How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (37 page)

Then the first time she asks to borrow the car, though by then it'll be some sort of teleportation device that runs on renewable resources of squirrel urine and Starbucks coffee-cup sleeves
.

Then will come her prom and her first kiss at the front door, while I flick the patio lights on and off, yelling,
“GET IN THE HOUSE!!!” which will lead to her screaming “IHATEYOURFRIGGINGUTS!” for the second (and far from last) time
.

Still deeper into our futurescape I go
. . .
jumping ahead a few more years to the husband and me (I've aged pretty gracefully, might I add) now dropping her off at college. It's a decent midsize school that's a bargain at a hundred thousand dollars
.
^*
She'll live in a fun, lively coed dorm where she'll have a whole bunch of first-time experiences that I hope to God I never, ever hear about
.

Then we'll meet her first “serious” boyfriend. I'll think he's wonderful and will knit him four ski sweaters, only to be brokenhearted when they have a friendly breakup two weeks later. Six months down the line I'll meet Number 2; this time I'll try to keep my distance but will find myself growing fond of this kid who brings me flowers and calls me “Mrs. C.” Him I'll only knit two sweaters, but again it won't work out, and again I'll take the breakup hardest of all
.

Then somewhere around Number 15, this one will stick (good thing, because otherwise I might have made good on my threat to shackle him to me). He's a good person who loves her and tolerates her weird parents, and after a respectable amount of time we'll
throw them a big, overpriced wedding at some exotic destination—like Hawaii, or maybe Jupiter, especially if they're offering group discounts
.

Deeper still I go, further into the future
. . .

Now we're with the daughter and the son-in-law and their children—our grandchildren: two boys and one manly little girl who call us “Paw-Paw” and “Mee-Maw,” and they'll adore us, though the littlest one will be afraid to hug me because of the steel-belted-strength whisker that grows out of the mole on my chin, but I'll win her over when I show her how I can make it dance
.

I'll love those children so deeply it'll be a challenge not to squeeze them until their eyes pop out. They'll grow to be good kids who share just enough of our good qualities and none of the bad ones—though the granddaughter will test her mom/the daughter in ways that will amuse me to no end.
^*

And then one day I'll awaken to see their faces—all of them—at my bedside, looking down at me with love, telling me, “Go to the light, Grandma
. . .
Go to the light!”

And as their soft, loving voices echo in my ears, I close my eyes and rise into that big bright light, and all sound fades away and I become one with the cosmos
and am filled with a sense of wonder and love and fulfillment and so many beautiful feelings and I am just a vapor now or maybe a liquid or a cosmic plasma, I'm not sure what happens at that altitude
. . .

And then the fantasy melts away, and I am back on the playground. My eyes are wide open, staring at the bright-blue sky, and gushing like the falls of Niagara.

I am not ready for the light.

I am not ready for this day.

I am not ready for her to grow up and out and away from me.

My head is a mess of feelings and images and emotions and impressions—it's like someone threw a tantrum at a gift shop and dumped the Hallmark-card rack to the floor, scattering the sappy feelings all over the place.

Now I am full-on ugly crying. My vision is blurry, my face hot with tears. I wipe the tears away, but no matter how hard I rub, one of my eyes will not clear. I'm blind . . . Dear, God, I've cried so hard, I've broken my eye . . . MY EYE!!

A hand grabs my shoulder—it's the husband. He holds me as I sob, stroking my hair and whispering, “It's okay. She has her sunblock.” And he pats my leg, which is where he finds the contact lens that I've simply cried out and is stuck to my jeans.

Turns out I'm not blind. I'm just another weepy parent.

I grab the balled-up napkin from the bottom of my purse and dry my soaking-wet face. My husband gives me
a hug and a smile and then gently informs me that I have a candy wrapper stuck to my cheek.

On the way home we walk past our daughter's new classroom. I peek through the window and see her sitting on the carpet, listening as her teacher teaches them the “Good Morning” song.

The child's face is so vulnerable and eager, her expression one of total openness. Then her eyes shift as she notices me there. She gives me a wave and a nervous smile. It's then that I remember that she's still got a ways to go.

And, apparently, so do I.

*
Like those fake buckteeth with braces that fitted you so perfectly and that you wore the first time you met your husband's high school friends, and for twenty incredible minutes they actually believed they were real; and then your four-year-old had to go and try them on the dog, and when you saw how they'd been obliterated and covered in dog saliva, you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from crying, and you've spent the last year trying to replace them, but you'll never find another pair like them, may they rest in peace.

*
Please see Chapters 1–24.

*
Per semester.

*
As per Appendix B, for example.

APPENDIX A

I AM MY FATHER'S SON

C
ue the sappy music and a cheap, watery fade-to-flash-back effect.

October 10, 1985. It's the night of my eighteenth birthday. Eighteen, the age at which one may become legally hammered in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

My best friend, Deb, and I are standing outside the Palomino (a local bar famous for having the only working mechanical bull in western Canada), and I am dressed for eighties-style action: skin-tight black angora sweater dress, red leather stiletto shoes, and a wide red belt that hangs from my hips and converges at my groinial region in a not-so-subtle V. My hair is permed, feathered, and teased in a gravity-bashing style to which several cans of mousse have given their lives, and I am holding a burgundy pleather
clutch purse that is filled with the finest drugstore cosmetics that money can buy.

This, I think, will be a night to remember, but not because I plan on joining the ranks of the hammered. Like most people who grew up on the prairies, I was getting blitzed on wine coolers in seventh grade, so the idea of spending this night getting drunk isn't especially appealing (also, I don't want to risk getting vomit on the angora—it's very hard to clean). No, this night is not about alcohol. It is about me and womanhood, and the public intersection of the two. Because while I was not born with testicles, or a tiny penis that some shaky-handed doctor accidentally exploded and then hastily converted into a makeshift vagina during a circumcision-gone-wrong; even though I was born a human girl-child with shockingly average female genitalia, I was raised as a boy.

Perhaps it was because my parents were pot-smoking, antiestablishment types who didn't believe in “gender,” or maybe it was simply that after seven years of raising sons, by the time I showed up, they decided, “Screw it. Let's just stick with what we know.” Whatever their reasons, it was clear my parents had no intention of indulging my second X chromosome.

If this were an audiovisual presentation, I would take you through the following slide show of my boyhood:

       
•
  
There I am at age three, wearing my brothers' hand-me-down underwear, the Y-front opening of which will confound and confuse me for years to come.

       
•
  
Here's me and my dad; I'm eight. We're enjoying a daddy-daughter moment in which he is teaching me a card game he has invented. This game is based on “Go Fish,” only it is called “Go Fuck Yourself.” He has just asked if I have any threes, and I am smiling proudly as I reply, “No, Dad . . . Go fuck yourself.”

       
•
  
That's me running shirtless through the neighborhood long past what should have been allowed, and there's my mom, too busy making macramé plant hangers to notice.

       
•
  
Me and my dad again. He is looking at me with an expression of confusion and disbelief; that's because I've just asked him if I can take ballet lessons. He will answer my question with his own, “Why the hell would you want to prance around in airy-fairy tights?” and will suggest that I take judo instead.

       
•
  
And there I am with my brothers. Here they are dangling loogies over my head; there, jamming rancid sweat socks in my face; that's a good one—one of them is giving me an Indian rope burn, while the other farts into my screaming mouth.

       
•
  
The next one is me ratting out my brothers to my dad, who is taking a hit off a joint while telling us to “piss off and work it out.”

So that's the following photo and every one after that: me flailing my arms like a spastic windmill, throwing wild, ineffectual punches at my brothers' respective balls.

Based on my very unscientific polling methods (i.e., having asked most of the men I've ever slept with, dated, or married), it appears that my childhood was fairly standard by most men's experiences. Which is probably why it never occurred to me that my daily existence was different from that of anyone else I knew.

Until the day that I began to develop teeny-tiny breasts and a teeny-tiny shoplifting habit to match. For it was on that day that I strolled into Woolworths and stole a pair of magnetic earrings that I traded to another preteen thief for a freshly lifted training bra. I smuggled the lacy contraband into the house and locked myself in the bathroom, feeling like a cross-dresser as I tore off my shirt and wrapped the front-clasping garment over my mosquito-bite boobs. I don't quite know how to explain what I felt, except to say that it was a religious experience, like something out of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
but if the coat was actually a 32AA Playtex bra.

And thus began my life as a girl.

From that moment I took it upon myself to learn the ways of womanhood, with a self-taught curriculum that included such lessons as “How to Wear (and Stuff) a Stolen Bra,” “The Mystical Powers of Mascara,” and “The Subtle Art of Getting Felt Up.” Over the next few years I transcended the family plot to turn me into a boy and transformed myself from a scrappy little dude into a wily, willowy woman.

Which is what I am when I find myself on the night of my eighteenth birthday, in line at the Palomino, so
drenched in femininity that no one would confuse me with the boy I once was, a boy whose only ambition in life was to pee her name in the snow (though sadly, all I ever managed to spell was “oooo”).

I proudly flash my license to the Beefy Bouncer at the door and then enter the promised land. As I order a virgin daiquiri I marvel at the sight of men and women flashing smiles and cleavage at each other in an ear-splitting, eye-melting blend of music, laughter, and acid-washed clothing.

Deb and I squeeze ourselves onto the crowded dance floor, where we join our age-of-majority brethren, jerking and bobbing to the hits of Huey Lewis, Wham! and De-Barge. After an hour or so, Deb parts the sweaty waters of lumbering dancers, while I fetch our purses from the bar and follow her downstairs to the ladies' bathroom.

As Deb steps into a stall to pee, I take a spot at the mirror and begin violently flipping my hair forward and back, forward and back, prepping it for the can-full of mousse I'm about to force into it. On an upswing I notice a woman enter the bathroom, her XL frame packed into an XS tank top that reads “METALLICA: Metal Up Your Ass.” I detect an unsettling expression on her face, one that I instantly recognize as drug-induced, perhaps angel dust or PCP (neither of which I really know anything about except for what I'd learned from Meredith Baxter-Birney on various after-school specials).