A Name Unnecessary

When I arrived home my mom was there waiting for me. She grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and threw me against the wall.

“I should take you outside and beat your ass, skipping school. What are you thinking? Who were you with? Where were you?”
With each question she jerked me forward and banged me against the wall again. I twisted away from her and started for my room. She grabbed my arm and squeezed hard, spinning me around.

“Don’t you dare walk away from me!”

“What, you happen to be around for once when something happens and now you suddenly give a shit?”
She slapped me hard and fast on the side of the head. I stumbled back.

“Sit down and start talking. Now!” she ordered.
I glared at her, rage building.

“I was with my girlfriend. We were making out all day. I’m gay.” I spit the words at her like insults. Her face transformed from angry, hard lines to wide and stunned arches. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled.

“It’s my fault.” She shook her head. Sat on the couch and dropped her face in her hands. Her reaction overwhelmed me with anger. I stomped across the room to face her.

“What?” I demanded.

“I should have told you.” She flopped back on the couch.

“Told me what?”

“I don’t know, Jane. I was knocked out, I don’t remember.” She pressed her thumbs to her temples and squeezed her eyes shut.

“What, Mom?” My heart beating in my temples, I burned to slap her hard.

“You were born with both male and female, I had to choose. I must have chosen wrong,” she said, shaking her head, eyes still smashed shut, teardrops seeping through.
My legs buckled and fear rose in my throat. I bent forward, my hands on my knees. I reached out for the TV to steady myself. I thought I would throw up or faint. My mom touched my arm and I jumped, snapping away from her.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” I snarled.

“Jane, calm down.” She stood up, reaching toward me. I backed away.

“How could you not tell me?” I roared.

“I wasn’t sure! I wanted to!” she whimpered, advancing toward with arms outstretched like a mummy.

“Get away from me!” I had backed myself into the kitchen. She came through the threshold. I grabbed the back of a wooden chair and threw it down in front of her path. She looked stunned, then grabbed it and whipped it violently upright.

“Don’t you get wild; this is your problem, not mine. I’m the one who should be angry―”

“At what? Are you crazy? You’re never around! Raelyn thinks I’m her mother! You’re high, drunk, sleeping, out somewhere, gone! I’m so sick of you, I hate you!” Spit flew out of my mouth, my fists clenched at my sides, my face like lava, molten red.

“If your dad was alive, he would never approve of this, this—it’s sick!”
My face went from red to white to gray; my stomach lurched, my mouth filled with metallic juices. Without thinking, I leaped at her, crashing into her with a bear hug around the waist and taking her down. I heard the “thunk” of her skull against the linoleum and my forehead smashed into her nose, between her eyes, knocking me dizzy. I pushed up on my hands and knees to see her. Her nose seemed to swell before my eyes; shadows grew out from its slope stretching under her eyes. I slapped my hand over my mouth feeling a sob rise to my throat.

“Jane!” a familiar voice shouted. The door slammed. Gram appeared in the kitchen. I looked up at her with my hand still pressed tight against my mouth. She gasped. Tears exploded out of my eyes.

“Oh, Jane. Oh, dear!” she moaned, pulling me up off of my mother.

“The hell?” my mom slurred from the floor, half conscious.
I ran toward the bathroom but didn’t make it. I fell on the floor gripping my stomach, my body shuddering, senses dulling, vision blurring, heart exploding, guts wrenching and spilling out onto the floor, drenching my body and the carpet in color and pain.
My gram’s hand appeared on my damp forehead; she smoothed back my hair, and I vomited.

“Shsh, it’s OK. Where are your sisters?” she said, patting the top of my head.

“I don’t know,” I said, pushing myself up.

“OK, OK—” She helped me up, putting my arm around her neck. She walked me into the bathroom where she turned on the shower and peeled off my soiled clothes. I stood under the water and turned the temperature toward hot, stopping at a near scald. The stench on my skin could be removed but the one deeper than skin, the one I felt but couldn’t reach could not. I stepped out of the shower and sat down on the edge of the tub, feeling weak. My gram was scrubbing the carpet, cleaning my mess. She saw me and came to me, toweled me off and wrapped me in a warm oversized robe that had been my dad’s, then walked me toward my room. On the way, I saw the sloped shape of my mom in a chair at the kitchen table.

“I’m OK, really.” I pulled away from her, walking into my room and flopping onto my bed.

“Where’s Sophie and Raelyn?” I asked.

“They’re with your Aunt Grace and Uncle Ron.” She sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand.

“OK, Honey, I’m going to call for an ambulance now,” she said.

“Why? Who needs an ambulance?” I asked, feeling faint. I reached up and felt a welt on my forehead where my head cracked my mom’s face. My head was pounding.

“Trust me, Jane. I have a plan. Stay put,” she said sternly, patting my hand before standing up.

“Gram, wait. I need to ask you a question,” I said, reaching for her hand.

“What is it, Sweetie?” She sat back down.

“Mom said I was born a hermaphrodite,” I said, gripping her hand, biting my lip to stifle the tears.

“A hermada what?”

“She said I had both male and female parts.”

“She’s full a shit!” she said, wrinkling up her brow. “I was there, I know. You were a baby girl.”

“Why would she say that then?”

“Don’t you listen to a word a that bullshit. I don’t know why. She’s sick is why and I’m gonna get her help. Don’t you worry, Baby, just sit tight,” she said, getting up and walking out. The whole bed seemed to float up at the release of her weight. I closed my eyes and concentrated on steady, calm. After a few minutes I opened them again. I thought of Sophie and Raelyn and remembered they were safe with Aunt Grace. I got up slowly, grabbed a sweater and jeans, pulled them on, and quietly made my way down the hall toward the door. Yiya was hunched over with my mom in the kitchen, embracing her and talking quietly. They didn’t notice me walk out of the house.

I left with the idea that I was going to be with my sisters, but my feet were taking me somewhere else. It wasn’t until I passed the 7/11 and turned right that I realized where. My pace quickened then broke into a trot, advancing quickly through a run into a flat sprint. Head down, arms pumping, I blasted forward with a might and at a speed that could only end in collapse.

I fell against her front door, heaving and coughing, my stomach twisted in painful knots, and pounded a weak fist three times against it before it opened. I fell through the threshold into her. She caught me and held me upright against her. The strength of her unabashed embrace and the presence of her care, so potent it was nearly palpable in the air around her, instantly quieted the loud clamor in my head and in my lungs and made way for great, moaning sobs. She stood there and held me in a firm hug while I cried, wilted against her. I don’t know how long we remained that way, with the front door standing open, my lanky frame hanging on her soft yet physically powerful one, the evening breeze blowing my hair into her eyes and hers into mine. When it subsided, she gently released me and held me steady by my shoulders in front of her.

“Jane,” she said.
I didn’t say anything, only imagined how I must look and hung my head, hiding my face in my hands. She closed the door and guided me to the couch. I sat down, continued to weep, to hide my face. She sat next to me, put an arm around me, and remained silent. An hour might have passed that way in near silence. There is never any silence. There are always birds and their languages, rustle and breath, wind over orifice. Sound that seeps through walls, scorns all concentration, lunges, uninvited, into ears. And when she took my hand or embraced me, I thought my heart should be just a little less rapidly metrical, my pelvis should loosen its congested clump of nerves, the fall of my breath could be just a whisper less firm.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked.
I got up and paced the room, suddenly too agitated to sit so close to her, to have her comfort me.

“I had a fight with my mom. I told her I’m gay.” I watched carefully to gauge her reaction. Her expression relaxed from concern to something softer; she exhaled as if in relief.

“Well, first of all, let me give you a hug,” she said, rising with arms outstretched. I went to her and let her hug me, then quickly pulled away and continued pacing.

“She didn’t take it well?” she asked, pulling her hair back and knotting it behind her head.

“Not really, no,” I said and laughed. I blushed at my laughter, surprised and embarrassed by it. I looked at her and she was smiling.

“Come with me, Jane,” she said, walking out of the room toward the back of the house. I followed her, noticing on the way that the kitchen had new, hand-painted tiles hung above the stove. She disappeared into her bedroom. I stopped and stood still in the hallway. I had never seen her bedroom before; it seemed forbidden for me to enter it.

“Jane?” she called.
I walked in cautiously, intrigued. She was seated in front of an easel in the corner of the room, beyond the foot of her bed. She was painting a kind of self-portrait on a large canvas. The image was of a younger version of her, child-like but savage, crouching, naked in a desert with wild hair, holding a spear. The eyes of the child were what struck me first: so real and penetrating.

“I was in the middle of this and I don’t want to stop. Make yourself comfortable and talk to me while I paint,” she said, facing the canvas. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. She glanced back at me, her brush poised before the canvas as she turned.

“You can sit on the bed,” she said, returning her gaze to her painting. She added small shadows to the face with delicate strokes. Her back was straight; her legs straddled a stool atop a paint-splattered drop cloth. She wore an oversized blue shirt buttoned in the front that fell off her left shoulder, exposing a white tank top underneath. A loose knot held her hair high on the back of her head, revealing the bare slope of neck as it disappeared behind blue collar. Dark coils fell haphazardly about her face.

“I’m fine here,” I said.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“Very much.”

“I call it Wild Child. She’s the aspect of me that’s predatory and primal. She fights and she survives. I see the same thing in you,” she said.
I related so completely to what she said it was as if I felt a change occur within me right then. A sudden bravery was available to me that had not been there before, a feeling that I could say anything.

“I skipped school because I was making out with Stacy in an old junked-car lot,” I said.

“Wow,” she said, not looking away from her painting, “who’s Stacy?”

“A girl from school, a girl I’ve known for awhile.”

“Was this a first for you and Stacy?” she asked, putting her brush down and squeezing a dot of brown paint onto her palate.

“Yes, it was. For me, anyway. I don’t know about her. We kissed for hours. I have never felt anything like that before.”
I saw the bend of her smile from behind when she tilted her head a bit to the left.

“Tell me about Anne,” I said.
She sighed loudly and painted broad, brown strokes from beneath the wild child’s feet straight down to the bottom of the canvas.

“Anne was my first love, my only real love. I was young and too afraid to be myself, to have what I wanted.” She turned to face me while she cleaned the brown from the brush with a rag.

“We started out as friends, or at least we thought we were friends.” She swirled the tip of the brush in a cup of water then swiped it up and down her sleeve. Her brow was furrowed, one corner of her mouth curved down.

“But we were really in love. She was a free spirit. Strong, unafraid, reckless even. You remind me a lot of her in that way,” she smiled at me and winked. My legs went numb. I crossed and uncrossed my ankles. A dog barked outside.

“Why were you afraid?”

“My parents, my church, everyone thought it was wrong. I was afraid they were right.” She picked up her palate and faced the canvas again. She dipped the brush in black, mixed it with a bit of red on the edge of the palate.

“She told me it felt right, so that was how we could know it wasn’t wrong. That love so genuine and good could never be wrong. She said that if she were a man, we would have been married. She was right.”

“When did it end? What happened?” I flattened my back against the wall, hugged my knees to my chest, ran my fingertips across the carpeted floor.

“We were in college. We both knew Josh. He was in one of our classes. He also went to my church and had a big crush on me. Anne knew and would joke about it. She never took him seriously or was the least bit threatened until I started spending time with him.” She painted a crack in the earth between the child’s bare feet, accenting the edges with dark maroon.

“She asked me if I was in love with him. I lied and said yes. She asked me how I could be in love with both him and her at the same time. I told her that I couldn’t be and I wasn’t.”

“Why did you lie to her?”

“Because I couldn’t be with her anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She walked away.” She leaned back and cleaned the brush again. On the canvas, the earth opened beneath the wild child threatening to swallow her. She straddled the dark abyss with a brave face, holding her spear as if in victory.

“And you never spoke again?” I asked.

“She wrote me a letter; I never replied. I married Josh. Twenty months later she died in a car accident.” She wiped a tear from her cheek, cleaned the brush with the rag.

“In the letter, she asked me to give her heart back to her because she needed to be
free. I guess she didn’t know that she still had mine.” She rubbed out the shadows on the painting with a malleable piece of rubber.

“Tell me about Stacy,” she said.

“She’s confusing,” I said.

“You mean you’re confused about how you feel?”

“No, I mean she is. She acts like she likes me one day, then changes, treats me like a stranger.”

“Ah, come close go away,” she said, dabbing her brush in blue.

“I had a dream about you last night,” I said, the beat of my heart growing louder, the warmth in my cheeks deeper.

“You did?” she asked, glancing back with raised eyebrows.
I hadn’t dreamed of her the night before, but I had dreamed of her. Only I had been a man in the dream, and she had been without clothes. The memory of it was vivid and exciting. The fact that I had just said something to her about it was terrifying. I looked again into the Wild Child’s eyes, reclaiming the bravery there as a quality within myself.

“What about?” she asked, gliding the brush in curved lines of blue across the top of the canvas.

“About being with you. You were―” Gravity came alive; a low, modest torch lighting up. I could feel it on my arms and shoulders, pulling me into the floor. I told her whatever I felt, spurred to truthfulness by an idiosyncratic enchantment.

“I think a part of me is in love with you,” I said. Her back squarely facing me, suddenly dark and quiet, the words floated in the air and I longed to catch them and draw them back in, wanted the floor to open and let me tumble in, into the black rift, over the cliff and down.

“Well, if you were just 15 years older, Jane, we would have something here,” she laughed, turned her head and winked at me.

“Don’t laugh at me,” I snapped, the skin on the back of my neck pricking with a mix of humiliation and relief.

“Oh, Jane, I’m not laughing at you,” she said, turning on her stool to face me. Her eyes, her hair, her neck and face became a visual clamor―one I would look at until my restraint becomes a caress, holding me until I evolve to where the room loses its walls and furniture, the whole becomes deformed in the act of grasping the part, thoughts are loosed which have no shape.

“There is a part of me that wants to laugh at you, to pat you on the head and tell you how flattered I am, treat you like a sweet little girl who has a crush on me. The truth is, I want to do that because there’s a part of me that’s in love with you too.”
I raised my eyes to meet her gaze and smiled in spite of my effort not to.

“You are something special, Jane. You’re wise beyond your years and there is a knowing energy about you, a kind of maturity. I feel a kinship with you. And I want you to know that you can feel safe here with me.”

“I do,” I said.

“You can say anything to me, too, and know that I will listen without judgment. It’s a very natural thing that you feel. I think there is a measure of erotic energy in all attractions between two people, be it a friendship or a business relationship, or even a student-teacher situation. That it exists between us is a very natural thing. That doesn’t mean we ever have to do anything with it.” She spoke with her hands. They were strong and graceful; her fingers were long and tapered like candles.

“I never thought about it that way,” I said, feeling my embarrassment ebb.

“I will never do anything to hurt you, Jane. I will never laugh at you,” she said, tapping the handle of her paintbrush against the base of her palm for emphasis.
I looked away from her and picked at the carpet, gratitude rising in my chest like a balloon.