Some Strange Music Draws Me In E-Book

Griffin Hansbury

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 484

Beschreibung

It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, 'deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity sparks fury among her new neighbours and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and her best friend. But it is also a catalyst for Mel. She comes to realise that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being. Narrating this blistering coming-of-age tale from 2019 is Max – formerly Mel – who is on leave from his job for defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past. Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a compassionate, gripping and emotionally charged narrative, peopled by an unforgettable cast of characters bound in electrifying relationships. Griffin Hansbury's elegant and fearless prose dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realisation amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

Leseprobe

‘Hansbury has created a rich portrayal of moving forward in all life’s messy glory while wrangling with a painful past.’ 5 stars, The Skinny

‘An uncompromising excavation of a transmasc adolescence.’ Lauren John Joseph

‘This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognised this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.’ Michelle Tea

‘Some Strange Music Draws Me In is luminous, propulsive, tender, and full of light. Hansbury’s prose is both scathing and soulful, delivered with care and grace and aplomb. This novel’s warmth is palpable, and Hansbury has crafted a truly rare thing – a gift and a guide.’ Bryan Washington

‘Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a beautiful exploration of adolescence and aging. Filled with the lingering echoes of a former self, Hansbury has created a rich portrayal of moving forward in all life’s messy glory while wrangling with a painful past. Max and Mel will leave you reeling with emotion, transformed and hopeful. Like a good song, this is a novel that will play on your mind for years to come, humming brightly and freely.’ Andrés N. Ordorica

‘Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a story of how latent queerness can point toward the exit from poverty and despair. It’s about inter-generational queer care, about how even with a clean getaway we nurse our wounded pasts … a book filled with compassion.’ McKenzie Wark

‘Sharp, perceptive … There are no easy answers in Hansbury’s bracing narrative.’ Publishers Weekly

This funny, defiant, and passionate novel will make you want to play Patti Smith’s Horses at full volume … The coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.’ James Hannaham

‘It’s tough and sweet and smart about the places we come from and how we fight and flail to discover ourselves inside them. Griffin Hansbury has achingly captured the miracle of queer generations seeing and saving each other, without hiding the real struggle to connect across generations, our different times and traumas. A gorgeous novel.’ CJ Hauser

‘A touchstone LGBTQIA+ coming-of-age novel containing superbly drawn characters, a brilliant story, and knowing prose.’ StarredBooklist review

‘A spectacular read about queer identity and finding your place in the world.’ Apple Books

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Some Strange Music Draws Me In

GRIFFIN HANSBURY

Contents

Title PagePart One 198420191984Part Two2019198420191984201919842019198420191984201919842019198420191984Part Three198420191984Part Four 201919872019AcknowledgementsDaunt Books Also by Griffin HansburyAbout the AuthorCopyright

12

part one

3

1984

It happened that green and crazy summer when I was thirteen years old. A stolen first line, slightly altered, because I’m not much of a writer, but I have been something of a thief. And a liar. I might as well admit that up front. It was a lie and a theft that made everything go haywire that summer.

I cribbed the line from Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. At the moment when it happened, or at least when it began to happen, that paperback was jammed in the back pocket of my denim cut-offs as I sat on the dirty, carpeted floor of the Swaffham Towne Drug, reading teen magazines. Syrupy tang of blue Slush Puppie on my tongue. Mosquito bites stippling my legs. I want to remember myself as I was then, a girl that is difficult to grasp. What did she look like? My prize article of clothing was a pair of Nike high-tops, kept 4hospital white with a bottle of foamy polish. Nikes weren’t cheap and I had to make them last. Everything else I wore was off-brand or hand-me-down: my wayward older sister’s Lee dungarees cut into shorts, a Michael Jackson baseball tee from Bradlees discount department store, a trucker hat with Pac-Man on the front clapped over my unruly mess of hair. I wasn’t good at hair, didn’t know what to do with it, how other girls achieved feathered wings and lift. But I had good skin. Everyone said so. ‘You have good skin,’ they’d say, admiring what one woman at the Jordan Marsh cosmetics counter called ‘peaches and cream’. I was a winter, dark haired with light skin that didn’t tan, but only burned and peeled back to paper white. I blushed so intensely, people would laugh and tell me I was bright red, making me blaze with deeper embarrassment. As for my body, it was an unknowable zone, an overlarge assemblage of limb and belly that felt like a thing of its own making, mostly disappointing, incapable of climbing fences or playing baseball, incompetent at dancing, too heavy in its steps. Heaviness had always been with me. When skipping rope in first grade gym class, the teacher scolded me to be light on my feet. By junior high, my mother prayed that I would stop growing: ‘So you don’t turn into a glump like your big aunt Beverly.’ My aunt Shirley, the smaller, told me I walked like a truck driver. I didn’t mean to. That was just the way my body propelled itself through space. My shape, that enigmatic packaging, had its own design and cared nothing about anyone’s objections, including my own. However the message came, the world confirmed what I felt, that my body was off in its most essential calibrations. But even with all its 5klutzing about, it held deep coils of feeling yet unnamed, and that summer I could sense it getting ready for something new, a quiver of arrows looking for a target.

It was 1984, still fresh in the month of June, and soon I would turn fourteen. Come September, spared the indignities of Swaffham High, I’d be off to Catholic school, an all-girls academy in a town far enough away I’d have to go by carpool. No more riding my ten-speed to the crummy public school. No more jeans and T-shirts. At Sacred Heart I’d wear a uniform, equalised in an ocean of plaid polyester. In that sameness, even with my big bones and heavy feet, I hoped to fail less obviously at girlhood. Something to look forward to. But there would also be no more Jules, my best friend, who could not bear the thought of going boyless in her teen years and opted to stay local. Our impending separation held me in a state of ambivalent attachment, either clinging or pushing away. I believed Jules was too gifted to stay behind. She excelled at science and could play any instrument you put in her hands. On the phone, she could pick out tunes on the push buttons. ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.

No matter how much I pleaded, Jules was going one way and I was going another. It felt like a break-up, like my parents splitting after my sister, Donna, left town in a blaze of shame and anger, pregnant at nineteen by a guy who knocked out dents at Mike’s Gas-N-Go and gave her two black eyes before taking her to live in Texas, where she named their kid Stetson because she favoured the drugstore cologne and it seemed like the sort of name people get in Texas. My mother 6told Donna, ‘Don’t come back,’ and Donna didn’t. The house was peaceful, for a little while, without the violent storms between my mother and sister. I lied to myself that I didn’t miss Donna, didn’t go to her bedroom to feel close to her, but only to pilfer from the records and magazines she left behind. If my mother didn’t want Donna back, why didn’t she turn the room into the ‘study’ she claimed to need? Though I’d never seen my mother study anything in her life. By then she’d quit waitressing and enjoyed the luxury of a sit-down job, working as a teller in a bank. She spent her nights in bowling alleys and discos, searching for a new man, while my father, resigned to divorced life, mouldered in our upstairs in-law apartment, sleeping through daylight and drinking beer until his night shift at the high school, where he mopped floors and it didn’t matter if he smelled of Miller High Life. It had been years since I’d seen him in one of his bad drunks, breaking dishes and threatening murder. His resignation came as relief, but I still avoided him. Like an old fighting dog neutered into passivity, he remained in possession of a body muscled with the capacity for violence. Now and then, my parents would pass each other in the driveway, my mother dressed to the nines and smelling of Ambush for a night out, my father slouching off to his mop. It wasn’t a house I wanted to spend much time in.

We had twelve weeks until high school took us into its unforeseeable alterations, and Jules and I planned to make the most of it, roaming the town’s four square miles of nothing much. We’d spend whole afternoons watching cable TV at her empty house, trying to glean the workings of sex from R-rated movies like Risky Business. On Jules’s bed we’d lie side by side 7in the scent of strawberry candles and girl musk, listening to the song that Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay do it to in the movie, that steamy scene on the train, and Jules would insist that the word come had a sexual meaning, that when Phil Collins sang, ‘I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight,’ it meant something different than the utilitarian word we knew. I’d try to connect come to the idea of sex, but nothing clicked. Come where? Jules would rewind the tape and we’d listen again, as if to a riddle we could solve with enough repetition, trying to imagine how such a simple word could hold another, more profound and secret meaning. We said the word to each other as much as possible. Over the phone it was, ‘When are you coming over?’ ‘When do you want me to come?’ ‘Come now.’ ‘Okay, I’m coming.’ If our mothers heard, we were certain they would not recognise our attempts to conjure carnal knowledge through the incantation of a common verb that meant only to arrive.

Our days often began in the town square, the centre of our little nothing place in the world with its fire/police station, barber shop and pizza shop, a single-screen movie theatre with a wilted marquee, Red Mike’s Package Store (‘the packie’, Massachusetts vernacular for liquor store), and the Towne Drug, where the only reading material for miles could be purchased. That’s where I was when it happened, sitting at the magazine rack looking through Tiger Beat and waiting for Jules. I was in communion with a glossy pin-up of Michael Jackson in his shimmering blue jacket with the gold epaulettes, arms full of Grammy Awards, when I first heard the voice of the woman who would turn my life in a new direction. 8

The voice was deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall, both the young black-and-white Bacall and the older one who did those commercials for decaf coffee because ‘caffeine sometimes makes me tense’. I looked up, expecting an old-fashioned starlet. She wasn’t, but I could see she was different. In a world of outdated Farrah Fawcett flips, lumpy corduroys, and Dr. Scholl’s, she looked like Joan Jett. Shag haircut, tight black jeans and tank top with spaghetti straps, black cowboy boots traced in purple thread. Tall and lean like the rock stars in Creem, she had strong arms – from playing guitar, I thought, or maybe the drums. From her leather fringe purse hung a pair of feathered roach clips. She was chewing gum, snapping it in her mouth as she chatted with the pharmacist, calling him ‘hon’, while he filled a paper bag with pill bottles. He looked irritated. The woman must have intimidated him because of what she was. I could see it in every part of her, a special electricity. She was a city person, confident and strange, a blast of cool in that incurably uncool place.

She felt me staring and looked over her shoulder, giving me that glare perfected by people who attract stares. It was the ‘what are you looking at’ glare, the one that says, ‘Take a picture, it’ll last longer.’ She sized me up and smirked in a way I took to mean I wasn’t worth the effort, reducing me to the small-town kid I was, in my stupid Pac-Man hat, my too-white Nikes, copy of Tiger Beat on my lap. I felt my skin blush but didn’t know why, except that I felt exposed, like she’d seen something true about me, something I had yet to see myself. When she completed her business, she walked 9out, shaking the bag of pills like maracas. ‘Cha, cha, cha,’ she said, door slamming behind her with a tinkling bell. I stood to watch her swing into a beat-up black Trans Am, golden fire-bird spreading its wings across the hood, and as she roared away, the stereo blasted some strange music I’d never heard, making me wish I could follow.

‘Freak,’ the pharmacist muttered.

I didn’t know what he was saying about the woman, except that she was different and maybe had provoked in him something of what she’d provoked in me, a feeling of being mediocre. We were amateurs, but she had power. I thought of ‘Super Freak’, the song we requested from the DJ whenever our Girl Scout troop went skating at Riverdale Roller World.

‘She’s a very kinky girl,’ we’d sing as we sailed around in the disco lights, holding hands, two by two. ‘The kind you don’t take home to mother.’

—

When Jules finally rolled up to the drugstore on her Schwinn, I was standing outside in the hot sun. Atop the fire/police station, the noon whistle was going woomp-woomp, the warning sound of an air-raid siren they tested every day at twelve, keeping it ready for a fire, a storm, a nuclear bomb. The woman was gone. I’d probably never see her again and wanted to commit every detail to memory. Just by existing, she materialised an obscure part of myself I did not yet know but struggled toward, advancing in a way so private, my movement went unseen even by my own awareness. 10

Jules stood straddling her bike. Led Zeppelin T-shirt, cut-off shorts, a pair of grungy Keds with a hole in the toe. With her dirty-blonde hair tucked behind her ears, she looked like her usual self, plus the recent additions of black eyeliner, silver crucifix dangling from an infected earlobe, and gauntlets of black rubber bracelets ringing her wrists. Jules had been fourteen for months already and was well on her way to mastering its more mature contours. Born in late summer, I was the youngest in my class. My smarts kept me ahead until the changes of middle school left me struggling to comprehend concepts other kids seemed to know, as if they had access to a textbook written in another language that explained all the things that happened at basement parties and in the woods behind the baseball field. I lost Pauline Grasso, my childhood best friend, to that book. Set adrift on the choppy waters of junior high, I gravitated to Jules Cobb because she was the other odd one of our bunch and no one invited her into the woods. We were the same. And then we weren’t.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Just waiting.’

‘No good magazines?’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Same old stuff. I already looked. For like an hour. What took you?’

It hadn’t been an hour, but I was in one of those moods when I wanted to push Jules away.

‘I had to wash my hair,’ she shrugged.

She had shoulder-length, stick-straight hair the colour of wet straw and always said she was washing it when she was late. I made a face. I could see her hair was oily, untouched 11by White Rain, the discount shampoo our mothers bought at Stop & Shop.

She asked, ‘Did you get a Slush Puppie already?’

I showed her my blue tongue.

‘What do you want to do now?’

We walked our bikes to the Greek’s for slices of pizza and cans of orangeade in the air-cooled inside. I thought about telling Jules about the woman in the Trans Am, but she felt like something I wanted to keep to myself. If I told her about the woman’s cowboy boots, her unusual air, Jules might say, ‘That doesn’t sound cool,’ and I’d have to reevaluate. In her advanced maturity, Jules better understood the differences between cool and uncool, and I would’ve ceded to her authority, letting the woman crumble. I didn’t want to lose the feeling I had. Besides, I didn’t think I could explain it, how I recognised something of myself in the woman, an element I could not name because it came from the future and had not yet formed.

‘Whidigat’s wridigong widigith yidigou?’

Gibberish, like the word come, was part of our secret communications. We didn’t use it much any more, but for two years it had held us together in a world where we felt apart from most people. I don’t know how we learnt it, only that it came to us through the ether of girltalk, like the hundredth monkey figuring out how to wash potatoes and then transmitting that knowledge across a body of water, from one island to another, through the mystery of animal telepathy. Like those primate sisters, the feral intelligence of teenage girls is sometimes capable of collective witchcraft. 12

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said, not wanting to play along. Gibberish, I told myself, was for babies.

‘Say it right.’

I could feel Jules wanting to close the distance between us.

‘Nidigothidiging. Okay?’

To give myself cover, I said I was really in pain over Michael Jackson, I had seen photos of him with Brooke Shields in Tiger Beat, and while I knew they were just friends, it reminded me that I would never be loved by him because we came from ‘two vastly different worlds’.

‘How do you think I feel,’ Jules said, letting the orange grease from her slice drip onto her paper plate. ‘The love of my life is dead.’

‘True. At least with Michael I have a chance.’

I believed that. When I wrote my love letters to him in purple glitter pen, I believed my words would reach him and he would pick me, out of the millions, and take me to his mansion in Encino, California, with Muscles the boa constrictor and Bubbles the chimp. There were other kids – the lucky ones, I thought in the innocence of that time – who were chosen, but I would not be one of them.

‘He came again last night,’ Jules said.

She meant the ghost of Dennis Wilson. Jules had a thing for dead drummers: Keith Moon, John Bonham, and now Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy who drowned in the sea. Drummers, she liked to say, were underappreciated, and loving them felt like doing something important for the world, like saving the whales. Shaggy, druggy Dennis Wilson had first visited her a week before, emerging from the poster over 13her bed, the one where he sat shirtless, in dirty blue jeans, on the hood of a ’55 Chevy. Dead and gone, in his suntan and windswept hair, he had stepped from the poster and lain on top of Jules, pressing his weight onto her sleeping body. And now he had done it again.

‘What did he do?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘And everything. He was wicked heavy, and then he got heavier. I could feel him breathing. And other things.’

‘What other things?’

She whispered, ‘I could feel his bulge.’

‘Did he do anything with it?’

‘He just. You know. Pressed.’

I tried to picture it. The blue jeans, the leather belt with its chunky buckle.

‘Did he come?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Did you?’

‘I don’t know. I felt wicked weird. Like strange.’

‘When you’re strange,’ I quoted from a Doors song, ‘faces come out of the rain.’

Jules gave a solemn nod to the profound truth of that lyric. While she loved dead drummers above all, her heart held space for other departed idols – Jim Morrison, James Dean, John Lennon – their tragic ends sweetening the impossibility of her desire.

‘Maybe you were high,’ I suggested. High was something that happened, not from taking drugs, but from your mind altering itself naturally, because you were a weirdo. When you 14were high, your head went bubbly, your skin tingled, and you felt things that weren’t there. This was part of girlcraft, the power to set your body on fire without a match, and later, to come without being touched. When Jules and I were really high, we were in the Twilight Zone, where everything became bright with meaning. A phone that rings twice and then stops. Seeing the time 11:11 on a digital clock. Then seeing it again. Coincidences. Déjà vu. We could also get high from green M&Ms, a delicacy we hoarded in our jewellery boxes because we’d heard they produced a psychedelic effect with aphrodisiac qualities.

‘Did you take any greens before bed?’ I asked, handing over my pizza crust, her favourite part.

‘I wasn’t high,’ she said. ‘It was Dennis. He’s trying to tell me something.’

‘Yeah, he’s trying to tell you he wants to get in your pants.’

In these discussions, I never stopped to ask why Dennis Wilson, a famous heartthrob who could have any of the sexiest women in Malibu or Hollywood, or anywhere on the planet, would choose to spend his erotic afterlife in the boondocks of Massachusetts to press himself against an average girl still figuring out how to manage a pimply T-zone. Such a question would not only have been cruel, it would have ruined the fun. Also, I believed the ghost story was true. Dennis Wilson chose Jules Cobb the way Michael Jackson, if he’d ever received my letters, would have chosen me, Mel Pulaski.

After pizza, we went to Jules’s house, where the television got all the cable stations. Most of the houses in that depressed town were the same, plain Folk Victorians with peeling paint, 15crabgrass front yards, and cracked driveways veined with green. Lopsided garages hung with netless basketball hoops. Chain-link fences and American flags. ‘Reagan-Bush ’84’ bumper stickers on beaters yet to die in the annual Fourth of July demolition derby. But Jules’s house was different. It was underground, a cinderblock box buried in the earth. You could see the upper part sticking out, with its asphalt-shingled roof and basement-style window wells dug in the dirt. If you had long legs, as I did, you could walk right over and sit on it.

We dropped our bikes in the scruffy grass, wheels spinning, and descended a set of concrete steps to the subterranean gloom. The place felt like a bunker, spiked with the odour of earth and iron. It was the brainchild of Jules’s father, Ray Cobb, a bearded, blustery man who smoked pot and worried about nuclear war with the Russians, his paranoia shifting with the evening news, bending always toward a fear of penetration. He wore a knife in a leather sheath on his belt and stayed close to guns, working a forge at the Smith & Wesson factory, like Hephaestus, Greek god of metal and fire. He had a habit of pocketing the irregular discards, so you might find a six-chambered cylinder wedged between the couch cushions or a snub-nosed barrel sitting in the soap dish on the bathroom sink, as startling as a severed finger.

Jules plopped on the couch, its wheezing Naugahyde patched with duct tape, and pressed buttons on the TV clicker while I foraged in the kitchen. Cases of Tab soda stood stacked by the fridge, off-limits by order of Jules’s mother, who’d been stockpiling cans of old Tab since she heard the manufacturers were changing the formula, replacing saccharin with 16NutraSweet. Ginny Cobb was a Tab fiend, and she did not want to lose the metallic tang of her favourite chemical sweetener, even if it did give bladder cancer to rats. In the mornings, instead of coffee, she heated Tab in a microwave oven and drank it from a mug decorated with a Ziggy cartoon: ‘Hang in there. Today won’t last forever.’ This summed up Ginny’s philosophy of life, in which each day was to be endured until its hotly anticipated end. Maybe it was all the saccharin that made her hair limp and her skin grey, pulled tight over the bones of her face, a pair of drop-temple eyeglasses that looked like butterfly wings alighted on the bridge of her flinty nose. Maybe it was just the meanness that dwelled inside her like an incurable condition. Ray scared me, but Ginny terrified. I didn’t like being around either of them, but during the day, the Cobbs went to work, including Jules’s older brother, Dale, just graduated from Swaffham High, and the house was ours. I found half a pizza in the fridge and we ate it cold, sitting in the air conditioner’s chill, watching Jaws 3 in 3D, except 3D didn’t work on the television, so it just looked extra fake when the shark smashed through an underwater window at SeaWorld and started eating the park employees.

‘My dad’s such an asshole,’ Jules said.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, though I didn’t know why, in that moment, Ray was an asshole, only that Jules always said so, spurred by some dark thought running on a track in her head. I mostly encountered Ray on Saturdays, when he was on the couch, smoking pot in front of Channel 5’s Candlepin Bowling, and if we tried to hang around, Ginny would come storming into Jules’s room, screaming at us to shut the hell up and go outside, 17because ‘Your father is trying to rest goddammit!’ Ginny was always kicking us out, and on those lazy summer weekdays in the underground house, I knew it was best to get on my bike by 5:45 so I could be gone before she came home and said, ‘Melanie, it’s time for you to leave.’ No one ever called me Melanie. People knew to call me Mel, the way Jules never went by Julie-Anne. But Ginny had a cold-blooded way of kicking me out, and I never resisted. She gave me the sense there was something unlikeable about me, and it generated a bad feeling inside, like my stomach agreed I was rotten at the core.

After hours of television, I said goodbye to Jules and set off. The early evening tasted sweet with settling heat on mown grass and honeysuckle, and I didn’t feel like going home. I rode my bike the long way, down the farm roads where the Strawberry Festival had come and gone, and a barn full of cows made milk that got churned into ice cream at the Lazy Meadows Creamery. A bunch of kids clamoured at the window, grabbing cones in their grubby hands, and I thought to stop for one but kept going. I worried about my weight. Lately, walking my body through the world felt effortful, my legs grown longer and thicker, but being on the bike made it easy, the way a whale might feel while swimming, unbound by gravity. I had worked up a good head of steam and my body felt smooth and powerful. The sun came in low across the treetops, intensifying the green of their summer-fat leaves, and the sight of that throbbing light, saturated thick with gold, urged me to stick my arms out like airplane wings.

Unbidden, the woman at the drugstore returned. I imagined her Trans Am coming down the road. She would recognise me, 18pull over, and I’d rest my palm against the sun-warmed metal of the car. She’d have one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, a cigarette between her long fingers clustered in silver rings, bright with lozenges of turquoise. She’d be listening to that music, a song I’d never heard, and she’d tell me the name of the band, opening up a new sonic pathway. She’d offer me a Marlboro, and though I’d never tried before, I’d know exactly what to do. The smoke would go down smooth and warm, tasting of the most delicious thing, an adult flavour, toasted and nutty, spiced with the equine fervour of cowboys herding cattle in snowy mountains. Flavour Country. And then? I could not conjure what came next. Only me standing astride my ten-speed, nodding along to the music, a breeze coming up off the strawberry fields, making the air smell of simmered sugar. Only me leaning down to see the woman’s face dusted with warmth from the falling summer light. That’s when it came to me, gliding with arms outstretched along that quiet road, flanked by sugar maples and pin oaks in full green, that what I had been struck by that afternoon at the drugstore was a crush and the reason I didn’t recognise it was because it was a crush on a woman, the sort of thing that was not supposed to happen. Not to me. And not in Swaffham. I squeezed the brakes and stopped. I had crossed the town line, something I’d never done by myself, and hadn’t even noticed.

I looked back at the sign that marked the border. ‘Entering Swaffham,’ it read, ‘EST. 1646,’ the year of witch hysteria in New England. Nearby stood a sign for Crime Watch Community. ‘We are watching,’ it read above an all-seeing eye. ‘We report all suspicious persons to our police department.’ Did my new 19crush make me a suspicious person? I had not asked for this. For some of us, there comes a moment when we realise that the object of our desire lies outside our known world, beyond our towns and families. Out there, we understand, there is another way to want, to have, to be. Sometimes, even when we do not venture out to find it, when we try to want only what we are given, the object comes to us. And the world, without our consent, breaks open and expands.

I took my hands off the brakes and kept going. The sky was turning violet, but I didn’t want to go home. There was nothing there for me except the vapour of my mother’s perfume, a lonely supper of hot dogs and baked beans, my father upstairs with his six-pack, and television, television.20

21

2019

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t want to hear about how angry I am. Nobody wants to hear about my anger. There’s too much of it. I got the double whammy. First the rage of living as a girl, told to be good, be quiet, be still, followed by the rage of being a transsexual man, unseen and un-understood, alone, erased, and more recently, told, again, be good and quiet. In one body or the other, girl or man, I am getting it wrong. But I’m not supposed to let my anger show. The open-minded still want their transsexuals to come with hat in hand, full of humble gratitude – thank you for permitting me to exist – to come with easy stories and reassurances, and to never be critical or bitter or, god help us, angry. So what else is new?

When I was a kid, adults were always telling me to smile. My face wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, and it made 22people uncomfortable. People like Larry, my mother’s hairdresser, who never gave me the kind of cut I wanted. A big, bearded, swinging 1970s type, Larry wore unbuttoned shirts, a gold medallion on his hairy chest, and half-tinted sunglasses through which you could sort of see his eyes but not quite. Once he had me in his chair, he would tease me for my downbeat disposition, calling me ‘Smiley’ because I never smiled, and the more he cajoled, the more defiant I became, squeezing myself into a tight snarl of fury. Just once, I retaliated. ‘Oh, yeah?’ I said. ‘Well, you’re fat.’ Then I smiled, washed in the sweet relief of talking back, but when my mother slapped the smile off my face, I understood something about how power worked. Some people were allowed to dish it out while others had to take it.

It’s June again. The middle of the year in the middle of my life. If I live to be ninety-six. An undesirable goal, if you ask me. There are people who want to live forever, but I am not one of them. My knees hurt when I walk down stairs, I’ve lost a few decibels in my right ear, and my eyes struggle to focus when shifting from far to near. Like the past, the distant is easier to see. It’s the close-up things that muddle into slush, so forgive me if I sometimes lack the requisite amount of self-reflection. I’m just trying to get through the present. I am in my mother’s garden, pulling weeds. Putting my anger into it, grabbing fistfuls of mugwort, dandelion, clover, whole networks of quack grass creeping rhizomatically through the soil. There’s a certain satisfaction in all this ripping out. It’s been a difficult year. My mother died in January and I have felt unmoored by her absence, as if something inside me that I cannot name 23has come loose, a tether snapped. I visited her bedside in the final days, being good, telling her she was forgiven. I had her body cremated and then, in spring, scattered her ashes in this garden, peppering the purple irises, probably the last living things my mother conceived.

Soon after her death, before I could get my footing, the scandal at school knocked me back down. The whole thing could have fizzled out, just another local drama, but then the Boston Globe had to do that article, stirring up a Twitter shit-storm, and I collapsed. I would not call what I had a nervous breakdown. It was more like a nervous deflation, a leaking of air that flattened me. I’m on probation, taking the summer to work on my cultural sensitivity so I can (hopefully) return to my job at the Ampleforth Country Day School as a more trustworthy teacher of English and all-around non-toxic person. Let’s say, for now, that I said the wrong thing and, again, had to be slapped.

My own house is not a long drive away, but I am in hiding. Sheltering in another place and time. Tending my mother’s garden, cleaning out her cluttered rooms, I feel unspooled, cast back through the years, as if I’m still glued to this world, still a kid pushing through the molasses of frustrated hours. Young time is slow time, every season a marathon, and then it sprints. People warn you about that, but it’s a surprise when you feel the jolt. I’m not sure I can bear going back to the classroom. I wouldn’t mind a sluggish summer. Even in Swaffham.

Much has changed about the town, but mainly at its margins. Developers ripped out the forests and installed asphalt oceans for bigbox stores and restaurant chains. They paved 24the strawberry fields and dairy farms for a gated community with ‘Swaffington Farms’ carved in gold letters, a made-up name meant to convey the exclusivity of a posh bucolic life. In between the new construction, the old town rots. Walmart killed the drugstore. Home Depot destroyed Satterwhite’s Hardware. The sun-faded ‘For Rent’ signs drooping in the windows give off a contagious despair that infects the surrounding houses. Gutters sag and screen doors hang limp. The town is covered in litter. Along the roadsides appear the same two items over and over: failed lottery tickets and empty mini liquor bottles, detritus of the white working-class sliding into ‘deaths of despair’ – drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease. Few young people remain and the elderly are dropping fast, leaving houses to successors who can’t pay the property taxes.

In the mornings, it’s an accomplishment if I get out of bed before ten, stretch, and make a pot of coffee in my mother’s sputtering Proctor Silex. To call it vintage would be too kind. Like me, it has merely endured. In the kitchen that hasn’t changed since 1970-something, relentless in its avocado-green-and-harvest-gold persistence, I drink the coffee while grudgingly looking through the books assigned by my sensitivity trainer. I don’t read in the sun any more, not since I had a melanoma removed from my leg, and there’s no shade protecting the backyard. Over the years, all my mother’s trees were cut down due to some blight or another. She never bothered to plant replacements, no green leaves for carbon-scrubbing the future. A staunch denier of climate change, she’d call me up every time it snowed and say, What 25global warming? On one of the last days we spoke, it was seventy degrees when it should have been thirty. ‘What a wonderfully warm winter we’re having, don’t you think?’ I couldn’t stop myself from mentioning the end of human life on earth. ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ she said, ‘the climate has changed a million times over the aeons, what’s one more change?’ Easy for you to say, I thought. You’re leaving.

I weed in the late afternoon, when the sun is low, and then drink a beer on the deck that juts into the yard, listing on its rotten legs. Now and then, a flock of wild turkeys wanders by. Thanks to overly successful conservation efforts, they’ve become an aggressive nuisance across suburban Massachusetts. In the birthplace of Thanksgiving, they get their revenge by strolling around in gangs, attacking people in driveways and breaking into houses. I admire their fuck-you attitude and like to see them strutting with their tails snapped open like fans tipped with sunlight. They are the only life around here.

In the blue house next door, the family has moved out, both parents dead. On the other side, the yellow house sits festering in foreclosure, lost by a woman my mother liked to complain about. ‘She’s not neighbourly,’ she told me. ‘You never see her come out of that house, not once.’ But the woman’s greatest crime was to leave her lawn untended. ‘When her backyard turned into a jungle, Mr Spackman mowed it for her. And the poor bastard has lung cancer. Do you think she said thank you? Not once.’ When the grass grew back, my mother went over and said, ‘You should take care of this before someone calls the town and they give you a fine.’ But 26the woman did nothing and now the yard looks like a jungle again and my mother is dead so there’s no one to complain.

My long-lost sister, Donna, keeps texting to say she’s coming to help with the house. She can’t wait to sell it off to Jerry Logue, of Logue Brothers, Inc., a construction company that’s been in town since before I was born. They own half of Swaffham and did a lot of the damage, bulldozing the forests and putting up those developments. When Jerry’s letter arrived, the mailman told me he’s been buying up properties, waiting for people to die so he can knock down their houses and prep the sites for a big deal. He’s already bought the blue house and the one behind that, and my mother’s property would round out an extra-large parcel in a commercially zoned area. Donna is hoping for a Dunkin’ Donuts because she loves their coffee, but the mailman heard that Logue wants to bring in an Amazon fulfilment centre, one of those vast, windowless hangars where the robot overlords have been known to puncture cans of bear repellant, unwittingly scorching human workers with pepper spray, and employees tell stories about urinating in water bottles because bathroom breaks slow productivity at the world’s largest retailer. Donna says we’re sitting on a goldmine, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This house is where my anger was born and nurtured. I have little fondness for the place, but don’t want to see it fall. There are too many memories I haven’t yet fit together into a story that makes sense. Too many weeds I still have to pull.

27

1984

Days passed the way they do in summer when you’re young in a small town, sluggish and dull, swollen with potential and no way to realise it. Without a licence and a car to drive, you’re shipwrecked, stranded on an empty beach you can’t enjoy because you’re too busy being lost. I’d sleep until noon, drink a glass of orange juice mixed from a frozen can-shaped lump, and drag a lounge chair to the backyard to lay basted in baby oil, willing the sun to bake my skin the shade and shimmer of buttered toast. It didn’t. My skin boiled pink, backs of my thighs blotched as I lay belly down in a faded one-piece Stars ’n’ Stripes bathing suit, chin resting on the webbing of the lounger, a paperback open in the grass below. Breathing in the smell of warm plastic. Flicking ants off the pages of that summer’s reading list: Lord of the Flies, The Crucible, The 28Scarlet Letter. I could not wait for high school to take me into its dark and mature agitations.

Was that true? When I look back at that girl today, she is the citizen of another country. Her language and customs are not mine and it’s sometimes hard to remember who I was then. Once the self expands, it cannot be brought back to its original shape. That girl is gone. And yet, as I watch her turn on her chaise longue, before she’d ever heard the term chaise longue, I know the feeling of turning in the small-town sun, adjusting the elastic of a bathing suit. I know the green abundance of the tall maple, how the leaves shuffled to white in a good wind. That tree has since collapsed, but ghosts remain, as the present also haunts the past. So when I say I could not wait for high school to take me, I say it from the point of having long ago been taken. I know where the story goes. The girl does not. Would she want to go where I have travelled? I never asked. I only went.

After cooking myself, I’d change into shorts and T-shirt, get on my bike, and go find Jules. We’d meet in the sun-scorched Square or I’d ride to her house, Walkman loud in my ears, ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’, my tall, heavy legs slowing as I climbed the hill of Pine Street, and then coasted down the other side. Every day was the same, summer’s first weeks uncoiling, idle and endless. But on one of those long and constant afternoons, my life veered once again in the direction on which it was fixed. It started, as those days did, with a lot of nothing much.

Jules and I had wandered to the dead-end at the top of her street, where the asphalt crumbled to the woods in rubble, beer cans, and broken glass, where older teenagers parked 29cars at night and tossed condoms on the ground. We didn’t know the word condom, but Jules in her wisdom called them ‘rubbers’. Rubbahs. Some were dry and brittle, like snakeskins, and others were soft and glutinous. We stepped on them and watched them squish, expelling gooey interiors like crushed gypsy moth caterpillars.

‘They’re probably full of VD,’ Jules said. ‘Or AIDS.’

I didn’t want VD or AIDS, but you could only get that one if you were like my mother’s most recent hairdresser, Lance, a slight young man with a golden fleece of curls. He had to close his salon because he was ‘sick’, and everyone stopped going to him because of his scissors, his hands in their hair, because we were all ignorant and afraid.

‘I bet this one’s my stupid brother’s,’ Jules said as she picked up a stick and snatched a fresh rubber, holding it to the light so it glistened yellowy white, making me wonder how Dale did it with his girlfriend, Tammy, in his shitty Mercury Cougar that smelled of rotten eggs because of something called the catalytic converter. Dale was the boy version of Jules, long and willowy, with an oily head of dirty blonde hair. I had some sort of feeling for Dale, a tangled desire – sometimes I wanted him and sometimes I wanted to be him, to inhabit his body like a hungry soul taking possession. What did it feel like to move through the world in a boy’s body, shirtless and unafraid, taking stairs two at a time? To have and to be. Two desires intertwined. I wanted to ask Jules if she ever felt that way, but something told me not to.

I watched her wiggle the rubber like a fish on a line. The milky stuff had come from inside Dale, and I tried to imagine 30the internal mechanism of his body, slippery ducts we’d learnt in biology. (Vas Deferens, Jules had noted, would make a wicked pissah name for a heavy metal band.) Dale with his greasy hair, Levi’s cords and flannel shirts, dirty sailor’s knot braided around his wrist. He smelled of unwashed clothes and Irish Spring. Boy smell. Jules flicked the rubber at my face and I jumped.

‘Don’t!’

She grinned, taking pleasure in watching me flinch, flexing the streak of meanness that ran through all the Cobbs. I called her a jerk. She flipped the rubber into a pool of green water where clusters of frog’s eggs floated on the surface like tapioca pearls. Still bristling with wickedness, she poked them with her stick.

‘Don’t,’ I said again.

‘You’re so boring.’ Boring was her new word and it was just about the worst thing you could be. To prove I was not the boss of her, she whipped the eggs, killing the pollywogs nestled in their jelly. The queasy sight made me recall a time, maybe a year before, when she and I had watched while Ray destroyed a nest of rats in the stone wall behind their house. He poured gasoline over the rocks, lit a match, and laughed with pleasure when the animals came running out, bodies on fire, racing in horrible circles. Lately, more and more, Jules could wear her father’s cruelty as easily as she wore his flannel shirts. I felt it coursing through her like a fever.

‘Hey, Ray,’ I said. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘Don’t start,’ she said.

‘You’re the one who’s starting.’ 31

‘Don’t call me Ray.’

‘Then don’t act like him.’

She chucked the stick into the trees and strode back to the road where she climbed onto a boulder spray-painted with SWAFFHAM SUKS, sat down, and started anxiously picking at the pimples on her forehead. It was a difficult time for both of us, but I could not see that. All I knew is that I was angry at Jules for making me walk into the future without her, and I loved her more than anyone. I didn’t know how to say all the cluttered emotions, so I took a seat and pressed my shoulder into hers. She stopped picking and hugged her shins, pressing mouth to knees, to the skin that smelled of vanilla lotion and unbaked bread.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘S’okay.’

‘I hate him.’

‘I know,’ I said, understanding she meant her father, that she didn’t want to be like him, regretting the way he could overtake her, like the devil entering the body of a Salem girl. We relaxed, sinking into each other, and our closeness set off an unsettling throb inside my body, one I had not felt before and guessed had been put there, through some enigmatic transmission, by the woman in the Trans Am. Maybe she was a witch. I felt the commotion she aroused in me spreading, a virus in my cells, like a spell that I, too, might transmit. I smelled Jules’s hair, smog of teenage greasiness and sandalwood incense, and willed her to touch me. Like magic, she turned to the sunburn peeling on my neck and shoulders, around the straps of my tank top, and I closed my eyes, 32enjoying the sensation of her fingers working the itchy edges of the burn, lifting papery skin. This was how we bonded, one primate grooming the other. This was how we touched, pretending sex had nothing to do with it when it was woven into every fibre.

A blue jay cried from the white pine and, in the depths of the trees, a woodpecker drilled. Our civilised world was surrounded by nature’s relentless press, tall green grass reaching for our bare legs, music of crickets in the dry yellow weeds, smell of soil and wildflowers, pine resin percolating deep in the skins of the trees. We were animals, too, trying hard to be people.

‘Hey,’ Jules said.

‘Hay is for horses, better for cows. Pigs would eat it, but they don’t know how.’

‘I’m serious,’ she said and slapped my shoulder.

‘That hurt.’

‘Listen.’ She sat back and looked at me. ‘Have you seen the tranny?’

‘The what?’

‘Don’t you know what a tranny is?’ Her tone highlighted the distance between her almost-fifteen and my still-thirteen, a distinction she fully exploited. ‘It’s a man who thinks he’s a woman, so he wears dresses and wigs. Then he goes to a doctor to have his dick cut off.’ She made scissors with her fingers to show how it was done. ‘His balls, too. The whole package.’

I tried to imagine it, but could only picture my Michael Jackson doll naked, his pelvis a shield of plastic muscle, smooth and unsexed. 33

‘So,’ Jules said, ‘did you see it?’

‘What?’

‘The tranny. My dad saw it up the packie and my mom saw it at Cumbie’s. What’s a tranny doing at Cumberland Farms?’

‘I don’t know. Buying cigarettes?’

Jules rolled her eyes.

I asked, ‘Why are you calling him an “it”?’

‘What would you call it?’

I didn’t know which pronoun was right. Him or her?

‘Hidige, hidiger,’ Jules said in gibberish. ‘Idigit.’

‘It feels mean to say it.’

‘It feels mean,’ Jules mocked. ‘You’re so queer.’

‘I am not.’

‘You love Michael Jackson, and everybody knows he’s a fag.’

‘Don’t say that. Remember what happened to the last person who said that?’

The last person was Dougie Nesbitt, a kid in our science class who liked to taunt me by repeating, ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag, Michael Jackson is a fag.’ We were melting sugar into carbon and I was holding a test tube with a pair of tongs over a Bunsen burner when I told him to stop and he wouldn’t, so I jammed the hot end of the tube into the back of his hand. It was worth a week’s detention to shut him up.

‘Pyromaniac,’ Jules said with admiration. ‘Let’s burn something.’ She took a Bic lighter out of her pocket and flicked it into flame.

‘Why do you have that? Are you smoking pot? You’re gonna turn into a druggie.’

‘God,’ Jules huffed. ‘You are so boring!’ 34

She hopped off the rock and marched toward the house. I followed. This is how it went that summer. We were bored and boring and all we could do to spark to life was to hurt each other in little ways, to abandon and follow, push and pull. I grabbed my bike from the yard and announced I was going home.

‘Don’t go,’ Jules whined, looking sad and young.

‘You’re being a jerk.’

‘I won’t be a jerk any more. I’ll stop. I swear.’

‘You swear?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

As I followed Jules into the gloom of the underground house, I tried to picture the person she called ‘the tranny’ – a man in a dress and lopsided wig, unrolling pantyhose over a pair of hairy legs. What did I know? I had never imagined such a person, but now that the idea had been introduced, I felt it taking hold, whisking through me like a tonic. I felt unsealed, open to whatever would come next, so when Jules suggested we get high, actually high, I didn’t say no. She rummaged through the innards of the coffee table, through the clutter of magazines, empty Tab cans, and motorcycle parts, until she came up with one of her father’s pot pipes, a brass contraption that looked like a hunk of plumbing.

‘He never remembers all of them,’ she said. ‘There’s stuff in here.’

My big sister smoked pot, in her psychedelic bedroom with boys who came in through the window on nights our parents went out, and the smell of it always conjured Donna, skunky pine and blacklight posters, a teenager going nowhere 35good. I’d never tried it, afraid one puff would turn me into my sister.

‘This is a peace pipe,’ Jules said, ‘and we need some peace.’

‘I don’t know.’ I was willing but had to be cajoled.

‘Please don’t be boring. Please, Melly? Just do this with me? Please.’

Jules looked so sad, kneeling on the dirty carpet, lacework of acne across her forehead and black eyeliner crumbling under her pretty blue eyes, a girl trying to forge a whole self out of bits and pieces, scraps of dungaree and flannel, glued together with Aqua Net and spit. How could I refuse? I took the pipe and put it between my lips.

‘You inhale,’ she said. ‘Like this.’ She sucked air, clamped her mouth, and exhaled. ‘Hold it as long as you can. Like holding your breath underwater. Ready?’

I nodded. Jules lit the Bic over the bowl.

‘You’re not inhaling. Try again.’

I tried again.

‘You’re wasting it,’ she said, taking the pipe. I watched her suck, hold, and blow a lavender plume of smoke. She’d done this before, I understood. She had another life, private hours kept secret and separate. What else did she do without me?

‘Are you feeling it?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I feel it.’

‘Awesome. Now we can party hardy.’

She went to her father’s cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey, which seemed like a bad idea. She clapped the bottle on the coffee table with two shot glasses and knelt down. I watched her push a greasy hank of hair behind her 36ear and crack her knuckles, like a cartoon piano player, before she unscrewed the bottle and filled the glasses, amber liquor sloshing over the side.

‘Shit,’ she said, wiping the drops from the dirty table with her fingers and sucking them.

‘Ray’s gonna kill you.’

‘I do this all the time. I just put a little water in the bottle. He’s too stoned and stupid to know the difference.’

She took one of the shot glasses and held it up to catch the weak light coming in through a high window where weeds waved in the earth above. Sometimes, in the underground house, I felt like I was at the bottom of a grave.

‘Over the teeth and past the gums,’ Jules said. She swallowed in one gulp and slammed the glass to the table like people did in cowboy movies. ‘Your turn.’

The whiskey tasted like dirt and kerosene.

‘Don’t sip it,’ she ordered. ‘Swallow.’

I tipped the whole glass and the liquor scorched my throat. I fell to the floor, coughing while Jules laughed and called me a spaz. She went to the kitchen and came back with a pair of McDonald’s collectible glasses full of Pepsi and ice – as always, I was Grimace and she was the Hamburglar. We’d heard the painted decorations on those glasses contained dangerous levels of lead and they should have been destroyed, but no one listened to the Massachusetts Public Health commissioner. We worried about getting AIDS from our hairdressers, not about being poisoned by Ronald McDonald. Into each glass Jules added a generous pour of Wild Turkey.

‘It goes down easier this way,’ she said. ‘Take another hit.’37

She gave me the pipe again and this time I managed to hold in the smoke. I lay on the carpet, a dirty yellow wall-to-wall sculpted like scrambled eggs, and felt my head buzz. Being really high didn’t feel anything like the Twilight Zone or green M&Ms. I looked up at the water-stained ceiling and the window where the sun-bright grass juddered in a breeze.

‘I’m floating,’ I said.

‘Me too.’

Jules lay close enough so I could feel her breathing, and sang the lyrics to a song I didn’t recognise. Something about wanting a kiss. Was she singing to me? I tried to imagine her kissing the boys from school, the ones she liked who never liked her back. On the inside flaps of her book covers, fashioned from brown paper Stop & Shop bags, she wrote the names of boys who lived in nice houses with in-ground pools, boys with money for Members Only jackets and Bugle Boy parachute pants that made their legs whisper when they walked. They wanted nothing romantic from Jules and me. We were not the right sort of girl. But while I was still trying to figure out what sort of girl I was, Jules was nailing her version down. She took the bus to school and sat in back, mixing with boys in grungy jean jackets and long hair, the sort who hung out in the woods behind school and came in stoned. They wore ‘ADIDAS’ T-shirts because the letters stood for ‘All Day I Dream About Sex’, and Jules let them grope her in the soggy school-bus stink of body odour and bagged lunches.

‘Have you ever kissed a guy?’ I asked. ‘In real life. Not dreams and not posters.’ 38