever feel to them the way ours do to us.” She thinks, And that would be how you can tell that they’re transsexual, Sheila.

Sheila looks at Jane sideways, pursing her lips as if to say, Well, aren’t you understanding? Aren’t you just Transsexual Mom of the Year? Maybe Sheila doesn’t think that, maybe she just resents Jane’s tone or her navy silk pantsuit and pearls, or maybe it’s just Jane. She’s not cuddly. The other mothers look sad and scruffy, faded sweatshirts and stretched-out pants, as if all their money has gone to the therapists and endocrinologists and surgeons, leaving not even a penny for lip gloss or new shoes or a haircut. There are two fathers in the group. One is the soft, sorry kind, the kind who sits weeping in the front row at his son’s arson trial, the kind who brings doughnuts to the support group for Parents of Guys Who Microwave Cats. The other one, the General, is the kind of big, blunt man Jane likes. He’s not in uniform, but there’s no mistaking the posture or the brush cut or the tanned, creased neck or the feet in black lace-ups planted square on the floor. When he talks to someone in the group, he doesn’t just look at them, he turns his entire head and shoulders, giving a powerful, not unpleasant RoboCop effect. Jane likes him much better than his son-turned-daughter, a shellacked, glittery girl with a French manicure and pink lipstick. This man protected his slight fierce boy, steered him into karate so that he would not be teased, or if teased, could make sure it did not happen twice. Loved that boy, fed him a hot breakfast at four a.m., drove him to tae kwon do tournaments all over Minnesota and then all over the Midwest. They flew to competitions in Los Angeles for ten and eleven, to Boston for under thirteen, then to the National Juniors Competitions, and there are three hundred trophies in their house. That boy is now swinging one small-ankled foot, dangling a pink high-heeled sandal off it and modeling himself not on Mia Hamm or Sally Ride or even Lindsay Davenport (whose dogged, graceless determination to make the most of what she has, to ignore everyone who says that because she doesn’t look like a winner she won’t ever be one, strikes Jane as an ideal role model for female transsexuals) but on Malibu Barbie. And the General has to love this girl as he loved that boy, or be without.

Sheila picks up the other half of her sandwich and says, “Jo”—or perhaps Joe? — “just walked in. I think we’ll spend the rest of the break together.”

Jane looks at Jo, an overweight young woman who must be going into manhood; if she were going the other way, they would already have replaced the Coke-bottle glasses with contacts and done something nicer with her short, frizzy brown hair and treated her jawline acne. Jane thinks, No wonder you’re such a misery, Sheila. Your Jo, waddling through life, will never be an attractive anything. Jane drinks her coffee and thinks that it may be that in this world good-looking matters more than anatomical anomalies — that like well-made underwear, good-looking itself smooths over the more awkward parts of your presentation and keeps your secrets until the right moment.

Malibu Barbie begins the next group. Dying to talk. She bats her eyelashes at her father, which is not what Jane would do if she wanted to win this man over, and then she looks around the room. Her makeup is better than Jane remembered; its not Jane’s taste, it’s more the department store makeover look, but she’s done a good job. Subtle blush, the crease of the eyelid slightly darkened, black mascara framing the big brown eyes. At the thought of this boy teaching himself the stupid, necessary girl tricks that Jess refused to learn and now doesn’t need, Jane’s contempt dissolves. Who does not change and hide? Maybe calf implants and tattooed eyeliner and colored contacts and ass lifts are just more trivial, even less honorable versions of gender surgery. Jane doesn’t really think so, she thinks that augmentation and improvement are not the same as a complete reversal of gender, but it does occur to her that if it were as easy as getting your eyelids done, and as difficult to detect, there might be more transsexuals around and they might be considered no worse than Roseanne or Burt Reynolds.

“I’m a woman,” Barbie says. “I’m as much a woman as any of you.”

Of course, she does not mean, As much as any of you MTF transsexuals; she means, As much as you, Jane and Sheila and Gail, as much as you, Susan, who Jane suspects has been chosen to lead this mixed group because she manages to radiate unmistakable genetic femaleness without offering up a single enviable physical quality. Susan is the permanent PTA secretary, the assistant Brownie leader, and even the least compelling transsexual woman can feel her equal, and Barbie and the other pretty girl in the room, Pamela, can feel superior. The envy of the biologically misapprehended, of people who know that God has fucked them over in utero, is not a small thing, and the anger that plain women feel for pretty ones is a hundred times worse when it takes such drive and suffering just to get to plain.

Susan does not pick up the challenge; she doesn’t even hear it as a challenge.

“Of course you are. And what does that mean to you?”

“It means this.” Pamela speaks up. She and Barbie are a tag team of newly discovered feminism and major trips to the mall. “It means this culture looks down on women and it despises transsexuals, and as both, we don’t plan to take it lying down.”

Take what? Jane thinks. Take fifty thousand dollars’ worth of hormones and surgery and a closetful of Victoria’s Secret? (It is amazing. You could stand next to naked post-op Pamela in a locker room and all you would think is, Jesus, what a great body she has.) Take the fact that because you were raised as a boy, however unhappily, there is still something there, some hidden, insistent tail of Y chromosome, that calls out when the world ignores your feelings, when it’s clear that you are not the template or the bottom line of anything important, I don’t have to take this shit?

“Barbie and I have invited the Transgender Avengers to come to a meeting.”

And Barbie’s father looks the way military men looked when their sons grew their hair long and left the country. “Who the hell are they? Barb, I thought the point was to just become a woman, just live your life as normally as possible.”

Barbie thrusts both slim arms out in a martial arts jab, and her silver bracelets jingle up her tan, hairless arms. She says, “I’m a fighter, Dad. You know that,” and Jane thinks, Oh my fucking God, and she and Jess rise at the same time to go laugh in the hall.