Synopsis:

Could any gender-conflicted kid be as unbelievably lucky as young Davy?

Story:

The No-Brainer

by Daphne
 © 01.2008 by Daphne Laprov

“Do you understand why we’ve raised you like this, Davy?” My Aunt Susan was giving me one of her intense looks. “Yes, er, no, er, uh, really, I guess so, I mean, you must have reasons. I don’t mind.”

It was twilight at the farm. The sky at the top of the hill was lit up in pinks and oranges and deep blues. My little brother was hanging out of a tree across the yard. He was swinging Jeannie and his skirt fell down across his chest so that his panties were, well, evident. He and Jeannie were shrieking like they’d never had so much fun.

“It’s been easy up to now,” she said. I knew what my aunt meant. I was almost fourteen, and almost as tall now as my cousin Anne, who was three days older than me, a stringbean of a girl.

“We thought it was important for you kids to know that character has nothing to do with gender. You’ve been a boy for most of every year; summers, you’ve been a girl. Anne’s always been a boy in the summer. You are both beautiful kids, and so are Jeannie and Bobby. The nicest kids I know. I think we did the right thing. I hope you will think so, too.”

By “we,” my Aunt meant herself, and my mom and my grandmom. My uncle the preacher didn’t really matter, and my dad and my grandad were dead. My mom and grandmom and aunt thought they had been pretty wonderful men. My dad was killed in the war.

One night when I was supposed to be asleep, I listened to them talking, and that’s how I learned that every summer my dad had been a girl, too, every summer right up until he went away to college. Later, I found some pictures in a scrapbook, and figured out which ones were my Aunt Susan and which were my dad. He was a handsome boy and it was easy to see that the lovely girl in other pictures was the same kid. There was one studio portrait of him and my aunt and my grandmother; they all had on white dresses and he was a lot prettier than my aunt.

As long as I could remember, each year from about Easter on, my mom had been letting my brother’s hair and mine grow out, so that by the time school let out for the summer, it was curling around our ears. Then we’d pack the bags in the car and make the long drive to the farm. I’d start out as Davy and by the time we got there I’d be Daisy to everyone who didn’t already know me. It was easy, really —- I just felt like Daisy. Bobby was Bobbi, my cousins Anne and Jeannie became Andy and Johnny. It was so regular and natural that we hadn’t even thought much about it until a few years ago; I mean until Anne and I started introspecting, whispering on the sleeping porch late into the night when we were supposed to be sleeping.

We’d switch our genders back again on Labor Day weekend. Mom would cut our hair, we’d all exchange goodbye hugs, she’d load us up into the car and on Tuesday Bobby and I would be back in school and back in our boy personas. For Anne and Jeannie, it was much the same; the preacher’s kids would be back home, back in school and back in church in their girl personas. When we’d see them again at Christmas, it was like we’d never been anything but boys (me and Bobby) and girls (Anne and Jeannie).

Until last year, anyway. That was when Anne gave me a Christmas present that she’d picked out herself, a lovely nightie and a note: “You are so beautiful. I can’t wait to see you in this gown next summer.”

. . . . My aunt was still talking. My mom had joined us, and she was listening intently. I was staring at my sandals. “We wanted you to understand how life looks from the female side of the road,” Aunt Susan said. “And I think you do understand. The question now is, what next?”

I looked at my mother, silently beseeching her to explain.

“Sweetheart, you are already changing into a man,” my mother said. “Even if we let your hair grow next spring and put you in dresses again, next summer you will look just like a big boy in a dress. This is your last summer as a girl.”

I continued to stare at my sandals. I studied my blush pink toenails, one by one. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“Unless. . . .” said my mother.

I gave her and my aunt my full attention.

“Unless,” she said, “you think you would like to spend the rest of your life as a woman.”

Was I hearing right? Was my mom saying that I didn’t have to go back to 9th grade and pretend that I really liked hanging out with the guys? I still didn’t know what to say, so I buried my head in my aunt’s ample lap and squeezed my mom’s hand.

“Look at me, baby” said my mom.

I looked, but I could hardly see her through my tears.

“This summer, you have to choose,” she said. “Anne has already made her choice.”

“Mommy. Aunt Susan. So have I,” I said.

* * *

We were back on the sleeping porch. I waited until I was sure my little brother and Jeannie/Johnny had fallen asleep, and then shook my cousin Anne/Andy into consciousness. “Why didn’t you tell me?,” I hissed at her.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me I had a choice.”

“Oh, that.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I decided to be a guy a year ago,” Anne said. “I think I’m going to become Andy full-time, and live at your house. But that depends on you.”

I sat up on the mattress, pulling my jammies about me. I looked at my cousin. Anne was tall and flat and bony, like she’d always been. She wasn’t a bit like the girls I knew in 8th grade, who were growing curves.

“They made me promise not to tell you,” she whispered. “I’ve been on hormones since last fall. The pills keep me from turning into a woman.”

What Anne said scared me and excited me at the same time.

* * *

I know what you are thinking. This isn’t credible. It isn’t a bit believable. All the same, it is true.

One of the first things I remember is waking up from my nap and my mom getting me dressed to take me to play in the park. I don’t know why this particular day is so embedded in my memory, but there it is. I’m three and it’s a warm sunny day, and I am wearing a white sailor dress. Around my neck is a chain, and on that chain is a locket, and inside that locket is a tiny black and white photo of my Daddy.

My mom must have been hugely pregnant then, but I didn’t notice, and a couple of months later my brother Bobby was born. My father had been dead from a Japanese bomb for six months.

I think there were guys who wanted to marry my mother but she didn’t give any of them encouragement and after a while they stopped trying. I think also that Bobby and I didn’t wear dresses so much except when we went to Nana’s house and on special occasions like one time Mommy took us to the circus and of course at the farm every summer.

I could read books without pictures before I went to real school. There was one book that had stories about what happened to people who got to make wishes. Usually they wished for dumb things and they were sorry afterward. I thought if I had a wish I would not waste it on dumb things; I would just wish I was a girl, and I would not be sorry afterward.

* * *

I had friends in school up until I was ten or eleven because they’d always known me and didn’t care much that I was somewhere between a boy and a girl. Some days at recess I’d jump rope or play dodgeball with the girls and some days I’d run around or play king of the mountain with the boys. I had a friend Linda who like me was a kind of swing factor. We slid back and forth across the apartheid of the playround doing what we wanted to. Weekends if it was sunny, Linda and I would play in the woods near the golf course and if it rained, we’d play in Linda’s attic. That was where Linda’s mom found us one day with me dressed up in her clothes and Linda dressed in a suit I’d brought over from home.

When I heard the door to the attic open and turned to see Linda’s mom poke her head up the stairs I almost peed my panties but Linda’s mom just laughed and told us to be sure to hang everything up when we were done. A little later I heard her on the telephone and a little later afterward, Linda’s mom called us to come downstairs as we were for some ice cream and cookies.

So we did, me wearing Linda’s Sunday school hat and dress with a little purse and knee socks and her really shiny shoes, and Linda wearing my suit that was a little bit too small for her even then and a white dress shirt and a real tie. I started to go downstairs and she said “stop” and smeared some lip gloss on me, so I said “if we are going to do this right, I need to show you how to tie that tie,” and I retied it so the big part was just a little longer than the tail and it reached down to her belt buckle.

When we got to the kitchen we found that half the ladies in the neighborhood were there, prominently including my mom and her best friend Mary Margaret. They were all amused and the consensus was that except for our haircuts, Linda and I had pretty good disguises.

It was Mary Margaret who decided that Bobby and I should go around at Halloween as gypsy dancers. That sounded good to me. Mary Margaret huddled with my mother and then I remember an enormous number of petticoats and big hoop earrings fastened around my ears with rubber bands. I don’t know what Bobby thought but what I really remember is that nobody at my school figured out who I was until I pulled off my gypsy scarf, so I got a prize. That night my friends and I went trick or treating. We collected a huge amount of candy mostly on the strength of my girl gypsy dancer costume, and the next week a picture from school of me in my dress and scarf was in the local paper.

Buddy Huddleston gave me some crap about the picture but the other kids told him to shut up.

Seventh grade we all went to a bigger school. I was OK for the most part. Evenings every two weeks most of the kids from my old school all went to dancing class to learn how to ballroom dance. What I remember most is how good Linda smelled then, how much I liked snuggling in the back seat of a parent’s car between two girls in hose and bouffant skirts, and the feeling that I was on the wrong side of the room at the dancing school. By “wrong side,” I mean that all of us well-scrubbed boys were lined up on one side and when the teacher clapped her hands, we had to go to the other side and invite a girl to dance. The orchestra was three old guys with a piano and saxaphone and drums played fox trots and cha-cha-cha. No matter who I invited to dance, it became very quickly evident that I had no clue about leading my partner. Since I also had no clue about rhythm, I’m not sure why I decided it would be better to be the invitee than the inviter, but I did.

It was the beginning of eighth grade when the storm broke over me. Buddy Huddleston had grown a facefull of pimples and about four inches in height during the summer. In the new school, he’d also gotten in with a bunch of guys who got their kicks terrorizing oddballs.

This time no one told Buddy and his gang to buzz off. I think maybe in 8th Grade the worst thing that can happen to you is to be the most different person in your class. I mean like, there are always a bunch of Buddies looking for an easy target. Getting in the middle, standing up for the geek of the year, would have been social suicide. I don’t blame my friends.

Nor did I think of myself as especially odd, but something about me sure signalled that to Buddy-boy. A long time afterward, Linda said she was sorry she didn’t tell him off. Her take on it (later) was that Buddy had been having a hormome surge aggravated by being beaten up by his dad whenever his dad got drunk, which was frequently.

All I knew at the time was that whenever I came near old Buddy, he and his pack of thugs would be onto me like wolves cutting an orphan calf out of the herd. “Fairy! Fay-rie!” The Buddy boys would lock arms around me so I couldn’t escape. They’d push me back and forth, chanting. “Fay-rie! Davy! Fay-rie!” until the bell rang for class.

I asked my mom what a fairy was. She asked me what I thought a fairy was. I said “a little magical thing with wings.” So what was the problem, she asked. I decided my mom must be clueless; anyway she was no help; so I said “thanks, Mom.”

By the summer of which I spoke earlier, as perhaps you can now imagine, I was a real mess compared to everyone I knew, including my brother and my cousins. I was working out a new paradigm that went something like this: It’s not my fault I’m smart. I like books. I like learning stuff. People (Buddies) pick on me because I’m smart. It’s OK for girls to be smart. I wish I were a girl. If I were a girl, Buddy-types wouldn’t pick on me.

* * *

My mom’s question was a no-brainer. There was nothing more to think about. By that summer, I’d already chosen in my dreams. "If only I was a girl . . ." was the way each of them started.

I couldn’t go back to my school, of course. Anne went to my old school, as Andy with a buzz cut. Andy fit right in there, and to my delight led the class in ostracizing old Buddy. I went to her old school as Daphne, which I'd decided sounded cooler than Daisy. I had a headful of curls, a permanent smile, and about two cup sizes of padding.

Like my aunt had done with Anne the year before, my mom took me to a kindly shrink they’d found out about. He asked us a lot of questions, repeating them until I figured out the right answers, and then -— as he had prescribed for my cousin —- Doctor Josh put me on a course of drugs that stopped the androgens and, in due course, unleashed the estrogens.

* * *

Life is good now. I’m a happy girl with a husband who adores me. I have a job that’s so much fun that I often forget that it’s supposed to be work. Our two beautiful adopted kids are married and making beautiful grandchildren. In one of life’s ironies, my cousin Andy and my childhood friend Linda have coupled up in San Francisco. They probably will marry sometime soon. My brother Bob is kind and sweet and 100 percent macho Marine; lately, he’s been stationed at Pendleton, 40 miles down the beach. Mom passed on a few years back, but Aunt Susan is still going strong at 80 up at the farm. I think I’ll take the grandkids up there for a long visit this summer. ###

Notes: