She slowly bends down and lays my two cards on the coffee table. Like an offering.
“You’re the one making it this way,” I say. I watch her carefully.
“I don’t see why you can’t just keep being like this.” She doesn’t meet my eye, but she nods toward my ambiguous button-down shirt and jeans. I traded my binder for a sports bra from a shop in the airport. I thought that might make her freak out a little less. I stuffed the binder in the airport gift bag and hoped she wouldn’t notice the way it bulged out of my back pocket, but my mother notices everything.
“There’s no reason for you to tell people you’re a boy,” she says. “If you really think you feel that way, I don’t see why you can’t keep it to yourself.”
Ah. I didn’t say a word about telling anyone else, but I should’ve known that’s exactly where her mind would go.
“Who are you worried about me telling?” I ask. “You don’t even know anyone at Harvard anymore.”
“Your father has contacts in the alumni associations. Word spreads fast about this sort of thing.”
Right. She’s worried about the neighbors.
And Dad’s coworkers. And the people at the snooty Catholic church we go to every Christmas and Easter. And the Republican congressmen who come to our catered May Day barbecue every year.
“The way you are now, everyone thinks—well, they used to see you as a tomboy.” My mother runs a hand over her perfectly waved hair. “When you were younger, it was cute. Even your father and I thought so. That’s how you got your nickname, you know. We’d meant to call you Annie, but when you were three, you insisted on going to church in slacks. Your father was the one who started calling you Toni.”
I don’t answer. I’m too stunned. I’d never known any of this before.
“You’re too old now to be a tomboy,” she goes on. Her cigarette is trembling where it dangles from the tips of her fingers. “I don’t like the way you dress or the way you talk, but at least our circle here is used to it. For you to take this farther because your new friends have planted some ideas in your head, however, is selfish and shortsighted. Even if you won’t think of how your behavior reflects on your father and I, you should at least care about what the community thinks of you. You’re getting a good education. You’re interested in politics. You could do well someday. Do you want to be known as a laughingstock in this city for the rest of your life?”
I swallow. I wish I thought what she was saying was completely ludicrous. I wish I couldn’t see her point.
I do want to work in politics someday. But you don’t see a lot of trans people on MSNBC.
“I don’t care what people think,” I say, shaking that off. “I need to tell the truth about who I am.”
She sighs. “When, exactly, did you decide this?”
Does she know? Can she sense, somehow, that I’m still deciding it right now, as I stand here?
No. That isn’t what she’s asking. She doesn’t want the details of when I went from cisgender to genderqueer to gender variant to wherever the hell I am right now.
She just wants to know when I started to hate wearing dresses.
“I told you,” I say. “I’ve always known.”
She nods slowly and looks back at the clock. “Is it because of something I did?”
I want to say yes. To say she raised me wrong. To hurt her back like she hurt me.
“No,” I say. “I’ve always been like this. When I was a kid I used to lie in bed at night and pray that when I woke up in the morning, I’d be a boy.”
I have to swallow more stale, heated air before I can keep going.
I’d forgotten all about that, but it happened. Oh, my God, that really happened. I never understood what it meant until now.
“When I got old enough to look it up, I found out it’s more common than you’d think,” I tell her. “I can send you some books—”
“No. Please don’t. I do not need those kinds of books in this house.”
She gets quiet after that.
My credit and ATM cards are still sitting on the coffee table. My mother pointedly looks down at the cards, then back up at the clock.
I pick them up off the table and hesitate, waiting for her to snatch them out of my hand. She doesn’t.
I don’t want her money. Not after what she said. But the five dollars in my wallet isn’t even enough to get me back to Boston for finals.
“Goodbye,” I say.
She still doesn’t say anything. So I leave.
I bang open the front door and take deep, long gulps of fresh air, my heart slamming in my chest as I walk as fast as I can down the sidewalk. There’s a cab stand by the convenience store three blocks away.
When, exactly, did you decide this?
I decided it five minutes ago, perched in my mother’s stark-white living room.
I decided it when I was twelve years old, the first time I saw myself in the mirror with my hair cut short.