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

Jess says, “Oh, Jesus. I don’t know what to say. Transgender Avengers — is that next to Better Sportswear?”

Jane and Jess walk toward the lobby; they have twenty minutes before the meeting with Dr. Laurence, and Jess knows that Jane will want a cigarette before they go choose what kind of penis Jess will have.

Jane smokes every now and then. She hates to smoke in front of Jess. She certainly doesn’t want Jess to smoke, but she has thought that a small cigar, every once in a while, might help. It is all small things, Jane knows. She is now practically a professional observer of gender, and she sees that although homeliness and ungainliness won’t win you any kindness from the world, they are not, in and of themselves, the markers that will get you tossed out of the restaurant, the men’s room, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. (It is incredible to Jane that a big feminist party that has room for women who refer to themselves as leather daddies, and women wearing nothing but strap-on dildoes and Birkenstocks, and old women with sagging breasts and six labia rings, should draw the line at three women in Gap jeans and Indigo Girls T-shirts just because they were born male.) If you take hormones, if you dress in a middle-of-the-road version of whatever your size will allow (no bustiers without a bust, no big Stetsons on guys barely filling out size sixteen in the boys’ department), if your fat is distributed in the usual ways and you are not more than six inches off your sex’s average height, the world will leave you alone. It may not ask you for a date, but it will not kill you and it will probably not notice.

Jess would like to walk into Dr. Laurence’s office, go into a deep sleep, and walk out with his true body. He has known and seen this body in his dreams, behind half-closed lids, in quick glances at the mirror (with a few beers and a sock in his shorts), and he knows that it is not the body he will have. He’s seen the phalloplasties on a couple of transsexual guys, both the plumped-up clitoris version and the hot-dog version with the silicone implant balls, and neither makes him happy. Inside of himself he is Magic Johnson, the world’s greatest point guard. When he flips through Dr. Laurence’s photo album, it’s clear that he’ll be more like Anthony Epps of the Continental Basketball Association’s Sioux Falls team. Jess lights one of his mother’s Kools. In high school, when he played basketball on the girls’ team, a distant cousin of Chamique Holdsclaw said to him, “It’s true you all can’t dunk, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play.”

It would please Jane to know that it was Jess’s smile and not her shopping good manners that got Marcella Gray at reception to fiddle with the appointment book. Right after they pick the most realistic penis, somewhere between the little and the deluxe, Dr. Laurence says, “It looks like we’re good to go for the day after tomorrow.” He puts his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “You did great with your top surgery, this is going to go fine. A year from now, six months from now, you’re going to be a happy young man.” Dr. Laurence believes in this work. He believes in going to El Salvador to fix clubfeet, cleft palates, and botched amputations, and he believes that it’s his job on this earth to give people a chance to live life as it should be lived, whole and able and knowing they have been touched by God’s mercy. Dr. Laurence believes that when someone like Jess is in the womb, there is a last, unaccountable blast of the opposite sex hormone and the child is born one sex on the outside and the true one on the inside.

Jess and Jane walk back to their apartment; the clinic has a row of condos, upscale and fully equipped and three blocks from the surgical center. Men and women come and go, with companions or nurses or large doses of Percocet, doubled over with pain in March and out of the chrysalis in May or June.

“A little sunbathing?” Jane says. Everyone looks better with a tan, and it will be a while before Jess can lie on their sundeck again.

Just two years ago, they lay naked in their backyard, sunblock on their nipples and white asses, reading and drinking club soda. Now they turn away from each other to strip down to their underwear. Jess goes into the kitchen for two bottles of lime seltzer, and Jane sees the dark hair on his golden arms, his neat round biceps, the tight line of muscle at the back of his arms, and the two thin ridges of scar tissue on his chest. She nagged him to massage the scars four times a day with vitamin E oil and a mix from her dermatologist, and now they have almost disappeared. Jane watches this handsome boy-girl beside her put down the bottles and stretch out on the chaise.

“Don’t burn,” she says.

“Oh, all right,” Jess says. “I was going to, but now I won’t.”

Jane watches her, watches him, until Jess falls asleep, a lock of black hair falling forward. Jane pushes it back and cries in the bathroom for an hour. She leaves Jess a note, suggesting that they get in some entertainment while they can and go out for Chinese and a movie. They have gone out for Chinese and a movie once a week for almost fifteen years, even when Jessie would only eat rice and chicken fingers. When Jessie was at Michigan, that was what they missed the most. Jessie sent an occasional note home, written on a stained and crumpled Chinese takeout menu. When Jane opened the envelope, the smell of General Tso’s Chicken came up at her.

When she hoped that Jessie might just be a lesbian, when Jessie also thought that might be it, her hair short and spiky in front, carved into little faux sideburns, long and awkward in back, Jane took them on vacation to Northampton, Massachusetts, the Lesbian Paradise. Jane found out that Jessie’s appalling haircut had an appalling name: the mullet. Surely Nathalie Barney and Barbara Stanwyck and Greta Garbo, all lesbians of the kind Jane would be happy for Jessie to be, would not have been seen in mullet haircuts and overalls. Jessie was so happy her mouth hung open. If she took her eyes off this unexpected, extravagant gift, it might disappear. She squeezed her mother’s arm and then dropped it, reluctant to show just how much this parade of everyday lesbian life meant to her, more than any other trip or present. She worried that her mother might think that all the other presents and the trips to Disney World had been wrong or unnecessary, and they had not. But it was true that this trip was the only time Jessie did not feel like a complete impostor.

Jane was just happy to see her daughter happy again. She could live with this, easily, especially with Jessie bouncing beside her, smiling right up to her thrice-pierced, beautifully shaped ears. There were unfortunate outfits, of course, and more of those haircuts on women who should have known better, and although some women were admirably, astonishingly fit in bicycle shorts and tank tops, more were too heavy for their frames, cello hips trying a John Wayne walk, big breasts swinging under washed-out T-shirts. Hopeless, Jane thought, but not bad. Jessie ate like a hungry boy, for fuel, for muscle and bone and growth, and as she worked through a double chocolate chip cone from Herrell’s, her ears turned bright red. Jane started to turn around, to see what it was, but Jessie hissed, “Don’t look,” and despite Jane’s hostile maternal impulse to demonstrate that it was her job to monitor public manners, not Jessie’s, she sat still for another ten seconds and then strolled over to the wastebasket and dumped her half-eaten cone, pretending, if anyone cared, that she couldn’t eat another bite. What had turned Jessie’s ears scarlet? A man or a woman, beautiful as Apollo is beautiful, and in the cropped silver hair, loose jeans, layers of Missoni sweaters, and brown polished boots there was no clue at all and Jane thought, Goddammit, go home, we’re looking at lesbians here.