Martha Hadley took my hands in hers, and squeezed them. “Boy or girl, Billy,” she said. “Well, that’s the question. That’s why we want you to meet him, or her—that’s the question.”
“Oh,” I said. That was how and why I became a teacher.
THE RACQUET MAN WAS ninety when he checked into the Facility; this followed two hip-replacement surgeries, and a fall downstairs when he was supposed to be healing from the second surgery. “I’m starting to feel like an old fella, Billy,” Bob told me when I went to visit him in the Facility in the autumn of 2007—the same September Mrs. Hadley and Richard introduced me to the LGBT kid, the one who would change my life.
Uncle Bob was recovering from pneumonia—the result of being bedridden for a period of time after he fell. From the AIDS epidemic, I still had a vivid memory of that pneumonia—the one so many people never recovered from. I was happy to see Bob up and about, but he’d decided he was staying at the Facility.
“I gotta let these folks look after me, Billy,” the Racquet Man said. I understood how he felt; Muriel had been gone for almost thirty years, and Gerry, who was sixty-eight, had just started living with a new girlfriend in California.
“Vagina Lady,” which had been Elaine’s name for Helena, was long gone. No one had met Gerry’s new girlfriend, but Gerry had written me about her. She was “only” my age, Gerry told me—as if the girl were under the age of consent.
“The next thing you know, Billy,” Uncle Bob told me, “they’ll start legalizing same-sex marriage all over the place, and Gerry will be marrying her next new girlfriend. If I stay put in the Facility, Gerry will have to get married in Vermont!” the Racquet Man exclaimed, as if the very idea of that ever happening was beyond credibility.
Thus assured that my ninety-year-old uncle Bob was safe at the Facility, I made my way to Noah Adams Hall, which was the building for English and foreign-language studies at Favorite River; I was meeting the “special” new student in Richard’s ground-floor office, which was adjacent to Richard’s classroom. Mrs. Hadley was also meeting us there.
To my horror, Richard’s office hadn’t changed; it was awful. There was a fake-leather couch that smelled worse than any dog bed you’ve ever smelled; there were three or four straight-backed wooden chairs, of the kind with those arms that have a flat mini-desk for writing. There was Richard’s desk, which was always a mountain of upheaval; a pile of opened books and loose papers obscured the writing surface. Richard’s desk chair was on casters, so that Richard could slide all around his office in a seated position—which, to the students’ general amusement, Richard did.
What had changed at Favorite River, since my days at the formerly all-boys’ school, was not only the girls—it was the dress code. If there was one in 2007, I couldn’t tell you what it was; coats and ties were no longer required. There was some vague rule against “torn” jeans—this meant jeans that were tattered or slashed. There was a rule that you couldn’t come to the dining hall in your pajamas, and another one, which was always being protested, that concerned the girls’ bare midriffs—how much midriff could be bare was the issue. Oh, and so-called plumbers’ cracks were deemed offensive—this was most offensive, I was told, when the “cracks” belonged to the boys. Both the girls’ bare midriffs and the boys’ plumbers’ cracks were hotly debated rules, which were constantly under revision in infinitesimal ways. They were sexually discriminatory rules, the students said; girls’ midriffs and boys’ cracks were being singled out as “bad.”
Here I’d been expecting Martha and Richard’s “special” student to be some cutting-edge hermaphrodite—a kind of alluring-to-everyone mélange of reproductive organs, a he or a she as sexually beguiling as the mythological combination of a nymph and a satyr in a Fellini film—but there in Richard’s office, slouched on that dog bed of a couch, was a sloppily dressed, slightly overweight boy with a brightly inflamed pimple on his neck and only the spottiest evidence of a prepubescent beard. That zit was almost as angry-looking as the boy himself. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed—either in resentment or due to the effort he was making to scrutinize me more closely.
“Hi, I’m Bill Abbott,” I said to the boy.
“This is George—” Mrs. Hadley started to say.
“Georgia,” the boy quickly corrected her. “I’m Georgia Montgomery—the kids call me Gee.”
“Gee,” I repeated.
“Gee will do for now,” the boy said, “but I’m going to be Georgia. This isn’t my body,” he said angrily. “I’m not what you see. I’m becoming someone else.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I came to this school because you went here,” the boy told me.
“Gee was in school in California,” Richard started to explain.
“I thought there might be other transgender kids here,” Gee told me, “but there aren’t—nobody who’s out, anyway.”
“His parents—” Mrs. Hadley tried to tell me.
“Her parents,” Gee corrected Martha.
“Gee’s parents are very liberal,” Martha said to me. “They support you, don’t they?” Mrs. Hadley asked the boy—or the girl-in-progress, if that’s who he or she was.
“My parents are liberal, and they do support me,” Gee said, “but my parents are also afraid of me—they say ‘yes’ to everything, like my coming all the way to Vermont.”
“I see,” I said.
“I’ve read all your books,” Gee told me. “You’re pretty angry, aren’t you? You’re pretty pessimistic, anyway. You don’t see all the sexual intolerance ending anytime soon, do you?” the boy asked me.
“I write fiction,” I cautioned him. “I’m not necessarily as pessimistic about real life as I am when I make up a story.”
“You seem pretty angry,” the boy insisted.
“We should leave these two alone, Richard,” Mrs. Hadley said.
“Yes, yes—you’re on your own, Bill,” Richard said, patting me on the back. “Ask Bill to tell you about a transsexual he knew, Gee,” Richard said to the girl-in-progress, as he was leaving.
“Transgender,” Gee corrected Richard.
“Not to me,” I told the kid. “I know the language changes; I know I’m an old man, and out of date. But the person I knew was a transsexual to me. At that time, that’s who she was. I say ‘transsexual.’ If you want to hear the story, you’ll just have to get used to that. Don’t correct my language,” I told the kid. He just sat there on that smelly couch, staring at me. “I’m a liberal, too,” I told him, “but I don’t say ‘yes’ to everything.”
“We’re reading The Tempest in Richard’s class,” Gee said—apropos of nothing, or so I thought. “It’s too bad we can’t put it onstage,” the boy added, “but Richard has assigned us parts to read in class. I’m Caliban—I’m the monster, naturally.”
“I was Ariel once,” I told him. “I saw my grandfather do Caliban onstage; he played Caliban as a woman,” I said to the girl-in-progress.
“Really?” the kid asked me; he smiled for the first time, and I could suddenly see it. He had a pretty girl’s smile; it was hidden in the boy’s unformed face, and further concealed by his sloppy boy’s body, but I could see the her in him. “Tell me about the transgender you knew,” the kid told me.
“Transsexual,” I said.