Mad Honey: A Novel (25 page)

AS I GET
out of the car, I feel another memory trying to surface, something triggered by the sound from the steeple. It’s something buried so deep it takes a while to form.

I’m remembering a nursery rhyme about the churches in London. It rises in my heart suddenly, the whole thing, and goosebumps prickle my arms. Because the person who used to sing this to me was my father. I couldn’t have been six years old. But I’m remembering being in his arms. Back when he loved me.

Oranges and lemons

say the bells of Saint Clement’s

You owe me five farthings

say the bells of Saint Martin’s.

I open the door to Edgar’s Music. It reminds me of other music shops I’ve been in, except airier and messier—it’s like being in someone’s cluttered living room. There are chairs and a potbelly stove. A guy with a beard is sitting on a stool playing “Wagon Wheel” on a Martin. On the right wall are Fender Strats and Telecasters, little white price tags dangling on strings tied to the tuning pegs. There are amps toward the front—Peaveys and Rolands. Toward the back are the drum kits—snares and floor toms and hi-hats.

Over at the counter a large woman with a bad perm is talking to a customer, and the two of them are laughing, like they are old friends. The customer grabs his bag and says, “Dig ya later, Lizzy!” and the woman says, “Take care, Len,” and looks happily at him as he heads toward the door.

Then her gaze falls upon me, and I freeze.

Because Lizzy is clearly a transgender woman.

Obviously I have a well-tuned trans-radar, compared to most people, but you don’t need
t-dar
to know this woman’s history at a glance. Lizzy has big hands, an Adam’s apple, a large frame, five o’clock shadow, the works. She looks at me with a big smile, her face welcoming and bright. “And how can I help you, young lady?” she says, in a voice that is both low and unashamed. It’s like she’s well practiced in being herself. And in taking exactly zero shit from anyone.

My heart is pounding in my chest. “I need—a cello string?”

“A cellist,” she says, impressed. “Any special string, or you want me to pick one at random?”

“The A string,” I mumble.

“One A string, hold the mayo,” she says, with a laugh, and she turns her back and starts rummaging around in a set of drawers behind the counter.

Outside, I can still hear the bells of the church pealing away.

When will you pay me?

say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,

say the bells of Shoreditch.

There’s a growl from behind the counter, a sound I’d expect more to come from Boris than a woman my mother’s age—or older—and now she turns back to me, looking slightly sorry. “I don’t have the individual strings anymore. I thought I did, but all I have are the sets.” She puts two different packages on the glass countertop. “I’ve got the Red Label Super Sensitive for $45.99, and the D’Addario Helicore for $134.11. Plus the tax. You can take your pick.”

I’m still trying to find my voice. “I don’t know,” I say, haltingly. “I mean—”

“Yeah, it’s a choice,” she says. “You have to ask yourself the question we all ask ourselves.” She looks at me hard.

“What’s—that question?”

“Are you Super Sensitive?” she says, with a grin. “Or are you a
Hella-core!” And now she laughs, deeply, as if she has just said something hilarious.

The guy with the Martin is still singing.
Hey, hey, Momma rock me.

A little bell rings as the door to the store opens, and a dude with a ponytail and a Charlie
1
Horse cowboy hat ambles in. He has a loose walk, like he’s high.

“Yo, Lizzy, what
up
?” he sings.

“Hey, Johnny,” says Lizzy. “It’s good to see you!”

The guy playing “Wagon Wheel” stops playing. “Hey, John,” he says.

Johnny takes a look at me and raises one eyebrow. “And who do we have here?” he says. “New girl in town?” He looks down at the counter. “Cello strings. You play cello, honey?”

“Yes,” I say. I point to the cheaper set. “I’ll take these.”

“You
are
Super Sensitive,” says Lizzy, approvingly. “I knew it.”

“Is she taking good care of you, honey?” says Johnny. I nod, and hand Lizzy fifty bucks. “Cause if she’s not, I can take good care of you.” He pushes his cowboy hat back on his head. “You need taking care of?”

“Let’s back off, Johnny,” says Lizzy, all business. “All right now?”

“Aw, I’m just—”

“I said back off.” She looks at him intently, and Johnny backs off. It’s clear nobody messes with Lizzy in her own store. There might be different rules out in the world, but in Edgar’s, Lizzy’s word is law. It’s kind of amazing, how fearless she appears to be. Because a lot of the trans people I’ve seen seem a little apologetic, like they’re somehow begging the world for permission just to be themselves.

And what I fear—what I know—is that sometimes I’m like that, too, because I’m afraid to lose my invisibility.

“Jeez, somebody took some
bitch pills
today,” Johnny says, heading toward the back of the store. The “Wagon Wheel” guy starts playing again—this time it’s “Dear Someone,” by Gillian Welch. He sings it softly, as I stand there at the counter, my head still spinning.
I wanna go all over the world, and start living free…

“Sorry about him,” Lizzy says, handing me the change and the
strings in a small brown bag. “Drummers, you know. They get frustrated because they can’t play a real instrument.”

Lizzy’s makeup is really bad. Her eyeliner wobbles all over her eyelids, and she’s wearing way too much mascara. I kind of want to point this out, to help her. But she isn’t the one who needs help.

“What—do you play?” I ask her.

“What do you think?” says Lizzy. “The cello, of course.”

“Do you really?”

“Well,” Lizzy says, modestly. “Not much anymore. We have a little trio that plays weddings, bar mitzvahs.”

“Thanks,” I say. “How long have you— Has this store been here a long time?”

“Twenty-three years,” says Lizzy, thinking it over. She gestures to the inventory. “My empire!”

“It’s your store?” I say. “You’re—Mrs. Edgar?”

Her face lights up with a big smile. “You
are
new in town, aren’t you.”

“I am,” I say. “I just moved here in August.”

“Cause you’d know, otherwise. Everybody knows. I was Edgar, now I’m Elizabeth. You know.”

“Right,” I say, and I can still feel my heart beating.

“What’s wrong, honey?” says Lizzy. “You never seen a trans woman before?”

From outside, the bells come again.

When will that be?

say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,

says the great bell of Bow.

“I’ve known—a couple,” I tell her.

“Isn’t that something,” says Lizzy. “Used to be, I was the only one around. Now we’re everywhere. The world’s gotten to be a little bit better place, bit by bit.”

“Have people been…nice to you?”

She laughs, like this is a funny question. “Nice enough. So. What’s your name?”

“Lily.” I want to say:
I’m trans, too. You and I are sisters!
But is this really true? Are we sisters?

“Hey,” says Lizzy. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I walk toward the door, my heart pounding.

“You come back anytime. People like us, we got to stick together!” she calls after me, and I’m gripped with fear that what I think is hidden might be apparent to Lizzy.

I’m not the only one in the world with
t-dar
after all.

“Cellists, I mean,” she says, as I head outside.

All I wanted to do was to be like everybody else and have a normal life. And it’s not like my being trans is some terrible secret: it’s a wonderful thing, really—at times I’ve thought of it as a gift. Not being openly trans—whatever that means—hasn’t been some crazy plot of mine to deceive people; it’s just been the fact of living every day. Because I was lucky enough to get on puberty blockers, and do my transition young, people think I’m cis, they think I’m just like they are. Is it really my responsibility to out myself over and over, for the rest of my life? What is it, in the end, that makes me different from cis people at this point in my life—besides
history
?

Still: it’s different when you’re in love with someone. Maybe the whole point of being in love is that you tell each other everything. Even when you don’t know what the consequences might be.

I climb behind the wheel of my car. The bells of St. Clement’s have fallen silent.

Asher,
I text.
Can you come to my house tonight? I need to see you.

IT’S QUARTER TO
TWELVE,
and I’m lying in my bed holding a book that I am not reading. I have one light on, the Hello Kitty lamp I’ve had since I was six years old. The book I am not reading is
The Princess Bride,
which they made into a movie. I remember my mother reading it out loud to me while I was recovering from surgery a year and a half ago.

There are so many things I love about that book, but the thing I love most of course is all the sword fighting. It was seeing that movie when I was little that made me want to start fencing. I love when the Man in Black and Inigo Montoya are fighting all over the rocky terrain, and Inigo is so amazed by Westley’s virtuosity.
Who are you? I must know!
he says.

Get used to disappointment,
Westley replies.

There’s also the business about Westley pretending to be the Dread Pirate Roberts. It makes me think about the way people assume identities, about all the masks we wear, and how often people assume you are exactly what you appear to be.

There’s a thing called
passing,
which is not only about transgender people but about everybody. It has to do with the way the bigotry and meanness of the world get parceled out, based on how you might, or might not, look or act like everybody else. The way there’s a particular kind of anti-Semitism that gets leveled at people who “look Jewish,” whatever that means. African Americans with darker skin sometimes are on the receiving end of more bigotry than people whose skin is lighter. Gay men who “act gay” get treated one way, those who
pass
as straight get treated another. It’s a whole pyramid of bigotry, with people who most resemble the dominant culture at the top, and people whose difference makes them stand out at the bottom. It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.

Inconceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

As a trans girl, I pass without much effort, thanks in part to the random luck of genetics, and also thanks to my mother getting me on puberty-blocking hormones when I was twelve. My body loved estrogen, too, which is mostly because I’m shaped like my mother, big up top, slim hips. And once surgery was done, what was there to make me stand out as different from other girls my age? The thing Dr. Powers had promised me—that “even your doctor won’t be able to tell”—turned out to be true.

How my surgeon managed to magically make a vagina and
clitoris and labia out of nothing more than superfine sugar and marzipan I can’t tell you. But I know everything looks and feels like it’s supposed to. There’s a statement someone in my support group once used—
The plumbing works and so does the electricity.

So what makes me different, at this point? A Y chromosome that you can’t even see? Is that really the thing that determines the truth of the world? I mean—I can’t get pregnant, so there’s that.

But a lot of women can’t get pregnant. And, as it turns out, there are even some women who have something called androgen insensitivity disorder, which means they have a Y chromosome and never even know it.

I don’t think it’s an invisible chromosome, or the inability to get pregnant, or anything else, that makes people so cruel to transgender folks. I think what they hate is difference. What they hate is that the world is complicated in ways they can’t understand.

People want the world to be simple.

But gender isn’t simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it’s complicated—that there’s a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world—is what makes it a blessing. Surely nature—or god, or the universe—is full of miracles and wild invention and things way beyond our understanding, no matter how hard we try. We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We’re here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

Which is why I feel so ashamed to be in hiding. I ought to be standing in a spotlight on a stage, shouting
I’m trans and I’m proud, everybody shout my name!
I mean, it’s not like there aren’t trans and nonbinary students at Adams High. I remember how amazed I was, that first week of school, to see Caeden Wentworth stand up in assembly and tell everyone about the Rainbow Alliance. Oh, I knew that there were plenty of people in that room who didn’t get it, or who couldn’t tell you the difference between a transsexual and the Trans-Siberian Railway, but mostly people seemed glad to be in a place where a nonbinary person like Caeden could just be themselves. There are lots of other queer students at Adams High. Sometimes it seems like over the course of my own transition, the world
has gone from a place where trans stuff was exotic and incomprehensible to, you know, just one more way of being human.

So why is it that instead of joining the Alliance at school, I acted like this had nothing to do with me? Why—instead of making friends with Caeden and Gray and Ezra and all the other queer and trans and enby students—did I wind up going out with Asher Fields, the co-captain of the hockey team, a poster boy for cisgender straight men? Is it just internalized transphobia? Is my love for him actually a weird way of hating myself?

Inconceivable!

The thing is, I already know what it’s like to be outed, to live in a world where everyone knows the most private things about you. Nobody ever threw me a Pride parade.